Last week, as I was driving down the Dan Ryan, I saw an amazing sight. There was a 12' aluminum ladder skidding diagonally across the lanes of traffic, with a sheet of angry sparks. The attendant noise of metal scraping concrete was like the hiss of a great angry snake. I swerved and managed to avoid it. I've no idea where the ladder came from, but it cut across my consciousness as boldly as it cut across the six lanes of traffic. It happens that I am afraid of ladders, but this is the first that frightened me in a horizontal position. What could this errant ladder mean?

I was also bitten by a dog this weekend and had an allergy attack during the middle of the matinee (of a one act show). Other than that, I am fine. The bite is a flesh wound. The allergy attack has passed. I quite unwisely chose to get ripped the same evening of the onset of the attack. It was the worst hangover I've had in a long time. Some lessons must be learned through experience. Never put your body through withdrawal when it is already on the offensive.

The allergic reaction was entirely my fault. And I do know better than to eat foods to which I am allergic. I ate at a noodle shop last Saturday and ordered a dish that had a preponderance of carrots heaped atop it. Unexpectedly. As much as I tried to eat around it, I probably had a couple of tablespoons' worth of carrot. Despite all those allergy shots that were inflicted upon me as a child, I cannot eat even that much.

Yesterday was bookended by piss. I awoke to the sound of a dog pissing very near to the bed where I lay and went to bed very shortly after my elderly cat decided to urinate all over one of my merino sweaters. He's very sneaky. He perpetrated this crime while pretending to peer intently into a nearby stack of LPs. Misdirection is key to that little trick, as it is in ventriloquism. There were also all sorts of snafus with the video equipment as I was trying to finish a project.

It was a shitty day, with the exception of an evening spent at the theatre. I went to see Man From Nebraska with the OFW group. It was breathtaking. The director of OFW stars in the show. I'd seen him onstage before, years ago, but was amazed by his skill. I am so glad that I managed to make it, as I had contemplated calling the box office to release my ticket and sleeping instead. There are few things, in my opinion, that are better than sleep, and this was one of them. Then I went home and slept in my own bed. Ah, bliss. Now, if I can train my mother not to pound on my bedroom door like the Chicago Police... She "knocked" on it this morning to awaken me and my entire body jumped from the bed like a startled fish and just hung there for a moment.

I paid a visit to one of my favorite bookstores in Chicago today. I qualify that because my favorite bookstore remains Prairie Lights. They just aren't in walking distance anymore. Just as my favorite record store is a thousand miles away. I went in to pick up a copy of Sense and Sensibility and ended up buying a tribute album to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It is, as the post-it sign in the store said, amazing. The source material is pretty incredible to begin with, but the covers are fabulously funny and moving. For example, Sleater-Kinney and Fred Schneider (aka the man from the B-52s) performing "Angry Inch" or Steven Colbert's "Ladies and Gentlemen". Yoko Ono's "Exquisite Corpse" made the dog growl, but he's generally cranky. Cranky enough to bite me and wake me up with his pissing. The album is to benefit the Hetrick-Martin Institute, which runs the Harvey Milk school in NYC. I highly recommend it.

Tonight is my first show night without a show call in a long time. It hasn't really sunken in that my show has closed, but as I told one of my friends this afternoon, I suspect that it may this evening. It can be very hard when that evening rolls around, as one gets the itch to go somewhere around call time, that feeling of a forgotten obligation. So, I'm rocking out to Hedwig and waiting for Lewis.