Retreat

It's hard to describe what is going on. In my life. In Sue's. There are definitely cracks and fissures. Time is cracked like a busted windshield. Maybe there's been a wreck somewhere. Maybe I've been in a wreck, my head spidering the windshield upon impact and I haven't even woken up from it yet. I'm still in a coma. Shards of glass in my face. On life support.

Waking in the dark two nights ago, upstairs in our friends' house, I didn't know where I was, and suddenly I thought I was in a hospital bed. That's what it felt like. The assured breadth of the bed supporting me. Lying on my back. In the dark. Somewhere I felt there were nurses and I was safe.I sighed and I thought, I made it. I knew there has been some serious damage done, because our friends contacted us and said, come up, and they took care of us both. I was in a hospital bed, when you think about it.

Do you know when you can't breathe, how the doctors put an oxygen mask over your mouth and you breathe pure oxygen? No fumes. No pollutants. That's how this house was. No pollutants. Just creativity in its purest form, in everything. In the meals, in the food we ate and how it was prepared and consumed. In the conversation. Their friends came over one night, and on the porch we made music. More creativity. No judgement. Just sharing the gift of music we had, but no judgement. No snark. I hate snark. I hate the place where snark comes from: insecurity and cowardice. The cowardice to face your own self. To face your own insecurities. So they tear you down to build themselves up. I have someone like that in my life right now. She does snark, and I think people have told her its funny, that she's amusing and entertaining. I try to be patient, but only because she's popular, and I don't want to be unpopular.

I know someone else, she has to prove how good she is. It's a competition for her. It gets so dull and boring. I don't know why she does it. Probably for the same reason most people do it: to compensate for some inadequacy. To prove to themselves something. So prove it to yourself, I want to say, but leave me out of it. But we're not that close, to have that conversation. So I treat her like I would someone on the subway, who has a cold and can't stop sniffling.

Sue too. People in our lives who seem to have some real problems and we're in their splatter zone. We both try to sympathize. Be patient. But sometimes it seems the more patient you are with people, the more they stay where they are. Why should they change? Why should they work on their own shit when you're being patient? A long walk down an empty lane helps. The combination of quiet and vigor, the yin and the yang, for balance. The sound of conversation painted on a canvas of stillness.

And there's always the question of my role in things. What are others writing on their blogs tonight about me? How am I impacting others? How can I adjust to make someone else's life just a bit easier? Or even a lot easier? But I've done that. For a long time I concerned myself with the needs and desires and especially the opinions of others. Why give anyone that much control over your life? The test is, if you offer that kind of control, and the person takes it, you know it's the wrong person to give it to. Only the person who rejects it should be given power over your life.

I Need A Change In My Life

Something is very wrong in my life. Changes need to be made. It was one week ago today that Sue and I returned from a wonderful adventure in Nova Scotia, but I didn't know it was a week ago until I checked a calendar. I thought it was about a month, maybe three weeks ago. When the life we returned to here in Boston, with all of its "challenges,"  can overwhelm the feelings of peace and serenity, of being, that we felt there, some drastic changes need to be made.

We started out just heading north from Boston, not knowing where we'd end up in two weeks. We had a tent and a car, and some camping gear. That's about it. But Acadia National Park proved too crowded. Too loud. Americans are loud people. So are French-Canadians who cross over to see the sights on this side of the border. And it's all family-oriented there, it's a safe little national park that Edward Abbey would have hated, and we realized it's us who didn't belong there with the parents with the wee ones who couldn't keep their voices down and the parents who were so stressed from their own life choices to not realize that they and their wee ones who pushed and shoved were rude. Sue and I looked at a map and headed for Cape Breton.

We realized when we got home that something had changed in us there. Something deep, like an earthquake that rumbles deep inside the earth, but it's barely felt on the surface yet a real, significant change occurred.

For me, my soul, that thing captured in this container called my body, began to make itself known again. I began acting and thinking like a writer. And just like I used to be when I lived away from the ocean and didn't know how much I missed the sea until I saw it again, I realized how long it's been since I acted like a writer. These internal dialogues between made-up characters, snatches of words, phrases, descriptions, exposition, all floated around in my head like dust mites in a sunbeam. All I could think about doing was finding a dilapidated old house set in the fog, heated by a wood stove, and get up every morning and put on my favorite old flannel shirt and worn baggy jeans, and write. And the creative spark burst into a creative flame that unfortunately seems to have been extinguished now that I'm back here in Boston.

I'm seriously questioning if the choice I made in 2008 to work in the theater was the right one. I co-founded Boston Public Works because of the hassles of getting a full-length new work produced in Boston, especially if you're a white man like I am. Especially if you're an older white man like I am. Boston is an extremely young, white city. The fringe theater scene, where a new playwright like me would get first produced, is populated for the most part by young, white theater graduates who came from families who could afford the expensive universities like Boston University and Emerson. They graduated, stayed, and formed theaters, and they pretty much cater to the younger population. I actually had the artistic director of a theater--a young man who I like and respect very much--tell me he likes my plays, but they can't cast them because of the actors in the ensemble they pull from, the oldest is about thirty years old. They don't understand the themes that I write about, don't understand older characters, don't understand people who live on the fringes of society, don't understand life events like death and adultery and loneliness. (If any of you are reading this, don't argue: You don't. You think you do on a surface level, but live the life you've lived one more time, commit a few sins, and you'll see what I'm talking about.) Anyway, Boston continues to be the most racist place I've ever lived in, and I grew up where the KKK was evident and real. Boston theater is as white as rice, all the way down through the production teams. I don't want to go so far as to say that the theater community in Boston is racist. I don't think it is. But I do think it acts in a racist manner. For example, gender parity is a topic the leaders in the local community is always promoting, but what they're really promoting are white, female playwrights. I've been to the meetings where all but three or four in room of about 40 to 50 playwrights are white women. If you're not young and white of either gender in this city, you might as well stay home.

