2004-06-19 - 10:17 a.m.

GODDAMMIT!

GODDAMMIT!GODDAMMIT!GODDAMMIT!GODDAMMIT!

I really was having such a good day yesterday.

I woke up early enough to have my favorite breakfast: vegan chorizo, potato, and cheese breakfast tacos from Whole Foods, smothered in salsa and tabasco sauce. I even got to check my e-mail beforehand and got two wonderful e-mails.

The first was from the mentor I mentioned last entry, Vicki Mahaffey, who responded to a message I sent her wishing her a Happy Bloomsday. She was, as I imagined, in Ireland for the annual Bloomsday Joyce conference (it is very weird to think that it is entirely probable that I will go to most of them from now on), and it turns out she had been hanging out with the big Joyce guy from Berkeley, whom she thinks is pretty cool. I had made my decision about schools without consulting Vicki on who the best Joyce peeps were, and so was very pleased to find out that she would have steered me Berkeley's way anyway.

More noteworthy was my e-mail from The Ditcher. In case any semi-consistent readers have forgotten, The Ditcher was my best friend for a year and a half of college, after which she promptly ditched me for reasons that neither of us could quite explain. I had tried repeatedly to keep the friendship going, but she never responded to any of my e-mails, even after I visited Penn back in January and attempted to make up with her. Well, earlier this week I was on the phone with my beloved Kidrin who still has one year to go before she graduates. She mentioned that she had seen The Ditcher and they had a discussion in which The Ditcher said that she identified with the main character of Avenue Q, the fucking brilliant musical that won the Tony (I mentioned both the musical and my last encouner with The Ditcher as orchestrated by Kidrin in my Philadelphia trip entry). The Ditcher, it seems, is desperate to find her purpose and shake the post-grad malaise. I empathized completely, having been in a private little Hell after I graduated (due in no small part to the fact that The Ditcher had ditched me), and decided one last time to swallow my pride and send an e-mail of love and comfort even though The Ditcher had long since past deserving them.

She hadn't responded for four days, and eventually I decided that I had once again wasted time and energy on this girl, but then yesterday my eyes fell out of my head when I saw her name in my inbox. After wrenching my eyeballs away from the dogs (bless'em)I read the e-mail. It was a nice little e-mail, and at the end she said, "Let's try to keep in touch this time (I know it's been my fault up until now)."

That, gentle readers, is about as close as EITHER of our prideful, neurotic asses are ever going to come to an apology.

So The Ditcher and I, while certainly not best buds again, are most decidedly buds. That really makes me happy, and it means that The Ditcher will no longer be known as The Ditcher on these pages, oh no! She will be restored to her original title before exile, Tina Sparkle (name that movie).

After that, the day continued very well. I went to get my breakfast tacos and they were yummy. I then popped over to Platypus hair salon to get my sideburns trimmed by Mr. Platypus himself, whose scalp massages have cause me to fall hopelessly in love with him (of course, I pick Austin's only straight hair stylist to fall in love with). I grabbed a coffee and a cookie and headed home to watch a movie before preparing for a little get together I was having later on with Datura, Ms Firecracker, and some other lovely ladies who wanted me to teach them some theatre games. The movie in question wound up being Shattered Glass, which is a great movie that I highly recommend. Hayden Christiansen may be a god-awful Darth Vader, but he is excellent at playing a total weasel.

As all this cool stuff was going on, I began to get suspicious. I find that, when a lot of things are going right, it turns out to be the universe preparing you for something that is about to go very wrong.

That's when I checked my e-mail again.

I got an e-mail from the lovely and talented ZenithNadir. He's in the army. He's getting shipped to Iraq.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCKITY FUCK FUCK GODDAMN BASTARD MOTHERFUCKER! AND FUCK AGAIN!

ZenithNadir, while occassionally the kind of person you want to slap in the face, is also the kind of person who you know will always have your back, and who will defend you against anyone and anything. When you think about it, that's the kind of person you would want defending you country.

ZenithNadir, however, does not belong in Iraq. He's a pale Irish boy and should not be out in the sun. Seriously, he is going to get a sunburn in two minutes. By the end of day one, he's going to look like something out of an original series Star Trek episode. He'll be maroon, for fuck's sake.

And, oh yeah, he shouldn't be there because nobody should be there, because this war is totally fucking pointless, because the 9-11 commission has found no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, which Osama-fucking-Bin-Laden himself has said on many occassions because he hates Saddam for not being fundamentalist enough, and yet despite all this 50% of America still believes Saddam Hussein engineered the 9-11 attacks. I guess you can take that famous quote and reverse it: you may not be able to fool all of the people all of the time, BUT YOU SURE AS FUCK CAN FOOL SOME OF THE PEOPLE ALL OF THE TIME!

I am so sick of being angry.

I really wish I could be angry about other things. They're making a musical version of Winesburg, Ohio, a good candidate for my favorite novel of all time. I was angry about that for about five minutes on Thursday, until I heard the latest news about the war. I get angry in traffic. Nothing compared to news about the war. I want to be angry about so many things, and I am, but somehow all of it pales in comparison.

And I thought I was angry before.

As I drove to go buy food for the get together I was having, I could barely keep from crying in the car. I checked to see if I had anything in the car that was angry enough so that I could vent. I had Tori's live album, and I put on her performance of "The Waitress." I have never screamed the chorus so loud in my life. There are moments in performance when raw, undeniable emotion comes through. Directors work for weeks or months with actors to reach that point, and many never do. I wanted a tape of me in the car screaming "I BELIEVE IN PEACE, BITCH!" so that I could show it to actors in the future and say, "This is what fury looks like."

It helped a lot to do that. I was able to function after that. I talked to PearlJammer and Shkbob, and bought some bread and cheese and edemame and couscous, because I'm that pretentious, and I went back to my apartment and packed more of my things into bags, and then the girls came over and we had a fabulous dinner, and I went to go see Ginger Leigh but she had, unfortunately, finished her set early, and then I went to see Grupo Fantasma with PseudoSlovak and saw some old friends at the show I hadn't seen in a while, and I danced my ass off and had a blast.

But every time I thought of ZenithNadir, I wanted to cry. I still want to cry.

He means a lot to me. Once upon a time a group of us were playing taboo, and he had the word and he said, "K-Dog has a lot of this. And Tina Sparkle. And Notorious RRZ." The word was "beauty." I'll never forget that. I don't want him to die. I don't want him to kill. I don't want him to have a single solitary wound, physical or psychological. I don't even want him to get sunburned. I want him home, safe, giving me hugs and telling tall tales and occassionally pissing me off. I want him home, and everyone else. No one is dying for my freedom in Iraq; they are dying for fanaticism and greed. You will not want to be anywhere near me if my friend becomes one of them.

Okay, so now its personal. Now its time to redouble my efforts and figure out how in the name of all that is blessed on this Earth to get that evil, megalomaniacal moron out of office and to get my friend and everyone's friends and parents and children and siblings and cousins and spouses and lovers the Hell out of the desert and back home where they damn well belong. I'm through playing around here. Regime change begins at home!

And after that, I'll see to this whole "Winesburg, Ohio: The Musical" bullshit.

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