I know the book isn’t officially out for another week and a half, but I’m already hearing about the book showing up from pre-orders and getting shelved in bookstores, so hey! Go on out and get a copy!
Useful links: Bookshop.org | Powell’s | Barnes & Noble | Amazon
I don’t live my life by too many -isms. So I guess maybe that’s a sort of minimalism, but let’s not get absurdly reductive here, even if that is one of my favorite modes. Apart from the possibility of minimalism, there’s feminism and maybe a couple of others, and I’m pretty cool with that. I don’t need a lot of overarching guiding principles.
One I’ve found extremely useful of late, though, has been incrementalism, and I promise you it does have something to do with the lumber-heavy picture above. That picture represents most of the pieces of a shelving unit I’ve been working to build in my garage. I need some more storage space, so I ripped out the useless and awkward cabinets that had been in one corner sometime last year, and I’ve been slooooowly working toward putting more functional shelves in their place.
Most of that slowness, though, came before I started embracing incrementalism. Why? Well, because I kept sort of waiting to get the big chunk of time and energy that I needed to go ham on the project and get everything cut, assembled, placed, and then properly organized. But I kept not getting it, in no small part due to the six month run of back-to-back plays on stage, and another backstage that kind of ate up big chunks of weekends. Combine that with the standard parenting and husbanding and general life maintenance stuff, I just never found the time and/or energy.
But then I started to consider things from an incremental perspective. And I thought about that saying: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly,” as a way to embrace a liberating anti-perfectionism. And I kind of adapted it into “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing slowly.” Because I’m still kind of waiting for a big chunk of time to do the whole project, but I’m also maybe two lunch hours away from having the whole thing assembled properly. Maybe just one, but let’s not push it, because I do still need to actually eat on my lunch hour, and lunch-plus-power tools isn’t really a winning combo. Your mileage may vary.
So basically, I figured if I can break it down into 20 minute chunks spread out over a week or so, I could have the shelves up in a week, and if I’d done that six months ago, the shelves would have been up all winter and my garage would have been a lot less cluttered. Might have even been able to park a car in it, and isn’t that a crazy thought?
I actually started this idea with housecleaning, and then expanded it to writing, and this is one of my first experiments with tackling a building project with the concept. (The real test is going to be unfucking my basement office space, and by unfucking it I mean a pretty comprehensive DIY renovation, which is deeply intimidating.) But the housecleaning has been going well so far, and the writing has been… well, it’s been. I can get behind the concept of writing 200 words a day being better than writing 1000 words once every quarter or something, but I still haven’t quite figured out how to make that work when I’m genuinely stuck.
Housecleaning has been the big breakthrough here, though, and I’m waffling a bit right now between continuing in my sporadic and haphazard method of figuring out which little bit to tackle on a given day, or finally giving in and trying to lay out all the bite-sized chunks of cleaning into a comprehensive rotation. And that does illustrate one of the limits of incrementalism: some things you just can’t effectively tackle in pieces like that. Compiling the huge list of individual chores and then trying to lay them out in a nice, even, 20-minutes-a-day layer throughout the month is just a thing that I’m probably going to have to attack all at once. BUT, the promise of steady progress toward seemingly daunting goals is a pretty attractive promise, and if it means going all out every once in a while, I think that’s worth it.
Anyway, likely more thoughts and updates on this in future. Fingers crossed!
Okay, so it’s quite a modest little book tour, just a few dates and none of them in the Metro Detroit area, but such are the breaks. Even so, this is super exciting!
And I’ll say I think this is one of the nice things about having a co-author for my very first book. Even if no one shows up, he’ll be there, and he and I can talk for days about just about anything.
Also, do love the graphic designer who aligned the brick wall in my headshot with the edge of the book. 10/10 no complaints.
Somewhere in the social media sphere I recently discovered some start-up or something that had suggested the idea of a fund that people in a community could pay into, with the fund then used to improve that same community. And of course, I saw it with the snarky caption “Techbros invent taxes.” And I was both amused, and sad, because yeah. It’s kind of like that. Probably the only difference is, in the techbro vision of it, some investors somehow profit from this, probably from the administration of the fund, which then basically sounds like skimming or embezzlement.
Now, to be clear, I’m not a “tax everything all the time” kind of person, but as the title of this post suggests, I am the sort of person who recognizes the necessity of taxes. And overall, I think most everyone does too, though often they might not realize it. Too often I think the people who get fed up with it are getting distracted by what are effectively small potatoes, grabby headlines of public money being wasted. A government-funded study on whether or not water is wet, for instance. Fascinating philosophical question, but might be an absurd thing to write a whole grant for. Though I’ll also note here that the reporting on these absurd wastes of money tend to be absurdly reductive, such that if the full scope of the thing were accurately described, the spend might actually make sense.
But I digress.
It’s not just that taxes are a necessary evil, they play a key role in promoting civilization as a concept, and help bind people together in a community. For the latter, taxes provide for the maintenance of public spaces, for instance. And to be extremely basic about it, they provide for things like libraries and public parks. These aren’t just “nice to have” items, they’re kind of crucial to building community. No, every community with a park doesn’t leverage it to its fullest to build community… but everywhere there is a tight knit community, you can bet there are public spaces where the community comes together.
