On the advice of Tony Horton – which was not given to me personally – I gave up drinking two cups of coffee a day sometime last week, and have moved on as a human being in my life to drinking fourteen cups of decaf an hour instead.
That is growth; these are results.
But I did not do this because I am concerned with having a physique that resembles that of Tony Horton, nor his financial success, nor his considerable renown. I did it because I want to sleep like him – I want the sleep of Tony Horton.
I do not believe there is any sleep like the sleep of Tony Horton. I imagine him floating into fatigue with the grace of a hang glider, a puff-ball hat wrapped around his torso in bandolier fashion as he tightens the drawstring of his ironic hospital pants yet another inch, the captain of his own mausoleum absolutely. At nine-thirty p.m. precisely, the call of slumber washes over him with the warmth of morphine-ignited death, and he says, “I have problems, perhaps, but I know how to solve them.”
Then, without a trace of cumbersome sexual urge, or consideration given to the aforementioned thought, he falls unconscious. The elves in his muscles emerge from their wiry caverns with a tide of regeneration, painting the dull exhaust of his workout-annihilated ligaments with hot pink spray paint in a speed and arc suggestive of having been shot from circus cannons. Halfway around in the awakening world, the people of the East buzz in furious parallel with the volcanic river of The Tony Horton Bloodstream, a light speed constellation that injects every cell with a belief in itself, and exiles every impurity to the least uncomfortable part of his anus.
But not even the sun and Asia working in tandem are enough of a metaphor enough to describe this phoenix ritual, because while Tony Horton rebuilds, he also dreams: He dreams of his own life.
And then, when he awakens, it becomes the dream that came true.
I want to sleep the sleep of Tony Horton, but I toss and turn instead: Thinking about how I don’t, and maybe more.
And I cannot fix myself – incapacity is all I can hope for, like a handyman unable to repair his vacuum cleaner with his meager tools and no warranty, who must throw it down a garbage chute and blame teenagers instead. I simply have to make myself incapable of being the person that I am at the end of a civilized hour rather than think that I can become somebody else.
But everything I think about, when I think back on it, really can be blamed on having been a teenager at one time. I can’t see Tony Horton as a teenager. He was a robot built by God but imbued with a greater humanity than everyone who is not robotic, which is everyone. That’s classic God – doing His thing. Ad infinitum.
So: The caffeine had to go.
Here is a history of caffeine addiction as I’ve now withdrawingly hallucinated it: A long time ago, everyone was mining and farming everything in sight, i.e. potatoes, and there was a social interest amongst the only people who could afford a decent suit in endowing the citizenry with wonderful pep. Thomas Jefferson was on his way to see Abraham Lincoln with Archie and Jughead when he was struck with an enormous thought: Get everyone all jacked up in the morning so they wouldn’t start the day at 9 a.m. with the thought that lunch was only three hours away. Also, ban liquor.
Of course, if regulators and other social engineers could begin anew in our increasingly sedentary yet psychologically weighty days, you can bet that caffeine would be a controlled substance, and that mini-bottles of hotel vodka would be in the Halloween baskets of our children.
This sounds awful, but there is no doubt in my mind that caffeine is an enormously more insidious substance than booze, and this is why: Booze is mandatorily episodic. Booze ends. A severely drunk man may pass judgment on another severely drunk man who gets hit in the face with a frying pan by his wife for failing to remember their anniversary, but both of them end up passed-out anyways.
Even if you want to keep going, every road comes to a close. Don’t tell me that you can’t quit drinking: You quit drinking every single time you drink.
But caffeine, and what it leaves behind, goes on forever.
So this is what I’m thinking: I’m not such a bad guy. I pay my taxes, and I think that people who have lawns should mow them. I’ll pet a dog that somebody has tied up outside a drugstore. I don’t pretend to not have scotch tape just because I think people should get their own goddamn scotch tape, and I certainly don’t deserve to have a bunch of alcoholics that I’ve invented judge me just because I can’t be like Tony Horton, who probably never even touched a cup of coffee in his life, even though I think he would be a Chai Tea guy.
This is what I would pay to hear any lifestyle guru, anywhere, anytime, simply say:
“You can’t have it all.”
But they never will.
Do you ever pretend to not understand things that you actually do understand, simply because you find them annoying and you’re really hungover? I do this all the time.
Today I was at the grocery store, and when I was at the cashier, the cashier asked me if I wanted a free bottle of juice from some gigantic pile of free juice. I told her I didn’t, and she asked me if I’d like to donate one for free.
