xtcian

resume your resumé

7/1/02

RESUME

Ian Williams
Brooklyn, NY

EXPERIENCE:

Writer/Director, The Pink House, a college comedy. 1999-present. Oversaw a disastrous production that included insane actors, a broken hand, the hottest two days in North Carolina history, a typhoon that washed away the set, a lightning bolt that nearly killed the art crew, and a lead gaffer who had gone off rage medication and threatened to slug Tessa. Due for wild success July 2005.

Senior Editor, That Internet Job. May 2000 - June 2001. Used one year of life going to meetings. Spent early months proffering hard-wrought ideas for $43 million business; spent later months on Napster downloading songs by The Little River Band. Laid off unceremoniously when it was clear that there would never be a website, and therefore my unique brand of penetrating sarcasm was unnecessary.

Writer, Famous Movie Trailer Company, Hollywood. 1998-2000. Wrote the ads for the worst movies coming down the pike. Deliberately lied about, misrepresented, and gave away the endings to various blockbusters.

Senior Editor, That First Internet Job. 1996-1999. Was part of original editorial team that created now-hugely-successful online city guide. Sold stock at 71 when everyone else was holding for 125; stock now at 19. Editorial integrity of site now replaced by monkeys; legacy ruined.

Contributing Author, 13thGEN Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail. Concocted half-baked theories about my generation straight out of college and stumbled into a bestseller. Used temporary generational fame to hoodwink tobacco company focus groups into adopting "flannel cigarettes."

EDUCATION:

Norfolk Academy, Norfolk, Virginia. Attended deeply-repressed military-style prep school and managed to turn 18 without ever kissing a girl.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Double-major in Music and Psychology, but don't have my diploma because I still owe them money. Spent most of time in Chapel Hill trying to have intercourse with various Pi Beta Phis.

SPECIAL TALENTS:

Good bank shot from 14 feet out; Morse Code at 35 wpm; can name most '70s AM radio hits in less than a second; deeply biting and unsolicited social commentary; long, self-involved bouts of self-pity coupled with occasional bursts of rage; French.

REFERENCES:

6/30/02 I know I'm a

6/30/02

I know I'm a dork, but at least I have the energy to be diverse. Other dorks geek out about one particular thing - you know, medieval war re-enactments, Heavy Metal Magazine, the band Rush but I am more of a dilettante, slightly dorking out over 20 things or so. I spray a fine sheen of nerd over my interests, which gives me the appearance of being curiously well-rounded, rather than vaguely creepy. I also have a moderately well-sharpened fashion sense, and can put most strangers at ease with a well-placed bon mot.

One dorkout of mine is an affinity for cartography, or the study of maps. Fortunately, Tessa shares this obsession (her mom even called her Miss Map in the '70s I reminded her that after next year, she'll be Mrs. Map), so she doesn't automatically recoil in horror every time I come up with something mappish to throw on the wall. To me, maps are a no-brainer; they're usually very pretty, lots of blues and greens, practical, and let you know your place in the world. Jackson Pollock said that he painted from within, because he "was nature," and nothing looks more like nature's desire for abstract entropy than a map.

See how silly Cape Cod looks, notice the Michelangelo/God finger touch of Gibraltar and Spain, the sexy way Africa and South America belong together. I pity the states Wyoming and Colorado, so square and mandated; give me the squiggles of North Carolina and the squashed-bug appearance of Maryland.

I mention this because we found a map in the barn yesterday (it will take us years to go through all the boxes in there) in the back of a book called "Manhattan 'How to Get There' 1941." Basically, it did the same thing X-Man does for New Yorkers carrying a Palm: give it the address, and it'll tell you the cross street. The "How to Get There" also gives you the bus or subway stop, suggesting that both were used just as frequently (not true these days). Laurie Williams looked up her address and said, "The 2nd Avenue bus to 6th Street yep, that's still how you get to my place." I'd say the book is probably about 75% accurate today.

It's the inaccuracies that are the fun stuff, and there's loads of streets that don't exist anymore, elevated trains going down 1st Avenue, and forgotten neighborhoods that are now the left turn lanes on the lower portion of 6th Avenue. It's the kind of book fellow dork Kevin would have on his Manhattan street necrology page.

One thing's for sure: when you hold this book, you suddenly feel the tight brim of a hat across your forehead, you look down to find yourself wearing a smart tie, and you're at the corner of 22nd Street and 4th Avenue, looking for a dame who wanted to meet at the five-and-dime counter next to the I.R.T. stop. It's 1940 and starting to rain, and things are about to get interesting.

the fold-out map of Manhattan, 1941

6/29/02 You forget how much

6/29/02

You forget how much you love the water until you go back into it. Even though it was utterly landlocked, Chapel Hill always found us in a boat, either in the verdant tree-overhangs of University Lake, or the obvious drowned forest of Jordan Lake. One way or another, we'd go fishing or tubing, or at the very least, steal away into a forbidden pool at another nameless apartment complex. We were in the water all the time.

It was this I remembered as our rowboat drifted from the silty edges of Rudd Pond; incongruously, it seemed funny that a place so far up in New England would have a name begging to be slurred by a Southern redneck. Try it yourself: "Rudd Pond." It's almost as bad as that street in Hoke County, NC called "Old Wire Road."

Willis, Laurie and Neal try to navigate through the grasping lakeweed

I would have enjoyed it more; nay, verily I would have enjoyed the entire day more if I hadn't felt like someone had hit me with the convex end of a shovel. Which segues perfectly into:

The Celextant, June 29, 2002

Upping the dosage of Celexa always brings on a bout of fatigue, but this particular episode turned from temporary guest into regular lodger. The fatigue I get in the late afternoon is unlike most I've known; it's not a tiredness in the regular sense, but an innate lazy weariness that seems unaffected by rest. I mean, I feel like I could sleep for 11 hours and still bump into shit all day.

I'm hoping that this too will pass - most problems attached to the drug have - but meantime, I'm kinda wishing speed hadn't proven to be such a killer, 'cuz I could use some right about now.

6/28/02 I have several criteria

6/28/02

I have several criteria for the places I want to live: as I've said before, I want a healthy gay population (even though I'm not gay, I feel more comfortable when the queers are around), an indie bookstore and movie theater, and a coffee shop that serves frappuccino-like crap with whipped cream. Bonus points also go to neighborhoods with ne'er-do-well teens on skateboards, really good basketball hoops with nets, a park within walking distance, and either the view of a large body of water or a mountain. Park Slope has all that stuff except the water or mountain.

But after looking at the map, I've hit upon another really good way to pick a place to live, especially in New York: check out the blogs per subway station ratio on the nycbloggers website. I'd say that if you didn't know anything about the town, simply picking a subway stop that has 10 or more bloggers represented is a good place to start.

Looking at the map of Manhattan, a few things are made obvious: first off, the Astor Place stop has a shitload of bloggers (most likely because of NYU) but it's also in the East Village, a place where most of the things I listed can be found. Tons of lesbians, a park, good coffee shops, and two hole-in-the-wall indie movie theaters showing Kurosawa films. I believe the East Village should be abandoned at the age of 30 for health reasons, but it's really great for a few years.

Other places with tons of bloggers: The Lower East Side and my old hood 1st Avenue and 14th St; the flamboyantly wonderful world of West 4th St.; the cool area up near Lincoln Center; the hipsters in Brooklyn's Cobble Hill; and of course, all the folks at my subway stop.

I know it's not a perfect theory there are a confusing number of blogs to be found on the Upper East Side, and my disdain for that part of town has been relentlessly documented. That, and I have no clue what the hell people are writing about over at the fuckin' Port Authority, but there seems to be more there than abandoned porn shops and sickening public restrooms.

