Just Like Merrion Square Blues

There's been an arc of feeling throughout this trip. The first one, as my plane landed and I boarded my train to the west of Ireland, was one of relief. The two weeks off stretched before me, and over and over again I sighed deeply, feeling the tension and worry start to drop away, stubbed out like a finished cigarette.

Midway through week one I started getting that anxious feeling, wanted to get home and get back to work. Missed my kids, missed the Midwest. Knew this would pass, and worked through it. I knew I came this far away for a reason, so that I wouldn't drop the tools and leave the job and just head back home. I came this far so that I could look back on everything from a proper distance, to better judge it all.

The week in Dingle ended and I packed it all up and got on the train again. A week was enough, but it's a lovely town, and there's a strong reason why I've gone there three times in the past year. "Time doesn't seem to pass here: it just is. A remarkable place altogether," said Bilbo once.

Spent an interlude with some friends just outside of Dublin, but still I thought of home. For a while I had thought about coming home early, and columned the costs of either staying, or changing the flight booking. Economy won out, but also the knowledge that it must be fight, not flight, when faced with these thoughts.

The last day or so has been in the city centre, Dublin city. No more sea air, no more apartment life, no more home-cooked meals by myself or my hosts. The hotel and the streets are my home. And now a new feeling: familiarity and comfort.

The city can be a bit oppressive, with the crowds and the beggars and the tourists and buses, but strangely I seem to be finding myself happiest and most content here. Maybe it's the time away that's finally sinking in, but I think I'm getting used to Life over here.

On my list of Ten Things To Do, #10 was, "look into maybe finding meaningful work over here." And I even found this, thanks to Issy. The interviews aren't until early March, and they said they weren't able to meet with me earlier, even for a friendly chat, so, well, there it is. Best that the job goes to someone around here anyways, considering the state of affairs here.

I've got a couple of days left here, and I'm still very ready to head home, but there was a moment tonight, sitting in a pub, sharing a drink with Elisa, when Issy arrived, telling tales of an old double-decker bus, that I felt very much at home. Donal arrived shortly after, tired after a long day, and we went to a show, and chewed and debated it afterwards in an old Dublin hotel bar, cracking jokes and enjoying the time together.

It was a lovely night.

Pancakes and Writers Tears

And so now I'm in Dublin, and I'll be here until Saturday.

Spent most of Sunday taking a long train ride up from Dingle to Dublin's Heuston Station, where Donal met me and took me back to his (and Issy's) home, where I spent the past few days. They were incredibly gracious hosts, giving me the place to myself while they went to work. I worked as well, laying out the summer rehearsal schedules and other Limelight business that I am getting very, very caught up on. (I can't tell you how good that feels.)

I haven't written anything for the new play in days, though, so I have to get back to that during my time in the hotel I booked for the rest of the trip. I loved my time at Donal and Isobel's home, but you know, fish and house guests and all that. No need to overstay my welcome.

Today is Mardi Gras, which everyone here calls Pancakes Day. Right before Lent starts, tradition says, you use up all your sugar and stuff and gorge yourself on pancakes. Cafes everywhere advertise them, and I made sure to have a few (topped with blueberries) before I get back to my normal routine of Never Really Eating Pancakes, Actually.

I don't recall ever hearing of Fat Tuesday being called Pancakes Day in the states, so either this is a local thing, or I just didn't grow up in a very religious family. Probably the latter - giving up something for Lent was never on our annual list of things to observe.

Since I'm here to write, I picked up a bottle of something called Writers Tears. Donal shared a bit with me the other night, and I found one of the last bottles available at the great Celtic Whiskey Shop on Dawson Street. And so now my fantasy of the writer holed up in a hotel room to finish a project is now complete.

And to think I could have gone to Wisconsin and rented a cabin. Probably would have been cheaper, but I know if I had done that, I would have been back to work by last Thursday. The break's been wonderful, and badly needed, but I miss my kids, and I'm anxious to get back to teaching.

How to Disappear Completely

Week One: The Freedom of the City

Monday

Wake at 4 AM (local time), read for a bit, then fall back asleep until mid-morning. Buy groceries and work on summer schedules, catalog copy, and staff possibilities.

Around 10 PM I head down to An Droichead Beag (The Small Bridge), a large pub down the hill that features live music every night of the year. A couple of girls play some quiet trad and I take a seat at the end of the bar. This will become my standard seat every night I'm down there.

