Most know her as Allie, if they are fortunate enough to know her at all. But her true name, like her true self, is a great deal more complex, beautiful, and frightening. More interesting. Most people really are not interesting. They may be pretty, or famous, or speak French fluently, but they’re just weird bags of mostly water that can walk around and buy things.

Alexandria just wrote a play called “Dream of Me,” and it’s real good. It’s about love and the mess that goes along with it, especially being young and in New York City. Though some of it is just about sex too… where the two overlap, no one knows.

It’s structure and presentation is thoughtful and inventive. You may be made uncomfortable. More so if you’ve ever been in love and lost it. There’s some full female nudity that may be gratuitous, but it makes sense, it punctuates a character that is already exposed and vulnerable. There’s even some laughs.

She’s a bit too young to be successful, but like her charismatic ancient namesake there is much to do while young (drunken Dionysian orgies, founding cities, writing plays, conquering the world). Hey, whatever they may be, follow your dreams. Love requires someone else to go along with it.

“Dream of Me” runs at the Cell theater, in Chelsea, through March 15th: Tickets.

It’s a puzzle game that allows you to manipulate light to create sound. A set of strange but intuitive tools give you a creative arsenal for fucking off your entire day. Act III is the jam.

PLAY.

I went into the Sonoran desert with my dog, near the base of Mount Lemon in the afternoon. The ground, littered with sun-baked cactus detritus, much like a Saturday night in Manhattan, was a minefield of unyielding pricks. We tread carefully, mindful of scorpions and coyotes, two adventurers with keen olfactories.

We came upon a rock face by a purple prickly pear, that was covered in ancient pictographs. Wild butterflies inhabited the greenery that grew from it’s shade, their wings painted dreamland blue.

* **

We entered a narrow cave in the old stone canvass, that ran for a short way through it and out the other side. I emerged, half blind by the light and found myself face to face with a white coyote, the desert trickster. I froze instinctively, gripped by a primal caution, though I felt no fear.

I turned only for a moment to collect my companion and the coyote was gone.

Late in the day a double rainbow appeared that grew bolder as the sun slid lower. I kept catching a glimpse of the white trickster from the corner of my eye, but it was always just a chollo bending in the wind, or a humming bird darting by. When we arrived home we met a girl who was taking out the garbage at the neighboring casita, a visitor from the East like us.

Her name was Calabria Khan. Fixated on the rainbows, thoughts of gold, I didn’t even see her at first. She thought I was shooting her taking out her empties. What a doll, she posed.

More Sonoran flowers.

I need a favor Gruber.

Roman Polanski’s in the news again and it reminded me of his underrated 1999 fantasy, The Ninth Gate. It’s strange and disappointing, but it’s subtle humor and creepy mystique make me yearn for more. The world would be a better place if, instead of Bruckheimer, Depp had signed onto endless Polanski projects.

To review, Polanski, the genius who gave us films like Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, and The Pianist, escaped a Kraków ghetto and managed to survive the holocaust, though his mother was killed at Auschwitz. He moved to the US, began making incredible movies, and in 1969 the goddamn Manson family murdered his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate. Later, he had sex with a 13 year old girl at Jack Nicholson’s house and fled to France.  He’s been there ever since.

Megs with her beloved (& abused) Paddington.

Hated Meghan Czerwinski when I first met her. She was my friend’s little sister and a constant teenage burn up. It was torture trying to hang out at his house, she was in a perpetual foul mood, a territorial animal that just ruined everything. Still, it was kinda hot. At some point I realized she wasn’t a worthless psycho and she realized I wasn’t a worthless loser and we declared an uneasy truce, sharing her brother.

We went on like this for a time, dividing him like he was some queer Poland occupied in an uneasy, but mutually beneficial alliance (not sure which of us was the fascist/communist).  Only, instead of breaking our treaty and going to war, we disarmed. Been legendary pals ever since.

She is one of the strongest people I know, yet she can cry on command. I have no idea why Meghan still even remotely struggles with the rest of us, someone should be paying her in diamonds just to hang around and tell them what’s what. Actually, some people already do.

HBD!

Joaquin may have your attention now, but he hasn’t yet surpassed the great Crispin Glover.

Saguaro’s at dusk, outside the casita.

I heard a tale about a rare gem of nature, the Saguaro pearl, and went out into the Sonoran desert in search of one.  Like the oyster, the Saguaro cactus produces a protective barrier around foreign irritants, but in the case of this archetypal cactus, the objects of desire are beautiful woody globes of varying sizes. Much more intriguing than the tiny, over-marketed mollusk balls, they are also quite rare. Saguaro’s grow very slowly, taking 75 years before even producing their picturesque limbs and live to be hundreds of years old, so short of hacking them down like some Bush republican, all I could do was hike for miles and inspect the remains of the fallen giants.

Woodpeckers drill out tasty holes that other birds later live in.

They grow up to 50 feet, towering impossibly over the rocky landscape and surprisingly, beneath the prickly green flesh is a circular cage of wooden ribs. This, plus their size make the occasional carcass easy to spot, as there’s always a conspicuous skeletal form splayed across the ground. I had hoped to find an old bullet of Geronimo’s that had passed through some filthy white man’s skull and embedded into an old saguaro forming a priceless treasure.  When I came across some very large remains, that could have been the right age I painted my tomahawk red with glee. I tore the ribs apart (careful to avoid splinters) and dug around in the dirt (careful to avoid scorpions) looking for smooth, round wooden spheres. In the end I found nothing but I got a really good saguaro rib walking stick out of it.

However, all was not lost. The Sonora Desert museum (a living, outdoor museum/park) has several specimens, including behemoth that contained the top of a glass beer bottle. It was preseumably punched into a saguaro and used for shooting practice by filthy white devils. Later, the cactus encased the severed bottle top in a wooden pearl. A reminder that this natural world is filled with wonder, but if not respected, is just a beautiful prison.

Sanctuary for doggies and bunnies alike.

I spent a week in the Arizona desert, near Tucson, in a little lofted casita. It had two of my favorite things, a fireplace and a spiral staircase… both lead to paradise.  Outside, the desert floor provided all the dry kindling needed for a good sustained fire, a great comfort to the coyotes roaming about after dark.  We heard them each night, sometimes a few howls, but other nights the blood lust cacophony of the beasts awakened primal memories of nightmares that once made our ancestors fear the dark. But wasn’t afraid in this cozy abode with fuzzy friends, and dry wine, no sir.

Life ain’t much without em, other than suffering and dying horribly alone.