This is one of the ways that addiction gets talked about – that if you just resist once, then it will start to get easier to resist as time goes by. From what I understand though – from Radiolab and Nurse Jackie and the WTF podcast and others talking about addiction in pop culture – it doesn’t work this way at all. If you refrain from something you’re addicted to – it might not get easier for a long long time.

Not that Gertrude is addicted to sex with Claudius (or is she?) …but whether this is advice for addiction or refraining from sex…it’s not really useful. Better to go with one day at a time. Skip it tonight. Then skip it tomorrow. Even if it doesn’t get easier.

Custom hides under the bed at night, or sometimes in the closet. He comes out at night to find some sense to eat – and (bonus!) to scare small children. He’s a fairly predictable monster. A little bit boring, truth be told. But a monster, all the same. He’s got the devil horns, which is pretty standard, but occasionally terrifying in the right light. He’s got a suit that covers up the bulk of his monster body. He’s a sharp dresser, Custom. He can help you get used to anything. Even his own devilish face.

This is a thing that villains do in the plays all the time. Richard the Third puts on a show of piety. Iago pretends concern and care. Angelo puts on a face of purity. Hamlet, in talking like this to his mother, is sounding a wee bit villainous. He’s not at his best in this scene is Hamlet. At least for a modern reader, watcher, engager.

But he does say Assume a virtue… which any note will tell you means Pretend, Fake – but with a modern reading, it could be a little less villainous sounding – a kind of assumed virtue, presumed virtuous until proven otherwise. Or putting on virtue, like a coat, like another identity. Like a uniform. Like – put on the nun’s habit even if you don’t feel like a nun.
Still though…villain talk.

The thing that we don’t really talk about here is that Gertrude and Claudius apparently do not share a bed. They may be honeying and making love – but it’s not in a bed they share. It requires a kind of deliberateness, it would seem. It says – “Hi honey, I’m coming over to visit you in your bed tonight. You wanna come over to mine later?”
I mean…I imagine it might be good for sleep. A king’s sleep is important for the governing of the country, after all. But what if he sleeps better with his wife by his side? I guess then, he has to ask her to come to his bed all the time.
There’s a bit of probing to do on the bed issue. For Shakespeare as well. So much of the craziness around what people imagine is his relationship with his wife stems from him leaving her the second best bed in his will. Scholarship I’ve read indicates that this may actually be a loving gesture – assuring her a place in the house forever – or assuming the 2nd best bed is actually the marriage bed. But it makes me wonder – did Shakespeare and his wife share a bed or visit one another’s beds?

Were the sleeping arrangements of the king public? We assume Queen Elizabeth slept alone (and what about King James?) And were the sleeping arrangements of the royalty of other states public?
I know that French Royalty had rather public sexuality. What about the Danes? Other royal courts? And how do the sleeping arrangements shift as you travel down the great chain of being? Does one have separate beds the more privileged one is? Certainly the poorer people couldn’t afford more than one bed, if they could afford one at all.
I could spend days in the historical rabbit holes of little things like this.

My neighbors had a dog called Good Night.
He wasn’t Good Night in this sense, though.
He was Good Night with the sense of Good Grief.
In this sense the stress is usually on the Night part.
With Good Night, the dog, sometimes it was on the “Good” – sometimes on both. If you said it like Good Grief, you get pretty equally weighted long sounds on each syllable.
Good Night was a sweet country dog.
Black coat, I think it was. Sweet but mischievous disposition.
He ranged the dirt roads and fields of Wheeler’s Cove – fierce and playful companion for the two boys of the family.
I was mostly afraid of dogs at that point in my life but I somehow have some affection for Good Night in my memory. He must have had a lot going for him to be remembered so.
My Granddad’s dogs do not fare so well in my memory – nor do any of my own.

Well that would be nice and neat, wouldn’t it? If the dark things in our hearts just hung out in half of it – two clear ventricles of bad stuff. And then, yeah, you could have a heart excision and find yourself all clean and clear of all the things that troubled you before.

But the heart doesn’t work that way – it is more a train station than a depository. The bad stuff cycles through, as well as the good – along with the blood. It pumps stuff in and pumps it back out. And yet somehow we think of it as having personalities and qualities. The hardness of the heart or the cruelty or the weakness or the soft, etc. I wonder what the actual hearts of the actual people whose hearts have been discussed this way actually look like. Is there some power in the metaphor that is actually there? There’s usually some little seedlet that relates to the truth.

My new favorite websites are Shakespeare’s Words and Etymology On-line. “Pursy” did not appear in Etymology On-line, though Google provided some etymology, just on its own.

I started with Shakespeare’s Words and it said pursy is fat, pulled up – and other things in this territory. This word only appears twice in all of the canon – here and in Timon of Athens. That made me suspicious. Is this a too self-referential definition of a word? I mean if it basically means “fat,” then Shakespeare is being redundant here. “-in the fatness of these fat times?” I don’t know.

I want pursy to relate to PURSES – to convey some sense of fat money purses hanging from everyone – everyone controlled by their purses. The fatness of those kinds of times would be interesting to me. There’s something about the meaning of the sentence, too, that conveys a sense of corruption that pursy, the way I want it to be, would fit right into, likewise, for Timon of Athens, actually.

It also has a modern feeling. In these pursy times – when high end purses are a major market element. Or maybe all times are pursy.

I mean this word is not often used. It has a level of obscurity that would allow it some re-interpretation. There are plenty of words for fat…I want a word like what I think pursy should mean.

This sort of moment would be one of the hardest for me to play were I to play Hamlet. Mostly, gender is inconsequential for me in acting. I may be a woman, but playing men is no big deal for me. I’ve done it many times. But this is a young man’s quality that is hard for me to take on. At least I cannot possibility take it on in life – maybe it I had to PLAY it, I’d be fine – but I’m not sure. Like most young men, Hamlet here demonstrates an extreme confidence in his own self worth.

I listened to a podcast on Confidence  recently and it highlighted how often at work, men will declare competency in all kinds of things that they are not (yet) competent in. One guest described two tales of an internship. She described hers as “No big deal. I’m mostly getting coffee for everyone.”
While a male colleague described his as this incredible awesome experience that’s setting him up for life. She said she was embarrassed for him as he described it – it was so out of line with reality – but it paid off – and that blustery self-aggrandisement got him somewhere.
That sense of entitlement, that natural sense of “I deserve this” or “I’m better than” or “Everything’s mine” – THAT would be the hardest thing for me to take on.

The gardener in the black hat sneaks out at night under the cover of darkness. He twirls his mustache as he makes his way to his neighbors’ compost heap. The egg shells shine in the moonlight, showing him the way. He stirs the heap with his shovel a bit to find the richest compost below. From deep in the hill, he pulls out a shovel full and brings it over to the weeds that have sprung up around the flower beds. Tenderly, with great care, he tips bits of it around the weedlets, as if he were tucking children in for the night.
He repeats this action for the weeds ringing the vegetable garden and the berry patch. He is careful not to leave any obvious signs of his presence.
It is delicate work being a gardening villain.

I am VERY good at Avoiding things – even when they are inevitable. Difficult conversations. Inevitable conflict. I can skirt and edge. I can soften out of the scene. I can disappear. I can distract. I can be so nice nothing can get through the nice onslaught.

But I have discovered that I’m not alone in this. Even the most confrontational people will avoid difficult conversations of a type. We all have to learn how to address this sort of thing, I guess.