xtcian

7/31/02 You never get to

7/31/02

You never get to spike the football in the end zone when you make a movie; your success is made up of little victories. If you're not a fan of little victories, you shouldn't be making movies, because those are the pellets that you will feed on, small bits of good news that invigorate your heart and refill your spirit.

We had a pretty big victory today, as the IFP, the most-respected independent film organization in the country, picked The Pink House as one of thousands of movies submitted from around the globe to participate in the IFP Market Festival on September 26. What makes this all the more incredible is that they chose this year to discontinue their "narrative feature" portion of the event, and reduce the acceptance rate by 40% for new projects, which means only twenty movies got in from all the submissions. All this based on our 8-minute industry reel and the script.

Needless to say, it buoyed the mood of our production team immeasurably, and it means getting all kinds of connections en route to finishing funds and god willing, distribution. But moreover, it is the first time that a separate body - one that has nothing to do with people who worked on the movie, or friends or family looked at what we did last summer and said "hell fucking yes." Coming after a very long, solipsistic soliloquy delivered to Tessa in which I bemoaned my state of wretched uselessness, it was a fresh slap in the face.

I finished the first draft of the script almost exactly three years ago this week. Since then, my patron saint has been a narcoleptic priest: I'm surely blessed, but there's a long time between visits. The first victory came in the first reading of the script, when the crowd in California thought the jokes and personalities were fantastic. The second came months later in New York, where an enrapt crowd at the Atlantic Theater School cheered us out of the building and Patrick came on to produce. The third came over a year later, when Tessa took to the project. When Heather Matarazzo decided to take the role of Charlotte, and Zack Ward came on as the lead three days later, I knew we had a shot. And when I saw the film transfers of our DV, I knew that shooting on digital video wasn't going to hinder us like it might have a few years ago.

Everything else has been a terrific struggle, including the shoot itself, and I've spent vast stretches of time feeling caked in shit - but between these little victories, and working with people like Rick Gradone, Todd Walker, and Liz Mann, slowly becoming a real part of the film community here in New York, I feel like we may be one of those little baby turtles that beats all the odds and makes it across the parched sands and into the ocean.

me and Tessa having no idea what we were getting into; leaving for the Pink House shoot. taken in Greenwich Village July 9, 2001

7/30/02 One thing about being

7/30/02

One thing about being an "informed customer" is that you price yourself out of any kind of normal interaction with customer service people, or schlubs working retail. For example, I've been around computers my whole life, and been attached to one Macintosh or another since my first Mac 512K in 1986. So when I get on the phone with Earthlink technical support, I basically have to give them my curriculum vitae so that they don't tell me some shit like "check to see if your modem is plugged in, sir." It bloody well is plugged in, ya bastard!

Today at the decidedly dumbarse-filled Radio Shack in Park Slope was no exception these are dim bulbs who typically must solve the electrical problems of even dimmer bulbs. I'm sure someone comes in daily with a computer mouse, wanting to know "why this footpedal doesn't work" (true story from my buddies at the IBM Help Desk) – but Radio Shack cashiers explaining something to the typical clientèle is a bit like the blind leading the deaf and blind.

My mission was simple: to find that little Y-adapter that turns two separate phone lines into one line that goes into the back of your 2-line phone. I confess I have no idea how that little thing works; for years, I just plugged both phone lines into the two jacks on the phone. But that little adapter makes everything so much more graceful, and it seems to work, so why not?

I'll tellya why not because finding that part can be a nightmare. I was shown extension cords, 3-way jack hooks, modular adapters, and even whole, other phones. Finally, I saw the right bit – heretofore termed a "2-line coupler" – but they weren't so sure. I had to convince them that I knew what I was talking about, and when I left, they had that "he'll be back" smile.

I really pity any kind of cashier working in technological retail, as well as folks working the phones for computer support. The world is rich with reprehensible dumbasses, sure, but the worst folks are those over 40 who have no idea where to start, and lack the intuitive tools to prosper. It's funny how all those hours with the Colecovision actually paid off take that, dad!

I'll give you the top three problems that older folks have with computers if we were to solve these, maybe something could get done in this country:

1. The Web vs. the Internet vs. Email vs. America Online. 50-year-olds don't get that although their computer connects to the Internet, the internet itself has no intrinsic use to them. I tried explaining it to my stepmom, using a metaphor she could relate to: that the "internet" is 5th Avenue; that "Internet Explorer" is the cab; that Saks, Fortunoff and the Gap at 55th St. are all "websites" she can go to; and that her cell phone was "email," so she could talk with others while on the ride. She understood this as long as she was at the computer, but the information couldn't stick. America Online is a conundrum because it isn't quite the internet, and they have their own web browser, and email is on it. Plus, she got confused that I sometimes checked my email using the web, and then my metaphor was further ruined by the fact that Fortunoff, Saks and the Gap are actually websites too and now cell phones can leave messages on email. Why does all this shit not confuse me and all my friends? I mean, it all seems perfectly natural.

