The Happy Place

It's hard to overstate how much I love the Thanksgiving holiday. Four-plus days off from work; I don't have to travel anywhere, and what with my friend Ezra's fondness for taking in Thanksgiving orphans such as myself, I don't even have to do anything--just show up at a specific time, carrying a bottle of wine, then sit back with friends and eat, drink and maketh the merry.

It wasn't always thus. Back in college, the holiday was too short to fly home, but the dorms closed so I always had to find someplace to stay. This was particularly awkward my Freshman year, when I found myself at a cast party the weeked before Thanksgiving, essentially begging the gathering for a place to stay. I found one (and ended up having a memorable vegetarian Thanksgiving that consisted, as I recall, of rice, rice and rice); but the next year I ended up staying at the YMCA on Huntington for the holiday, which was a whole different kind of memorable. (The infamous "Hail Mary" pass from Doug Flutie to Gerard Phelan came that particular weekend, and I watched the game on a tiny TV in a tiny room at the Y, sitting on my tiny bed and staring at the screen--remember, I'm a Miamian, so I was rooting for the Hurricanes, not for B.C.--while yelling things in complete shock.)

But things change, and my Thanksgivings slowly got better and better, until I am now where I am, ridiculously happy with my holiday. I ended up seated next to the utterly wonderful Sarah Underwood (she was also in Outta Sync), whom I hadn't seen in months; and at a certain point during dessert, I felt it come over me. "Ah, there it is," I said to the nice people near me (it was a very long table that covered, I think, at least two time zones), "my stomach just reached its happy place."

And then, as is always the way of things, instead of stopping there I finished what was on my plate and my stomach promptly moved to the "overstuffed and overwhelmed" place. But so what? It's not like I had any place to be; or any place I would rather be.

Then today, I scratched an itch: the single most distressing casualty of the Zen Noir distribution has been that for weeks I have had absolutely no time to do any writing. (Although I have to say--the fact that our DVD kept selling all through Thanksgiving day, in surprisingly good numbers, was also extremely pleasant.) So this morning, I sat down with my "Marathon" script and made just a tiny little change; a texture thing, really, although it does tie up a storyline that had been left dangling, and without a line of dialogue being spoken. I'd realized weeks ago that I needed to tie up that loose thread, I even knew what to do; even so, it wasn't till today that I could actually sit down and do it. It felt spectacularly satisfying.

The release of the movie will end quite soon, when we open in Chicago. I won't be traveling for that, and after that we only have to keep DVD sales moving along. At last, I should be able to get back to what I really do, writing. About bloody time.

At the same time, the stories out of Iraq today are so horrifying that I simply can't look at them. Maybe tomorrow I'll be able to think about such things, but not now, no, not now.