Stress

Been a stressful two days, hanging at the hospital while B. underwent his procedures to check his pancreas and such. He flies home this morning. I'm spending the day preparing for dinner guests, a guy in my piano class and his wife, first dinner guests I've cooked for in maybe five years! Making a clone of the classic cassoulet.

I took my AlphaSmart to the hospital yesterday and did manage to get some writing done. I'm hoping to finish a new play by Feb. 1 for a competition but no biggie if I don't make it. It's fun to be writing for the stage after so long but I have no energy, none whatever, to enter the marketplace, so what I have in mind is putting together a collection of plays that can't be performed while I am alive. I also like the freedom this gives me to raise more hell than I would want to deal with if here ha ha. A collection of posthumous plays, perfect. Last words and all that. I was, after all, a playwright through most of my working career, even if I've called myself a retired playwright in recent years. It's probably what I'm best at. So I can let out all stops, write for my favorite audience (me), and define going in that these are "posthumous" plays, not to be performed in the years remaining to me. Which means that I shouldn't enter that contest, just in case I get lucky, although this one is a little tamer than what I have in mind.

But I need to get back to the new screenplay, and the novel ... oh my, so damn much to do. I've also fallen behind in piano studies and must catch up before classes start again. Where does time go?

I'm reading an extraordinary book, FAUST IN COPENHAGEN: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF PHYSICS, setting the early years of Quantum Mechanics, focusing on the personalities involved. Fell in love with Schrodinger so much I'm seriously thinking of writing something based on two weeks of his life when he combined erotic renewal with formulating his famous equations. A remarkable period in his life, about which little is know, leaving it open to dramatic invention and interpretation.

It was good spending time with B. He is his father's son, including embracing a number of Dick's vices. I fear, however, I'm going to outlive him, despite the guarded better news at the hospital yesterday than the news from the day before. His family line has paid dearly for their hard-drinking Idaho logging roots.