But as I said, it's a good start. Bloggers are good people; they are technophiles, extroverts, they pick their neighborhoods wisely, and generally have something to say. Except for those knitting blogs yeesh! Somebody put a cable-knit sock in those motherscratchers, please!

6/27/02 Sometime in the winter

6/27/02

Sometime in the winter of 1987, the much-lauded actor Fred Weller, some other bros and I were walking home from a party in a late-night winter flurry. Some girl was with us and was horrified when we all pulled out our units and began to write our names in the snow. "That's totally disgusting," she said, and without missing a beat, Fred turned around, member in hand, and said, "This, my dear, is why cursive was invented."

It's a memory that occurs to me almost every day on 8th Avenue, where each neighborhood dog has left a curlyque trail of pee-pee that looks like all of them were having a terrible time spelling their names. "Daisy" one seems to read. "Morton" reads another.

Our dog Chopin, who has terrible cursive, eschews such displays as ostentatious and crude. He only pees on solid objects, and always manages to stop before moving on. He also prefers to poop on those big subway air vent grates, but will accept cobblestones, basement shafts, or anything with a lattice-like appearance if nothing else looks promising. Among other things, he hates bicyclists, skateboarders, rollerbladers, or any person that appears to be moving much too fast for how much work they seem to be exerting.

They say you take on the characteristics of your roommates, and I must admit, every time I see someone hopping on a scooter, I don't quite trust them; when a delivery guy blows by on his bike, I growl a little and when I walk over a subway grate, I really just want to poop.

Chopin poses, disdainfully, in front of a sidewalk lined with the embarrassingly bad cursive of his neighborhood peers

6/26/02 Michelle celebrated her 30th

6/26/02

Michelle celebrated her 30th birthday tonight, making yesterday the last day the Williams kids (at least this generation) will be in their 20s. That's only a big deal to those of us keeping count of such things, and I'd bet neither Kent or Steve care, having said goodbye to their thirties 3 or 4 years ago. Being in one's twenties, however, was a pretty big deal to me, as I ended up writing about it in two books, countless magazines, and even wrote a movie whose protagonist is writing his thesis on the "Ten Archetypes of Americans in their 20s."

All of which is deliciously ironic, since I don't feel like it was a very good decade in my life. Sure, the beginning was great, being at Carolina and dating as many Pi Phis as I could carry and we had some life-affirming times at both the Purple and Pink Houses – but my relationships with women and my knack for self-sabotage pretty much color that decade for me as pretty clueless. In one of my favorite UNC classes ever, Dr. Richard Lucas demanded that we all sow our wild oats, be as insane and careless as possible, fuck up our lives in the name of spontaneity NOW before we got into our 30s. He said that not to do so would cause irreparable damage. I thought he was being a bit extreme, but I can safely say from this vantage point that every stupid thing I did in my 20s helped me become a better person in my 30s.

Yeah, but you're in therapy and on Celexa for being so anxiety-ridden and miserable!

True, but I also made a feature film, I'm living in the best town in the world, and I'm getting married to one of the greatest women in North America. There is absolutely no way I would have had the gumption or the self-trust to commit myself to Tessa if I hadn't been shown the Wasteland that is Other Women. I thank God for all of my Bad Relationships, because they have trulie Bestowed upon Me the Abillitie and Wisdome to Knowe the Difference.

Michelle holds forth at the nicely-furnished but poorly-run Bona Fides restaurant Tessa and I actually left without paying after waiting over an hour for our food

6/25/02 This was supposed to

6/25/02

This was supposed to be my "Brooklyn day," you know, where I stay at home and get all the little things done that I've been desperate to do for months. I wasn't due to leave for the editing room until 3:30pm, so ostensibly I had the whole first part of the day to myself. I sure as hell did; I slept until 1:35.

Now, this was par for the course in Chapel Hill and Los Angeles, where nothing in my world had much import until well after noon, but these days it seems like a Roman vomitorium-like luxury that I don't really have. So I made the best of things, paid all the bills on the way to Asset and called Earthlink to ask why the hell our DSL modem hasn't shown up yet. Apparently there's two kinds of modems, and well, the details are so dull as to bend one's mind. Suffice to say I've been waiting for the forkin' thing for 5 weeks.

I'm kind of pissed at Earthlink, even as I've been their strongest customer. I signed up for service back in 1995, which is how I got "ecstasy at earthlink dot net" instead of "ghkjsdhf3984e723 at earthlink dot net." Of course, my email address (and probably this website) has been the source of some grief, since people sometimes think my email might be spam from either porn or rave drug distributors. For the record, my email is "ecstasy" because that's the address I had at UNC. And I had "ecstasy" at UNC because my favorite living band is XTC. Plus, I always loved the word "ecstasy," long before the drug fell into favor.

My best ecstasy experience, speaking of which, was a night in mid-August '95 in the French Quarter of New Orleans, tooling around with Sarah Adkins in the back of someone's Chevy. We went to a show where a Japanese rock band/performance troupe was using a snowblower as an instrument. I drank a fifth of Skyy Vodka, danced with 35 strangers on top of a table on Magazine Street, then watched the sun rise over the rooftops of the Garden District. Ah, the crazy mid-90s!

Sarah and I pose behind the French Market in 1995, mere hours before our rhapsodic, MDMA-induced torpor

6/24/02 The Taconic State Parkway

6/24/02

The Taconic State Parkway is a bone-rattling journey that sometimes feels just as bumpy and disorienting as the mud-hole carriageways it replaced sometime in the early part of the 20th century. The 55mph speed limit and the undeniably scarce attention to gas and food make it a bit of a drag to most Americans accustomed to seeing the friendly beckoning of a Taco Bell every twenty miles or so, but what it lacks in amenities, it makes up in charm. That, and I'll just have to get used to it, because Columbia County isn't going anywhere.

I happened upon a website tonight while looking for a link to the Taconic Parkway in the preceding paragraph (I didn't find one relevant enough besides, do any of you click on these links anyway? some of them are quite good) and I surfed it for damn near two hours until my eyes gave out. It's called Forgotten New York, and it's the fucking coolest thing I've seen on the web in months. It relentlessly archives dead Manhattan streets, weird subway mysteries, the elevated trains that would have sped through my living room in the East Village, even a collection of ghost ads on the sides of ancient buildings that may surpass James Lilek's page devoted to the same.

It's relevant today because we went straight from Columbia County to Grand Central Station (in 1880, we could have taken NY22 straight from the Cobble Pond Farms gas station to Grand Central directly who says you don't learn some cool shit on the net?) to scout locations for the 1929 pick-up shots we want for The Pink House. In the film, Oxford (my brother Sean) wins Chloe (Natane Boudreau) back from the bad guy, and a simple scene needs to convey that she has escaped him. Originally, it was to be shot at some docks somewhere, with her exiting a boat into his waiting, loving arms, but Tessa intervened. I said, "How about an old rundown train station?" and she said, "How about Grand Central?"

Of course, little above 20 feet high in Grand Central has changed since 1871 (as far as you know, anyway) so we had a good time putting our thumb and forefingers into joining "L's" like directors do, making sure we can turn Grand Central into another night in 1929. Barring a terrorist attack (there are few better places, in my opinion), it should be a fun shoot.

