Threes . . .

{A brief note from the Aviarist: Started this back in June, prior to being consumed by

In Bocca al Lupo

, so do forgive the lack of timeliness. There are still some ideas here I like. Anyway...}

All my theories about the nature of humor aside, they're not just for comedy

{Threes, that is.}

.

This post is inspired in part, of course, by the strange coincidence (in every sense of that word) of the recent celebrity deaths. Personally, I tend to perceive a desire for meaning where others might perceive an actual meaning, or pattern. Does this biscuit resemble a face to you? Yes, it does, but I believe that's because our most necessary and long-established pattern recognition ability is related to human faces, not because your biscuit is trying to tell you something. However, even I am given pause by the phenomenon of triple demises, or even just triple serious injuries. Maybe we're looking for a pattern to something that's very frightening for us, to make it somehow more rational, and pinpoint a supposed "end" of such a cycle. I don't know. But I know I have more trouble embracing that rationale for times such as those.

For the record, I'm not torn up about any of our recently departed entertainers. I usually am not when it comes to celebrities. Jim Henson was a big blow, and I continue to mourn in my own little way Jeff Buckley and Elliott Smith. But on the whole, I react to celebrity demise with a "how sad," not any profound catharsis. I did not, after all, know them, no matter how well I know their work.

In our work as Zuppa del Giorno, I and my comrades-in-comedy are always searching for and instructing others in "the comic three." We express this a number of different ways: set-up, narrative and punch-line; catch, wind-up and release; introduction, suspension and delivery. Typically, the real tricky beat for performers -- especially those unaccustomed to any stylized acting -- is the middle one. This is totally understandable in this context. It's the least concrete part, of indeterminate length, and it often functions in mysterious ways when it comes to a joke in particular. Is it exposition, important detail for later use, or is it in fact a misdirection that makes some sort of punchline or payoff possible? There's another set of basic terms we use to describe a progression of three: beginning, middle and end.

I can't say for certain what it is about threes that make them so generally comprehensive for we humans. Why is it that a three -- a beginning, middle and end -- should make sense to us on such a basic level? Why not a five, or a two? For the most part, I'm content to accept it as a fact. However, an idea occurred to me while I was mulling over for the umpteenth time this week what I find an interesting supposition. Maybe even a draft of an explanation. It has to do with how we, as individuals, perceive time. Maybe it's because we can't ever completely reconcile the past, present and future. Maybe it has to do with our relationship to reality as we understand it.

{Insert fart joke here.}

Now look: As much as my syntax and unabashed love for the layered parenthetical may argue against it, I am not a fan of pretentious theory. We can expound all day on reality, and perception, and philosophy, and phlah phlah phlah. I'll love it. Hell yeah, abstraction. Bring it. So long as it stays in the realm of discussion, and doesn't wander into realms of authority because, brothers'n'sisters, we just don't know. We don't. What we have are ideas, and ideas are exciting things. But let's keep our pants on, 'cause there's a time and a place. (And the naked philosophy party starts at my place at 9:00, Friday.) My idea, then, is something like this:

We all have distinct relationships with our pasts, or memories, and our futures, or dreams. We try to live in the present, most of us, because that's where it's at, man. Yet we're tugged, one way and another. The past seems to offer us answers, if only we can understand it well enough, the future to offer us hope for change. When you come right down to it, this paradigm makes up such an encompassing framework for our perception at large that it's extremely difficult to escape. When we speak about it in greater absolutes, it is a unifying experience for literally everyone alive today, regardless of culture or credo: we are born, we live, and we die. It's the great commonality, and so that rhythm translates across any border. It's the music of comedy. As for why students of comedy seem to have the most trouble with the middle bit, well, isn;t that the same in life, too?

Sure, yes, okay -- I acknowledge that this could be a rather backwards deduction, fitting reality to a three because threes are there. I could be seeing faces in biscuits here. But it's an intriguing idea to me, nonetheless. Plus, it makes me laugh.

Unwanted Knowledge

I've returned to my research of corpses, which seems to be endlessly fascinating to me. (This return is in the hopes of generating new [more gooder] material for

my play-in-progress,

Hereafter

.) I think the fascination stems from the fact that so much of the research is a discovery of items I never even had a hint of before. No one knows, because no one wants to know. I've always had an appreciation for the taboo--in some of the dullest senses--but this is the first time it's struck me as a pointed preoccupation. I love learning about things I ought not to.

