Plays come in all sorts and sizes. For three weeks in a row, one of the playwrights in my workshop, a guy who normally writes plays of about 120 pages, has brought in a new 10-minute play. Each of them has been good, immediately produceable, and would be fun to see. Back in the 1990s, I produced a lot of one-acts and one-act festivals, and Moving Arts kept doing that right up until about six years ago. Current management doesn’t produce one-acts — which is completely their prerogative. I liked them because it gave lots of playwrights a chance, and lots of directors, and lots of actors, and because generally the plays were fun. And, as my producing partner of the time used to say, “If you don’t like one of them, just wait, because there’s another one coming right up.”

Of the 64 plays I’ve written, many many of them are short plays. One of them, which got produced in Hoboken, NJ but which I’ve never seen staged or even heard read,  is all of three page long. Here’s why:  That’s all it needed. That’s all the story there was. More importantly, that’s all the theme there was:  Once you’ve made your point, you’re done. I was reminded of this when I had a brief discussion today with another playwright in my workshop about the HBO limited series “Mrs. Fletcher.” Ordinarily, “Mrs. Fletcher” wouldn’t be the sort of thing I’d watch, but for one reason:  I’d read the book and it was starring Kathryn Hahn. (Yes, that is one reason. I usually stay away from watching adaptations of things I’ve read because I don’t want the filmed version interfering with the prose version I already enjoyed; but in this case, knowing what the book was about and knowing that the lovely, talented, committed, and brave Kathryn Hahn would be starring in it, I watched it.)  I was pleasantly surprised to learn that each episode was only 30 minutes. Oh. It was serialized more like a comedy than a drama. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the series ends about two-thirds of the way through the book — right at the climactic event in the novel that resolves the theme. In other words, right where it should. The book, on the other hand, goes on… and everyone’s life is neatly resolved… and quickly what had been a book about adventure and the freedom to be who you wanted to be becomes a book that resolves everyone’s story to the expectation of the society around them. What a disappointment. The series, by the way, was executive-produced by the novelist, who also wrote some of the episodes, so this seems like a rare instance of a novelist getting a second chance at his material… and improving it.

From Méliès’s most famous film, 1902.

After my workshop this morning, I headed over to the Egyptian Theatre for a screening from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s festival of preservation. They had promised a recently discovered Laurel & Hardy short (I’m a fan) and a fully restored Chaplin short (less of a fan) and never-before-seen films by Georges Méliès (film’s first special-effects master, starting to produce and direct sensationally surprising films in 1896) and by the Lumière brothers, who patented their own version of the cinematograph in 1895. I’m not a film fan per se, but I’m interested in the silent era, and I know that because Méliès burned the negatives to all 520 of his films in a dispute over rights, they’re difficult to see in any good form. The intricacies of the preservation and restoration process on all the films shown, as detailed in introductions by a representative, are too involved to go into detail here; for the Chaplin short, an introductory clip showed all four source-material films (three of them prints and one of them a negative) used to cobble together a complete print that could be restored. The Lumière clips were astounding, showing elegantly dressed and coiffed people, in top hats and waistcoats, or in dresses with majestic headwear, strolling along with the Eiffel Tower in the background, looking every bit as fresh as though it were shot with an iPhone today — but clearly being from 1900 or thereabouts. In another one, people are traveling via moving walkway, such as you find in an airport, and I realized:  That’s right! We had moving walkways in some places in 1900, and then we seemed to forget about the technology, because I don’t think moving walkways returned (and then, again, mostly in airports) until the 1980s or so. The Méliès films were very short; his early pieces were only one minute long, and rightly so, because they present the sort of tricks preferred by Méliès, as a stage magician, over things like plot and conflict. (One of his longer pieces, probably 20 minutes, was screened as well, but it required narration by our host and I’ll admit I fell asleep for probably five minutes of it.) Spectacle works in brief bits, but spectacle without the pursuit of objective — i.e., people in conflict — loses its fascination. This is precisely the problem with some of Terry Gilliam’s films, most especially “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” which is a great bore. When nothing matters, nobody cares.

