Okay, I'll go.
But when I get to Ohio, I'm gonna whip out my johnson and piss all over that hellhole.
Nah, that's a work, just one last reference for the minions.
It'll be just fine. It'll be good to meet Kirk's children, who almost certainly will have to care for me in my old age, given the decreasing possibility of my breeding. I have friends from undergrad who I haven't seen in 15 years, and it's unlikely they have children who will care for me at any point in my life—but perhaps there's some other reason that seeing them will benefit me in an as of now unknowable way. Spoon Millionaires will be terrific; I'm sure that everyone associated with the Lima show will bring something to it that didn't exist three months ago. I'll be impressed with the production, pleased with the performances; I'll gain tremendous insight into the play which will facilitate our most important rewrite (I bought a penlight!) and I'll be grateful to Kirk for carrying me through this whole process. On Saturday, we're even going to the University for some high level Spoons bidness, and while thinking about that causes me no end of horrible flashbacks, in truth, I know that there's nothing from 1994 there anymore. As far as I'm concerned, that place is a ghost town. Being afraid to go back to Ada, Ohio because of how awful things were a decade ago is beneath me. I am not your rolling wheels; I am the highway. I am not your carpet ride; I am the sky.
It's cool. It'll all be just fine.
Some of that is even almost kinda true.
Seriously.
I won't enjoy myself, of course, 'cause that's not how I roll; I'm currently planning to skip the Saturday performance, 'cause I'll be too anxiety riddled to watch the show a second time. I'll almost certainly avoid all of the actors, save Hodges, and also slip by everyone else associated with the production; they'll think I'm snubbing them, but truthfully, I have no ability to conduct myself appropriately in social situations without being consumed by absolute terror. And I'll be thrilled to get back home and see my kitten on Sunday afternoon, swearing to myself that if I can ever work out the paycheck part of this equation, that I'm gonna go full on Howard Hughes and never leave my house again.
And every word of that is true. That's a damn shoot, brother. My Kingdom for a work at home gig.
And thus—I'm off to Lima. Wish me luck.
"But wait...what will happen to this blog! This happy-go-lucky blog is like an angel on our collective shoulder! Who will make blowjob references and criticize the dominant religious paradigm of our time? Who will talk about the Giants and transsexuals? What about Pam~? What about your painful, temporary restraining order deserving crush on all matters Pam~?"
Yeah, I don't know.
Here's what I'm committed to. I'm headed to Lima for the second show of the six show run; a few days after the full run ends on the 19th, Kirk and I will be back in this space for a post mortem. If and when we get another show, it's entirely possible that I come back with another largely worked series of pieces ostensibly about how I don't want to go to Topeka or Cheyenne or across the street or wherever it is that has the discernment to produce our next show. In the meantime, we're kicking around opening up a thing on MySpace, allowing us to talk to you good people in the interim, keeping the Spoon-mentum building, maybe allowing for one of the co-authors to chat with the barely legal ladies who are easily swayed by one's ability to correctly punctuate conjunctive adverbs; furthermore, were there to be some blogging done over there, it wouldn't be a shock.
But you shouldn't, seriously. As down that road lies madness.
"Hey, I lied madness that one time."
And how'd that turn out for you, voice in my head?
"Best weekend of my life."
Here's what wrestling's taught me about life—always hit the catchphrase. Wrestling's actually been real good about passing on life lessons, far better than kindergarten, in which I didn't learn a fucking thing. "How about we pick up the pace a little, grandma!" I would often yell in the middle of naptime. Weird having your grandmother as your kindergarten teacher, I'm just saying. Woman had an obsession with naps.
Know what else I learned from wrestling—always put yourself over. Always.
In Madame Bovary, Flaubert wrote that, "Human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars."
I was asked by the Palm Beach Post's theater critic what the purpose of this production blog was. I told him what has been my customary rap—we wanted to build a truly unprecedented site for a previously unproduced play, and since I can add virtually nothing on the technical side (all props to Kirk) I had to sing for my supper with this blog. Maybe someone reads it, thinks I'm funny, and then wants to see or produce or publish our play.
Yes, dammit—don't let that glide past your eyes so quickly before you click away to whatever freaky-deaky band it is that Kirk's listening to these days. We need people to (1) see (2) produce and (3) publish our play. So hop on that people. Ask not what Spoon Millionaires can do for you; ask what you can do for Spoon Millionaires.