I start outlining the play I'm working on until an American girl asks me about what I'm writing. We chat for a while. She's touring around the country for a month, going here and there. Then I get talking to a group of Kilkenny girls who are also here on holiday. We stay up until 4 AM and I even get to play host for a bit in my rented apartment. One of them eats toast.



Tuesday

More sleep. Instead of adjusting to GMT, I pretty much stay on US Central Time, waking at noon and staying up until 3 or 4 AM all week. I continue to work on Limelight business, and get to a point where the administrative stuff is "caught up," for at least a while. I wander back down to the pub and listen to more music and jot down more ideas for the play. Could have joined the Kilkenny girls for some stir-fry, but I politely decline. Need to stay focused on the tasks at hand.

Wednesday

Today is the day where I let myself do Nothing. I sleep until 2 in the afternoon, take a long walk around the town, and watch a lot of Sky TV. I may have written a bit, but the day is mostly spent on standby mode.

Thursday

While sleep has been easy to come by here, it is often interrupted by a group of barking dogs which seem to be penned in directly under my window. They are awful.

I spend a lot of time writing, and a fair amount of time doing more of Nothing. Whenever I want a break there are always several channels of overplayed American sitcoms to watch. I am also limited in doing Nothing because for some reason all the ATMs, Internet connections, and most mobile phones are out of service all along west Kerry. They finally come back online around 9:30 at night.

With money now in my pocket, I wander back down the hill to the same pub and take my same seat. The landlord of the place I'm renting is playing with the trad band tonight. After he's finished for the night we chat over a pint, mostly about the state of the Irish economy. Lots of empty, newly-built homes around here.

I return "home" and watch the newest episode of Lost, recorded on the DVR of my Sky box. A wee country cottage this is not. I also read a remarkable play by Brian Friel called Translations.

Friday

I step outside to get some lunch at The Goat Street Cafe and the sky is filled with smoke. Farmers are burning the gorse up on the hillside and it's created quite the atmospheric conditions. I eat seafood chowder, write some silly lyrics for another silly song, and take a walk along the bay. I read a second Friel play: The Freedom of the City, and finally fall asleep around 4:30 in the morning.

The dogs only wake me up once.



Saturday

Some laundry, some last-minute food purchases. I've made practically every meal I've eaten at "home." Pasta one night, a steak another night. I drink a lot of tea, and learned how to make coffee using a French press.

Maybe I'll wander into a pub or two tonight, or maybe I'll just stay in and write some more.

I am perfectly okay with the idea that I can do whatever I want, whenever I feel like it.

Tomorrow I leave for Dublin, for friends, further thought, a bit of theatre, and more work to be done.

All These Will Be Worthless

That's the title of the play I'm attempting to write.

Limelight has a strong history of original works, and we've had a new play pretty much every year since we've been in business. As our 10th Anniversary nears, I wanted to make sure we had another original play for the summer 2010 season. Last year the Lumberjacks! team knocked one out of the park, and so that meant that it was my turn.

The last major play I wrote, Heroes and Villains, was about a group of friends that comes to realize that they all need to go their separate ways. It was also a bit of a response to the glut of mythic-hero-type stories that had become all the rage in the movies, on the tv, and even on the stage. I was a bit tired of stories about "destiny" and "chosen ones" and magic weapons or outlandish villains, and so I wrote a story about regular people following their own heroic journey.

So now I'm trying to write a new one, and it is again a reaction to the played-out stories that we're seemingly fixated on right now: the apocalyptic thriller. I want to try and write a story that doesn't end with the world blowing up, but instead offers a glimmer of hope about where we're going.

I met with a small team of actors throughout October and we started putting together a story. There were lots of ideas, including one involving a zombie-hunting Ronald Reagan, and if you can believe it, I have figured out a way to include that in the story.

It's about two sisters growing up at the end of the cold war, during two different stretches of time in the 1980s. It involves the Berlin Wall as well, but I haven't quite figured out how to pull that part off. There's also a character named Ryan Ortega, and I think I'm starting to figure out what to do with him.

I made sure to read Tom Stoppard's Rock 'N Roll before I really got going with it, since that play concerns wall-and-cold war themes as well. Thankfully they're very different in story and scope.

So now here I am on a brief sabbatical, and it's time to get this thing written. We were originally going to be performing this thing in March, but due to the lack of writing time in my life, and the fact that we want to do it right, we're moving it to the summer schedule. It'll get more exposure and more effort there anyway.