After the screening, and after a late lunch at the Pig n’ Whistle, an English pub originated in Hollywood in 1927, where I had bangers and mash and a Guinness, and where a busser cleared away my copy of The New Yorker when I went to the restroom (I wouldn’t pay my tab until they returned it — which they did), I went to the Moving Arts one-night event “Tainted Love.” This was an evening of — wait for it — short plays, staged in and around a large multi-level house high in the Hollywood Hills. It was terrific fun to be surrounded by so many friends of the theatre, including actors I’ve worked with since the 90’s, and to get reacquainted with a woman who has, off-and-on, been coming to see our shows for 25 years. I also got to see two longtime acting buddies play marshmallows — there they were in their respectably representative marshmallow costumes, playing it for all it’s worth as they feared getting roasted alive, and making me howl with laughter. Georges Méliès would’ve been proud.

I didn’t work on my play and I didn’t go to the gym and I didn’t do any real reading or writing and I didn’t continue the Civilization 6 game against my 17-year-old where I’m actually winning. So… what did I do today? At just after 10 p.m., near the end of the day, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher.

I started off the morning by prepping for an interview. The (highly recommended!) Pere Ubu podcast — accessible here and elsewhere — is doing an episode about “super fans,” with an interview scheduled with me at 10 a.m. This necessitated my getting up early, quickly sampling from the two dozen Pere Ubu albums I’ve got, and, impossibly, selecting my “favorite” track. The interview lasted 20 minutes, and will no doubt be boiled down to two minutes, and was completely unenjoyable, dealing with one of my favorite subjects.

Then I did the Mega Sudoku. Every Sunday that it’s possible, I do the Mega Sudoku. Here’s where to access it. Some Sundays it takes 20 minutes or so; sometimes it’ll take an hour or more. Today I had to redo it four times (and there went a chunk of the day to be sure) because I’ve got a new MacBook Pro with a menu bar that I kept accidentally hitting with stray finger strokes and, somehow, wiping out entries. I finally finished the puzzle by switching to the old laptop. (Note to self:  Learn how to turn off the accidental entry-clearing function.)

Listening to the torrential downpour outside made me wonder:  Now that it frequently POURS in Southern California, does that mean I’ll never have to hear “It Never Rains in Southern California” again? (God willing.)

I read part of the LA Times.

I talked to the wife.

I spent too much time on Facebook and Twitter.

I kept thinking about things I was going to write but didn’t. And things I was going to read but didn’t.

I fixed some lunch and read more of the LA Times.

I took a nap.

I woke up and found that my wife had left for work and my son was over at a friend’s. I made a salad for dinner and read more of the LA Times. I texted the son to see when he’d be home, given that it was a school night, and he texted back to tell me that it wasn’t a school night, and I checked the school calendar and learned that, indeed, there is no school tomorrow, that even with the invention of “presidents’ day” they still get two days off, one this week, and one next week, and I grew mad about this as just the latest example of our kids getting under-educated while some other nations are clobbering us with their early education.

Then I had more flavored seltzer water and popcorn.

I was never going to watch the Academy Awards because I have a hard time understanding why anyone would. I feel the same way about the Super Bowl. If I were up for an award, I wouldn’t just watch the ceremony — I’d attend. Barring that, I have zero interest. I’m also of the opinion that most awards are undeserved (unless they’re to me). So I was surprised an hour ago to learn that the actual best picture I saw last year, “Parasite,” won for Best Picture. To quote the great arts programmer David Sefton on Facebook:  “Bloody hell. They just gave best picture to the year’s actual best film! Has that ever actually happened before??” Not to my knowledge. I view this as a partial make-good for “Crash.”

Now I’m going to dig into the stack of “Doctor Strange” comics I’ve been stockpiling. Maybe even make some progress in Kafka’s first novel, which I’m making my way through.

Tomorrow will be more action-packed.

OK, the Iowa Caucus vote count is now 96% complete — and I got just as many delegates as billionaire Tom Steyer and without spending one penny of my own money. Sweet!

I try my best to be a Stoic.

No one is a true Stoic, at least not as outlined in the Enchiridion of Epictetus. Being a true, complete, Stoic would be to renounce joy and happiness (in addition to the more negative emotions), which would also mean rejecting everything, outside work, that makes life meaningful and enjoyable. Even when I first read the Enchiridion, decades ago, I realized this… and realized that Stoicism is best employed as a practice, and not as a goal.

