Office Bar karaoke night

What kind of man doesn’t want sex?

Picture this: you drive to your typical B-grade karaoke dive, and as you stride in the door you’re surrounded by your good friends. They’re actors and actresses. These actors are partying with you on the Saturday night of a three-day weekend. They know you well and you know them well. There are high-fives and deep hugs. The red wine is cheap and plentiful; someone throws down a credit card for a round of drinks, and the bottles and glasses go around and around.

Someone pulls out a bottle of blue diamond pills. “You can get ’em on-line without a prescription,” he screams happily into your ear as he presses one into your sweating palm. The music is hard and loud as people are becoming brave enough to take over the microphone for their own karaoke faves.

And there are, my friend, women.

These women are actresses; they take care of their bodies, they know how to smile, and tell jokes, and laugh, and dance. When one redhead sidles to the bar, there is an instant of body contact between you two that makes you wonder just how many Mai-Tais she’s had — or whether she might be completely sober. And as you watch the women dance they begin to hold one another. It starts as a joke — my, we’re behaving in a downright lesbian fashion, how novel! — and then it changes into something else, something darker, when they realize that the Men are watching them very closely. Now there’s another group of two, grinding and laughing loudly in the center of the floor; the men whistle appreciatively. Now the men do an improvised karaoke number; their shirts come off as they gyrate and sweat. The women scream happily, ironically, for the instant choreography of the drunken men, and the subwoofer pounds the beat as you dance, kick kick kick, and the women begin to gyrate.

Here I interject:

Something is going to give, my friend. Irony and cool detachment will fail. Too much estrogen in the air, too many chemicals in the blood, too many tens of thousands of years of human evolution overdriving your cerebral cortex.

You are going to have to make a choice.

Let us proceed.

A woman sidles to you, sweat running from her bare shoulders. And her hand touches her moist throat and her eyes make polite contact with yours, and then they make impolite contact, and then the unspoken note hangs in the air, the fundamental frequency of the human race, implacable, unstoppable: touch me, kiss me, hold me, fuck me.

Now what kind of man is going to drive home alone?

What kind of man?

A married man, that’s who.

The Byrd weight loss plan

By the end of 2001, I weighed 207 pounds and hated the shape of my body. Today I weigh 180 pounds and am still in the process of losing weight. I don’t starve myself, I don’t abuse myself, and I haven’t used drugs in order to accomplish this weight loss.

There is a billion dollar industry in the United States built on the dreams of fat people to be thin. Turn on any late-night television and you’ll see endless commercials for weight-loss chemicals and sit-up machines and cross-trainers and a bunch of other bizarre stuff. Intuitively you probably know that all this stuff either doesn’t work very well or doesn’t work at all. So why do these companies remain in business?

The fact is that it’s very easy to make money off people who want to be thin.

It’s very easy to make money based on people’s dreams. Everyone in the United States wants to be thin and beautiful. Look on any magazine stand and you’ll see very thin, very healthy-looking beautiful people. They have perfect teeth and perfect bodies. The part the magazines don’t show is that these models spend a major part of their lives preparing their bodies to look like that! We see the results and we don’t see the process.

And here’s the key difference between my process and whatever other fad diets or pills or powders you’ve taken in the past…

You didn’t pay anything to read this.

I’m not going to try to sell you anything. I don’t want your money. I don’t want to make a fifteen-percent commission off anything. Send your money to someone else!

The unifying theme of all modern fad diets is that they charge fees for fancy caffeine pills or concentrated juices or bad medical advice. I’m not going to charge you anything, ever, not now, not in the future, for this information.

Consider that the next time you pay good money to fail on yet another fad diet.

The modern American diet is steeped in fats, from the pounds of French fries we consume to the chocolate shakes and fried chicken and cheese pizzas. Fast food is a terrible source of fat in the American diet and, on my plan, you’re going to have to be damn careful when you eat out to count fat. It IS possible to eat out, but it’s going to be necessary to count everything you do.

Here are the key elements to my plan:

  • Exercise moderately six of seven days for at least forty-five minutes.

 

  • Track all your protein, fat, carbohydrate grams, exercise, and daily weight in a daily personal log.

 

  • Eat when you get hungry, not after. Five or six small meals a day is reasonable.

 

  • Emphasize protein, track carbohydrates, and eliminate fats.

 

  • Reduce or eliminate alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs to “one per week.”

 

  • Lose weight slowly but consistently, one or two pounds per week.

 

  • Deal correctly with guilt.