Since it's largely a story about females, I wanted to have a woman's voice come through, so I've got a girl writing some original music for it as well. It's not a musical, though; I imagine she'll play stuff in-between scenes or occasionally pop up on stage, like the troubadour on Gilmore Girls.

Wrote a complete outline of the show will listening to some trad in a pub last night. Much of my administrative work is caught up for the time being, so there's nothing left to do but write. Here goes...

The Off Season

Or: The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Myself

I am taking a bit of a break from myself and my current life for the next two weeks. There has been far too much work in my life, and not enough peace, and so I have had to put the job on hold for a bit, to relax and get caught up on the work.

A note on terminology: The Work is different from The Job. The Job, which I do happily (most) every day of the week for nine months out of the year, involves teaching an elementary school classroom of kids. I've been doing this for about a dozen years.

The Work refers to the other job, the theatre company I founded and have run for about ten years now. It involves directing several productions a year, but also includes supervising a staff of (roughly) a dozen directors, graphic artists, photographers, etc; planning seasons, picking shows, calculating budgets, answering email queries, organizing and attending planning and production meetings, running workshops, supervising other shows, maintaining a website, and occasionally writing new works.

Here are the facts:

1. I am currently out of the country. I should be teaching, but I have taken a two-week leave, which The Job was incredibly supportive of me taking.

2. There is this post from a few months ago. It is required reading in order to better understand the trajectory from Point A to Point B.

3. Doing the Job and the Work simultaneously has becoming increasingly difficult over the past two years. The Job continues to need an incredible amount of attention, and The Work has become more complex and more demanding as the company matures into a proper organization.

4. The amount of time involved, and the stress that comes about as a result of doing the Job and the Work means that my Free Time becomes something that I guard and hoard like a dragon crouched on a mass of plundered gold.

I'm a pretty independent person, and I like my time to myself, especially when the Job and the Work involves working with large groups of kids day and night. I still like getting together with family and friends, though, but any time a gathering or a getting-together is offered, it goes through some perverse cost-benefit analysis in my head.

Will it take away from The Work that has to get done? Sometimes, yes, but I have to enjoy myself every now and then, and so The Work is set aside for a time, but it is always in the back of my mind.

5. Sleep is something else that I get into a real panic about, because it's so damn difficult for me to get any. For the past few weeks I've been waking up at 4 AM, no matter how tired I was or what time I went to bed. I wake up, toss and turn, fret and stew, do some of The Work in my head, and finally resign myself to getting up and starting the day, knowing that it'll be one that I will walk through in a strange, listless, easily-irritated trance.

(Despite the fact that I had been up for over thirty hours, and am six time zones removed from my usual sleep patterns, I woke up precisely at 4 AM, local time in Ireland. What. The Fuck.)

6. Please take note of this: I am not depressed or despairing. I enjoy my life, and the Job and the Work, but there is way too much of it right now. I am obviously not in a happy place at the moment, but it is the amount of work, not the work itself, that is causing this. This is an important point to make.

7. A simple one, but perhaps the most important: if I keep going the way I'm going, I am going to grow old and die alone. (And maybe not even grow old; the last thing I want to do is drop dead of a heart attack during tech week on some show I'm working on.)

Whenever I start dating a girl, I immediately put the potential relationship into that cost-benefit analysis thing I do, and realize that I won't be able to commit myself to a proper, healthy relationship without letting either The Job or The Work suffer. And so I extricate myself from the situation and continue devoting all my spare time to The Work.

This pattern has been going on for about seven years now, and I have effectively given away the romantic-social life of my thirties to The Work. This is also probably why my vacations (and this brief sabbatical) take place across the Atlantic Ocean. When you want to travel fast and light, The Work is too heavy to fit into my luggage.

(Ironically, I have brought along quite a long list of items to be accomplished for The Work, but Ireland in the wintry off-season is a better place for it than puttering around at home for two weeks. Besides, if I stayed home, I would be back at The Job by Wednesday, because I would miss my class too much.)


So, after considering all these facts, I am forced to make a choice:

Change, or face the consequences of another ten years of stress-filled work and a fire-bombed social life.

I would like to stay on this earth for a number of decades to come, to explore much more it, to have a healthy, normal relationship with friends, family, and future partner(s), and to be hale and whole, not this stretched-out, worn-out thing of a life I've been living for the past few years.

My mission, in the next two weeks, is to figure out how to Change.