The Outside Eye

Yes...

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:40:00 +0000

The day after Barack Obama won the Presidency of the United States, I took my daughter Ari to the book store. I bought her a book called "We are All Born Free," which is a simplified version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with beautiful illustrations. (I also bought her a pop-up book called Monsters of the Deep because I had to bribe her.)

We then went to Woodlawn Cemetery in Carbondale, where the first Memorial Day celebration in Illinois was held--one of the first in the country. There we sat among those who died for the preservation of our union and the freedom of African Americans during the Civil War, and I read the book to her below the chestnut trees on an unseasonably warm and pleasantly breezy Fall afternoon.

She was largely uninterested but liked the pretty pictures. The crazy ocean animals in 3D were by far her favorite.

Why did I do this? I don't know. I felt like I had to do something today, not just for me but for her. And this book is a gift to Ari. She won't remember this day but she'll have something with the day's significance attached to it. While she may not remember the day Senator Obama became President-elect Obama, the first president she'll remember will be an African American.

The first president I remember was Jimmy Carter. Funny. I've met both President Carter and President-elect Obama.

I love my country today. No, I've always loved my country. But today I'm really proud.

My electoral picks for this election cycle....

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:52:00 +0000

<p><strong>><a href='http://projects.washingtonpost.com/2008/pick-your-president/'>2008 Election Contest: Pick Your President</a></strong> - Predict the winner of the 2008 presidential election and enter to win a $500 prize.</p>

My latest project

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 17:46:00 +0000

So then I lost my job with Time Out Chicago Magazine. It was nothing personal or anything, and there are certainly no hard feelings on either side, but a new editor came on board and that's always a time to make changes. I'd noticed there was no longer an astrology column in TONY so I think TOC simply wanted to make a similar change.

But this did mean a big deal for my family and me since we made the (admittedly risky) decision to move into Genevra's family home and live rent/mortgage free in Southern Illinois on little more than my column's income while Genevra finished her graduate degree.

Since Genevra's assistantship (believe it or not my family is living off a graduate assistantship right now) breaks for three months over the summer, we'll have no income.

Looking for a job down here is pretty odd. I did that once and wound up writing obituaries for the Southern Illinoisan. I don't want to say anything bad about the experience, but if I were to say something bad it would have something to do with the fruits of my labor. Okay, fine, I'll be more specific. I'm not sure I've ever worked so much for so little...like, ever. Maybe when I was 15 and bagged groceries but if you factor inflation into the equation, I probably broke even. I'm sure there are some analytics that would suggest I lost money by working there, but I left my copy of SPSS on my old job's computer and that math would frankly depress me.

All that being said, I decided to make a somewhat bold move, something that I've wanted to do for a long, long time. I started a business. It's called First Person Astrology.

Yes, I'm still a playwright. I'm working on a new play for Rough and Tumble out in San Francisco called A History of Human Stupidity. But I need more money, as all playwrights do, so I started a business. Although so far, this business definitely doesn't suck. I'm kind of loving it, actually.

FirstPersonAstrology.com is, as far as I can tell, the only place online where you can subscribe to custom, regular (as in weekly) horoscopes based on your exact birth time. In other words, it's real astrology. And that means I should sound like a real astrologer and not call them "horoscopes." They're transits, really. Less specifically weekly forecasts.

As a columnist, I never faked anything. I did my best to write the best interpretations I could based on what's called transit-to-transit aspects. I used what's commonly called newspaper astrology to interpret sun sign-only stuff. (In other words, I'm a Taurus, so I'd read the paragraph labeled Taurus.)

Real astrology, as in the stuff that's been around since probably ancient Babylon, is different. It's based on where the sun, moon and planets all were when you were born--exactly when you were born and where you were born on Earth. That's your horoscope--the map of the sky when you were born. As transiting planets or the sun or moon intersect or make significant angles with those points in the sky that correspond with your map, stuff happens.

I keep your chart on file. Punch up all the data in my nifty software, and send custom horoscopes to you every week based on this information. It's pretty sweet. My subscriber list is small but growing steadily. Responses have been positive.

The coolest thing is that I'm the only one out there doing this...so far.

I never thought I'd be an astrologer. And it feels funny to say it. I certainly practice astrology and have for almost half my life. Maybe this is one of those incredibly lucky things that you hear about on Oprah, about the guy who loved fishing and then opened a bait and tackle shop, retiring from his Wall Street gig after 25 stress-filled years...

Or maybe this is like my T-Shirt business and I'll realize there's no money to be made in it. Who knows. Right, now I'm feeling good.

And my transits are excellent by the way.

My vows

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 15:25:00 +0000

This is what I said to my wife during our wedding ceremony. I'd always wanted to share them on this blog, but the time around and after my wedding is when I sort of drifted from regular blogging. Things have been crazy ever since, thus the continued drift. But it's been a happy drifting.

September 9, 2004, on stage at the Neo-Futurarium in Chicago, sometime after 7 p.m., I said...

I promise, always, to make promises I intend to keep. I promise that I will never stop trying to be the best man I can be. I promise to see you as you are. I promise to remind myself constantly that you were not put on this earth to meet my needs, but that I was put on this earth to love, to forgive and to grow from every unfulfilled wish.

I promise to grow with you. I promise to change. I promise to listen. I promise to be faithful to you in every way I know how to be faithful, learning and relearning with your help and compromise, what that faithfulness means to both of us.

I promise not to quit. I promise to face with courage and endure the many deaths that our love will die over the years. And through those deaths I promise to keep my faith in a friendship that has time and again tested beautifully; that has resurrected livelier; that has re-ignited stronger; that has at its core a shared value that our purpose on earth is to throw ourselves demons-and-all into the crucible of love, so that we can finally see ourselves, demons-and-all, reflected in the eyes of another human being who loves us despite those flaws. I promise to cultivate the courage to see myself in your eyes as I am.

And I promise to seize our happier moments--to let them live unencumbered and unfiltered within me as long as I can--and to celebrate your beauty, your integrity, talent and passion, all that you’ve taught me and all that loving you has taught me.

Genevra, I expect nothing more than a life with you, a life that is sometimes exciting and sometimes dull, sometimes full and rich and satisfying, and sometimes seemingly in ruins. And in those ruinous moments I expect nothing more from you than your commitment not to quit.
I promise to look beyond this great moment in our lives as a moment of pure ceremony. And I promise to remember these vows, to recite them to myself or to you on occasion for the rest of my life; and to never regret the life that began after I uttered them.

The story of parenthood

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 14:54:00 +0000

The story of childbirth is always miraculous. It ends with a happy deus ex machina. All the anticipation and suffering lead to a crescendo of pure bliss, instant agape and personal transformations for both mom and dad.

Don't trust absolutes. I never do, but for some reason, this time around, I did.

It's not that parenthood doesn't reward us with these things in some measure, but people often remember things incorrectly. More accurately, people remember things in fairy tale black-and-white.

The terrible things that happen to us are recalled as total nightmares without the moments of hope and reversal that were with us at the time. And the blessings are recalled as such: pure and unmixed.

Genevra and I--I recently realized--both despise sugar-coating. While we're both very diplomatic people, (and at times I've been a total coward when trapped between lying and hurting someone's feelings), we both endeavor to infuse our lives with as much honesty as possible. It's no wonder that our wedding ceremony was laced with this kind of honesty. And it's no wonder that we met while working with the Neo-Futurists, a company with the same impossible mission.

So it's in that spirit that I share my perspective with you. (And I'm sure many people will disagree with me, but I feel like writing in objective absolutes, which as I said you should never trust...and for the same reasons, you should never trust Libertarians.)

The explosion of love and absolute attachment doesn't magically appear. Your baby--cute, helpless and abjectly cuddlesome--is a stranger. Her needs are a mystery. Love, no matter what life-event it's born from, is never handed to us. Opportunities for growth and love are presented to us, and so if you're open to it, your heart will grow. And if you're out of your mind, you'll leave your baby on a doorstep.

I saw a dharma talk once and while I can't remember this Zen master's name, I remember he was also a gestalt therapist. Go figure. Anyway, the thing I remember most about his talk was that he referenced all the many stories of enlightenment that pepper Zen Buddhist teachings. You almost always hear about someone who, in one single moment, achieved enlightenment. (Won Hyo achieved this understanding upon puking his guts out.) But in reality, the Zen master said, we tend to experience many "tiny enlightenments" throughout our lives that accumulate into something amazing, often upon retrospect.

And maybe, if one day I'd been told I was enlightened, it would be easy for me to look back on my life and wonder when exactly it happened.

I have a daughter. Her name is Ariana Bayiates. We call her Ari. She's almost six months old.

When she was born, I was pretty giddy but also tired. I probably wondered more about what Genevra was feeling having gone through all that. I also wondered if I was feeling enough love. I waited for what everyone told me about--that ray of love that would knock me over and change me for good. I secretly hoped that there wasn't something wrong with me.

My love for her continues to grow and I feel it when we make eye-contact more often than when I'm watching her--though I do love to watch her. She's a great Zen master, this girl. The lesson that she likes to teach me over and over again, is that she loves me best without artifice. She likes Daddy the Clown, but she loves Daddy as he is, the man with the beard who wonders what he should do next. She smiles widest when I smile at her with my eyes, when in an unguarded moment, I realize how much I've grown to love her. And it makes my heart hurt, our smiling together.

The other day I was waiting for my wife in a store. I had Ari with me in a stroller, facing me. But I watched for my wife somewhat impatiently. Ari made a noise. Just a small peep. In that one moment, I remembered that I was with my daughter, that I wasn't waiting at all. Waiting is for weenies. There's no such thing as waiting. All the time, in every moment, we're living, not waiting. Thanks, Ari.

I have a hard time with that one. I'm a weenie. I have a way to go. Six months isn't a long time.

Sometimes I get frustrated, and frustration breeds anger in some measure. Anger leads to a hardening of the heart. In extreme cases, anger leads people to become so hardened against others, it can dehumanize them, even making murder possible.

A slight frustration (on the tamest end of that spectrum, obviously) can still lead me to forget that I'm with my daughter. I can feel that rather than spending time rocking my sleepless baby to sleep, I'm instead not where I want to be. I'm not writing. I'm not working on the house. I'm not meditating. I'm stuck somewhere, waiting.

I've had moments, however, when that frustration melts away and underneath it I see myself at three years old, dressed in homemade pajamas, walking from door to door in my troubled family's home late at night, finally reaching my brother's door and telling him "everyone's closing their doors on me." Instead of sitting up and reading, Ed would take me in and play with me until I got sleepy.