After getting lunch, we took the subway shuttle to Times Square, but not before passing a curious door, fathoms deep under the busiest train station in the world, marked with an ancient sign: "KNICKERBOCKER." The door was locked, and seemed to lead nowhere. And then, tonight, looking for the Taconic State Parkway, instead I found the mystery of the "door that goes nowhere" on the Forgotten New York page. I love it when things are so deliciously cyclical.

director of photography John Kelleran chats with Tessa about shot placement at Grand Central

6/23/02 Today was a very

6/23/02

Today was a very rich day, the kind of day that is best explained through pictures. If you're on a dialup account, I'm sorry, but you'll just have to wait the 45 seconds or so for these things to waft onto your computer. And by the way, get a real internet connection! You're slowing the rest of us down!

Anyway, we went from Columbia County to Boston and home again, and here's some of the things we saw:

Michelle and Tessa share a laugh after Michelle's 350-mile trek on the Northeast AIDS ride. The closing ceremony featured the mayor of Boston, a sweeping soundtrack, and of course, a rousing chorus of Erasure

above, the three girls before the ride
below, the three girls after the ride

a woman wearing a Carolina jersey sobs in the arms of her son who had just finished the ride. Their family held a sign that said "Shawnelle, we miss you"

back home, Tessa and I finish our garden at 1:30AM, by the light of the full strawberry moon. Crops planted under the full moon are thought to have mystical properties; we shall see

6/22/02 Hoops isn't the same

6/22/02

Hoops isn't the same as it was in Chapel Hill; back then, there was a game every weekday except Friday, it would last for hours in the waning sun, and we were all playing really well. In August, the heat was inescapable, so we did the opposite we immersed ourselves in it, playing ball until we were drenched in the sweat of the person we were guarding. I made plays in those days that were truly impressive for someone who had started playing seriously at 19, a good ten years later than everyone else.

But that was before moving to Los Angeles, and now New York. Since 1997, I've been stuck in the once-a-week regular gig, with the occasional game scattered throughout the month. The "occasional games" might be at Chelsea Piers, sometimes with the guys in Astoria on the weekend, or some sort of pick-up game, but I know this: it's not enough, god dammit.

The Monday night game in LA was actually the "Young Adult Night" at the Mormon church in Arcadia, a good 45 minutes away from where I was living in Hollywood. Mormons are generally good people, and missionaries are on a strict ascetic regimen, but god help you if you play them on their "P" or preparation day. It's the day they can get all their ya-yas out, and in hoops, that manifests as fouls, hacks and muggings. It got to the point where I couldn't play with the missionaries anymore; they had way too much pent-up rage.

The Thursday night game in New York is better, because most of us are old friends, but I have to say, I suck in there. Maybe it's the lighting, maybe it's the often-judgmental order-barking, maybe it's because the other players never pass, maybe it's because my fucking back has taken the sting out of my game but I can't seem to find my game in that place. It's a pity, too, because it's the most Hoosiers-like basketball fantasy for the old-time purist you can get. Right in Soho on Mulberry Street, it's the ancient St. Patrick's Church, its cornerstone laid in 1809, the old gym a relic of bygone cagers. Weirdly, I have a lot more fun with Sean's friends in Astoria, or just with the Chipper down in Chapel Hill.

Basketball has always been a metaphor for me, and these days I'm mostly feeling the impermanence of youth. Physically, I feel similar to the days when I was 22, but there are two things that are much harder to overcome the next day: liquor and hoops. Which is probably a good thing I'm not in Chapel Hill anymore, because the town is powered almost solely by those two elements.

Lindsay misses his free throw to get in the next game at the Mulberry Street Garden

6/21/02 Okay, so I did

6/21/02

Okay, so I did the research, and it turns out I was right and wrong about "the longest day" thing. Today is the longest day of the year, but so was yesterday, and so will be the next two days after. The difference between them all is so slight as to be totally unnoticeable in New York, the sun sets at 8:29 pretty much all week. The cool thing is that the longest day of the year is even longer up here in Columbia County, where I write this: twelve whole minutes longer. Now, admittedly, I'll never see six of those minutes because they happen at 5:18 in the morning, but sometimes 6 minutes can make all difference in a tightly-contested hoops game that is desperately eking out the last visible photons of light as night approaches. I've been involved in countless unlit basketball games that carried on until someone got hit in the nose with the ball really hard.

The day today in Columbia County lasted 15 hours and 7 minutes; on December 20, it will last 9 hours and 4 minutes (click here to find out your town's stats). I find it almost excruciatingly hard to believe that from here on until Christmas the days will be getting shorter. Stuff like that would depress me if I weren't so busy and downing so much Celexa.

But for now, it's summer, and the gloaming lasts clear into the 9 o'clock hour, and days are sleepy, languid and forever. Our flowers have shot into the sky, and the grass in the pasture groans audibly into foot-long drifts. Chopin the dog, like an old Jewish retiree, sits on the hill by the barn and stares at the Catskills. My and Tessa's projects sling through the afternoon; every once in a while, we pass each other and sometimes she even shows me her boobs. Life is rich up here in Columbia County, I tellya what. I wish we could both dilly and dally here all the time.

a storm passes us just northwest

6/20/02 I'm not sure, but

6/20/02

I'm not sure, but I think this is the shortest night of the year. Much is always made of "the darkest night" (like in the Robert Frost poem) or the pagan glory of the summer solstice, but nary a mention is ever made of how short this night is. Probably because it isn't terribly interesting. Worse yet, it's most likely tomorrow night anyway.

Speaking of long days, we've entered into a curious part of the Pink House moviemaking process: at first, we were just glad that 58 hours of footage can be strung together to tell a story, but now we're trying to refine each tiny, singular moment until it's actually funny. It's as if we took a giant slab of marble, and managed to carve out the beginnings of form, much like the slaves of Michelangelo stuck forever in rock. Now we have to free the slave, make the right chisel marks for toes and fingers, and let the work have its ambulatory freedom. It's pure slogging, and what's worse, the cutting room is stiflingly free of oxygen.

It's strange being this close to a fine cut of the film, I'm finally being forced to think of things that I hadn't considered in well over a year. Stuff like "why is Charlotte winking at Michelle?" and "how did they get the money to hire Hobex?" and all the little plot points that make perfect sense when you're writing the screenplay at the Bourgeois Pig in 1999, but now must be reconciled in full color. It's amazing how much crap can be thrown away, as long as you have reached the point where fighting for unnecessary plot just makes you feel like a moron.

Paradoxically, the last few days have also reminded me of the tremendous, soul-dragging difficulty of the shoot itself. It shouldn't be this way, since now the actors have become the characters on screen, but each time something flies by, each time an edit works, I'm reminded of how arduous and horrifying that scene was to shoot. There are many pictures typifying our unrelenting fatigue on the set of The Pink House, but somehow, this is my favorite:

Tessa and I finding a swingset in someone's yard during the car scenes of the Pink House movie - click on the image to see more

6/19/02 Nobody has the tenacity

6/19/02

Nobody has the tenacity of my sister, something that was made clear to me again today by 10:45AM, as she set off to Bear Mountain to begin the 350-mile AIDS ride with her co-workers from the Union Square Caf. This is pretty amazing, considering she has a sub-par bike – most of the riders I saw were on $1200 cycles made from latticed polymers, weighing a third of an ounce – and that she never rode more than 70 miles in her training. But there I was, loading her bike and two others on the back of the car and schlepping them all up the Harlem Valley so they could pound out the four-day ride to Boston.

The other passengers were Beth and Simone Beth wants to be a yogi, Simone wants to be an actress, and both are servers at Union Square until either of those things happen. Beth still carried the knee scars from a wipeout she had last week. Those girls, who tonight are sleeping nervously in a tent on Bear Mountain, are, dare I say it, a good bit braver than I. What stuns me is Michelle's compassion; she's willing to slog 350 miles through the heat on an old mountain bike for an AIDS cure, and I'm reasonably sure she doesn't even know anybody with the disease.

