Nightescape

Something I've noticed about artists is their general knack for finding each other. Take a thousand strangers, stick them in a room together, and within two hours the actors and musicians will have formed a clique. One could ascribe this to mere theatricality -- the signals sent off by clothes and mannerism, the flourishes of speech that scream "I am a writer," and the odd sense of humor that comes with creativity. One could argue that it's more like a soul bond -- similar personalities screaming across the ether.

One could say pheremones. One could say arrogance. One could say vocab, gesture, and audience.

One could say sleep schedule, a common level of alertness. People feel uncomfortable when someone's more awake then them, as though they're behind the game; likewise, they're irked when someone's more sleepy -- it's laziness. Artists, for whatever reason, tend to be night owls.

I've never really understood that, although I certainly am whenever given the chance. It could be the intimacy of darkness, or the mystery of the city that no one sees. It could be convenience. It could be that it's cheaper.

It could be that we're all insomiacs haunted by inner demons or muses that won't quit.

Probably not.

In any case, I've been spending most nights hanging out with Chad and Ciro, coming in at three or five in the morning and crashing 'til noon. It's a life of long talks, art museums, Mamet films, and poetry open mics, (at which we are among the best, of course). . . I've missed it. It sounds pretentious as hell, but I've missed it.

Although it's wreaking havoc on my biology, it's good to be back.

Limbo Rock

I'm not a fighter. Sure, I can best most opponents and enjoy a good brawl. Sure, I recklessly challenge ridiculous odds and leap into danger at the drop of a hat. But when I come up against a wall, I don't run at it with weapons flailing. I look for the chink, or I talk it down, or I climb it.

As a result, I do a lot of waiting. Waiting for the politic moment, or the one when no one's watching. Waiting for the right odds -- the right hand. Doing my research, honing my prep work, and waiting for the second when I can slip through the break in the radar. And if I get the stop order, even at the last second -- emotionally invested and halfway through the sting -- I drop my tools and walk away. I regroup and go back to waiting. I'm good at it.

As any soldier can tell you, "nothing" is The Most Stressful thing to do.

I'm in a place where I know that things are going down, on an instinctual gut level. It's why I stayed in town this weekend -- I am positive that I need to be here. True to form, five of my friends are in crisis on the "I can't stop crying and I never cry" level; death, isolation, and missing persons; distant fathers and buried resentment.

I can't help any of them right now on even a surface level.

All I can do is wait, and look to the long term. Work on the strategies while lieutenants take care of the tactics; hold on to my sanity with a guitar string.

Waiters are underappreciated.

The Fox and the Owl

I am not an owl any more than I am a wolf or a cat. It's important that you accept that, or you'll never really understand where I'm coming from.

However, I carry an owl around inside my head. I don't know its name; it seems like a silly thing to ask. Mostly, it stays inside my head, but sometimes it hangs out on my balcony -- bigger and golder and whiter than a real owl has any right to be. Val notices it more often than I do, which makes sense in the same way that Max and I can sneak up on Uncle Rex but a stranger couldn't.

Aside from that, the owl mostly minds its own business. Ghost owl, spirit owl -- whatever you choose to call it, it's fairly uninterested in the physical world. Why it decided to hang out in my head specifically, I don't really know. It's just one of those things. That doesn't mean I'm not happy to have it around most of the time. It makes for good company, and it lets me know fairly powerful things that I wouldn't otherwise.

Occasionally, it decides to take a more active role, for reasons of its own. I'm inevitably chagrined when I notice, which doesn't usually happen until I've already outlined my eyes and fluffed my hair out to look more like feathers.

I guess there are some times when tricksters need to be rescued and wisdom steps in; all I know is that I'm restless.