I see myself, my entire family, through the 70's and 80's. Each of us struggling to be noticed in our own ways. When I remember this, I soften and vow to make hers a different kind of childhood.

No one believes that good parenting is handed to us, and that's true. It is as hard as you think. But many believe that love is handed to us. It's not. Something much more wonderful happens. Instead of being drawn up to heaven by the hands of God, we're given the opportunity to climb there ourselves.

What would you rather?

One day, I'll look back on this young woman's life and remember it as the deliverance of a blessing--a miraculous day when everything changed.

And that's okay, too.

I Always Ate My Food One Dish at a Time...

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 22:11:00 +0000

And then Genevra and I moved to Carbondale, IL, five and a half hours south of Chicago. We moved to the place I once blogged about, into the home of Genevra's (now late) grandmother I once blogged about. (http://www.andybayiates.com/2004/08/where-did-andy-go-part-1.html)

My wife is five months pregnant. I'm looking for work. I'm rennovating an old Victorian (yes, I do wiring now). And I'm studying for my GRE's.

Pregnancy. Not such a big deal for the guy. That is, you don't puke or get really tired or throw out your back while shopping. And, unless you do a lot of celebrating you tend not to balloon.

Looking for work. Not so easy here. I've had two interviews so far. My mother in law suggested that I shave my beard and grow out my hair a little. I guess she feels that the Wally Shawn look is a tad more employable in the Heartland.

Rennovating. I, like Bob Villa, am from Massachusetts. My father was also a very handy guy, and an habitual addition-builder. Had he stayed in his thirties perpetually, he'd have built additions all the way to Lowell by now. I held flashlights for him often. I have watched a lot of rennovation shows. This is the extent of my schooling. I have been learning as I go but with success.

The GRE. It's funny. I have all the same weaknesses that I had when I was studying for the SAT. My reading is so slow (and I can't skim) that I get bogged down on the comprehension sections, thus hurting the rest of my verbal score. My math is atrocious. Since my practice verbal GRE score was about the same as my verbal SAT score, it means I've managed to improve with age. My quantitative is another story. I have become a math midget, forgetting at one point that 9X9 equals 81. I scored in the 13th percentile for math. Sweet.

I found a website that referenced a Hong Kong stress study that assigned numerical values to certain life changes. The higher the number, the higher your stress level may be in reaction to that life change.

The death of a spouse is #1 at 100.

If you add up all the changes going on in our lives right now, Genevra and I score a 165.

According to this study, Genevra could die and I could go to jail and I'd still only clock in at about 162.

I'll definitely take my current situation over death and imprisonment. But I must be doing well. Well enough to blog about it.

I admit that I'm spread very thinly. I'm not performing terribly well and/or efficiently at anything--the rennovating, interviewing, studying for my GRE.

I've always had a terrible time doing too much at once. Genevra is great at it. Most women seem to be. I, on the other hand, am happiest when I can focus on one thing at a time. Just today I was organizing my tools in the basement, and even though my nose was running, instead of stopping what I was doing in order to blow my nose, I chose to finish putting my screwdrivers in order, despite the giant pendulum of snot that dangled in front of my chest.

This tendency is not serving me well. Taking care of a house in itself tends to pull you in many directions. Rennovating (especially when the whole house from top to bottom needs some form of attention) can leave one in a constant state of distraction.

But I'm no 165. Not even close. This study is bunk or I'm a veritable buddha.

Now if I can just get this second job. (I'm still writing my column for Time Out Chicago.)

Well, one thing at a time.

Sort of.

Not really.

My Time Lately

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 05:36:00 +0000

Here's the show I've been working on. It opens in a week. Please come see it if you can.

www.neofuturists.org/shows/daredevils.htm

Life Part Three

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 19:51:00 +0000

So then Genevra and I decided to get new lives.

Not that we decided this overnight. From the time we began dating in 2002, we discussed the painful finitude of our artistic careers. One imagines that an artist eventually gives up on art because he's tired of rejection. One imagines that an artist wakes up and decides that since he can't do, he'll teach.

Far too simple. I'm sure it happens that way for some people, but doubtful for most.

We each became sick of being theatre artists, of working very hard for very little.

I left the Neo-Futurists. I wrote a blog. I batted business ideas around with my friend Randy semiannually, it seemed. I sold T-shirts on cafepress. Genevra received an inheritance when her nice grandmother, Celia, passed away in June. And then we began to talk. Well, we'd been talking since 2002. And probably talking pretty seriously since 2004, but after Celia died, we talked long and hard.

We talked about a lot of things: Insurance, our COBRA, a second dog, a child, going back to school and for what and who would do it and who would stay home with a baby, buying a house, moving out of town, where to move--my God did we talk about WHERE to move. Over and over again we talked about that and researched. We bought laptops this year, and one was always humming while the TV was on. "What about Paducah, Kentucky?" one of us would ask during an episode of the Daily Show.

And we almost bought a storefront in bluegrass country one day, even made an appointment to see it. Yes. We almost did that. That would have been a cool store.

But we settled and we thought, and a plan began to present itself to us. Celia's passing left us a home in Carbondale, IL, down the street from a university. We wanted to have a baby soon. We didn't know how we were going to afford it. We wanted new careers. We didn't know which ones made the most sense and we were sure we couldn’t have a baby and get new careers at the same time.

But the plan came together on its own and it made sense. And then we made a baby. And when I say we made a baby, I don't mean we decided that we wanted one and then spent six months to a year trying. I don't even mean we spent two months trying. I mean we made up our minds, noticed that Genevra was in fact ovulating at that very moment (we thought) and then BAM. So it took us anywhere from an hour to three or four days to conceive.

Not bad. In order to conceive, a Greek and an Italian apparently need only think about having a baby within two feet of each other.

I shouldn't be telling the world. She's only two months pregnant and we don't yet know if the pregnancy will be viable, but I'm optimistic. We're not naive about the odds, this being her first. But if things don't work out, that's fine. At least we know things work (very well) in the conception department so we'll just try again and hope for similar luck.

We move to Carbondale, IL in one month. I am applying for the creative writing program at SIUC and plan to teach, and not because I can't do, but because I can't stop doing, and don't know that I'd be good at anything else. Genevra will be pursuing some freelance writing online--doing as much as she has time to do with the baby and all. When the baby is a year old, she's going to start grad school and is investigating various Psychology degrees.

And when we've gotten our degrees, we'll relocate.

New house. Rural area. Renovation work. Parenthood. New careers. Even Simon is going to have to learn to use a doggy door and make in the backyard instead of his litter box. Big, fat change. The biggest.

I seriously can't wait.

Not that I'm a big fan of bragging or anything...

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 20:00:00 +0000

...but if you saw my last post, you may have read that I got a very strange writing gig...Well, this is it.

http://www.timeoutchicago.com/article.jsp?xy=sign_out/1.signout

Where Did Andy Go (Part 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 17:00:00 +0000

The following things have happened to me since my last post:

I had a road trip as a kind of bachelor's party
I got married
I travelled through Italy with my new wife for two weeks
I came home and got laid off (yep)
I began an exhaustive search for a job
I made a decision to search for a job-job that I would appreciate, to build a career, to stop this whole day-job nonsense and once-and-for-all forget the idea of writing for a living
No one wanted to inerview me
Out of the clear blue I was approached by a friend of a friend and wound up getting an incredibly bizarre, regular, freelance writing gig
I decided I would still get a job and use the gig as a means to get extra money
No one wanted to inerview me
Out of the clear blue, a friend came to me with a proposal to pay me to write and direct something.
I accepted.

It's a fact--one of which I'm not very proud--that I decided to stop doing my laundry until I was offered a job. This vexed my wife and left me wearing mismatched socks for weeks. Being a somewhat superstitious man (I'm a Boston Red Sox fan, afterall) I am prone to such behavior.

Although Genevra and I have had our share of bothersome financial snafoos transpire, and we are still in the thick of them, these two bizarre gigs, for the time being, have released me from my job search.

I therefore blog before you adorned in freshly washed attire.

It's also a fact, that I felt guilty blogging while I should be looking for work. This is true.

I submit the above list of events as an excuse for my long absense, as well as my guilt over blogging when I should be hunting for the perfect corporate rejection.

And before I tell you that none of these are good excuses, I should share one additional excuse of note:

I took extensive notes on my road trip. The next thing I was going to write about was my bachelor's road trip; however, after being laid off, I was unable to find my notes. Until yesterday, that is.

David Gergen was hiding them in his book, Eyewitness to Power, which I attempted to finish while my best friends and I wound our way along the northwest coast. (Yes, I like David Gergen, so what of it?)

So I begin this blog at the end of my sabbatical. I have done my laundry. I have cleaned my office. Yesterday, I walked through my neighborhood to look at the bungalows and discovered River Park. Though the temperature drops and there are four more weeks of winter, I no longer fear my own shadow.

It's good to be back. And I've got a lot of catching up to do.

Where Did Andy Go? (Part 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 14:27:00 +0000

In the weeks since my last post I have been busy. And I've done much traveling.

First I went to North Carolina to visit with Genevra's parents. They live in Chappel Hill. While I've been to the South many times, I have never visited during the Summer. One afternoon, while antiquing in a nearbye town with Cheryl and Jim, the four of us were crossing the street and it occured to me that my movement was slowed. A car was waiting for us to cross, and I was thinking to myself "I should trot across the street to be polite" but my feet were not compelled to agree with me.

My mother always said that she thought people moved more slowly in the south because it was so hot. Perhaps that's why us yankees seem like we're in such a hurry. Where we come from, we can move quickly without passing out.

Despite this, the South remains on our list of possible places to move.

There is mind-bogglingly good barbecue down there. And I have discovered hush puppies and they are good. Genevra is an iced tea fan and loves the sweet tea you find at all Southern restaurants. I also love the weather there in the Winter, Spring and Fall. Chicago is annoyingly cold for about 7 months out of the year. I still might take oppressively hot weather for 3 months over the cold for 7.

A weekend after that I was in New York City of all places. Genevra and I met with Randy, who will be performing our wedding ceremony. While we were there we also met Doug, one of our publishers from Playscripts, Inc. Both meetings were productive and fun.

There is a prevailing feeling among New Yorkers that New York is the only real city in America. My New Yorker friend Randy loved Tokyo because he felt like Tokyo was the only other city anything like New York. Myself living in a very large city that pales in scope to New York, I see things a tad differently. New York is not a city. Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, San Fracisco...those are cities. New York should be its own country...like the Vatican City.