Beth, Simone and Michelle pre-ride. Click on the picture for a short Quicktime movie showing a typical interaction between Sean and Michelle at dinner

After driving the gals upstate (and then backtracking back up again Michelle had forgotten her wallet), I dropped by New City to see Jamie Block at Prudential Securities. Nestled deep in an office park that could definitely have been worse (and would have been, if it were in North Carolina), his office had a clean, early-90s sheen with that curious landscaping that seems to be taking over America. While not as Orwellian as the stuff built in the '60s, there is almost something sadder about the intensely-manicured stretches of tiny lawn that greets the modern-day hotelgoer or investment counselor.

Jamie, of course, couldn't be happier. He actually likes playing with money, and is good at it, like his father was. It reminds me of the guilds, where the patriarch passed down his smithy job to the sons. Sure, the sons would try to be a bard for a few years, but pretty soon, the smithies would come calling. Two years ago, Jamie had a record deal at Capitol; now he's part of an investment group worth a quarter of a billion. And he's much happier. I kind of miss doing lines of coke off the stomach of a chick in the kitchen of a bar on Avenue B, but hey, why live in the past?

6/18/02 Nothing's more boring than

6/18/02

Nothing's more boring than listening to someone else's ailments, although that never stopped my Auntie Donna. Suffice to say I suffered today through the kind of sinus congestion that even the reliable Afrin couldn't conquer. I'm told that I have to get surgery for my deviated septum, which wasn't even deviated through anything fun like cocaine. I fucked up my sinuses by smashing my nose into the lip of a trashcan. At least I got something out of my three years in LA.

While Tessa went to watch the WNBA's Lady Liberty play the Orlando Miracle (God, I hate focus-group-tested sports names) at Madison Square Garden, I met Sean, Jordana and Michelle in the East Village for fish and or chips. Michelle's set to go on the AIDS ride tomorrow and wanted to give me my birthday presents before she left bike riding gloves, a leatherman, and a cool electronic odometer! Now I can see in glorious, vivid detail how many miles I can ride before I get exhausted and cranky.

Sean and Michelle describe Mom finding a used condom wrapper in Michelle's coat when she was 13

Later on, we went to Urban Outfitters and gawked at the pre-fab hipster T-shirts that say things like "Goldfarb Family Reunion 1982" on it, retailing for $26.99 I mean, who the fuck are they kidding? You can get the real thing on 1st Ave. for half the price, and that includes washing out the musty smell. I used to think that our generation (and I'm including you 25-year-olds, too, ya bunch of big-pants-wearin' rave muthafuckas) was impossible to target, that we could sniff someone selling our secrets back to ourselves and avoid the Man like the plague, but if Urban Outfitters is making money on these T-shirts, then maybe even those days are gone.

They did have O.P. shirts, though, and I almost bought one.

6/17/02 I like my friends

6/17/02

I like my friends Jon, Bud and Chip. The four of us started hanging out around Labor Day 1985 at the onset of college - desperate castaways from northern prep schools stuck in this sweltering southern bouillabaisse, knowing no one, clinging to each other the way expatriates in Paris no doubt clutch their Sunday New York Times. In those days, we dined on the Smiths, the Cure, took disastrous road trips in the cold rain where nobody got laid, and spent inordinate amounts of time making delirious fun of each other.

Bud was actually from North Carolina, so he had the vernacular down, and had a few friends from Statesville, so naturally, I relied on him to save me from the masturbatory self-involvement I'd perfected at Norfolk Academy. We used to take long walks around the woodsy expanse of campus, where I'd grill him about all things Carolinian. He also had a girlfriend that visited him from his hometown every few months, and I had yet to kiss a girl.

He introduced me to Jon, a frail yet culturally hyperliterate dude from Paoli, PA, and from then on, "Meat is Murder" never stopped wafting through the dorm. Jon had a knack for dating psychotic women, which had to be some sort of Freudian complement, because he's the least psychotic guy I know. On Christmas Eve in 1985 while my parents were throwing antiques at each other during the worst marital meltdown in North American history - Jon arranged a ski trip and got me on the next train to Vermont. And neither of us could ski. He's the only person who hated Duke as much as me (although 12 years of forced magnanimity in sports broadcasting may have made him soft).

Chip was the hardest to know, and in fact, spent the first three months of college fighting with Bud, who found him to be, well, a business major. The irony was that Bud was a business major too, at first, but thought Chip's prep middle-class background made him especially asinine. After a few months, however, all of us were going through majors like disposable razors. By the time we graduated, there were probably eleven or twelve majors between us.

Most college friends disband into that "I wonder what they're doing now" sort of distant friendship, but something in the water at Carolina has kept us all heavily immersed in each other's lives. Jamie Block and I were talking about "The Big Chill" today and remarked that we're now the same age as those fuckers, but we have none of the Lost Idealism and belief that our best days are behind us. I told him that when you change careers every two years, like most of us have, we are continually full of optimism (despite our griping to the contrary). Also, the people in that movie never saw each other after school, and we all managed to stick together.

Bud was my roommate, off and on, from the summer of 1987 clear until 1994. We once lived on cookie dough for a month. He never "graduated" from Carolina, but that never stopped him from writing me (as alter ego Dr. Thornton Long) countless notes on fake hospital stationery to get me out of doing stuff. Bud has a hibernating gene that makes him cocoon for years at a time, but is now entering a relatively extroverted phase. He hikes a lot of mountains with his girlfriend Baps, and they were just at the farm a couple of months ago.

Jon just moved to somewhere in New Jersey, and even though we suck for not getting together more, it's nice to have him close. He got married last year in a great ceremony in Lexington, KY to an awesome woman named Lisa. Jon and I always manage to keep extensive radio contact, and usually meet at the ends of the earth (i.e., wherever Carolina is playing in the Final Four).

After a stint in Washington D.C., Chip came back to Chapel Hill where we slacked from 1991 to 1997 together. Or should I say that I slacked; Chip always had a job. We have a basketball rivalry that has been a war of attrition since 1988, although I have dominated the last few years, due to his unwavering interest in Burger King sausage biscuits. My family has an irrational love for Chip, and that includes Tessa and my mom, who says that he's the funniest person she knows, as long as you listen carefully while he's mumbling.

There's so much more about the four of us, affectionately known to our various girlfriends as The Four Guys Not Named Biff, but decorum (and, dear reader, your attention span) prohibits going through them here. Suffice to say Jon's nickname is "Will You Stop Touching Me," Chip actually hit me on the head as hard as he could with the business end of a phone receiver, and Bud once ran across Chapel Hill barefoot to stop someone from jumping off a roof. Like I said, I like my friends Jon, Bud and Chip.

above: Chip, me and Jon outside our dorm in fall 1986
below: Chip, me and Jon at Jon's wedding, spring 2001
not pictured: Bud, who couldn't be bothered to get in the pictures

thanksgiving all-stars!

6/16/02

Wow, what can we say about this picture? A few things I'm sure of: I'm the photographer, and I'm using one of those unbelievably shitty 110 cameras with tiny film and a snap-on flash bulb, the kind I don't think they even make anymore. It is Thanksgiving 1978.

In the middle, turning around, is my sister-in-law Melissa, with her hair in full waffle late-70s regalia. At far left is her soon-to-be husband, my brother Kent (they got married three years later). The two people at far right are my brothers Steve and Sean, and my Mom smiles from the rear of the picture. Naturally, I have no idea where my Dad is, but I'm sure everyone in this picture can, if called on the phone right now, offer their conjecture.

