Just Wrought

Recovering playwright, once won a STRANGER Genius Award for theater. Now writing a bloated novel about… G-d help me! Theatre.

Tag: everything2

  • June 2, 2005

    This re-posting requires some introduction, since some of it responds to a previous “daylog” written by a guy with the handle “iceowl”.  (Keep in mind, this was text-only, pre-Facebook, semi-anonymous stuff we were producing back then.)  Iceowl had written, among other things, the following.  (It will quickly dawn for those of you that know me that iceowl is even more of a bullshitter than I am.)

    Ok, let me tell you something about [Paul]. [Paul] is a big Irish guy the way I am a big Sicilian/Slovak guy. As I suspect I spend more time lifting weights than [Paul], I’m a bit larger in bicep girth than he is, but he has the scar that trumps all visual toughness. Nobody is going to fuck with [Paul] ….

    He talks louder when he drinks….

    One day he said to me, “Hey, I got this thing…” and it turned out to be some sort of contest and would I help him write a screenplay, by the way we only have eight days and we don’t even have page one.

    Of course, this is my kind of challenge as [Paul] well divined. So I sequestered myself, all my waking, non-money-making hours, for ten days. [Paul] and I traded the script back and forth, and when it was clear we weren’t going to hit the deadline, [Paul] negotiated an extension. He got it for us. We submitted. We did pretty damned well, but we didn’t win.  I had taken part in writing a 110 page script in two weeks, and for me, that was consolation prize.

    …I met [Paul] in Seattle, then. It’s his berg. We ate and drank and went to his favorite bar. We ate his favorite oysters by the pier near the place he works. …

    … [Paul] and I drank the drinks of his favorite bartender. We saluted random things and then [Paul] burst into song at one point. He has a very good voice. It couldn’t possibly be any other way.

    Uh-huh.

    And here’s what I wrote seven years ago while waiting for my second son to finally decide to come out into the world.

    Thu Jun 02 2005 at 2:16:31

    ESTRAGON: I can’t go on like this.
    VLADIMIR: That’s what you think.

    Waiting for Godot
    Samuel Beckett

    Day 12.

    Didn’t the Wise Men make it all the way to Jesus in this amount of time? That was always my impression anyways.

    * * *

    Well, let’s review some lessons learned from this experience, shall we?

    1. A mucus plug lost does not a baby bring.
    2. Doyle is a pediatrician, not an OB/GYN.
    3. I can blather on about just about anything for 500 words.

    There’s no news on the baby front. None, zilch, zippo. I’m beginning to feel a bit offended frankly. Does this little fishy know I wanna hold her/him? Can’t she/he hear how excited I am to meet him/her? (Leave it to me to be offended by my own unborn child.)

    But blather on I shall, if blather on I must.

    * * *

    What an amazing ego-high to be mentioned in iceowl’s last daylog along with his father and his writing. Icey’s an amazing guy, and an amazing writer; but as Doyle will attest, he tends to fuzz up on the minor details, or perhaps, more generously, he’s writing them as he sees ’em, like an umpire calling a favorite pitcher’s slider which just misses an on-the-black strike instead of the ball that it is.

    Fact is: I work a way shittier day job than iceowl, and get paid way less to do it. And while I may make money as a writer, it’s way less than say a B-level competition ballroom dancer makes doing that.

    Fact is: I didn’t move to Seattle because it was a better place from which to be a playwright. There is no good place to be a playwright, because to be a playwright is a very foolish thing. I suppose if you had to pick the best place to live to be a playwright, it would be London. I’ve never been there. And then second best would be New York City. I’ve lived there twice. I moved to Seattle to raise my kids because every kid in New York City is, to some degree, a wise-assed, dead-eyed punk, and since my kids will have a genetic predisposition toward that kind of attitude anyway, I figured I’d better raise them in an ameliorating “nicey-nice” Lefty sorta setting like here (though between you and me, I generally love New Yorkers and hate Seattleites– go figure.)

