Weather wimp

Man, it's cold outside! Too cold for me. OK, OK, it's only mid-30s, maybe 10 less with the wind chill factored in. Not nearly as cold as the sub-zero freeze in which they played football in Green Bay yesterday. There are parts of the midwest that would consider this tropical weather. However, all these matters are relative. I'm a SoCal guy, still calling myself that though I haven't lived there in over 40 years: I like warm weather. My comfort zone is between 70 and 105. As a kid, I grew up when a big deal on the weekend was to head off with the family to spend a weekend camping under the stars in the Mojave desert. I prefer deserts to mountains. I don't mind frying my eggs on the sidewalk.

So it's plenty cold outside, as far as I'm concerned, with no relief in the forecast. Hell, it'll be April or May before we see 70 again.

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Loving this wallowing in nostalgia I've been doing, revisiting Army buddies and experiences. This has given me a battery charge to return to the Cold War novel, too. I loved the pages I read. The story was stuck -- and I think my new plot point might unstick it. We'll see. It's on my list after I finish the two scripts I'm working on. Scripts are a hell of a lot easier to write than novels, believe me.

The "posthumous" play I'm writing has the working title Oregon Dream. It comes out of personal material I've used before, most successfully in my favorite play to date, which enjoyed critical and commercial success in the 1980s, The Half-Life Conspiracy. However, there I took a distant angle at the autobiographical source material. I looked at it obliquely. I didn't get down and dirty between the sheets. The new play does this. I took the same point of attack in a mediocre poem some time ago, a poem I showed only to one person (JMM), and the Sally novel I interrupted a year or more ago was close to this point of view as well. (I have no idea if I'll return to it: both the Cold War and old age novels excite me more now.)

I'm writing this play knowing I will not market it. I don't want a production done while I'm living. Why? Because I don't want to play all the stupid marketing games that go with a production -- I don't want to be asked about the autobiographical roots of the material. I don't want people who will recognize these roots to ask me about anything. Writers have done this before -- O'Neill with Long Day's Journey Into Night is a famous example. There's nothing particularly inventive about this but it is a gesture you don't see all that often. My plan is to write some plays of such personal, intimate nature -- as many as boil up out of me -- that I don't want them done for the reasons above, and then make sure they are available after I'm gone. Someone may or may not be interested in them. These are plays that I need to write. To hell with the rest. It's an interesting way to "come out of retirement" as a playwright.

I like how the first is going. It's got a lot of wicked energy in it. I know of no one who would do it even if I allowed it. But it's shaping up just the way I want it to be, which after all is the job, and the only job, I have as a writer.

So I need to finish this, and the more accessible screenplay for my agent, and then get back into the Cold War material. All the while practicing, practicing, practicing the piano and the banjo.

Interestingly enough, Luke Warm asked if I still played banjo. I mostly played banjo in the Army. Then in grad school I switched to guitar, picked up a 12-string from Barre Toelken, a folklore prof at U of O then, and played that through the 70s into the 90s, when I put my Guthrie tribute to rest and stopped playing entirely until recently.