Actually, it's not quite true that I've never before tapped this appetite for the occult. As an elementary school student, I almost single-handedly kept the library out of its stock of books on monsters and mythological creatures. It was embarrassing, I remember, but a thrill. The strange is thrilling. Erotic, too, in a way. Remember playing doctor, or sneaking looks at pictorial nudity? No? Just me? Alrighty then...

I feel I'm at a curious stage of writing, too. It reminds me of a couple of my first serious attempts at creative writing. A short story and a short play, written years apart, they both started out as one thing in my mind and were drastically different by the end, largely through the application of heart, of earnest meaning. These were improvements to the work, hands-down, but in both cases I was initially resistant. "No, I'm not trying to make

that

, I'm trying to make

this

." Someday I'll learn that it's more about whatever it is I'm making, and what it wants to ultimately be. In the case of

Hereafter

, this self-made conflict has to do with whether it's a play about what happens to our bodies after we die and how funny that can be, or if it's about how we process the idea of death itself. The latter is, naturally, winning out in terms of dominant content.

It's curious how creative work gets started, and where it can go from there. The ideas that energize our start-up can eventually hinder the process, and the emotions we discover in the process itself may end up being more significant. Well: If not more significant, than more directing, at least. Yet my research today has done more to motivate me to rework the play than anything else in recent memory. In particular, I was learning about the embalming process, and it was really firing up some ideas that I want to get on paper . . . er, screen. Which is ew; very ew. Still, it's fascinating. I didn't know, for example, that you should never investigate the lower end of the coffin in an open-casket funeral. Why? Because sometimes morticians remove the major inner organs and seal them in a plastic bag that gets deposited at the corpse's feet.

YEAH. LIKE THAT. YOU'RE WELCOME.

I also had a wonderful conversation about

Hereafter

and the subjects it addresses with a friend yesterday, which invariably motivates more writing. So that's the order of business this weekend, while

Wife Megan

is away selling swag -- writing more interesting tidbits about the verities of death. Maybe the things I have to share with you are unwanted. Or maybe, it's all just fascinating, and I'm saving people the trouble of admitting it.

Here-Ever-After

Most of the work I've been doing on my play-in-progress,

Hereafter

, has lately been confined to my noggin. In particular, when I'm walking the few blocks from the train to the ol' office job. Then I get to the ol' office job, and most if not all of those thoughts go whizzing from out my ears, displaced by insurance rates, supply vendors and other undesirables. So I thought,

Hey,

thought I,

hey, why don't I do some of the same thinking on the Aviary? That way I'll not only better retain it, but open it up for other people to badger and criticize me about it as they may see fit.

So here we are. Badger if and as you will.

Interesting to try to communicate my thoughts for people who know what I have written, and them what don't (read: most everybody). I held

a reading

in December, from which

much was learned

. Those who participated are about the only people on earth so far who know what my play is about, and odds are it will be about things altogether different once it passes through this nascent stage of revision. The over-arching theme of the various stories has to do with what happens to our bodies after death, and how we separate sense of identity from physical evidence. It's also a comedy, largely; or anyway, it's supposed to be funny. I've got roughly six characters in ten inter-related, but not necessarily inter-connected, scenes, some of which are much stronger than others. The biggest question I had prior to the reading was whether or not this wanted to be a play, rather than a sampling of scenes. It turns out it rather would like to be a whole play, which is great, and also means way more work for me.

Some scenes just don't work, and it's that simple. I have two such set in a gastroenterologist's office (which should have been my first clue, right there) that flounder and waffle mercilessly. These, and their companions in dysfunction, I believe I will rewrite from scratch with new ideas that are influenced by an improved sense of continuity to the whole thing. More importantly, the characters they particularly address are weak. It's going to be a lot of re-imagining, which is fun, even when it's frustrating. This is what got me started on day-dreaming about it, anyway -- the possibility of that freedom to do more than revise, to rewrite.

Along those lines, too, I realize an immediate need to rearrange what scenes I do have fairly strong. As they are arranged now, my eye was more on structural symmetry, not enough on organic cause-and-effect. Which is actually pretty funny, since one of the philosophical arguments I have going in the thing is between linear and holistic perspectives. Philosophy is another little facet that needs rearranging. Just now, some of the characters have perspectives that are too similar for anything terribly interesting to happen between them. This, and the aforementioned, leads me to contemplating the cut of one (or more?) of my dears. The whole thing could really benefit from an outline of some kind, which, again: funny. I'm not very good at or about outlining. I don't like doing it, and I'm pretty crap at it, generally imposing too much logical control and not enough intuitive exploration. Then again, maybe I'm just doing it wrong, somehow.