    Fact is: I do have a scar on my face— product of a short career as a New York window cleaner— but people still fuck with me all the time. Just this morning I was pushing on the revolving door to my building, absent-mindedly wondering how horrible it would be if I had to watch my wife get a c-section, when the door abruptly stopped . I looked up to see a guy caught in the door cussing at me for not watching what I was doing. For some damned reason I immediately hollered back at him for trying to squeeze into the same quarter section of the door as his fat-assed girlfriend, instead of going one at a time like a homo sapiens. This pair was clearly a casting reject from the Springer show, so I wasn’t going to waste a lot of time with them. It’s my favorite feature of the revolving door: you go out, I go in. Bye-bye now!

    Still it had me anxious and amped for the next half hour. I’d really like to think I’m beyond my car-kicking, street-fighting days. I shamefully recall an episode from a few years ago when I was back in New York. I kicked a car as it nearly ran me over on Queens Boulevard. The asshole stopped about 100 yards down the street, as if to say, “You wanna go?” I whipped my arms in the air to invite the confrontation. “Come on, Motherfucker!” Then I looked down and realized I had my 2 month baby boy strapped to my chest in a snuggly. Not one of my prouder moments.

    Fact is: I do get louder when I drink, but I cannot for the life of me ever recall singing to icey. And if I did, then who knows what else transpired? It’s all just too disturbing to contemplate.

    Fact is: and here’s the hell of it: I miss iceowl and I’ve only met him twice in my life. I want him to come up and give me an excuse to go on another glorious writers’ bender.

    Whaddya say, icey? I’ll sing your song.

    Posted at 1:12 PM in Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: daylog filibuster, everything2, iceowl, Joe Mastroianni, Paul Mullin, screenplay, writing

  • May 24, 2005

    In this entry from my on-going attempt to filibuster my unborn child out of my wife’s womb seven years ago, I whine about writing, and whether or not I should stop.  For about a decade this was a standing question for me.  I thought, talked, and wrote about it constantly until I realized, “Hey wait a second!  Writing about whether or not I should write is just a really lame excuse for writing.”  I have since moved on to other lame excuses.

    Tue May 24 2005 at 1:30:14 UTC

    Five hundred words.

    This is the daily quota that JohnnyGoodYear reminds us that Graham Greene suggests we writers try and meet to stay in shape. And–good God!– who would want to argue with Greene, possibly the most prolific and compellingly readable author of the prior century?

    It’s just that . . . well, does it apply to playwrights? And does it apply to playwrights who often fervently wish they didn’t write at all? It seems to me this discipline that Greene demands, and GoodYear promulgates, presupposes a devotion motivated by . . . what? That one’s writing betters the world? Oneself? More often than not it seems to me that this sort of devotion requires a faith that I long ago forswore. I cannot abide a God that insists I believe in Him any more than I can dedicate myself to a vocation that demands I ante up all my dutiful attentions whether or not it feels meaningful to me. And yet . . . and yet . . . Here I am writing.

    I promised I’d keep you all posted on the progress towards my second child’s birth ever since my wife lost her mucus plug three days ago. But now, with so little progress to report, I’m starting to regret it, in a way not unlike my regret of the vow I made to myself some decades back to be the best playwright possible.

    We get caught.

    We get caught in these ideas of ourselves and what it is we’re supposed to be doing. It’s all so noble I could be sick if I focused too long or too hard on it. We get into this writing business because we’re convinced that our minds might make the world a better place, and then we discover that the wisest men understand that the world needs no bettering.

    We bring children into the world because, let’s face it: it’s fun— both to make them and then to be with them once they’re here. Only a fascist fool could honestly believe he has anything to teach a child, except maybe how to blow a bubble or use a kazoo.

    So for now, I’m going to stick with this, through downvotes and upvotes, through your boredom and mine, through frustration and occasional elation, until I become a better playwright, a better writer, a better husband and father, a better man . . . or . . at least until the baby comes.

