Is that really all there is? No rope end quivering in the nothingness, no Dougie Fairbanks leaping in and out of clay jars, no Captain Blood, no Indiana Jones, no chance to break through, behind the sweet pine 2 x 3s and into the outer darkness of gaffer's tape and klieg lights... Nothing out there but unfulfilled dreams and final ridiculousness. It's all this side of the set, this moment under the lights, an endless string of pearls, each pearl a moment rolling downstage and into a gutter somewhere... Never to be seen again.
For now it seems this is a year that was all winter; there was a spring, a sort of businessman's spring that existed on a calendars only, then a final, sick sort of green in the leaves... Then frost and squelching mud and death. How 'bout that?
And somehow I am still here, I drink, I breathe, I sweat, I hear the jazz like a fast train carrying me somefuckingwhere, anyway... The things that used to please me please me all the more now, now when I need them to recede into a decent background, become set dressing for my adult life... They come out mugging, leering, snapping fans and striking provocative poses, just when I need to forget my own lack of drive, my own lack of, well, shall we say oomph... Like some burlesque put on for you and you alone and you can't leave... Ah, what the hell... At some point it all dries to a sort of fine, faint smell that you barely remember, like the memory of water on baking cobbles... Yet the hard outer layer remains, a stubborn old stump whose sweetness was long ago leached out into the ungrateful sand. That's where we old men go, right? Into a kind of desert? Or a swamp, roots drowned in alcohol... So laugh now, cry now, while you still can... Even if it's just a play, even if it's all for show.
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