Daniel, your plays are truly inspired (and inspiring) works of art. The latest, Forking, is a choose-your-own-adventure play?!? What is the craziest thing (other than bacon) that you draw inspiration from? I understand that your bacon-reviewing blog is no more; for nostalgia’s sake, can you tell us about the best bacon you ever had? Did your dog agree or disagree with that assessment?

1. Inspiration.

Calling Forking "inspiring" is very generous of you. It did inspire a lot of drinking.

My inspirations are deeply random. I had a short piece that was inspired by that one astronaut who was so jealous of another astronaut that she drove to Florida in a diaper with a knife, pepper spray, rubber tubing, and some garbage bags in her car. Only I didn't write about an astronaut gone bad, it ended up being about the opposite: how astronauts occupy this one kind of very special pedestal, like firemen, only more so. Oh, and that play was also about professional killers.

I've also had a couple of shorts inspired by mathematicians. Have you ever met a hard-core, career mathematician? The things they work on are so wildly abstract... they're kind of like the high priests of the nerds: sweet, intense, visionary, and incomprehensible.

Another time I wrote a play about short-term memory loss after a concussion, because that actually happened to me. (I don't recommend it. Kids, remember, stay hydrated when you exercise!) I wrote another play about a dead hamster, and another play about the feeling you get in bus stations in the middle of the country where everything is broken except for the flickering fluorescent lights.

Probably the only common thread there is the familiar cocktail of sleep deprivation and deadlines.

2. Bacon.

I love that the bacon blog still exists out there, even though I haven't touched it in years.

The blog, that is, not bacon.

Best bacon? Well, a wise man once said, "The best bacon is the bacon you're eating." But if you want me to take the long view, I think the most paradigm-shifting bacon I ever had was the first time I had real English bacon at this slightly grotty breakfast table in a messed-up but ridiculously-old bed and breakfast in Oxford. That was kind of a light-from-heaven, never-knew-an-animal-could-taste-like-this kind of moment. For all the smack people talk about the English and the various kinds of sheep guts that they eat, those people know their way around a pork belly.

(This was pre-dog, but that's just as well, because the dog wouldn't have gotten any anyway.)

More recently, I was treated by a friend to some homemade bacon-infused vodka. This was made more or less how you'd expect (sticking cooked bacon in vodka and letting it sit for a couple of weeks), and tasted more or less how you'd imagine (assuming you have an adequately capacious imagination). Genius. And, like all true genius, deeply unsettling. It tasted kind of like a fuel tanker and a Niman Ranch freezer truck colliding on the upper deck of the Bay Bridge. It hit your palette like the first blast of heat and pork, then it lingered, burning, and by the finish it had that asphalt-y taste that you'd get as the one deck of the bridge melted onto the other.

You can read Daniel's Cameo Writing Downhill here.

Daniel Heath is a San Francisco Bay Area playwright. His play, Forking, staged by Pianofight, recently completed a run in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Forking is a fully-scripted, choose-your-own-adventure play in which the audience votes at key moments. His next play, which does not involve voting, is Fifty Years Hungry; it was commissioned by Playground as part of the 2008/2009 Playground Fellowship. His short plays have been performed throughout the Bay Area and as far afield as Toronto, and he is a three-time winner of the Playground Emerging Playwright Award (2007 / 2008 / 2009). He is a lapsed fiction writer and thinks plays are way more fun. (You can find a little more of his advice from Scriptfrenzy '08 and Scriptfrenzy '07.)