What is really cool about this picture are the walls; I remember them being in a state of spackle-bedecked disarray for months. My dad, usually Gestapo-like in these control freak years, let us put a bunch of silly drawings up there and doodle all over it. Drawing on walls has been a family idee fixe for a long time - we drew all over the back of the London house, and there are some amazing pictures of Kent and Steve drawing on the walls of their condemned house in Hollywood, not long after their father, my mom's first husband, died in a car accident. There's something so wonderfully anarchistic about defacing a home wall. We did it in the Pink House as well, with a giant map of North Carolina; all guests were invited to mark the spot where they lost their virginity.

The yellowness of this picture is one of my favorite things about the 70s, and now all of my memories, preserved in photographs, are canting yellow along with them. The only place this picture will not get any more yellow is right here on the internet, which fascinates me. We've managed to slow down time right here on the blog.

And one last thing. Michelle says she is a vegetarian, but look at her in the picture (bottom left) - she's holding aloft the seared leg of a dead bird like she was the flesh-gorging victor of a feast in Valhalla. I mean, it's smeared all over her face. The girl is 29 now, but she's obviously in full-blown denial.

6/15/02 It's funny, because I

6/15/02

It's funny, because I used to call myself "inoffendable." There was nothing before that I've ever seen, ever been told, ever experienced that actually offended me. If something was unbelievably rude or inappropriate, my instinct is to laugh first, or at least bask in the absurdity of the moment. Being inoffendable, I thought, kept a body young, allowed for infinite elasticity and permitted you to keep friends most everyone else had long abandoned for safer acquaintances.

But then we saw Bad Company tonight, and I have to say, pretty much anything that uses nuclear terrorism to sell entertainment tickets has begun to... well, offend me. Coupled with The Sum of All Fears (which spent an unbelievable two weeks at the top of the box office), it seems like Hollywood, as well as the American moviegoer, thinks it's okay to add stakes to their stories by including the possible annihilation and radiation of an American city. Now, given that I live in and near New York, as does Tessa, and Sean, and Michelle, not to mention 40 or 50 people I adore, I'm finding the whole fucking thing hard to take. Much racist commentary has gone on about the nuclear gamesmanship between India and Pakistan, comments like "they aren't sophisticated enough to understand what nuclear war entails" but it seems to me that we're even worse.

I realize these movies were put into post-production long before Sept. 11 (and I guess we should be stunned that Hollywood even had the sensitivity to delay their release a few months), but it's going to take a lot more than digitally editing out the World Trade Center towers from every skyline shot to make me feel like caring about action movies again. In the middle of "Bad Company," Anthony Hopkins has to show Chris Rock the effects of a nuclear blast on Jersey City in order to convince him to buck up and be a good protagonist. And I can't speak for the entire audience (most of whom were 10-year-olds answering their cell phones), but I detected an audible gasp when the dramatization detonated over the East River. The bomb itself ends up in Grand Central Station, which I have always thought to be an excellent place for a pedestrian pipe-bombing, which is why I tell Tessa to only buy her tickets in the booths to the side of the grand hall.

Yeah, yeah, I should do as my therapist says (god, the stuff I hear myself saying) and avoid all contact with this kind of thing. Dr. Gorman says that most obsessive-compulsives believe, erroneously, that if they only do enough research on their obsessional subject, they'll cure themselves. The truth is, that's a path that leads to more and more compulsion, because you'll keep looking until you find something that horrifies you. In this case, however, I can't be blamed: we were meaning to see The Bourne Identity (which, I'm told, has no stolen nuclear devices) but it was sold out, along with everything else. While I was parking, Tessa and her sister Michelle got tickets for the only movie left, and I didn't know the plot points until I had already bought popcorn and Mountain Dew.

I pray that I don't always feel like this. We live in terribly interesting and interestingly terrible times, and not only that, we live in a fucking bullseye. I realize that we are going to need some good luck to get through the rest of this decade unscathed. I think I can handle the pressure of being in the nuclear shadow as long as I am surrounded by the people I love, get good therapy, pop some pills and develop a state of healthy denial. But using my dread as a plot point against me is no longer acceptable. It makes me fucking angry. I am offended.

6/14/02 It's official: every time

6/14/02

It's official: every time I change the dose of the Celexa, I get thrown into a tailspin of fatigue that is truly barbiturate in intensity. The same damn thing happened when I went from 10mg to 20mg, and now that I've gone to 30mg, I walked into walls all day.

We showed the newer, improved, music-laden version of The Pink House tonight, this time in front of John Kelleran, Rick Gradone and Todor the Cartoonist. Watching it with them reminded me I'm a pretty good writer, god damn it!

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

6/12/02 There was a day

6/12/02

There was a day when I geeked out more than any other, hitching my trailer to a passion far more dorky than marching band, Dungeons & Dragons and chess club put together. I involved myself with something that would virtually guarantee that I would not have sex with a woman for another ten years. Of course, I'm talking about Ham Radio.

I don't know why amateur radio aficionados were as buffoon-like as they were; after all, they were only doing what every hipster kid on earth does every five seconds with the internet right now. There's no discernable difference, in my mind, between randomly IM'ing somebody half a world away - and contacting them via a 40-metre dipole with a Yaesu transceiver. Sure, you had to have a license, an antenna that invaded the neighbors yard, and a moderate understanding of Morse Code, but that's not a far stretch from a kid with an ISP, a cable modem strung through the neighbor's yard and a moderate understanding of HTML. But somehow Ham Radio enthusiasts were fat, friendless, greasy, sartorially horrific and did everything they could to scare women away.

I did learn a lot of things during my Lost Years as a ham operator. My call sign was KA0JXA, and I got very good at CW (Morse Code) - about 45 words a minute, better than most typists. Unfortunately, the Morse bled into my subconscious obsessive-compulsive disorder so badly that I was looking at every billboard and counting the number of "dahs" and "dits" in the words. For instance:

I A N W I L L I A M S
.. .- -. .-- .. .-.. .-.. .. .- -- ...

has 16 dits and 9 dahs. The scary thing is that I can still make this calculation in under two seconds, even with longer phrases. It's my little autistic savant skill, guaranteeing me no end of things over which to obsess. I suppose everyone has an autistic savant skill, I just choose to publish mine in a blog.

Anyway, you take something from every phase of your life, and the concept I took from ham radio was called QRP. Hams have a 3-letter code for just about everything, and QRP stands for "I will reduce power." And thus sprang forth a curious subdivision among ham radio guys who turned their zillion-dollar transmitters down almost to zero, so that they were broadcasting with barely enough power to light a single bulb on a Christmas tree, and seeing how far they can get. On a good day, a good QRP'er from Australia can carefully link up his radio, transmit at 4 watts and reach somebody in Italy. It's a pretty cool feeling, doing so much with so little. By comparison, your favorite FM station transmits at 100,000 watts and can barely make it 40 miles. It's all in the wrist, you see.

I like to try and foist the concept of QRP in my own life, which is really hard because I'm such a high-maintenance freak. I never allow myself to become complacent, however, and I always know what I can do without. I have a QRP in my home life, knowing exactly what I can do with very little, even despite having so much stuff. The attacks of 9/11, and my own aging process have given my QRP an added meaningfulness. The Purple and Pink Houses were biospheric studies in QRP; we got by pretty famously at dangerously sub-poverty income levels.

In the same vein, sort of, my latest project was the rescue of a 100-year-old wheelbarrow from a dirt grave behind our farm. It took two days of figuring out, but now we have a garden tool that functioned in both 1899 and 2002. That, too, is a pretty cool feeling.

