Photograph courtesy of Corbis.

Once upon a time, we were young children. We did terrible things, played games that really weren’t all that much fun for our un-willing partners, and piled embarrassment upon our Parents with our lack of inhibition and atrocious manners. Why did we do these things, you ask? I’ll tell you. The answer is simple; we were young children. Then one day, we became adolescents. Impulsive creatures of hormonal rage. We lived it up in the summertime, and danced, crawled, squirmed, or punched our way through high school. Ah, yes; High School: the house of good times, the hall of bad times. The cavern of testosterone, cheap teenage perfume, laughter, tears, cliques, and wads of chewing-gum stuck to the bottom side of rickety desks.

After this profound and pitiful chapter of the human experience, we each took our own road. Some of us went to college. Some of us did not. Some of us joined the military, some of us went to hippie communes in places we’d never heard of, simply because we wanted to get as far away as possible. However, no matter how we filled the blank pages of the post-high school choose-your-own-adventure book, we had one thing in common; slowly, we were becoming adults. Seventeen passed into eighteen. Eighteen to nineteen. Twenty, twenty one, twenty three.

And somewhere amid that cluster of years, we encountered a tragic truth. Those things which branded our high school experience—gossip, rumors, the pressure to please the people we look up to—things which we hoped would stay locked up in those classrooms and musty lockers, did not stay put in its proper place.

We don’t live with our parents or guardians any longer, and we may now do a lot more watering plants, washing dishes, and taking out rubbish than we ever did before when they were our ‘chores’. Yes, we’ve come into our own, haven’t we? We have jobs, paychecks, bills, migraines, maybe even children. But, what happens in High School doesn’t stay in high school, and we still have our daily dose of drama.

I was recently reminded once again of this ironic disappointment, because my Beloved One has a cyber stalker. It feels like High School to me. I don’t particularly enjoy it either, because I hated High School!

I suspect we’ve figured out now who her bullying cyber-prankster is. We’ve not yet agreed on the proper reaction, but, we have pinpointed the culprit and their motivation. Pain.

Revenge Begets Revenge

“Human Beings are capable of doing inhuman things.”
—John Malkovich

I’ve the uttermost confidence that nothing I write here will sway the aforementioned individual from carrying on with a string of arsewipely deeds. However, I do hope to motivate some of you people who find it difficult to let go of your past, whomsoever you may be. I honestly don’t believe that I personally know anyone like that—thank God—so I’m not dispensing advice to any of my friends when, I advise you to consider your own safety before you torment your ex-lovers for sport.

John Malkovich—kooky actor extraordinaire—tells us: “Human beings are capable of doing inhuman things.” Well, he would know wouldn’t he, he’s John Malkovich. However, when we try to stomp out our bad memories by poking the beast that caused them, we’re overlooking a fundamental trait of human behavior in our victim: everyone has a snapping point. Not a breaking point, when they’ll surrender, a snapping point, whereat they’ll go berserk. You can only slap a person so many times before they get tired of it. Most people lack the self control to not get angry and respond in kind. Apart from your immediate physical well being, you do run the risk of joining the ranks of the crude and cultureless in the process of ruining your enemy’s life. So remember, as you chuckle and consider all the deliciously humiliating and hurtful twists and turns you can hurl the object of your hate: It may not take too long for your victim to become your victimizer. People who’ve been poked and prodded along to their snapping point, encounter such a huge rush of rage and adrenaline that they are temporarily immune to universal concepts of right and wrong. As your whole ambition is to empower yourself, and take power from your foe, be careful you don’t end up in a body cast, (or body bag).

The Past Does Hurt

“The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the teacup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.”
—W.H. Auden

The second thing to consider is your overall sense of peace. Yes, the past does hurt. Rejection still stings, even if it is from ten years ago. We may see someone who ripped our heart and soul into shreds in a shop, and if we aren’t careful to control our thoughts, it can begin to keep us up at night. The pain of the past floods into our present. However, when we dwell on the past, we render ourselves incapable of accepting a future. And, what you truly don’t know—no matter what you believe—is what that future holds. It could be so much happier than the days gone by.

I think you owe it to yourself to let what’s passed wither behind you. God knows, I owe it to myself.

Let sleeping dogs lie.

© Jeffrey Puukka, 2009

So, Frank McCourt and Walter Cronkite have passed. One a celebrated author, the other a legendary Newsman. Do you suppose there’ll be any further to-do’s at the Staples Center to take over all the major networks?

No. I don’t either.