Not that I want New York to cecceed. I like New York. And despite its other-wordliness, it is extremely American. I would not be a happy New Yorker, but I do like New York a lot. In a city like Chicago, you could uproot your life and move from one corner to the other, bouncing from neighborhood to neighborhood and your life probably wouldn't change that much from move to move. You would alter a few things like where you bought your groceries or where your bank was, maybe. You'd discover a few new favorite places to eat. But you'd still do mostly the same things in the same places. New York gives one the impression that with a series of similar moves, you would live a series of completely different lives. Even in a city like Chicago, you could spend your whole life trying to eat at every restaurant in the city and fail. The endless grandure that is New York would leave you unsure if you could dine at every restaurant in your neighborhood.

We left New York and came home. Soon after, we recieved an email from a breeder of Boston Terriers letting us know that she had puppies available. Genevra wanted to visit her grandmother in Southern Illinois so we planned a double trip to drive to Carbondale, IL and then swing over to Missouri on our way back and pick up a little puppy whom we decided to name Simon.

In the meantime, I finalized plans to take a road trip from San Francisco to Portland by way of the Redwood Forests and a drive along the northwest coast. We will go over Labor Day weekend and then come back to Chicago for my wedding. My friends along for the ride are Randy, Mike and Noam--my three oldest friendships. Noam, I've known since I was about three or four years old, we think. Mike I met when I was in Kindergarten. Randy I got to know when I was 16. But it was Randy who I was closest to during those incredibly formative years of high school and college at Fitchburg State, where we were roommates for a few years.

Then it was off to Carbondale. Southern Illinois is fascinating. It doesn't quite know if it's the midwest or the south. People speak with southern accents, mostly, but if asked if they're the south or the midwest, most of them see themselves as midwesterners. It's hot down there, and again, one is compelled to move slowly when crossing the street. They are mostly republican down there. The BBQ is good. But I didn't see any hushpuppies anywhere. Genevra has noted, and I've observed this to be true that: in the North when you ask for iced tea at a restaurant they will give you unsweetened iced tea; in the South if you ask for iced tea, they will bring you a sweet tea; in southern illinois, if you ask for an iced tea they will ask you if you want your tea sweet or unsweetened.

While in Carbondale we had an opportunity to visit with one of my favorite of Genevra's extended family, her first cousin once removed, Wendel. Wendel is a collector of antiques and an amature Civil War historian, who used to work for the Wildlife Refuge and is a Korean War veteran (he didn't serve in Korea but surved elsewhere during the war), as well as a tenor guitar player who specializes in plucking out Civil War tunes.

Wendel told me about Southern Illinois during the Civil War and apparently its mixed identity dates back to before Lincoln's presidency. It was a very evenly divided area politically--half the folks identified with the Confederates and the other half with the Union. Men from the area enlisted in both armies. At an historical marker in Carbondale (yes, I made Genevra stop and take me there one hot afternoon to see what it was) we found an interesting graveyard. Burried there is the man who started Memorial Day--Wendel had told me that a man who was instrumental in starting Memorial Day is a relative of his and Genevra's but we weren't sure if this was the same man.

Also in the graveyard, was an interesting looking stone sarcophagus (bottom right in photo above) that sat on two stone pillars about two feet off the ground. The gravestone next to it was rubbed blank but a nearbye marker had two possible explanations for the sarcophagus: One story was about a woman who refused to be buried in yankee soil and wanted to be buried in her home town in the south. Upon her death, her husband had dirt from her hometown placed inside the sarcophagus, which was kept above ground to literally prevent her from being buried in yankee soil. The other story was about a union soldier who's family, upon discovering that a confederate soldier was to also be burried at the site, had the coffin removed and placed in an above ground stone coffin so that he would not share the same soil with a confederate. Crazy.

Coincidentally, I was reading and have recently finished the best piece of historical fiction I've ever read called The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. It's about the battle of Ghettysburg.

After we bid farewell to Genevra's loving and I'm sorry to say deteriorating grandmother, Celia (who didn't like FDR very much but did like Ike) we ventured across the Mississippi river into Missouri. The drive to the river was stunning. I like the landscape in Southern Illinois a lot better than most of the mid-state area. Cornfields, I'm afraid, bore me silly. But Southern Illinois is more wooded and hilly.

The area became extremely rural and we spotted tiny shacks with huge confederate flags on front lawns, German sheppards chained to poles in front yards--impossible not to imagine an overalled man in the back yard sipping on lemonade with a shotgun across his lap. I had just said to Genevra that maybe I could live in a place like this. Then I saw the flag. "See," I said. "That shit...I just don't think I could handle living near that." I'm not just an upstater, afterall. I'm a Massachusetts liberal--a New England yankee born and raised. Symbols like the confederate flag tend to shock me.

As we neared the Missippi, suddenly a town appeared. The sparse shacks, the occasional farm and the occasional brick, collumned home on high ground; all gave way to a small, hilly suburbia. I knew that this must be by the river and probably the only crossing of the Mississipi for miles. And I was right. But what we found was much more interesting.

Chester Illinois. Home of...Popeye. Apparently, the man who drew Popeye was from Chester and based his characters on people he knew from that town. Thus this small town has the silliest claim to fame I've ever seen. Genevra and I laughed in disbelief through the whole town. I hate to be a condecending northerner, but the popeye museum, the popeye collectibles store, the large popeye statue and the anual Popey picnic...it was just too much for me to bear.

A few hours into my first run-in with the Show Me State, we made it to the small town where Simon was born. Simon was 8 weeks old, unfortunately had a case of kennel cough which he's still recovering from, and is extremely cute and sweet. The Boston Terrier is a really great breed with an excellent temperment. Our car ride home with him to Chicago by way of St. Louis was a long and uninteresting trip. Genevra drove most of the way.

While in mid-state Illinois there was a huge downpour that forced me to pull over. The visibility was so poor, I was constantly scared that someone else who had pulled over would crash into our car. Soon after, the sun came back and an enormous rainbow appeared over the Illinois plains. I am not a midwesterner. It becomes so clear to me whenever I see those cornfields. And we drove on. We finally arrived home at about 11:30 that night after a huge trafic delay due to construction.

Simon has been learning our home and learning how to go the bathroom in a doggie litter box. Genevra has been stuck at home doing most of the training. She's a loving but impatient dog trainer. She never loses her patience with Simon, but comes to me broken hearted, and often teary every time he pees in the wrong place. She's such a sensitive woman. And yet not in the least bit wimpy--in fact quite the opposite. I adore that about her.

Genevra and I will marry on Sept. 9th. The following day we will travel to Italy for two weeks. My hope has been that after my return, my life will finally slow down, but I will need to get ready for a performance of 43 Presidents at The Carter Center in Atlanta when I return.

A large matter that Genevra and I will work to resolve when we come back from Europe as husband and wife will be deciding where we will live and raise our family. Both of us are certain that while we love Chicago, we will leave it someday. We have seriously considered the Southeast and the Northwest so far, but will keep the Southwest as a possibility as well. A priority for us is warmer weather. We neither of us appreciate the cold.

I am more and more ready to abandon the variety of city life. I will miss it, but I will do fine without it. I'm looking for a place of beauty. I like the charm and the history of the South and the weather of the Northwest. I will avoid confederate flags on front yards. I will not live anywhere that has a cartoon character as their major source of hometown pride, and I will not live in New York City. Or LA. I'm not sure where that leaves me, but I've still got a lot of traveling left to do.

Until next time...

Gmail

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 20:12:00 +0000

I have four gmail accounts to give away today.

I will give more accounts away in the future.

The first four people who e-mail this address XXXXXXXX will receive a free gmail account, no strings attached.   I will update this site as soon as the accounts have run out.

THE FOUR ACCOUNTS HAVE BEEN GIVEN AWAY TO:
Peter
Jan
Sorphea &
Mike

Congratulations. Now you can turn around and sell your invites for like 10 bucks on ebay...or with your new, great power as Uncle Ben from Spiderman says, you can exercise great responsibility...

Stay tuned for another round of invites in the future. And don't be affraid to ask.  It took a lot longer than I thought it would to give these suckers away.

Seeing

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 16:00:00 +0000

I've been terribly busy. I was in North Carolina last weekend visiting with my in-laws-to-be, and will soon be in New York visiting with Randy, who will be performing the ceremony for Genevra and me on September 9th. I will also hopefully get a chance to meet my publisher-to-be when I'm in New York.

I'm home today. I can't give you images when I'm writing from work so I give you images today. It will give you some context for some of the stuff I've written about.

This is a banner ad that I built today. This is one of the things that's been keeping me busy. Please feel free to put it on your website if you have one, or send it to friends, whatever. Use it for free. I only ask that you save it and upload it to your own site and also please preserve the link.

And this is Genevra and then me and then Genevra again:

And this is Fitchburg:

This is Alexander Pope:

Sometimes I Think I'm Alexander Pope

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Mon, 12 Jul 2004 19:25:00 +0000

I try like hell not to experience my dayjob with any of the joy I like to infuse my work with when I write or mount shows, but sometimes I just can't help myself. Here is an actual email that I wrote to a staffing agency today. The reason why is apparent in the letter. These people just blow me away. I'll follow-up by posting any replies that they send to me. Those people usually reply to everything...

Dear City Staffing,

Last week, to my abject elation, I opened a package that was sent to me from your company. Inside, I found a pair of Old Navy, size 10, starred and striped flip flops (one starred, the other striped.) In my position, I am constantly courted by staffing agencies for their business. I am sent gift cards with unknown balances to various beverage peddlers about the city. I am sent holiday greetings, business cards with "personalized" notes on them. I am even, perish the thought, sent candy!

Your firm is a firm that I have used before on a number of occasions and am in the habit of ignoring the requests made by hounding swarms of alien staffing agencies, precisely because I am happy with the services you have rendered.

But never have I been happier with what your company has to offer, than when I opened that package and discovered those large and overtly patriotic sandals. The fact that there was no name, no note, no letter in the package, only intensified the joy of the experience for me. It is obvious to me that City Staffing knows when to let the imagery speak for itself (as they say in the business, I'm sure.) And what imagery indeed!

It is true that I'm a size 8 1/2, and am somewhat morally opposed to open-toed footwear (upon my own feet, I should qualify), but had I been born a man of average size, thus possessing what I'm sure you carefully researched is the average-sized American male foot, and were I not so vehemently disinclined to clad my feet so scantily, I would have leapt at the chance to shed my black, leather shoes for a chance to flip and flop my way through the halls of this corporation, not only displaying my proudly naked hoofs, but also showcasing my fashionable patriotism one step at a time.

