While trying to find something to write about for this week’s Tuesday Thoughts, I found myself looking back through stuff I had written in high school. One thing in particular really stuck out to me, a play written by myself and two friends called “A Vagrant Wind.” At the time, we thought the play was hilarious. We saw it as just the right amount of the absurd mixed with a couple of jabs at our theatre department’s expense.

What the play actually was: An incredibly confusing mish-mash of nonsense and references and things only the three of us would find funny. I remember one of the bits we cut was to all freeze in place while someone put a sign on stage that read “Press A to Continue” and we wouldn’t budge until someone from the audience came up and hit the sign. I find the whole thing to be a tad embarrassing now. That got me thinking about just how much our comedic sensibilities can change over time. I mean, when I was a kid I made a James Bond parody with my friends called “Yesterday I’ll Die Tomorrow.”

That, I thought, was the funniest thing in the world.

Actually, that’s a bad example, that title is still pretty funny.

I guess what looking back on all this stuff made me realize is that it’s important to dive in without a sense of risk and force ourselves to keep creating more and more things so that we can hone in on exactly what our sensibilities are. You can’t just sit down at a computer one day and expect to churn out some kind of masterpiece like Neon Genesis Evangelion.

You need to spend years doing horrible high school plays that you get to look back on and be super embarrassed about, so that you can learn from your mistakes. I don’t claim to be some kind of writing master, but I do think I’ve learned from “A Vagrant Wind.” Even something like Refresh, my most recent piece, has little tiny bits and pieces from “A Vagrant Wind.” Mainly, my penchant for nonstop video game references in everything I write.

Sure, we only rehearsed the show once and then promptly forgot about it so that we could work on my high school’s production of Jurassic Park: The Musical, but “A Vagrant Wind” clearly continues to live inside of me, as I’m sure it lives inside of the hearts of its other two authors as well. That being said, I’m sure I would be horribly embarrassed if someone were somehow able to read the script in its entirety, so I’ve taken the liberty of attaching the script in its entirety for your enjoyment. It won’t make any sense. It won’t be particularly funny, and you’ll probably wish you hadn’t read it. But maybe, juuuuuust maybe…you might learn something. I… think I did?

I now present… A VAGRANT WIND