    Okay, so about that, here’s the nitty-gritty: Heather went to the doctor today and was told that she’s dilated to 4 centimeters, and that her cervix is 50% effaced. And what does that mean in bottom line layman’s terms? Well, that she’ll be having a baby. Some time soon. How soon? Only the Credophage knows.

    And I know yesterday I said I wasn’t anxious— but dammit!—it’s creeping up on me.

    Come on, baby. Come on! You’re almost here.

    And I am almost there . . . five hundred.

    Posted at 1:12 PM in Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: daylog filibuster, everything2, iceowl, Joe Mastroianni, Paul Mullin, screenplay, writing

  • May 21, 2005

    Seven years ago today, on a bizarre, pre-Facebook social site for writers called Everything2, I began an endeavor to filibuster our second baby out of my wife’s body, writing a minimum of 500 words every day.  Had I known that it would actually be another 18 days before Kiwi would come into the world I might have thought better of the effort.  But that’s one of the highest glories of parenthood: even when you think you know what’s coming, you actually have not even the rawest idea.  Heck, had I known then what I know now about the restlessly wriggling energy ball of fierceness and joy that was hurtling his way toward our family, every night up until his birth would have been a sleepless Christmas Eve (and since every night for a year and a half after was semi-sleepless, I’m glad I got that rest instead.)

    So I’m going to share some of these filibuster “Day Logs” over the next week or so because sometimes, when you force yourself to write in circumstances you don’t normally, you dig out some jewels you might not otherwise ever know were hiding. 

    Sat May 21 2005 at 23:28:15 UTC

    Heather lost her mucus plug yesterday.

    Oh, you don’t know what that is? Isn’t that funny? How many countless scenes of birth have been brought to us by Hollywood and yet not one of them employs the words “mucus plug”. No, we have to wait until we prepare to experience the real thing before we learn about that little friend. The mucus plug is about what it sounds: a snotty bung for a barrel designed to keep things where they’re supposed to be until, well, they’re not supposed to be there any more. In any case, what you need to know is that its demise signals that labor’s a pretty safe bet in the next couple weeks.

    An even stronger signal is the fact that Heather was up from 4 to 7 am this morning suffering contractions, back pain and cramps. She quietly took herself into the living room couch, deciding not to wake me until she was sure this was the real thing. It wasn’t. The contractions subsided. We had a normal breakfast of french toast. Then we took Declan to the Pacific Science Center and had a good time poking around there, though the boy was a bit scared of the animatronic dinosaurs and super-sized insects. He was even a little freaked out by actual fly-bys in the butterfly room, but on the other hand his dad reckons this is the coolest thing I’ve experienced in a long time. Living gossamer leaves of color flittering right past your face in all directions. It’s enough to make you glad you’re bringing another life into the world to share it with.

    Then we went to the Red Mill, the best “fast” burgers in Seattle. Heather and I each had one. Declan, per usual, happy to merely poach our fries and some of our shakes. The boy would rather eat dirt than burger. Go figure.

    Anyway, I got this nifty laptop that my work has loaned me because my boss wants me to spend as much time at home with the baby as I can. (Sometimes even corporate America can be cool.) I’m thinking I may take it with us to the hospital and tell y’all as much as I can during the process.

    Or that might not happen at all. You parents out there know how these things can go.

    In any case, wish us luck. It won’t be long now.

    Posted at 1:12 PM in Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: daylog filibuster, everything2, iceowl, Joe Mastroianni, Paul Mullin, screenplay, writing

  • Make Me One with Everything

    Make Me One with Everything

    Luck is a sympathetic magic, to be coaxed with metaphor and token.  So I have decided to troll for a streak of it by posting a run of early essays that I wrote for Everything2, a quasi-prophetic mash-up of Face Book and Wikipedia, if the former only allowed text and the latter had a sense of humor. 

    The following essay was written in 2003 during the build up to invasion of Iraq.

    * * *

    It’s got to be the oldest Zen joke in the West . . .

    There’s a barbecue at the Zen Buddhist Temple, and the Zen Master’s working the grill. A young monk reverently approaches. The Roshi looks up, smiles and says, “Wanna hotdog?”