It is a proud day for City Staffing, indeed, for the country. Though I will not wear your large, alternately starred and stripped, open-toed sandals, I will never forget them, and I will likely display them in a place where others may ask about them, so I can recount with delight how they fell into my life. As trophies, may these podiatric emblems of American Nationalism--and indeed, good corporate know-how--bring others an ounce of the same kind of joy they brought me.

Yours truly,
Andrew J. Bayiates

The Ceremony of Innocence

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 18:45:00 +0000

Once upon a time there was a little boy who was made of bits of string, paper, household appliances and other odds and ends. When people asked him what he was, he'd say "I don't know. I'm made of flotsam." And so he became known as Flotsam Boy.

Flotsam Boy met lots of people growing up and they always seemed to be one of two kinds of people: One type was confident, strong and whole. They were made of one thing--like Cheese Woman, Hardwood Floor Guy or Octopus Man. He always admired the way they were made of one thing.

The other type was also made of many parts and pieces, but they weren't the same as Flotsam Boy. These people were very different because they thought they were made of one thing, but in fact were made of many different things, and those many things were usually unpleasant things. There was Various Animal Parts and Railway Crashes Person as well as Needles, Buckets and Rotting Turtles Woman. That type of person could look in the mirror and still see only one thing, even though the rest of the world could see a very different picture.

Everyone loved Flotsam Boy, though. The thing people loved most about Flotsam Boy was that he knew he was made of Flotsam. He even talked about it a lot. He learned at a young age that if you spoke honestly about what was wrong with you, while simultaneously admiring others, you could become very popular.

But Flotsam Boy was not happy. Flotsam Boy wanted desperately to be a whole boy, even if he would grow up to be something lame like Republican Platform Wall Paper Man; he would accept that fate rather than grow into Flotsam Man.

So Flotsam Boy decided to interview every whole person he knew, so he could learn what made them into whole people. First, Flotsam Boy met with Artificial Heart Man. Artificial Heart Man was very welcoming and thought Flotsam’s idea was great. He invited Flotsam Boy in for tea and the two sat down next to a window that looked out onto a beautifully landscaped rose garden. (Artificial Heart Man loved natural things.)

The two talked and talked and drank tea together and talked. Actually, Flotsam Boy mostly listened and Artificial Heart Man mostly talked. It occurred to Flotsam Boy at one point that Artificial Heart Man perhaps talked too much. At another point during their conversation, Artificial Heart Man's eyeball fell out onto the tea table, but for some reason Artificial Heart Man didn't notice.

Flotsam Boy was going to say something, but figured that a Whole person must be aware of such things. As the afternoon wore on, however, Artificial Heart Man's body began to crumble bit by bit before Flotsam Boy's eyes. And the whole time, Artificial Heart Man just went right on talking as though everything were fine. Troubled by this, Flotsam Boy bid Artificial Heart Man good day and left for his appointment with News Anchor Woman.

News Anchor Woman was very happy to see Flotsam Boy. News Anchor Woman was much better about not doing all the talking. She asked Flotsam Boy a lot of probing and interesting questions. At one point during their conversation, however, Flotsam Boy got the impression that News Anchor Woman wasn't really listening. She kept looking at herself in the reflection of her shiny cookie tray, and occasionally she'd put her fingers to her lips and use their tips to primp her eyebrows and fix the hair behind her ear.

And then it happened. News Anchor Woman reached behind herself for a moment to pick up a plate of cucumber sandwiches, when her pale blue blazer opened slightly to reveal a maelstrom of swirling, incongruous pieces, parts, odds and ends. Underneath her clothes she was a veritable junkyard of calculator parts, safety pins, neon stockings, tape recorders, monkey guts with apricot, tool belts, Vaseline and just about everything else.

Flotsam Boy was shocked and could only think of one thing to do. He pretended to be queasy, dismissed himself politely and ran home, shattered.

Every time he met with a Whole Person, they turned out not to be whole at all. It was then that Flotsam Boy realized that he was living in a world full of fractured people, all of whom pretend to be whole. Indeed, only some of them pretended successfully, while the rest pretended poorly. He was a boy alone, singular, different, lonely and apparently doomed to forever live in pieces because he had to live honestly. Flotsam boy decided that if all things were really many things, and wholeness was just an idea, then all things, indeed the universe, must be nothing. And that kept Flotsam Boy in bed for weeks.

But then one day Flotsam Boy decided that if all things were nothing, then a person could make nothing into anything. Flotsam Boy decided that if he had to live in a world of appearances, he was going to exercise his right to choose any appearance he wanted so he could become one of the Whole People. After all, if wholeness wasn't really whole, then in the end the thing that he had always wanted was actually easier for him to have than he had ever thought. Yes, wholeness was all a lie, but that only made his dreams more attainable since everyone knows it's easier to pretend to have something, than to really have something.

That day was a Monday in April. On Tuesday, Flotsam Boy woke, closed his eyes and said to himself "today, I am Bicyclist Boy." And so he looked in the mirror and gone were the bits of string, gone was the paper, gone were the household appliances and the other odds and ends. In place of the flotsam in that mirror were a pair of gleaming black spandex shorts. Under his arm was a fancy black helmet. On his hands were those cool Velcro gloves, and behind him, on its very own kickstand was a lightweight, electric-blue hybrid that one might say was profoundly awesome.

And Bicyclist Boy grew into Bicyclist Man. And he rode and rode. He pedaled and pedaled. In no time at all people stopped calling him Flotsam Boy. And he was admired for his speed, his confidence and endurance. He was admired for his ability to memorize where all the potholes were. He would even win races and be interviewed by News Anchor Woman behind the big news desk the next day. He was happy. He was whole. And life was good.

Or so it seemed from the outside. Bicyclist Man couldn't help but notice that people didn't love him as much as they did when he was Flotsam Boy. There were times when Bicyclist Man was feeling tired or insecure, when he would look in the mirror and for a second see all that flotsam again but this time it was strange and rotten.

He became pre-occupied with people's perceptions of him. He always wanted to be completely sure that he was Bicyclist Man in everyone's minds, so he visited Mind Reader Man almost every week. Mind Reader Man would inevitably tell him the same thing. "Bicyclist Man," He'd say. "Don't worry. Everyone in this town is too busy worrying what everyone else thinks of them to be thinking of you." Despite his reassurances, Bicyclist Man was never convinced that he appeared as whole as he wanted to appear.

And Bicyclist Man would meet women and fall in love with them. He would either fall in love with someone who was in obvious pieces, and would eventually leave because he was tired of being the whole one; or he'd fall in love with another whole person, and the relationship would end because they fought too much. It was always the same type of argument: Motorway Chick wanted to drive to the movies. Bicyclist Man wanted to bike. Neither would for a moment sacrifice their precious wholeness for the sake of the other's needs, so their relationship would end.

Bicyclist Man eventually developed what one might say was a profound depression. So one day he gave up. He threw his bicycle off of a very tall bridge and watched it sink to the bottom of Looks Just Like a Huge River Man.

He came home, sank to his knees and cried. He tore off his clothes and he let his parts fall to the ground. He was Bicyclist Man No More. He cried for fourteen straight days, stopping only to drink water and occasionally go number 1.

And when those fourteen days were up, he cooked himself a huge pile of banana pancakes and ate them. While he ate those pancakes, he made a promise to himself. He would go on living, and he would live without a name. He would live for the pancakes he was enjoying. He would live to give love to others, not for the opinions of others. He decided that wholeness should be forgotten. He decided that pieces should be forgotten.
He decided never to live within the reflection of another person's eyes ever again. He would inhabit his parts as a dog inhabits its tail, nose, ears, eyes and tummy--without question, without disappointment, without pride.

He would eat and talk and love and care for his parts as long as they could hold him steady. He was a man. He was a person. Above all, he was.

And strangely, after he made this promise, no one seemed entirely together, but no one seemed like a liar either; and everything everyone wanted seemed both an illusion and important all at once. The sun rose. The sun set. And no one who spent a moment with him for the rest of their lives didn't leave feeling a little less lost, and a little more love. The rest of his life, one might say, was profoundly awesome.

WWGWD?

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 18:28:00 +0000

George Washington still kicks ass.

It can't be disputed that he was regarded almost as a demigod two hundred years ago. And it is silly to revere the man in the same fashion today.

A playwright once wrote George Washington as a character into his play and the public panned the production because he dared do more than have a George Washington figure walk accross the stage. He actually made Washington talk like a man. That offended the public. That might give you a slight sense of how much this man was worshipped.

But I am not immune to the fashionable late 20th/early 21st century cynicism that pervades our history lessons today. Though I was born a month and a few days before Nixon resigned, I still feel the effects of Watergate when I regard my political representatives. I like my history dirty, bloody and real. I like the insecurities and faults. I appreciate the embarrassing anecdotes.

But I do believe that some revisionists go too far.

Those revisionists not only strip away the myths that surround the men, to make them flesh and reveal their insecurities and dirty habits, but they also go one step further and measure their subjects' actions with a contemporary ethical yardstick. That's when these historians lose me. When you make a myth a man, I call that history. When you make a man a monster, I call that dimestore fiction. I call that biographic myopia.

But what's great about Washington is that you can't make him a monster. He has survived the worst of the revisionists (as I believe the fad is swinging toward the middle now, thank goodness) and he has never come out worse than a mere man.

He had a temper. He was in some ways vain. He made a few mistakes--one of which started the French and Indian War back before the Revolution. He may not have loved his wife very much. The negative anecdotes are few and usually pretty funny. He snapped at the man who painted his portrait, for example. Wooo.

And here's the worst thing, in my opinion, that you can say about him, the type of thing that folks (particularly young students) today are so fond of latching onto: He may have been incredibly aware of his own role in shaping the history of our country to the extent that he created a kind of persona so that he could be deified. He may have even refused to run for a third term partly because he wanted to preserve that status, as the public was just becoming capable of anger toward his administration. The essence of this accusation is that his humility was all an act.

Wow. From that to Watergate. What a monster. How naive of me to think that Washington kicks ass. Seriously, if you're a student today, try talking to your classmates about how Washington was a great man, still worthy of attention, praise and celebration. Call him a hero. You will not be taken seriously. Even one of the co-writers of 43 Presidents reacted with a kind of smug, knee-jerk acedemic cynicism to my musings about the old General.

