From time to time, I've thought about where I might have veered away from the present area of difficulties, but I think my choices were sound. After three years of being frozen out of New York theatre entirely, law school was a sound choice. It's theoretically possible that I could have gone to another city, but outside of long-term local companies and quasi-companies, virtually every professional theatre in the US casts everything out of New York. As an acquaintance from undergrad who invited me to his regular nickel-ante poker games when I first moved here (and whom I later found out was playing with a marked deck) put it, quoting an old playwright: "If you don't make it here, you won't make it anywhere." And then the same corrupt culture, which I honestly didn't expect to find in any of these places, doomed my prospects in law and the academy, sequentially,
I'm not sure why I think that I'd be materially better off if I were sitting in Sarajevo or Belgrade waiting to watch some theatre at the JDP or the Sarajevo War Theatre (at Sbux for the former, and Caribou for the latter). Perhaps its simple proximity to the art outside of the corrupt system that I've been fighting to work within for decades.
To be clear, I'm not Ralph Nader (not least because I don't have a Yale law degree). I'm not crusading against the corruption within the immense industrial systems of material prosperity. I'm trying to accomplish things. And I can't help but notice that given the mimetic and profit-seeking tenor of the times, very few others here are doing the same. They seek personal approval and favor, whatever the context. Ideas have no material hold on them.
Every iota of my being is straining towards foreign shores. But, for the next few hours, I'm away from the tourist hordes and sub-human dangerous ones, and I have some piecework and a small stack of useful books in front of me.
And as for the rest of the day, and the evening, sufficient will be the day for the evil therein.
Hic Rhodus. For the nonce.