xtcian

6/13/02 Because of a strange

6/13/02

Because of a strange confluence of events - Tessa's sister Michelle wanting to see the Baseball as America exhibit at the Museum of Natural History, and my psychopharmacologist treating me across the street from said museum - we spent the day on the Upper West and East Sides. Even though I'm much more of a basketball fan, the baseball exhibit was pretty cool, featuring the actual bats, scoring cards, pennants and baubles of baseball going back to the 1820s. There was even the Honus Wagner baseball card, commonly thought to be the most valuable card in existence. The card itself is only slightly bigger than a large postage stamp, but it's still cool to see the highest pedigree of anything, even if you don't particularly get off on it.

We left Michelle to wander more of the museum and found our way across the park to the Upper East Side, where Tessa had a bridal shower to attend. I wandered around 86th St., where I hadn't been since I moved to New York exactly two years ago. On my nascent voyage, I stayed with my friend Meira right on that street, my body wracked with the paralysis of a debilitating back injury, trying to make sense of That Internet Job, which was only a week old. Now I was back on that street, getting money from the same ATM, buying the same stupid high-maintenance lactose intolerant tablets at the Rite-Aid.

The world seems like a different place, and my life is in such a different geological era, but nothing on the corner of 86th and Lexington had changed. There were still the crazy-hot Jewish chicks with $75 pedicures and confusingly large breasts, clonking down the sidewalk, trying to catch the Hampton Jitney to deepen their pre-cancerous tans; I could smell the deep pit of the 4 and 5 trains buried fathoms beneath the 6 train, so far down as to be heated by the earth's mantle; I sensed again the culturally asphyxiating blandness of the Williams Sonoma and Baby Gap stores. The Upper East Side bores me like nothing else in New York can. It seems like all you can do is tidy up your too-small apartment and then anesthetize your ennui by buying belts at Banana Republic. I mean, how can anyone even tell their blocks apart? Without looking at the street signs, how many of them could find their homes?

Tessa chided me in the cab on our escape, saying that they've got the best museums in the world up there, as well as Central Park. Ostensibly, she's right, and there's as much culture there as anywhere in the world, but who truly believes your average Price Waterhouse systems analyst chick is going to be spending any time at the Rose Planetarium? And how many of these people have even seen the inside of Central Park, instead bypassing the hoi polloi for the Hamptons?

I suppose the bigger question is "why the fuck do you care, psycho boy?"

The Celextant, June 13, 2002

So my second meeting with Dr. Gorman went pretty well, despite not having paid her for the first one (something I probably shouldn't do again). I told her that the Celexa was definitely making me feel a little better, but that I still had at least 1 1/2 days a week that sucked, and mornings are still hard. Most side effects, including the sexual stuff and my previous Prozac-induced inability to care about the protagonists of movies, has been surprisingly limited. Which, of course, means she's upping the dosage to 30mg. 40mg is apparently the norm, and Dr. Gorman seems to view lingering depression as a beast to be stamped out. Fine by me, I think. I could do with having those 1 1/2 days back.

Tessa (far left) and me (at right) in the creepy overhead mirror at the Williams-Sonoma on Lexington and 86th