Filed by Bil at 11:20 pm under Activism, General

All righty then.

It’s been a while. Apologies. I have a handful of excuses for disappearing from this blog, one of them being the absence of my own personal laptop at home. There have been three posts in the last two and a half months, and they were so far in between that tipyourwaiter.org can be considered “dormant” for that time period.

But that time period is over now. I have my laptop again. And I didn’t even have to bribe anyone.

How did I get away with it, you ask? How did I grease the wheels without any grease? Simple. Human error. Beautiful, serendipitous human error that happened to work out in my favor. And no, not my human error.

Here’s the story: sometime in the summer (July or August, whenever that first giant-ass rain storm of the summer was) my laptop was sitting innocently enough on the OTHER SIDE OF THE ROOM where some windows were accidentally left open. Due to the hurricane-like wind of that particular storm, the rain reached that other side of the room and my laptop drowned like a turkey. Two things were fortunate about that scenario: 1) people do not eat laptops when they die, and 2) it didn’t really die; it’s a machine. It was never alive.

Suffice to say, due to some of my busy schedule acting in one show while simultaneously trying to direct and produce another show, I never found the time to take my laptop in to the Genius Bar to have the bearded wise ones take a look at it. (This busy schedule is another one of my rock-solid excuses for not blogging all summer.) Finally, a couple weeks ago, now that I was only house managing/jumping out of the shadows with a chainsaw twice a night (believe it or not, this was actually took less of my time), I was able to take it to the Mac store. We happened to have a frayed battery-recharging plug around the apartment, so I cleverly brought that with me and blamed my computer’s inability to wake up on it. They bought it (suckers!) and said they would fix the computer free of charge, as it is still under warranty.

Six days later (that’s six days of hopping around with excitement that I would have it back), they called and said it looked like water damage. Water damage is not covered under the warranty, they said, and if I wanted it back it would cost over $750. In this economy? Bullshit! I was crushed, of course, not for sentimental reasons but because that’s a lot of money. I thought about selling my body to pay for it, or worse, asking about a payment plan, but pretty soon I started to give in and even began to reconsider my hatred of eMachines. It was a dark time.

Well, luck favors the lucky, and sure enough two days after the first election where the candidate that I voted for won, we got the word that somebody somewhere had screwed up the paperwork on my computer, and they went ahead and fixed it. Since we had not asked them to fix it (again – who has $750?) they said they would have to give it back to me for free. So I went and picked it up, no questions asked, and so far…so far, it works magnificently. Look at me. I’m blogging again.

It’s not that I couldn’t do it on another computer, but I don’t want to blog while at work (my co-workers are there) and I don’t want to hog Devon’s computer while at home. But it’s back on. And this time, it’s purpose-driven.

No, really, there is a purpose to this renewed blogging life. A spirit of service, if you will. Part of that involves getting a diverse set of authors writing at least once a week (each!) again. Multiple minds, multiple topics, multiple posts, multiplicity all around. Why? For what purpose? That will be divulged later. What it is exactly is not the point right now.

Let me just leave with this, however: Obama has a good point, we must think about serving others in this country. I feel right now a sense of duty that my skills must be applied. What can I do? Well, I am a trained theatre artist. My college education was paid for me, and I owe it to those who paid to use that education. I owe it to those who took the time and energy to teach me to use that training. I chose to major in theatre on my own, nobody told me to, and I did it for selfish reasons (mainly: because I love it). So now I must create. It’s like Batman: why bother with the ninja training if you’re not going to fight crime? I live in a place where people actually go see live theatre; I owe it to these patrons to offer theatre, and to entertain them, to transport them temporarily to somewhere fun and fantastical and gut-wrenching and weird and thought-provoking and mindless. Hard times? Entertainment can help. Social injustice? Entertainment can help. Golden age? Entertainment can – well, entertain. So I’m going to do my part to use my skills and ideas to enrich this community. That’s the drive. Details will follow in the coming weeks. We’re on schedule so far.

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P.S. Go Back to Maxico! is back as well…for those who are into that sort of thing.