Now, I comprehended the situation immediately: It’s some sort of thing where a customer has to technically volunteer the donation of the item, even though there is no cost. However, it’s also sort of weird, and the sort of thing that you can believably act confused about. When I said that I didn’t want to donate something to charity for free, she kind of gave me a look like I was a terrible person, but I just pretended like I didn’t really know what was going on and couldn’t hear her over my headphones.
But why did I do it? I’ll tell you why: Because I hate stupid technicalities, and I didn’t go to the grocery to be victimized by some strange by-law. Weird little things like this are the sorts of stuff that make me feel like time has been standing still for the last ten years in some weird purgatory loop of guilt-driven, ineffectual, white-bread adulthood. It’s the kind of bullshit that is really that same bullshit, if you know what I mean.
I swear: I just wanted to pick up all the juice and throw it through the fucking window, screaming, “Is this what you want? You want me to donate all the juice? I’m doing it! All the juice is free now! I gave all the juice away!”
So, all things considered, I think I did a pretty good deed by doing absolutely nothing. Do you ever attribute morality to your actions simply by virtue of the fact that you don’t do something really pointless and destructive, despite the fact that it entrenches and compounds your sense of dread and alienation from everyone and everything to not do it, because at least then you would feel alive for forty-five seconds before you were tackled by security guards and imprisoned, and also you’re really hungover?
I do this all the time.
So: Here we are now, in the dog days of summer, while I’ve been speaking calmly and acting like it all makes sense. What nobody and/or you knows is that all of this has been an attempt to bend the world around me; I always think that if I’m a certain kind of person, everything will conform to a shape congruent with the person I’m only pretending not to be.
I often feel that lying seems to work well for everyone else. There is something about myself that I am incapable of concealing.
Seems strange, though, that I shouldn’t know better than to be so self-centered by now. I hear a lot about caring for others, and all of it resonates in theory.
In the end, though, I feel like an egg to chicken. Who owes who first?
Oh, I’m just kidding: I’ve got your back.
But I regret it.
The main thing that has discouraged me from starting a pornography business for a long time has been my inability to follow through with things. No matter how hard I seem to try and deviate from the obligate salaryman and paranoid antisocialite I am tediously comfortable being, I inevitably seem to end up being that way anyways, with nothing to show for my unremarkable subplots but entrepreneurial souvenirs, obsolete contacts and underwhelming stories.
But all this is a problem from the context of a pornography business: There is so much hostility and regret alongside even a brief involvement in the pornography business. You cannot say to people, “Well, I was making some pornography for awhile, but then I got offered a steady job again, and I hadn’t been to the dentist in a year, so…”
Even a dentist would hear nothing in the latter parts of that sentence and, fairly, neither would you – months and years after you quit the pornography business, you’ll get the occasional residual cheque, or have to look up something for a prior tax return, and you’ll really roll your eyes. “God,” you’ll say, “That whole pornography business. That was not for me.”
And what about your friends and family? The people you need by your side when life sends a pulse through the market realities of your existence? They’ll all say, “We’re not helping you this time – you made a bunch of pornography. Some people we know bought it.”
My point is that it is one thing to take a brief foray into real estate, or Amway, or a new group of friends who you aren’t sure you’ll ever be comfortable with – it’s another thing entirely to scar yourself with underworld porno money. After all, who wants to live with a reminder of how badly they really did want to break out of their shell, long after they abandon that ambition and go back to the sort of thing you can discuss at a barbecue? And now what are you? You are in two worlds and in neither of them.
And so, whatever you do, don’t undertake a career in pornography unless you’re an extremely decisive person. Don’t do it unless you really have the courage to change who you want to be. Don’t do it unless you have mountains upon mountains of character to withstand nearly everything life can throw at you, and if you can live without everything that sustains you as who you would otherwise exist as.
After all, it’s tough to just make something for a dollar and sell it for two nowadays. The whole era of starting something from scratch is really moving behind us. You hear about a guy who begins a company expressly for the purpose of selling it to some other company, and then you hear about his well-connected parents, and where he went to school, and then he is on television talking about how the secret to success for everyone is to work hard. He wears some very casual clothes to assure you that he has never been involved in anything unkind. None of these events surprise anyone. Complete and utter stupidity and absurdity is the infinite broadcast loop of our culture, and this is no opinion or threat: It simply sells.
