This Summer We Are All Cleveland

I need a real Baseball Summer. I need to get lost in the stats and the chatter, the day-to-day as well as the play-by-play. I need to feel involved, like my attention will have an effect on the outcome of some early-August day game. I need to see all those ancient themes of promise, wisdom, hubris and redemption unwind again, re-enacted by a new generation of players absolutely awash in talent. And I need it to be a special Baseball Summer too. One for the ages… and that’s why, 25-ish games into the 2025 MLB season, I’m thinking: It is time to root for Cleveland.

Hear me out.

I’ve lived on the west coast for a couple of decades now, but I was born and spent my first three decades “in the sleepy west of the woody east.” I had my personal summer for the ages in 2004 when my beloved Red Sox broke the curse and won the World Series. We all sobbed for the parents and grandparents who had lived and died never getting to experience that moment of civic pride and ecstasy. When they won again in 2007 and again in 2013 (and again in 2018,) it was still great, amazing even, but… was it the same? The honest answer: Not quite.

What do you do when you’ ve been conditioned since the crib to root for the underdog and your team no longer is one? You go looking for them. I rode my Chicago friends’ joy in 2016 when the Cubs finally had their beautiful summer (which, yes, I know is one of the darkest chapters in Cleveland history, but come on… 108 years? It was their moment.) And for several years, I turned my underdog spirit to supporting Osaka’s Hanshin Tigers in Japan’s Nippon League. Why? Because they totally fit the bill: an unfairly disrespected city whose team is perennial underdog to the pinstriped, big-city Tokyo Giants. The Tigers even had their own ‘curse,’ a very confusing one that somehow involves Col. Sanders… but I digress. Last year, the Tigers won it all for the first time in nearly two decades. They’re now champions of the Nippon League and this spring they absolutely shredded the LA Dodgers in exhibition play. No longer underdogs, the Tigers are ‘the team to beat’ this year.

And that’s why I say, it is time to root for Cleveland.

A city that has been the butt of too many unfair jokes. A city whose celebrities, the Drew Careys and Harvey Pekars, are people you could imagine coming from your hometown too. Well, probably not Halle Berry; she’s obviously on another level altogether. And this ol’ Gen-X punk rocker remembers Cleveland is also the home of Pere Ubu, Rocket from the Tombs and The Dead Boys. A brawny city of believers that has always worked hard, kept the faith, and deserves a lot better than it has gotten. It sounds like Cleveland is all of us these days.

And what about the team itself?

No big deal, just one of only nine MLB teams still in their original city for over a century. The second team to break the color barrier, signing Larry Doby just a few months after Jackie Robinson signed with the Dodgers. The Guardians even already have a legit post-season grudge with the Yankees. What’s not to like?

And if you’re one of those people who is still upset about the “name change” in 2022, all I can tell you (aside from the fact that you’re going to die sad, bitter and alone) is that before they were called the “Indians” they were the Cleveland Naps. The NAPS! …and they were called something else before that. I have to admit, “The Naps” sounds pretty cool & weird.

So, I’m all in. #GuardsBall it is. I’ll ride with you through the slumps and the streaks, the nail-biters and the bad hops, the hot summer and the chill of fall. All I ask for in return is effort and, more importantly: Joy. Trust your talents and play with abandon. Know you play for a great city and know that even greater things can happen to a city when it has a dazzling baseball team to get behind.

Maybe it’s just me, but baseball needs to be more than just a minor glance-at-the-box-scores ‘diversion’ this summer. In the midst of the chaos and uncertainty of the current world, I’ll admit I need some occasional shelter. I need to feel invested in something positive. I need to get myself lost in the rhythms, poetry, and season-long story arcs of a closely-watched season. I need the baseballness of baseball.

While my heart forever beats for the Red Sox… Guardians, I’m giving you my HOPE this summer; a precious commodity because, like everyone else, I don’t have a lot of extra hope lying around these days. I’ll be bookmarking your websites, following your feeds, downloading your podcasts, catching the highlights, lurking on your message boards and hanging on every pitch. And if it should come down to a Guardians vs Red Sox playoff match-up, well… we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

#GoCleveland #GuardsBall

Signs & Symbols / Omens & Portents

I started the new year with the discovery of a Black Widow spider, settled in and making a living in the light next to my front door. I’ve been in SoCal for decades and I’ve never seen a Black Widow anywhere “in the wild” before, but now suddenly here was one dangling two feet from my face. Happy New Year to me.

