Bristol Meyers

It's just been an exhausting couple of weeks, that's all. You know, the holiday season, it's pretty intense in my line of work. It could've been worse. More intense, I mean. I shudder to imagine if I were still working in a Toys 'R' Us this time of year. All the same, New Year's Day is one of the most hectic days of the year if you work in a restaurant that serves brunch. There are twice as many hungover people and half as many places open. What I'm trying to say is that I didn't get around to cleaning my apartment today. Tomorrow for sure.

Today I learned that in polo, every player needs three horses. Otherwise, the horses get worn out, and those things are expensive.

I really admire horses. They don't ever quit. You can literally work a horse to death. They'll do it. It doesn't matter. They'll do it. They're renowned for their unparalleled work ethic, and their huge dicks. If you're born as a horse, you've won at life.

Chrysalis

New Year's Eve, and I was in my local grocery. Saw the crowds, with their carts and their kids jamming up the snack food aisle and the liquor aisle, and all I could think was "fair-weather fans."

Those are my aisles.

I realized, purchasewise, that I've been treating every evening as a holiday. That's the bright way of looking at it. The dark way is in explaining that I eat junk and I drink junk 'til I fall asleep well after midnight.

But I make it into work on time, and I work hard, and take pride in my work, and they love me at work, and they frequently say so. And they pay me the money that keeps me alive, the money that I put into my body, to survive, and then a touch more money, making it worthwhile to remain in that condition. Thereby allowing me to make it into work again. And that's how I've fallen into my most recent funk.

My New Year's resolution is to pursue more creative outlets. I haven't acted, haven't written, haven't read, haven't drawn, painted, built, or made music in months and months. I haven't had the energy or motivation. But people keep giving me journals as gifts. Nice, leatherbound journals with acid-free paper. That's a clear incentive. An open-ended commission. And most importantly, it's support.

I wonder if that's why I create. Clearly I don't do it for myself, or I'd be doing it instead of talking about doing it. I don't do it for money; there's no money in it. Either I don't realize how much I need the thing itself or I'm so fucking shallow that I need an audience to watch me chase it down. Either way, thanks for listening. I mean it.

My other New Year's resolution is to clean my room. I can, I will do all these things. Starting tomorrow.

Central Perk

On the train today, I noticed a pet supply store. It's in the Wicker Park neighborhood. There are pawprint decals on the windows and mannequin canids. The name of the place is "Wicker Pet."

And I thought to myself, Really? You bought and established a pet shop in Wicker Park, and you chose not to name it "Wicker Bark?" Was Wicker Bark already taken? Explain yourself.

Maybe they didn't want to be cutesy. That's fine. I respect that. But only if you can come up with something better. More attractive. Catchier. The thing that bothers me the second-most is that they went ahead and put "Wicker" into the name, and then side-stepped the punchline in favor of something even less remarkable. The thing that bothers me the most is that it bothers me at all.

At work, we have a lamb sandwich on the menu. It's not called a lambwich. Missed opportunities get to me, I guess is what I'm saying.

On Modern Environmentalism

Keeping it moving. I start a new job next week. That's when the restaurant opens. I'm waiting tables again. I think I'm getting fairly good at it. I know better than to get too specific, but it seems like it's gonna be a really nice, clean place. Exclusively organic/humane/local/eco-friendly/sustainable fare.

Sustainable. One thing that strikes me as interesting--not just with this place but on the whole--is how much our cultural verbiage has changed in just ten years. It seems to me that in the Nineties, all the activists were saying "save the planet." And the rainforest, and the whales, and so on. No one says "save" anymore. It's "sustain" now. As though Earth is a cancer patient for whom we can only delay the inevitable. Make her comfortable. Enjoy our last moments together. Prolong her life, if possible, but not her suffering.

If you'll allow the analogy to go on, who's the cancer? Who's expanding too fast and who's selfishly consuming the resources that the body needs to keep itself, as well as the disease, alive?

"Save" implies that if we sacrifice our modern comforts we just might be able to reverse the damage that we've done. "Sustain" implies that we can find alternatives that keep the planetary motor running just a little longer. This new attitude is very telling of--as I'm sure I'm not the first to point out--what seems to be an era of compromise.