Mom and Tessa gardening with the renovated wheelbarrow

6/11/02 After an abortive attempt

6/11/02

After an abortive attempt at viewing the Pink House movie tonight (computer/monitor relationship problems), Mom, Tessa and I went to Barnes & Noble in Union Square to look for computer books. Tessa has been trying to figure out Entourage for the Mac, so she immersed herself in the computer section, while I just stared around at the vast, unbelievable quantity of books currently in circulation. So many schlubs have book deals that it almost seems like some colossal stupidity on my part not to jump back onto that steamer.

I felt lucky when we wrote 13th-GEN and got a book deal right away, because there weren't that many non-fiction tomes about popular culture to begin with. The whole "social science" or "cultural studies" section of a bookstore is a relatively new development; back when 13th-GEN first came out, every bookstore had our book, but finding it was a different matter. Thank god 110,000 people did, or else I'd have run out of liquor money by 1994.

I've said it before, but I should have moved to NYC when the gettin' was good. I'd have been seven years ahead of the curve and been in a good position to dictate my own writing career (you know, as long as I didn't get hit by a cab). As it was, I had to finish my novel for my own reasons, and then the book world seemed to get so glopped up with half-baked ideas that I scarcely desired to throw my hat in the ring. Making movies is so much more appealing in so many ways, if only because you get to associate with 75-80 members of your phylum.

I've always managed to get the career I wanted, even as it changed every two years. Now I want to get myself back into the book world, and I'm having trouble finishing the two chapters that both Crown and Simon & Schuster requested. I must be on fucking crack not to put my nose to the matrix and do it, but something has kept me back - and I'm wondering if it's not just the same old boring, typical Williams family paralysis. I swear to god my family and I can let things dangle for months before we are moved to action. Sure, we're capable of incredible bursts of energy, but like a sprinting lion, after 20 minutes or so, we're done hunting for the week.

The only thing that really counteracts it is Red Bull, because cocaine is just not an option. I know I'd end up pulling a Len Bias, may he rest in peace.

publicity still from "13th-GEN" in 1993; clockwise from top left: me, Neil Howe, R.J. Matson, Bill Strauss

6/10/02 I have all sorts

6/10/02

I have all sorts of pictures that are recreations of previous pictures; the most involved of which is a panorama of Audubon Park in New Orleans that has me sitting with various people in 1987, 92, 94, 95, 97 and in 2001 with Tessa. If I ever figure out how to string them together in Photoshop, I'll put them up on the site somewhere - they're pretty amazing.

Most of these pictures are simply shots I took back in the past that happened to be great pictures, and then I just get the same people to sit in the same place 14 years later. Aging is something that fascinates me. Or am I just a vain control freak? Can't I just be both?

left: Lindsay and me in April 1991; right: Lindsay and me in March 2002

6/9/02 So much has been

6/9/02

So much has been made of the "mind over body" connection that any mention of it had better say something new about the subject. I'd just like to warn all readers that there is no risk of that happening in this blog entry.

I am fascinated, nonetheless, of the amazing amounts of shit you can make your body do if it is immersed in distraction. Today as Tessa and I were biking on the Harlem Valley Rail Trail, we talked about the future of Asset, and I have all kinds of ideas that could make us solvent and release me of years of debt fatigue and the basic misery of being a constant freelancer. We rode four miles and I don't even remember being on the bike.

This goes double for basketball; I can't run more than a mile before breaking down in an exhausted pile of knee-shredding boredom, but I can run up and down a basketball court for three hours without getting winded. It's all about distraction, y'see, allowing time to pass without concentrating on the immediate.

Which is the opposite of Buddhism in many ways, a religion that not only asks you to experience the here and now with a clear, vibrant consciousness, but to lean into any feelings of pain and misery in order to get the most out of them (and to substantially reduce your suffering from them). Good Buddhists like Pema Chodron actually advise against taking antidepressants during times of intense sadness because it robs you of the moments you can learn most about yourself.

To which I mostly say, "yeah, RIGHT" but there is something about the occasional sheer unhappiness of my mental state that breaks down when I really push my face into it. An image that keeps on coming up for me is the time in 1993 when Sean, Tamara and I rented a house in Nag's Head during a hurricane. We walked out onto the beach in the middle of the night as the gale force winds spat the sand at us like buckshot. It was almost unbearable, but I made myself stare clear into the dark ocean for as many seconds as I could endure.

I suppose one of the major keys to life is discerning between the abyss, and your reactions to it. The abyss itself is rarely the problem. I used to think I was completely addiction-free, but it turns out I had one of the worst ones of all.

6/8/02 I just read a

6/8/02

I just read a fascinating article in Salon about the "creative class" in America and the elements some towns offer that make them so desirable. Author Richard Florida has many indices that explain the "supercreative core" and the "bohemian index" and other catchphrases that seem to be the trade of pop sociologists, but his thoughts seem to bear truth in my experience. He says that "gays are the canaries of the creative economy," and I told Tessa the day we looked at Park Slope that I only wanted to live in a town that had a rambunctious, healthy queer population. Good things happen around gay people; the bookstores are better, the music is louder, and the attention to politics is, at worst, more interesting.

Florida says (again, in pop sosh talk) that "three T's" make up the perfect creative community: technology, talent and tolerance. I think Chapel Hill succeeds in this regard to a certain extent - the University brings in talent, the Research Triangle is awash in technology and as far as civil rights go, Chapel Hill is making a decent go of it - but it's still just too damn small to feel important. Durham and Raleigh are more interesting; despite a vocal gay community in Durham, I think both places suck because they're so fucking ugly. North Raleigh is an abomination taken straight out of the Anaheim, CA School for Disastrous City Planning, with no decent public transportation, Arthurian-themed planned living spaces mowed out of ancient forests, strip malls and car dealerships that stretch for miles. The only way to meet someone in North Raleigh is to hit them with your car.

The ironically-named Florida also says that southern towns (mentioning my old hometown of Norfolk, VA by name) are dying on the vine because of the lack of the "new creative class." I find it satisfying that racists, both North and South, ensure their own cultural and economic poverty. The more gays you hate, the farther from a fun place you get to live.

Which brings me to Brooklyn again. People know each other there. The pharmacist remembers you. Skate rats go to Halcyon on Smith Street and listen to breakbeats. Lesbians hold hands. I feel like it's the place that people think they're getting when they move to Manhattan, but the truth is, Manhattan long ago priced itself out of society's most interesting members. I'm still trying to figure out how any truly vital art can possibly spring forth from someone able to pay $3200/month for loft space in SoHo. The only place a beginning artist could possibly live in Manhattan is in Harlem; with a roommate or three on the Lower East Side; or at Ground Zero with a government grant. But if you want what you were looking for, come over the bridge to the town the Dutch called Breuckelen. The "creative class" and I are waiting.

Or, you know, stay where you are. Far be it for me to know what's best for anyone anymore.

Tessa endures my attempt at another picture of a foggy, early spring day in Prospect Park

6/7/02 Despite my lengthy, lugubriously-explained

6/7/02

Despite my lengthy, lugubriously-explained and relentlessly documented paranoia, spending the day in midtown Manhattan can still be quite fun. After meeting with the animator Todor (all of our animators have Cher-like single names to me) who brought terrific ideas to the beginning sequence to the Pink House movie, we trekked up to Harlem (where I'd never really been, strangely enough) to see Andy London's models for the "Hang in There" archetype. Suffice to say the guy is totally brilliant, and absolutely has the right dynamic. He made a little sample Quicktime movie that had unicorns, stuffed reindeers, kitty cats floating on hearts, and all kinds of sappy, girlie ephemera that had me doubled over. I love the fact that we're culling from so many worlds; everyone who works on this movie gets to dork out on something they adore, which is the definition of how I want to live my life.

