I said, “What have I got to lose?”

She said, “What have you got to win?”

The world’s between these two postures is astonishing.

Every once in a while you pour it out to a stranger. The comfort of an unknown ear lets you open up and say hello to yourself (Hi, you!) and your broken tongue is whole again.

…and too foolish to help it.

What if there were no clocks?

No weekly schedules. No calendars. No New Year’s Day.

No numbers to mark your age.

No BC or AD. No Judeo-Christian notion of history and forward motion.

What if there were no machine on my kitchen wall ticking away the sands, no hour glasses to measure moments?

What if the word moment didn’t even exist?

What if it all just was as it is?

And the stars were just stars and the sun and moon were simply dancers.

What would we worry about then?

Would we enjoy the sight of humming birds in the purple thicket more?

I’m tired of writing “So sorry to hear…”

Moms. Dads. Grandparents. Children.

Distant friends. And not so distant.

Husbands. Wives. Friends.

Everywhere we turn, it’s like a great wave of grieving.

So sorry to hear. Thinking of you. Sending you the best.

All meant. All impossible to make as meaningful as it should be.

It’s been a forever long year, a last year for too many.

So hold on tight to your loved ones. Hold on.

Five favorite moments in a theatre:

1.

When she says in The Ferryman:

When I'm old... when I've forgotten my own face, the shape of my hands, or what those hands did, I will remember your face, your hands. And that's enough for me. That's enough.

And my jaw dropped and my heart saw the love I have for the world and the woman who was putting my boys to bed some 3,000 miles away.

2.

When he says in True West

You go down to the L.A. Police Department there and ask them what kinda' people kill each other the most. What do you think they'd say?

And the brother says back: Who said anything about killing?

And he says: Family people. Brothers. Brothers-in-law. Cousins. Real American-type people. They kill each other in the heat mostly. In the Smog-Alerts. In the Brush Fire Season. Right about this time a' year.

3.

In The Beauty of Leenane at the Steppenwolf when she walks around with the letter taunting, teasing the notion of putting it in the stove and someone shouts from the audience, "Don't! Don't burn it!"

4.

When the white kid in Master Harold and the Boys spits in the face of the black man who raised him because his father didn't.

5.

In the Belle's Stratagem when a redhead stands in a corset, blue eyes afire with life, and draws an invisible bow that she aims at the man who she is promised to. And I think, I am going to marry that woman.

The trees outside are heavy with oranges and limes.

Velvet green hummingbirds hover and float in whirrs among the blooming lavender petals of the mexican sage.

I am spellbound from the window as the kids push and punch each and run to the car with the boogie boards under their arms.

How great is this?

There’s no good way to move unless you’re willing to leave it all behind.

When people talk about hope and faith and higher powers with a sense of certainty, I always wonder if they remember the last crisis: the time when they were falling, tumbling without the parachute.

Did they see the purpose then? Did they have faith the story would end the way it should? Did they really feel the purpose of it all in their snapping bones and say, “I’m all right with this.”

I can tell you I am not that way right now. Unable to see beyond the lamplight of my ego, my inner self ties itself in knots looking for itself, searching for meaning for itself in a pattern of its own making.

It is stupid and useless and profoundly lonely: an exercise in self-defeat.

And even though I know this, I cannot help myself.

Why?

We drove through the hills and found a spot in the lowlands to see Neowise.

In the dark, we stared up toward the Big Dipper and searched.

But there was too much light and we could only stand with our heads craned as people around us pointed and said things like, “I think that’s it, there.”

After awhile we gave up and went home.

The next night, as I was putting Liam to bed, he suddenly sat up. “Wait, Dad, we have to go out and see Neowise.”

“Oh, Liam,” I said. “We missed it. Last night was the last good night.”

There was a deep pause in the dark. Then he began to cry. Big sobs of loss.

“It’s okay,” I said. But nothing could hold back his tears.

“It’ll be 7,000 years before it comes back,” he said.

It was unnerving and true. All I could do was hold him.

One of my first jobs out of Ad school was at a small, nationally-known creative boutique in Minneapolis.