On the bright side, if we really do finally trash the place, maybe NASA will get the funding it deserves.

Hammertime

I still try to keep a private journal, but until recently my thoughts have been unfit for sharing. I'm more discerning now. But after so long, what could possibly be so important and so interesting as to draw me back here?

Yeah, it's sharks. You guessed right.

I still don't have cable, but on that Internet I watched a National Geographic special called "Shark Superhighway." It's about hammerheads, which are the best of all. They travel in schools, which is unusual for sharks, and because they travel that way, they might be migratory, which would also be unusual for sharks.

In the special, a group of marine scientists and conservationists attempt to capture a hammerhead and attach a satellite beacon to its dorsal fin, because if they can prove that hammerheads are migratory, and that they follow predictable migration paths, then they can petition for restrictions on open-ocean fishing in the areas they pass through and protect them from extinction.

Anyway, they do it. And the narrator says,

"...All the team can do is wait for the tags to send in their data. But the tags will only work if the sharks rise up to the surface. Just a few feet below, and their signals will be too weak to reach up into space. But if and when they do, the satellite will beam their information back down to Earth. The team will receive it in the form of an e-mail."

ATTN: SCIENTIST@SCIENCE.COM

FROM: HAMMERHEAD@PACIFIC.OCEAN

SUBJECT: Re:

MSG: HEY. BRUCE HERE. DON'T KNOW IF YOU REMEMBER ME. I'M A HAMMERHEAD. ABOUT 9', 600 LBS. I'M ONE OF THE SMALLER ONES. YOU PROBABLY MEET A LOT OF HAMMERHEADS, I KNOW. WE MET OFF THE COAST OF DARWIN ISLAND. I SPENT FOUR AND A HALF MINUTES ON THE BRINK OF DEATH WHILE YOU HOSED DOWN MY GILLS ON YOUR SCIENCE BOAT. YOU TURNED ME INTO A CYBORG. MAYBE THAT RINGS A FUCKING BELL?

ANYHOODLE, JUST THOUGHT I'D LET YOU KNOW WHAT I WAS UP TO. SWIMMING MOSTLY. EATING FISH AND LARGE FISH AND RAYS AND RAYS AND SOME FISH THAT ARE SMALL. MY GIRLFRIEND'S PREGNANT BUT WE'RE NOT READY SO WE MADE THE TOUGH CALL AND SHE'S AGREED TO EAT HER YOUNG. BUUUUTTTT... YOU'RE PROBABLY MORE CONCERNED WITH WHERE I AM RIGHT NOW, WHO AM I SHARKING KIDDING? NOT SCIENCE. THAT'S FOR SURE. HERE ARE MY RECENT COORDINATES:

LAT1: 1.443N LON1: 92.092W LAT2: 0.352S LON2: 82.252W

ALSO. FYI. E-MAIL IS VERY LABORIOUS FOR ME. PERHAPS IN THE FUTURE WE COULD KEEP TABS ON MY LOCATION VIA FOURSQUARE OR EVEN TWITTER. JUST FRIEND ME AND IT WILL SHOW UP ON YOUR FACEBOOK. I HATE YOU.

THANK YOU FOR CONSERVING MY SPECIES, HUMAN OVERLORD.

YOURS,

BRUCE CYBERSHARK
SHARK INDUSTRIES
OCEAN

So, my new project: sorting through the music, images, and documents that survived the great hard drive crash of '11.

(It feels weird to me, abbreviating 2011 as '11. Like something's missing, almost. I never felt that way about the last century.)

I've deleted all the inessential photos. Duplicates and blurs and such and things that just don't matter anymore. The documents I haven't got to yet. I'm not ready to read through all that junk. I'm working through my music folder now. I have a lot of crappy songs, as a result of my "gotta catch 'em all" completism. I will not show them mercy anymore.

