You can close your eyes and just listen.

Here are two:

You can vent your frustrations, and send us the result. Just a reminder, there’s a Hatemail Recording Session coming up on the 29th!

You could also let Kathryn Daniels take it away. Kathryn has been a good friend to the Hatemail project from the very beginning, and is a licensed massage therapist (there are all kinds of cool letters after her name!). As a subtle hint, she takes private clients!

So get it out, and soothe it away!

I read a New York Times Opinion article recently about our human tendency to anthropomorphize machines and assign the badge “Artificial Intelligence” to robots that simply aren’t intelligent. (I suspect he’s referring to articles like this one.) The opinion article is a great read, but it’s kinda long and it seems to conclude in a different place than it starts out, so if I were a high school English teacher, I’d give the essay a B.

At its core, this piece is a warning to us humans not to infuse our technological advancements with religious or philosophical ideologies. And I must say, I completely agree with that statement. My favorite point the author makes is this:

In fact, the nuts and bolts of A.I. research can often be more usefully interpreted without the concept of A.I. at all. For example, I.B.M. scientists recently unveiled a “question answering” machine that is designed to play the TV quiz show “Jeopardy.” Suppose I.B.M. had dispensed with the theatrics, declared it had done Google one better and come up with a new phrase-based search engine. This framing of exactly the same technology would have gained I.B.M.’s team as much (deserved) recognition as the claim of an artificial intelligence, but would also have educated the public about how such a technology might actually be used most effectively.

It punctuates exactly what he’s trying to state before going on to make grander observations about religious wars and the concept of personhood.

However, it did get me thinking – not so much about personhood or religion, but about the meaning of intelligence.

I take an Existentialist view to most things, but especially people, and I freely admit my favorite saying came first from Jean-Paul Sartre: “Existence preceeds essence.” Without getting too deeply into the philosophy itself, I want to make it known that the train of thought that follows is rooted in this idea. I like it because it grounds me.

So, on that note: the pessimistic view to take away from this is that we never asked to be born and yet we were, thus providing a lifetime of misery and suffering at the consequences of our own actions, and, as Sartre put it, “We are condemned to be free.” The optimistic answer is that freedom is beautiful, and if we own up to our responsibilities and accept the consequences of our actions, and if we make good choices, we can create a joyful existence for ourselves.

Building off that: all the misery and joy that befalls us in our lifetimes is a result of our actions. And our actions don’t just happen, we choose to act as we do. And we don’t just choose from thin air – our brains make those decisions for us, consciously or subconsciously, and it always boils down to a yes or a no. “Do I do this? Yes or no? If so, how? If not, what do I do instead?” It’s a butterfly effect, upwards and outwards.

Now, to break it down: our brains, I feel confident in saying, do everything in a yes or no progression. Consciously, this is how we decide to act. Subconsciously, they keep our bodies functioning. (“Do I give the order to release this hormone? Yes or no? If not, what happens instead?” And so on.) It’s all yes or no…or, in other words, binary code.

Here comes the awkward part. Bear with me.

Emotions are just chemical reactions inside you. Our brains controls them. Our brains use this yes-or-no functionality to do so. Emotions are not magic. They are evolutionary byproducts of increasingly complex coding. (This hereditary coding is what’s gotten us to this point in time.)

Emotions are the root of our belief that we humans are special. They fuel the idea that we are somehow more than just highly advanced monkeys, which are just advanced mammals with prehensile appendages, which are just advanced animals that evolved within highly complex ecosystems, etc.

What I’m getting at, really, is that we’re just nature’s versions of complex machines. We’re the natural version of Artificial Intelligence. We’re advanced, yes, but our intelligence doesn’t make us gods. We’re animals – anything more is an illusion.

And I know this may come across as cold and unfeeling. But I don’t mean to say that our emotions aren’t valid, nor that our beliefs ought not to guide us. Happiness may be just a combination of chemicals swirling around inside us, but happiness is still very real. Our actions are still our own. Religious and philosophical ideas are always worth exploring.

So, getting back to the original point: let’s not infuse our technological advancements with religious or philosophical ideologies. But also let’s not be afraid of technology, even if religion and philosophy sneaks in, because robots are only as human as we can make them…and we’re only as “human” as we can make ourselves.