My book was great and I was proud to be hired there. The school was too, and used it to advertise themselves.

But the agency was heavy into healthcare and the Clinton Healthcare Act killed the appetite from clients to spend.

Assignments dried up and I competed with award-winning art directors and writers for even the tiniest jobs — weekly flyers for low priced strawberries at the local chain grocery store and direct mail pieces for tooth brushes.

I began to compare my salary to other things. Cars, vacations, furniture sets. Nothing seemed right. Then, I settled on the image of a baby Steinway.

That’s what I was. A baby Steinway that was being unused.

The negativity of my mind never ceases to amaze me.

There are three lists.

The first is all the stuff I thought I wanted to do. Become a famous writer. Unseat a president with undercover reporting. Make love to lots of hot women. Direct famous movies. Win a gold medal as the untouted member of the US Equestrian Team. Be an award winning creative director. Be someone interesting enough to open SNL and do the talk show circuit. Be the kind of guy everyone listens to in the room. Pull off a Nehru jacket at a cocktail party. Tell the funniest jokes on the planet. Blah, blah, blah.

The second is all the stuff I think I still want to do, all untested by reality. Stuff like, learn to surf and sail, scuba dive with my wife and kids, ride the Colorado River, write a book/story/play/poem/tv show/movie/essay that’s life-changing for all who read/see/experience it, meditate better, travel the world with my kids, make more money, win big ad awards (still), found a theatre company that produces work that bends time and space with cleverness and authenticity and earnestness. There’s more, but really, who cares? As you can see, the things I still think I want to do is a forward looking shadow of the things I thought I wanted to do.

Then, there’s the third list.

That’s the list filled with things like marry a woman with freckles who can eat fire and has a wicked sense of playfulness, be a dad to two boys who yell at each other half the time and play like old friends the other half, help an amazing redhead be as fiercely herself as possible, bike to Walnut Creek for a hamburger, meet Jesse Owns and learn that he was friends with my Uncle Jimmy Lee, hold an Oscar statue given to the screenwriter Ben Hecht in my hands in the bowels of the Newberry Library, be mistaken for Moby, nearly get fired by David Mamet from a bookstore that taught me the real value of reading, move to LA and live between a McDonald’s and a Buddhist temple at Crescent and Sunset, kiss a girl in front of the Chagall in downtown Chicago’s hot summer midnight dark, talk with my father before he dies about what’s on his mind, make Tacos for my sister when she’s recovering from chemo, apologize to a woman I married and hurt, rebuild a Lego At-At without instructions for my kid, ride the Matterhorn at Disneyland 12 zillion times because I love the laughter that comes out of the boys every damn time we do it, listen to a friend play “The Rain Song” from the bumper of a car in the Staten Island summer heat, drive a Mini Cooper from Cedars Sinai with a new life in the back, ride a bike to Subway with a laughing 8 year-old , get ice cream on a lark in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. And more.

The first list goes on and on and never ends. But it’s full of things that don’t carry much meaning anymore. The second list, while tempered by time, also stretches out forever. It’s all in the future, too — all based on a person I want to be.

It’s the third list that’s meaningful. It’s an incomplete list but one that will someday find an end that is sharp and cliff-like. It’s a list of the things I’ve actually done while trying to do the things on the first two lists.

Which is not to say the first two lists are useless, or bad, or a stupid fantasy. They are necessary because they are signs of hope and ambition and the values I carry within and project outward. But they are best used as guides, rather than goals or definitions. They are places to aim toward, not land.

My dad always told me to do something I loved.

And generally, I have. Which means I’ve been lucky and I’ve had a pretty good time.

So I work. A lot. Because I like work.

And I’ve got a reputation for it.

But sometimes people tell me not to work so hard.

To relax and enjoy myself.

Take a break. Make sure I get a vacation.

They tell me that there are other things that life is about besides work.

Therapists have been particularly enamored of telling me this.

On your death bed, they say, you won’t wish you’d spent more hours at the office.

Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll think, shit, if I’d worked a little harder and made a little more money, I might’ve left something more for my kids.