The whole point is to make everyone who is really brave and interesting extremely, extremely poor, and to do this until people forget what these things are; until the whole world is sports and fucking and sleep and age. Maybe you see through it, but by then they’ve got you locked in, and you can’t do shit. In the meantime, I don’t mind the person I default towards while between voluntary (OK, mostly involuntary) spurts of trying to emerge as a once-destined-self-made-man. A little security never hurt anyone, or at least not nearly as much as insecurity does, and I am older now and I know this.
But what then?
So if you suffer all these doubts, I cannot think that a career in pornography is right for you, even though I have never had one, and know absolutely nothing about it. Besides: There are many great futures, even though they end, so long as you are in love.
Lifeline – Toronto Fringe Festival – Fringe Listing under “L”
Lifeline is an enormous play about the echo of life from death hidden in a deceptively lightweight package. With a charming cast and a number of very good laughs, several stories take place in a hospital under the common theme of alienation and sadness borne from loss, but also of how loss can lead to redemption.
The play opens with the suicide of a main character, but make no mistake: Everybody in Lifeline starts out alone. Departures, betrayals and fatal mistakes are given just the right amount of weight without going overboard, and beautiful conceits are given towards how attempts at fixing yourself with your past still on your shoulders can cause collisions that only end up hurting everyone.
But not, thankfully, in every case – one thing that Lifeline does well with its multiple stories is show all of the outcomes possible in reaching out to others, and all of the characters in the play both learn and grow from their experiences. While some might say that the play fails to deliver on its emotional climax, I believe it does precisely what it ought to. “There are things you can’t beg for,” says one of the characters, and I believe this speaks to each of the storylines – as in life, some conclusions and relationships are brutal, and if they have any meaning at all, it is that only they were meant to end.
Ultimately, I think Lifeline is about the fact that you can become a greater and better person by caring about people whether they care about you back, or if who you care for is an actual somebody or just the memory of them. The character that kills himself has, as one of his final thoughts, that people did not know him well; in the show that follows, I believe we are left to contemplate how many of the other characters share a dark proximity to that sentiment, and that they will avoid it is what we are meant to hope for.
I realize that this entire review doesn’t say very much about the show specifically, and may just seem like a bunch of weird, broad statements about so-on and so-forth. If you do go see it, though, I hope you’ll keep these thoughts in mind. I think they’ll make sense to you then.
The Good: Pretty much everything is good about this show, but I found that the end of the closet scene was what made it go from good to great. I really felt that there was an easy way out of it for a playwright and a hard one, and that the more challenging tack was taken. I love it when this happens. That was when Lifeline really dove into ‘holy shit…!’ territory for me.
The Bad: Though performed well, some things go a little long – the flirtations between paramedic and nurse, and parts of certain monologues.
The Final Verdict: This is a very, very good show that should absolutely not be missed. It’s really exciting to see a company this young – and their youth does show, despite solid performances – deliver such an extraordinary and heartfelt production. Go.
All or None – Toronto Fringe Festival – Facebook Page
All or None makes an early, extended reference to The Bachelor, and it fits: This play is full of the same endless ruminations on love and marriage as a subject of destiny, insecurity and commercial-breaking indecision as you’d find on any reality show.
Unfortunately, this is the only thing that the play is really full of, and unlike The Bachelor, it doesn’t have the grand locations, bleached-teeth close-ups or high fashion spectacle to fall back on. It wouldn’t be fair to say that nothing happens in All or None – a misunderstood job interview / first date is a brilliant little piece, and everyone drinks seemingly non-stop – but unless you’re the type to squeal whenever Bret Michaels speculates that someone might truly be the girl for him, I don’t think you’ll get much out of this play.
Mind you, this doesn’t mean it’s not occasionally enjoyable. All or None is not trying to transcend or transform its intended audience (lucky, bored white people, presumably) or mature outside of its pop-cultural framework. All of its characters are immediately recognizable to anyone who has seen a film intended to launch the acting career of a pop singer, and the supporting roles manage to have an entertaining time existing in various degrees of torture over the whiny, insipid main ones. The first 45 minutes or so is the angst of everyone over whether or not their relationships properly furnish their overarching adorations of their own self-importance – lots of drinking here, and an obligatory 4/20 moment – followed by 15 fun minutes of actual story and tension, and finishing with 15 minutes of more discontent over a predictable conclusion.
