“Aye, then, the tea!” cry Sis.
Yes, they call this a Live Journal, but really, this is more personal column than journal. I say this sort of thing to justify my continued use of it, although I have been convinced that I really should start to write in my leather-bound longhander. I realize that I still hold back on this forum, not much, but enough that I am not really writing as Bilal, as full-tilt Bilal, but am in fact affecting a variety of Bilal, like spearmint. I am not Bilal here, I am bdar, and bdar is a being who is not entirely overlapped with me. If you could see both me and bdar, it would appear as though a thin outline were around me, and you would try to bring the lens into focus, until you realized that you had no lens, and that it would not help anyway.
And in this way, I am able to see myself doing both. The longhander will be privy to the deeper darker feelings. The longhander will know the name of my girlfriend.
Been a bit since I’ve been back, which means, as usual, that I have much to write about. I, being bdar. See how that works? Boy golly, it’ll be great when I finally get that second personality installed.
First of all, I love the Harry Potter movie, and I think anybody who hated it is either being paid to do so or is too hopelessly caught up with the illusion of their own hipness to really enjoy much of anything anymore. No love for the haters, y’all. Peace out.[1]
The Thanksgiving holiday turned out to be a Feast and Famine weekend (thank you, Benjamin, for the coining of that phrase), in which I celebrated the Christian tradition of Thanksgiving dinner with my girlfriend’s family, and for the rest of the weekend, observed the Islamic tradition of fasting between sunrise and sunset during the month of Ramadan. I don’t know what that’s done to my metabolism, but I need to be careful not to get too focused on that, because it offers me an easy answer for the ebb and flow of my young waistline. I need to exercise more and stop eating so much that is bad, bad, bad for me.
The power of Google, the search engine, is great and terrible. Every so often, while I am bored at work, I will punch in names of old co-workers or classmates to see what I can find. Usually, I find what I expect, such as rosters in school organizations or writeups for stage work; occasionally I find something that makes me say “I thought so,” or “good for you” (an old high school newspaper colleague writes for the Associated Press, for example).
Last Wednesday, I placed Scott Sifferd’s name in the Google and found out that he was dead.
Scott was a year ahead of me in high school, and I knew him from his senior year on the Downers Grove North “Omega” and his presence in the A Capella Choir. He was a good guy, and I didn’t know him as well as I might have liked, but I have fond memories of that lanky, red-haired cut-up, some of which took place in a Washington, D.C. hotel room. And those memories, I think I will share with the longhander.
Rest in peace, Scott.
The revelation led me to contact a few people who, I found out, already knew but hadn’t told me. I harbor no ill will toward them, as I said, I wasn’t one of Scott’s close friends, and there’s no reason they should have expected that I’d care. But this led to one reconnection that will hopefully lead to a reunion of sorts in the future, with people I hadn’t quite realized I’d missed. If that’s too specific, I can vague it up a little.
Last night was the workshop for the completed rough draft of my first full-length play, and at the end of the evening, I realized two things.
1) I’m a pretty good writer.
2) But what I shared with the group last night was not a stage play, despite my attempts to make it so.
The work was described as “cinematic,” but I don’t think it’s a movie, either. I think that the play I’ve written would be best served in the form of a graphic novel, and the reason I say this is that I came to the conclusion that the writer I was most channeling in the creation of the piece was Alan Moore. Dense backstory, dense characters, very specific settings and landscape, low exposition and high visual, and I think that the piece might best be served in the still panels of a comic book. I’d actually like to try this, but I don’t know any comic book artists.
So, it turns out that I have not yet written a full-length play yet. Back to the drawing board. As it were.
Audition on Saturday. Hm. Should probably memorize my monologue.
[1] Not sure why I’m defending Harry Potter with hackneyed g-speak. Know I mean? My boy Harry can take carea his DAMN self, don’t need no help from me, a’ight?
Creative Control 