Expatriate Younce

and I, in our recent

brainstorming phone call

, got to talking about ideas and our rather different relationships to them. To put it mildly, I have a love-hate relationship to my ideas. My ideas have burned me before and, though I try to forgive and forget, I am holding on to the odd grudge, or seventy-eight. Ideas are as malevolent as they are beneficial to me, some resulting in a well-deserved sense of accomplishment, and other resulting in a tremendous amount of wasted time and effort. Of course, as I write this, I realize that I'm a little too focused on product over process here. Younce points out that my urge to fulfill a creative idea's potential is what enables me to get creative things done, but the flip side of that coin is frustration over delayed or (in many dreadful cases) aborted projects. Take, for example, this idea I had of incorporating the three fates into my play (

in a gastroenterologist's office, for

Pete's

sakes

). Thought it was great, ended up screwing the story into places it most certainly does not belong.

So outlining, free writing and cuts. Perhaps I hate acknowledging how little I've accomplished on a first draft, and that's why I generally avoid the revision process? Whatever it may be, I'm determined to make this project the one for which I break that habit. Then I am sure I will have still more revisions, but hopefully I'll be slightly more capable of them.

Then, too, maybe Youncey can finally get his werewolf story.

Open Up

So.

On

Wednesday last

(Odin's-day, oddly enough), while I was guest teaching in a high school, the school went into what was referred to as a "lock down." It was the start of second period, and the gym had just about acquired all of its students for the period when an announcement came over the loudspeaker. At least, that's what I'm told happened. I heard about it from the gym teachers, as the school-wide announcements do not penetrate the gymnasium itself, and I heard it whilst basing

Friend Heather

in a thigh stand for a photograph. We held until the photograph was taken, as a "lock down" doesn't particularly mean anything to us. After we got down, we asked what it meant, and were instructed that I had to go into the boys' locker room, Heather into the girls'.

Okay,

thought I,

I'm not about to hang in the locker room; I'll go into the teacher's office.

And I did. And I wondered if I should lock the door (I understand language! [So long as it's English!]). It's a tiny office, and no one else was in there, though I could hear the raised voices of the boys in the adjacent locker room. Just as I was contemplating joining them, the male gym teacher for that period entered from there. He said a few noncommittal things to me about it being an eventful day, then turned back around and yelled at the boys to shut up, admonishing them for thinking everything's a joke, until all was silence. Then he turned back to me as if he'd barely interrupted himself and explained the situation a little better in a subdued tone. I felt bad, hearing him talk to me after he'd been so aggressive about the boys' silence, but I was also gradually coming to appreciate the motivations behind his severity.

In 1999, just a couple of months before I would graduate from college, two young men executed a plan to take their high school hostage with a murder spree that included the use of planned explosives. The whole thing was elaborately planned out, actually, and -- notwithstanding all the death and destruction wrought that day -- it could have been much worse had the plan gone accordingly. "

Columbine

" is now a word with tragic and unfortunate associations, probably for the foreseeable future, here in America. It's an Anglicization of the Italian

colombino

, which means dove, and "Colombina/Columbine" was a character popular in both the Italian and English commedia dell'arte traditions. I don't know what came first, but pictured above is a Columbine flower. Perhaps they're named for their resemblance to a dove; they characteristically hang in a shape like a dove with its wings tucked until they blossom, but they also aren't all white. Some are a rather vivid shade of red.

The main preoccupation for the gym teacher was the fact that the door out the back of the locker room seemed to be locked and he wasn't sure if he could unlock it. His feeling was that everyone would be safer in a certain back hallway, and he set about finding the key to those doors. Eventually he found it, and we all filed out of the locker room. I trailed the group, and found myself in a narrow, dim hallway that soon bent to the left and became a landing to two flights of concrete stairs that made a sort of u-turn, where there was a second, smaller landing. At the top, where I remained, were double doors that led outside and were locked with a heavy-duty wedge bar; presumably this was part of the appeal of this room, such as it was. The students all just fit on the two flights of stairs and landings, and most sat, preparing for a long wait. From the top landing, I could see everyone but a couple of boys at the base. It was cramped once people sat, but no one thought of spreading out a bit back toward the direction from which we came. We waited.

