xtcian

it doesn't like being called dwarf orchard

5/14/13

On Thursday morning, Tessa woke up to a surprise: she was to pack her things and get on a plane with us to New York for her birthday. Waiting to meet her were 30 people at the farm, eight of which (your humble narrator included) all have birthdays within the same 2-week period.

Any of you who know my wife will realize this wasn't an easy task. She schedules events the way lizards lick their eyes; she needs it for moisturizing. She would plan an event for the weekend in LA, then I'd go behind the scenes and get everyone to reschedule. Within minutes ANOTHER EVENT would take its place on our shared calendar.

Finally, I got everyone to pretend a big dinner was happening, just to give me some cover - and even then, there were new plans popping up on our GCD7000 clear until Wednesday night. That all ended with this:

Lucy designed the card and I cut together the quotes, partly for the theater of it all, but partly so I could ameliorate any potential Tessa freakout by showing her the people she'd soon be seeing. But it was all good, and 24 hours later, we saw this:

entering driveway at farm

We hadn't been at our li'l farm during this particular early May time period in 8 years. The last time was this. And though I often deal in superlatives, I don't think our place has ever been so fecund, verdant, and spell-binding.

Just in case the bees weren't doing their job, Marlena and Lucy took little paintbrushes to pollinate the two apple trees with one another:

Here's the kicker... after seven years of putting up bluebird boxes, I wasn't very hopeful. The tree swallows usually move in first, and there's not much you can do to dissuade them. But ever hopeful, Lucy, cousin Barnaby and I marched up the hill to look inside:

...and for the first time, there sat a bluebird mom keeping her eggs warm. I admit, I was incredibly giddy, and I believe I can say It Was My Least Rock 'N' Roll Moment. But fuck it!

It's really the people who make any moment, and we were joined by so many. I know I sorta canceled a lot of things Tessa had planned in Los Angeles, events like assistant-directing a short film, writing part of our book, and skating her pair routine. But I hope this little out-of-time, out-of-mind, stolen weekend - far away with some of her favorite people - was the perfect distraction. Because she's awesome, and she deserves it.

I really hope the spring proves profound and fertile to us all. I mean it.

peach blossoms from my dwarf orchard

goodnight, sour prince

5/7/13

I got some sobering news today on the state of my health: extensive bloodwork showed several things that suggest I am involved in a dance that I can't do for much longer. Maybe one is not supposed to talk about such things publically, given that health insurance companies remain evil, but as a quick perusal of these pages prove, I'm not winning a Senate seat either.

Put bluntly, my cholesterol numbers are bad, and I'm pre-diabetic. And apparently those things together are a real disaster in the making if you're not careful; they call it ischemic heart disease, but you can call it a run-of-the-mill bullshit heart attack.

I mention this because, well, you should all get tested to see if there's anything lurking in your biodynamic, and also because I believe there's a certain sunlight-disinfection in saying things like this publically. You can deny anything you want, you can live as if you don't have a stake in the game, but the one thing you can never say is that you weren't warned.

It's also just another puncture in my bubble of entitlement and exceptionalism - after all, I may have been miserable and suffering from gout and getting strep throat every three months, but all of MY tests for anything WORRISOME always came back NEGATIVE. I was going to eat Sour Gummi Worms FOREVER, because I was this ageless man-child who got to do whatever the fuck he wanted.

sigh

Any time you can kneecap those self-defining myths about yourself, you have the opportunity for growth, because the alternative is unacceptable. Besides, I told Tessa that we will die like Admiral Nimitz and his wife: commit suicide together when we're good and ready. And I can't disappoint her, she gets really pissed off.

So now it's no more desserts; I have to throw away my gum; I run harder and faster; I go back on the Niacin, Vitamin D and Omega 3s; and I hope I don't have the kind of genetic horseshit that means going on a statin and carrying around packets of goddamn Splenda.

