When I don't write a blog for so long, it turns out a lot of things happen to me, so here we go.

I am not going to Montana any more. I auditioned for and got a very good role at Apple Tree Theatre, north of the city in Highland Park. The show is called Pen. I think it'll be good.
The process of deciding between Montana Shakespeare and Pen was necessarily brief, but difficult, and it's very much bound up in something I've been thinking about since I got back from North Carolina. See, my Grammy is dying. She's been quite feeble for what seems like a very long time now, but while I was there I was witnessing the beginnings of what must be truly her final dissipation. I'm reminded of a quote from a goddamn comic book, as I am in almost all situations, in which someone describes death as not a single, final severing, but rather a continual process of theft - one thing after another is stolen from us until, finally, we have nothing left to hold on to, and we let go. Much has been taken from Grammy, and I know she's ready to let go. One so-terrible-it's-funny thing was to participate in a frank discussion with my parents on the subject of "if she wants to die so darn much, why does the old broad keep easting!?"
But, my grandmother is a wonderful woman, and though she was seeing things and living increasingly in memory and accusing my mother of deceiving her when reminded where she was, she is still wonderful. When awoken from confused dreams, the blood flowing through a brain which has seen too many throbs already (bits and extensions breaking off, a mind truly rotting as it considers itself) her instinct, the tension which has been built into her body through constant repetitive exertion, is to ask whether she is late for the wedding, to insist I take the pie she has baked to the reception, to ask after the groom's name and apologise that she has forgotten. This woman lived her life as a source of love and nourishment and joy and, though I'm sure this slow - amazingly slow - process of death has the power to take that from her too, it will be the last thing to go, because it is her as deeply as anything can be.
This is what I mean when I say that I must make of my life a devotion. As my grandmother's was a devotion to love and sustaining others, I have to find a way to make my life a dedication to something greater than myself.
It is a powerful sacrifice, I think, to give your life for a cause in which you believe, but it is greater yet to live your life for that cause. I think it's probably an ubermenchian ideal to will yourself into the shape you