Fat? White? Male? Funny Pants?

Posted 1:51 PM by sean
Sometimes when we are upstate, a group of people will decide to go on a walk. I ask them where they are going, and it turns out they are going to some point, and then they will turn around and come back. I ask them if they will be buying anything on the walk, and they say no. "Sandwiches, candy, soda?" "No".

So I tell them that I'll stay here, they can go for a walk, and I'll let them know if they've missed anything while they were walking.

Yes, yes, I'm sure something lovely happens on these walks. I go on walks with my wife, but she's a computer games whore and it's the only way I can get her attention. And, truth be told, I always bring cash because I always secretly hope we will get sandwiches, candy and soda. And usually we do.

So the other day when I was in the middle of a glorious two hours spent on the golf course, I realized why I love it so much. I'm walking around, only to end up back where I started. However, I get a ball and a thing to hit that ball with, and, on the walk, a place to aim the ball eventually.

I went and played golf with the New York parents, and I had such a ball. Sure, some people take it seriously and sure, sometimes it is frustrating as hell. And yeah, you get tired of people telling you to keep your head down and which club to use and countless more nonsense, but basically, you are just wandering around on a really pretty walk and you have a stick and a ball.

18 holes may be a bit much for me, just about four or five holes more than I want to play. Also, five hours out in the sun might be just a touch more than I want to do, especially when it's 10 am to 3 pm. But it really isn't just fat guys walking aroound in funny pants.

When you hit that ball right, you feel a tuning fork go off in your chest. I can hear the pitch, that's how clear it is. You get all the ball, it goes sailing, the right direction, the right yardage, the right everything. I scored about 130 on 18 holes yesterday, but four or five of those shots were damn near perfect. If I break a hundred some day, it'll be because I got five more of those shots a game.

But, I don't really care. The walk is nice. And they had sandwiches.

Other Blogs

Posted 4:31 PM by sean
I got a call from a friend last night asking me if I'm sad because he read my blog. I told him I wasn't.

In an effort to avoid any more phone calls like that, I'm posting another blog. It is disheartening that the best stuff I've ever written in this blog will never be read again, but that's the nature of blogs in general. We're only as good as whatever you are writing right now. But I have a random assortment of blogs I check every few days, and I thought I'd give a shout out.

By the way, if you track your own blog back to mine and this is the first you're reading of this, you should know the best stuff is from some months ago. I won't tell you where, you'll just have to start reading and stop when it gets awesome.

First are a series of theater blogs. Mac's Blog is where I start, but then I usually check in on Terry Teachout who is a critic for the Washington Post.

Then I go quickly through Dan (although lately he's not been posting much), then George and then Laura. The last blog is fascinating because I've watched a playwright as she's left New York to return to the South and then, y'know, try to figure her shit out.

If you think every single one of us doesn't consider leaving New York once at least one a month, you're mistaken.

On each one of these blogs, I sometimes wander from there. The fun thing is that Mac sometimes fights with these guys and gals about what's important in the world of theater, which thrills me and makes me feel retarded. But it is fun.

One of my favorites is Alton Brown's Rants & Raves . I can't say enough about AB. This is not the best show on TV, it is the best show for ME on the PLANET. He's a southern nerd chef, a genius of food prep who is an armchair scientist and... Look, I'm not going to go on. I refuse to argue the point. There is no better television show currently being made if the demographic was one dude, and that dude was me. To be fair, Alton posts about once every two months, so this isn't one I check very often.

My own family's blogs are to the side, but you should really start with Sean Patrick , the other dark meat, or as I like to call him, Mini-Me. Bud isn't a member of the family, but I've known him since 1987, and he once pulled a knife on me at a time in my life that I should have been stabbed.

By the way, no-one posts as much as I'd like them to.

As long as I'm getting to my friends Anthony is a fantastic multi-talented hyphenate. It's impossible to describe what he does without selling him short, but he writes, directs, acts and (God help him) is an expert at improv. Dan basically publishes a blog that contains anything he doesn't publish on Slate or Salon or the New York Times, which means he also doesn't post as much as he might, but everything he writes is professional and polished.

There are also people who have no idea that I know them. This blog is one of the most powerful examples of the way the internet has changed the world. Insane that this guy can blog his life for me. Anil Dash is a pretty infamous blogger in his own right. This girl is a great photographer and a big baseball fan, which is fun.

Two women who blow my mind are Krissa (petithiboux) and Dooce . Dooce is very popular with my family, but Petithiboux (which is what I always think her name is in my head) is just goddam miraculous. I adore her writing, I adore reading about her life.

I read two famous people's blogs. Margaret Cho is one, but I read her blog so you don't have to. Believe me, I'll snip out the funny stuff and email you with it. Zach Braff is also keeping a blog, and every time he writes it's hilarious.

So. Now I don't have to write for a day or two, right? Go read these guys.

Relax

Posted 4:45 PM by sean
All right, all right, let's all just calm down for a second. My last post is just something you are going to have to put up with if you want to read this blog, it only happens once every great while, most of the rest of the time I'm sweet as a child's ice cream.

I promise, coming soon, will be rhapsodic declarations of love to my wife, my family, my craft, my career. I will tell a story about my sweet friend who recently turned a corner, from grief to recovery. I'll talk of loves past that I still miss, when the weather turns from summer's sweet freedom to autumnal melancholy. I'll look forward with hope to that miracle of a day when I see my child's first steps.

