So let me tell you about his dream I had.
In my dream I’m at my high school reunion. The location of the reunion should be my high school, but instead it’s one of those dreams where every time you enter a room, you’re in a new locale. So I greet my classmates in the Quad, and then quickly delve into a tent that leads me to the Mexican coastline. Everyone looks like a hyper-real version of the way they were in high school---exaggerated appearances and demeanors. All frozen in time, augmented by my memory.At some point, an authority figure seeks to round all of us up. This person’s identity is unknown, his purpose unclear. But he definitely wants to break up whatever it is we’re doing. I duck into a tunnel, and emerge a few thousand miles away at the boardwalk I used to frequent when my folks would take us to the beach. The reunion group has scattered, and while most have disappeared, a few remain, as faces in the crowd. I overhear one of them saying that the production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” has already started. So I walk over to this production, only it’s about 20 people on the beach, kneeling in a 5x4 pattern, all looking like rabbis. They range in age from 4 to 84 years of age. And for some reason, they’re all invoking “Cassius”.
The person standing next me then says, “And the ironic thing is, they’re just gonna throw Cassius in jail again anyways.”
Yea, so that was interesting. Let's back up a bit, shall we?
I’m at my friends’ apartment last night, celebrating his 29th birthday. And we’re chattin’ about the blog, about my life, etc, and we get to talking about themes. Namely, did this blog actually have any? After all, if I’m gonna publish this blog to worldwide acclaim, fame, fortune, and all the Jewish versions of “A Midsummer Night’s Caeser” I can handle, there should be some sort of narrative thread.
Course, life’s messy, not…well, thready. (There’s my Whedon-esque quip of the day. You can all go about your daily lives now.) Hard to create a linear structure while dealing with the everyday, the fantastical, the “well how in the hell did I end up here” of it all. Be that as it may, it’s safe to say the year’s been about sloughing away many of the trappings that were present January 1st. “Trappings” may be too strong a word. IN about 2 paragraphs or so I’ll come up with a better one, so please be patient.
I spent last New Year’s Eve alone. Jenny was in South Bend, and most of my friends were in New York. I remember the ball dropping on TV, and I remember typing in a short message as the display on my cell phone: “New Year/Rules”. Short for “New Year, New Rules”. Damn you, 15 characters or less display! Anyways, even then I had a sense that the way things were going were not the way they should further proceed. I didn’t quite know HOW they should proceed, and in a lot of ways I still haven’t a clue, but I do have a sense that I’m better off now than then.
Which is a bit odd to think about, when most of the entries since the summer haven’t been the cheeriest of sorts. Been a lot of growing pains, which have been unusual. The last time I truly grew, heightwise, was around senior year of college. It’s true. I never had a growth spurt, I just sorta grew for 8 years straight. Oddly enough, the patterns of my life stopped growing right around then as well. The next 5-6 years were a basic retread of that cycle: Harvard- and theatre-centric. Like Chris Rock would say, I was that guy at the club…you don’t know how old he is, you just know he’s a little too old to be in the club.
So there I was, 27, sipping on Cristal (OK, a $10 bottle from Star Market), ringing in the New Year with Alicia Keys and Dick Clark, and knowing something had to give. Or grow. Simply change. Sheryl Crow was partially right: a change could do you good. She left out the part of “it’ll do you good after beating you like a red-headed step-child and make you wonder why you ever regretted stasis”.
Be that as it may, the pains were in the end a blessing, with a tinge of a curse. I’ve got more focus, I’ve got more direction, I’ve got rhythm, who could ask for anything more? But seriously, to say the pains are over is of course a lie. You never stop growing, if you do it right. You can certainly stop yourself from growing, which is in way how I saw my classmates in my dream. You can stave it off as long as possible, as I did. You don’t always know you’re holding off what should be the inevitable. It’s not usually a defiant, “I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Toys ‘r’ Us kid” type of holding pattern. You’re just in what feels like a comfy place, and even if you don’t like everything about it, it’s something you know, and knowing may be half the battle, but the surest path towards atrophy.
So you move on in your life, and for me, a lot of that was moving away from the Harvard theatre scene. It was great for a while, back when I convinced myself that doing shows at Harvard meant “bigger spaces” which meant “better portfolio” which meant “quickest path to being Radiohead’s tour designer”. But really, by the end, I felt like the 84 year old babysitting the toddlers. I was in jail. I was Cassius. Trapped in a cycle I no longer understood, each play bleeding into the next until they no longer were discernable from each other.
And I had sand in places I’d rather not discuss.
So maybe that’s a them for the year: sandblasting away the old. Yea, it hurts like hell at its peak, and may leave a few burn marks in its wake. It’s worth it, though. It’s also worth noting that the process, long overdue, has just only begun. Many steps to be taken yet. People like my friends from last night have helped me part of the way. Others have parts yet to be written in the process. Hard to predict, but easy to hope for, who might be those participants.
‘Cuz it’s not, in the end, about making solitary promises to your cell phone on a wintry night. It can start there, to be sure. But it will also end there if you don’t extend your hand for help. And maybe learning to extend that hand, tentatively at times, to be sure, has been the biggest step yet.
A long overdue step, indeed.