January.

I’ve been having these dreams lately — I asked C if he has dreams like this and he said yes, so I assume they’re one of the various broad categories of dreams that everyone seems to dream in common, like you’re trying to get somewhere and you keep getting waylaid, or flying, etc.; which, isn’t that strange but somehow reassuring? before you even get to consider how weird dreaming is, at all, and that we all do it and no one really knows why or even what it is? — anyway, I’ve had these dreams the last several days where nothing to speak of happens, I’m just sitting around feeling as if something has gone badly. Not something specific, or not that I remember when I wake up. Just something. The dream is just the feeling: worry, dread, embarrassment, something like that.

I have these dreams from time to time. I hate them. I hate them because that feeling is more or less what’s in my head about 80% of my waking life, and I feel as though I should get a break from it when I go to bed.

Maybe the dreams are about the heaviness of reckoning. January is for assessing. Where am I? What have I done? What is still to do? It’s all very serious and very …. visible, I guess? with the leaves gone and the air so clear and no Christmas shopping and no planning and traveling and no decorating and no mailbox full of catalogs and Christmas cards and no letters full of vacations and illnesses. December is a rainy night in heavy traffic with construction on the New Jersey Turnpike. January is a two-lane highway in West Texas it’s noon and there’s no one on the road but you, what’s in front of you in front of you and what’s behind you behind you.

January is when you’re supposed to do all those things you’ve put off (“December is CRAZY, but I’ll definitely get on it after the holidays!”). It’s not easy. I feel drained after Christmas, and picking up the ball requires me giving myself a good talking to, but I do love the cold clarity of January. Checking to-do’s off lists, archiving emails I didn’t respond to until now, pulling the trigger, the just fucking do it-ness of January.

I ordered new ceiling light fixtures for the kitchen and the hallway. I’ve hated the lighting in both those spaces ever since we moved in 4 years ago. The hallway light might as well not even be a light it’s so dim, and the kitchen has this I guess you’d call it track lighting but it has hanging things on it that I’m constantly bumping into. So. The new ones — one a vintage glass fixture I found on ebay and the other from Home Depot — are arriving by UPS tomorrow! I think we’ll have to hire someone to install them. I wish C or I was comfortable doing this kind of work. You’d think in a household of two husbands one of them would be that husband, but no. There should be like a rent-a-husband service for these things. But you shouldn’t have to pay them because husbands do that stuff for free. Okay it’s not a good business model.

Career-wise, art-wise, I’m ready to put together a reading of my new musical, Jack. Not a public reading but just me and 10 actors in a room so I can hear what my words sound like coming out of people’s mouths instead of bouncing around in my brain. It’s a very new experience doing something like this alone. (The only thing I can compare it to is my film Life in a Box, which I spent over a year working on by myself in a room, logging and editing sequences, but there were always others involved in various ways even if I was for much of that time the only one making creative decisions.) Momentum is so much easier in a team, and these practical non-writing tasks get divided up. The expectations of your collaborators pushes you along when you get sluggish.

A friend offered me space for a reading; now I need to find 10 actors (three of them teenagers, one elderly woman, and others of various ages and genders). I’m increasingly anxious contemplating that this will be the first time anyone has read the work but me. I’ve shared a handful of songs with a few friends but no one has heard the whole thing.

That’s what I’ve got cooking so far this year.