Let's assume for a moment that people in history for some reason are less complicated than you or me, and CAN be reduced to uni-dimensional motivations, that they can be reduced to a formula that somehow explains the motivation behind all their deeds. Let's assume that General Washington's reluctance to serve as our first president was 100% vanity and 0% humility. Let's assume that his stepping down from office was the same.

Measure the man's actions and they are still those of an unparalelled hero.

He wasn't much of a warrior. That can't be disputed. His victory over the British was owed mostly to his habit of strategic retreat.

But Washington was fortunate enough to be remembered mostly as our President, as a leader, and those qualities no revisionist, no smug cynic with eyes to read could dispute.

As a Neo-Futurist, (a company that has its artistic shit together but is always on the verge of falling apart organizationally) I have sat through countless hours of furious meetings, heard bitter rumblings I felt would surely lead to mass retirement. And I have longed in those moments, to be led by a man or woman who could turn my heart around. What must that be like?

During the tail end of the revolution, while the British were negotiating their peace, Washington stood among rumblings so much more severe, from men who were convinced they would not be paid, would not get pensions from Congress. Some of the men even wanted to sieze power and overturn this slow, pathetic deliberative body.

General Washington, in one speech, was able to stand before a hostile, bitter and unwelcoming crowd of angry soldiers, and turn them into cheering, happy men unanimously in favor of sticking it out and giving Congress a chance. Some of them even weapt. It is easy to say that I have never met a person who in any way possesses the kind of greatness that George Washington possessed, that left everyone who met him with a lasting impression, inspiring them to use words like "majestic". But I would give up my life in the Neo-Futurists for one fifth of that greatness to be hired into our company's Valley Forge. It is badly needed.

I know of no other military leader who successfully overthrew his government and then did not rule it afterward. Even Cincinatus had been appointed interum dictator of Rome. But Washington, who could have been crowned king in an instant, resigned and went back to Mt. Vernon. King George III, upon being defeated by Washington's army, heard of Washington's intention to resign. He was in disbelief. The king said "If he indeed does that, he will be the greatest man in the world."

Was Washington an actor? I don't think so, but I can't prove it. I do believe this, though: He did the right thing at the right time and it wasn't an accident. Does the reason entirely matter? His most honest desire was always to do what was right in those moments when he was so needed. And he was actually capable of doing those things. Does it matter that his motivation may have been in part or wholy selfish?

What have we come to expect from our heros? Are we not still in possession of those unrealistic ideals when we allow ourselves to be so cynical and unforgiving? Because with that cynicism, we laugh at what we call blind reverence, while we turn a blind eye to the essence of true human greatness (which is, I humbly suggest, all too human.) We make the mistake of comparing everyone to an ideal which doesn't exist--which, again I humbly suggest--is all too naive.

I will say it again, and I will say it proudly. George Washington still kicks ass. I will even go so far as to say he remains, unshakably, my hero.

(I created a T-Shirt design that makes me laugh. Check it out here.)

Of Beaver Creeks and Butt Cracks

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 17:42:00 +0000

I was in the state of Colorado from Wednesday night to Sunday afternoon; however, I was only able to see what Colorado was really like from about 10:45am to 1:30pm on Saturday when I was able to borrow someone's car and escape Beaver Creek.

Beaver Creek is a resort. I guess I kind of knew this, but now that I'm 30, I find that I experience things with a much more clear sense of what I like and what I don't like.

I don't like resorts.

Some people need to have children to turn into their parents. I only needed 14 dollar french toast to turn me into a raving version of my dad. By the end of my stay, a simple conversation about the price of room service set me howling about the failure of capitalism to always deliver the most competitive prices, the questionable legality of a 25% "resort tax" and possible grounds for a law suit over a ten-dollar grilled cheese sandwich.

The people we worked for were very nice. The employees were very nice. It was hard, though, to feel like a have in a land of work-for-haves. The employees are never allowed in the pool. Some of the only color we saw were the nice, latina maids. I am just not comfortable in that scene.

Presidents went smashingly, though. We got approached by a lot of people at the resort about the show and even though the crowd was very conservative, they were very receptive.
We also performed two nights of Too Much Light at Allie's Cabin up the hill from the Vilar Center. That went well on Friday but not so well on Saturday. The house was too conservative and didn't much like our political sensibilities, let's say.

One group of people, however, were happy to see Too Much Light that Saturday night. Two women and one man approached Genevra and I on Sunday about a half hour before we were to leave for the airport.

"Andy!" I heard. This happens to you when you perform in Too Much Light. People sometimes recognize you and say "hey, you're that guy..." which is what theater performers are more used to. But performing in Too Much Light as yourself, means that some people learn your name like they learn a character's name. And if they're a big fan, they even get to feel like they know you personally. When they bump into you, they call out your name and it sounds very much like they know you. The first reaction I usually have is "shit. Who's this person? Do I know them? Have I forgotten them?" Then to my relief they follow up with "I love you in Too Much Light..." or something to that affect.

Anyway, back to Colorado. "Andy!" I heard, in that same familiar tone. And up walked three people--two women, one older, and a man who appeared to be in his mid-thirties. He spoke again "How 'you doin' Andy? We liked your show."

Yes, Genevra had been in the show with me but she's not a short, thin bald man with a beard and unusual glasses so I tend to be spotted a little more readily. I asked the man's name and I shook his hand. He didn't have a very firm handshake. His name was Brian.

Brian was developmentally disabled. He certainly didn't appear so, but after a few words it was obvious to me. The two women with Brian (I'm guessing a mother and a sister?) began to speak with Genevra about the show while Brian seemed pretty interested in talking to me.

Unusually, I felt confortable around Brian.

"I've got a story for you that you could do in your show" Brian said.

Afraid that I might be listening for too long, I replied with "well, you can email the story to me."

It seemed that Brian didn't hear me and so launched into this: "It's called...um, Mom, what's it called? Mom?"

We both looked to Brian's mother, but she was talking with Genevra. I heard a snippet of the conversation..."Yeah," Genevra said, "it's very much a reflection of our daily lives..." Mother and sister were smiling and nodding, quite interested.

Brian gave up and turned back to me. "It's called," he tried, "called, um..." and then it hit him. "It's called butt darts."

"Butt darts?" I asked.

"Yeah. It's when you put a quarter up, um, in your behind, like between."

"Between your butt cheeks?" I asked.

"Yeah. Between your butt cheeks. And then you squat down..."

I wanted so badly for Genevra to hear this so I looked her way. Their conversation was still continuing. The three of them were missing all of it. "It's very immediate, for us" Genevra continued. "Something can happen to us on Tuesday and we can write about it that day and it's in the show on Friday..."

Brian continued. "You squat down over a cup, and then you let the quarter out your butt, and you try to get it into the cup. And that's butt darts."

I laughed. I mean, I really laughed. And I wasn't laughing at Brian at all. Brian's story, it's innocence and honesty and the heady, polite conversation happening in my right ear while they all missed Brian's story, it was too much for me to bear. Brian laughed too. He could tell that I was genuinely amused.

And to cap it all off, he added "my mom's an expert."

Perfect!

I had to look over again. They missed it all, and were wrapping up their conversation. Brian then asked me "do you take stories from people over e-mail?" He had heard me.

"I never have," I said, "but I'd be open to it."

"Because we've got a lot of good stories," Brian said.

"I'm sure you do," I said. And with that Genevra and I bid the family goodbye and I was able to tell Genevra about butt darts and Brian's accidental comic brilliance.

Meeting Brian was the most real and fun interaction I had at Beaver Creek. I met some great people but never got a chance to talk to anyone because of all the work we had to do, or the trips Genevra and I would take alone to recover from all the work we had to do. And because, frankly, a lot of the resort guests I met at Beaver Creek didn't make me feel as comfortable as Brian made me feel. Meeting that family was like meeting an American abroad. Brian made up for it all.

A part of me sincerely wishes that the whole world was as honest and funny as Brian was with me. I bet, even if he couldn't quite put it into words, that Brian wasn't totally comfortable at that resort either. If I had my way, I'd get the entire resort to participate in a game of butt darts.

Blackout

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 15:08:00 +0000

Hello readers,

I'll be un-blog-able this week. Consider this my out-of-office reply. I should return on Monday, June 28th and should be busy but still free to post.

I'll be in Beaver Creek Colorado this week, performing 43 Plays for 43 Presidents on Thursday at the Vilar Center and then Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind at Allie's Cabin the following two nights.

When we get back we go immediately into preperation for 5 performances at Theatre on the Lake in Chicago before and during 4th of July weekend.

I will miss my 3-4 times a week posting, but promise to return with vigor, and a sense of what Colorado is like having never been there.

Please wish my cast and me good luck. The Vilar Center is huge.

Emotocon-servation

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 19:29:00 +0000

I hear from time to time that e-mail is a horrible means of communication, a means that leads directly to misunderstandings. I hear from time to time that sensitive or even vaguely imortant issues should happen over the phone or preferably in person.

There is science behind this. Within our brain is a division known as the limbic center. It's function is much like that of our emotional and intuitive nature--our proverbial heart. If you're talking to someone and they don't say anything out of line, but they give you the creeps for reasons that you can't explain, it's because your limbic center is picking up on body language or micro-expressions, that your neo-cortex (your proverbial head) can't explain. The limbic center and neo-cortex don't speak to each other very well so that's why sometimes you feel things that don't make sense or you can't describe.

The limbic center responds to millions of environmental cues of which you have no awareness. In others it observes facial ticks, movements of the eyes, body postures, tones of voice, dilation of the pupils. Your limbic center is a lie detector, a joy detector, a lust detector. But it communicates with feelings that you can't always interpret or many of us learn to ignore. But many of us, all day long, take for granted what we don't ignore. How many times have we looked at a friend and communicated volumes? That's almost all the work of the limbic center.

In face to face communication, we are operating on all those levels at once. On the telephone, our instinctual sensors pay attention to vocal changes in tone, but are partially hindered by not being able to observe body language. Over e-mail, we are stuck in the land of the neo-cortex and are left to fill in the gaps.

But is it really fair to blame e-mail, to say that e-mail is terrible? Might it be more accurate to say that people are too quick to assume, that we are an insecure species ready to fill empty space with visions of an outside world beset to vex us?

Assuming that you've never met me, you likely have a picture in your head of what I sound like--how I would be reading this to you and responding to you physically. And that image would be different in every reader's brain. We are incapable of experiencing anything without context, so however it is you may imagine me, it is based on your own experiences, your own mental records, your own baggage.

