Tea and empathy.

I've had a day to think about it, and the blog, it seems to me, is best for communicating with three very specific sets of people:

• blog enthusiasts, who troll about all day looking for interesting insights into anonymous strangers
• fans, who, via my website or previous positive experience with this here blog, come to visit on a semi-regular basis
• web searchers, whose terms are so specific that my blog (out of a shmazillion, n.t.m. all the other types of accessible, search-able pages out there) pings back on the old search-engine sonar

Sew, these being the cases, this is the best venue for venting, extemporizing, theorizing and...er...empiricizing on the issues of theatre, writing, circus and the generally creative life altogether. I have Douglas Adams to thank for this insight, and the value it may actually inherently have. I'm not altogether clever about these things, these emerging (yes, it's a blog, they've been emerged for some time now I know SHUT UP) forms of communication, but he certainly was. He was writing about this phenomenon fifteen years before it came to pass.

And so, dear reader, what is to follow will be various observations and extrapolations on what I like to think of as The Third Life {(c)(tm) JeffWills, Hugin+Munin Productions Ltd., Inc., LLC, PDQ, WTF}.

The Third Life is that life lived outside of the norms and expectations of mainstream society. Let me be clear that I don't consider this life special in the sense of rarity; I believe we all have ambitions and inspirations that are outside the frame of expectation. I also believe that we are all interconnected, a whole, in spite of where we come from or what our ideologies may be.

However, some of us embrace a life that, from the outside, seems to be lacking in immediate compensation, a life of more dreaming and possibility than substance and reward. Living that kind of life is hard as hell. What keeps us with it? That's a good question.

Incidentally, I haven't (and possibly never will) read "The Artist's Way."

Enough loftiness. My next post will probably address what I consider to be a conflict of interests between comedy and improvisation. And there will be fart jokes.

Oh yes: There will be fart jokes.