I went to one of these mega-schools that were popular to build in the 70s --

James W. Robinson Secondary School

. Robinson, as we and everyone in the area called it, was named in honor of a certain Sergeant James W. Robinson, Jr., the first Virginia resident to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor in the Vietnam conflict. The school is massive, and it needs to be to hold the some 4,000 students day in and day out. I found its size intimidating when I first arrived (in spite of attending the almost equally massive Lake Braddock Secondary for two years), aggravating throughout my middle years there and ultimately it became a weird point of pride in my final months there and thereafter. I would never have admitted this at the time, though. I felt largely oppressed by my circumstances, due to too many factors to get into just now, not the least of which was simply a seeming inability to understand that I was going through profound changes. I turned it around just before my senior year, but up until that time I was increasingly falling into stereotype (or archetype, if you will). You know the type. I kept to myself as much as I could. I even took to wearing the ubiquitous black trenchcoat.

The students had already changed into shorts and t-shirts for their gym classes, and the stairwell was pretty chilly. By and large, they were very well-behaved. It was only natural that their whispering would occasionally escalate, and we'd remind them, or they'd remind each other, with a "shh!" The teacher explained to me, as I tried to look responsive without actually making any sound (I wanted to avoid any hypocrisy, and figured that lacking any rapport I ought to lead by example), that they ran drills in lock-down procedure frequently -- too frequently, he felt. It made the students take it less seriously than they ought. Then again, this particular time could be a case of an aggravated parent on campus, or perhaps a building search for contraband. He didn't name the other possibility. He didn't have to. He went on to explain that they didn't hear all the announcements in the gym, certainly not in the stairwell. So, periodically he would call his fellow gym teachers on his cell phone to see what they knew. He even called someone at the elementary school (a separate building). No one had any information for him. We shushed the students again, and he told them all to just relax.

I've been

pretty quiet in my 300+ entries to date

on the subject of September 11, 2001, but that's not because I'm at all removed from the experience. On bad days, I'm avoiding it; on good days, I'm rising above and moving on. Both explanations are to say that it was the kind of event that one never quite epitomises in description. You had to be there, as the old comic excuse goes. What I can say about that day, for myself, is that it has a lasting and highly personal effect on me. It's a little darkly humorous for me, these people who advertise "Never forget." The memory of it lives at the back of my head like a patient worker, occasionally pressing his button or pulling his lever. I was rather alone that day: new guy at a temp job in Rockefeller Center, the phones mostly didn't work, giving me only the briefest opportunities to touch base with my girlfriend in Brooklyn, I was trapped for hours in Manhattan, picking up news from car radios and strangers' conversation. Eventually I found my way to the apartment of the only person I knew at the time who lived on the island. He wasn't really a friend of mine, but of my girlfriend's, and his place was packed with strangers watching the news. Sitting silent on a stool there, I worried about my dad in D.C., and relived the surreal morning, with its evacuation from the 50s down the twisting, disused fire stairwell of 30 Rockefeller Center. It seemed like we'd never get to the bottom.

When the bell for change of classes rang, no one needed to be shushed. It seemed to remind everyone that time was passing, and the longer we had to wait, the more likely it seemed that whatever motivated our lock-down was a dire circumstance. Minutes after the bell rang, the whispering started up again amongst the boys. As our time in the stairwell passed the hour mark, I stretched against the railing and the cold, and some of the students began to be more aggressive in their efforts to make sense of the situation, or at least lighten the mood. Some were playing a silent game (save for occasional involuntary victory cheers) that involved flicking out digits on both hands against one another. Some asked me who exactly I was; they'd never gotten an explanation on what they were doing in class that day. Others tried to nap or discuss quietly. One young man seemed to continually take it on himself to take charge of the mood and, by and large, he was pretty good at disrupting expectation and continuity with his joking. He seemed popular with the class, in a jester kind of way. Soon, talking to no one in particular, his kidding turned to half-serious plans for what to do when someone burst in with an automatic weapon. It was on everyone's mind. You'd occasionally hear one of them add a onomatopoetic gun noise to his whispered conversation. The jester was still trying to be light, but he was scared too, and losing his audience, boys getting variously agitated into signs of despair, or aggression. So I took a gamble. "Hey, seagull," I said in a normal tone of voice (he was wearing a t-shirt with a seagull silhouette on the front), then whispered, "If you're going to plan for us, whisper it." Then I offered a wry smile, hoping he'd get me. He did, simultaneously embarrassed at being caught out and pleased with the attention and the hushed chuckles of his peers. The tension did not stay away for long before mounting again.

