Screened-In

It's official: I'm depressed. I spent all day on my loveseat in the dark yesterday trying to confirm this suspicion. And even though the episode of Top Twenty Five Unsolved Crimes I watched couldn't have helped matters, it's true, I'm under a bona fide cloud.

We screened Off the Radar for an audience two nights ago. It brought phase one of this project to a close. Phase two will be harder in a way because we have to figure out just what the hell we're gonna do with it. But now I've landed in a weird sort of limbo. I know I have to take a few weeks off to come down from the freefall of the last year. My brain has gone dull and mealy like cold oatmeal. I'm useless. I can't multi-task or self-motivate or any other hyphenated word combo. I've forgotten how to have a decent meal at home. Instead I'm piling up points at local restaurants while my beautiful new black stove sits untouched except for cat paw prints. And my closet smells like smoke--a telltale sign of too many late nights standing outside too many bars trying to shake off the days.

I have to wonder how long I'll last before I start itching to tick my way back up the roller coaster and descend down into another rush of late nights and limit-testing days. The fact is, I'm addicted to the mayhem of my double life. I have been for over a decade. And when I'm in these "interim" periods, this in-between, I don't know how to be me. I've built an identity around overextending myself. Who am I if all I have to do for awhile is make dinner at home?

And yet I don't feel ready to enter phase two and read the audience response forms we handed out. They're sitting in an envelope next to our hard drive, a hundred potentially heart and mind changing sentences peering through the seal. So, I've decided to let them sit for a week (or maybe more) until I can regain my footing. I can't stop thinking of what it looked like to see Honduras up there on the screen, in some ways just as I remembered it and in some ways even sharper and more alive. I want so much to feel that moment and let it sink in before I leave the audience and go back behind the scenes again.

I both need and don't know how to use this time off. The screening was a blur of names and faces, handshakes, shrugs, cringes and comrades. There's no way I could have prepared for how it'd feel to be there and no way to prepare for how it'd feel to be past it. So here I am, December 10th no longer looming and a crater of uncertainty lodged at the base of my spine.

I think Sam Shephard said that right smack in the middle of contradiction is where you want to be--that's where the action is. I think I'm there. Maybe that means something good is gonna happen.