2. The Operating System is not your Computer, nor is it an Application or Files. This one was so hard for my grandma that we had to take the Mac apart and put it on the living room floor. "The computer is a piece of hardware. The 'operating system' runs the 'applications' like Microsoft Word. The 'files' are the little pieces of Microsoft Word you make yourself." My mom resorted to body imagery for grandma: the OS is the brain, the applications are the various systems (nervous, respiratory) and the files are individual things the brain remembers. Again, this held sway about as long as a dog command, but my grandma was a stalwart, practical type who didn't need to know why milk turned into butter, she just wanted to eat it.

3. RTFM, or Read the Forkin' Manual. There was a day in computing when the manuals for applications like Word or FileMaker were so arcane and non-intuitive that even the most weathered of us had to use deductive reasoning just to get a jpeg to print. These days, however, most programs and hardware come with giant pull-out posters with Ikea-themed visual aids and text with little room for creative interpretation. Failing that, there's a "...for Dummies" book for everything under Neptune, including vast, vague ideas like The Internet for iMacs for Dummies. Hell, there's even a Divorce for Dummies if they want to save on postage.

Tune in next week, when I rail on 62-year-olds who don't understand the whole "the screen shows images at 72 dpi" printing cafuffle!

7/29/02 Thirteen months ago, Tessa

7/29/02

Thirteen months ago, Tessa and I took the exact same trip that we took today: from the bowels of Cleveland, across Pennsylvania, to home in Manhattan. Of course, back then we were returning from Neal Lerner's heart surgery, about to meet up with a crowd in Stephentown for Labor Day, and the horrors of the week after that (9/11) were yet to happen. On our trip in 2001, we were barely decompressed from the problem-plagued Pink House shoot, and we had one of our worst fights, lasting about 200 miles on the road and leading Tessa to swerve over to the side of the highway, nearly flipping the car over.

I'm pleased to say that no fight happened on our way home this time, only more rain, rancorously-pleasing gossip, and soul-divining headrubs. I'm also pleased to say we don't live in Manhattan anymore, and that Stephentown is unnecessary when we have the farm in Columbia County. We're also engaged now, which, truth be told, was something I began to mull on that trip last year (fights notwithstanding). We're in such a different "place," to use therapist's parlance, and yet so much seems the same to me.

I'm still unemployed, Tessa's still freaked out about the money, our company hangs on a fulcrum, and the movie is still in need of finishing funds. My deviated septum is still keeping me up at night, the book proposal is unrealized, and the Chopes is still awfully cute. In effect, I pushed a major "pause" button on certain aspects of my life, even as other major events continued to unfold.

Life is strange about "stuff" things can be left in a box that once seemed very important, and after six weeks or so, they become irrelevant. There are hospital bills you need to pay, and they go to a collection agency, and soon enough, you never hear about them again. There are drugs you are sure would cure you, and then you stop taking them and get better anyway. The transience and impermanence of so many things leads me to ask: how do the Buddhists get anything done? Or, more importantly, why do the Buddhists get anything done?

It seems the only thing I have kept up in this past year - besides the happiness of my betrothed and the unemployment claims is this blog itself. I've posted here every night since April 10, since I first went on Celexa and decided that the 1/2 hour or so before I sleep would be spent documenting my existence, proving to myself that I was and am. Like looking at your own name in the phone book, sometimes you need proof that you are regarded, you know? And there is one thing I can take away from today's trip: it is truly time for action.

The Celexa's already workin', ma! Tessa and me at the Napa croquet fields on my first day on the drug

7/28/02 It's about midnight, and

7/28/02

It's about midnight, and I don't think I've fully woken up from this morning I had one of those fitful alcoholic sleeps that seem to have no restorative properties. I think I can safely say that age decreases two things: my ability to recover from any liquor, and my confidence that I'm correct about any given situation. Thank god I don't drink that much anymore, or else those two qualities would work together in glorious dis-harmony.

After a very lethargic, slow-witted lunch with the last group of Chi Psis left in town (I sat next to Dave Burris' girlfriend Clare Scanlon, who assistant-edited Amy Eldon's "Dying to Tell the Story" a very bizarre coincidence), we got on the road and drove through another god-awful storm that flashed lightning down on either side of the car for two solid hours. We couldn't stand it anymore, and decided to pull off the road into Cleveland, into the waiting arms of the Clarion Inn, where I lie right now.

