For the past week and a half I have been having crazy fucking dreams.

They started out troubling–the first night I dreamed my boyfriend left me–but ordinary. And then they quickly became more labyrinthine, more eerie.

The second night, I was on the El on my way to a party, carrying about a half dozen huge boxes. I got to the end of the Brown line and realized I had missed my stop. So I got back on the train going the other way, at which point I decided to look into one of the large boxes I was carrying and found something very small inside–I can’t remember what. Suddenly I realized I didn’t know the address of the party I was going to, suddenly I had missed my stop again and was on the platform, suddenly I saw an actress I know get on the next train going the other way and I followed her onto the train…

It’s hard for me to capture the sinking feeling of dread these dreams cause me to wake up with every morning without seeming totally crazy myself. A few nights ago I was in a hotel but someone wanted to get me so I had to wait up all night and sneak out the back door so I could catch a 4am flight to somewhere else. And when I got there…something about opium dealing. The only thing I know about opium I learned from Sherlock Holmes and a couple of NYTimes articles about poppy farms in Afghanistan.

The reason behind these dreams is not a mystery–I was recently put on a medication that is given to people for malaria (it’s also used to treat a lot of other things as well, and I do NOT have malaria for the record). This drug occasionally causes blindness, and that has been the focus of my neuroses. However, as the dreams have persisted and become more vivid, I called my mother, a pharmacist, who told me that nightmares are also a side effect.

Their meanings are also not mysterious. Shortly before I started having them, I learned that I am about to undergo a major, major life change. This fall I will be moving across the country to San Diego and entering the MFA Playwriting Program at UCSD. This has been a cause for celebration, not nightmares. But it seems completely logical that all of my dreams have been about leaving, running away, not knowing where I’m headed. My dreams and the great unknown that my life is about to become are in a conversation that my rational mind can’t have with itself.

I know where my dreams end and my waking life begins. But these dreams have been haunting me like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It reminds me of that lovely line by Edgar Allan Poe–All that we see and that we seem is but a dream within a dream. In the past few days I have been trying to contextualize my own experience of the reality of my dreams and the ways in which my real life suddenly feels like fiction within the debate over Mike Daisey raging throughout the theatre community. I think we all live in a world of truthiness and factish things (I keep envisioning facts as slippery eels)–and I have profoundly mixed feelings about the disgraced monologuist. It’s hard for me not to believe that several other parties–the translator–and Foxconn–and Apple–all have their own agendas and vested interest in discrediting Daisey, which nobody seems to be talking about.

But back to dreams. To finish up this post let me end with Roberto Bolano, a deeper dreamer than I:

I dreamt that a storm of phantom numbers was the only thing left of human beings three billion years after the earth ceased to exist.

Which is just another way of saying:

…the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff…

I always have big plans to write about my writing process, but in all honesty, that’s harder for me than just sitting down and pounding away at a script. My month in residency at the DCA with Vintage was an incredible gift from both institutions, and now that I’ve been away from it (and away from Chicago) for a bit I finally have clarity about the play and the workshop–the culmination, for me, of the prior six months of researching and writing Lion on the Cheesegrater. At a certain point during the workshop I forgot what the play is about. This is bound to happen when instead of being a living, breathing thing your play becomes a problem to solve, a complex differentiated calculus equation. Writing plays is distinct from differential calculus insofar as there isn’t a predetermined set of steps you can take to solve the equation and a correct answer waiting for you at the other end of the rainbow. My director reminded me that I didn’t have to solve the play by myself, but I felt like I wasn’t getting it to where I wanted no matter how hard I banged my head against the proverbial brick wall (not to mix my metaphors).

I was sitting in a coffee shop during the final week of the workshop with my brilliant and magnanimous producer Michael our conversation turned towards Ernest Hemingway.

Once in college my professor asked the class what writers they try to emulate. I threw his name out and the professor stared at me in disbelief and bemusement before she summarily dismissed that hope.

The economy of his language has an incredible poetry to it–every word vibrates.

As Michael and I were talking I remembered Hemingway’s interview in the Paris Review, when he was asked by George Plimpton how much rewriting he did.

“It depends. I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.”

“Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?”

“Getting the words right.”

A week after our final presentation at the DCA I was having dinner with a friend, and over our Algerian crepes she made a few observations about the script and the clouds just parted. She reminded me that the play is about a group of women doing something dangerous because they believe in their cause–peace–enough to risk their lives and an outsider who finds her voice in the process of telling their story. Everything else–the noir, the gender dysphoria–matters because of this. But it took the whole circuitous journey to get back to this simple truth. My play and my journey to write the play both fall into those two fundamental stories we tell: 1. Stranger comes to town. 2. Woman goes on a journey.