Maybe I’ll think, Fuck, I really enjoyed working at that place, what the fuck was I thinking not doing more?

It really depends on what you do, doesn’t it?

Do you like what you do? Do you love the people you work with and for? Do you think the organization you’re clocking hours with is doing something worthwhile in the world?

The therapists don’t usually start there because the people who come to them come with anxiety and stress. You’re staying calm at the office and yelling at the kids when you get home. And they assume that what you do at the office is meaningless to you and you can’t see it.

They assume you don’t like it.

They assume you’d do something else if you could.

It doesn’t occurs to them in a true way that you might just enjoy it. You might actually love it.

That it’s simply life and being alive that’s stressful and anxiety producing and that there’s nothing you can really do about that. Except notice it and live with it because a vacation (or a meditation or a book or anything else you might think of) won’t keep you from avoiding it.

Plus, they think that what they do is really amazing. And it is. But not what I’d want to spend my life doing.

So anyway. That’s why I hate vacations. They’re based on that idea. That whatever you’re doing you don’t like and so you need to do something else for 2 weeks a year.

Or let me put it this way: If you’re doing something you dislike so much that you think 2 weeks a year doing something else will make it worthwhile, you should fucking quit your job.

When this is all over, I’m gonna start a theatre company called the Theatre of Rejection and it’s going to put on nothing but ignored, forgotten, aged work that no one ever saw. It’ll be run by the blind and maimed lurching around in the shadows of the minuscule flyspaces where the rats gnaw at costumes in the dark. We’ll paper the walls of the lobby with all the “Thank you but no thank you” letters. Every show will be billed as the “worst theatre ever produced.” And every show will feature a character named Cassandra played by a fierce pale skinned redhead I am in love with and who breathes fire at random moments so you leave with singed eyebrows. Our curtain call will be a big fat finger to everyone who ever said NO!

When this is all over, I’m gonna stop working for everyone else and put the 401K down and take a long nap. And when I get up, I’m gonna get a pair of OP shorts and a black sweatshirt and learn to sail with my teenage boys in a warm water bay where sting rays glide like angel-winged wafers over the white sand. Then we’ll sail around the world and the boys will learn to be fearless and discover that the true meaning of faith is to let go of everything absolutely and the only way out the airplane built by others is without a parachute. And when we get back we’re gonna spend our Saturday mornings at the food bank passing out watermelons and potatoes to the truly needy.

When this is all over, I’m gonna teach our old dog to stand on her hind legs and dance the pogo while playing the only three chords you need to make a Ramones song destroy an eardrum.

When this is all over, I’m gonna kiss you furiously in the kitchen and the living room and play room and patio and bedroom and anywhere else I need to so that you never doubt how much you are loved by me.

When this is all over, I’m gonna read a Sunday paper that you hold in your hands while drinking freshly-made coffee as you sleep late in bed.

When this is all over, I’m gonna look at my resentments every day and demolish them with clarity and openness and clear amends where necessary and I’m going to jump into H&I with both feet and be of service to people who need it. I’m gonna reach my hands out and hold the world for anyone who needs it.

When this is all over, I’m gonna stop worrying about being liked and trust in love and hold the whole world in pre-emptive positive regard.

When this is all over….

All over….

When this is all over, I’m gonna do stuff I’ve never ever done before.

Yep, when this is all over I’m gonna stop waiting for this to be all over and I’m gonna do some stuff. Big stuff. And I’m gonna do it like it’s never going to be over, because it never will be.

In the ring is the question: Pie? And the answer: Yes.

On the inside of the looping sterling silver bracelet: …the ever fix’d mark…

But the most important thing to me that’s been engraved over 18 years is on the air we breathe together and the steps we take no matter what the world has done around us…..

The irises of her eyes widen.

We talk about the other therapist, E. I go into the journey of it. How I got to her. Why I felt matched well with her — her knowledge of the program, the sense of intimacy that ran deep in me. Her understanding of me that made me, eventually, feel too transparent.

DId she mean too much to me? Or perhaps I wanted too much, to be more than $140/hr appointment?