That’s an awful lot of philosophy, young man…

Yeah, yeah. I’m young. I get that. I’m not even 30, and here I am trying to break down our dearly-held beliefs and upset the social norms.

False. I’m not some rebel-rouser, here to cause trouble. What I want from posting this article on the internet is for people to see what we have to work with. I promise, it’s okay that our brains function like robots. We are still proactive. We still create art. Our opinions are not invalid, and life is still as complex and wonderful and frightening as it ever was. We need not worry about being special, nor concern ourselves with justifying our existence.

We can debate until the end of time on the nature of our lives, but once we realize that the nature of our lives is not for us to discover but for us to determine – for ourselves — then we can be free of the fear and uncertainty, and we can move forward into the future with confidence and grace.

I came up with a simple “script,” really just a bullet point list of the flow of a scene. I usually based this off of some ideas they had, or fleshed out a story they told me. I then came up with a list of assignments, i.e., Director, Art Director, Cinematographer, Actors, and gave them specific assignments, then turned them loose, guiding them and making suggestions as the “Producer.”

Here’s the results, I’m really proud of these kids:

Congrats to you, Bil, and to you, Trevor, our gracious host, for another amazing Hatemail Recording Session! The next one takes place just before my birthday, Sunday, August 29th. Be there! Add to the numbers!

6:50 PM

6:35 PM

6:10 PM

5:45 PM

5:11 PM

4:47 PM

4:40 PM

4:39 PM

4:12 PM

4:05 PM

3:52 PM

3:45 PM

3:35 PM

3:15 PM

Needless to say, all the free time I thought I had today was instead spent laboring to clean up the joint before our audience arrived tonight. It was a giant mess, but we were able to clean the visible parts of the theatre before our guests came. This is a victory, considering how much there was. There is also much more to do in the basement playing space, so I’ll be heading down there for a couple hours more before coming back north to the Hatemail recording session.

So, after several hours of covering ourselves in sweat and sewer grime, we somehow found the energy to put on a play to make the cleaning worthwhile. And it was the most amazing performance of this show anyone has ever seen. I mean, seriously, everyone was on fire tonight. It was fantastic. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s the kind of show I wish we could do every single night…without the flood first.

And yeah, this pattern I now find myself in (work hard to clean theatre, do awesome show, work hard again to clean theatre some more) seems very much like the weather itself: hot and miserable, cooling and fun, hot and miserable again. And that’s just life, man. Ups and downs. Bad times and good times. It’s all cyclical in scope.

I write like
Vladimir Nabokov

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Some mathematical algorithm thinks I write like Vladimir Nabokov – modern day Nabokov? Sure, I could see that, because modern-day Nabokov is dead, whereas I apparently am too alive to get any writing done.

After the prospect of writing professionally for a website came up (see: O wretched source of income), I decided that I would need to do more with the blog I currently maintain. I also wanted to make sure that all my outside writing projects got finished in a swift and efficient manner. Of course, this was before I had 17 days straight at Dream Theatre, interspersed with a 40-hour day job work week, plus a sudden summer burst of social obligations. Whenever I have time here at my apartment, I sleep. I spend more time at my office than I do in my own apartment because of the show and all these friendly outings. Needless to say, the crap you see from me here on Tip Your Waiter is just about the extent of my available brainpower, and that’s not much.

But I am making strides at the office to start integrating myself with the Santa Monica offices, including a self-started weekly e-mailer to my team, so that dream is as alive as all this social sleep-walking. Also, now that the show is open, I’ll have several days a week to get home and let my brain roll. And those are weekdays, so (with few exceptions) I won’t have any birthday parties to attend or friends’ shows to see or bars to explore or whatever.

What exactly is it that I need to get done? Well, there’s my medical pulp crime sci-fi thriller mystery novel - I have a solid first draft complete and some edits to make now, so that’s first. Once that’s done, I can begin the process of submitting it around to get published. Piece of cake.

While I await responses from publishing houses and agents and so on, I can get to work revising an already-completed draft of a play about struggling artists called “The Mimes.” Once that’s done, I can set a future date for a staged reading or something. Simple as can be.