Soon after that the air dried out and the winds blew and well, you all saw the news. My beloved, adopted city was burning out-of-control. Correction: As I type this, it is still burning in a lot of places, just not quite as out-of-control. Whatever you’ve seen on the news, trust me: it’s even worse than that. A few of my friends here have lost their homes and everything they own, but even more startling is: Everyone I know knows someone (or multiple someones) who lost their homes. It is a colossal disaster. Trying to explain the scale of it to friends back east, I did some quick math – the Palisades fire alone has burned an area over three times bigger than my entire hometown… and it is still burning. You don’t get that kind of scale from the news.

And then there was Monday. I’ve watched every Presidential Inauguration since Jimmy Carter’s in 1977. I was too young to vote then (heck, I was still too young to vote in 1980 when Reagan replaced Carter) but, even though I was kid, my parents made a point of explaining to me the importance and the unique majesty of the proceedings and I was immediately hooked on it all. So, today’s inauguration & speech was my 13th time watching the Peaceful Transfer of Power, the speeches that follow and the actions that immediately follow the speeches. What I witnessed along with everyone else was unlike anything I ever saw or heard before, or expected to see or hear, in America, in my lifetime. And with the air all around me still smelling like an electrical fire (as it has for the past two weeks,) it occurred to me that the official policy of the United States, as of today, is now: “Climate Change is a hoax.” …tell that to the fires. The fires that used to happen between August and October, but now happen anytime between June and January.

I’ve been posting to this blog for nearly 18 years. I’ve focused on my creative work, and creative struggles and the ups/downs that come with living the life I freely chose. I haven’t talked about politics or, more specifically, my politics, but at some point silence does become complicity. I think we, as a people, have turned a dark corner and I think it’ll be a long, hard time ahead before we start moving toward the light again. My heart is absolutely broken. Something profound ended on this latest Inauguration day and something… else… has begun. I would be lying if I said I knew what was going to happen next. I don’t, but I do know this: It won’t be good and afterward, nothing will ever be the same again. ….including us.

Keeping Track of Things. Losing Track of Time.

It is hard to believe it has been nine months since my last post here. There have been a few things worth reporting (thank you to all of my subscribers) but when put in context of the past year’s current events in this increasingly on-fire (figuratively and literally) world, everything ‘creative’ seems inconsequential and small. I struggle to remain hopeful while all around me I feel like I’m watching a classic Greek tragedy where, as is the case with Greek tragedies, everyone can see calamity approaching, but no one seems capable (or willing) to stop it. This is definitely not the kind of mindset you want when you’re trying to ‘be funny’ or write comedy.

But I have been working.

I’ve done an extensive re-write on my horror feature script and given it a new title, because every trusted friend/reader that read it for me absolutely hated the original title “SeaBird.” So now (or “for now”) I’m calling it “Thirsty AF.” So far, the response to the new title and rewrite has been good, here’s the initial report from the Slamdance Screenwriting competition:

“This is a lean and mean script, a page-turner of great storytelling and descriptive action. The setup is simple, but the slow decline of the characters is fun (and awful) to observe a la OLD or THE TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (the visual of burning money for warmth is a great one). The most genre-surprising element is the order of deaths—there are no niceties to the deaths and the ones who die first are unexpected (much like Eli Roth’s CABIN FEVER). The ending is a clever cliffhanger ending that hints for the first (real) time that there could be a supernatural power at work, a curse of sorts. The best part of that element is that it is left unexplained. Overall, this is a fun, wild script that could play really well at genre festivals!”

I’ll take it. No contest results yet though; those will be coming in the next few months. In the meantime, I have been trying to get the script in the hands of horror producers/companies. This is especially difficult when, like me, you no longer have an agent. Regular readers here will recall that my agent died from COVID in 2022 and finding a new agent has been its own frustrating journey so far. I’ll spare you all the details on that.