Plenty of people have it much worse than I ever will. Many of you have been dealing with things that makes this seem like a bad haircut. One of my fraternity brothers, Dan Wheeless, a great friend of many in our extended community, just passed away from an epileptic seizure this weekend. There's nothing interesting about these afflictions, but the day you find out about them hits you upside the head just the same.

i skirt the rubicon

5/5/13

This is going to be a quick one about screenplays, because I'm in the middle of a writing bender, a doozy, a 2-day sabbatical that turned into a 3-day frenzy because of a 4-alarm migraine. It has to do with two things that hate each other: cleverness and emotion.

The "clever" is that part of your story that made you want to write it in the first place. It's the central hook of your plot, and it is an IDEA, and it what our old housemate Caleb Southern dismissed as "premise".

I get "clever" in two ways: either it's the can't-miss idea for a story, like this true fact: "in 58 BC, a young, going-nowhere, debt-laden Julius Caesar stuck ruling a Roman garrison in rural Gaul befriends Diviciacus, a Celtic druid priest, and the two solve crime using each others' strengths - both magical and military." Will I ever write that script? Or pitch it? Even somewhere cheesy? Maybe not, but the fact that it could actually sorta have happened is pretty sexy.

The other "clever" is just a scene I want to see, it's just that simple. I had a friend who used to do cocaine by dipping his house key into the glass vial and snorting it - and I kept thinking: his house in the suburbs, complete with wife and kids... there's a shitload of cocaine inside the front door lock that they don't know about. Translate that to a plot point in a crime drama, and you can write the rest.

Plot and clever are all a big studio cares about, but your audience actually just wants to see two people fall in love, get revenge, or find redemption. This piece I'm working on now, it's a combination of Three Days of the Condor, The Dead Zone, and Malcolm Gladwell's non-fiction book The Tipping Point.

But it's really a love story between two people who don't know each other yet, and every time I come back to that simple fact, the compass find true north again.

make it work, designers

5/1/13

And now it's time for another great entry in our...

Yes, you've come here for years to get the unique perspective of a guy hanging on to the feathering tendrils of bloated youth, and we never disappoint. But enough lolly and gagging. Time for...

Dear Aging Fratboy: Cardigans? What do you think? Don't they just accentuate how fat we've all become?

That depends. Your cardigan needs to have three characteristics to make the cut: made of NON-ITCHY COTTON, no elastic-like gathering at the waistline, and it has to actually fit.

If you get the ones that gather right at your belt, making a little "poof" above it that looks - both up close and at a distance - like massive love handles, you should give the fuck up. Now. Seriously.

Get one that conforms to your body, even if you've been hiding the fact that you're in your 40s. Anything XL and over, and you start looking like Hitchcock after eating Mr. Rogers.

Aging Fratboy... I like basketball shorts that go way down past the knee. But I'm white, and I'm told they look like "culottes". What are culottes, and what should I do?

Do you actually still play basketball? I mean, do you really actually play games of basketball with friends, where there's defense, and running, and you keep score? If so, you have earned the right to wear whatever the hell you want.

with Scotty, Lindsay/Jack, Rizzo and Seth - and those shorts are some of my SHORTER ones

Anyone saying you're wearing culottes needs to get dunked on.

Dear Aging Fratboy: What's the latest one can wear white jeans?

1991.

Aging Fratboy - What is your general rule about "favorite T-shirts"?

I don't have a general rule, but I have rules about T-shirts in general: you can wear any shirt as long as it doesn't have writing on it. Exceptions include:
• your alma mater. 35 of my shirts are Carolina-related.
• utter non-sequiturs. This does NOT include $45 "Gettin' Lucky In Kentucky" ironic shirts from Urban Outfitters. This DOES include Matt Gentling's "I Am All Excited About the Church of God" shirt with the Tasmanian Devil on it.
• shirts left in your possession by someone else. Somehow this absolves you of any responsibility, and allows you to enjoy the shirt all you want. Having lived in several group houses with intermingled laundry, I have many such shirts.

The above example was left in my drawer accidentally by Susannah Mills at some point around 2000. It depicts a random Kappa Sig party at the University of South Carolina in 1997. Words cannot express how comfy and perfect this shirt is now.

Aging Fratboy, I saw you wearing one of those Italo-Gallic "double collar" dress shirts at an event last weekend. Are you officially endorsing the double-collar aesthetic?

