So Anyways… I’m Weeping in the Shower.

"I can’t suffocate this way.”

If it’s helpful to remember “what you get” by being a supportive reader here, you can always check out my Everyday Writing Promise (-ish?) that is far too thorough, as well as the following…

Because- to put it simply- I try to always include far more words here than I do anywhere else (@catchingbreaths, for example) so you genuinely get more multiloquence for your buck (?)…

But I also give unlimited reader scholarships to anyone who asks or needs one, because of the kindness of Word Nerds who help sponsor this ongoing memoir commitment.

Is almost-every-single-day perhaps too much of a commitment and a little insane? Maybe.

But I’m just really damn grateful for anyone in the world who thinks that words, and legacy, and reading, are still worth something, instead of the “dying art” that flash-pan captions and trend-upon-trend often make us feel.

Once we are gone… What are we leaving humanity?

Is this the art we’re scraping on the cave walls of our time?

The more and more we give of ourselves in 5-second-videos and constantly-evolving-algorithm-rides, the less and less we seem to say and show.

I got an idea for a show story in the shower the other day… and I resented it almost instantly.

(The story, but normally also the shower.)

I am not being dramatic when I say that it is a special type of indignity when the peaceful psalm that can be warm water becomes a searing pain from twisting and bending wherein your spine cannot stand to stand.

I have tried every single way to approach the marathon that is hygiene and vanity… and they all end up with my feeling like a moth squashed halfway on the sidewalk by some child’s sneaker, after a parent gruesomely encouraged the youngster to do so. (Both felt equally painful to witness.) I am that moth, and I am the person who hates witnessing the pain of a pacifist bug, minding its own business.

What is my business?

It used to be story making. It IS story making. But dancing alone or writing just for myself - though an important outlet not to be disregarded - do not “fill my coffee” without the connection to others. I need the Salon of the Refused. I need the backstage much more than what happens on.

Let’s face it, too: Telling your own stories alone about yourself only, is only about the most myopic thing a human can do on a planet populated by humans with mono-myopia and  moth-malaise… even if we don’t want it to be.

So anyways… I’m weeping in the shower.

Weeping because getting a new stage narrative in my head is like being haunted by a photogenic poltergeist. I see the lights, colors, full score (it’s always made by music, not my mind). In the same way I write fictional novels as if I’m having a dissociative experience- reading my own words back since I was a child like, “Oh wow. Didn’t see that plot twist coming. Who did that?”- I feel as if my existential decisions are third person omniscient.

(I am rarely my own narrator.)

This show would be an anti-hero hero “story that was never told” of Hera to a circus’y indie soundtrack that best meets the adjective triad of: “Gothic Greek saloon”.

It would be my thirteenth fully crafted haunting, and by the end of the insufferable accident of music making my mind see the things I don’t have the stage or the loves to make real… I was suffocating.

“I hate myself,” I cried to my partner, hair sopping wet on the pillow I never remember to wash even though Seventeen magazine told me that was Rule One at thirteen, “I am haunted and I can’t keep these inside. I can’t suffocate this way.”

There isn’t an ending to this story I’m telling, by the way. There is just a narrator somewhere…

And a pillow with two kinds of tears.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.