While I await the staged reading, I can maybe work on a draft of another play that I have a complete outline for. The story is there, it’s all ready to write, I just need to give it dialogue and personality and fluidity and consistency and pathos. That won’t take very long.

After that…I dunno, we’ll see where I am when that happens.

I realize this is not a very secure strategy for leaving the day job world by 2016. Shut up. My hope is that by the start of next year, I’ll have come up with a more sound plan, with benchmark goals and everything.

It’s becoming more and more clear to me, by the way, that part of this no-day-job by 2016 involves me and Devon being back in California by the time that happens. It’s gonna be hard to leave Chicago, though. So hard, in fact, that I’ll have to write Chicago a love song as I go. And it will have to be this awesome:

“Orestes” opens this Thursday down at the Dream Theatre in Pilsen, the Heart of Chicago. “Orestes” completes the Agon Trilogy, which has won Best New Play of 2010 by the Chicago Reader.

Here’s why you should come see it:

1) It takes place in Hell.

In this play, Hell is cold and dark. Forget what you believe about burning fire and torturous machines. Electra finds her way to the black pit in the second act of this show, and there she finds the long suffering of people in their own private sequestered rooms, tortured by themselves and able only to torture Electra once she finds them. This show shows us not the physical pain of Hell, but the mental anguish of loneliness and lost hope.

2) All your questions about Chorus will be answered.

I’m not giving anything else away. You have to be shown by the cast, not told by a blog.

3) The audience matters here.

In this play, moreso than in any other play I’ve experienced (either as an actor or an audience member), the audience are characters. There is a purpose to the actors’ talking to the audience, not for the simple sake of “breaking the 4th wall” or for any kind of shock value. The audience not only has a presence to the characters onstage, but a history. It’s thrilling and it draws you in as completely as possible, and there’s no hokey “audience participation” necessary. (Read: do not shout out occupations for the cast. They will cut you if you do this. Really.) Don’t be fooled by Tryphosia in the lobby before the show, you will actually be scared by the importance you bring as the audience member.

4) Seeing live theatre is awesome.

You can’t get an experience like this staying at home, and you can’t get it at the movies. It’s not expensive, and it’ll make you think things you never thought you’d think. Don’t be shy. Live a little.

Tickets are here:

This is an article about an incident from May 2008 that promotes a rumor (disclaimer: JUST A RUMOR) about one of the world’s wealthiest people, who plays basketball for a living, being the dreaded enemy of waiters everywhere.

The article announces in its title that this is an unsubstantiated rumor, so I took two extra steps to see if anything more relevant could be found. Why the lunch-hour investigative journalism, Bil? Because I care, that’s why.

An article about the same incident from Cleveland Scene gives a little more insight:

An amateur cover-up of LeBron James’ tightwad tipping habits

Again, this is all unsubstantiated, but one valid point sticks with me:

LeBron’s handlers also tried to downplay the incident, telling the New York Post that LeBron misread the bill. “There was a misreading of the receipt, and the appropriate tip was provided.”

But it’s not exactly believable spin, since waiters possess the vision of starved falcons when it comes to reading the gratuity line on credit-card slips. And when you’re stiffed that bad, chances are you’re gonna re-read it three or four times — purely out of disbelief that a man that rich could be that cheap.

The next clue is in the next paragraph:

And as a frequent patron of XO, LeBron knows that dinner for two equals the down payment on a new yacht, which is why he had a gofer shuttle over a $200 tip the next day.

If this much is true, then a quiet bribe to nip a PR disaster in the bud seems to have done it’s work well enough. And hush money is more believable than quotes in a newspaper.

I’ll say it again: I don’t have any reason to believe or disbelieve any of this. It’s all internet rumors. However, since the guy chose to play in Miami instead of in Chicago, I’m going to choose to believe it’s absolutely true. Jerk.

Miami can have him. I hope the restaurant scene there knows what they’re in for. I hope they accidentally spill coffee on his $8,000 suit or something.

I don’t even like basketball. It’s the principle of the thing. The rich and famous set the example because, well, they are rich and famous. If they don’t tip well, what will become of our society?