That practice, which has brought me great relief throughout my life, is summed up best as this:  “There are things within your control, and things outside your control. Things within your control, you may exert your power over. Things outside your control, you should let go.” Applied well, this can be awfully soothing. Plus, productive. It counsels correct action, and relieves frustration.

After a glorious 18 days off — from any kind of work, from even thinking about anything troubling, as I went to Spain to see the world’s actual greatest rock band and also to New Jersey (twice) to visit my birth family, and even from writing anything in any form — this week I found myself clenching my jaw and my shoulder muscles as I bore witness to the presidential impeachment “trial” unfolding. So far, the result isn’t any different from what I thought it’d be, but its lack of suspense doesn’t drain me of my dread and outrage; a country in which, evidently, anything a sitting president might do to ensure his own re-election is permissible surely isn’t the country the Founders conceived, nor is it the one I thought I lived in. Tonight, after the Senate voted 51-49 not to hear from witnesses (and after more than one of the GOP Senators voting against witnesses said they believed that the Democratic House managers had proved their case — but they still didn’t care), I decided to come home, grill a big steak, drink an entire bottle of red wine, and watch something distracting on Netflix. Because what they had done was infuriating, but it was outside my control.

That’s what Stoicism does for you — it helps you question what you can affect, and what you can’t, and constantly raises for you the question of what, if anything, you could do.

I grilled my ginormous tomahawk steak (freshly purchased from Ralph’s on a WooHoo! deal) outside, cracked open a bottle of Spanish red wine, and sat out there enjoying both, while occasionally throwing a piece of the steak to my two dogs and petting them to our mutual satisfaction. It was pretty good.

Except — I was still seething.

So I went on ActBlue and donated a shit ton of money against those GOP assholes in the Senate running for re-election, and against Mitch McConnell in particular, because y’know what? It may not seem very Stoic, but  THAT was within my control.

So now I’m thinking: Just watch what the 58% of us who hate all this are going to get up to in the next 10 months. There are millions of us. And that action is within our control, too.

Last week, just before New Year’s Eve, I got a new MacBook Pro. It arrived here at my company, our friendly trusty I.T. company came to set it all up — and then discovered that Apple has yet again forged ahead with new hardware that leaves mere mortals behind. The last time I got a new laptop (four years ago), we discovered that there was no longer any way to play or burn a CD or DVD. (In fact, I now have no way to play a CD anywhere, because my car won’t play one either.) And of course the powerpack attachment is different every time — sometimes the new version inserts straight in; sometimes it’s a different attachment; sometimes it’s magnetic. In this particular case, we found that Apple has removed both the Cat 6 cable (which I need to connect to something here in my office) as well as all the USB ports. Instead, I’ve got these nifty little slots that, well, nothing plugs into except the new Apple powerpack.

Now, as a longtime Apple user (happily using Apple since 1982), I have to admit that I appreciate these cutting-edge advancements. I just wish they didn’t always cut me at the last minute. For context:  I’m leaving for Spain on Saturday and I need all my stuff to work.

So, we ordered a thingamajig that slots into a couple of those nifty little slots and now provides a couple of USB ports and a Cat 6 port. So now I can do things like, well, attach my iPhone and iPad that are clearly also from Apple. No, I don’t like to think that Apple removed those ports in order to force me to buy a new iPhone and a new iPad. I would never think that. Instead, I think that the new MacBook Pro has a hidden cost of an additional $79, because that’s what the cigarette-lighter attachment that we had to buy and that I think everyone will need costs.

With that safely overcome, last night I set out restoring my iPad. I say “restoring,” because when I went to update its operating system two months ago, the screen froze and no manner of ministrations would thaw it out. Instead, I just didn’t use the iPad for two months. But now my plan is to take it, and not a laptop, overseas, thereby cleverly keeping me from doing any corporate work while I’m there, because I haven’t loaded the corporate-work email on it. Instead, I’ll go to see Pere Ubu (!) play, and check out Hieronymus Bosch and Picasso, and nibble on boquerones and sample tapas and down glasses of tempranillo without ever once wondering what’s going on with my email. I devoted almost two hours last night to restoring my iPad, synching it to the new laptop, confirming that everything on the old laptop was now running and working on the new laptop, and went to bed feeling happy and satisfied, delighted with my accomplishment and proud that I hadn’t needed the I.T. people or even my friendly and helpful colleague at the company to rescue me on any of it.

