1. Watch “The Cowboys” with my 9-year-old son. I was that age when my father (and mother) took me to see it. In the movie, John Wayne plays a rancher who is forced to hire a bunch of kids who work for him as real cowboys. Near the end of the movie, John Wayne’s character is killed off and the boys have to complete the cattle drive without him. This was astonishing to me, and I kept waiting for the trick ending, showing that he was actually alive and had been secretly watching over the boys the entire time like a guardian angel. But nope, he was actually dead, and I couldn’t get over it. I’m curious to see what this generation will make of that. Prediction:  nothing. They’re inured to everything now.
2. Stay up really late (or, well, early) writing.
3. Interrupt extended bout of writing with blog posts.We’ll see.

Last night, my friend Jonathan Josephson’s theatre troupe descended unannounced on Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood to perform several poems by Charles Bukowski. You can watch the performance below — and be sure to note the reactions of diners seated in and around the playing area. I understand their constrained response:  I’m not sure I’d want to be eating Barney’s signature chili dog while being accosted by an actor reciting “My Underwear Has Shit Stains Too.”

Last year, I bought my wife a gift and a card on Valentine’s Day. When I brought them home, she said, “Oh. I thought we weren’t celebrating it.”

I spent days pondering what that meant. Especially since I thought everything was fine.

Today was Valentine’s Day again. As we know, I was busy out of town for four days, then utterly jammed the past two. And I had to pick up not just my son, but also two of his friends after school for a sleepover so their mother could have her first date in three years (on Valentine’s Day, no less). So even though on the way home, I thought about it being Valentine’s Day, if I stopped to get something for my wife, it would be not only last-minute and inconvenient — but also unnecessary, because it seemed to have been established last year that we weren’t celebrating it.  I didn’t know why we weren’t celebrating it, or when we had evidently agreed not to, but somehow, the story went, we had. So I drove home with said kids in tow and ordered a pizza and a salad and that was it.

Then my wife came home with a gift and a card for me. “Happy Valentine’s Day!” she said. Then she grew slightly impatient when I didn’t open either item right away.

So I have several theories about this. (As I told someone today, 35 years of writing plays have left me focused on motivation.)

1. She’s toying with me. Then and now.
2. She isn’t toying with me, and this year she’s in a better mood than last year.
3. Last year, I did agree not to celebrate it but then forgot, and this year I was too preoccupied and used last year as an excuse. (If those things are true, I’m the unwitting villain in this piece.)
4. Neither one of us knows what the fuck we’re doing.

By the way, the year before, we celebrated perhaps the best Valentine’s Day ever for us, with a wonderful time before, during and after a fine meal at a fantastic restaurant with romantic live guitar accompaniment. So one thing you can say for us:  After 28 Valentine’s Days together, we’re still not stuck in a rut.

Microsoft word kept underlining my use of the word “forfend” in red today, suggesting that I’d misspelled it or, heaven forfend, made it up. (And, indeed, WordPress keeps doing the same thing as I write this.) So I took a minute to consult my friend Webster’s New World and discovered that “forfend” is now considered archaic. It may well be, but I’ll continue to use it, and I contemn anyone who would caution me against it.

Here it is, free and available for your own use. There are many reasons I love the random corporate slogan generator, but here’s just one:  the awful crap it generates typifies what keeps me in business.

In my circle of friends (and with readers of this blog), my antipathy for “The Descendants” is well-known. So, of course, I got an email from a sympathizer aghast that “The Descendants” won a Golden Globe tonight for “Best Picture.”

Here’s what I think:

It’s good to bear in mind that “Citizen Kane” lost the Oscar to “How Green Was My Valley” (a film now more obscure than Charles Foster Kane’s sled).

And it’s also good to know that one year, the Nobel committee was tied between giving the prize for Literature to Beckett or Ionesco — until finally one guy just switched his vote to Beckett so they could go home.

I once won an award for a play that I wasn’t sure was the best in the festival; the following year, in the same festival, I lost, when I know I had the best play.

Awards:  meaningless.

Except as marketing.

And “The Descendants” still stinks.

Here’s something that’s never going to get old:  that little lancet of joy when I learn that something I’ve written has been accepted. I just had a short play chosen for a festival in San Diego in February. (More about the particulars of it another time.)