Speaking of writing things that definitely are not comedy, last fall I did finish the previously-mentioned “memoir” project I was working on last summer. The draft, and it is definitely a first draft, clocked in at 88,000 words. I’m not anywhere near satisfied with it or with myself, because I definitely edited (censored?) myself in a few areas, but it was still a valuable and helpful personal experience. I wrote about and wrestled with some issues that have always taken up a lot of space in my head and just getting them on the page helped me work through some mental stuff. No one else has read it yet and I don’t know if anyone ever will, but I’m glad I wrote it and I will, at some point, dive back into it. …actually, that wasn’t quite accurate. A few hundred people have actually read the “memoir” because I wrote it in a series of 70+ daily anonymous blog posts on a popular online publishing platform. Writing it “in public” even though it was anonymous was an important aspect of the project. I had to commit to facing difficult material and topics (ie: my actual life & history) every day for nearly 3 months and to push through the hardest parts whether I wanted to or not. Even if I wasn’t always completely successful and didn’t always go as far as I could have, the heartfelt reader comments and messages definitely made me brave enough to go further than I thought I could/would. I deeply appreciate all the time those people spent reading and responding to my real story.

I’ve always tried to keep the focus of this website on my own little life of creative work and creative engagement with the world but, like everyone else I know, these days the precarious state of the world and the country intrudes on my thoughts 24/7. In spite of my complaints, I know I’ve been insanely lucky on so many levels. I know that every tragedy, setback or disappointment I’ve ever endured has not been unique to me. This world is a grinding wheel that eventually wears everyone down to dust. I’m not different or special in that regard. I make a point of reflecting on gratitude every day. I continue to, or at least try to, face every morning with the hope that people will come to their senses before it is too late, and regrow that sense of empathy that all people are capable of when they’re not being manipulated by sociopaths with other agendas. I try not to contribute to the vitriol, while still standing up for what is right, what is human and what is humane in a world where the volume of hate is getting cranked to eleven and repeated lies warp the reality of too many people.

Good luck everyone.

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Gotta Be… A Finalist.

It was a good week. A few days after learning that SeaBird had placed in the HorrorOrigins screenplay contest (in the Horror Feature division, of course) and is in the running to win it, I got word that my Ireland-themed comedy pilot Gotta Be McGee has made it to the Finals in the PAGE Awards International Screenplay Competition.

I’m thrilled by this. The PAGE Awards is one of the biggest and most respected screenplay competitions. People can (and have) argued that screenplay contests in general can be arbitrary and a waste of time (and money) but the fact is, writing “spec” scripts can be a lonely business. You can get honest notes & feedback from your “writer’s group” if you’re lucky enough to be part of a good one (like I am,) but forget about getting regular friends or family to read your scripts. …and now that my agent is dead, even if there wasn’t currently a writer’s strike, it would be almost impossible to get many “industry reads” of my new work, so placing high in a few screenplay contests can get it some attention and serve as validation that the script is as good as I think it is.

Also, and I know this is going to sound hokey and ‘woo-woo’ to non-writers: When we create these characters they really are “alive” in our heads, and in a way, they really do exist – out there somewhere in some parallel/alternate reality. It feels like you’re doing them a disservice if they only live on your hard drive and in your imagination and no one else’s. With this Finalist slot in the PAGE Awards, I know that McGee and the rest of the characters in his world now exist in at least a few people’s heads and that they felt ‘real’ to those people too. It is a small victory, but it is a cherished one. I’ll take it.

Keep writing, everyone.

SeaBird Sails Again!

I know it is only mid-September, but that Halloween Feeling is starting already. I just received word that my horror feature SEABIRD has once again placed in another screenwriting contest. It was named an “Official Selection” for this year’s Tuscon Arizona HorrorOrigins Film Festival

I couldn’t be more thrilled. We all know that writing contests can be hit-or-miss, even with the same strong script, but this placement keeps SeaBird’s streak alive: It has placed somewhere in every contest I’ve submitted it to. … and who knows? On October 28th it might be declared a “finalist”

Have I ever mentioned that Halloween is my 2nd favorite holiday?
(second only to Thanksgiving.)

Stay spooky my friends.

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