After about a hour and a half of nothing, we got the call that the lock-down was over, and we could return to our third-period classes. It didn't quite engender the relief you might imagine, though everyone was pleased to march out from the chilly stairwell. We all returned to the locker room and changed, then walked out into the brightly lit gym to learn what we could. The students quickly took to the halls to access their community of gossip. Heather and I soon learned that the official announcement had actually stated that classes could take place -- just in the same locked room, until further notice. None of the gym teachers heard that. I felt a little ashamed at my relief over not having had to teach an hour-and-a-half gym class, but not at my hiding with all the men. It was the only sensible course of action, given the information we had. As we watched students flow out from the doors that faced onto a windowed hallway, one of the gym teachers said, "Look at the cop car pulling away. See that dog in the seat? It must have been a drug search." We went on to teach an abbreviated third period before leaving campus for lunch, a necessary diversion. The beginning of our last class for the day, seventh period, was interrupted a few minutes in by an announcement from the principal. He congratulated everyone on a clean report for drugs, including some students themselves who had been pulled from their classrooms. In something of a tangent, he went on to admonish those older students who were violating traffic laws when driving off school property, and let them know that they could expect an increased police surveillance along the road at that hour. "But overall: good job today."

When I was in high school, I was often very angry. I was also, often, terrifically depressed. I'd have a lot of answers for you if you asked me why, and I believed in them very much. I was creating so much -- my world view, my appetites, my self -- at such a frenzied pace that it was important to me to know the things I knew. We complain a lot about teenagers' personalities, but in terms of life stages it's really where the rubber meets the road, more often than not. All that ambitious, energetic emotion for learning that children have meets all that complex, interactive consequence that adults enjoy. It's confusing even without the sea change that released hormones bring to . . . well, everything. It's exciting. It's terrifying. Particularly for those of us who've been through it already, and understand the potential for disaster, and feel responsible for them.

It's hard to write about this without offering some sweeping verdict on it all (harder still, in some respects, not to relate it back to government or religious issues). That's not what I'm writing for, though. I'd like to avoid that. Instead, I mean to do what I do with other, less traumatic events here at the Aviary. That is, write out my experience in an effort to come to some kind of better understanding about it. Opinions must enter into it: I don't agree with using a "lock down" as any sort of practical device for something other than an immediate emergency. To wit, I disagree with using it to facilitate investigation, or set an example for teenagers to let them know they stand a chance of being caught at something. Yet I appreciate its necessity for preparedness. It seems extreme, but if you read

the details of the Columbine incident

, it's evident that the scenario was disastrously mismanaged by the authorities. Of course it was -- it was virtually unprecedented. And if the authorities have to shape up procedurally, so ought the schools. We drill for the potential of fire, of earthquake. This is another kind of natural disaster.

But. "Natural" does not mean it is without cause. Quite the opposite, in fact. I've read the details, and I saw

Elephant

in the theatre, and I wore a black trenchcoat through high school, and played

Doom

and fantasized about all sorts of socially morbid scenarios, and I still don't presume to explain the reasons behind Klebold and Harris' actions. What I do mean is to suggest that regularly cowering in a darkened room and being forbidden to speak might, just might, be more a part of the problem than of any sort of solution. Giving a society (and what else is high school than a constantly evolving society?) a little information and then turning their ignorance back on them as a kind of preemptive punishment, that's frustrating. In fact, revolutions have been begun for less. Unfortunately, most teenagers aren't yet capable of revolution, of the organization and long-view perspective required to make a social change. What they are capable of is making louder, more extreme choices until someone hears them. Hell: Most of my so-called choices in high school, in retrospect, were little more than reactions. Teenagers are exceptional at reacting, and we discount that ability at our, and their, risk.

Let people talk. Listen. Please.

