Life is happy and sad and utterly exhausting.

Today, Jason (the artistic director of Catastrophic) and I are driving to Austin, as is everyone else in Houston, it would seem.

As I may or may not have explained here, the play I’m doing is based on a tape letter that Daniel Johnston made for David Thornberry, his best friend back in 1985 or so.  The first act of the show is me performing that hour-long tape almost verbatim.  Well, tonight we’re going to meet up with David and his wife Kathy McCarty, who was also a close friend of Daniel’s and was in Glass Eye (Daniel’s favorite band back then) and eventually put out an album of covers of Dan’s songs that played a pretty big role in bringing more attention to his songwriting brilliance.

So that’s pretty huge, huh? It feels huge. To be getting the inside perspective on what the guy I’m playing was actually going through at the time he made this tape.

All of that said, I’d almost rather skip it. Not really, I know it’s going to be great. But doing this shit is kind of killing me, too. Work has been almost unmanageable, a non-stop, frustrating barrage of intensity from beginning to end, all day, every day for weeks now. Going straight from that to a few hours of talking, singing, yelling, freaking out and generally getting very excitable a few nights a week is taking an emotional toll. Not in a huge way (yet), but still. It is a lot.

Well, whatever. I’m mostly enjoying everything about doing the play. I have to remind myself occasionally that the end result is going to be a great piece of art that will be performed live in front of people, because right now it’s mostly a lot of work. Fun work.