Hello, people! The coconut oil is solid. Autumn is here.

These are those October weeks where if I don’t immediately scurry out of my apartment right after my work-from-home shift is over I’m not gonna get any more sun on my face that day. In a couple of weeks the sun’ll be at the horizon when I finish work for the day and I’ll get no more beams till the next morning. No more beams!!!

I’m a creepy crawly whose favorite season is winter but even for me? That’s rough, buddy.

That said, the leaves here in the Hudson Valley are dazzling already. Multiple times the past few weeks a tree has caused me to stop in my tracks and just mouth open stare.

Have you been stunned by beauty lately?? I highly recommend it in these fricked up times. No matter what they do, they can’t stop us from looking at beautiful stuff and being like “Whoa.”

Last newsletter for a minute so let’s make it a long one.

///

The LA performance of The Bridge and the River and the Road, the first Courier play, absolutely ripped.

Took place in the living room of the big homie Alec, editor and producer of the Thicket & Bramble podcast, the wonderful genius Julie to whom he is husband, and their kindhearted sweetie pie dog Ellie.

An audience full of passionate creatives who were present and down to engage with the work. I had multiple people come up and express how the grim grind of LA had been getting them down lately and the play had made them feel like they needed to get out there and make some art immediately.

That right there? That’s the good stuff right there.

Anybody who’s seen/heard my stuff: If it inspired you and led you to go make some art, please send it my way if you feel like it! I want to see.

///

For anybody who knows me, especially from back in the day, it would be easy to assume I’d come away disliking Los Angeles after my first visit. I assumed this too. It is objectively a bad place that causes harm.

I can’t fully explain it yet but, weirdly, I ended up kinda loving the vibe??

There are of course many extenuating circumstances. I spent most of my time chilling in my wonderful friends’ beautiful house. There was a very good dog there. I love cities in general. The climate and the flora and the fauna and the landscape and the architecture are all beautiful and wildly different from where I live. There were many more Hispanic people around than where I live. The week ended with me telling a story in a room full of good people, which is my favorite thing to do.

But also? There’s just something about it, man. I found myself liking the city’s energy in a way I didn’t anticipate. I wonder if it’s because, beneath all the anguish and bullshit that capitalism causes for artists there and everywhere, there’s also this thrumming pulse of “Ooooh movies are so COOL and we MAKE THEM HERE!!!” that gives this hidden undercurrent of childlike joy and wonder, even with all the rest.

Or maybe not. Maybe I just love my friends and love making theater. Either way I had a great time.

///

I am apparently going to learn to play the harmonica? This comes as a surprise to me.

A family member passed away very suddenly recently, and I inherited their harmonica. As soon as it was handed to me, I knew for a fact I was going to learn to play it.

I’ve known for a while I’m going to learn to play weirdo bloop blorp synth music and incorporate that into some of my shows, but harmonica was not ever part of the plan.

The one I received is a Hohner Special 20 in the key of G, and all the beginner lessons are with a C. Alec and Julie and I had a lovely outing to the Hollywood Guitar Center where I got me the Special 20 in C you see pictured above.

I’m a pretty decent singer, but I’m not a musician. I’ve always dreamed of learning a musical instrument, at least competently enough to play with other musicians, and have tried at various times in the past, but I’ve always petered out on practicing. As I do a lot of times I try to practice something that isn’t theater.

And the barrier to entry on harmonica, I’m already discovering, is perhaps a bit steep? Any instrument is hard to pick up from zero, but harmonica, for me, so far, feels like a baffling kind of Breath Puzzle that I’m not yet solving. Seems like I’m gonna need to learn a whole new kinda thing with my mouth and my breath.

There’s seemingly no harmonica equivalent of sitting at a piano as a novice and just playing the black keys. I guess it’s more like violin or something, where you gotta learn a whole new way of using your muscles to even get it to sound like anything.

So we’ll see how this goes. Everybody I tell this to is like “Hell yeah, Gahb, that’s a very you instrument.” I think they mean I’m a very mouth-centric human, which is true.

I’m not musically talented, but I have noticed music becoming a major part of my creative process the past few years. These last two plays I’ve written, Moss and the first Courier, I look back at certain music I had on repeat while writing and realize part of what I was doing was saying “I want to tell a story that feels like how this song/album makes me feel.”

I have a growing list of music like that. I want to write a story that feels like how this makes me feel, and one that feels like how this makes me feel, and one that feels like how this makes me feel.

I’m curious how these feelings would develop were I to become a musician.

I’ll keep us updated on my harmonica journey over the next let’s say 3-7 years or so. I like to learn stuff real slow.

///

My bag got searched twice at LAX.

The first was because I forgot to drink the water in my bottle. After the guy had ushered me all the way out so I could drink it then ushered me all the way back in, the bag still got flagged.

It was a bizarre and uncomfortable sight, watching my very tightly-packed carry-on being burst open on a steel table like that. Loose charger cables everywhere. Performance draft of my play sitting in a TSA bin. A play that, those who saw it know, largely revolves around trying to keep a bag from being searched at a checkpoint.

The TSA agent was Latino. Most likely Mexican, statistically speaking. After a tense minute of him rooting around in the pile of my stuff, he pulls out the harmonica. He opens the cardboard box (which I had been planning not to open until I arrived home), pulls out the plastic case, pulls out the harmonica.

Looks me right in the eye, big bright smile on his face, goes “Harmonica??”

