When I started this project, I was in a café that has now changed names and styles several times since. The last time I saw it, it was a Korean Barbeque restaurant. For all I know, it’s closed entirely now.

But then, it was a coffee shop – and I decided to embark on this project of using a sentence from Hamlet every day as my writing project. I remember doing some math – trying to work out how long it might take me to get through the entire play.

I remember thinking – “Gosh, I might be in my 40s by the time I’m done. “
Well – I’ve been in my 40s for a year now and I’m just coming up on the halfway point, I’d guess. The sense of time spreading out ahead of a person. . . well, it’s quite remarkable.

It is so long. And so short.
That café came and went. But this structure remained. And it could be a long time before I’ve exhausted it. It has been long enough and not quite as long as it could have been.

What is he trying to DO with this line? I can understand that he might have just noticed his mother laughing or flirting or something and so this line might come from there. But why say it to Ophelia? And why make this two hour crack? Has it been two hours since they had their nunnery scene? Is there some sense that he’s comparing Ophelia to his mother – trying to encourage merriness in her after their difficult letter returning scene? Like, there’s a sense of – “There’s my mother doing just fine after the death of her husband. Maybe you could cheer up too, two hours after our breakup.” Or “I’m like my mother – see? We’re both laughing after my father’s death. Look at us making merry.”

But also – his father is about to die again within these two hours in the sense that the show they’re about to see features a re-enactment of his death. Maybe it’s fore-shadowing.

And the actual news of how he died has happened within those two hours as well, meta-theatricaly – even though he died before the play started, we discover it in the two hours of the play (Well, three or four when it’s played all the way through.)
It could be a meta-meta-theatre moment.

Be merry, certainly.
But while you’re at it could you also make art, make music, make theatre, make dance, make peace, make love, make order, make time, make discoveries, make way for others behind you.

The sign outside the shop reads:Singular Jig-maker

All jigs made here – 

Fun, brisk, hopping sort of dances, songs, tricks, games, tools for sawing and cutting in two.

In the window – another sign – a testimonial that reads:

When I need a jig, God is my jig-maker. No one beats God in the jig-making department. Come in and get a jig today.

I, too, have been accused of merriness. Not in those words exactly, as merry has been shoe-horned into such a small Xmas box of language that no one uses it but in relationship to the holidays and also to go-rounds. Otherwise – we tend to go with happy. I’ve heard many varieties of “You’re happy. You look happy. What a happy person.” Which is funny. Because I don’t usually feel that way. I may LOOK happy, indeed.

What I am, often, is friendly. And I hate to be called on that, too. Like when the folks with clipboards and causes call out to me on the street – usually it’s “Do you have a minute for gay rights or animals or children or the environment?” but at least once, someone called out, “You look friendly – come talk to me.”

I hated that. I wrote a whole thing about it – maybe even in this context, I can’t remember. But somehow it shook me. If there’s anyone I didn’t want to appear friendly to, it’s the folks on the street with clipboards. I want to look busy and unapproachable in that scenario. But. . .the friendliness snuck out, I thought. I felt called out – revealed. And I suddenly understood how that friendly person has so often gotten me into trouble. This was exactly what I was hoping to avoid with my friendly self – Trouble. And yet it got me there with some regularity.

I’m less friendly now, less merry, too. But the friendliness and merriness that remains is of a more honest sort. The sort I actually feel, instead of a mask to deter assailants.

And then today, the day I typed this, seven months later. One of those clipboard people called out, “You look friendly.” TODAY. AGAIN. I hate it.

Cue the Nothing Montage.
Cordelia upon Cordelia saying “Nothing” and “Nothing, my lord.”
Followed by Lear upon Lear with “Nothing will come of Nothing” and all the other Lear characters who reference this nothing again and again.
Cue also Julie Andrews singing “Nothing comes from Nothing. Nothing ever could.”
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
There must be, too, some nihilism in the Nothing montage.
Vast landscapes of nothing.
Zeroes.
Mushroom clouds.
It’s remarkable how quickly nothing turns to SOMETHING.
There is almost nothing that is well and truly nothing.