On an even more basic level, there’s simply the roads and sidewalks. These kinds of things could never actually work as private concerns, or pay-to-play concepts. And without this kind of publicly-owned benefit to the general public, there’s no space in which community can develop. Otherwise the entire world is subdivided into privately held parcels where you have to pay each time you want to enter or cross another parcel.
“But without taxes, I’d have money to save and put into savings for this kind of thing!” you say. (I really had considered writing this as a Socratic dialogue, but that felt like too much work.) And I say, sure, you could have savings set aside for the sidewalk toll and the dozens of privately owned toll roads you’d have to drive down to get to the grocery store, but that starts to sound like some kind of bleak dystopia. And while we might complain now about the horrible and uneven upkeep of roads, for instance, I have the distinct feeling that the patchwork nightmare of nothing but privately owned roads would make one long for the days of having to swerve to avoid a few crummy potholes.
Because without taxes, not only would the construction and maintenance of the roads be up to the whims of the owners, but there would be no funding for the establishment of any kind of standards, much less the enforcement of them.
And honestly, let’s not even get started on the idea of privately-funded police, or fire departments, or national defense. Because that’s all been tried and it’s been such an unmitigated disaster that the only rational response was to raise taxes and create those things as public services. I mean, if you want to imagine such a thing, just apply the current nightmare of health care and health insurance in the United States to fighting structure fires. Such an absurd nightmare.
From a historical perspective, which is often how I like to look at things, I’m fascinated at how the hatred of taxes (and their kissing cousin regulations) seems to really gain steam in a world only made possible by taxes and regulations. I find it a sobering demonstration of how complacency can breed contempt. So much gets taken for granted, our thoughts get disconnected from the notion of even having to maintain civilization or the infrastructure around us, and we’re given to wonder darkly about what must be happening with the money taken out of every paycheck.
And the answer is, well, look around you. You can see the investment everywhere. And it is an investment, in the future, in the community, in ourselves.
This has been one in a series of evergreen posts that I’ve got around here because it’s the kind of things that I think all the time and come up periodically in discussions. If my thoughts ever change on a topic like this, I’ll update accordingly, or provide a link in this post to my new thoughts on the matter.
What do I do when I’m not doing stuff? I play some video games. In general, I’ve found quite a soft spot for survival crafting games, especially those with procedurally-generated worlds like Valheim here, which my wife likes to call “Viking Minecraft.”
I play in casual mode, quite unapologetically, since the things I love the most about these games are the building and exploring. Which doesn’t mean I don’t die on occasion, given that there’s a lot of stuff in the game that can only be gotten from big beasties, like the Lox that punched my ticket the other night, or in otherwise precarious situations (like scaling the side of a weird tower that can only be entered at the top level). So there are still quite frustrating moments, but they’re more manageable than otherwise playing on unforgivable mode.
Anyway, pictured is a base of sorts that I’ve been working on for quite a while now–probably about 200 in-game days or so. I envisioned it as a sheltered seaport, though the path to the open ocean is quite a ways south of there and I might have been smarter to build elsewhere. But once I sunk more than a few hours into the site it got to be too much of a hassle to move. And now that it’s done, I’ll no doubt be moving on to my next major building site. More screenshots surely to follow… someday.
Because I haven’t been doing enough theatre this season, I’m back at it, this time stage managing The Cemetery Club at Village Players of Birmingham. Happily for my sanity, I’m actually co-stage managing the show with my friend Justine, who was our stage manager on Romeo & Juliet. She figured she was doing too many shows in a row herself, and agreed to work on this show on the condition that she share the load with someone, aaaaaaaaaand that someone is me. Which is cool, since this is the venue for my first stage managing gig a year and a half ago, Arsenic & Old Lace (where I worked with an actress who is the assistant director on this show, and yes, that’s how community theatre works).
Our big tech Sunday went really well, and we open this Friday! This was a much shorter process than I prefer, based on my experience with Arsenic & Old Lace, but that just means it’s a new sort of challenge. One which I am loving so far.
So around two years ago, I finally went ahead and joined my local Community Emergency Response Team. I first became aware that CERT was a thing years and years ago in a different part of Michigan, strolling through a community first responder fair in a Meijer parking lot, and it sounded like a really interesting concept. In fact, somewhat similar to a concept I’d spitballed on LiveJournal in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and it turned out that FEMA and the Los Angeles Fire Department were a decade-plus ahead of me.
In brief, CERT was created as a way of training residents in basic disaster survival in LA in 1985, while creating a pool of volunteers to assist in disasters that did not personally impact them, or which they and their families were otherwise safe from. The program expanded from LA around 1993 and gained real steam in 2002.
Fast forward two decades and I was looking to get more involved in my community, especially in the age of pandemic. So I looked them up online, e-mailed the sponsor/head of the program at the fire department (also our Fire Marshal), and was told to show up at the next training night. They train monthly, and I got to do one of the coolest hands-on training sessions, which involved safely lifting huge slabs of concrete off of rescue dummies. So I was pretty hooked. I think it was the following week and a massive water main broke and took out water to half of our city for a week or so. So I jumped right in and spent a couple hours here and there each day handing out bottled water at the fire department.