And if some of the language and themes resonated harshly with some people—well, I'm a believer in the aphorism that controversy creates cash. You build Spoon-mentum any way you can. This was how I did my part. If I were more talented, maybe I could have done it a different way, but I'm only as talented as I am, and I recognize that one's mileage may vary in that analysis. Those of you who hate this blog—believe me, some days I'm right there with you. I am what I am and that's all that I am, and I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
But maybe it's a little more than that.
Here's how we're gonna bring this home. One of the ways that our writing partnership works is that Kirk edits me a little bit; not in the blog, as evidenced by my 9 pages that one day on Jesus and ee cummings and Foo Fighters and Scott Hall, but certainly in our writing Spoons.
One of the ideas that I had that didn't make the final draft (although I'm gonna try to sneak it back into the next rewrite) was that, at a point in the play where the Witherspoons' ownership of the intellectual property rights to the word "spoon" was being articulated, the actors would abandon their characters and break into a couple of monologues from Spoon River Anthology.
For those of you uninitiated, that's a novel/play where the deceased citizens of a small town give little, tiny speeches. There aren't many American plays, as far as I know, with the word "spoon" so prominently in their titles, so I've grown to feel a little bit of a kinship with Edgar Lee Masters; and as such, I think maybe I can discuss what the production blog has been about by specifically referencing Spoon River:
Dorcus Gustine
I was not beloved of the villagers,
But all because I spoke my mind,
And met those who transgressed against me
With plain remonstrance, hiding nor nurturing
Nor secret griefs, nor grudges.
That act of the Spartan boy is greatly praised,
Who hid the wolf under his cloak,
Letting it devour him, uncomplainingly,
It is braver, I think, to snatch the wolf forth
And fight him openly, even in the street,
Amid dust and howls of pain.
The tongue may be an unruly member—
But silence poisons the soul.
Berate me who will—I am content.
I read a handful of blogs by academics, people who uphold the value of free speech and academic freedom; people who (rightly) believe the current attempt by David Horowitz and his acolytes to intimidate professors into towing corporate America's official line (in the way the media has been so cowed over the past quarter-century) under the color of providing "balance" is a dangerous attempt to quell free thought. If we can't be free to speak our minds, to hold and express sometimes unpopular minority views in colleges in this country—exactly where can we do that? Work? If my institution is any barometer, employees in corporate America are experiencing an anxiety unprecedented in our lifetimes. Stepping out of a very thin line threatens our paychecks, and many of us feel ourselves just a missed paycheck or two away from losing our homes, cars, and health care. There's a thin line, we in the middle feel, between ourselves and the poor—and as the poor fall further and further behind in this country, as the safety net gets sliced away, as wages stagnate, prices rise (gas is...how expensive today?) and health insurance becomes more and more impossible to afford—the idea that we'd be out of work for any period of time is scary.
So, we stay in line. We stay in line out of abject fear of falling. Because we all know what being at the bottom means—nametags, shit jobs, lousy, unsafe schools for those of you with kids. And now—maybe military service. We're in a permanent war—a permanent war requires cannon fodder. And for those without options, the military becomes an option.
Better a body bag than a paper hat, I guess.
I think all of this is intentional, by the way. As mentioned in earlier blogs, I don't think the war is going badly, I think this is precisely what the power brokers wanted. Oil prices are up exponentially, profits of energy companies and defense contractors are enormous. Poor kids are dying (ask Kanye what George Bush thinks of poor people) and everyone in the middle is too freaked out to rock the boat. As long as the big hitters are getting paid and there's no real political fallout—what exactly has the downside been to the war from the perspective of the powerful and soulless? Half the people have given up on the prospect of anyone in power ever really speaking for them, and the other half are divided between the frightened and the frightening, either petrified at the loss of a paycheck or the thought that two men might somewhere even as we speak be kissing. It's almost as if they're afraid that, if Johnnycakes were on the menu, they might have to order a plate.
Ten days after 9-11, Ari Fleischer said that Americans, "...need to watch what they say." And even before we knew, conclusively, that we were being spied on by the Bush Administration and that those who protested him faced a disturbing pattern of harassment and even arrest, I felt the chilling effect. There was a day when I felt I could tell the truth as I knew it to be in the classroom; that day has long passed. When it comes to my job, because I'm mine—I walk the line.
But not here. Here, I just wanted to tell the truth. And I get that it doesn't necessarily always put me in the most attractive light, working against Kirk's and my stated, longstanding goal, of finding a way to get laid as a result of our mirth making. At some point, so the story goes, I began to repel the very people I wanted to attract, and I'd stop that were I able, but failing that, I may as well die with my rhetorical boots on.