It’s a fair thought to imagine a Hamlet lying between one’s maiden legs, too but it isn’t ladylike to say so. The fiction that women don’t enjoy a little Hamlet in dark places is one of the most insidious fictions of the patriarchy. For women who might really enjoy the Prince of Denmark lying in her lap – and I do mean Country Matters here – it’s insidious to pretend that we wouldn’t, to play coy, to just want to be overcome, our will surrendered to the conquering hero.

That’s the root of rape culture. This belief that only men want sex and women simply tolerate it – or are just driven wild once our wills have been subverted, then we let loose all our secret desires. For all the women who have no desire for Hamlet to put his head in her lap and would maybe prefer for Gertrude to put her head in her lap or to just put her own hand in her lap, we, the women who’d quite like a bit of Hamlet, or his ilk, might want to find a way to be clear about our own desires, to be honest about them, to shift the culture from No somehow meaning Yes to so many men, to a world where we can say yes enthusiastically.

It might be the kind of world in which Ophelia could say to Hamlet, “You know, I had a dream just last night where you did just that” instead of having to pretend she hadn’t heard or hadn’t understood.

To me – it is a fair thought. To Ophelia – it might or might not be. Hamlet’s been such a dick in this scene and in the previous, it might not be such a fair thought. For others – it is decidedly not a fair thought. And for all of us – it is not a fair thought if it were not with our consent.

The fairness of the thought is entirely conditional.

Of course she didn’t think you meant country matters, you dick!
And she especially didn’t think you meant CUNT-ry matters as some Hamlets like to play it. You’re in public, you jerk. Even if you’ve been enjoying all sorts of country matters with this woman in the privacy of your own bedrooms, you don’t talk about them in front of your parents at a damn play!

This is all assuming that this reference to country matters is a sexual metaphor. It just occurred to me that it could be country as in Denmark rather than country as opposed to city. Country matters would then be matters of state – which, as a Prince, he could certainly be interested in.

However – in context – this little possibility is pretty slim – as what could affairs of state have to do with whether or not Hamlet gets to lie in Ophelia’s lap.
In any case, I’m having trouble seeing Hamlet’s playing with Ophelia here as the harmless charm offensive it’s usually played as – at the moment – to me – it’s mostly just offensive.

There’s a couch, in my memory, and on it, I am sitting with a man’s head in my lap. I stroke his brown curly hair because it’s just right there and seems to be the thing to do. He’s a man. With is own apartment now.
We watch an episode of Kids in the Hall, wherein I’ve heard of but never been able to see, due to it’s being on cable. I know this man to be a player. I have heard stories about beach weeks and bedrooms and I have seen him in action with a girl on a bus, many years ago. But there’s a tenderness on this couch. Something I didn’t really see in those two months when we went together, when I tried to express my affection and he teased me for it. And despite all those reasons I have to push this man away. I have ended up here on this couch in my memory (Is it yellow? I think it’s yellow. Or chartreuse.) because I longed for him ever since – even with all the reasons I knew him to be bad news.
How I ended up here on this couch, I don’t recall. How I left and never returned, I also can’t recall. I suspect he tried to push my boundaries again and I made my permanent exit but all I really recall is the couch, the lap, the hair and the TV show.
If I could find my journal from that time, I’m sure the rest of the story would rush back but here, now, at least twenty years later, it is simple. It is a man with his head upon my lap.

The last time Hamlet saw Ophelia he was breaking up with her, quite cruelly. He left her in tears, convinced he’d lost his mind. He’d said some really shitty things, told her to get her to a nunnery a bunch of times and then fucked right off without even saying farewell. And now he’s asking her if he should lie in her lap? Bad news, Ophelia, this guys is Bad News.The minute you dry your eyes, he comes swanning back again, all charm and dirty jokes and chitty chat.

I’d like Ophelia to be able to say something like, “Have you forgotten what a dick you were to me not long ago? Wasn’t that you who told me to get me to a nunnery? And now you want to cuddle up to me and lie in my goddamn lap? Who do you think you are, Prince of Denmark?

It’s like Hamlet forgets what he did before and I think the audience forgets, too. We like this merry Hamlet and want Ophelia to welcome him, enjoy him and we forget how he’s just left her.