Feelings of Insignificance

I haven't posted anything for a couple of weeks. No excuse for it, really. I just didn't have much to say. I was in a play that closed last weekend, and start rehearsals for another one next week. The Bears played their final preseason game last night. Their first play from scrimmage was a forty-seven-yard bomb from new starting quarterback Kyle Orton to wide receiver Mushin Muhammad. That was really the highlight of the game. The starters only played two series, and then it just got dull, dull, dull.

I had planned to write something brilliant about the plays I've been working on, and my whole theater hobby, which may or may not turn into a career, and blah blah blah. But I've done little this week other than watch the news, and I can't help but feel that anything I have to say about my life is just not that important right now. At the very least, it could wait a little while.

A few weeks after September 11, 2001, the Onion ran a headline that said something like, "America longs to care about stupid shit again." And I don't know what this says about me, but that pretty much sums up how I have felt about world affairs for the last four years. In the '90s, I was aware of politics and current events. I saw the headlines. I was reasonably well-informed. I knew that our government probably did some things that they should not do, and it was probably for the best that the general public didn't know about it. The worst thing anybody could say for certain, though, was that our President couldn't keep it in his pants. Hell, I know plenty of guys who can't keep it in their pants, and I never thought that alone made them bad people.

My point is that back then I didn't feel that the state of the world colored every aspect of my daily life. But I feel that way now. And I hate it. When I read about New Orleans, or Iraq, or Pat Robertson, or just about anything having anything to do with our current administration, I get a knot in my stomach and I can actually feel my brain tugging at itself, as if it is trying to force me to find something light and entertaining to look at. It's as though reading the daily news briefs on the Internet Movie Database will make the headlines in the Guardian a little less real.

So, to sum up, I just finished a play, which was good, and I'm starting a new one, on which the jury is still out. And the Bears' opening day is a week from this Sunday. Why should anyone care? I dunno. Maybe you'd just like something else to think about for a few minutes.