Thanks to good friend Doug Hackney of letting me know about this:  Jason Freedman’s post “Become a morning person. How to end insomnia for $520.99.” Here it is.

My response is twofold:

1. Hypnosis worked better than anything else ever has.
2. My hypnotist told me that my problem is that I don’t really want to go to sleep. “You’re right,” I said. “It seems like a waste of time.” I related this to my brother recently and he agreed and in precisely the same words:  “It seems like a waste of time.” Which makes me think that the Wochner family condition certainly runs in the family, and therefore may be genetic (as has always been my assumption), or may be cultural. Maybe we’re just not a bunch of time wasters.

There are other reasons I don’t really want to go to sleep. I’m a playwright, not a novelist. Novelists work in seclusion — they write their novel (inevitably in the mornings), and then they do whatever else it is they do the rest of the day. (Almost all of them:  work a day job or teach.) Playwrights write at night because the theatre takes place at night — that’s our natural timeframe. In fact, we often write after the theatre. So here’s the schedule:

• 8 PM the show starts
• 10-11 PM the show ends
• 11 PM – 1 a.m. drinks ensue, whether it’s your show or not
• 1 a.m. to ??? you’re writing your play

This applies not just to me. It’s the same story I’ve been hearing in my workshop for 17 years now, and one I heard again just last Saturday:  “I didn’t write these pages until 2 a.m. this morning….” We know, honey. That’s when all of us were writing our pages. You’re one of us.

That said, I did download the free program that the gentleman above recommended. It’s called f.lux (and no, I don’t think the wordplay is cute enough). It controls the relative light of your computer (in my case, a 17″ MacBook Pro). It lowered the glow from my screen to a shade of what I’ll call Santa Monica Pier at dusk. We’ll see if I sleep any better. And maybe this vodka-and-cranberry I’m having will help.

At some point in the immediate years hence — i.e., within the next three years — I intend to arrive upon the truly perfect solution for me:  Going to bed at 5 a.m. and awakening at 11 a.m. I did that for years and it worked flawlessly. I don’t need a lot of sleep — I just need it to be in the right timezone for me. In three years, my 8-year-old will be 11 and he can get his own damn self off to school just like his older sister and brother did. I’m counting the hours.

Here’s where to get one.

What would I do with it? Unless the Red Skull shows up in town, absolutely nothing. Except regard it lovingly from time to time.

This morning I attended an event at UCLA called “Millennials in the Next Economy,” put together by The Atlantic Monthly and sponsored by Allstate.  The topic: “the economic prospects of the Millennial Generation (people born between 1981 and 2002) – how they are making their way through this job market, how they are coping with economic uncertainty, and what they can expect in the years to come.” (This link will take you to more information, including the results of a nationwide survey of Millennials.) After about fifteen minutes of the presentation, I texted my 19-year-old to say, “You’re screwed.”

A few key takeaways:

• 24% of recent college graduates have been unable to find a job. For the last two graduating classes, their entry into the job market was “a rout.”
• About a quarter of people aged 26-29 are living with their parents.
• Nationwide unemployment of Millennials is about 16%. In some areas, it’s 28%.

The second speaker was a guy who did market research and polling for Bush/Cheney 2004. Shortly after his remarks — and after I didn’t applaud — I put my hand up. I never got called on, so in frustration I posed my question to the other people at my table:  “Do you think Millennials are really pissed at the cost of a trillion-dollar misadventure in Iraq, when that money could have been invested into our economy?”

Here were the responses at my table:

From a middle-aged Latino man to my right: “You are sitting next to the right guy.”

From two other people: smiles and nods.

From the young woman across from me:  “This Millennial is.”

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the subprime mortgage meltdown (some of it in our collective mirror). But blame for the Iraq war, as well as recognition of the enormous ongoing cost of it, needs to be delivered to a certain address in Texas.

Mike Love is talking up plans for a “Beach Boys reunion” next year to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the band. (Here’s a story about this in the Guardian.) I’ve seen the Beach Boys — back when it was still actually The Beach Boys, and not Mike Love with assorted sidemen — and I’ve seen Brian Wilson, and let me say, this is a very bad idea. Carl Wilson was the heart of the band’s live act; his death, more than Brian’s submergence below the waves of sanity, ended the band as a touring vehicle. Carl is dead; Dennis is dead (and I actually saw him in his last concert performance — he was howlingly bad then); and Bruce Johnston’s health problems have sidelined him. That leaves Mike Love, aka “The Annoying Nasal One,” Al Jardine, and Brian.