Really, and without spoiling it, I think the ending is more interesting to view as revenge porn for all those women on eHarmony in their late twenties who think their viper-ish marketing jobs and world travel experiences accredit them to wreck the relationships of the lesser women who stayed home and cared about someone. After all, they’re the ones who really fit in with all those good (see: rich, successful, 99th percentile) guys, right?
Indeed, this play is basically (and cynically) concerned with putting everyone in their place as fate accords it. Moderately attractive women unable to secure more than one-night-stands should have to actually settle for a sense of humour rather than just pay lip service to it, unrealistically wonderful people find their perfect matches and survive betraying their fiancées self-righteously, and women in short skirts end up with obnoxious lost boys who are forever bearded; slouching through their food service careers.
But, of course, we all know this, so what exactly is the company attempting to challenge? It may be a cute little thing, but All or None is about as inessential as it gets.
The Good: Christina Aceto really tears it up in dual roles, providing the vast majority of the laughs overall. It’s the kind of performance that will stick out in your mind no matter how many shows you see this Fringe.
The Bad: When the play ends, you almost get the sense that everyone was going for some kind of sad or mature moment in the narrative. With all due respect, this is a ridiculous play – one that is about people who nobody should really feel sorry for, or at least not for any reason that we’re shown – and I think taking itself seriously sort of pierces the experience overall. Also, everyone is such a relatively thin archetype, with such familiar problems, that the whole thing could really be a lot shorter.
The Final Verdict: You know what? Go see it. A lot of the whining and bitching drags on and on, but it has some good moments, and if you pretend that the play is really supposed to be a satire of what it’s attempting to be seriously – I suggest mentally dubbing the teacher’s voice from Charlie Brown into much of the dialogue – you can have a really good time.
Trevor Small (Len Forsythe) and Suzette McCanny (Sharon Kaplowski), Photo by Gord Tultz
The Four Minute Mile – Toronto Fringe Festival – Official Site
If The Four Minute Mile is intended to be about a man descending into jackassery, I’d say the problem is that it isn’t much of a descent. An unsympathetic protagonist, too much story compression and a bizarre conclusion that turns the entire play into an extended joke mar what seems to be an otherwise talented company.
Ostensibly, the story is about Len Forsythe (Trevor Small), an office-drone-turned-motivational speaker who encourages others to live their lives to the fullest only to lose his own in doing so. Forsythe’s obsession with his career ultimately leads to his old friend Darryl (Brian Starks) having the opportunity to use Les’ own techniques to transform himself into some kind of Neil Strauss / Mystery figure, with all of the implied creepiness intact, who then steals Les’ longtime girlfriend Sharon (Suzette McCanny). Why Sharon isn’t Les’ wife by this point in the play isn’t explained, but I’m guessing it’s because the motivational mojo Darryl appropriates doesn’t register as powerful enough to break up a marriage in the 45 seconds that it takes Darryl to convince Suzette to get drunk with him. This is the only thing in the play that really happens – everything else is just kind of a setup, and a broad one at that.
And what parallel is the show’s title, an allusion to Roger Bannister’s then-thought impossible run of the four-minute mile, supposed to have within the play? Is it the idea that Darryl, a diminutive electrician, could have the tedious machismo to swipe the girl of a seething self-love guru? Electricians make bank, bro.
Whatever the title may refer to, it certainly isn’t the easily foregone success of Forsythe, whom the play goes out of its way to establish as endlessly successful with women (he loves them and leaves them, prior to meeting and immediately seducing Suzette on the first day he meets her) incredibly intelligent (he gets into every college in a large book of colleges) and professionally invincible (he gets ‘fired’ from a job when its contract runs out – I don’t think he knows what being fired is.)
If all this ubermensch is intended to set Forsythe up as someone who won’t see his fall coming, as well as the type of person ripe for exploitation by the ego-gratifying motivational speaking industry, it’s understandable. Unfortunately, it also renders him almost completely impossible to rally behind, giving you no real stake in whatever happens to him. If the company had more time, or made different choices, maybe they could have elaborated on his character to the point where we could care.
In the end, what is this play? Is it a call for humility through a criticism of superiority? There is lots of stuff in the play about Ancient Rome, and how their empire fell apart because of how sick they were of being so badass, and how its individual parts preferred a less potent but more personal identity. In the end, though, Darryl wins over Suzette with the same old Roman bullshit. Maybe this play is about how Suzette is a woman locked in an endless cycle of dating emergent alpha male douche bags? I guess that ground has been covered.
