Do You Know What Is Crueler?

(I asked him this in bed)

Nov 28, 2024

Did you get a chance to check out yesterday’s column?

It’s free to you now (Life In The Grey) BUT…

If it weren’t for you supportive Word Nerds here, I probably wouldn’t be able to justify writing every single weekday. A lot of people write once or twice a month on Substack for paying subscribers, so my neurotic self is over-doing the best-that-I-can as perpetual thanks to you but:

I take your support and presence to heart.

So, I hope to keep going: archiving and expelling!

That being said, if you ever get sick of having a busy Inbox, you can unsubscribe from emails from Susbtack but still be a subscribed reader by checking things out on your own timeline using the website or the app. (I hate too many emails so… I get it)

If you need a scholarship? Just ask!

Word Nerds who give even just $5 a month help make that possible.

I truly need your support, use your support, cherish your support, and won’t let it go to waste.

Want to change up the pace? You can read some of a fiction novel I shared here as thanks recently.

Want to read some novellas? Here are some on Kindle (though I can send to anyone who needs the help). There are even more than you see listed here, so reach out if you’re in a reading mood!

Want to read on?

Shutting up now…

But one last thank you for the road: THANK YOU!

“Did you like the story I told you the other day?”

I asked him this in bed, right as he was starting to drift off to sleep before an early morning of work the next day.

(I like to be annoying like that.)

He looked at me blankly.

“The show idea?” I clarified, ignoring the fact I was perhaps also procrastinating on what I’ve recently come to hate:

Sleep.

I’ve never been a capable sleeper.

I used sleep-machines many years ago when my lungs were much worse - enduring two different sleep studies (the kind where you’re creepily watched in bed all night long in a facility, with wires attached to your scalp like Medusa; Frozen with gum-like goop that takes days to remove without alcohol pads).

I stopped using my sleep machines once I got off oxygen years ago - Something I only use now if needed post operatively or while sick in hospital.

Recently, my shortness of breath has gotten worse, however- to the point where it was hard to even blow out a candle next to my bed the other night before falling asleep. We have a few theories (I don’t think it’s lung related but I do think it could impact them again if not eventually handled).

But sleep? Sleep has never happened without some sort of medicinal help.

“The show idea?” I was saying to him, trying to nudge him into staying awake.

After diving deeply into the Hera anti-hero, hero dance theatre show that (accidentally and sometimes to my chagrin) took over my brain the other day, I was thwarted by my thirteenth or fourteenth full scale (sometimes unwanted) show concept- replete with characters, costume concepts, soundtrack, style.

I was driving home from a long doctor day with my youngest in the passenger seat, and as she fell asleep, the basic ideas that had already flooded my system to a score a few days prior became a sculpture.

“That’s hard to answer,” my husband said, which was not the reply I was wanting… “Because I feel so torn on the subject right now.”

The show features mythical, compassionate roles and complicated non-villains like Death and Dignity, as well as Loneliness and the Scream, and Blue Pills, and more (It’s the first two roles - peaceful and complicit and very much not one-note- that my partner was referencing his confliction towards.)

“No, but did you like the STORY,” I fished.

(Meaning the whole bit where the teenage girl actually falls in love with Death, for example - played by a teenager himself, don’t worry - and he later breaks his own heart when having to try to decide what’s the ethical thing to do for the person he now doesn’t want to lose. A huge arc as the show goes on. Reality and City-of-Angels-like-mythical danger combined.)

“Oh that,” he said sleepily, eyes half open… “Yeah. No that was good. That part was okay.”

I normally make shows by accident.

I throw songs that have a general sound (or sometimes a deeply contrary sound leading to an emotional discordance for the audience) into albums with super super random and poorly-named names. That part is just a superstition I can’t change… but sometimes it pays off? Like this playlist was randomly called “AND THEN” which THEN- considering it features an ill woman eventually sacrificing her own death with dignity to aid an ailing teen who doesn’t have the right to one - felt apropos.

Once, I cared so little about the playlist title and what I was dumping it there that I named it “DUMPSTER” and then the show ended up being about a cardboard community it vagabonds, helping one another and looking out; A story about Dads and sons, but definitely a little bit Peanut Butter Falcon energy and a little bit Arthur Miller.

I didn’t know the show would reveal itself as having scenes “in” a dump, nor that I’d imagine a set that’s a cardboard city. It just made itself that way.

(I also didn’t know that when I created it and imagined one of my dear friends playing the Dad, that- after I pitched it to him- we realized there were completely kismet parallels to his actual dad that he lost, and all sorts of goosebump giving commonalities along those lines.)

But I’m coloring outside the lines a bit too much with what I’m saying right now.

I’m not sure if anyone would still be “with me” right now because… Don’t we all know a person where every-time you say “I’m a writer”, they say, “Oh I’ve always wanted to write.”

That feels a bit like this.

Like I’m just saying things that aren’t becoming realities so… Who has the time to care?

(Certainly not the sleeping husband at this point in my storytelling.)

But that’s the thing about making sh*t:

There is nothing crueler to life than people who are always able to follow through on the making (and also have a propensity for being hyperbolic, as there is plenty crueler, of course)… but can’t find the space to do what they’re meant to do.