The desire to be more to people who mean more to me is deep. To be special.

Moving through this starts here for some reason, with this new therapist who listens with her eyes.

What will I discover in the reflections that appear in the dark irises of her eyes?

Yeah. 15 years in this married life.

NY. LA. Ashland. Denver. San Francisco. Oakland. Lafayette.

Santa Barbara still glitters in front of us with with its palm trees and curving beaches.

The story is taking quite a turn right now. Will the car fly off the track?

Hard to say. But wherever it lands, we’re likely to be in it together.

That’s the bet we made in front of friends and family 15 years ago on the patio of the oldest hotel in Ashland, Oregon.

Afterwards, we had cupcakes (that you made) and ice cream and I surprised you with a move on the dance floor.

We met in the smallest of apartments. We’ve lived in 7 since (if I count your actor housing in 3 seasons at OSF). Now we’re in a house that has seen us through nearly a third of the married time we’ve been together.

A Mini Cooper. A Prius. An inherited Avalon. A Jaguar. A Volvo.

2 kids who still play swords together in the backyard.

A dog named Dot.

Nectarines at midnight. Backyard summer movies.

We’ve been lucky.

Lucky most of all in each other.

Crazy to think that if we double our record, I’ll have to be more than 70 to see it.

Can that be? Could we do it?

I wouldn’t bet against us, that’s for sure.

Happy Anniversary, H.

The word comes from a Danish phrase that means “play well.”

None of us is thinking about that when we are searching through the pieces on Sunday afternoon looking for the one piece that has been separated from the At-At.

We built the commoditized dream from George Lucas’s head a year ago and in the intervening days it’s been played with, knocked around, and been part of galactic showdowns between the boys. It has also slowly disintegrated before our eyes. Doors came off. The nose where the operator should sit went missing. What was 4 legs became just 3. A foot couldn’t be found.

Most people would’ve looked at it and said it’s useless. There’s no way to put it back together. But in the shut down — our new reality — I reasoned, why not? The 8 year-old was interested. And it’s lovely when he sees things reconstructed. The promise of his smile alone made the challenge worthwhile.

So I’ve been slowly trying to put it back together for weeks.

The first thing I found was the foot. I was lucky because it was discovered whole among the thousands of blocks we have. All I had to do was put it on.

The leg was another matter. It required hours of searching for the long pieces that made the femur and shin; the pins and joints that created a knee. I tried to assemble it by just looking at the other already attached legs, but it proved too difficult and I had to look the instructions up online.

Slowly, carefully, I was able to find the puzzle pieces and then, one morning, it was a standing At-At again.

Still skeletal, of course. Still unfinished.

But up it went, and the boy jumped and whooped and started a new fantasy battle with it right away.

Now I am determined to finish it. To restore it what it once was.

Yes, this is crazy. I don’t care.

In the re-habilitation of the old, it’ll be something new.

Of course, looking it on the table — missing it’s armor plating so the insides are exposed, so it looks as fragile as it looks formidable — the metaphor it represents for this moment in time does not escape me.

It will likely never be the same. But I already see ways we will improvise on it, find new things to add to it that George Lucas didn’t think of. No, it’ll never look the same, but the boy’s smile will be just as big when we find the new shape of it. Maybe bigger because while it will be built around the bones we know, it will be something we have never seen before, too.

So much time inside has made me short on patience.

It’s like my inner clock has decided that there aren’t enough minutes for me.

It has lost a sense of generosity. It has stopped understanding that every tick is the same for everyone and there is no sand in the hour glass that has my name on it.

The moment belongs to all of us, all the time.

The sooner that’s remembered, the sooner we can come back to others. And ourselves.

I look in the mirror and I don’t see the 35 year-old that my inner self believes itself to be.

My neck looks wrinkled; my eyes tired; my belly has a paunch.

Is it the end of my “anything is possible” self?

It’s hard to know. But it feels like it. And, frankly, that depresses me.

I’ve never known this self.

It’s the most longstanding feeling of being uncomfortable I’ve ever had. It runs with a bottomless cold undertow.