No reservations? Maybe some...

I was just biking around town this afternoon, and the memory came flashing into mind, of the time, a few months back, when we saw Anthony Bourdain at Bender's bar, around the corner. Much of the usual Thursday crowd were there for a Sunday afternoon, effecting a masculine contrapunto to the Guerrera-Malenfant baby shower. From our table in a back corner, we spotted Bourdain, at the bar, up by the door. I don't have any faith in my capacity to recognize faces, so I was struck first merely by having recognized his. Then, I was struck by how blue his hair is. They must work hard to keep all yellow wavelengths out of gray TV hair.

I went up and offered, on the table's behalf, to buy him a drink, in such a way that he didn't even need to respond in order to politely decline.

What I wish I'd said was something along the lines of...

Fast Times at ACSF

Sean Penn is coming back to Shelley's acting class. He was there a couple of years ago, some months before we put on that play. I quit the class after the play, so I don't know what's been going on there since, but rumors indicate that Shelley's daughter is/was dating Emil Hirsch, who starred in the film Sean had just finished shooting last time he came to the class. So, I imagine Shelley's been keeping the lines of communication open, and now -- well, here he is (supposedly) coming back.

Shelley sent email to me and presumably other erstwhile classmates, inviting us to rejoin the class in the run-up to Sean's return. The weekend after I got that email, I went camping, and spent an evening trying to write a scene to perform for the occasion. But I hit a few dead ends, and, as is typical, haven't picked it back up since then.  So... I don't have anything to show for the past couple of years, in which my excuse for not acting is that I want to write my own part and "play myself".

I was talking at work about Sean Penn coming back. I was standing atop a loading dock awning, painting a warehouse wall with Josh and Caitlyn. Josh has been working with me for years, but Caitlyn was new, and didn't know I'd been in an acting class before. She was asking about my involvement. I gave my usual excuse, that I was "accessing tools of personal expression". She asked if I feel like I'm acting in my day-to-day life. I can't remember how I replied, but I'm sure it sidestepped the question in some way. At least, I didn't focus as much on the question as I'm drawn to doing so now... I look at the phrase above, "my usual excuse, that I was 'accessing tools of personal expression'", and I think of how limited my vocabulary is, how rarely I express a new idea, how often I'm having the same conversation or relating the same story to another audience--how often my own original words or ideas come to feel to me like clichés. Even that sounds clichéd, how often I've said, "I've said this so often it feels like a cliché." Sure, maybe I tailor the phrasing to suit the moment, maybe, but regardless: I can see how my life consists of a lot of rehearsing a series of familiar scenes. Thus, as in any acting situation, I face the ever-present danger of losing touch with the meaning of my words, or choosing the wrong meaning, because I've lost understanding of which is right, or if there even is one. The eternal search for meaning... What does meaning even mean? Ugh. And so on.

It's like a life spent practicing telling jokes; which, actually, is my biggest take-away from Sean's first visit: the man is an entertainer. Pretty much all night, 'til 4am, whether with an audience of one or two, or the entire group, he made effective use of his inevitable position at the center of attention to churn out a seemingly endless stream of jokes and stories. I can only remember one--probably even the next morning I could only remember one. This may be one of the things that differentiates me from successful entertainers. Nonetheless, I retained a joke, one joke, and perhaps it's a testament to Sean's entertainment value that I'm asked to repeat it whenever I mention "Sean Penn at my acting class", to anyone who's heard it before. Anyway, Josh, who's heard it before, asked me to retell it for Caitlyn, and volunteered to play my role in the story (it's a joke with roles--there's physical humor):

birthday post

Last night, summer beer, delicious bbq... It was one of those occasional, unanticipated grand evenings of perfect indulgence. I am reminded of the sentence Geoff often repeats when he's having just such an experience: I have reached maximum sufficiency; any more would be a superfluent abundity. I don't know if he "got" that from somewhere, or if he composed it himself (I should ask!); but the level of drunkenness required to trigger its recitation (and to appreciate it) raises mirthful doubts of whether any abundance could ever truly be superfluous.

As I'm prone to do in the throes of such satiety, I lingered too long. People begged off at or near the typical Thursday witching hour of 10pm, and I was left in Craig's living room virtually alone, with Craig and Andy wanting to play video games. I must make note to myself that this is always a good time to leave -- I have some level of psychic resistance to social video gaming, which I'm not yet willing to either explore or overcome. It may help me to bear in mind how much this mental block resembles, in practice, my father's resistance to any technological development, and how elderly he seems as a result -- but whatever! If I'm just simple, well, "'tis a gift to be simple", so nyah, nyah, nyah and shut up!

Anyway, while Andy took a piss, Craig helped set me up a "mii", a video avatar, on Wii Bowling, after that was determined to be the only game suitable for a party of three -- another hint that it's time to leave at this point: I'm pretty sure these two would rather be engaged in a first-person shooter escapade. When it came time to actually pay attention to the process, my feelings of carefree abandon started to attach a lot more weight to the "I-don't-care" end of the Happiness Equation, the other variables for which are slipping my mind*. Minimal effort and focus on entering my name into the system resulted in my inadvertently making a mii named Damp -- which crystallized my attitude about the whole venture, yet paradoxically brought me as much cheer as I anticipate a Wii is ever likely to do. I was further delighted to find, when Andy came back from the toilet, that the mii he'd already created for himself on some previous night, is named Stank! So, it was Damp and Stank, rocking the lanes on league night!