The next morning, ensconced at my desk and well aware that my task list was lengthy but ready to get absolutely everything under the sun done so that I’m fully prepared to leave for my trip, I opened up the new laptop and logged in — but it wouldn’t take my password.

Wha…?

So I did what anyone would do:  I typed the password in again.

And again.

And again.

Because why would we assume that it wouldn’t magically be different on the third try?

But it still wouldn’t work.

Which was puzzling — because my password hadn’t changed. Or… had it? Because, it suddenly occurred to me, I’d synched it with the iPad, and that has a different password, one all its own, so I tried that one. And when it didn’t work, I tried it again. And again.

Then I wondered, Hm, if maybe it hadn’t somehow defaulted to one of my other passwords that I use for the other electronics and the other accounts. After all, they’re all synched. So I put in the password for my phone. But that wouldn’t open the laptop either. Then I put in my master password (well, one of my master password — yes, my passwords live in a house with two masters, and also 10 mistress passwords). That didn’t work. Then I wondered if I’d used the right case, because for some of them I’d gone from upper case to lower case, about 12 years ago, when I was in a business meeting and my wife texted me to ask for one simple password of mine and had somehow unknowingly changed every password I had anywhere and completely discombobulated my synched systems when she changed that one password.

(Isn’t life so much simpler with modern technology?)

So, now I got out some very old tech — what we call a pad and pen — and I wrote down every password I use. Yes, I have them memorized. There are 12 base passwords in all, as well as a variation system that, no, sorry, I can’t disclose here. Then after typing each of the 12 passwords in, and it not working, and then typing it in again, and it not working, and then typing it in a third time, and it not working, I scratched it out. When all 12 got scratched out and I still had no access to my new laptop, I started to feel the creeping dread of a man lost in a labyrinth in a horror movie:  What if it takes all day to get this resolved? What if I never get “that” document back? What if this never gets resolved? I’m leaving on Saturday!!!!

Finally, we put in an electronic support ticket with the friendly, trusting I.T. company and they called.

I love these guys, and told them so yet again, but did ask, “Um, how long do you think this will take? I’m always glad to see you, and to talk to you — but I’m really jammed at the moment.”

They said maybe very little time, maybe longer. (This is a response I will be adopting myself in the future.)  They told me to manually shut down the laptop, which would bring up an admin screen upon reboot, and they could help me reset a password from there.

“Great!” I said. These guys have always solved every problem, and I was feeling confident I’d be back on my way quickly. But I didn’t know how to manually shut down the laptop; Apple seems to have removed that button.

“You know where the digital fingerprint button is? It’s that one. Just hold it down.”

So I looked at my keyboard — really closely looked at it, to find the digital fingerprint button — and noticed something else.

A green light.

Signifying that…

My Caps Lock button was on.

I pressed that off, entered my password…

… and my laptop lit up faster than you can say “Open Sesame.”

I guess I left the Caps Lock button on somehow from before…?

This is why I have an I.T.  company on retainer.

And why I should just stick to what I do better.

This morning I did what many people do on the first day of a new year:  I slept until two in the afternoon.

Well, technically, no. I slept until 8:30 a.m., which was ruinous, given that I’d gone to sleep just four hours or so earlier and then on a bellyful of vodka gimlets after a six-hour party with two dozen guests. At 8:30, finding myself ruefully fully awake, I fixed myself a cup of coffee and an English muffin, watched an episode of the new “Lost in Space” on my laptop, then went back to sleep. Then I woke up at two in the afternoon.

