FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: this blurry fox sleeping in my friend Nell's garden

I was once hired to send out provocative emails to the feral film critics of Small Regional Markets. My job entailed throwing pebbles at the windows of the San Francisco Chronicle at midnight, slipping ransom notes under the bedroom door of the Boston Globe, and orchestrating failed meet-cute-moments with The Seattle Times; loitering by the honey dews, praying our hands would graze over the same ripe melon. For this, as well as scheduling targeted social media ads, I was given a handful of ducats every two weeks and access to all-you-can-eat mixed nuts. This is 100% true if not entirely accurate.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Dear Reader, I was just trying to get their attention. ¹

Shuffle the papers, clear the throat, look through the camera — See? You’re looking at the back of the lens but this will feel like eye contact to the audience on the other side. Punch with your eyes. Clear your mind. You are an eleven-year-old green belt, the screen is plywood, and eternal glory is always on the other side.

A few days ago, I was wedged into the back of a classroom with some of the best and brightest — I was not the best nor the brightest, I was filming the best & brightest to promote the program which had assembled aforementioned best and brightest into the room to attract even better and brighter in the future. Does this make sense? Life is short, don’t read it again, just keep moving!!! One of the brightest-best was reading out the Terms and Conditions of a major social media company and, as we all sat for a moment inside the sinking feeling of living trapped within a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide agreement I realized that I hadn’t sent out a Pillow Fort in awhile.

Shame on me!²

And so, here we are, August already, at my little press conference.

There will be a time for questions at the end, but please don’t start lining up just yet.

It’s been a busy stretch! Just the other day, for example, my friend Nick told me I should move my savings (quadruple digits but we’re working on it! Bird by bird/buck by buck) into a Wealthfront Cash Account to collect 5% APY instead of the twenty annual pennies I’d been getting from the US BANK account I opened in elementary school (Go Koalas!). Growth is possible. It’s never too late for a change. I hope my financially savvy choices can serve as an inspiration for some and a warning for everyone else.

Since my last bulletin, I flew to Baltimore to film a series of YouTube videos for one of the top asphalt magazines in the United States.³ Everything is fluid but only some things are 300 degrees Fahrenheit.⁴ We’d get up early and fill our cameras with sweaty footage of pouring, rolling, cooling, dumping, breaking, digging, work.

Bought steel-toed boots and cargo pants for the shoot and got a rush out of filling my pockets to the BRIM.

Driveways and parking lots were born before our very eyes a mere stone’s throw from Civil War battlefields. One night at the end of a long day my co-worker and I both listened to the Presidential Debate on our respective phones at opposite ends of the rental house. Dread and dead tired. This was was already one month and/or a million years ago.

WE’RE DOING IT LIVE

When I got back to Chicago, I filmed my friend John Michael’s show SPANK BANK TIME MACHINE during it’s run at Steppenwolf. It’s a raunchy, absurd, heartfelt one-man show about grief, friendship, and the live-saving-time-traveling-potential of Narcan to bring back people who have just OD’d. Catch it if you can!

I’ve been filming and editing more live shows lately and it’s been a blast. I just edited and locked a comedy special my friend Blythe directed (TBA soon hopefully!) and now have a couple other live shows in the ol’ queue. Cut to the Close-Up, audience reaction, go wide, bump the laugh, pull the pause, tighten and tweak and punch up (and believe: eternal glory is still just on the other side).

TINY HOUSES BIG DREAMS

I started filming a fresh web series cooked up by the supremely talented and courageously crafty

Claire

McFadden (for further reading see:

The Claire McFadden Monthly

), shot by good pal Chris Owsiany, and directed/edited by Pillow Fort editor me. We filmed most of two episodes and only got kicked out of one (1) cemetery. Pretty good stats all things considered!

ABBY PAJ TRIES TO TAKE A WALK

Creative & Life-Partner Abby Pajakowski is currently developing a full-length play for The Neo-Futurists called ABBY PAJ TRIES TO STAY ALIVE. The show explores disasters, apocalypses, and prepper culture in connection to Abby’s depression, anxiety, and avoidant behavior. I’m producing, Sammy Zeisel is directing, and Abby is researching/writing/performing in it! I may be biased, but local amateur scientists have already confirmed that it’s going to be absolutely sick. As part of that project, Abby and I went on a twenty-mile walk along the Lake Front Trail in Chicago and documented it for The Neo-Futurist bi-monthly Patreon show THE INFINITE WRENCH GOES VIRAL. The piece is compiled of original writing, interviews with folks who joined up along the way, and 10 hours of walking. Below is a peak behind The Neo’s paywall so, if you’re intrigued and want to follow along on the journey with artistic updates about the project from Abby every two weeks, please consider joining The Neo-Futurists’ Patreon to support the art with your attention and/or money!

Tiers start at free dollars.

A TRIP

I flew to London and back. In the time in-between those two flights; I drank beer and tea with old friends, walked around old haunts⁵, saw a play that I loved, stood in front of amazing art, ordered my favorite at our old neighborhood kebab spot, had two (2) spiritual moments with foxes, and sat on the upper deck of every bus I could get my butt on.