Now I can move onto getting the words right.

I meant to write this post this yesterday, but it’s been a crazy week at the theatre factory. I’m utterly exhilarated, totally exhausted, and trying to write a hundred miles an hour.

Yesterday I took a brief break from Lion on the Cheesegrater. Not entirely, of course–BUT after another inspiring rehearsal and script meeting I jetted to High Concept Laboratories to play with my Vintage friends in an entirely different capacity–the third annual Sonnet Fest. I’ve been doing Sonnet Fest since before I ever met the Vintage folks, when I was living in Rhode Island, and since then it has become one of my favorite standing one-night-stands. I love that Sonnet Fest gives me the chance to kick back and get in touch with my ridiculous side, and I am still invariably the tamest act of the night.

On our first fling I wrote a little play called Sonnets from Last Night (I’m dating myself now; this was back in the heyday of that website Texts From Last Night–does that still exist anymore?). Last year Lady Gaga met Billy Shakes as sixth graders, and this year I got to explore one of my favorite themes, Dinosaurs As They Relate To Unrequited Love.

I suppose this is the time to confess that I love dinosaurs, but not in the way that I would ever want to do any actual research on them. I check http://trextrying.tumblr.com/ with embarrassing regularity. I like the idea of dinosaurs. I firmly believe dinosaurs capture our existential ache, our questions about extinction, and our fears of dying alone. And scaly. I’ve now written about this topic in at least two plays and maybe three blog posts (sorry, dear readers). I promise, after this, I am done. I will move onto other themes.

But I love Sonnet Fest because there are dragons, Josh Dumas making sweet love to the guitar, Serbian local-access cable cooking shows, and my boyfriend can, the piece before mine, have the brilliant idea that we should cast the entire audience as the Sonnet XXIX-reciting Tyrannosaurus Chorus and they were totally game. I owe some big thanks not only to the Vintage crowd and my intrepid cast, but also to the brilliant video designer Davonte Johnson for pinch-hitting and turning the world upside down on command, and my beautiful, incisive, T-Rexified director Lavina Jadhwani, who was busy saving orphans and didn’t get to see the performance.

No but really, T-Rex trying to bench press is both adorable and heart-wrenching. Just saying.

Of all the terms for illegal drinking establishments that came to be under the Volstead Act, my favorite by far is the blind pig: patrons would come to the saloon nominally to see the main attraction (like a pig or a tiger) and would receive a complimentary beverage, getting along the technicalities of the liquor laws. Not so long ago I worked at a place that did essentially the same thing.

There’s a bar a half a block from my apartment that I have been eying for years–since long before I lived in the apartment, when my fella lived there alone and I was a tourist in his life. In many people’s lives. Now it is our apartment, and it is tucked in a little neighborhood near the cemetery and the tracks, on a mostly sleepy and innocuous block. Nobody on our street decorates egregiously for the major hallmark holidays, and the paint is fresh enough that it’s not peeling off. The marks of dilapidation have not yet revealed themselves. It is an almost suburban patch (I typed “provincial” first) in between two more vibrant neighborhoods.

But our apartment is flanked on either side by two  delicious dives–during the day potbellied, senescent men sit outside smoking and drinking beer, and as the day fades into evening the crowd gets younger, though not much, and indistinctly Eastern European. Crowd is perhaps the wrong word, since the bars are clearly only sparsely populated–although there always seems to be a couple of people outside smoking. For a brief time this summer, one of the bars opened a sushi bar in its adjacent space but the only time I only once saw any clients.

In between these two bars is a shop that prints t-shirts but that remains tightly closed and shuttered during the daytime. It’s enough to make a person wonder whether there isn’t some more nefarious business going on, whether there isn’t something more significant buried under the newly-formed mound in the sidewalk than gas or power lines. The lavanderia across the street seems fraught with meaning, all those washers and dryers spinning their secrets.

Last night, we finally went to the bar–my fella, his friend and I. I broke my toe earlier in the week, so walking is still a little difficult for me, and the guys were tired and hungry after a long rehearsal. When we walked in I was bowled over by the smell of stale smoke, a not unpleasant smell. There was a group of people at the far end of the bar, and a few women sitting at a table in the middle of the bar, so we slipped into a booth near the door. There was low music and round mirrors suspended from the ceiling pointing straight down, so that the floor could touch up its rouge and mascara when it got stepped on, which didn’t seem too often. We asked if they served food and we swear she said “only microwavable” but she was softspoken and might have said “only appetizers.” Chicken fingers were the only edible and available thing on the menu, so the guys ordered that. There was a fish tank jutting out from the wall over the heads of the middle group of women, which we speculated was the source of the sushi. It wasn’t really exciting, and yet it didn’t disappoint.