 

If there is a heaven

If there is a heaven, bright with light and love,

Complicated dances, Christmas every day,

Angels holding hands, a permanent parade,

Heaven is a silent prison without you

If there is a hell, awash in fire and pain,

Loss and misery, regret for life unlived,

Writing on our bodies naming all our crimes,

Hell’s a golden garden if you are with me

I miss you, I love you

If I live a life, and these two hands grow old

Crossing lines and years appearing on my skin,

More and more, although they seem my father’s hands

Young they’ll ever be if they run through your hair

I miss you, I love you

Wheel! Of! Fortune!

I received the call from Mandy this morning. Monica called to say that Chris was in the hospital. From my new work desk in San Francisco I called my brother’s cell phone and Monica answered. She asked, “How are you doing?”

I asked to speak to Chris. I asked him, “Where are you?” He thought for a moment and said, “Minnesota.” I asked him, “Where in Minnesota?” He responded with a string of syllables.

“Don’t… not good,” he eventually told me.

Monica told me not to visit. She also told me to manage my parents. “He’s really doing fine,” she said. “Tell your mom not to worry about him, or make a scene.” The nurse told her that it’s most likely encephalitis, a swelling of the brain tissue caused by a viral infection. Many people recover from it, but the damage is permanent to some.

I called Mom. I called Dad. They decided to fly out to see him.

I decided to fly out. Why I decided to fly to Minnesota I’m not sure. I have the vague idea that my purpose is to protect him from my parents.

I told my new employer. The trade show this week is the most important one of the year. He was gentle. “You make time with your brother as required,” he wrote, in perfect clipped Japlish.

I sit in terminal B in Las Vegas at midnight. Slot machines and cool air and tired old women in NASCAR jackets. Too much noise to rest. My next flight leaves in an hour. I don’t know Minneapolis.

1/7/1991

I just got done reading The Maids, and it didn’t make sense to me but I liked it anyway, so I read it again and a logic that should have hit me the first time began to fall out. The play is about the nature of status, I think. Maids = low status. Therefore the play is about low status people.

A couple of morals the play draws I disagree with. I don’t believe that low status always dreams of being high status. That’s what Claire and Solange dream of: being the next higher person in the hierarchy of status in which they perceive themselves to be. Only we improv’ers know that servants can be high status in the right context, and we know that some people enjoy and take comfort in their own low status.

In this play red, the color of criminals, equals high status. White, for purity, equals low status. Odd how low status sees itself alternately as noble in its earthliness and also as scum. According to Genet it can’t make up its mind.

It’s so obvious that this was written by a man. There’s a lot of pornography going on in it. We’re supposed to alternately enjoy and be grossed out by Solange whipping Claire. It’s somewhere between Marquis de Sade and Freddy Krueger.

If I were to write a play where the characters must be clearly and deeply exposed in a very short time, and if I knew French, I would write it in that language. The French are just nuts with their emotions, and in their writing characters lose their tempers and their cool about as often as they blink their eyes. This is a great convenience for a scriptwriter. Those who write about Americans and the English (Shepard, Pinter, Rabe) need to always be aware of that pained, ever-present wall of bullshit and solitude with which we surround ourselves on the street and in unfamiliar situations. If the French want to yell, they yell. If they want to cry, they cry. Very simple. At least that’s the way everybody writes it.

1/7/1991

Waiting for Godot! What a breathtaking, illuminating, legendarily perfect play. And it qualifies as a true piece of art: the longer you study it, the more patterns and ideas and morals and lessons and beauty falls out of it. I love it.

All the characters in the play are as important as their names are long. Supposing this, Vladimir equals Estragon, Pozzo equals Lucky, and Boy is not too damn important. Vladimir is the man of the mind, always abstracting information and presenting it in the form of rhetorical questions. Vladimir is the only one in the play with a sense of time; Estragon can remember nothing. Pozzo has lost his watch. Vladimir has bad breath. Vladimir has a perspective which the others lack.

Estragon’s feet swell up. Estragon can think in the limited reality that is the stage. Estragon cannot think. Estragon can dance. Estragon represents the concrete.

I think Pozzo is Godot, although we’ll never know for sure; Pozzo is the living status relationship. He needs a Lucky or else he can’t be cruel. Lucky is the tragedy made clear, and the other characters cannot perceive Lucky’s tragedy due to their own.

I have plotted this play in my mind. A tree and a rock. The tree is Vladimir’s. The rock is Estragon’s.

