There are ways musical theatre has permeated my life deeply, and ways it's simply rote memory. It's there everytime someone likes to propose a toast and I think "to Maureen's noble try/it went well/was the yuppie scum stomped/not counting the homeless how many tickets weren't comped"; it makes the invariable answer to the question "who am I?" the obvious "I'm Jean Valjean".

I'd like some part of this to be continous, to be ongoing.

In 2005 I didn't write here. Not once the entire year. This is like my poetry, at the edge of the season my best thoughts, best words, the things that will evoke everything I felt later for you, for a future self. A sense of writing out into the void, expanding.

It was a year of contractions. Things ended. Essentially everything as it was ended and everything as it will be began. But it was prosy. It was words like "working through some things".

I turned thirty. When I was 27 I wrote here a list of things I wanted to do before I was thirty. I didn't do many of them, but it feels so far from failure. It feels so far from who I was to who I am.

I mean. I don't even know me.