O blind pig, you thing of tarnished beauty.

Siren song of the disenchanted.

Beacon for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to drink free.

You could say we came to see the fish.

Or you could say (and this might be true) we came to see the barflies.

Or you could say we came to see ourselves.

At dance class on Thursday, I caught a glimpse of a young woman’s reflection in the mirror behind my instructor–red-faced, bouncing up and down, looking wholly inelegant and undignified. She looked like a flapper in the wrong movie, performing, as she was, some unrecognizable bastardization of the merengue with lip-biting determination.

It took half a second to realize I was looking at myself. Two days before I had walked into a hair salon, handed the stylist a picture of Louise Brooks, and walked out a half an hour later with a heavy fringe of bangs. The next night I bought a box of “dark chocolate” hair dye, and as I was standing in the bathroom with the rubber gloves on and hair saturated in something that smelled vaguely like formeldahyde, felt like I was in an action-thriller film in which the hero is on the lam so his girlfriend has to also assume a disguise by cleverly changing the color and style of her hair so they don’t get caught because she too has an obscured but questionable past that will inevitably come back to haunt her and most likely cause her untimely demise because Hollywood still operates on an unconscious but Draconian double standard where the impure, sexually experienced woman gets sacrificed and the virginal ingenue lives and gets the impure, sexually experienced hero in the end. In this scenario, I am totally fucked.

At the dance studio, I glanced at the other women around me to see if they noticed my air of mystery and escape. They were mostly middle-aged women who seemed to be experiencing difficulty leaving the ground for the jumps and the claps and frankly the cha-cha-chas. If God is dead, I thought, dignity is buried at her feet like a loyal and equally dead puppy. They were all completely oblivious to my recent physical transformation, which was not borne of a questionable past but rather a questionable future. In a need to reimagine who I am, who I can become, to try on other people’s lives like wigs and cocktail dresses, this is where I live these days. In a sorely misguided–one might even say delusional–moment, I thought Latin-inspired dance aerobics might provide the transcendental experience I was seeking. But the class is eight weeks, so I have seven more chances for a transformation:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless.
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where the past and the future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I think my saucy new middle-aged salsaing friends would appreciate Eliot’s take on Zumba.

New Year’s Eve is my favorite holiday. It combines two of my favorite things: champagne and fresh starts, with healthy doses of liminality and debauchery. But it’s also a siren song of nostalgia and self-indulgence disguised as reflection, and to be honest I just don’t feel like writing a deeply introspective post about 2011. Right now I don’t have any interest in looking backward; I just want to stare unblinkingly at the year ahead.

On January 10, 49 (you read that right) Julius Caesar led his troops across the Rubicon and apocryphally said, “Alea iacta est.” The die is cast. Nineteen hundred years later Woody Guthrie wrote a list of New Years Rulins that I think the stoic Caesar would’ve approved of. Guthrie jotted down 33 rulins, and of those the first three and the last three particularly resonated with me:

1. WORK MORE AND BETTER
2. WORK BY A SCHEDULE
3. WASH TEETH IF ANY

and

31. LOVE EVERYBODY
32. MAKE UP YOUR MIND
33. WAKE UP AND FIGHT

For the past few weeks I’ve felt suspended in that moment after the dice have been thrown and before they land, between the contraction and relaxation in a heartbeat. I resolve to breathe more and (more deeply), use fewer commas, and try to know when to fight and when to relax and let my heart get filled up.

As a postscript, I found in the archives of my old email address an alphabetical list of possible careers. I have no idea if I wrote these or who did or when, but I’m re-posting them here unaltered for inspiration to all of us who are still making up our minds:

• Autopsy assistant
• Bartender at the Liberace mansion
• Cat nanny
• Donkey trainer
• Elf at Santa’s workshop
• FBI Fingerprint examiner
• Grave digger
• Hurricane hunter
• Ice sculpture carver
• Junk mail machine operator
• Kitty litter box decorator
• Laser tag referee
• Magician’s assistant
• Nuclear electrician on a submarine
• Opera singer
• Parachute tester
• Quality control/taster for chocolate factory
• Romance specialist
• Scratcher (scratched backs for patients)
• Turkey wrangler
• Undercover vice decoy
• Video game tester
• Wallpaper peeler
• X-ray technician for zoo animals
• Yawn counter at a sleep clinic
• Zamboni driver