All my thoughts have been in letters
Life Astro has written me, its been a long time. SInce the passing of “G”.
*Note: I have to remind myself this public facing journal is freeform. Scratch isn’t a rebadged KFO. I consider myself plying my trade on the dinner theater circuit. I’m in the Poconos, the chitlin circuit. I’m trying to stay in the game but i’m far from the lights of my own personal Broadway.
Dinner Theater Circuit
A New York-centric article about the concept
A FIELD GUIDE TO DINNER THEATRE IN THE US appears to be an dormant, but it has a lot of great articles that rise above being just SEO blog entries.
Theater in the Poconos I don’t have a link here, but it is a memory, either from film or tv about being washed up and only able to get work in the Poconos, which it appears still to this day has a thriving dinner theater circuit.
Chitlin circuit
For me as a kid growing up I understood that Dinner Theater (in the Poconos or otherwise,) and the Chitlin Circuit to be the same thing; they arent, but certainly similar. I guess the big difference starts with the segregation, but also that the Chitlin circuit was about food and entertainment for the negro, but it wasn’t limited to theater. The first link above is a solid NPR take on the history of the CC.
Trigger Warning: Long FormUSA Today does a very passable piece on the Chitlin Circuit When I ready a piece like this I like to imagine that a writer actually made enoug money to pay their mortgage, or catch up to bills, as opposed to five cents a word.
Worth noting… Again, for my future self and any who ever reads any of these pieces, this is freeform writing. My approach (it is too little to call it technique), is to come to the keyboard and begin writing. I don’t have a outline, I have no idea what i’ll write. I do not force it. I will start and move on to whatever is there in my head. Post KungFu I am less likely to anchor my thoughts on a moment and then reflect and radiate in regards to my thoughts. I think I do still have that rabbit hole writing in me, but it was initially honed on the imagery of poetry, intermingled with looking back on interactions I had with my intimates. This is an informal journal that i’m using to open my mind back up to writing.
I haven’t written poetry in years and my inner circle is frayed. To lay the brick and bars of this gilded prison I broke away from nearly everyone, all in the hopes to securing a good life for my future self who will be incapable of working, but will probably live longer than what a younger version of myself (26 was my assumed death day, when I was a short sighted depressive.) imagined a short life ahead.
Things still in my mind
I can’t get Julie Powell out of my head. It is easy enough to armchair this rumination as a way of my mind to think about my mortality, something i’ve not really dwelled on in years. Since my thirties I pivoted away from obsessing over the hot breath of Death upon my neck. I still have to admit that I am not playing it safe. I ride a bicycle, have two sports cars, walk everywhere and enjoy sushi; between mercury and parasitic worms who would ever eat fish again?
Julie Powell had a good run. She tried to make something of herself, married, got a solid job, it didn’t fulfil her, eventually she came up with an idea that propelled her to work that writing muscle and advance her cooking skills. Every day she dialed in on just those two topics of Julia Child and her own personal reflections of Julia’s impact on her life and then she hustled and secured a book deal. Her life changed. She was alway human, never became polished and hidden behind a PR machine. She was my people.
Sure… I’ve made this Faustian deal with myself over the years. I want to do all of this work and then I want between sixty and eighty four months where I live a nice life, then I can shut it all down, move into some two hundred squarefoot ADUrent my house out, tend to the garden and hopefully have enough to end my last years (whether i’m cognitive or not,) comfortably. I don’t really have any other thoughts. I mean, regardless of our good or bad behaviors, our bodies are just filled with these terrible lottery tickets of death. Yes, I’d love to die unaware, in my sleep, beside (she won’t like that,) my wife. I’d prefer to not have a slow cancerous end and I used to think that I didn’t want my mind to go, in truth though, it appears to be very upsetting in the beginning, towards the end most present as unaware.
I dunno, because she wasn’t really a celebrity and was more a regular person who did an act we associate with celebrity, it is real. More importantly, I assume she wasn’t ready to go.
I’m not ready to go. This desire to stick around means i’ll have to do more to preserve my body…
