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Showing posts from August, 2008

Levity

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Yesterday, I was promoted to captain at my restaurant, which is a big deal that doesn't happen all that often. I gave a speech to about twenty of my peers. The transcript follows (with apologies to Robert Howard and John Milius ): I have been characterized as an ambitious man. I don’t deny I own an unquenchable lust for glory. All my life I’ve been told to keep my feet on the ground and my head out of the clouds. There’s time enough for the earth in the grave. Now let’s touch the vault of heaven. You have been my allies. I remember days like this when my father took me to the forest and we ate wild blueberries. More than 20 years ago. I was just a boy of four or five. The leaves were so dark and green then. The grass smelled sweet with the spring wind. Almost 20 years of pitiless combat! No rest, no sleep like other men. And yet the spring wind blows. We strive together. We can’t forfeit. We would only be back here another day. Perhaps in worse company. For us, there is no spring.

La Strada

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I met a stripper who worked summers in New York to pay for drama school in Montana. I knew she wasn’t lying because she had big shoulders. She smiled a lot, too, ingenuously, which was how I knew she couldn’t see the irony. Of all the actors I know, the ones who don’t live in the big cities are the happiest. In another time, being the best Iago in Cheyenne would have meant something. “Is this life?” is a question best asked rhetorically, at the right moments, like when you ride the TGV to Paris and watch the fields of mustard and Syrah pass as you lunch on olive tapenade and onion confit with fresh bread. That’s just one instance. Another great time to ask “Is this life?” is when you are in a car in the Nevada desert with your Mom and your Dad and your baby brother, with nothing around for miles and miles, and a mad, dusty herd of antelope race across the road just where you are, no coincidence, just jolly good antelope fun, because what would you do all day if you lived in the desert?