I’m creating a blog post primarily for the purpose of justifying the fact that I just spent $2.46 on a large coffee at a cafe, rather than continue to isolate inside the darkness of my dreary abode.   If I can get out of this cafe knowing that I accomplished something other than yet another unnecessary monetary purchase, it might do my soul a bit of good.

So to continue the ongoing progress report here (if use of the word “progress” isn’t stretching the definition too far), I did accomplish something after I wrote the previous entry.  I wrote about three or four more pages of dialogue between the male protagonist and the female antagonist.  I’m not sure I can use any of it, but at least I wrote something.   I was trying to “just write” (as many have suggested.)  The reason I stopped was because my “just writing” was leading to immoral areas.   I was beginning to get off on the evil of the evil characters.  Another good reason to leave my room.   Things like that tend to happen more behind closed doors when we don’t think anybody’s watching.

In general, this playwriting process is so inherently annoying compared to the more fulfilling process of composing music; I wonder sometimes why I am even bothering.  I’m getting older; I’m not really looking forward to spending each day for the rest of my life wracking my brains out.  It’s just that at the rare moments when I feel like I have something on the ball here, the sense that I get within myself is that I know  I have something on the ball.  It’s not just a feeling anymore.  It’s not just a hope, guess, conjecture, or speculation.  It’s a certainty.   It seems to come from somewhere outside of me, beyond me.  

Then, it incurs a sense of obligation – of mandate.  I simply have to keep working on the script, for the single reason that I know it to be potentially positive and powerful.  Otherwise, hell yeah I’d give the damn thing up.   I’m pretty sick of the fact that the process awakened a buried resentment regarding a failed forty-year friendship, for example.  But if it hadn’t have aroused that particular negativity, it would have aroused some other negativity.   And it has, in fact, aroused many such negativities.

Why?  Because it’s a process that I hate.  I don’t enjoy writing theatre of any sort; I’m doing it because of this sense of divine, cosmic, or extraterrestial mandate that doesn’t permit me to stop working on a project that I love, even though it involves a process that I hate.  Now if that isn’t twisted, I don’t know what is.