As cool as that was, if I wanted to do stuff outside of our community (volunteering for wide area searches, helping conduct storm damage assessments, etc.) I had to do their 20 hour basic training program. This week, I finally got to do that as our fire department hosted a class for the first time since before I joined up. The training was interesting and engaging, and it was fun to work through the class with a bunch of people encountering CERT for the first time. As the Fire Marshal predicted when I came to my first training session, and upon hearing my background as a Marine, there wasn’t a ton in the class that I had not already learned along the way. But it was nice to see it all put together in a cohesive way, and delivered by some really knowledgeable and experienced folks.
Chances are I’ll probably document a bit more of my CERT experience as time goes by. Generally, I’m sure it’s either going to be training, or supporting planned municipal events (the holiday parade, 5ks, that kind of thing), but I find that interesting enough on its own. Like I said, a big part of my motivation was to get active in my actual community, and what I’ve been able to do through CERT has been quite rewarding in that way so far.
One of the strange things I’ve had to do lately has been to actually do thank you notes to booksellers and other such folks. Some of these, I’m told, are headed out of the country, but who knows where the others may end up? These started out with my co-author, Tobias Buckell, and then he handed them off (literally, meeting around halfway between our residences) and I added my own two cents, and practiced my signature.
And yes, practiced. Ever since paper checks went out of style, I don’t get many opportunities to sign things.
It’s definitely not something that I ever saw as part of the publishing process, but I gladly threw myself at the task because, hey, it’s good to be grateful that I’m here at all, and getting this chance. Something to keep in mind for other opportunities that might spring up.
And if you, reading this, happen to be one of the people who got one, then hi! Thanks very much, again!
Another show is in the books, done, complete. Romeo & Juliet at Stagecrafters, in Royal Oak, Michigan marked my fourth adventure on stage with this particular text (though twice it was as embedded in Shakespeare in Love), and I don’t think I’m nearly done yet. This was my second time playing Prince Escalus, also known as the guy who shows up late and yells at everyone for fighting and/or dying. This was also the most rage-filled time playing him, as the director capably supported choices that really let me touch on this character’s feelings of pain and anger at the proceedings in Verona. It’s not a huge part, but I made it mine for a few weeks.
This was a very special show for a lot of people, not the least of which was the director, who was accessing some very personal elements in the show, though unrelated to young love and feuding families. It was very much an honor not only to be part of that, but for her to encourage me to audition in the first place, wanting me to be part of it. I am very grateful that she did.
As usual, I met a ton of cool people, worked with some very cool people for the first time, and got to spend quality time with others that I’ve worked with often before. In all, a beautiful blend of the new and the familiar. This was also my first show at Stagecrafters, which has a local reputation among community theatres as being top tier. That is very much reflected in their facility which, while definitely vintage in many ways, also seems to have the space and facilities of something more on the professional spectrum. In that, it was a very interesting experience to work with them. I’m not sure when I will again, since they (along with many of the other community theatres) seem to be going in for more and more musicals, which I’ve usually avoided. But maybe it’s time for me to start taking voice lessons, or something.
All in all, a wonderful experience that is bittersweet in its conclusion. Loved being a part of it, but happy to be moving on to other things, both in and out of the theatre.
One of the things I love to do when rehearsing shows is to create a playlist specific to each show that I use while driving to the theatre as a slightly more interesting way to do vocal warm-ups than just making a bunch of weird noises. No hate on those that do, it’s just not my thing. (Shoutout to castmate Ed who does those noises, and it’s a lovely thing.) So I figured I’d share my playlist for the current show, Romeo & Juliet, and share a bit of my thinking.
I do really hate the cover art that Apple picks for those songs, by the way.
Anyway, the song choice probably looks random, but isn’t entirely. On some level, I picked songs that resonated thematically for me, like “One Week” as a fine example of dysfunctional romantic relationships. “Crack the Shutters” kind of reminded me of the “morning after” scene, following R&J’s secret wedding and Tybalt’s death. “I Predict a Riot” seems obvious, and I like rounding out with “Nautical Disaster” and “Superman’s Dead” for the tragedy aspects.
On the vocal warm-up level, though, I obviously choose songs that I have reasonable mastery of the lyrics and some hope of being able to sing. I like songs like “One Week” and “Everything at Once” for the speed of lyrical delivery, which kind of works to limber me up, especially for how much of a mouthful Shakespeare’s verse can be. And I try to stay with stuff within my reach vocally, like “The Mary Ellen Carter” so I can focus on breathing and volume. As much as I love singing along to Barenaked Ladies songs, for instance, I have to be sparing on stuff that Steven Page sings, so I don’t spend too long in my falsetto range.
And I realize this makes it sound like I know a lot more about vocalization and good technique than I do. In truth, I’ve just figured out what works for me, and leaves me with my voice for the duration of a show, especially one like Romeo & Juliet, where my character spends a lot of his limited stage time yelling at, like, everyone.