Adventures in 2007
By Vincent Truman On June 7th, 2007
I haven’t blogged much this year, as anyone who has been to this page has already realized. Yet it has been a most adventuresome time, which may or may not lend itself to something I used to snap at people in chat rooms when they repeatedly asked ”what’s up”: that is, if something was up, no one would be online.
The year kicked off on an up note with my father dying. If that sounds cold, well, I suppose that would be an accurate statement. He was a rough childhood - just like the rest of us - and gradually and bitterly whittled his world down until all that was left was a dog and two rooms in a house (the rest were abandoned over the years, leaving a sea of cobwebs and grey dust in their wake). I gave up talking to him in about 1986, after he suggested in a vaguely ominous tone that he would like to get a gun and shoot my mother. I knew he wouldn’t do anything about it, but there comes a time when you no longer want to say, ‘well now you know you don’t mean that’, especially to one’s parent.
My mother, sister and I met in January 2007 to go through his house and sort it all out. Mom should have had no interest in coming - she has indicated as much when I talk to her now - but did come anyway, because her kids had lost a dad. Despite being as touchy-feely as a family of Boys in The Bubble, the three of us managed a group hug early on.
After that, it was a chess game of epic proportions, the details of which are annoying dull, but suffice to say that it all ended with my sister and her lawyer meeting with me and my lawyer and my interest in the estate being bought out. No more group hugs are forecast, but for at least one member of the surviving family, money is worth a bit more than group hugs. So it goes.
The Girlfriend and I celebrated our two years together by choosing to cohabitate. It was much harder for both of us to come to this decision, not only because we both had done the Live-Together Mambo before, but also because we really quite liked living on our own. However, those concerns were squashed by this question: we are together, we’re staying together, so why wait to move it up a notch? Despite this, we have had some of the snippiest and loudest arguments of all time. And despite that, I now get to look across the room and watch her working or go shopping with her or go grab sushi without a promise that we will do so “next weekend.”
And then there is “Suspicious Clowns 9″ with four new people joining the three crusty comics at the group’s core. It has turned out to be a brilliantly creative and diverse show, perhaps more than any other that came before it. There are the usual conflicts, but whether it is because I am more mature and/or more old, none of it is particuarly getting to me. I did have my one-per-show blowup, but that was over in ten minutes and I apologized to the group and then we all moved on. There was work to be done.
My favorite scene remains “Friendly Fire”, a sketch that I’ve written a blog or two about in the past. With the new ensemble, it is perfectly realized - and by that, I mean that there’s no telling what will happen. In that scene, we really do ride the razor’s edge between intention and interpretation. It is all up to the audience at that point, and it never fails to stir my guts up like a beef-simmering crock pot gone wild.
There is much talk of what the future holds for the group and there looks like a few things are falling into place, i.e., a tenth show later in the year and a series of short films. I’m anxious to get started on that stuff.
I’m currently working on a second book, tentatively titled “This is my First Time… So Please Be Brutal”, which will be collecting all of my cartoons into one horribly offensive tome. The Girlfriend urged it at first, then a few other folks said, ‘yeh, your cartoons are so much better than, well, other things you do’ and so the book started forming. I’m over half way done with that, and will be really pushing it in the future (I don’t envision doing much pushing on myspace, so you needn’t Fear The Daily Bulletin).
And a year ago, my cat died. The mourning process is pretty much complete, and the pain I feel when I think of Johann is just as pronounced as it was, but now it is tolerable: the inner muscle ache that just goes with the territory now. It’s sort of like knowing that a group hug with my family will probably not happen again. What can you do but go on? There’s work to be done.