I'll be brutally honest; I don't feel like writing tonight. But I see those hits and I just feel like I owe it to people. I guess the project consists of equal parts obligation and indulgence.

I saw a play at the theater tonight, Swingtime Canteen. Great little show. I fell in love with the whole cast by the end. I've spent the rest of the day since being inexplicably dejected afterwards.

On the surface, it doesn't make much sense to be depressed by such a light-hearted, wonderful little play, but I am. At this very moment, I'm sitting here not going to a party, on a damn Saturday night, because I feel to despondent to do much of anything.

In case you don't know, Swingtime Canteen takes place in 1944, in London, during a USO show for the GIs stationed there. It's got a lot of old 40s music and a lot of great humor. The cast of this particular show was just extraordinary. They worked so well together, and the sense of time and place evoked by the play is very nice. But it's hardly all that serious of a play. So why am I so depressed?

Several resons. First is the very temporary-ness of the theater experience. We of the VCR generation are spoiled by taped experiences we can repeat and review until their impact is lost. I saw this show on closing night -- more or less, I will never see this cast perform this play again. I might see the play, and I might see the cast, but seeing both together is nigh-on an impossibility. This makes me regret not going to get my tickets earlier. I could have gone to a second showing. But no. All I will have now is a memory. That is plenty, but I'm still a little miserable about never being able to relive that experience. I don't know what that says about my life, but I think I'd best not go there tonight or I'll be jumping off a bridge somewhere before midnight.

Secondly, all the old people in the audience. You should have seen it. This wide vista of gray, balding heads and wrinkled skin. I was one of a handful of young people in the theater -- the vast majority of the people there were elderly; a lot of them probably were in the war, and all of them certainly lived through that time. Then you look up on the stage, and so much of the cast there were young, vibrant, full of life -- children of the 90s, playing the part of the audience in their youth. Ghosts of the past, performing a show for the people who lived that past, soon to become ghosts themselves. I felt like an intruder, born in 1971, coming into this place and witnessing these people reliving a tiny slice of their younger days. It was eerie. But I bought into the world of this play, sentimental and campy as it may have been, and at the end I didn't want to leave. I wanted to stand up and say "take me with you". A wild, irrational impulse. It doesn't help that I have such an over-romanticized perception of that period of history in my mind.

Yeah. So that's why I'm not going to the party. Makes a lot of sense, huh? I got a peculiar satisfaction out of that moment -- out of the strange symmetry of these performers doing their strange little timewarp, getting the audience to sing a song from more than 50 years ago... it wasn't quite enough to get them out of their seats at the end for a standing ovation (arthritis, I guess), but... it was enough for the young people. A number of kids were standing up and clapping at the finale. Another wonderful little moment.

I wish I could relive it. I can't help it. It's the way I am.

All right, well, enough of that. Here's a little something I got in the mail the other day. The person who sent it said I could quote him, so I'm doing it in spades to fill up the space I don't have the heart for myself. It's about Day 10, the dime-store religious discussion. Read on...

Without sounding too pretentious, I don't think your interest is purely academic. If what you read has a profound impact upon you, (as I think it some small profound way it has) : ) , It is digested and a part of you. I don't hear people who read and study conventional western philosophy say; "I only have an academic interest." Faith or spiritual expression is something that lives and expresses itself within one's life and thoughts. There are a lot of weekend occultists out there who become Azmodious the Impressive on friday night and by sunrise monday morning they're accountants. The same applys for every faith: esoteric, mystical, conventional or mundane. I'm not saying you're an occultist. I do, however, think you dismiss your spirituality. Just because your beliefs don't fit on a business card, just because you acknowledge your faith is the product of observance and experience and not traditional adherence, just because you maintain, that for you, spirituality is more abstract that what you've observed in the printed word, doesn't mean it's less valid. (I'm not getting culturally relativist on you, here.) Joseph Cambell spoke of true Shamanism as compared to Traditional Faith as someone whose beliefs are not upon tradition, but their own life experience. The masks of God for the true Shaman is based upon the god he sees in all things.

That being said, I'm done for the night. I have no rebuttal for the man, but let his words speak for themselves, from me to you. Goodnight.

D.

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