Now, to business:

Look at the screen of the gadget before you. To the right of this bloggishness, you’ll notice what the techies at WordPress have called, ‘the sidebar’. Look at the sidebar, and scroll down, below the archives, categories and my twitterfeed. You’ll spot my blogroll hovering there; a hodge-podge of links waiting to be clicked on and loved by someone. Someone like you.

If you hover your mouse over those links, a brief description of the website should appear.

Perhaps I should be more ambitious about developing and promoting my own stuff. However, as we all (hopefully) learned in our schooldays, where would we be without friends?

{Disclaimer}
The ‘sidebar’ is temporarily located on the right-hand side. However, if the website is redecorated, the sidebar may then move, in which case, the directions provided above would be outdated.

{Second Disclaimer}
The saying “where would we be without friends?” is figurative. The author of this blog may not necessarily know the authors of linked pages.

{Disclaimer The Third}
Disclaimer Two is a partial truth; Sotamies is a blog written by the author of this blog’s father.

{Fourth Disclaimer}
The claim that the links of the blogroll are “waiting to be clicked on and loved” is sheer personification. Frankly, the links themselves probably don’t give a damn.

{Disclaimer 5}
Disclaimer Four is an assumption. Maybe the links have feelings after all. Click gently.

© Jeffrey Puukka, 2009

Here’s an experience a lot of us have had.  You see [Fill in the blank] for the first time in [Fill in the blank].  As you’re standing there going on about [Fill in the blank] something about them slowly begins to eat at your brain.  That is, their general visage or persona strikes you with that sense that you aren’t saying something.  Something, moreover, that you really should say.  It would only be polite.  You’re supposed to comment.  Why?  Because something’s different!  That’s why.  You can’t quite place what is different, but you know very well that something has changed since the last time you had the [Fill in the blank] fortune to see them.  Their hair?  Could that be it?  Have they changed their hair; cut it?  Grown it?  Colored it?  Have they lost weight?  Are they wearing a brand new outfit?  Do they suddenly have blue eyes instead of green, or red eyes instead of blue? 

Well, I bring up that socially awkward scenario because; depending upon how often you visit my page/read this blogship; you may not notice that it’s different.  As of today, it’s different.  New colors, slightly new lay-out.  It occurred to me, as I was sitting in front of the window.  There I was, watching rain fall and pool upon the roof of the used-car lot’s office {which sits smack outside my living room}, it occurred to me that it is no longer winter.  Things on my little corner of the web ought to look more ’springly’.  Brighter.  Merrier.  Cheerier.  More color.  So that’s what I did. 

And you [shame, shame, shame] probably don’t visit nearly often enough to appreciate it. 

A sketch of Shakespeare; one with which I can well identify at the moment.

Now, before I bailed you out on having to figure out for yourself what had altered around here, I was sitting in front of the window, having a wee ponder.  It was today’s repetition of the always predictable daily ponder that happens after I’ve come home from work. 

It probably drives my beloved one slightly mad.  She probably feels as though I’m not interested in her, when I come home and the first thing I do is sit in a chair, seeming to stare out at nothing, lost to all living things around me. 

Yes.  It must be maddening for my Beloved one.  But I’ve come to understand there’s a reason I do it so often.  It’s a sort of rethinking of maybe useful thinking that was done earlier that day without my control.

Alright, that makes no sense!  Perhaps what follows will be just as mad, but I’ll try to make a metaphor.    

At the moment I still have no dedicated space from which to do what I used to do in my office.  That’s been the case for the last few years.  Now its not as much of a hurdle as it was six months ago because I have a laptop.  There’s not as much need for an isolated desk if you have a laptop.  However, I do miss having an isolated room.  I’ve noticed I do my best work when I have space to absorb that work, and then spit it back out at me.  The research I do for [Fill in the blank] can take over the wall.  Then, the work that needs to be done happens smoothly in that environment, because I’m swimming in a room full of research, musings, reminder notes, and so on.  And of course, when the subject that needs working-on changes, the rubbish on the wall gets torn down and replaced with new, much more important material.  Now, I don’t have such a closet or cubicle at the moment.  That means the ‘office’ tends to be world-wide, scattered, unorganized, and very much an imagined place I go to inside my head.  That seems to be where I go during the daily ponder.

I think I’ve figured it out, and I suspect it works like this… 

1.  On the way to or from work I tend to read/scribble about things vaguely similar to whatever it is I’m working toward creatively…  {At the moment, solving and building up the infrastructure of The Lab, so that it’s fit to put out work again in a year or so.} 

2.  When I get back home, I seem to be incapable of doing anything around the house until I’ve unwittingly dedicated a-few-cigarettes’ worth of time to staring out the window. 