    The monk replies: “Please, Master, make me one with everything.”

    Besides being pretty darned cute, this joke, I’ve always suspected, has something deeper to say about Western attitudes, toward Zen in specific, Eastern thought more broadly, and most generally of all, our poorly perceived relationship to each other and the universe at large.

    I’ve been a practicing Buddhist for twelve years now (ironically enough, ever since around the time of the last war brought to you by the Bush family.) For most of that time, I’ve kept my mouth shut about my practice, for a couple of simple reasons. First and foremost, it’s just considered bad Zen form to prattle on about it. “Him who’ll tell ya, don’t know. Him who knows, won’t tell ya” (my hillbilly stab at Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching). Secondly, upon hearing that I’m a Buddhist, most people tend to react to the novelty of it, rather than the substance. “That’s wild!”. . . “That’s crazy!”. . . “Only you, Paul!”. . . “We’ll see how long that lasts!” Since Buddhism is decidedly not a religion of conversion, I see little up side in telling people I follow it. But in these darkening days of terror and hatred and waste, I’ve begun to feel that it’s incumbent on me to pipe up about a practice that has helped me face these things; and while it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, it may just offer some unique and rarely considered perspectives on our world and our place in it.

    So what’s the problem with “make me one with everything?” In a nutshell: you can’t make someone, even yourself “one”, any more than you can make yourself obey the law of gravity. You are one with everything, whether you like it or not, and that oneness necessitates inevitabilities and responsibilities that all of us as human beings ignore at our peril and the greater suffering of everyone.

    For instance, some examples of the inevitabilities: you will die, I will die, everyone who will ever read this will die. Death is inevitable. Pretty simple stuff so far, right?

    Here’s another inevitability, directly related to the first: you will suffer, I will suffer, everyone who reads this will suffer (though hopefully not because they read this).

    And another: what you do, and don’t do, reverberates throughout existence. You can’t avoid this through hiding. You can’t wall off your section of existence and hope that all the awful and inevitable things happening on the other side won’t creep across. They will. Why? Because any wall you build is an illusion. Why? Because you are one with everything, whether you asked for it or not, whether you like it or not.

    So that brings us to our responsibilities. And these are not Buddhist responsibilities, per se. Remember, one doesn’t become one with everything because one is a Buddhist; you just are, and because you just are, and because as part of the unique blessing/curse of being a sentient human being, you know you are, you have to acknowledge that your responsibility is to everyone and everything.

    Americans love being heroes. We’re shocked when we hear that most of the world doesn’t see us that way. “Don’t these ungrateful bastards realize we saved their asses in WWII?” (I’ve said these very words myself on many beer-sodden occasions.) But from the one with everything perspective, storming Normandy and all the rest of it was less heroic than the Hollywood media machine would have us fool ourselves into believing. We saved ourselves by storming those beaches, just as much as anyone. And while there’s nothing ignoble about self-preservation, it’s not necessary to lord it over a bunch of people who happen to live in Europe, and who lost a lot more lives than we did.

    Americans are very comfortable being powerful, because we are so convinced that we are right. And much of the time we are. Alas, the universe responds with an profound “So what?” For just as you can’t make someone “one with everything”, you cannot coerce someone to be free, and you cannot force someone to give up force. You can only force them to force you to use more force. The Buddha recognized such recursively misguided action as a trap. He compared it to trying to still the ripples of a pond by patting them down with your hand. (In the case of our recent actions in Iraq, I’d compare it to smacking an oar down on the water. These violent ripples we’re currently creating won’t go away in our lifetime.)

    Regarding these actions, many Americans throw up their hands and say, “Better them than us.” But the point is: there is no “them”, only us. Some of our glibber war advocates say “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” I just wonder if enough thought and pause was given to the question, “Do we really need the omelet? Aren’t our geopolitical love handles big enough?”