This is the third year in a row that we’ve hosted a New Year’s Eve party mostly built around drinking and then playing charades. This is not charades for the faint of heart. The only way this could be made harder would be to write the prompts in hieroglyphics. It’s a cut-throat game designed to prepare you emotionally for just how difficult and challenging the new year might be.  The guest list gets split into two teams and then each team makes up their own prompts for the opposing team to act out and guess, with a focus on making the prompts just about impossible to act or guess. Obscure books are a favorite; so are “famous people” that no one has heard of, and little-known Yugoslavian action movies that are available in the backwoods of Netflix. One example:  “The Enchiridion,” which I submitted last year to the immense fury of my wife’s team. Hey, it’s not my fault that none of them ever read it.

While I like being alive, and so do my best to enjoy every bit of the experience of living, I can’t say I’ll miss 2019. Goodbye to bad rubbish, I say! Three members of my family had serious health issues (and one nearly died), more than one friend died, I had a truly delightful professional calamity that still has me fighting with my insurance company for a settlement eight months later, my credit cards and ATM cards got stolen and used, I set aside a full-length play I was writing that I suddenly lost faith in, and somehow or other my subscription to “Fantastic Four” has stopped appearing in my mailbox.  Finding out in concert that Roger Daltrey can still sing astonishingly well did not provide enough counterbalance.

So, I’m approaching 2020 with optimism. I’m going to Spain in two weeks to see Pere Ubu in concert, and while I’m there for that I think I’ll take in some of Spain as well. I have to think at some point there will be an insurance resolution (and at that point, perhaps I’ll share actual details here). And I’m almost 90 pages into a play that’s working far better than the other one. I’m ready to twist the throttle of 2020 all the way.

The heart-rending obit of William Ebeltoft, who physically died on Sunday — but who died inside 50 years ago during the Vietnam War. Read it here.

I got three pages into reading the article in the new issue of The New Yorker about the disintegrating cross-Atlantic marriage between two poets in 1970 before realizing that I didn’t give a shit about this at all.

I refer not just to the British election, which I watched with real interest before going to bed.

Oh no, I thought:  What’s this portend for my friends in the (soon-to-be former) United Kingdom but also for the rest of the world, for the global economy, and for our own elections in November?

So, of course, I had a dream — some would say nightmare — where at the last minute I ran for city council here in my town on a whim, and showed up to make my announcement speech at a city hall gathering barefoot and wearing shorts, going on about collapsing infrastructure and moral turpitude.

Some time ago, I read that dreams result from your brain’s nighttime filing of memories and thoughts from the day for easier later retrieval, and that in that filing process bits get shuffled around into strange new combinations. Running on a platform of infrastructure, for example, comes from a call I’d had earlier in the day with someone in the Silicon Valley area with a replacement scheme for our power shutdowns.

But what to make of finding in my dream that my former friend Jack, whom I cut ties with in 2005 because he’d disappointed me one times too many, was firmly ensconced on my city council already and that I’d need his help to get elected?

I woke up from this an hour ago, and since then have been reading the wailings of my friends in the U.K. over their election results. Doesn’t feel good.

When my cellphone rang in my car with an incoming call from an unidentified number I didn’t recognize, I answered it anyway, hoping that it was who I thought it would be.

It was.

It was my gym.

On the electronic survey I’d filled out, they asked when I’d like to be called, and I said 6 to 9 p.m. The call came in at 3 p.m. The fact that they got that wrong? That’s what confirmed for me that it was them calling.

In many ways, I like my gym:

• First of all, there are locations in almost all the areas I frequent around the country (except where I grew up; I have an additional membership to a local gym there).
• Secondly, they’re open 24 hours. That works with my schedule!
• They have free classes, one of which I look forward to every week.
• They’ve got a full menu:  free weights, lots of cardio machines, a pool, a sauna, a steam room, a basketball court I don’t use, and more.
• I’ve never had anything but a positive experience with other people working out there.
• There’s plenty of free parking.
• It’s not a meat market or pickup scene. All different shapes and sizes and and ages and types come to this gym, and I like that. I wouldn’t mind losing a few pounds myself, and I’m always rooting for the people with much larger challenges than I have who are there and committed to what they’re trying to do.
• But it didn’t hurt when, a few years ago, a woman who was new in town propositioned me in the steam room about joining her on New Year’s Eve. I didn’t accept, but the flattery added inches to my ego.