The other night I watched a documentary about punk music, called You Weren't There. I felt like I could stand to learn more on the subject. I think that punk efficiently conveys emotion--angst, mostly--and on that level it succeeds at being art, but part of the point of it is that it's unpleasant to listen to, and on that level it fails at being music. I consider it as being closer to performance art. To play a punk song, it's required that you dress a certain way, behave a certain way. The music itself is just part of a larger spectacle. This is true of some other genres, but most of them don't carry it so far. What I'm saying is I think it's fun to watch but pointless to listen to in isolation.

I was on Facebook last night, browsing through the "people you may know" thing, and seeing that apparently there are some famous faces in my book now. I don't really know these people--I know they don't know me--it's just kinda cool to be able to say "No, Facebook, I haven't actually met Tim Meadows, but thanks for letting me know that we have nine friends in common." And then I actually did run into him today. He showed up, along with a number of other referential alumni, for Joyce's memorial service, which I helped run and set up and disassemble in time for the eight o'clock curtain. Somewhere between 800 and 1,200 people showed up to honor her. That's how awesome she was.

The city shut down part of our street. There were cops stationed outside and plainclothes officers patrolling the interior. I'm not an expert on the subject but I'm not sure that Chicago's seen a funeral of this magnitude since, I don't know, maybe Benny Goodman's.

We all got very drunk. I hailed a cab. As soon as I got in, the driver lurched forward and stopped abruptly and I hit my head on the partition. I buckled my seatbelt and he started giving me an oral history of Eastern Europe. By the time he started talking about Area 51, I looked out the window and realized This guy has no idea where he's going. Classic misdirection. I helped him find my street, by which point the conversation had moved on to conservative media. He concludes by shaking my hand and telling me to just pay him "whatever you normally pay. Ten dollars or whatever."

So, that was Tuesday.

Dream: I'm at work. Everytime I dream of work, it has to be in an expansive labyrinth. No exception this time. I'm navigating my way to a problematic group of about fifty people. Collectively they're committing every breach of theatre etiquette in the book, and breaking a few laws besides. I try to talk to them; I beg them to control themselves. They look at me like I have two heads, both containing shit-for-brains. They ignore me, patronize me, wave me away, I lose patience and I use harsh words. They all get up at once and proceed single-file to the lobby. One of them is dressed like Batman. At least this will make a good story, I think, I can tell my friends that Batman got me fired.

I'm tearing up from the stress. A woman--not quite Amanda, not quite Dawn, at least half Julie--says she's sorry. "For what?" I ask her. She says, "I'm sorry Mel fired you. Is that... Isn't that why you're crying?" The next person I see is Mel. She tries to apologize and I cut her off. "I've heard already. Spare me." She tries to hug me and I walk away, all the way to the exit, where I realize I'm not wearing shoes. I left them in the managers' office. I can't leave without shoes. And I can't go back because I've already made my dramatic exit.

Dream Within the Dream: The alarm rings. What did I even set this for? I don't have a job anymore. I hit the snooze button again and again. The alarm rings. Waitaminute... I wasn't fired at all--that was just a dream! It's ten P.M. The shift is almost over. "No call, no show, no job." I'm in the maze again. Let me go home.

Reality: The alarm rings. What did I even set this for? I don't have a job anymore. I let it ring for a while. I reach to turn it off. Waitaminute... It takes me several moments and a cigarette to determine that a) I am indeed awake, and b) that my employers are expecting me in ninety minutes. Lucky I cleared away the cobwebs just in time. Otherwise I don't know how I'd've explained my way out of a dream come true.

Also I remember dreaming something about Irish people being mad at me, but I can't recall why or what about now.

You've heard by now about the blizzard. It rocked my apartment, not in the sense that I was hosting a Pink Floyd laser light show, but in the sense that my three-flat was swaying from side to side. Also, it was like a Pink Floyd laser light show. I had never seen thunder and lightning during a snowstorm before, and was ignorant that it was even possible. So, according to Youtube, was our local weatherman, who flipped out while reporting on location, repeatedly exlaiming "HOLY SMOKES!"

Around the same time, by coincidence, my hard drive crashed. And my phone hasn't been holding a charge for a while. So I never got word that the theater was closed. I braved my way to work only to find it locked. I was grateful for the night off but unfortunately my tauntaun froze before I reached the first marker.