3.  In that time, I think part of my brain is trying to pin those unorganized and maybe useless thoughts (from the bus rides) to some sort of order in my head.  In other words, I’m tacking all those articles, bits of research, musings, and reminder notes to an imaginary wall instead of a real one. 

4.  So, I sit at the window.  The two eyes in my face are watching the rain gather on the roof of the car lot’s office.  Somewhere in my mind, I’m in my non-physical office of no walls, working away, and actually—surprisingly—getting things done sometimes.

Now, I’ve had a few interesting ponders lately.  And, I suspect that soon I’ll have a much clearer understanding of exactly what I’m going to do, in my efforts towards building up The Lab.  I have a non-linear, not-very-useful vision at the moment.  After all, it’s really hard to tack a linear thing like a time-table to a non-existent {and often spinning} wall in one’s head.  It makes one feel a bit mental!  But I can tell, I can tell, I can tell that soon the eggs will be in a basket.  Then, I’ll be prepared to write a bit about what can be happening, and when.

The only thought to make a note of at the moment, is this.  As a member of the audience, as a director, as a reader, as an actor, the one artist I’ve constantly been moved by is Shakespeare.  There’s a lot of willing and ready arguments for why we should not do Shakespeare.  He’s too old, he’s been done too often, he doesn’t apply to us now, and so on. 

Wrong.  Wrong, wronger, wrongest, wrong as possible.  I’m happy they shared their opinion, but I’m choosing to ignore it.  Shakespeare, as a writer, was very, very daring.  There are a lot of contemporary playwrights who just aren’t that daring.

So, I’m sort of going to just say face it: I am who I am, and certain things about my taste don’t seem to change.  I am deeply drawn to the beauty, the brilliance of the language, and constant echoes of relevance in Shakespeare’s mountain of work.

So, while many of my daily ponders over the last year have had to do with why I should not do Shakespeare, when The Lab is up and running again, the Bard may play a big part in the work we do. 

As I said in one of my recent entries, nothing’s going to be happening right away.  I have a lot of gardening to do, in a sense.  But seeds grow, and blossom when the conditions ripen a bit.

©  Jeffrey Puukka, 2009

"Think Egg" (by meppol of Deviantart.com)

It amused me looking back at my latest entry that I not only wrote, but also supplied photographs of, eggs.  I must have really wanted to blog that night.  Or else I was just under a sort of eggspell.

It was eggs again this morning.  Poached, in the wonderful wee egg poacher my Sister gave me, and then dropped over some wonderful toast, and then gobbled up very wolfishly by me!

Then it was eggs of a different sort that kept me up last night until three in the morning.  Brain eggs.  Idea eggs.  Eggs sort of being laid, and then being rejected or being stored away for secret safekeeping where none of the thought-predators can get at them.  And I think it’s important to say that nothing has hatched, yet; but, a queer turn-of-events these past few weeks has sort of caused me to collide with what might be a way to get the theatre functioning again. 

Neil {He played Renfield when I directed Dracula some years ago, when Discovery Theatre Lab was much more active} keeps calling or emailing every few months, wondering when I’m going to do more theatre.  I’d sort of not had any option but to put him off a bit, and then I finally just wrote to him a week or so ago and said sorry mate, can’t do anything.  The process of writing him such a letter, to finally respond to all of his comments and questions on Myspace and so on, may have been more of a let down for me than for him.  Whenever I write “No, I’m not doing any theatre just now,” there’s something in my brain that spasms very subtly and says “hang on, why aren’t you?” 

Well, the short answer is that there’s more than a wee bit of gardening to do, so to speak, as far as the general health and infrastructure of Discovery Theatre Lab before it will be possible to produce any really successful theatre. 

A few eggs did plop down into my brain from eggland last night, however, we’re still a ways out.  One of the first important decisions to make, is whether it would be best to fix the Lab, or abandon it and start a new company? 

Sadly, at this point, Discovery Theatre Lab, is a program that has a varied history, sometimes a good, sometimes very very negative reputation depending upon who you talk to.  At the moment sits defunct.  Now, is it best to say: “yes, I realize nothing was perfect, but we have done some good work too,” and work to repare the broken ties?  Or should I let go of that, let it lie, and start a whole new company with a whole new name and build new relationships? 

I’m inclined to bugger on, fix what needs to be fixed, and take responsibility for this now half-sunk ship I started almost ten years ago.  Part of that may be a more internal desire I feel to sort of redeem myself as well.  If I let The Lab just lay where it lies, it would mean not righting what was done wrong in the past.

If I continue with The Lab, it really will need to evolve into a pheonix and climb out of its ashes, a new creature.  That’s what I sort of keep having my attention redirected to recently. 