Which brings me back to academic blogs. There is a place in this country where people still express themselves freely—it's the internet—but when one reads those academic blogs, the thing you can't miss is that they are all written anonymously.
I don't want to be Dostoevsky. I'm not ready to go underground just yet. It seems to me that the only way to combat the rampant hypocrisy that has battered this country like the three hurricanes I've been hit with over the past two years is not to go into hiding, but to stand up against the machine.
A few years ago, there was a debate if FDR should be in the chair for the monument to be built of him. Those opposed said that he never wanted to be seen in the chair, as it would show him as weak, so it would be disrespectful to display him as such in a monument.
I completely disagreed. Polio didn't make Roosevelt weak. It made him human. It made him real.
Too often, in my view, our private lives are completely divorced from our public pronouncements, allowing for those jackals who are able to maintain secrecy to condemn those whose jugulars are exposed. Bill O'Reilly, as big a falafel loving fraud as you'll find in public life, paid an assistant producer millions to settle that sexual harassment suit. Bill Bennett lost millions gambling while he proselytized about his Book of Virtues. Rush Limbaugh advocated draconian penalties for drug abusers for years and years and years, and then was busted for pumping down dozens of Oxycontin every day. And don't get me started on the numbers of divorces the big ticket conservatives have had while simultaneously saying that it's gay marriage which is what undermines heterosexual marriage. Imagine how many divorces those dudes would have under their belts if gay marriage was legal. They'd have as many drive thru divorce chapels as Waffle Houses in the Bible Belt.
If more people were willing to snatch the wolf—and fight him openly, even in the middle of the street—even if it made them unpopular, even if it opened them to ostracism, even if, sometimes, they got fucking devoured—it would make it harder for the moralizers, harder for the bullies, harder for the people so quick to condemn what they feel is immorality while engaging in all manner of perversion behind closed doors. I think that with every person who refuses to be silent—and also refuses to tell the truth only when under cloak of anonymity—we move a little bit closer to claiming our own reality—to stop living in so much fear.
One can have polio and still help lead the country out of the Great Depression. One can put a cigar inside the chubby intern and still, you know, not be the President who started World War III. I can believe these things and say these words from this production blog—and still be an awfully good college instructor. And not for nothing, but despite my being a dude with all manner of character flaws, if we truly are living in the endtimes and, as prophecy foretold, Robert Urich rises from the dead to lead the Wars For Control of all the Water in the Galaxy—and if, for some perplexing reason, the Glorious Final Battle is decided by who can give the best lecture, I will just flat out, right now, tell you how it is—you want to be on my team.
Or you're gonna be fucking thirsty. I guarantee it.
So, if at sometime down the road, prospective employer X happens upon my little production blog and decides to go another way based on whatever it is that might strike him inappropriate...
Screw you, brother. I hope you've stocked up on the Mr. Pibb.
This blog is who I am. Unless it's totally not. I have a friend, who knows me better than you do, who says it's not at all who I am.
So, either way.
I'm getting hit with one of those south Florida thunderstorms. The rain on my blog is a baptism. My assault on the world begins now.
George Gray:
I have studied many times
The marble which was chiseled for me—
A boat with a furled sail at rest in my harbor.
In truth it pictures not my destination
But my life.
For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;
Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;
Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances.
Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.
And now I know that we must lift the sail
And catch the winds of destiny
Wherever they drive the boat.
To put meaning in one's life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire—
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.
It's hard to objectively call me a slacker. I passed an 18 hour bar exam when I was 24. But I've always gone places that were under my level of capability, schools, jobs—like a prizefighter who protects his record by fighting only guys he knows he can beat, I've maintained this veneer of being the smartest kid in class the past couple of decades by carefully choosing which classes to take.
And among the deep, dark, truthful pool of reasons for my being alone at 35 is that there was a time when I wasn't alone, and one day I was again, and I just didn't have it in me to get over that. It's easier to lock the door than to risk going back to that place. You've all been there, most of you got over it. Me? Not so much. It's embarrassing, but there you are. And it might not be too late today, objectively speaking, for me to have the white picket fence and the 2.2 kids, but you can see too late from here.
I don't really know how it is that this production blog is going to bring me fortune, glory, and true love. It seems unlikely that my funny pictures from Snakes on a Plane are going to lift my sail and catch the wings of destiny.