As far as I've heard, our theater has only shut down twice before. Once was for another blizzard (though they ended up jury-rigging a show anyway, by insistence of the actors), and once for September 11th.

Even now the snow is still up to my knees. I'd never seen snow collect in dunes before.

Two days after the storm, the "state of emergency" was lifted from downtown, and I ventured out to blow some savings on a new computer. It's a laptop. Very sexy. It came in a box with "The computer is personal again" written in nine languages in a Tim Burtonish font. My roommate Clint used the computer skills he learned at Hogwarts to help me extract the important stuff from my old harddrive. (I was amused to find that "IMG_666.jpg" was a photo of a woman I particularly dislike.)

When I marched back to work this evening, there were flowers set out in the lobby and everyone was hushed. I asked if everything was alright. I was told that Joyce had died.

Joyce was our Producer Emeritus. She was an exceedingly sweet old Jewish woman--turned eighty last year. She had a red cardigan and a black cardigan. She moved slowly, but her wit was rabbit-quick. Anytime I asked how long she had been working here, the response was simply "since forever." I was never sure how much authority Joyce wielded, or whether she'd become more of a beloved figurehead, like the Queen Mum. But I could readily see the respect she commanded; the esteem she was held in. It was made clear to me many times how many performers owed their careers to her.

But what I liked about her, given my limited scope of perspective, was that she was nice to me. We'd talk sometimes. I'd hail cabs for her or help her down the stairs. When she found out that I napped on the kitchen floor during the twenty-four hour charity improv marathon, she chastised me, "Why didn't you come sleep on my couch in my office? I have a blanket for you. Jim Belushi's mom made that blanket for me. It's a good blanket."

She was, in general, a stick-up-for-you kind of gal. When our theater celebrated its fifty-first birthday, there was a luncheon planned for the day staff and office workers, i.e. "the boys and girls upstairs." Joyce related to me, "Now Jared, I don't usually raise my voice..."

"I can't imagine you doing it."

"But I was furious. I said, 'forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I believe the actors have something to do with this theater.'"

I don't know whose budget it came out of, but everyone on the night staff got free pizza and cake and beer that night.

What's hard for me is that I consider her such a fixture, and I've known her slightly less than a year. I cannot imagine the loss of the men and women who've known her for decades. I half-believed her death to be an elaborate prank in bad taste, until I saw her office door in a quite novel state: closed. With a single red rose tied around the doorknob.

A few weeks ago, I worked a wake for Mary, a teacher of comedy writing in our training center. I observed that "we'll have to have another wake to get rid of all of these leftover tissue boxes." While I don't put blame on myself--that would be superstition--I do regret the comment. "These things happen in threes, you know," I'm waiting for someone to say it. So I can punch them in the jaw.

Oneiromancy

I slept all day today. I don't know why. I know I was tired. Maybe it was residual fatigue from the last stages of my cold. Maybe I'm old now.

I dreamt I was in a car accident. That used to be a recurring nightmare of mine, where I would be cruising along and suddenly it would come time to, you know, stop the car, and either my legs were paralyzed, or the brake pedal had disappeared entirely. I've never been a confident driver, so it's easy to see how that anxiety would manifest itself in dreams. But this was the first driving dream I'd had since I engaged a deer in mutually assured destruction, nine months ago. I woke up at five P.M., sweating, my right leg bucking uselessly against the blanket.

By extenuation, I could say that losing control of a car in my dream signifies anxiety over a lack of direction or control in my waking life, but I'm not sure that's right. I have a plan now. My room is clean and I'm well-medicated and I feel like I know what to do. Perhaps I have a lingering subconscious fear that I have overlooked something, something as obvious as a brake or an airbag. Or perhaps, like the dozen other fairy tales I dreamt this afternoon, it meant nothing at all.

Paging Dr. Jung...

The Tertiary Adventures of 100 Proof

Last night was the office holiday party. Yes, I know Xmas was a month ago, but January 24th is the feast day of Our Lady of Peace, which would probably be just as important to believers if Bing Crosby sang about it and there were presents involved.