When you imagine a slight over e-mail that was not intended, I think that it's safe to say that while e-mail may be inadequate, it is not a demon. Your demons are the demon.

It's at this point that I should confess to you that about an hour ago, I was trembling with rage over an e-mail someone sent to me (that's the stuff of the reptillian center by the way, for those of you who are interested). I am writing this post now, and I'm still a little angry. I'm not feeling terribly forgiving, though I'm feeling better than I was an hour ago. Much better.

Does that now color your perception of the tone of my message? It should. Do I now seem irrational and/or self-righteous rather than ponderous? That likely will have to do with your own history with anger and/or angry people. That history may guide you to guess correctly, but you will be relying on your own experience, not the emotionless white-on-grey text of this post.

I love e-mail. I'm a terrible corresponder and don't correspond well via e-mail or the telephone really with anyone--including my closest friends and family. But, like exercise, I hardly do it, but when I do it I feel great.

I actually enjoy the facelessness of communication like this. I enjoy the writing part. I enjoy when I have so much to say that I go on and on and can't quite stop writing. I enjoy re-reading what I've written before I send it, only to make so many additions to my e-mail that I have to read it again. I like when, for important e-mails, I'll cycle through like that five times before I send, like I did this morning.

Sometimes e-mail gives people the courage to be awfully mean. I don't like that so much. I've been guilty in the past of being mean over e-mail. Again, though, is e-mail the real criminal or was I? It's not a terribly profound point that I'm trying to make, is it, so feel free to respond to this post and tell me that I'm stupid. You can get really mean after all, and you can picture me as a guy who deserves it and who's feelings won't even be hurt.

I also like talking to loved ones on the phone. I like to be able to pace and react nervously. I like hiding my facial expressions so I can roll my eyes when I hear bullshit. I like looking at my feet and constantly moving while I talk. I like being able to close my eyes, or stare in one spot so I can really concentrate on what the other person is saying. In the past, I have found much more confidence dealing with others on the phone, and even more confidence while typing away by myself.

In person, I have a tendency never to look anyone in the eye. That's not as bad as it sounds. I actually don't hear very well, so I tend to watch people's mouths so I can better understand what they're saying. I have a tendency to muddle words and speak a little like our president does from time to time. I can come off as academic occasionally, but never really in person. If I am really comfortable with you, I will become more at ease and articulate, but with most people in my life, that is not how I feel and not how I come accross.

I have a funny relationship with conflict. My fiance will tell you that I can be argumentative, that while I'm agreeable and compromising for the good of the pack, I can quickly and agressively defend myself very stubbornly when I feel a line has been crossed. Most others I know, would probably tell you that they've never seen me particularly defensive or combative.

At some point in my life I began to divide the people in my life into two groups--people I really cared about, and everyone else. At one point in my life, I used to care little about Everyone Else. Later, I began to care for all human beings--perhaps too much, but I still found it hard to truly participate, to truly engage in the dance of life with Everyone Else.

My fiance knew me for two years before she got together with me, even worked with me closely. She shared conversations with others who thought they knew me. She informed me at one point after we'd been dating for a while, that I do not at all resemble the person she once thought I was, nor did the opinions of the Others with whom she spoke hit the mark.

It became clear to me at that point that I live my life with most people like I'm writing an e-mail. I am interesting words on a illustrated page, but I leave the interpretation to others whom I mostly ignore. And when their demons respond, my immediate feeling is that their demons justify my condition, they justify this distance.

There are some people whom I really love, but I still live far away from them for whatever reason. This has happened a lot in my adult life. I may treat them mostly like they're Everyone Else, but they occupy a place in my heart that they couldn't possibly know about, since I never show it. I am my father's son. I accidentally upset a person who lives in that category today, and that person responded via e-mail in a way that I only imagine e-mail can give one the courage to respond. I'll leave it at that.

I like e-mail because it is convenient. I avoid conflict because it is inconvenient. I treat many people in a way that is convenient for me, in a way that usually causes very little harm. I lead a life that is somewhat monastic in that I have tried my best to remove the trappings of life because they bother me so much. I am sensitive. Too sensitive. Those are my demons.

Remembering the Brink

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 17:21:00 +0000

About a month or two before I proposed to my fiance, I was in a panic. After all, if you've never asked anyone to marry you before, it essentially means that you've not gotten your dating history right until that moment. I was daunted by the fact that I had only a string of huge mistakes to guide me in my decision. I still, somehow, knew that I would ask, but before I did I wrote this song. I called it "Thirty" because I had written songs for Too Much Light called "Twenty Seven" and "Twenty-eight" ("Twenty-nine" was a monologue), all based on my age at the time, and decided I'd make this the third and final installment. For some reason, everyone liked it but it didn't get into the show. I thought maybe it was because Genevra was there and everyone felt weird about putting this song in while she was in the show. Although Genevra really understood what it meant and so liked the piece. I think it made her feel a bit better about my not having asked her yet. Here it is:

I have woken up dead in a bedroom of pink, and
Thought to myself "what am I doing sleeping here?"
And I’ve woken up coughing and wheezing
And asking myself “hey, why does this asthmatic smoke?”

And I’ve felt a warm body beside me and leaned with one arm
Over nakedness talking of politics ‘till I said at last
"Hey, do you have a last name?" and she looked at me blankly
And said...“why”?

And why am I driving at 2 am by some cute woman’s house
Back in 1990-something and a cold sickening feeling is
Tickling my stomach saying
Damn she’s got your balls buddy and that’s not so good.

And I’ve sat myself numb-legged, trying to be Buddha,
Living with some nice woman who was trying to be my wife
And I almost gave my life to a woman out of pity
And I’ve almost believed in false goddesses too

And a big old bunch of nothing can prepare you for marriage
While a big old bunch memories are telling you to run
And you might have it perfect, you might love your woman
But you sing in second person and write about your pain

And you blame expectations and search your compunction
But you only see ghosts and you’re picking some fights
And a minute goes by and you’re like “shit, I’m neurotic”
And your girlfriend’s like “yeah, baby, you and me both”

But you no longer wake up in bedrooms of pink
And you gave up the smoking cold turkey that day
And you’ll never be Buddha but it’s so nice to try
And you’ve only had your head up your ass for a like decade.

And life tends to twist itself pointy like an arrowhead
Made from this light, that flashes like lightning
and this time around you can let yourself walk in a
direction that optimists like to call living

And don’t think I won’t go and follow that arrowhead
Don’t think I won’t be a man--whatever that is--
And please see me love you in the midst of my breakdown
And please reply “yes” when I finally ask.

The song never got into the show. I thought about re-proposing it but by the time I was back in, I was engaged and feeling much better, so the song was irrelevent. I will record it at some point and put it in the audio portion of my website--which badly needs updating.

I have noticed that for years now, when I am able to write something down that is this neurotic, I have almost conqured it. The moment I have written it down, is usually the moment right before I begin to recover. But I don't think that the writing is a catharsis. Art does give us some release, to be sure, but it's overblown, I think mostly by people who don't often make art so when they do it's just a bigger deal. For the rest of us who work all the time, I think we can describe these things so well precisely because we're starting to get a handle on them. Anyway, I wanted to use this song for something because although it's irrelevent, I do still like it.

Joy

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 16:10:00 +0000

And then suddenly we had a little dog at our house, sniffing, pacing nail-tapping its way over our hard-wood floors from room to room.

It was Friday. I was finishing up my most recent post when I got a call from our friend Heather. David, her husband, had found a very small dog wandering around Lawrence and Rockwell. He stopped to pick her up and found that she had no tags. He knocked on a few doors but no one recognized her. So David took her home.

David and Heather have two large boxers and a one-bedroom apartment so they thought to contact Genevra and I because we're looking for a small dog to adopt. I had Genevra call David and I left work early to hop on an El and see this little dog for myself, while Genevra prepared the house for her.

The plan was simple. We would foster the dog but look really hard for her owner. If no one claimed her, we would adopt her.

This is a cute little dog. She's a mix of some kind. We were sure that she had some Chihuaha in her, as you can see from the domed head and the eyes, but the rest was a mystery.

Both of us were performing in Too Much Light this weekend, so immediately we were overtaken by a tidal wave of Busy. Was she housetrained? Why is she peeing every fifteen minutes? Is she pregnant or just overweight? Who's going to watch her tonight? Should we take up the rug? Who will watch her tomorrow? Will she need to be watched tomorrow? Should we take her to a vet? We need to make flyers. Where's the digital camera? How much should she eat? Shit. We forgot to eat dinner!

There were moments, of course, when the dog would cuddle with us on the couch, perch her little chin on one of our bellies and rest, and those moments were good. But the dog did seem a little odd. For one, she was unusually calm. She didn't bark once all weekend (not that I'm complaining) nor did she play. She was always a little pre-occupied and distant, almost as though she were autistic. There were moments of connection and a decent appreciation for the petting and tummy rubbing but she didn't seem too interested in seeking affection. And for a dog of that weight, she didn't seem too intereseted in seeking food. She was after something else but we weren't sure what. We assumed that she just wanted to go home.

We were hesitating over naming her. We didn't want to get attached. In many ways, aside from the distractedness, she was a perfect dog. In fact, she had such a good disposition, whoever owned her obviously didn't teach her anything. She was a wholly undisciplined dog, though hardly any trouble as a "wild" thing.

On Saturday we learned that she was not fixed, and was in heat. That explained the distractedness and likely explained why she ran away from home. It also explained why there was blood everywhere.

When I lived with another woman about four years ago, she and I brought home a six week-old Chihuaha puppy named Orsino. He was incredibly difficult to house train, and really not old enough to begin to learn. He couldn't sleep through the night without having to pee at least once. Elyse and I would take turns getting out of bed at usually 2am, taking his whining little self from his crate with one hand, and then walking him down to the alley in the back of our building.

I remember standing there, on a work night, waiting for him to pee, my eyes closing while I stood, swaying slightly from side to side, when something occured to me. I thought to myself "This sucks. I'm so tired, but I'm not miserable...I would not give this up." That realization sent me reeling.

If I had been able to peer into a crystal ball before I brought Orsino home so that I could see what my life would look like with a puppy in it, I would have changed my mind. I would have watched in horror as I got up at 2am every other night to carry that little potato with feet into the alley, and I would have said "forget it".