From there, Tessa and I went to Fortunoff to get her engagement ring resized back to a 6 1/2 - which kind of sucked, since that was the original size of the ring. Moronically, I stole the wrong ring out of her drawer, thus causing them to resize it up to an 8. It was cool, though, because I geeked out and asked the lady to show me an example of tanzanite, peridot, and citrine. Tanzanite was cool, except that it's so weak that you can hardly ever wear it - you'd be better off spending the money on a sapphire. The peridot was the winner, as it was chartreuse-colored and interesting. Citrine was kind of a bust; it looks like weak amber, and is a little reminiscent of brown beer bottle glass. I feel sorry for November birthdays, stuck with citrine - us May babies get emeralds.

Stalling for time before the Erin McKeown/Norah Jones show at Town Hall, we screwed around at the Gap, Banana Republic, Nine West and the NBA Superstore - basically, we were behaving like good, cheese-filled beefy Americans.

Erin was brilliant as the opening act of the show, playing my favorite song of hers ("The Little Cowboy") and generally upstaging the considerably more pedestrian allure of the headliner Norah Jones, who sang beautifully, but not interestingly. Plus, Tessa hated Norah's guitarist, who was a sort of annoying jazz minimalist taken to little arty bleeps and blaps when the mood hit him. We stole away after the third song, feeling as though we'd heard enough, very glad to see Erin kick ass in front of a huge New York crowd.

Now we're up in Columbia County with my mom, snoring away in the front bedroom. The walls are thick, my white noise maker sonorous, my fatigue complete.

graffitti seen at the corner of 3rd Ave and 11th Street, looking oddly like my brother Kent's handwriting, even though he's in Iowa City

6/6/02 I've decided that freelance

6/6/02

I've decided that freelance work as a writer - while occasionally lucrative and while it certainly kept me in enough bourbon & cokes to last me through my 20s - isn't going to be enough if I plan on being an Actual Person(tm). I'm still going ahead with my plan to pitch ideas to my friends at Marie Claire and Self, and to finish the chapters for the "Dork" proposal, but I just can't live the sort of ham-n-egg lifestyle that carried me from Chapel Hill through California. That sort of living keeps you wearing awful shoes and makes you put off dental work until long past any good can be done.

The only catch is this: I can't take having a real job anymore, the kind of 9-to-5 slog that brought me to New York. I can't face getting on the 2 train and staring at the linoleum floor specially designed to camouflage barf flakes and urine trickles. I hated every second I was at my last job, and spent a year gritting my teeth, just so I could say I got through it. I know that's hopelessly bourgeois and there are scores of Americans drudging to their suck-ass day jobs every day for forty-five years, and that I am stunningly high-maintenance, but at least I can see myself for what I am.

After stints in the regular workforce, I came to understand what having a job really means: they pay you for the irrational act of being somewhere other than your beloved home at 10am. They don't pay you for the work (most people could do a year's work at their job in about two weeks) or even your attitude. They pay you for your physical body to consistently inhabit a strange place.

Thank god I had the internet, Napster, and Starbucks Frappucinos (with whipped cream) or else the sheer ennui of That Internet Job would have bored me into saliva-drooping states of post-shock-therapy catatonia. As it was, I was beginning to run out of songs to download. I already had the whole Schoolhouse Rock series and "Baby I'm A-Want You" by Bread - what more could I possibly want?

So the solution is to have a regular gig, but not a regular way of doing it. I have many ideas about the subject, and not all of them are unsavory.

6/5/02 We began to tackle

6/5/02

We began to tackle the major problem currently afflicting The Pink House movie - basically, the beginning is a bit of an incoherent mess. Things get cooking by the time the main characters settle into their respective house meetings, but until then, it's hard to tell who anyone is and why they're fighting each other.

Which brings me to the delightful topic of "pickup shots." If you feel as though your movie has some undeniably hole somewhere in it, a hole so big that it threatens to swallow up all but your most observant audience members, you can plan another 4-day shoot and viciously insert whatever new footage you want. In our case, we need Charlotte and her coven of sorority girls to make it obvious that they are:
a) evil
b) running for student body president
c) ruling the school
d) in a blood feud with the Pink House residents next door.

Most things in movies are accomplished with strategic edits, the wisp of a facial expression, or the minor strain of a soundtrack. Your characters don't even have to say anything. For instance, having Charlotte staple-gun her campaign poster over a "March for Peace" poster accomplishes a) through c) above. One of the things you learn as a first-time filmmaker and writer is that you literally need to squirt kerosene on at least 1/5th of your original dialogue.

Anyway, Tessa, Jessie and I brainstormed all kinds of things we can shoot upstate at the farm in order to fix all these problems. Between those shots and the animation, it's almost impossible to consider the movie even close to done. It's taking on the sheen of an impossibly overdue library book, but at least we're getting a sense of the whole.

Charlotte and her coven of girls in "The Pink House" - little did they know they'd have to revive the characters a year later

In a sine/cosine/tangential related story, I did my first "acting" tonight in about six years. Not since we put on "As You Like It" in 1996 have I pretended to be someone else in front of people (I mean, you know, besides the psychological personae we foist in order to quell our deep, lingering pain) and it felt funny. I never act; I hate it, and there are so many people clamoring for even the most shitty roles that I feel guilty even contemplating it. At least fourteen times we were nearly compelled to stick my ass in "The Pink House," but we always found someone else at the last minute, thank god.

I think I was pretty good, though. You know, for someone who has my neck.

6/4/02 Even though I didn't

6/4/02

Even though I didn't bother mentioning it last night (I was way too caught up in singing the virtues of Afrin Nasal Spray) we went to see the 24-hour plays and while the plays weren't entirely up to snuff, the night was again a fun one. I live in constant fear of being stuck in one of the endless, treacherously unfunny 20-minute train wrecks that occasionally plague these evenings, but last night, even the bad playlets had the courtesy to be short.

Lindsay is pretty funny when he gets into Producer Mode, storming around the Atlantic Theater with the officious "on message" look that newly-appointed school prefects have in schoolboy London, but he runs a great show. He's proof that the world is desperate for competent people to lead; he never tires of telling people about the plays, and his radar for new talent is unabating.

Onstage, my sister Michelle played a spurned woman out for revenge on some guy who broke the hearts of too many chicks - again, sort of poorly-constructed, but the guy playing the Lothario - and Michelle - were mindful of how little they had to work with, and played it up for the crowd. That's the thing about the 24-hour plays: there is simply no better audience. They'll laugh at anything, and always pull for the actors to succeed. Our friend Duncan actually walked offstage, in the middle of a scene, to look at the script - and he nearly got a standing ovation.

Michelle explains to her captee (Beresford Bennett) why he is being doused with lighter fluid

The last play was written by our friend Dan Kois, and Dan clearly understood the most important thing about writing a 10-minute play with no rehearsal: set up your joke, escalate it, implement a nice reversal, and do it quickly. His not-so-subtle jab at the current hot baseball rumor about the "gay player in the majors" starred Sean and Tessa's friend Garrett, and it was really funny. Sean actually looked like a baseball player up there, sort of beefy like Mark McGwire with the insouciant, staccato delivery of the ballplayers interviewed on ESPN (which, no doubt, he is watching right now - 2:27am).