What I don’t like about my gym, well, I’ve written about it here several times, and you’re about to hear it again.  So when they blithely announced via an email that they were raising my monthly gym fee again, and then sent me that survey, I took the opportunity to tell them what I thought. When the survey asked if I’d like to be contacted, I put in my phone number.

And then more than a week went by. I just figured that, once again, they weren’t going to respond to anything I had to say. Until, that is, they called.

The woman on the phone was named Kendra and was a new assistant manager, and before she could get too far, I told her how glad I was that she’d called, because although I’d responded to their surveys before, and posted comments here and on Facebook and on the local groups on Facebook, and had used Twitter to voice some concerns and at-tagged them, and dropped comments in their suggestion box with my name scrawled onto them, and had even spoken directly to people working the front desk, nobody had ever responded to or dealt with anything I’d brought up.

“Kendra, I’m on my way to a meeting, so I’m sorry to rush, and I’m very glad you called me, but I’m going to dive right in because I’ve got about three minutes.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Twice, I’ve found shit in the showers. I know you can’t control whether or not people are going to shit in the showers, but you could run a check more frequently and clean it up. The soap and shampoo dispensers are usually empty — so now I bring my own, which is a cost. You got rid of towel service, so now I bring my own, which is also a cost.  There’s a lake of urine and mud in front of the urinals at all times. It’s revolting. The men’s locker room is disgusting. It’s never, ever, clean.”

She apologized and said that she’d been back to work for this gym after being away for some time and had been hired expressly to manage this better. She was just now getting to call people, and said she’d work to make sure that the men’s locker room and everything connected with it would be better.

“Given all this, how do you justify raising the price?”

She started by saying “inflation” and I immediately cut her off:  “Inflation is 1.8%.”

When she started to fumble around for something else, I told her, truthfully, that I was shopping around for a different gym. “Do you have any incentive to keep me while you’re addressing these issues?”

“I can discount your membership by 30% for the next three months.”

“Great!” I said. “I’ll take it. At the end of 90 days, we can both see if the gym has gotten cleaner!” I thanked her and hung up.

Later that night, my first stop in at the gym was to see her and thank her.

“I want to thank you for calling me,” I said. “I know it’s hard to call a list of people and listen to complaints, so I have a lot of respect for what you’re doing. This is the first time anyone has lent an ear, and I’ve been a member here for six years or more.”

“I know, I checked,” she said.”

“I like the gym. I’d rather stay. I just don’t want it to be so disgusting that I’m having a weekly chat with one of your own instructors about how disgusting it is.”

She told me she was instructing the front desk to do a better job — I had told her that when the “service announcement” goes out every hour, beckoning staff members to do a cleanup, the fit friendly good-looking young people at the front desk mostly just stand around and chat. She said she’d fix that, and that she was also having a meeting with the outsourced janitorial crew to make it very clear that they had to do a better job of servicing all areas of the gym or she’d replace them. Finally, she apologized for calling me at the wrong time, even though I was just glad to be called at all and hadn’t brought it up. I was impressed she’d noticed.

“Thank you,” I said, sticking out my hand. “I appreciate it.”

So we shook hands and parted as new friends and I felt really good about it. It was all friendly and businesslike, and now I could continue to enjoy the gym — with a discount that far outweighed the proposed price increase — and I would have a better response to local friends and acquaintances who occasionally say to me, “Ugh! How can you even go in there?!?!?”

After my workout, thoroughly pumped up from this little negotiating success, and after showering and changing, I got into my car and saw that I had a text from my business partner, wondering if I had tried to buy about six hundred bucks of stuff at Target. As if. The last thing I ever bought at Target, so far as I can tell, was… nothing; I can’t even remember the last time I went to Target. Then I got a text from Chase about my personal credit card, asking if a different charge, also at Target, was actually mine. One of these messages said that my card had been present, so I pulled out my wallet — and sure enough, my three credit cards, my ATM cards from two different banks, and my Macy’s card were all missing from my wallet. It had happened while I was in the gym.

I immediately went home and canceled all of those cards. That’s one gym experience I don’t think Kendra can help with.

Gods of karma, I attest to you that I was pleasant throughout and completely justified in my dealings with the gym, and in no way deserved this.