That thought led me immediately to the screaming children in the Supermarket, to the desperate feeling I used to get when I saw a couple trying to go about their lives together with this small bundle of inconvenience tugging at their pants or throwing up onto the restaurant floor. They are indeed, standing wabbley in the alley. I look at them and I think "no way." But from the outside I can only see the inconvenience. Sure I see a few grins and giggles, but they seem to pale in comparison to the trauma of trying to live your adult life with a weight around your neck. But what I can't see is the insides of these adult's lives, the insides of their hearts--the parts of them that, though exhausted, wouldn't change it for a second, the parts that grow by giving.

Rain brings growth. Too much sun, will eventually make a dessert.

I grew up in that moment and it changed me. As I carried my empty puppy up my back stairs, I thought about my father. For years I'd seen him as a man who'd given up his dreams so that he could raise a family. He married a woman with three children and had a fourth (me). He gave up dreams of running his own business for the security of a brown lunch bag, a clock-out at 5pm and a daily commute.

By the time I got to the top of my stairs, I realized that my father had accomplished much in the destruction of his bachelor's life. He built a family. I had only seen his life from the outside, and only through my limited perspective. I'd neglected to see the inside, the part that would not undo the life he had made for anything.

Genevra is a woman who loves her freedom. She's a Sagittarius, if that means anything to you. Most of her decisions center around how something will affect or has been affecting her freedom. This weekend was hard for her, and with little love back from the dog, it was hard for her to see how all that trouble could be worth it.

On Sunday night, after two visits to a pet store, and the vet, after flyers went up over the whole neighborhood, after dozens of trips to the fenced backyard and even two attempted doggy-in-heat-prison-breaks, we got a call from Joy's owner. Yes, her name was Joy. A half hour later, our ward was gone.

The empty, newly purchased doggy bed practically whines when you look at it.

Joy has a neurological disorder of some kind, which may explain why she's a little strange--though her being in heat could have explained that as well.

Genevra and I are in some ways relieved because we were getting ready to leave town and didn't know how we were going to manage. We've begun the process of adopting another dog whom we've fallen in love with online. We're hopeful that we'll get to bring him home after the fourth of July.

For now, I wonder about love and giving. I wonder if what I found to be true is indeed true for everyone. There are some philosophies out there that believe that courage and success are measured first by humility and second by accomplishment. Some believe that the hardest thing to do is not exhault the self like we do here in the U.S., but to make the most out of your life while burrying your selfishness. Some believe that for everything you relinquish, you will be rewarded with spiritual growth. And some believe that while that's true, one must relinquish with moderation. I like that. I'm all for the middle way.

Certainly it was true for my father. It seems like it might be true for me. For Genevra...we'll see. I'm sure it will be true on some level. In the wake of our incredibly hectic weekend, I'm 100 dollars in the hole and I had a really big fight with my fiance on Sunday night. I don't know what I gained. And actually, as cute as Joy was, as much as I knew I could fall in love with her if I allowed myself to, I was pretty miserable all weekend. I did long for more freedom. I was overwhelmed.

But I never felt that I'd made a mistake. I may not have felt the love and growth that usually accompanies giving, but I wouldn't go back and change a thing.

Thinking and Smoking

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 16:09:00 +0000

Rain in the Summer. Far too many metaphores. Far too many descriptive passages about its melancholy beauty. Add the city into the imagery and forget it. You've got buckets of inspiration--the kind of stuff Woody Allen is overcome with in his rainy Manhatten. Like him, I feel overcome, but often fail to convey its deapths beyond the explicit anecdote.

I am in rainy Chicago. Chicago has a beauty, a sense of place all its own that I'm more in love with today than I was when I first moved here, even when I first visited. I can't say that it's a city that grows on you because I was taken right away. But I'm over my crush now. Now this is love.

I realized last night something that I have realized continually. Everytime it hits me, I rail. I vow to fix it. I forget again. And the cycle continues. That realization is this: I am more comfortable alone than I am with other people. There is a small group of people whom I don't consider "other people". But in general, I prefer to be alone.

I am in rainy Chicago. I am hungry. It is Thursday. I have not posted to my blog today. I tell myself I will post Friday. I've just learned that the Drinking & Writing benefit will begin at 9pm, not 8pm. I have hours to kill. This realization exhausts me. I walk to my bank. I deposit checks. I take out cash. I walk to Huey's in Andersonville. I enjoy a blue cheese burger and fries.

If you've never eaten at Huey's I highly recommend it. Take your out-of-town friends there and make them order hot dogs, or better yet brats. Lean back and grin over Chicago's history. You can still get damn good meat in this town. I hate seafood. Massachusetts was not my culinary home--but these streets still stained with the fantom blood of livestock, make the red-meat lover in me feel quite welcome. (I appologize to my vegetarian readers for that passage. It's lunch time.)

I am still in rainy Chicago. I love the warm rain, but my pants are beginning to get soaked around the cuffs. I decide to cross the street to a local market and buy a cigar. I've not smoked one for about a year. Yes. Red meat and cigars. The rain. My melancholy. It is Self Indulgence Day.

I buy my favorite inexpensive cigar--Punch, $6.95. I walk through the neighborhood I used to live in when I lived in Andersonville. Not much has changed. I walk the alleys. I love the alleys. You don't see alleys in in New York, not like these.

And the time is creeping, and my back is aching. The rain is falling harder and now my elbows and my shoes are wet. My bag is soaking through, and my back and butt are beginning to get wet. It's time for me to decide whether I should go to my friends' show or go home. I know that they need an audience. I've already bought tickets but I am aching.

And I'm aching in another way. I am in the rain in the summer puffing smoke rings onto Summerdale. I am dreaming of Chicago's Gilded Age, of men smoking cigars and conceiving skyscrapers--envisioning the future beauty of this city, fighting for the honor of the World's Fair, insisting that it can go toe to toe with New York. Chicago...a city with a big chip on its big shoulders.

Leaning against a tree, blowing smoke from my cheeks, it hits me. The warmth of my home office overcomes me like dreams of hot cocoa and a fireplace in the dead of winter.

And I walk, and I tell myself that this is in my control. I ask the question that I am most fond of asking myself: "in this moment, what kind of person do you want to be?" That question usually gets me to do the right thing. But tonight, I decide to do something about which I'll feel guilty. I decide to go home.

I wonder to myself, often, will a person go crazy if he doesn't spend enough time with other people? How can a person feel so much love for strangers from a distance, to connect with his past so passionately, to love a city--but keep his love for his friends hidden?

I ask this question but the city does not answer me. The city bares its lessons to me, but it never challenges me. I can't hurt the city. The city can't hurt me. It is a match ideal and beautiful, as well as stagnant and predictable. After all, if someone lets you blow cigar smoke in their face whenever you feel like it, you may never give up smoking.

Prognostication's Rewards: A Traveler's Tale

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 18:31:00 +0000

Seven years ago, I had a dream that my brother and my sister-in-law lay dead, side by side, in our family's laundry room. A year later, my sister-in-law died of an accidental drug overdose. A year after that, my brother died of an asthma attack.

When I was in seventh grade, I dreamt of a girl named Doreen, on whom I had a big crush. She and I were holding hands as we walked around a red house. We sat on a picnic bench. Some dark-skinned children ran into the backyard and played a game like ring-around-the rosy.

A year later, Doreen and I would briefly "date", and that exact scene would occur: Her neighbors, who occupied the same large, red house, were Indian and had a lot of kids who ran into the backyard while Doreen and I held hands on her picnic bench, as though on cue.

During the summer of 2001, I went on a Zen retreat. When I returned, I was having drinks with my friend Rachel (England Rachel for those of you who have read the previous post) when she told me that she, Chloe and my now fiance but at the time new friend Genevra were going to go on a road trip. And then a flash. I think it was because of all the meditating I had been doing. I saw Rachel in front of an alligator. More specifically, though Rachel doesn't remember this detail the same way, I saw Rachel standing in front of what could have been an alligator sign, and in front of her was some kind of small road.

Rachel thought that was odd because they were going to the Southwest and were not expecting to see any alligators. But I was pretty sure of what I saw so I made sure to tell Genevra and Chloe seperately to take a photo of Rachel in front of it if they saw an alligator sign.

While on their trip, they wound up getting turned around, and drove quite a ways in the wrong direction. And then they saw it--a huge alligator sign.

I still have the photo.

There have been many other instances of my having made predictions or having had dreams or instincts that seemed to come true, though these three strike me as most memorable.

I've taken to weirding people out now by warning them when I think I've had a prophetic dream. I dreamt that a friend of mine got his girlfriend pregnant. I warned him to be safe. I dreamt that my brother-in-law-to-be (hi Brent) got a job as a door man at a bar and was shot in the feet by a woman who was robbing the place. I warned him not to take a job like that. They both probably thought I was being a little odd, even though it happened that the couple hadn't yet settled on a method of birth control, and Brent had recently applied for a position similar to the one that I'd dreamt of and I didn't even know he was looking for work.

I don't see myself as psychic, though. But I also don't think it was coincidence.

I started paying more attention to my instincts one day when I was moving out of my apartment in Andersonville. My girlfriend at the time and I had just broken up and were going through probably the most amiable seperation one could imagine. We had always been good friends and worked together well. Somehow, dismantling the lives we had built with each other and literally dismantling the apartment went as smoothly as most of our relationship had.

At one point we decided that since we had so many books to cary out of the apartment to give or throw away, it would be a great idea to throw the books out the back of our third floor window and gather them into boxes below. I stayed below while Elyse tossed the books to me. We started giggling at one point because we noticed that if you threw a stack of books onto the paved walkway, they would hit the walkway in a stack and then burst upwards into an arc of books that launched away from the house. They became almost as fun to watch as fireworks.

I learned how much distance I needed to keep between me and the drop zone. But then there was this one stack of books that hit the ground and arced toward me--the top book somehow much more propelled than usual. The book came at me and began to lose momentum about 18 inches from my chest. In fact, it slowed so much that it was almost difficult not to reach out and grab it. I did so instinctively.

And when I grabbed it, it was facing me perfectly--front frontwards and upright, binding to the left. The title was something like: "Freeing Your Intuition. How to Unlock Your Own Psychic Powers." It had been a book that Elyse picked up at her job and brought home because she had thought I might be interested. I'd never looked at it.

I then decided to keep the book. I did learn a thing or two from it. Mostly I've learned how to tell the difference between my instinct and my imagination--a skill I very much value.