    From the Buddhist perspective, every bullet fired, is fired at your own head, or, if you find it more terrifying, your own child’s head. The upside of this is that every kind act—every bow, every smile—is an action done for—a bow made to—a smile smiled for—everyone. In our actions in the world, it is our responsibility to ask ourselves, very simply: are we adding to its suffering, or healing it? Every day we must ask the question, and every day, change the answer based on what the day gives us and what we give in return (though of course, we are the day, and it us.)

    This is the Buddhist practice in a nutshell.

    Call me crazy.

    Posted at 1:12 PM in Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: daylog filibuster, everything2, iceowl, Joe Mastroianni, Paul Mullin, screenplay, writing

  • The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine

    I decided at the beginning of this year to focus a little bit more than usual on luck: to court it a bit, if that makes sense. Luck is one of those wonderful inventions that cannot really exist— not in any empirical way— but that nevertheless human beings can still learn a lot by considering. For instance, I spent a lot of last week constructing an essay I felt compelled to write defending my chosen art form from prevarications that would weaken it. Contrary to what some assumed, it brought me no joy to make my arguments. It felt like duty. But then, as luck would have it, someone I did not know read that essay and reached out with an email to thank me for it.  We became Facebook friends and I noticed that this person had a professional relationship with one of my favorite places on earth, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I flashed on a long forgotten essay I wrote nearly nine years ago for an on-line gathering site for weirdoes and writers and weirdo writers called Everything2.

    I repost it here as a burnt offering to luck.

    I don’t believe in God.

    I pretty much don’t believe in God.

    Okay… here’s the deal:

    I believe in God. . .

    . . . but only in one place: the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Apparently, the universe is constructed in such a manner that the omnipotent, omniscient—though obviously not omni-present— deity known for the most part in these parts as “God”, only exists– as far as I can tell– when I exist within the walls of this largest Gothic cathedral in the world.

    I can vouch for this phenomenon going back to late 1999 when I first stepped inside the church, its cool echoing darkness enveloping me immediately. I was living up on the edge of Harlem at the time, and began going often. I’d walk in past the periodic light shafting down from the stained glass, sit on one of the chairs (the nave has no permanent pews) and strike up an ongoing conversation on hold since my earnest Catholic childhood.

    Hello Old Man. It’s me.

    These were not supplications, but rather heartfelt chats between one very good old friend and another. I didn’t have to genuflect or cross myself to gain access to this communication. It’s certainly telling that I don’t feel this presence at all at, say, St. Patrick’s Cathedral down on 50th and Madison, shouldered up against Rockefeller Center and all those other much taller skyscrapers. If God lives there, he’s the God of Pinstripes and Napoleon Complexes and Rudy Giuliani.

    We moved to Queens in the late fall of ’99 and my visits to St. John’s became rarer but no less ardent– in fact, maybe more so, since a two-train, 45-minute pilgrimage was involved.

    And then, less than two years later, the world changed for New Yorkers and for everyone. I found myself in Our meeting place almost every other day, two trains or not. The conversations grew ever more urgent, but also so private that I couldn’t even bring myself to write about them in my personal journal:

    9/25/01

    St. John’s again.
    Talking with God.
    Private stuff.
    Wondering: Is faith a means or an end?
    Or is the question nonsense? 

    Sometimes I’d cry. Sometimes I’d feel God feeling me cry and letting me know that it was understood.

    On December 7, 2001, while I watched TV in the living room, my wife took a home pregnancy test. From the bathroom I heard a calm but distinct, “Uh-oh.” Back then I didn’t know just how damned accurate those things have gotten, but still I had a gut inkling that this time it was for real. I had a whole new thing to talk to God about, a whole new way to be scared. 

    Old Man, help me be a good old man.

     On December 18, 2001, I turned on the TV just to be dosed with a whole new horror. 

    12/18/01

    8:12
    St. John’s is burning; a five alarm fire.
    God damn.
    What a lousy, lousy year.      

    In my head I drove a pathetic devil’s bargain worthy of Winston Smith in room 101. “Take the goddamned Twin Towers”, I practically prayed to Satan, “Just leave me my St. John’s.”