First with writing to Neil.
Second with seeing a license plate that said “KBO”.  (I asked the driver, “what does the license plate stand for?”, and he confirmed it was the reference to Churchill, keep buggering on!) 
Thirdly, with the recent anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth and death day.  Most recently, or significantly with the few the gathering eggs last night. 

I may do nothing whatsoever.  I may be too tired and too sort of ‘afraid’, by this point to really return to doing theatre.  But my mind really does keep being picked up and put down in a nest of theatre thoughts, so, I may not be able to ignore that. 

Whatever happens will be announced here, of course, and as I said earlier, if I do get up off my couch and start working again, it will be many months before any plays are actually being produced. 

    ©  Jeffrey Puukka, 2009

. . . . .

I remember that on this day, one of these last years, (1st April, April fool’s day. . .) my beloved one woke me up in the morning and told me she was pregnant.  –  She stuck with it too.  A long conversation, through to the point where I said overwrought but supportive boyfriend things like, “This can be good, we can make this work!”  She then dropped the giggling “April Fool’s Day!!!!” bomb. 

I didn’t murder her, she’s still alive and well.  Moreover, for all intensive purposes it seems we are again, moving in together.  {Insert sighs of relief and exhaustion here.}  I say “seems”, yes, there are still a few chinkylinks to add to the chain before our heads are on the pillow.  However, we were given the keys earlier this afternoon, so, if “for all intensive purposes it seems”, it seems intensely, with some evidence. 

Those of you who know me a bit more personally, know that this apartment has been a long time coming…  And for the first time in my humble existence, I will not be living in Gresham, but bursting through the bubble and taking up residence in Portland. 

In some three months time, her eldest will be joining us.  Again, those of you who know Victoria and I more personally already know the story there.  If you’re not one of the lucky one’s who knows us more personally, well, I’m not going to go into it here and now, so it’s your loss, boo-hoo, have a cup of tea and walk it off.  Regardless, in some three months time, her eldest will be joining us, and we will be happy to receive him, for now, in this apartment, we have space to allow him to do his own thing, grow, flourish, and all that sort of thing that you want children to do.  Hopefully he’ll move fast to doing it, too!

During that three some months, however, it will be lovely to do things like cook meals with my old cooking equipment, make use my espresso maker, sleep in a bed instead of on the living room floor, hang pictures, take them down, hang them somewhere else.  I’m very keen to have those lovely nonsense arguments about how to decorate the place.  I can honestly say that yes, we both have good taste, it’s just that I consider my own a bit superior to her’s.  (Who doesn’t consider their own sense of taste superior?)  I want an orchid for the kitchen near the window.  Hopefully the cat won’t kill it.  (That’s a good question to pose to you, my unpopulated community of readers.  Have you cats and orchids?  Do your cast try to eat them?)  Yes, an orchid.  I want an orchid.  Orchids are such erotic flowers that even men can appreciate them.  I want an orchid.  We don’t have a balcony, and the windows don’t provide any lush unforgetable views I could write poetry about, so, I want an orchid.  

Apart from the excitement of discovering how my Beloved one and I can put our stamp on the place, I’m also very keen to get back to all of that spur-of-the-moment boyfriend/girlfriend business we’ve missed out on, what with sleeping in the living room of someone else’s house.  Even more blissful, I have concrete evidence she’s mad keen to get back to doing the same, so, lucky be we. 

It’s been quite rainy these past few days, hasn’t it?  Well perhaps not for you–you might be reading from your sun-tanning chair in the garden of Eden, for all I know.  However, here, where I live, in the Portland Metropolitan area, under the gray curtains of the Pacific Northwest, it has been!  I’ve noticed something that even I don’t understand about myself.  I carry my umbrella with me, as I walk out to work.  I like umbrellas, provided they’re not some god awful pink thing with flowers, I like ‘em, have a soft spot for their shape.  However, as I walk out and about, I never catch myself opening my umbrella up, and using it.  This, I think, is due to the fact that it’s windy, and it takes more effort than I’m willing to part with, to keep it poised against the breezes raping it.  Notice, I said, “it takes more energy than I’m willing to part with.”  –  That means, I honestly believe it takes less energy to do what I actually do:

Carry:

(a) briefcase containing laptop
(b) unopened full-size cane-shaped umbrella
(c) a full Starbucks’ cup of coffee
(d) a cigarette

Whilst:  (That’s “while at the same time”, for you non-anglophiles.)

(e) avoiding puddles because of holes in the soles of my shoes
(f) getting wet

Oh well, I suppose if we all walked around doing things that actually made sense, there’d be no reason for films, books, or music.   

Hold fast!

© Jeffrey Puukka, 2009