I'm sick of these motherfucking spoons on these motherfucking millionaires.
But a brother's gotsta take his shot. Dig?
I'm out here on a limb with Spoon Millionaires; I've pimped it as hard as I can, sending out as many e-mails, notes, and postcards as I know how to do. I've revealed more than I had planned; I'm going to a place to which I swore I'd never return; I've called in every favor I had left. I got a snarky e-mail the other day from someone who safely can be called a former friend who accused me of self-flagellation. I have Christian friends who have stopped speaking to me. And there was another thing that, well that's just never gonna happen.
Spoon-mentum is not without its consequences. If anyone inquires if I've done enough for the play, I gave at the office, thanks.
It's possible that none of these seeds Kirk and I have planted yields any fruit; it's likely that we won't really overspread the continent with our Spoony goodness. Maybe we get another production. Maybe a third. Maybe even publication. But turning this into a job offer, into real live paychecks, into a new life on the high sea? Seems unlikely.
Because it's not really a supplementary check that I want. I mean, I won't turn down a check for $12.13, but that's not what I want. I want me some real money. I'm out for dead presidents to represent me.
"What would you do with money? You don't exactly lend yourself to a particularly extravagant lifestyle. Bling? A new Benz? Does Cristal make a no calorie iced tea?"
Granted, I'm not a particularly high maintenance chap. Although I wouldn't mind a stylish Forzieri python trim sand leather hobo bag; but money really doesn't mean toys to me—what money means is freedom. Freedom to lock the door. Freedom to be myself. Freedom to be left alone.
The truth is, if I had fuck you money, that's all I'd ever say.
Seems unlikely that I can get there from here.
But a brother's gotsta take his shot. Dig?
When I was on the TV, Hall of Fame catcher Gary Carter said to the audience during a break, referring to me, "There goes a guy who knows a lot about baseball." And you have no idea how much that meant to me—Gary Carter matters in my world, and has since I was ten—he's one of the half dozen best catchers who ever lived—and he validated all the hours I've ever spent in my life just thinking about sports—all the days I spent alone in my room reading, the books that I read on the school bus in ninth grade (earning the bizarre taunt, I thought at the time, "Hey, what kinda book are you reading? Is that a good book? What, you like to read? Book reader."), the statistics I kept in a grey folder that I carried everywhere during undergraduate school—all those hours worth all that stuff. Validated. Never again to be reasonably questioned. I had proof.
I've been trying to be funny since I was 8. It would be nice if someone analogous in that world who I also respected felt similarly to Gary Carter. As I mentioned to Kirk the other day, I think I'm funnier than I was when we had the comedy troupe, but unless I get constant validation of my delicate genius I just pout like a four year old told it's time to leave Chuck E. Cheese. So, if there were a funny dude who felt I was a funny dude—that would really help me out.
If he had a giant paycheck attached to that feeling—you know, all the better. Yeah, I'm afraid to dramatically shake up my life, absolutely, and I might well name my fantasy football team Restlessness and Vague Desire, but for enough zeroes on the left side of a decimal point, I'd find away to drag my big ass boat out into the water.
No, I'm not sure how it is that this production blog and entire Spoon Millionaires experience leads me to the true love of my life. That same person from earlier, the one who knows me better than you, says that girls aren't going to like this blog, so this idea sort of seems like the longest shot on the board. It's the Santa's Little Helper of my Spoons related hopes. But, you have to meet people somehow. It's unlikely to be when I'm out and about, as you get to a point when the heads don't turn anymore, and the old trophies won don't sparkle so brightly. So, you look for ways to, as Napoleon Dynamite so clearly recognized, use your skills to attract the women-folk. And while I have some sweet dance moves, I'm probably better at writing than shakin' what my momma gave me.
I mean, I can talk a little bit too, sure, but there are only so many people who can hear my homicide lecture.
It's really all part of the same thing. The play. The blog. Getting a job writing comedy. Having someone find me interesting enough to want to know me. You turn on your computer and stare at a blank screen. By the time you turn off the computer, it's not blank anymore. You turn nothing into something. It's like David Blaine, but you know, real instead of lame. And every time you look at the blank screen, you hope that by the time you turn off the computer, what that something you'll create from nothing will turn out to be is indisputable genius. You don't want to be a hack; you want to be brilliant. You want your reader to be moved and uplifted and thrilled and...devoured...with the magnitude of your words.
You want to move the stars.