    The firefighters, already crowned in glory, waded into the burning church which was home to, among so many other things, the largest memorial to fallen FDNY prior to 9/11. Commanders on the scene rapidly made the decision to use high-tech lasers to find their way through the smoke instead of following the common sense course of action: smashing through priceless, irreplaceable stained glass to vent it (adding a James Bond-esque/art connoisseur quality to their already enormous reputation for heroism). Within hours the fire was extinguished. But who knew how long the church would be closed to visitors?

    In March of 2002 I got a short-term temp gig up at Columbia University. I walked by St. Johns on my lunch break, saw where soot still blackened the stones of the northern transept. My heart heavy and anxious, I climbed the front stairs and went in. It still smelled of burnt wood inside, and the gift shop, where the fire started, was still boarded up, but I knew instantly that the conflagration had done nothing to fumigate my Old Friend from the place. I sat down to chat.
    In the end, you can only ask Him for a sample of his Grace, a slightly wider perspective than the one you’re sitting in. It seems like a small thing writing about it now, but such an epiphany is really the only miracle there is. Art can offer it sometimes. Perhaps that’s why I decided to become an artist.

    And becoming one I am still.

    Now I live in Seattle and have no place to talk to God. 

    Cathedral of St John the Divine

    Posted at 1:12 PM in Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: daylog filibuster, everything2, iceowl, Joe Mastroianni, Paul Mullin, screenplay, writing

  • doyle

    doyle

    Imagine a science fiction species that loses weight by breathing and poops bacteria instead of digested food. Can you picture it? If not, my friend doyle has a suggestion: go look in a mirror.

    I met doyle on the internet. I feel closer to doyle than some people I have shared a bathroom with for years. I have only met doyle once in person. I want doyle to bury me.

    All of that is tangential to the main point, which is that doyle has a blog called Science teacher and I think you should follow it.

    Michael Doyle was born in Northern New Jersey, a good-for-nothing Mick like so many no-good-for-nothing Micks born in Northern New Jersey. (By the way, he prefers to refer to himself as “Oirish” as if that were somehow more PC.) He worked briefly as long shoreman. He went to med school. He became a pediatrician and worked in the ER and the projects. Think about that for a second. An emergency room pediatrician in Newark. You may think you know hell, but doyle has a crisper acquaintance with the place.

    The reason I call doyle “doyle” and not “Michael Doyle” or “Michael” or “Dr. Doyle” or even “Doyle”, is that “doyle” was all I knew him by for months. We met as contributors to an on-line gathering site for weirdos and writers and weirdo writers called Everything2, a quasi-prophetic mash-up of Face Book and Wikipedia if the former only allowed text and the latter had a sense of humor. I’m not sure the following piece is the first thing I ever read  of doyle’s, but I do remember it arrested me. He  was on pilgrimage to some mid-western city where his sister had recently died in a car crash.

    December 9, 2004 (person)

    The driver seat is still intact–inside scattered cd’s with burgundy stains, her impossibly colored scarf, glass, pens. A bottle of chardonnay meant to be shared with her love survived. The other side of the car is splayed open, a gaping wound letting in rain, letting in sunshine.

    I picked up a couple of cd’s–Frankie Allison and the Odd Sox….and now my hands with bright red blotches, my sister’s blood when she bled for the last time. I absently rubbed my hands on my jeans–the bright red dulled to burgundy again. I took the scarf with me.

    Last summer a feral cat mutilated a mourning dove near my garden. I gave it water. It took a little. It hopped a few feet. It died. Its partner would not leave. It looked sad. A tiny puff of feathers still marks where the broken bird fell.

    Her ashes are in a cardboard box, decorated with construction paper, stickers, sparkly glue, and (of course) hearts.

    I kept going back in the car, not sure what I was looking for, but sure I would not find it.

    At least I got something right this week.

    Doyle and I hit it off early. He seemed to like my plays about science and my doggerel poems. I liked pretty much everything he wrote.

