HANGING ON FOR DEAR LIFE!

My friend, actor and comedian Joe Keyes, used to say, “I’m being dragged behind my life.” I think that’s the perfect way to put those times when you’re not just busy, you’re just… being dragged behind your life.

We were in Minnesota for a week over Christmas, visiting family and friends. We stay with my parents. They have a spare room in the basement, and it has what we call the “birth control bed.” It’s their old sleep number bed and it’s got two separate mattresses which comprise the bed itself. THR and I cannot sleep anywhere near each other in this configuration: the individual mattresses are not wide enough for both of us, without one of us being on the crack between the mattresses. When we’re each on our separate mattress, it feels like we’re in separate counties. We don’t sleep well or much.

And it’s never enough time. Is it ever? It feels like a week of nonstop blabbing, catching up with people, in ways you cannot do over the phone. I always tell THR, “I love going – and I love coming home!”

We come back home to Austin, and three days later I leave for Philadelphia for a Cinematic Titanic show at the Keswick Theater. It’s a great theater, and they treat us reeeeeeel nice! A great audience, making it all so much fun…

And the day I left for Philadelphia, my parents got in their giant pickup truck to drive to Austin. They were at our house when THR and I got home from him picking me up at the airport on New Year’s eve.

Good god, my parents have been here since LAST YEAR!!

HAAHAHAHAA!

I never tire of that joke.

My Dad and THR are rebuilding our deck. All week long I’ve smelled that familiar wood and sawdust smell and the sounds of Skil saws that I grew up with. My father is a relentless woodworker and carpenter, and it’s so wonderful to hear the rhythms of him working. Those sounds, the beats, the smells of his working with wood, the occasional sharp, punctuating “gottdamn its” that I know so well, only this time it’s in our own home.