Yes, with caveats. You must pick the right double-collar look - too dark a contrast, and it verges into "guido" territory, too jarring, and you look like a clown. An actual clown.

I opted for the "light lavender - dark lavender" collar, which you can only pull off if you're married and have seemingly stopped caring what anyone thinks.

Well, that does it for this edition. Tune in next time for...

this time baby i'll be bulletproof

4/29/13

As I said a few weeks ago, I spent the better part of last month in Italy, the first week being at a writer's conference called Sirenland. I went knowing absolutely nothing about how it worked, knowing absolutely nobody, and in the end, it reshaped the way I think about conducting myself. Yeah, "youth is wasted on the young", and epiphanies are wasted on those too old to use them, but occasionally one sneaks in whilst still relevant.

Sirenland is about writers, by writers, for writers, and yet I don't think I took away a lot about writing - which in many ways, is the mark of true success. If you go to a comic convention and come away versed in love, if you take a class on glass-blowing and you come away knowing you must quit your miserable job... then you truly dipped your heel in sacred waters.

Dating back to 2005, in many ways, I did LA all wrong again. I never considered it a home, and never made the proper effort to forge a community. In doing so, I sank into isolation and a well-documented occasional depression that brought up frightening spectres of my ghastly days as a kid. All that shit I'd conquered at Carolina, the emergence as a popular bon vivant from the depths of despair - I felt like I was losing it again, reverting once more to an awkward pariah.

In Positano, I learned - despite years of semi-self-imposed alienation - that I could still make friends out of total strangers, speak in public, make other human beings laugh across the room. Does that seem pathetic? Maybe so, but some of us are born needing 4 ounces more affirmation than others, and I'm no longer going to pretend I'm not one of them.

Sirenland also provided a huge service: it was a place that was unapologetic about Art. The commerce side of writing could wait; while you were in those marble rooms, gazed upon by busts of Etruscan leaders, it was about YOUR FEELINGS and YOUR WIZARDRY and HOW BEST TO DIVINE YOUR TRUTH.

Back in Los Angeles, we live lives of such apology and disclaimers and endless changes being made to satisfy accountants. You can live a long time in that world and not think it affects you, but it does. Everything you experience is coated with an imperceptible sheen of cynicism: even last Saturday night, as Tessa screened our short film, she introduced it as a "trifle" and I told somebody it was "too short to find anything to hate."

The truth is, a lot of people worked really hard, especially my wife, and we love how it came out. But that would expose us, so we hem and occasionally haw.

Not so with Sirenland, where your artistry ruled supreme, detractors be damned. I started out the week suggesting everyone could benefit from a good old-fashioned outline and a clear journey for our protagonists, but soon enough, I just basked in everyone's visions.

A group of us became inseparable lunch and dinner partners, so much like school that old joys came seeping back. We were living in the most beautiful dorm in the world, and they made our beds.

Near the end, there was a shift in mood. Some friends had problems representing their experience to spouses back home, others bisolated into intense romances, one amazing woman expressed anger she couldn't define, and I was certainly exhausted emotionally.

Since then, we've tried to define what happened: the woman thinks it was getting too "friendship-intimate" too quickly, another suggested it was the guilt of being surrounded by such opulence. For me, though, versed over years of Jartaculars and road trips, it was the knock-knock on the door of my old friend Shame.

Shame came to tell us that we weren't allowed to be so close to your fellow tribe; that we weren't supposed to use the Lavender Body Milk in the jacuzzi; that intense, glorious discussions like these were only for college students and drunk travelers in their 20s.

The convention was drawing to a close, Shame explained, and we were soon going to be back in our worlds, back where the only Art that matters is that which can generate income, and where your dreams take a distant back seat to those of your kids, and your goddamn job. Shame said he was going to make it easier for us, the re-entry, that he was going to grease the wheels of our spinner luggage and hold open the doors at the train station.

Shame told us it's a cold world out there, and it's best to keep your head low and don't expose too much. He said nobody cares about your revelations and it was high time to get back to doing what everyone expects you to do.