    During my teaching rounds, I will occasionally show pediatric residents wheat berries, and ask them what they think they are. These fine young minds have been charged with teaching nutrition to parents, so quizzing them about the most common source of grain calories in this part of the world should be fair game.

    I have yet to have an American born physician get it right.

    My other Everythingian buddy “iceowl” grew up with doyle and liked to fascinate me with stories about him. (Keep in mind when you read the following that iceowl has been to Antarctica three times and has written about it better than Hemmingway ever could have.)

    [Doyle’s] done much more for humanity than I have.  I’m just a silicon valley idiot…  He is one of those guys who is blessed to do well doing exactly what he wants in the world.  Classic Joseph Campbell example of, “Following your bliss.”  He wants very little from the world, and gives a lot.  So, Doyle couldn’t possibly do anything he didn’t want to do because the worst that happens is he gets nothing for his efforts, and he’s perfectly happy sleeping under the highway overpass if it comes to that …..  He just wants to do things none of us could stomach for more than a day – like dodging bullets and the cops both while illegally vaccinating kids in inner city Newark.

    Five years ago doyle hung up has white physician’s coat and traded it for the white lab coat of a high school science teacher. He calls his students his “lambs”, though I suspect few of them understand how closely he has observed the slaughter in his former life.

    In his blog he mixes the same blend of adoration and frustration that I came to love him for at Everything2. Here he is breathlessly elevating a discourse on respiration to a paean of the universe, because as he sees it— and trust me, doyle sees it as it is— there is no meaningful difference between the two. (I’ll do my best to capture doyle’s rapturously manic formatting.)

    Carbon dioxide that traveled through the hearts 
    of every child in our class.

    Carbon dioxide expelled as a sigh, 
    broken down by a few brain cells that would
    rather do anything but this school thing.

    We ruin it, this carbon dioxide communion, reducing it to hieroglyphics on a page, to be regurgitated by spilling bubbles on a sheet, a religiously messy communion of sorts sterilized to a formula:

    C6H12O6 +6 O2 =>  6H2O + 6CO2

    And yet, for a moment, the moment before eating the bean, a few students allow themselves the beauty and the power of the story to let them believe what they’ve always known to be true, that this whole life business, as messy and complicated and incomprehensible as it seems, gets down to this:

    Each living thing, every living thing, shares an intimate bond that goes beyond the language of science, beyond the language of art, beyond human boundaries.

    The universe belongs to all of us, as we belong to it.

    No matter how we do in school, no matter what we know, now matter what we do.

    I would trade all the biochemical pathways we “teach” for a child’s grasping, for more than a moment, that we are indeed the stuff of the universe around us, and that this stuff cycles through us, is us.

    Without an iota of the effort I put into it, Doyle writes the way I yearn to, with a high-wire walker’s combination of improvisation and precision. Because he flat-out knows so much, thanks to an enormous education and equally enormous experience, he can produce an uncannily free of flow of ideas without the so-much-smoke-blowing of so many formally educated, professionally self-identified “writers”. After I’ve been steeping myself in his prose for a while, I start to feel my own prose improving, taking flight. It could just be my imagination; but given how much both doyle and I believe in imagination, I’ll take it.

    Neil Gaiman first introduced me to the Talmudic legend of the 36 Tzaddikim in his Sandman series. “They say that the world rests on the backs of 36 living saints – 36 unselfish men and women. Because of them the world continues to exist. They are the secret kings and queens of this world.” I’m not going to come out and say Doyle is a Tzaddik. Such a pronouncement would be absurd, given the the legend’s clear and emphatic stipulation that no one can know who the 36 are. 

    I just have my suspicions is all.

    Photo by Susan LaRusse Eckert, used with permission of the subject, who only asked that I note: “She’s a little pissed off at me now–I tend to do that. I’d be much obliged if you mentioned that I’m truly sorry for my, um, knuckleheadedness.”

    Posted at 1:12 PM in Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: daylog filibuster, everything2, iceowl, Joe Mastroianni, Paul Mullin, screenplay, writing