I did get some presents, though. There was some company swag--a blanket, a calendar, a bracelet charm shaped like a bentwood chair. I need to find a friend who's really cold, wears jewelry, and doesn't know what day it is. There was also a raffle, where I won an overnight stay at the swank Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers.

"Hey Megan, what are you doing after this?"

"I don't know. Why?" said my beautiful friend.

"I just won a night in Heaven; I was wondering if you would join me."

I couldn't hear her response over the party, but at least she didn't slap the shit-eating grin off my face.

On top of that, we had a Secret Santa gift exchange, and Steve got me a soft, luxurious Italian leather notebook, with heavy paper that's perfect for ink drawings. I gave Danielle some sweet tea and a Threadless tee with a big watercolor sunflower. I packed it up in a burrito bowl and paper sack from Chipotle, which I think she appreciated. Inside jokes, etcetera.

I then proceeded to get absolutely shitcan hammered, which, along with extramarital groping, is the point of an office Xmas party, I think. Over the course of the evening, I had three glasses of Jack, a glass of beer, a glass of wine, and at least eight cups of a notorious punch that I heard referred to as "Allison's cougar juice."

Some of the night staff put on a parody show, and afterward there was karaoke with a live band. All in all, there are a lot of very skilled performers in our building. Which comes as no surprise at all. What is surprising to me is that I don't feel hungover in the least. I must be hangover-proof now. Which, if you have to pick one useless superpower...

What, You're Too Good for "Gilded?"

I told them I was sick and they could tell I was sick. One of the managers gave me some generic Dayquil and let me go home after the matinee was over. I thought it was very nice of her. I bought some more generic Dayquil at the Walgreens outside of work. (I've always been trepidacious about taking drugs for minor ailments, even more so since Shea told me his horror story about the time he accidentally went Robotripping at a screening of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, but desperate times, etcetera.) I did not have to buy more Chapstick. It was in the finger of one of my gloves. I... I don't know.

I spent most of the rest of the evening... I can't remember if I took a nap or not now, but I spent some time reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which Gabe loaned me. I came across a word in it that I didn't know the meaning of, and in my irritable state I got mad at myself. Was I that far removed from the habit of reading that consumed me for so many years? Had my vocabulary atrophied? Or, even more maddeningly, had I not read enough as a young man, that the secret of this word should still be locked from me? I threw off my blanket, lit a cigarette (as the characters of Kavalier & Clay do every three pages or so), and looked up "aetataureate" in an online dictionary, which had no definition for it, and then in a search engine, which explained that it was not a real word at all but a nonce word that Chabon invented for the story. "Of or pertaining to a Golden Age," the Internet said, but I didn't understand the etymology of it. So I looked that up too. It turns out aetatis is Latin for "of the age of," and aureate means "gold" or "gold-colored" from the Latin aureatus, "decorated with gold." So, that's what a nerd does on a sick day, if you were wondering.

Also I played some game on the Internet about evil robots or something. You know, as long as I was there.

Woe, Woe

Been fighting a bug all day. Came on me yesterday, on my way to work. Nasty thing. My guess is the Common Cold. I won't call it Rhinovirus because that makes it sound much cooler than it is.

I've suffered worse, and Friday is my day off anyway. So I've been resting, drinking orange juice, resting, reading, and resting. Not that it makes any difference. A cold lasts a week. There is no cure, outside the efficacy of the human immune system. Still, fatigue persisted all day, and now it's 6:00 AM and I'm working a matinee in a few hours. I made myself a spicy bloody mary, to clear my sinuses, and to help me sleep. I don't have any pharmaceuticals in the apartment. It's just me and homeopathy. Boozeopathy. The bloody mary is inflaming my chapped winter lips. I hopped on a train to get to a convenience store this afternoon, solely for lip balm. I've misplaced it already. Oh, why must they be so insufferably small?

Send in your answers. Winner gets a lifetime supply of Chapstick. Which is just one tube of Chapstick. You'll NEVER USE IT ALL. YOU'LL LOSE IT FIRST. WE'RE MAKING FUCKING MILLIONS OFF OF WINTER.