I am forcing myself to be very vigilant, despite the exhaustion. Having survived the headwinds of the winter, and not knowing exactly their source, I am acutely conscious of the fact that there are a great number of people in this culture with the means at their disposal of doing a great number of things to other people.
The way ineluctably seems that of Thoreau -- Walden it must be.
(The memory recurs of a production of Much Ado in conservatory--I was Dogberry, and during one rehearsal, I switched a malapropism a bit, and "Be Vigitant" became "Be Viagrant" (this was 1999). The director, one of the grand old men of American regional theatre, with a bit of awkward stammering, kindly suggested that I not do that. Much of doing classical comedy consists of knowing when there's sufficient freedom to do things like that. The opposite extreme was in Cincinnati one Sunday matinee, when some of the cast members (I conspicuously absented myself from the game) began swapping in names of social diseases for different character names. As it turned out, one of the handful of people who had shown up to watch the fledgling classical company that Sunday afternoon was a Shakespeare professor at a local college. That said, I have indulged in the odd game of "pass the penny" in outdoor drama (best defense: midarm handshakes) to while away the long summer evenings while playing the angry Indian.)