But, y'see, none of that is happening now. If I were a welder and no-one worked in steel anymore, I'd get to say "I'm one hell of a welder, but now they make buildings out of plastic" and no-one would shake their heads and say, "Your bulging delusions of grandeur are showing..." I'm really good at my job and I'm at the ass end of a run of great luck and I don't know where my next job will be coming from. If you think that doesn't suck, I mean, you're just wrong.

And what is surprizing to me is that, not only can you simply not read this blog, but it actually takes some time to download it. Go do something else.

Plus your emails just spur me on. Ask my wife. I do shit all the time just to get criticized. It's almost like I'm an infant, unless you count how good I am in bed. Sometimes I sit down at the computer with nothing to say and I just try to come up with something retarded and offensive. I'm amazed that it works.

So, as we used to say in North Carolina, if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes. I'm too lazy to keep this up for long.

Greazy Rope

Posted 2:52 AM by sean
Apparently, I have something to say. I need a forum. I have something on my chest that I have to get off. I mean, I don't know what it *is*, but there's some goddam thing or other that keeps me awake at 3 in the morning after not sleeping for *WEEKS* on end, right?

Pathetic. Really.

Okay, there is this one thing.

My friend Steve and I had an argument about malpractice. Actually, Deb and Steve had an argument about malpractice and I listened on and interjected, "that is true..." and "well, y'know..." and "Steve's not all that fat...", but the remarkable thing about the argument is that I almost never hear Steve express concern over his possible future, and it really made me worry about how frickin' *terrified* he is of getting sued and losing his license over a simple slip of the scalpel.

But I don't want to talk about that at all, what it made me think about is how much *everyone* bitches about their fucking lot in life. There's always someone going on and on about how unfair it is to have to work a jackhammer for the city, only to reveal that, WOW, he actually *works* a jackhammer for the city. Christopher Reeve is the fucking spokesman for stem cell research and, oh I just realized this, he's had a spinal chord injury that stem cell research might cure!

I mean, what the fuck. Maybe it's because I'm an artist (and I am one, don't give me that look) and our job is to try to recreate the human experience, but the fact is that all y'all's stories are frickin' *identical*. The best is when a group of actors sit around and talk about how hard it is to be an actor. Like that's new information. God, if only someone along the way had mentioned something about how incredibly hard it is to be an actor, then we could have made an informed decision...

Sleep deprivation begets sarcasm. "The lowliest form of wit", Oscar Wilde...

(Not really. What he actually said was "Sarcasm is the highest form of wit, I don't think.")

(Although John Knowles did actually say "sarcasm was the weapon of the weak", which I have been misquoting in the present tense for about twenty years now.)

(There's this thing called a "search engine".)

If you sit around a table making fun of the various things actors have done in order to propel them stumbling further along their pathetic career paths, all the actors at the table will laugh at all the things you mention *except* for the one thing they are currently trying which they think will work. But it isn't just us. God, the conversations I've endured as people talk about the political process of selecting the best T.A. assignments at your average state college, the dried up leaf my tongue turned to as I tried to identify with the vagueries of when a trans-continental freight truck ought to be weighed, the endless crescendo-decrescendo (more like sfortsandos)(Oh BURN!) of my various single friend's love lives (Not you, of course) make me wonder how many more moments I have on earth and if I'm going to get a few hours of dispensation when my time is up.

Maybe that's why virtually everyone I know that I'm not too close with has such a hard time *listening* to anything. Watch two people talking and they are completely ignoring the essence of what the other person is saying, they are listening for cue words that lead them to their own kvetchs. You always hear, "oh! Speaking of the mongrel hord, have we got the *worst* problem with birds pooping in our parking spot! Listen carefully while I explain the specifics of what the city and/or my landlord can do to make my specific lot in life free from this completely invented disadvantage!"

I wish I could do it, but it's something I've never been able to do. (Ignore it, that is. Not bitch. Bitching's what I do best.) I have really good hearing (and no, that's not something that the women who sleep with me say because they say it to all the guys- I actually do have above average hearing. That's why I get paid to produce recordings) and as such, I've heard shit my whole life. I'm also genuinely interested in the human-ness of people's stories. I am interested in the fact that we all have the same story.

My friends are awesome because they are just as boring as everyone else, but they try new shit. One friend broke up with his girlfriend of twelve years and now he's running around being the most attractive man in Brooklyn. One friend got fired from his shitty job so he became a freelance writer, who's been published about ten times in the last year, including a NYTimes article. Another friend was worried about how to become an actor, so he went to law school, passed the bar and works at a law firm... in order to be an actor. That's awesome. One of my friends is implementing a "New Mistakes for a New Year" idea for 2004. He's just doing things wrong in a different way to see what will happen. These people are awesome.

Don't you people know that a helicopter could drop out of the sky on to your bed at any second and kill you in your sleep? At the beginning of your life you are placed at the bottom of a greased rope and you have to try to climb to the top of it while everyone else in the gym is yelling at you for being fat. That's life, that's everyone's life. Some people have knots tied in the rope to make the climb easier, but no matter what, you are either gonna fall off before you reach the top or you are gonna fall off *after* you reach the top, and falling off is death and falling off will happen to you. You have X number of hours left, and you've been telling yourself the same damn story about your Dad not liking you and being unattractive in junior high. I know because I've heard it before. Probably from *you*.

People think I'm a talented actor (oh, and women think I'm fabulous in bed) but here's my little secret. I'm merely a self involved jackass. I'm *not* a self involved jackass idiot who doesn't listen. It's such a huge step up that people think I'm a genius.

Yeah, I had nothing to say. I just can't sleep and I'm feelin' mean.