12/14/1990

Read Streamers. Didn’t like it too much for the same reason I didn’t like Odets: the characters are synthesized, painted, false, bizarre puppets. In Streamers a morality comes up and bops you one in the face. About queers: “I mean, some of ’em are okay guys, just way up this bad alley and you say to ’em, ‘I’m straight, be cool,’ they go their own way. But then there’s these other ones, these bitches, man, and they’re so crazy they think anyone can be had. Because they been had themselves.” You got it, straight from the mouth of 1970: queers, niggers, and all that good bullshit are in this play. Joe Normal, seeing this play, will assimilate it as some sort of deeper “reality” which he’s been missing by working at his insurance sales job. Joe Normal will see this scramble of swinging dicks onstage and think that this is life, this is the emotional grind that I missed when I went to college. Rabe does not play to the masses because his work does not speak to them. Streamers is a hodgepodge of larger-than-life army dipshits who we’re supposed to care about.

12/13/1990

It’s a fascinating thing, watching people learn from you. The Immediate Gratification Players as a whole has moved me and changed me more than any organization on campus at Harvard. I’ve rolled up my sleeves and took care of them and it’s been a holy terror, especially with the Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am show, but it’s been just so rewarding to watch my players apply what I’ve taught them and have a good time doing it. I love them all so much. Sorry, Dramatic Arts 1, what I’ve learned from IGP and these amazingly open people tops the intelligent ramblings of Wheeler. There comes a point where you just have to tell the truth. IGP is that truth for me. I see improvisatory acting as a holy form of theater, in the Empty Space definition of the term; it seeks to move us by introducing our souls onto stage. We offer to psychoanalyze ourselves for your pleasure, and in doing so you, the audience, will find a distorted mirror image of yourself. It is a clean, fair, new art.

I read some of Creating Theater. I don’t think it was mandatory for us–the book, I mean. Everybody has their own opinions, directors especially. There are varying schools of theater but I think that the common denominator is that you have to be a little bit nuts about the art form. Why the hell do we want to get up and be someone else in front of other people for a little while? I can understand the wish fulfillment part, but why do we need the audience? Is it communication or introspection? What?

11/13/1990

Less than five seconds ago I finished reading Chekhov’s Sea Gull and I am full of it the way that good plays fill you up, to the point where your seams nearly burst and your belly bulges to contain the powerful emotions that come with absorbing a play too fast. Goes to your head, like too-cold lemonade in July. Where to begin?

The sea gull, I think, and Treplev’s gift to Nina, symbolizes the fact (to Treplev) that Treplev could not give Nina anything of value. Sea gulls are easy and worthless to shoot. A gift of a seagull is like a gift of sand. And then you have Trigorin’s trite analysis, in which Chekhov just fucking outdoes himself: it (a) sets up Treplev as the bad guy to Nina, it (b) foreshadows Trigorin’s seduction of Nina, and (c) it blocks Treplev’s implied message. AMAZING! New! Wild! Different! How the hell do you write so many things with such brevity?!

I can see, though, why this play was recommended for Acting 1. It’s easy to get along with. Prolly played to huge audiences, because there’s not enough really deep stuff in it to alienate the common audiences. Also the illuminati prolly liked it due to Chekhov’s message about the destiny of theater, through Treplev’s speeches in Act One. Gets you on a lot of levels at once. Also you’ve got Masha and Medvedenko as subplots AND comic relief. Only Walt Disney does it better.

I don’t like the ending line. It’s a bit of a cheat. Sure, it’s shocking to hear that Treplev has just shot himself but if you kill the lights on that line there is nowhere to be gone. The play is not only over, it’s killed. I would sorta have liked it if we HADN’T have known it Treplev had shot himself or not. That would have annoyed the shit out of audiences but it would have given the play a micro-degree more of class.

11/13/1990

Read Pinter’s Homecoming and found it quite interesting. The best thing about it, like Rosemary’s Baby, is you can’t tell exactly what it is that’s going wrong until the very end, where most everything is spelled out for you in the grossest and most terrifying possible terms. The image that I got is one of a worker bee (Teddy) bringing back food (Ruth) to the hive (everybody else). The model would work well in terms of developing the off-stage relationships of the characters. The trade of Ruth for a sandwich is utterly slick and cold. This play has something stinging to say about men’s perceptions of women, and it has something cold to say about the family unit. Imagine wild dogs fighting over a roast. Icy!

Oh, yeah, one other thing about the play: this play explores the essence of the block (see Johnstone). The men deny one another speech, actions, and objects. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a playwright use a block correctly in a theatrical context (in my of course brilliant theatrical repertoire.) Pinter understands that a block is actually a form of non-acceptance, and therefore hostility. He uses blocks to demonstrate the men’s interrelationships. Cool beans!