BRITAIN TRIPTYCH in THREE DECADES

First trip to Britain. Huge fan of wind, losing teeth, and pretending I was a squirrel from the Redwall series at every single castle we visited.

I stuck around on my second trip and lived there for a year. During my last week I realized I only had a handful of photos of myself so I panicked and snapped this selfie with Big Ben during peak construction.

Third trip. Demolished a Chicken Doner from my old neighborhood kebab spot in my favorite park. What a miraculous time to be alive.

Returning somewhere after a stretch always feels dreamy. Memories keep sprouting up with each familiar smell, sight, and sound; grafting a fresh memory into the trunk of the old one. It’s a rush of all of the unforgettable things you’d forgotten. Returning to a coffee shop for a meeting I was suddenly hit with the refreshed memory of my first morning in London back in 2017…

Day one, I woke up on a park bench that no longer exists.

Back in 2017, I flew to Stansted Airport in the window between crucial public transit hours. In the spirit of frugality, I had booked a bed at a hostel for £15 and both the bed and the hostel ended up not existing (when I looked for them on a map this is what I saw). Sleeping in the airport was discouraged by soldiers patrolling with machine guns, so I groggily waited until I could catch a bus to downtown London. If NYC is the city that never sleeps, I’ve found that London is a city that loves both sleeping in and winding down early. In short, I arrived in a city lugging everything I owned with nothing opening for another three hours.

And so I ended up in Finsbury Park, on a bench, with both arms looped through the handles of all of my earthly possessions.

I’ve thought about this moment many times since, but being back in the coffee shop next to the crucial outlet added a sharpness and dimensionality to the story that had started to bleed into personal-myth. When I retell the story, I don’t necessarily feel the wave of uncertainty about the precariousness of that moment. Physically returning to that space reminded me what it felt like to be the body that had lived that in the first place. A lot of the fond memories of that neighborhood were also colored by forgotten-sense-memories of truly scraping by: remembering where the cheapest coffee was sold, the crappy corner store with the bad produce, the meal deal combos, the ocean of in-betweens I so often found myself in.

Without a doubt, the highlight of the trip were the friends. Seeing the sights was sweet, but being lucky enough to have some homemade lasagna for a movie night with pals we love and haven’t seen in five years? Simply the best.

I left feeling immensely grateful for the time then and the time now. As a final lucky break, I caught my first glimpse of some truly spectacular Greenland peaks in between my unhinged in-flight-movie choices of Contagion and The End We Start From⁶.

JUST TRYING TO TAKE IT ALL IN

I sponged up so much great stuff!!

I loved the film GHOSTLIGHT, I loved the book MARTYR!⁷, I loved the play ECHO, I loved the song I’VE GOT IT ALL FIGURED OUT by my friend Hal⁸ (who I also love, fwiw) — Hal & the London trip form a perfect circle because he and buddy Patrick wrote this theme song for a long-distance short-lived recap podcast ONE TREE WILL. No need to get caught up on all twelve episodes but, if you have fifty-eight seconds to spare I do encourage revisiting the theme song.

~~~

And now, once again, after putting one word in front of the other, we’ve made it to the end! Thanks for reading & watching, and another big heartfelt THANK YOU to folks who have elected to support the stack financially; your generous subscriptions have gone right back into the art and cover everything from paying designers on short films I’m finishing up to getting me a cup of coffee as I crank out another post.

I’m going to play with increasing the frequency after my unintentional sabbatical, so please stay tuned for more sooner rather than later!

xoxo,

Will⁹

1. (Right now, in this moment, a team of fluorescent men jackhammer the concrete slab out back. Another good tactic.)

2. In therapy I can go a little metaphor-slap-happy and once casually mentioned what I call the SHAME HYDRA. The Shame Hydra is now canon in my little self-mythology. It’s a helpful image anytime a rapidly-self-replicating tentacle of shame pops up, plus it makes me feel like Hercules walking in slow motion away from an exploding monster to just casually be like, “oops, shame hydra!” in the middle of a session. No biggie. Just that pesky insatiable beast again.

3. Brat summer more like BRAG summer am I right? (I am not.)

4. Nothing makes a stronger case for switching to the metric system than having to spell Fahrenheit instead of Celsius.

5. Remember: when returning to an old home, you’re the ghost.

6. See: ABBY PAJ TRIES TO STAY ALIVE, #research

7. More Kaveh: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/08/18/poetry-is-doing-great-an-interview-with-kaveh-akbar/

AKBAR

I feel like everyone from Catullus to Carson has said some version of, You have to figure out how to train your instincts and then get out of the way. And it’s the most obvious thing when you can sense it, but it’s the hardest thing to articulate. And what works for me isn’t what would work for you.

8. At the risk of a self-horn-toot, Hal sent me this song when I moved to London and it remains one of the best gifts I’ve ever received. I encourage a deep dive into the Baum vaults; LOVE SONGS FOR THE MOON has a particular heavy rotation in our house

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