Let’s be honest:  most successes, when you dig deeper, are countervailed by many, many failures. If I’ve never been quite as dogged as Thomas Edison (“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”), I nevertheless got used to rejection early on. At age 11, I started sending short stories off to magazines such as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Asimov’s, Analog, Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy, and the like, and just as quickly, they’d come back, but even then my response was akin to: “Wow! They wrote back!” I was thrilled when some assistant would scribble a note onto the form rejection letter, as the time some kind woman wrote, “But thank you.” I still think about her. (Thank you, unnamed kind woman.) I never got rejected at school dances, because I just liked to dance, and would dance with all the girls — the big ones, the small ones, the pretty ones, the homely ones, the popular ones, the shy ones — in sixth grade, it just seemed wrong to leave any out. When I started actually dating, girls felt freer to reject me if they liked, and that seemed fine because there were others to ask. I wasn’t emotionally invested in it; I just wanted to go out with a girl and see how far I could get. (Results varied.)

When I started to get published, first in fan publications, and then with non-fiction and fiction in magazines and newspapers, it was thrilling. I liked opening a newspaper and seeing my byline. I liked getting some obscure little magazine in the mail and seeing my story (or, gasp, poem!) in there. Then I fell into the theatre and here’s what I discovered:  that live audience response trumped printed byline. How could seeing my name in print in a magazine — perhaps read, perhaps not, by unnamed and unknown people far away — possibly compare with actually being there when a live audience laughed out loud or was visibly moved by my play? One night, during a performance of my play Happy Fun Family, a woman literally Fell Out Of Her Seat laughing. To this day, I love her. Night after night, when women would sob at the end of About the Deep Woods Killer, I felt golden.

Rejection has never really bothered me. If it stings, it subsides almost instantly. I’m fortunate all around:  I’ve got a strong family, terrific friends, and the trappings of a pretty interesting life that I’ve snared and dragged back into my den. But acceptance is obviously preferable, especially acceptance of a play, which means that there’s going to be another audience experience with one of my plays, and if I’m even luckier, I can be there for it.

When Andre the Giant was a boy, Samuel Beckett used to drive him to school — in the back of his truck because that’s the only place he’d fit. All they would discuss was cricket. The absurdity of this situation — the future professional wrestler and adored star of “The Princess Bride” growing up carted by a future Nobel playwright of the existential — cries out for a play. Maybe I should write it. (I know Ionesco would have, had it occurred to him.)

Here’s something that I can’t imagine I would have said when I was in graduate school:  I like writing to spec.

I do it now for a living — writing all sorts of things for clients with my firm Counterintuity — and I did it for years as a newspaper editor and freelancer. (For the LA Times and others, book reviews had to be a certain length; as an editor, headlines and captions had to be a certain size to fit.)

But for some reason, it never occurred to me how liberating it could be to write plays this way. In the past few years, though, I’ve fallen into the habit and it’s been oddly liberating. Instead of staring at a blank screen and wondering what was on my mind that I didn’t know about, the prompt has become:  “We need a play that fits these requirements, in this timeframe, and works this way. Can you do it?” The parameters in these instances direct you to solutions.

In the most recent example, I was asked to write a short play that was 50% silent and that takes place in a very constrained space. That was fun. I had numerous launching-pad ideas, drilled down into one, started writing it, then my wife called form work and actually happened to give me what I thought was a better idea. I finished it and sent it.

While in that mode of mind,  I happened to be on Facebook and responded to a comment left on my wall that “that sounds like the title of a play. I should write that.” Within minutes, I had an email from an actor friend of 15 years saying, essentially, “Seriously. You should write that. Let’s have lunch.” and linking me to a set of guidelines for a theatre series here in LA where this play might fit.

Now I just got an email about someone else looking for a short play with very specific guidelines. I’m considering writing one. Even if they don’t take it, someone will.

We talk a lot about breaking the rules and going outside the box and coloring outside the lines. I understand why that’s appealing. But many artists far greater than we are forged great work within those rules, that box, those lines.

My friend Bill is an actor and playwright. Here’s something he just shared:

My mother, Florence, ninety, passed away tonight after a long illness. I was in rehearsal three thousand miles away. She said she’d see us on the other side but had “to go to a summer job.” She asked where was I, her eldest son. My siblings told her that I was starring in a show. She smiled and passed away, they tell me. I loved her very much, she was my initial audience, my reader, my safe harbor, my inspiration, my teacher.

Dramatists live for good dialogue, strong images, and fitting resolutions. I love Florence’s line that she had “to go to a summer job.” (Great metaphor!) And then, when she hears that her son is starring in a show, she smiles and passes away. Great exit.