To put it generously, Brian Wilson is not really in a state to perform. He’s not really in a state to tie his shoelaces. I saw him perform a couple of years ago and I’m still wondering if I wasn’t accidentally party to someone profiteering off a forced day trip from the home. The concert was a painful experience, with Wilson unsure at times where he was or who he was. My friend and I felt very bad that we were there. (For more on that remembrance, and on Brian’s disturbing appearance on the Tavis Smiley Show, click here.) It was so upsetting that afterward my friend mused long and hard about “the Beach Boys’ mixed legacy.” Ouch!

I love the Beach Boys. “Pet Sounds” and “Smiley Smile” are on constant replay in my car. I think we should leave it at that.

You have to give the City of Santa Monica credit for doing their utmost to protect their resident businesses. Last week’s emergency preparedness seminar covered every likely eventuality — right up to zombie attacks. (See bullet points below.)

The Hollywood Fringe Festival is producing correspondents’ videos of various shows around town. The second interview in this particular roundup — about one minute in — features me talking about Moving Arts’ show, “ASAP Fables,” along with some of our Asaps (or guides; a further play on “Aesop”). (It also features two of my children in the background: the big one with the black armless t-shirt, and the small one with the close-cropped hair.) Unfortunately, in a turn of events I didn’t notice during the interview, the correspondent seems to think that the name of our theatre company is “ASAP Fables.” It’s not — it’s Moving Arts. I was sure I mentioned Moving Arts in here somewhere, but it’s not in the edit. Drat. I should also note that although I’m not the best judge of what my voice sounds like, it’s been pretty blown out the past week, what with a cough I haven’t been able to shake for three weeks. Add onto that a couple of hours of running around shrieking and cawing and this is what you get.)

By the way, we do fun stuff like this show all the time. Just in the past year, we did “The Car Plays,” a really fine one-act festival, an interactive family-friendly show called “Arachnatopia” at the Natural History Museum (another in a series of plays I’ve written but never seen), the world premiere of “Song of Extinction” at [Inside] the Ford Amphitheatre, the world premiere of “Blood & Thunder” at our original space, and now this show. We’re already talking about doing a haunted house this October. Here’s the link to sign up and keep abreast of these and other fun developments.

I just got in from “ASAP Fables,” Moving Arts’ entry in the first annual Hollywood Fringe Festival. In our show, randomly assembled teams of Moving Artists created 8-minute fables built around a witches’ brew of  strange ingredients

• a randomly chosen animal
• a randomly assigned location within Hollywood United Methodist Church
• a moral to the story
• and an impossible assignment.

In our case, we were given:

•  a crow
• the chapel
• the moral “Nobody cares that you’re miserable, so you might as well be happy”
• and the assignment to “Fill the sky with your beauty.”

And, you had to work in the quote “Be who you are, and say what you feel” (from Doctor Seuss). And you couldn’t spend more than ten bucks on your show. How much did we spend on our particular impromptu play, “Reach for the Sky?” Ten bucks. Glad the budget wasn’t nine, because we would’ve had a problem.

More about how we accomplished this, and about the overall event, tomorrow. This morning I taught my workshop, ran an errand, then got over to the church to figure out some last-minute logistics on our show with my three scene partners, then performed the show seven times. As a miserable crow, this meant lots of running around and cawing on my part. After that, it’s now time for drinks. So tomorrow I’ll let you know what we did.

But here’s my favorite audience line of the evening. One of the people who came to see the show was an older gentleman who’s been following us around almost since our inception 18 years ago. I saw him in the first group that came in and later in the courtyard he was waiting to talk to me.

“Hi, Walter,” I said.

He looked at me and said, “Lee. I didn’t recognize you at first.”

“Yeah. It’s a lot of makeup.”

“No,” he replied. “I think since last time I saw you you’ve put on weight.”

Stan Lee on last night’s Craig Ferguson show. It’s nine minutes long, but well worth watching all of it. Stan is loose and funny and vainglorious and quick-witted — all of which must have been central to his success, and which almost must have driven his collaborators (I’m sorry, co-creators), to drink.

Last week I had my new suit fitted by a tailor. I don’t think she did a good job:  the legs now ride too high and the waist is too expansive. But listening to this call in which President Johnson specifies precisely how he’d like his new pants to fit made me think that perhaps I wasn’t explicit enough. LBJ was someone who always knew exactly what he wanted, including extra room from the bunghole to the brass tacks.

Slate helps us understand why it cost Alvin Greene $10,440 to get on the South Carolina ballot.

Now if they could help us understand how an unemployed unknown who lives with his father came up with $10,440 — let alone winning the Democratic Senate primary —  they’d really be providing a public service.