Remixing two plays seems like a fairly straightforward act; take two pre-existing works, strip out the things you don't like, and munge together those things that you do. Easy, right? The reality, of course, is crawling through hundreds of pages of disparate versions of the various drafts of both, revisiting stacks of all of the old notes that I already had on these existing pieces (changes that already were known to be needed), finding commonalities where none existed before, and reworking it all to a fresh new beat - um, theme.

Had I thought deeply about this all beforehand, I think I would have seen that The Physics of Joy will be much harder fought for I had made it sound in my head.

Oh, and in quick aside as I'm going through these works, there are some pure moments - a core in Odes and a family in Gabriel/Joy that I really, really love - but, man, is there a bunch of poo that I will be happy to never look at again. C'est la vie.