And I try to fight the segregation and racism that I've seen for the 34 years I've lived in Boston, but even that--the formation of Boston Public Works--has been wearing me out. The cast and design team of Turtles is diverse, but within Boston Public Works, internal disagreements, members who feel they should have a vote in the way the company operates (if you want to run a company, then start one of your own; really, how do people grow up thinking they get a say in everything?) members who feel their productions should be supported but they don't feel they should have to support the other members, makes me feel as if it isn't all worth it and makes me want to throw up my hands and yes, pull a J.D. Salinger to Nova Scotia. We literally would drive for an hour and see maybe three cars. Heaven! No one preached about gender parity while tabling the racial side of the issue (just for the time being, they say) or cultural appropriation (another popular cause) because there were real issues to deal with, like feeding your family. Friendly, quiet-spoken, polite. Yet keeping just the right amount of distance, giving space to an individual because space was one thing they had plenty of.

Get away. It's always been my modus operandi. (Is that the correct usage of that term?) Sue and I have a short trip to an undisclosed location next week for a couple of days. After Turtles closes in November, we're leaving for London and Paris.  In the spring, more travel. Sue and I are wanderers. Seekers. We know that. Traveling allows us to take the souls entrapped in these human containers out for a spin. We find our American culture humorous, but in small doses. Americans are always trying to tell people how to live, how to think, how to behave, and after awhile we both reach the point where we say, enough is enough, it's time for a change.

Why should I press 1 for English?

On the Red Line this morning, three Asians sat apart from each other but still talked loudly amongst themselves in their native language. I can pretty much read or think over the usual background noise on the train, but their language and their voices—not pretty to my Western ears—seemed designed to cut like a buzz saw through anything: the clanging and rumbling of the old train, my thoughts.

Changing to the D Line at Park, I actually got a seat. Sigh, peace and quiet, I thought, as I pulled out my book. But right across from me, standing in the handicap area, were two young black girls, singing together to a smart phone set to speaker, their voices as persistent as a monk chanting, or a leaky water faucet.

Both times my initial reaction was to shout, Shut the f**k up, would you? Do you see anyone else shouting across the aisle to each other over the course of five stops? Or, What makes you think that just because you think your sappy little song is so deep that everyone else does?

Of course I didn’t shout them down. I took a deep breath because violence and anger don’t accomplish anything, thought to myself that I live in a society and it’s not always about me (as these five other people seemed to think about themselves), and wondered just what was going on here.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard Asians talk noisily among themselves like the black high school students who ride at the back of T coming home on the D line. Just a couple of weeks ago an Asian woman and I had a good laugh because she was sitting next to me but talking to her friends across the aisle and two and three seats down. She was literally shouting in my ear. As with so many disagreements we can find ourselves in when navigating our multinational society, I have a sneaky feeling this was more a rub between cultures than a breach of manners.

And who hasn’t experienced a young person of any race self-absorbed in their music? I mean, it pretty much defines the age group, doesn’t it?—I am going to go out on a limb and say that young people of color will be less inhibited and more inclined to sing out loud on the T than their stiff-necked, uptight, white, Indian, Japanese, just to name a few, counterparts.

Our country is changing so fast, and if it hasn’t happened yet, in the next couple of years people of color—that’s non-Caucasians, you know—are going to outnumber Caucasians. I think that’s one point that the Conservative, predominantly white media keeps forgetting when they crow about their grassroots Teabag movement or when they ask, why should I press 1 for English, or push their Christian values on others. Or even when someone thinks, this ain’t China, this is the Red Line, so act like everyone else.

People keep having babies. Non-Americans keep flying in, settling down, and eventually raising their hand to take the oath to be Americans. (And through studying for their citizenship eventually know more about American history and politics than your average American who can’t find Montana on a map.) Their values and cultural behavior will change the landscape. In liberal California, it was the Latino vote that appeared to kill the gay marriage bill, which to me was not a good thing. Where I live, you can go away for a week, and when you’re getting off the T from your trip from Logan see new businesses have sprouted with signs written in kanji. Is that good or bad? It depends how long you’ve lived in Wollaston.

Hang on to your values, don’t forget your roots, while realizing the one constant in this world—and this country for probably the next twenty years—is change. And there will be those who will want to press their values on others, and there will be those who believe that learning Spanish or any language is a good thing, because learning anything new is a good thing, no different than learning how to cook or play the harmonica or ride a horse.

Peace through Musci: Playing for Change: One Love

More and more I'm getting excited about the idea of changing the world through the arts, whether it's music, theater, the spoken word, and any all combinations. The storyteller, the narrator, was a valued member of society around the campfire. It's time we brought that back.

This video is from the award-winning documentary, Playing For Change: Peace Through Music, comes an incredible rendition of the legendary Bob Marley song One Love with Keb' Mo' and Manu Chao. This is the third video from the documentary and a follow up to the classic Stand By Me and the incredible Don't Worry.

Released in celebration of Bob Marley's birthday on February 6th, this tribute to the legend is performed by musicians around the world adding their part to the song as it traveled the globe.

Check it all out here.





Playing For Change | Song Around The World "One Love" from Concord Music Group on Vimeo.