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Time in a Bottle

Scary

My writing space is the scariest fucking room in my apartment.

The street light hangs at shoulder height, hovering like some mechanical all-seeing eye outside my second floor window.

The closed curtains hang unevenly, a jagged crevice of cloth allowing only a sliver of light, as if peaking through a cracked door (like Poe's deranged tenant in the Tell Tale Heart).

Even during the darkest hour of a man's soul (it is currently 3:36 am) you can still hear the comings and goings of people as far as a half-mile away. If the breeze is right I can hear the elevated Red Line stop at Loyola and the robotic voice of the conductor, "Doors closing, Granville is next," in that menacing monotone.

It's alarming to know that there are people moving through the city at this late hour. Cars, trucks, the occasionally cranky motorcycle, roll within yards of where I sit. (I can't imagine how close they must feel to people living on the first floor.) No wonder the impulse to climb mountains or the increase in rent as you ascend (the penthouse always costs more than the first floor), the higher up you are the less you hear, and the safer you feel.

If I can hear them, see them, hell, sometimes smell them (or at least I can smell whatever they're smoking) then they can just as easily observe me.

I'm exposed up here in my glass bubble. We've hung no curtains or blinds. Each window is as wide open as a field with nothing to keep someone from watching me closely with even the cheapest binoculars.

It's scary up here. I've never felt so exposed in my life.

A Room Of My Own

My office is the sun porch of our Rogers Park apartment.

My monitor faces a window some six feet tall and half as wide. A window the same size stands to its left so that I essentially face a wall of approximately 36 square feet of glass. Immediately to my left (so close if I reach toward it I don't have to fully extend my arm to touch the glass) are three windows, each the same six feet high, though slightly narrower. Six feet behind me is the mirror image of arranged glass as the side-by-side mirrors in front of me.

Eight feet to my right hangs a heavy curtain of luxurious red and gold, separating me from the rest of the house.

We're on the second floor some twenty feet off the ground and thee tree outside the window is twice that tall. In summer the thickest foliage abuts the building at my eye level and squirrels scamper from the trunk to my sill on a daily basis, occasionally pausing to use their little hands (with the most delicate little fingers thin as claws) to eat some found treasure (and maybe contemplate the guy on the other side of the glass...sitting in that chair and tapping his fingers against that contraption).

In the winter the trees, of course, are bare and the lower sun throws long, thin shadows., like abstract, fine lattice work.

It's very much (I imagine) like living in a glass house. When people speak of rooms with "good natural light" they're talking about my office. It's like writing in a tree house.

It's the most creation-inducing space I've ever lived in, my 50 or so square feet of sun porch.

Something I Learned Today

For me to be successful as a writer it helps me to think of writing as a daily practice, like yoga, or tai chi. If you move in a certain way enough times, like practicing free throws, you create what's known as muscle memory. Your body learns to do something so well you don't have to think about the act, but can instead perfect (or as close to it as we can come) the art of it.

There are cooks and there are master chefs. There are writers and there are authors. There are basketball players and there is Michael Jordan. To reach that next level you have to learn something new about your craft every day. Either by reading someone else, by writing something you've never written or by learning a simple fact, intellectually you have to be more than you were yesterday.

Today I learned that Canada has two national sports - lacrosse is the official summer sport and ice hockey is the official winter sport. The US has no official sport, but baseball, that greatest of all games, is the national pastime, I don't care how many people watch the NFL or NASCAR.

New Yorker Covers

Need to kill some time? I spent a decent portion of my evening (at work) browsing every single cover of the New Yorker, starting with the first cover February 21, 1925 and going through April 2007. (I guess they haven't uploaded the last year's worth of issues.) That's 3,699 covers.

And why would someone spend the time to do this? Because he wanted to see every baseball themed cover. Of the nearly 3,700 covers I found 29, starting with this cubist-inspired bad boy from May 8, 1926.

Chicago Reader Review

One of the more nerve-wracking aspects of the show was anticipating the review (my first ever!). Granted, it's super cool that there even was a review, but that doesn't change the fact that while I was waiting, and rationalizing every mean-spirited, spirit-breaking, just-plain-shitty thing I imagined the reviewer would write, I was a little anxious. Yeah, yeah, I know it's just one person's opinion. But I comforted myself with a million little reassurances about how well structured, funny, and most of all, well acted the show was.

It turns out, that for the most part, my fears were unfounded.

Holding Court

Clocking in at a little less than an hour, Courtney Arnett's solo piece about her many trials as a single woman looking for a decent date feels at once too short and too long. Although the show is packed with examples of awful dates, many of her tales consist of little more than a quick costume change (into a prom dress or a bridesmaid outfit) and a few brief, if funny reminiscences before she moves on to the next loser or asshole who hurt her or didn't quite measure up. The show just doesn't build dramatically, and Arnett never seems to learn. Still, Arnett does have a strong, likable stage presence, and most of her material avoids being too self-indulgent--the result, perhaps, of its having been edited and shaped by local writer Pablo Rajczyk and director Joe Lewis. --Jack Helbig Through 3/30: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM, La Costa Theatre Company, 3931 N. Elston, 773-866-0200, $10-$15.