There was no way that I could have prevented my brother's and his wife's deaths. I may have predicted getting to hold Doreen's hand, but I didn't predict her dumping me in a matter of weeks, nor was I able to predict her untimely death when she was in her mid-twenties. And while I may have predicted the aligator sign, Rachel, Chloe and Genevra found that sign the day they left for their rode trip on September 11th, 2001. So I was able to predict the sign, but not the deaths of thousands on the east coast who died a few hours prior.

Feelings come and go constantly: which elevator will open to take me to lunch; where exactly is the best place to stand on the El platform so I can get into a car first. But they rarely predict anything important. As for predicting the events of my life, I didn't even know that I was going to end my relationship with Elyse until the words came out of my mouth--and then I knew like I had always known. And Genevra and I happened suddenly and unexpectedly at a time when I saw my destiny very differently. In September she will be my wife.

It would be nice to be able to save the world, to help others, but I think somehow to be able to predict events in your own life would not be so nice. I think, we are here for surprises. We're here to learn how to appreciate the good ones, and survive the bad ones.

It's a long, unpredictable journey. There's no way around that. One can ask only for a pair of shoes and a body, for now, to slip inside them.

Tales of Fitchburg, Part 1 (The Beginning)

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 18:21:00 +0000

My brother Ed had filled me with visions of college as an Eden. No one there was unkind. Everyone was more interested in learning than popularity, and athletics were not necessarily a prerequisite for sexual congress. This Eden theory was the opposite of my high school experience, which scarred me and left me an outcast virgin with no more than a social triangle to call my own.

I may disappoint the irony-hungry by saying that my brother was generally correct, although college was never an Eden.

Fitchburg State College, my alma mater, is a small state institution located in a hilly former mill-town in central Massachusetts. Mill towns were apparently huge during and after the industrial revolution, producing textiles and the like before dying somewhere around the great depression and never fully recovering. The City of Fitchburg was no exception. Main Street, running through a dead downtown, is lined with formerly beautiful buildings with marble foundations and proudly chiseled construction dates over elaborately tiled doorways. And all over the city there are abandoned mills, factories and warehouses, sometimes in large, interconnected lots which might span a half a mile.
A famous train-line which ran from Boston to Fitchburg was a favorite stomping ground of Henry David Thoreau’s. In his day, Fitchburg was a hilly paradise, barely settled and eminently rural. He would escape there from time to time by following the railroad that ran right past Walden Pond in Concord.

To this day it is still the last stop on one of the MBTA lines from Boston. Every now and then I’m sure a foreign traveler, accustomed perhaps to arriving at a major city and riding a train out to its last stop as a way of getting to know a new country, will pause with nauseous horror as he emerges from the train to see this city--its rotting bones stuck in the 1930’s and its draping flesh a modern American tide pool for the socially abhorrent. It had become a joke of a city, populated mostly by toothless white people with greasy ragged hair and oily fingers. We called it “the Burg”, and used the expression like it was a synonym for the joint or the slammer.

So I was eighteen. I was trolling for colleges. Speaking of Transcendentalists from Concord, I wanted to go to Emerson College. There were many people who applied to Emerson only to wind up at Fitchburg.

Emerson was an expensive communications college in Boston. I had decided I wanted to be a filmmaker because I had obsessively co-created a few raggedly assembled sketch videos and enjoyed myself tremendously. That was all I needed to uncover my life path.

After a college fair I found my first choice: Emerson. Beautiful, private, Boston-based Emerson. Being somewhat of a worrier I decided I better find a more affordable college as a second choice: FSC. Small, state-run, Fitchburg-based FSC. It held no interest. But it was affordable and one needed to have a no-frills back-up plan in suburban, middle-class, dreamless Billerica, Massachusetts--my home town.

Emerson cost about thirty thousand dollars per year. Fitchburg cost seven. I was accepted to both. I applied for financial aid.

My idealistic, genius, Boston University graduate brother Ed not only told me that college was Eden, but that I could find a way to afford any program. This mythic way did not readily present itself. And I had a friend, Randy, who had also applied to Emerson and Fitchburg, and he wound up in the same situation: accepted to both, but without enough financial aid to afford Emerson.

I remember our first open house. It was a program called, ingeniously, Fridays at Fitchburg. We took a Friday off from high school and drove my gold, 1986 standard shift Hyundai Excel fifty plus minutes to our first glimpse of rotting, hilly Fitchburg. It was raining.

The FSC campus is your traditional quadrangle--a few brick buildings surrounding an acre of neatly mowed grass and a few beds of yellow flowers. In the center of the campus, just outside the dining commons was an enormous, blue smokestack, affectionately nicknamed by my friends “the big blue dick.” I have no idea what this monstrosity was for, except to serve as a sickening beacon to prospective freshmen arriving freshly from their shattered expectations.

After we were shown all over the school, we walked back to a parking lot to retrieve my gold hatchback. We weren’t saying much to each other. I can’t say that I was impressed or disappointed. I felt the usual numbness I feel when I try to consider any choice that involves a potential for enriching experiences. I didn’t know this then, but I am a terrible judge of fun and rely solely on others’ lusts for adventure and newness. Like most people are with meeting friends, I generally need to be introduced to a good time in order to get to know it well.

Randy was my ambassador to fun. He would disagree with this as he probably considers he was generally miserable during this time of his life, but it was how his misery manifested itself that led me to so many places. Randy had a kind-of persistent longing. He was never satisfied, always looking to move on. My life, though like his not always a happy one, was at the very least persistently enriched.

The rain had stopped but it was still cloudy and wet. Randy was walking with his hands in his pockets, his well-hair-sprayed head hung downcast. The two of us, with near identically slight frames and short skeletons, shuffled into the McKay parking lot on that rainy Friday.

I broke the silence.

“That wasn’t so bad,” I said.

Randy nodded almost hypnotically. A moment later he began shaking his head and slowly erupted with “No man, that placed sucked.” A pause. I smiled. “It sucked!” he repeated, also smiling.

I nodded, certainly aware of Fitchburg State’s mediocrity, but again I relied on Randy to teach me the intricacies of any good or bad experience.

“I guess it does kind of suck,” I said.

“Totally,” he emphasized. “It totally sucked.” We laughed. There was an atmosphere of release and I found I did have a lot of things I could complain about if I tried hard enough, and we complained together over our drive home.

Again we would be stranded in an idiotic school and we would have each other. That was what we were used to. So it didn’t feel like the end of the world. It was, however, the beginning of a new one.

Bloom

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Bayiates) — Mon, 07 Jun 2004 14:51:00 +0000

There are so many mornings that we can't remember because they're identical. My alarm goes off at 6:30 AM Monday to Thursday. I snooze once. I wake and get ready for work.

This morning was different. It was different mostly because of what happens to my body when I'm performing in Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. It's a show that begins at 11:30pm on Friday and Saturday with a Sunday show at 7pm and a meeting afterward that can sometimes keep you up until midnight. Suffice it to say I'm wrecked on Monday mornings.

I was wrecked this morning so somehow I snoozed an alarming number of times and woke up forty minutes later than usual. I called work. I showered. I ate. I left. Whenever I'm running late, I like to give myself some leeway so I don't have to rush. I told my co-workers I'd be a half hour to an hour late. I was thinking to myself as I left that it would be nice to bump into the Limping Man because then I could follow him with my buffer time. That thought was followed of course by the recollection that Limping Man is as regular as Wilford Brimley, so my chances were slim.

It's a beautiful day today. On these days I love Chicago dearly. Finally the trees seem full and are everywhere. I think it's a good week for blossoms--some kind of blossoms. I don't know a damn thing about blossoms, but these blossoms are white and pretty and everywhere. I love them and I'm not afraid to admit it.

I rounded the corner heading toward the Western El stop, thinking of the blossoms when lo: Limping Man was there. He was running forty minutes late as well. A mental speedway second of disbelief, thoughts of karma and fate was followed by my steely commitment to learn more about this friendly hobbler. He carried a shopping bag with him today. He was wearing shorts today. He was on the wrong side of the flipping street today. Everyting was different.

I was walking south. He was walking north. "Hello" I said. "Hi ya doin'?" he replied. And then we went in opposite directions. Immediately I rounded a corner to the west that I never round. As I did I heard a much friendlier "hello" from Limping Man and a woman's voice greeting him back. I thought again about how low I was on his Friendliness Index but I tried not to let it bother me. I stopped. I couldn't keep walking west after all. I waited for the woman to pass, stuck my hand into the nearest free newspaper dispenser and then retraced my steps toward the north.

And there was Limping Man's back. It was difficult to follow him. After all, he moves slowly and I needed an excuse to leave some distance between us. At one point I had to stop. I held up my newspaper and peered over the top of it. I was about as subtle as Spy vs. Spy. People were litterally staring at me as they passed. The paper in my hand was an employment paper filled with want ads. I found that ironic since I was late for work--and later still because I was following a strange man for no good reason. The ads on the page I was looking at were for construction jobs.

Yes. I could have worked for the CIA.

He limped on and I watched. I decided to stay still because I could easily have put a block between us and still kept a good eye on him. Then the predictable--he turned toward McDonalds. My previous suspicions had been correct. He's one of the many retired men who spend a lot of time at McDonalds in the mornings. Just to confirm, I approached the front of the restaurant, contemplated throwing out my paper but chose to keep it in case I needed to stop suddenly and make an even bigger ass out myself by pretending to be looking for a drain management job by the ketchup dispenser.

As I walked into the vestibule, I saw him through the glass waiting in line. I decided that this was proof at least that he didn't come to use the restrooms. Again, with a brilliant idea, I decided to pretend to use the phonebook below the payphone. With artful intention (I am a performer after all) I flipped through the book, located a page of lawyers and then put my finger on my pretend find. I looked up from my lawyer, and saw Limping Man at the counter, leaning very casually and comfortably toward the employee. He had already placed his order and he was being his usual friendly self. He leaned with his right arm, and turning back...he looked at me.

Lawyers! Let's see. Yes. That's the one. I turned and left...satisfied that indeed, Limping Man is a retiree who lives nearbye and spends every morning at McDonalds with a community of other retirees.

Now, had anyone been following me, they would have determined that I was an out of work construction worker who was looking to sue his previous employee--probably because they fired me for being unable to lift anything heavy, or because of my penchant for expensive eyewear.

I rode to work happy. The sun feels brighter than usual today. I am reading a fabulous book. The people are wearing less. Somehow, it gives you the impression that you can see them more clearly. I'd like to think this is a day for fun--with the blossoms out and retirees lounging longer than usual in their shorts before they meet their friends.

I'd like to think this is a day for all things to be lay bare.