Half Ours

We’re divorced from reality. We get half of it. We pay our fantasies in monthly installments. We get visitation rights to the world. The rest of the time we spend in a singles bar, on the rebound, deep into a midlife crisis, trying to finesse small talk into a seduction, trying to turn seduction into an ongoing conversation. We end up step-parents to someone else’s world. We don’t own it, and we know we’re going to leave. We won’t let anything bad happen to it while we’re here, but once we’re gone these  people are going to fall off a cliff into oblivion—and we’ll be oblivial to them.

We’re bugging out of a country no-one’s seen, building a country that will never be. All the while people keep dying, but we don’t see that  either. There are people who have seen too much, but they’re invisible. Others are oblivious and invisible. Everyone keeps winking out. Every time we blink we go blind. We’re only seeing half the time, and a third of that is a dream (do we blink in our dreams? We must, or we’d go mad). We tried to conquer half the world, and it’s only half ours.

Our visiting privileges get whittled down to weekends, then we’re cut down to visiting hours, then half hour slots. It’s a sit-com sliced into you-tube segments. Can I really hold your attention for half an hour? How about three-and-a-half minutes? How about the next five  seconds,  starting now?

--Dan Kilian

This was the program text from a solo show I did at The Sidewalk. It was a half-hour slot! Get it?

Unpublished Interview of Dan Kilian by Todd E. Jones

Adventures in Solitaire