Only this time I told Shame to fuck off.

gaudeamus igitur

4/24/13

Before I start boring you with my Feelings™, I'd like to put in a word about the deranged sorority girl email that went viral last week. I think she's totally fucking hot, and so does my wife.

I like to think I have a unique perspective on this issue: the girl in question is the chair of her sorority; I was social chairman of my fraternity. We both went to ACC schools, both use impeccable grammar, and most of all, both of us make everyone around us suffer under the Tyranny of Fun.

I have spent DECADES of my life trying get people to do stuff, control-freaking my way into big adventures and small get-togethers, road trips, you name it. My efforts have been met with occasionally wild success, but mostly the general feeling that I was trying too hard.

One thing I was pretty good at, though, was the "themed fraternity party". My particular frat was an odd mixture of the coolest guys at Carolina, the dorkiest spazzes in North America, campus leaders, and bizarre shut-ins. The one constant, as I saw it, was that everyone was basically funny, and participated in Greek culture with equal parts irony and genuine brotherhood.

But we were never going to be any sorority's first choice; we were lucky to be picked third, past the usual phalanx of old-money houses from Charlotte, Greensboro and down east. Thus, to paraphrase Jane's Addiction, we may have been skin and bones, we might've been pointy nose, but it motherfucking made us try. So when the usual cadre of snorting, guffawing, broke-dicks from our own fraternity lined the wall and made fun of the rest of us for jumping up and down to the Violent Femmes during the Boxer Rebellion Mixer, it made me want to fucking cunt punt them.

So yes, this sorority president from Maryland is a guttermouth rage-aholic who needs sensitivity training regarding "retarded" people and "faggots" (two words and ideas I extincted from my worldview in the late '80s), and yes, her views on Mexicans will probably keep her out of the California Senate, but let me tell you this: SHE'S TOTALLY RIGHT.

Disregard the profanity and ask yourself: what is she really saying? It's so easy to make fun of someone utterly wound up in their microcosms - but she would ask, as would I, exactly when are we supposed to stop caring about our immediate environment? How is "not giving a shit" working out for you?

Her language may be common and vulgar, but her theme is universal: Andrew Marvell said it to his coy mistress in 1650, Robert Herrick advised it to his virgins, even Horace, around 23 BC, told us: Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus ("Now is the time for drinking; now we dance barefoot upon the earth").

She is carping her motherfucking diem, and we should all be so lucky to have someone in our lives giving such a damn. Those who can't remember the past may be condemned to repeat it, but those who condemn the present will have nothing to remember.

the Lodge, April 1987 - I'm near the bottom right, leaning back on The Budster

 

every shutter, every rooftop

4/22/13

I swore I would not write another blog until I finished this project I started in Rome: drawing the view from the apartment window of Nell & Jesse, who made the trip possible. You can't tell from this panorama, but it's almost 4 feet long, and it took 22 days of sketching, research, and buying pencils.

click for bigger version

The image you see above is actually four pictures stitched together, taken from about five feet away... which makes it look much different than the original, but y'all should get the idea.

It was a welcome distraction, a secondary activity as I came back to a life I want to live a little bit differently. They say it takes the human body and mind 14 days to undergo a transformative change in a new place; I was gone almost 20, and I return to you a slightly altered person.

I'd rather be kicked in the face by a family of bison than hear about someone's 3-week spiritual journey, or That Crazy Summer, or how you met some faith healer who gave you turmeric that becalmed your colon. So I won't bore you with my own, except to share a few epiphanies:

I needed some kind of brotherly spiritual program. And so I have begun one, so far so good.

As a collective country, we are both sick and numb, and I don't want to take part in that dialogue anymore.
Which leads me to...

I don't like the way I have been thinking about this blog, and if I'm to keep doing it, I have to relinquish my attachment to what it once was, and go back to how it started.

More on all that as the week progresses. That is, assuming any of you are still reading, and because I'm abandoning my illusions, I shan't be chagrined if you're not.

never stay too long at the party

4/12/13

fond of fondaments

3/28/13

(drawn on wobbly cafe table, 44° F)

next up: Rome, the South of France, and home
 

never let me go

3/24/13