Thinking Thursday

Check out the coming temperatures.

Thursday involved modest locomotion to arrange for a surprise birthday party for my friend Chris A. Chris has been living with cancer for just over four years. When he was diagnosed, we organized a benefit for him and raised ten grand as a comfort fund for him but now he is in palliative care.

On Sunday we will likely have our last "Sylvia Salon." He lives in a small place so he has always held an open house in the bar of Vancouver's iconic Sylvia Hotel and he decided to have one more this Sunday. This past Tuesday was his birthday so I have written to everyone coming on Sunday and asked them to bring a limerick about Chris as a present and I have arranged with the hotel to have a cake delivered from the Bon Ton (my favourite bakery). I will order champagne.

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It has been two months since my show, Knock Knock, closed and I began living day-to-day. It has been two months of waking each morning with no plans. The sunny days are easy: I go out for a long walk and I am stimulated by what I encounter. The rainy days are a challenge.

On rainy days, I really need a project. Reading makes me fall asleep, I can’t stand television and hardly any movies interest me—hence the baking. All I ever want to do is write but if I do that it will lead to a form and I will get sucked into another project. Writing, memorizing (producing) and performing Knock Knock was a compulsion/obsession for two years.

Two months with no current or future project on the horizon, no commitments to travel and no family at all. I have never lived so light and like any way of life, I am getting used to it. But it must end. I must have a project of some kind by November and possibilities are emerging:

1. Revising and expanding my book to include all the material I have developed for my course at Emily Carr University.
2. Re-printing my book as it is and writing my course material as a sequel
3. Leading all fundraising at PAL: Teaching the organization how to fish instead of delivering a large tuna every two years
4. Revising Knock Knock, learning it all over again and staging it acoustically. (But this will only happen if the play is accepted for production at Pacific Theatre.