Writer's Diary

6/26/26

At home in Pennsylvania on this incredibly quiet summer night, it feels like my childhood neighborhood is mostly old people now so there aren’t really kids playing into the twilight, which is sad, or maybe there are kids but they’re all inside all night anymore, you can’t really tell.

It’s a cool windy night, I guess I’m allowing myself to feel how worn down I am, something like a five-year sprint from the summer of 2021 when the city opened back up a little bit, this summer.

My dad, who reads this diary, said he’s worried about me and my post alluding to stalkers and internet harassment, all of which is true, but there’s not much to say about that—you just sort of find yourself living a weird life with weird features.

It can feel pretty terrible sometimes, but it also forces you to address the basic question, how did I get here, do I still want to be here, at least in the way that I was.

And actually just reading a philosophy book on the couch, or going for a walk, or driving to Wegmans with you is here with me feels so good and so nice that I do have to consider it.

I’ve had my fun, I’ve had my adventures, I’ve had my weird mutant form of micro-celebrity, and really the only thing that’s interesting about that is that it might lead to something completely different.

Not to be able to change is to have stopped living in some way because living things change. And if I don’t more earnestly embrace the last days of downtown idea, if I don’t really take a break, as the last few weeks have felt like a Fellini-esque ending to the whole circus, then I can’t really say that I’m still living in a spiritual sense. And Dante, Satan, is frozen at the lowest rung of hell, and Dante was a smart guy. The further you get from God and from the sun, from light, from the light, the colder you become, the more frozen. Depression also feels like being frozen, like your chest is a block of ice. Goodness has warmth to it, it moves, it melts.

I dare say I’m excited for a long period of lying fallow, of traveling, and of marriage too, and the new adventure that that implies.

Is life only redeemable as a work of art? Well, the only way to find out is to try to make it a work of art, and seeing if intention can be applied to the form of living, and to see if that form can evolve under that pressure, radically or subtly or both.

Yesterday, Bob, one of the actors I’ve worked with the most closely and has played so many great roles, and all the downtown plays and Vanya and Over the Moon and others, came in during the book sale at CTR to say how much he loved me and just to hang out for a little bit. And you know what, Bob too, I think there are a lot of people around me that I feel like I really adore, and share really first-class, life-is-a-movie-type memories with. The question isn’t wanting to give up that kind of life, or stop making memories like that, but how to protect that, how to protect that human core.

And how to also make it more about the work itself. In truth, the pressure to sell tickets always leads to the pressure to sell something else, a part of yourself. An image, a vibe, a scene, a party. You have to sell the parasocial token to get people to see the play or read the book. And I guess that’s really just how you end up with a frozen block in your chest, with that feeling of depressive paralysis, that Guido in 8 1/2 feeling.

Great art also needs more fearless patrons, and I realized that if I’m always working compulsively to stage my work and others’ work, if I’m afraid to show cracks or to show debt on the company card, then in a way I’m not asking enough from the people who enjoy the work and enjoy access to the world. Art actually does need the overclass to support it.

I’ve become the total exemplar of the late modern achievement subject, who exploits himself to the point of burnout, and, in a romantic sense, to the point of creating something new out of himself.