The Good: Performances across the board are solid, and direction in the minimal space is well done. Trevor Small and Suzette McCanny have the right kind of chemistry – attracted to each other, but kind of confused by each other at the same time. McCanny is a bit of a doormat whenever Small is being a gigantic crybaby in a way that I’m not sure reflects what long-term relationships are really like, but the script may not give them much of a choice.
The Bad: The use of multimedia is problematic, both in content and amplification, but I’m told that this may have been specific to the performance I attended. Also, you know, everything else.
The Final Verdict: If the subject matter of motivational speaking interests you, or if you really like to focus on performance, it’s probably worth the sit. Otherwise, I think Theatre Symbiosis is a group to watch for in the future. This is probably a middle-of-the-road play for the Fringe, it’s just made worse by what could have been done with more – all in all, maybe it just tries to cram too much into what it wants to do.
(Disclosure: I have known the Director of this show for many years.)
Amy Zuch, present and former, star in Key to Key
Amy Zuch’s Key to Key – Toronto Fringe Festival – Official Site
I was in the Comedy Brawl with Amy Zuch last summer and have seen her perform a few other times: She is very funny. Her self-depreciation sneaks up on you a bit, because by appearance alone she doesn’t really look the type to be so down on herself – career unseen, you might think she’d put together this year’s Sara Hennessey Town – but Key to Key is here to explain all that. Amy Zuch, as it turns out, used to be sixty pounds heavier, have bad teeth, bad skin, and lived alone in a hotel room with nobody to reach out to but room service.
Like any autobiographical solo show, Key to Key lives or dies on the resonance of its authenticity. Even if you identify with it, you scrutinize it that much harder. As the story of a person lost in the fantasy of creative career success before its undertones of anger over a lousy personal appearance and a consequently shitty life bubble to the surface, I was as enthusiastic to cast aspersions on this play as I was to see it.
But I cannot: It is great.
Zuch spouts cheerful neuroses full of hoping to become a Disney animator to herself, the audience, and cartoon shellfish of her own creation, but of course there is nothing crazy about any of it: Obsession with artistic achievement is a perfect hedge against self-loathing and a lack of self-esteem, particularly when you are young. Your lack of success in your lofty personal ambitions hasn’t yet begun to mirror your lack of success with other people, and it genuinely seems like the long shot by which you will prove yourself (after, of course, everyone better off than you now eventually fails.)
Then, of course, you grow up, and you find yourself with neither what you never had nor what you tried to get instead – the world going on all around and without you – and realize that there is nothing left to do but either make a change or do nothing itself. Zuch walks us through all of this with a candour that never feels forced, and focuses on her real issues rather than self-indulgently lionizing her own bravery.
She also doesn’t cut corners, and talks openly about how struggles with her appearance are tied heavily into obsessive-compulsive disorder, family tragedies, and how some of the solutions were not triumphs of the will but rather of the wallet. She also doesn’t fall into the trap of making it all about friends and family, humourously reminding the audience that the people who love you can end up being the ones who hurt the most.
I feel like I’ve spoiled enough of it, but I was really pleasantly surprised with this show, and hope dearly that it isn’t overlooked in the huge crunch of Fringe, and competing interests. Please stop caring about soccer and go see this play.
The Good: In addition to everything I’ve already said, there are musical elements to the show that also help to keep it moving at a good pace. When she goes to belt out a song, you imagine that the quality of her voice will be strictly in the spirit of the comedy it contains – you will be surprised. She can sing.
The Bad: Zuch soft-pedals a lot of how miserable and personal rejection is, making it seem only slightly awkward, and I don’t think she fully goes to the bottom of the complexity of how the overweight both hate and take solace in shitty food. She had the tension and quiet rage to throw those French fries over our heads and smash them into the wall if she wanted to – she should have.
Final Verdict: If you grew up fat and obsessed with trying to make the beautiful things you could not be yourself, this is the must-see show of the festival. If you don’t like it, it’s because you don’t know anything about it. Also, go fuck yourself.
The hardest day of my life was the day that I realized that I was not important; that nobody really cared about what I was doing except for me.
Since then, I’ve just looked at who I am as someone who has excellent taste in myself. Nobody will ever feel the struggle or the pain; all we can really read in each other, I think, is victory.
And even this is only a projection of longing for the victory that we ourselves would like to have, instead of the person we momentarily, enviously admire.
We are all lonely, snobby connoisseurs of the self.
But still: For her, I would try.