If it's Spoon Millionaires, if it's a production blog, if it's a birthday card—you want the standing ovation every time. You want to get praise and jobs and money and the women. ("Hey, Chico...first...we get the praise...then...we get the money...then...we get the women.") And if there's some woman out there who really gets it—who reads every entry of this blog and can't put it down and knows...just knows that I'm a dude she has to get to know....
...well, that woman is chemically unbalanced and clearly needs a complete neurological workup. Grow up, lady. Seriously. Grow the fuck up. You think you "get me" based on a couple of half baked and most likely partially stolen political observations? That's pathetic. Save your e-mails for some date rapist you meet on eharmony. I'm not interested. You're pathetic. Yeah, I'm talking to you. Pathetic. I don't know you, and I'm embarrassed for you. What horrible events must have transpired in your life for you to read my fundamentally fictional creation designed only, and I mean, only, to market our little farcical play, and somehow think that we're soulmates? What a ridiculous idea to even cross someone's mind. You're a child. A frivolous, little girl. Go home to your momma and leave me alone at the grown ups table. True love from a production blog? What are you, high? Are you high, baby? Are you high right now? Yeah, baby. No, don't listen to me, baby, you know how I get when the poison all gets backed up, baby. Mmmmm. That's it. I'll take care of you. You know I will, baby. Mmmmm. Oh yeah. I'm hot. So hot. Sticky sweet. From my head, head, head. To my feet. Daddy loves your instability, baby.
What can I say—the spooky chicks have always dug me.
The truth of the matter is, Edgar Lee Masters notwithstanding, we really don't come back after death to speak to the residents of our hometowns. The dead are mysteriously silent, regardless of what John Edward would have you believe.
Except they're not. Because after I'm gone, of course, there will still be Spoon Millionaires. I'm not suggesting that people will be quoting the Archduke in 45 years (although they goddamn should) but they could be, they'll have the ability to so do. A hundred years from now, if your great-grandchildren search "Jim Jividen" on whatever the 22nd century equivalent of Google is, they'll find that minister in Houston, they'll find the guy in southern Ohio who rides the ATVs, and they'll find Spoon Millionaires. And they'll judge my entire value as a human being based on the thoughts contained therein.
So, it's kinda important to me that it doesn't suck.
And after I'm gone—there will still be this production blog—someplace, somewhere, tacked onto a church door or burned onto a chip implanted into a newborn's wrist—will be my thoughts on all matters Spoons. I'll come from beyond to talk to you about the Giants and trannies and janitor pillow fights and TS Eliot.
Hey, not yet born ladies. How you doin'? If medical science so permits, I'm now 135 years old, and the kitten and I are still looking for some companionship.
"The kitten? Your cat's like 8 years old now and has an incurable disease, maybe you should..."
Shut the fuck up, voice in my head. You ever talk about my kitten like that again, and something really, really violent will happen to both of us.
"Sorry, man. My bad."
If you look at it that way—that writing allows you to, even if it's only for a moment, escape the grave, that it allows you a little immortality, then you wouldn't wonder why I only want the right kind of laugh from the play; why I wanted this blog to carry a modicum of honesty, why, every time I sit in front of the blank screen, I'm hoping to tap into that as of yet unfound reservoir of brilliance that represents my absolute best, most engaging potential self. I'm always hoping that one day, I'll find the guy I hoped I'd be by now, back when I left Ohio in 1995, swearing never to return.
But this isn't my best foot forward. I know that. It's both feet and all the rest of me too.
Take it or leave it, kids.
Is it gonna work? Is Spoon Millionaires gonna rip and tear its way across the American cultural landscape? Will I be offered a job with Vince McMahon or Saturday Night Live or The Onion or Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles? Will Kirk and I ride Spoonmentum all the way to the Tony Awards? Will our sitcom resurface to bring us fortune, glory, starlets, and syndication dollars? Will 2006/2007 be remembered as the year when the Hiner/Jividen comedy team finally exploded all over the national landscape—our pictures gracing the cover of Entertainment Weekly as we hold up giant, novelty spoons made out of platinum above a caption, "When Are We Gonna Get Us Some Competition?"
Will I win over some variation of Pam~?
Wow. Maybe I need to rethink this whole supreme being thing.
Have I moved the stars? Or just made the bears dance?
Time, I suppose, will tell.
And if it doesn't, I probably will. So, keeping tuning in, 'cause I have a pretty good guess about the answer.
But I can't tell you today. I got a plane to catch.
I'm going back to Ohio.
Spoon Millionaires
Sunday, August 6, 2006