And I’m like yeah. And he’s like “I’m sorry, brother, you understand, how it looked on the monitor…”

And actually, in that moment, I did not understand! Looking back I wonder if it looked like a knife?

Either way, there was something magical about all that for me. The pumping fear of being stopped at security, in this day and age, with the name Rodriguez, giving way to this sudden genuine human moment. This man was clearly delighted that I had a harmonica.

///

“When I vote, I don’t enter the booth thinking “I’m going to choose the person who represents my interests in this grand democratic project.” I enter the booth thinking “with this one hour of my day, I’ll express my opinion about the terrain on which I’d like to keep fighting for a better world.” And I’d rather be fighting the democrats than the fascists.”

Great piece from Margaret Killjoy about voting in these midterms as an anarchist.

///

Speaking of anarchists, this past Wednesday, 10/21, was Ursula K Le Guin’s birthday. She would have been 97. I love her so much. Everything I write you can follow back to her.

There’s this lovely podcast In Your Spare Time where various people read her blog posts aloud. This week’s episode had Becky Chambers, author of the brilliant Monk and Robot books, reading a post from 2011 called “It Doesn’t Have To Be the Way It Is” and I did the thing I often do with Le Guin’s non-fiction where one minute I’m enjoying but also grumbling about this or that point I don’t fully agree with and the next I’m standing up weeping in my kitchen.

Chambers calls Le Guin’s work “A love letter to difference.”

If you enjoyed that, why not check out this Rant About “Technology”? Or how about this one about how cats are anarchists?

///

I’ve been getting clips of Vic Mensa’s podcast and enjoying what he’s got going on over there.

Right now the big clip making the rounds is Killer Mike defending himself (poorly) from (accurate) accusations of being a fake radical. If you’re interested in that and have four hours to kill, F.D Signifier’s got you with this absolute banger of a video essay which dropped the same day as the Mensa podcast. I don’t always agree with FD’s takes, but this video is really good in my opinion. I learned a lot.

I’m not here to talk about Killer Mike, tho. I just want to present to you Vic and Van Lathan talking about The Matrix.

As a big Matrix fan, and proud Matrix 2 and 3 defender, none of this was news to me.

I concede that the first Matrix is a better movie than the sequels. But I’ve always harbored a little conspiracy theory that the reason the cultural story around those movies is so “Matrix 2 and 3 bad” focused is at least PARTLY because of what Vic and Van are talking about.

Matrix 1 you get this mind-blowing, beautifully-executed story about chosen family helping you to wake up and see the truth and become yourself and join the revolution. And then Matrix 2 and 3 are like “Actually the very idea of waking up and seeing the truth and becoming yourself and joining the revolution has already been absorbed and co-opted and instrumentalized by the machine so WHAT NOW???” and we weren’t ready for that story.

Nobody takes a big swing like Lana and Lilly. They knew we just wanted Luke to blow up the Death Star again and they were like nah let’s try something else.

You seen Sense8?? God I love Sense8.

///

This one is so obscure I hesitated putting it here, but I just love it so much and this is my newsletter so hey, why not.

October is Hallowstream, an annual tradition where two of my favorite streamers Kat Brewster and Jack de Quidt stream a horror video game. Kat is an academic whose work focuses on the history of computers and networks, especially the ways these things are used by queer people. Jack is a player on and the composer for the legendary TTRPG podcast Friends at the Table.

Hallowstream is meant to be a safe, fun, silly space to share in a piece of horror media together, be scared together, and talk about why what scares us scares us.

This year they’re playing Until Dawn, which is in my opinion an unpleasant game about unpleasant people and not something I’d enjoy playing myself, even though the actors are really committed and understand the assignment, but it’s still fun because Kat and Jack are funny and lovely and very smart.

The game itself is not relevant here though, because I just want to talk about the long tangent they get on from about the 21 minute mark to the 54 minute mark of this stream.

There is somebody new in the chat with the username Peanuts_1987. This leads to a discussion about the comic strip, which leads Kat to ask Jack (who is British) to describe what they think Charles Schulz looks like, which they do, which leads Kat to say they don’t think Jack has ever seen Charles Schulz, to which Jack passionately insists they have, which leads to a long slow sequence where Jack is sitting in the background in a chair facing away while Kat and we in the chat collaborate on gathering many pictures of various white men in a Microsoft Paint file so Jack can turn back around and guess which one is Charles Schulz.

That’s it, that’s the whole thing. It’s so stupid and so funny and is to me everything good about the internet. And, because Hallowstream is intentionally ephemeral, it will be gone from the internet forever within two months.

I have no idea if this will be entertaining to anyone who doesn’t already love Kat and Jack but maybe! Let me know!

///

Okay. We’re coming to a close.

This email will likely be the last public-facing Thicket & Bramble thing of 2026. Thank you to everyone who saw shows and listened to podcast episodes and read newsletters this year. You’re the best. I love you. Thank you for supporting local theater.

If you want to tell me how you felt about any of these things I made, might I direct you to this handy dandy form?

A lot more T&B is coming. My dream for 2027 right now is to keep performing the first Courier play while also writing the second one, as well as recording a bunch more podcast episodes, as well as some other secret stuff, with an aim to premiere the second Courier towards the end of the year.

For now it’s time to close up shop and hibernate.

///

Farewell, dear friends. I wish you a warm, cozy winter with good food and good pals. We’re gonna make it. Go tell somebody you love them. Right now! I mean it! Do it now!!!!

Goodbye!

Gabriel Maria Rodriguez
they/them
Hudson Valley
10.25.2026
thicket-bramble.com