Writing Wild


I have been seized by a powerful urge in the past week or so to write short plays. I explained last week (see 8/8/08) that Friend Nat had inspired me to write from start to finish a short play, and that I was rather proud of this. At the time, this led me to re-examine my progress on other creative projects I had professed on this here 'blog. One of my usual excuses for failing to follow-through on projects is getting distracted by bright, shiny new projects. I'm not exactly a fickle little magpie, constantly collecting projects that glint at me from below, but my joy for life does seem to flow from these occupations, and so I rarely refuse them. I consider being distracted by a new project, so long as it proves fruitful, a more-worthy reason for abstentia from older ones than, say, needing to find out what happens next on So You Think You Can Dance? Just as a random example.

Thus far, this one is proving more fruitful than I had dared hope. When I wrote the initial short play, it was very much a stand-alone scene, meant to explore my thoughts on death a bit (it's a comedy; don't judge me). Then, aided by a little research, I found myself fairly excited by an idea for another short play with a similar theme, and it connected itself pretty naturally with the first. Now I have four first-draft short plays, loosely connected either by character or, er, object. I've also got vague ideas for two more scenes, which would give me six in all, which -- length-wise, at any rate -- would give me a pretty full little evening of theatre. Hoo-rah, say I. It remains to be seen if the scenes provide some sort of satisfying arc once strung together, of course, and there's always the stage of revision, which is sort of my kryptonite when it comes to these things. Still and all: hoo & rah.

My writing this time around is reminding me of a lot of specific influences, and I feel variously pleased and confused with them. Friend Daryl is just bringing to a close a production of Keith Reddin's All the Rage at the Manhattan Theatre Source, a show for which I auditioned but did not achieve casting. I read the play in June to prepare for the audition, and it too is a somewhat loosely-strung (though not nearly so loose as mine) set of scenes revolving around darkly humorous themes. In the spring, I checked out a lot of Martin McDonagh plays from the Lincoln Center branch of the NYPL, having enjoyed The Pillowman on Broadway and curious about all these other plays for which he was more renowned. His boldness with a morbid and macabre sense of humor have definitely helped me justify some of the areas in exploration in my little efforts of late. There's even a good dose or two of Ben Jonson, Neil Gaiman and Adam McKay, though you'd probably never notice those, mired as they are in my own concepts and interpretations.

A writing experience is best for me when it gives me moments of feeling guided by the material itself, rather then my steering of it. Similar to the enjoyment of watching a play that I haven't read (movies are exempted utterly for the most part, as we're inundated with previews that seem hell-bent on spoiling at least one surprise for us), when I write something that has a will or energy of its own, part of what keeps me going forward is wondering what this or that character will do next. It's entirely up to me, of course, but occasionally they (I) surprise me (myself). This may seem at best naive, at worst indulgent, but I would argue that at least some portion of this feeling is necessary in writing something original. One of the best bits of advice I ever got on writing fiction was given by a speaker at a writing conference I attended back in 2001. He was narrating (aptly enough) his process in writing a story set in a hospital. He had a choice of three things happening next to his protagonist, three ideas. The first two were something like the character would flashback to memories of whomever he was there for, or he could have a talk with someone else in the waiting room, but the third was that he receive a telephone call on the hospital payphone . . . from his deceased mother.

Perhaps it's needless to say that this particular writer chose option three. At the time, thinking of it only as a writer of short stories and the like, I remember thinking about how pervasive fantasy is; it barely qualifies as a genre name, there are so many distinctions (besides swords and dragons) for its use. Now -- flashing back, if you will -- I'm struck by two things this illustrates. The first is an acting lesson to be found in this "other" medium. As an actor, one is often faced with two or more choices that work, that adhere to the givens and move the action along. We explore them all, and generally take the one that's most interesting; that is, the one that heightens conflict or develops character and/or, if we're lucky, surprises. The second strike is a reflection on both fiction and acting (and painting and cycling and governmental science, I'm sure), and has to do with risk. My sustained engagement in these writings and my apparent influences from recent reading are both results of remaining open, exploratory and loose, during my writing process. It's risky to release control, to give oneself up to the possibility of failure (or, perhaps worse, gratuitous exposure), yet without it what are our chances of creating anything fresh or effective? This is a not-uncommon thought here at the Aviary. Still, I enjoy finding it anew in corners I wasn't expecting to.

So please do forgive, Dear Reader, if the Aviary is a little lacking in posts this week and next. It is because I am enjoying the exploration. Worry not. I shall return. (Undoubtedly when I should otherwise be revising whatever I've cranked out.)