Lindsay keeps saying they're going to do a "Best of..." night and hints that my play from August 2000 may make the cut. Writing that play - and seeing it performed with flawless brilliance by Sean, Seth, Sarah Clarke and Randy Quaid's daughter - marked the end of the cycle of despair I'd clung to since the day I set foot in California in 1997. Having that kind of experience the third week I was living in New York was a huge metaphorical victory, and it convinced me that I could still write, and that I was not, as LA had whispered in my ear, a worthless sack of shit.

6/3/02 I have been in

6/3/02

I have been in a pretty bad emotional state of late, so I wanted to give thanks to the synthetic, technical things in life that make things for me a little bit easier.

First off, I want to thank LASIK surgery for giving me brand new eyes. I will never have to have foggy glasses coming in from the cold, and I will never go back into LensCrafters, even if just to avoid a tornado.

I'd also like to give thanks to Afrin, the nasal decongestant spray, without which I'd would scarcely be breathing right now. Yeah, I know it's addictive and bad for your mucous lining and all that shit, but it's the only thing that works. Do not write to me with your home remedy. It will be as effective as squirting Smucker's up my nose.

I'd like to give thanks to the drug Allopurinol, even though I haven't taken it in a year. It counteracts gout, which is not nearly as cool a disease as it sounds.

At this juncture, I'd also like to thank the new synthetic fabrics that make playing sports more fun. Yes, fans, I'm talking about wool that wicks, lycras, spandex blends, and whatever moon-rocks my new bathing suit is made out of. Let me also thank the new Hoover WetVac, the DeWalt 5 1/2 inch random orbital sander, the Thor washer-and-dryer-in-one, the tangerine iBook, and caffeine-laced analgesics like Excedrin bought in bulk. I am thankful for these things.

Let me not forget Coke, and behind it Cherry Coke, Dr. Pepper, Orangina, Aranciata, and cranberry juice mixed with seltzer. I would like to thank the state of North Carolina, and especially one of its residents, Dean Smith.

I need to thank extension cords, cordless phones, Fedex, Clearasil, tuna, and a pre-emptive thanks to the antidepressant Celexa - the jury's still out on you, but I have faith you'll eventually deliver.

To close, I'd like to thank the store Target, for a flawless redesign of product, and for providing so much cool stuff to a kid in the 1970s. To prove my gratitude, here is a picture of Tessa at the Target in Breckenridge, VA (although I mostly posted it to see it in congruence with the picture below it). Nature and nurture, I worship both of you the same.

6/2/02 Even though I have

6/2/02

Even though I have to shrink these pictures down and save them as jpegs at an abysmal quality, I hope you understand how beautiful the Harlem Valley Rail Trail truly is. Tessa (above) and I took some bikes down to Copake and cycled four miles towards Dutchess County. Being on a bike again, after two decades of not really riding, reminded me just how much of my youth was spent on a bicycle growing up in Cedar Rapids, IA. When we were speeding through the valley walls with the sound of endless farmland being mowed, I swear to god I almost pulled the same time travel trick Christopher Reeve used in Somewhere in Time. When I was a kid, the bike meant freedom - from other rotten kids, from school, towards fishing, swimming and Cokes from the service station about two miles away uphill. I pedaled furiously in 100-degree weather to get a Coke, or a Fanta, or grape soda, or any of the other sugar drinks that weren't allowed at home. Mom and Dad, I blame my Coke habit on you!

6/1/02 Today another longstanding Chapel

6/1/02

Today another longstanding Chapel Hill landmark is gone; the venerable Pyewacket has bitten the dust. I've long since gotten used to the impermanence of everything in North Carolina (in fact, it was one of Chapel Hill's better qualities) but the demise of Pyewacket comes as a bit of surprise in that it was so fetishized by everyone in town. It was certainly the best place to take your parents, if you were an English major, that is. All the other Carolina parents would patronize the usual boring surf-n-turf bullshit "New South" restaurants like Slugs and the edge-of-the-stripmall tastes of the Macaroni Grill.

Not my parents, and not my friends parents either. We all went to Pyewacket, even though I thought the food was a little boring. It had a kick-ass bar, and was an excellent place to fall in love (or at least seduce somebody), and it wasn't that expensive. Tessa used to work there, alongside all the upscale hipsters. And it always seemed packed, which is why I don't get the whole "lack of business" angle - but then again, I haven't been around in five years.

The Gap-ification of Chapel Hill has been a long time coming, and though it's easy to wax nostalgiac for the days of the Hardback Cafe and Jeff's Confectionery's vanilla cokes, those days ain't never coming back. The Intimate Bookshop burned down, then was rebuilt, then went out of business; Sephora now sells scented mascara there. Barrel of Fun - where I spent $8 daily on the Cyclone pinball machine - is now one of fifteen coffee places on Franklin Street. The Mona Lisa painting that had withstood decades of the Pink House was painted over the fucking day after I moved out.

the Mona Lisa in my room at the Pink House, circa '97. click here to see how it figures into the Pink House movie

The only way to stay sane in this world without devolving into a bitter, warped, cynical guttersnipe is to embrace these changes and figure that they all serve some greater good. My friend Ehren Gresehover hates the Amish because they've chosen a particular year, sometime in the mid-1800s, to call it quits on technology. He thinks the whole rustic Amish thing is arbitrary and moronic, and I'm inclined to agree. You can't decide you want the world frozen in 1986 (although it was a damn fine year for music), just because you were more comfortable with your surroundings then. The students of UNC today lap up their tall mocha frappucinos and comparison shop for toe rings the same way we sought out Suzanne Vega vinyl and took our parents to Pyewacket.

I mean, I'm trying to be at peace with the future, because there's not really anywhere else to go.

5/31/02 I have two ongoing

5/31/02

I have two ongoing projects with my digital camera that probably only keeps me interested in particular, but if you're going to be a total dork, you might as well fling yourself right into it. Plus, I'm getting married to someone spellbinding and have a pretty good career trajectory and don't have to try and get laid anymore, so now I can continue all of my stupid, shut-in, geekily particular projects without worrying what any of you think. Ah, the freedom!

Anyway, one project is a photo essay on company signs in NYC that still have the World Trade Center towers as part of the logo. I'm interested to see how long they last as symbols of New York, until the companies go through a redesign and get rid of them. Here's a couple of examples:

the Playpen on 8th Ave - porn and martial arts movies

a Manhattan Fruit Exchange truck in Chelsea

You'd be stunned how many of them there are, but I can't always get my camera ready in time, especially while driving. And of course, there's my other project (admittedly purloined from my internet hero James Lileks and his awesome ghost ads site) which is a photo essay of all the faded, crumbling advertisements on the sides of buildings in NYC, for companies that no longer exist, selling products nobody remembers how to use. Stuff like this:

cropped pic of 26th St. signs for furriers and muff beds, painted circa 1930

I mean, I don't even know what a muff bed is. The coolest signs are the ones with five-digit phone numbers that begin with letters. Obviously, I've had to crop the hell out of them to put them on this blog, but I want to put up a web page with some nice, dramatic ones on there. You know, because I'm a dork.

The best thing about having projects like this is that it gets you in the habit of looking, and sometimes a picture comes of it that you never saw coming. The benefit of a digital camera is the ability to erase pictures you don't like, so you don't have those 7-8 pics in each roll of film that are utterly useless. But you need to be careful with your emotional editor, or else you'll delete something cool just because it wasn't what you thought you wanted.

While snapping a pic of a WTC logo etched on a bagel shop awning, I tripped in the street. I would have erased the picture, but then I stopped, and saw this:

And that has made all the difference.