Play

After making a little play in the park outside the Rose Bowl, I just ran into Adam Whatshisname (the main guy on Party Down and other things) in downtown Pasadena. Twas a nice little momentary hello, and again I'm reminded that what seems so horrifically impossible to achieve really isn't all that far away from my reality, sometimes by a matter of feet.

Back to my little play in the park. I jaunted from bench to bench cursing Bastard speeches (Henry IV Part. II?), King Lear groans and the occasional rant from my current play Elevator to the weeds and overgrown amphitheater tucked away between the trees. I have a forest stage too which I've discovered over there (my Secret Garden, so hidden and well-guarded that none shall pass into my realm of pure imagination!) where I climb the top end of a fallen tree and chant sweet nothings to the chipmunks, lizards and stupid weeds (the weeds I see as such base things, I have no guilt in tearing them to shreds with verse). From my stage I noticed a tree growing up at a slant, some kind of sycamoresque thing reaching with its oval bunches of green leaves towards the sky, and I realized I could run right up the side of it - which i hesitated but did anyhow. Solid like a Mowgli, I run right up its trunk and stood in the nook where all branches meet. Awesome.

On my way out of the park, the dirt trail wound round and I took it with abandon. I started to wonder if there's a person in this forsaken place that enjoys playing outdoors like this .. I mean really, what's in an age? You say you're 28 and people are like "Oh my gosh, no way" but what's the big deal? Do I have to be fat, bearded and lazy? Is it so bad to still enjoy playing and being positive even into your early thirties? I mean we're still kids for crying out loud.. looking for work and all, but beneath we're just PLAYING with all this extra time between meals and sleep. Right?

If these were preagricultural days we'd be spending every waking hour scrounging for pieces of food, like cows grazing the fields. But no, we ruined ourselves by developing a means for working nature's order by growing food at our leisure, and BAM! We're released to do anything else our little hearts desire, so long as we're fed and slept.
The problem is, nature hasn't caught up to us. There isn't really anything else for us TO do; we aren't evolved to have more necessity beyond food/sleep/procreation. If you think about it, once you eat, rest and mate.. what happens next? That's where we get all goofed-up and our imaginations take over. To make up for this lack of necessity we've developed little manmade activities: Education, Religion, Games, Trade, Pleasure, Adventure, even Space Travel. But for what? Why do we do all this extra stuff?

I call it Play. The stuff we do between eating, sleeping, sex, birth and death is all play. We're children who use the word "adult." We go to work, and if we aren't playing the way we want to be playing, at least we're daydreaming about it.

So here I am enjoying a bit of playtime on a Tuesday afternoon when along comes Adam Whatshisname strolling as well. I think to myself, 'how nice that I'm not the only one who enjoys playing' and say hello to him, tell him I like Party Down and continue on my way. Am I right? Does he like to play?
Yes, because
1 - he's a professional actor (a make-believe profession to so many)
2 - he's good at it.
Pretty admirable if you ask me.

Enough of this. Ciao

Mikie