It was a great weekend, made even better by Tessa knowing so many of the brothers independent of my meddling other wives had to be eased into the proceedings, but Tessa's already been 1988-drunk with half of them already. I wonder what many of them think about us being together; either it's the most obvious thing on the planet, or it's a bizarre mixture of two past worlds. Or perhaps it's just "how did that whiny, basketball-hurling profanity-laced dork end up with someone as cool as Tessa?"

left: Tessa in July at Sears Tower; right: in April at the Chrysler Bldg

7/27/02 Don't know why this

7/27/02

Don't know why this is true, but it seems I can't really get drunk anymore. I figure the Celexa is having some inhibiting effect, but it might just be age: I've long had a theory that there should be an age limit for drinking, but on the upper end. Teens getting drunk is basically fine with me, but nobody should be allowed to get wasted over the age of 35. As for me, I did two giant tequila shots and went through three "cape cods" on the boat tonight, and I skipped the "pleasant buzz" part and went straight to "already hungover."

The boat ride, like all of the planned events for this get-together, was a blast. We parked out in Lake Michigan just in time for the Venetian Night fireworks, then danced all night to Duran Duran whilst wearing our 80s best. Tessa and I went for the "pledge formal" thing, but a lot of folks went as preppies, punks, and Madonna-wannabes. I try not to get too twee about the '80s - I detested being forced to digest a massive diet of the '60s thanks to the generation right above us but I really do think our music is better, and the fashion faux pas are much more subtle and interesting.

What was stranger about this 80s party is that the same crowd attended the same party in the actual 1980s, giving it a meta-event sheen that our planners didn't intend. I mean, I wore the exact same tux tonight that I did to a Chi Psi function in 1988, meaning that irony is just a matter of timing.

Tessa and me on the boat, against the backdrop of Chicago

Highlights from the evening: Tessa's hair was done up like a hood ornament, earning us the Big Hair Couple award; Wendi's dress was downright Nagel horrible; Walt Boyle had three costume changes, one of them being a giant rabbit; we got 2nd-place in the scavenger hunt, even though we took the most pictures; and best of all, the lake was choppy, meaning that the most seasick of the brothers were forced to stay upstairs and dance to the Smiths.

Chip didn't show up, which earned him a rousing chorus of "you suck"s and "PBD!"s on his voice mail (PBD = "pussy broke-dick" for those not on the 2nd floor of the Lodge circa 1987). He went to the White Sox game instead, which kind of blows the White Sox play like 95 games every year, and a boat ride like this is a genuine rarity. I'm sure he'll field his fair share of rancor by the time tomorrow rolls around.

The evening would have ended nicely back at the Hotsie Totsie bar if I hadn't engaged in a conversation with Alec McNab about the relative chance of someone setting off a radiological bomb in Manhattan. His brother, as well as mine, lives near Times Square, and he has some of the same fears I do. Leave it to me to talk about the same fucking bullshit at such a happy occasion. My knack for self-sabotage is incredible, like a moth to the flame. This was after not really worrying about it for weeks it's quite disheartening to think I can still ruin a night. I mean, if the Celexa won't let me get drunk, can it at least help me quash these thoughts as well?

7/26/02 You know how you

7/26/02

You know how you go to some cities for a wedding, or a special occasion, and see precious little besides your hotel room and the reception hall? That sure as hell is not going to be the case with our trip to Chicago, as a full-day scavenger hunt designed by none other than Rick Maechling - took us all over the city to just about every famous spot imaginable. We had our pictures taken in front of the Picasso sculpture, the Water Tower, the "chee-boger chee-boger" restaurant, both the Sears and Hancock towers, as well as the seals at the zoo. Nobody is as full of civic pride as Rick, which was great, because he was on our team. Even as the heat index swelled toward 100, everybody was having a kickass time.

This evening, we went to the Tavern Club for a steamy dinner (the air conditioning wasn't working) where we sat and gossiped with Eric Gribbin, Chip, the McNab brothers, and Alex & Wendi. It's hard to justify being in a fraternity, and most people are surprised to hear I was in one (I usually leave out the part where I was social chairman). Frankly, the Lodge makes me feel totally unapologetic, given the clientle. Any place that would take in Chip, Rick Maechling, Drew McNally, Ricky Bell, Jamie Block and me – and still be socially functional – has got to be imbued with magic.

among others, Alex Yong & Wendi, Chris Mumford, Ali Farahnakian, Bobby Vogler, with Tessa at bottom, and my eyelashes at far right; in the Tavern Club elevator

Later on, we all drove up to the Gold Coast and spent the rest of the night knocking back booze at Hotsie Totsie, a place that was full of dum-dum post-Northwestern hotties with French-manicured toenails; needless to say, we brought the place a dose of much-needed honesty. I had a great chat with Steven Comfort, whom I've always respected a great deal (it was strange luck that Susan, his sister, played such a huge role in my early 20s as well as his father, Coach Comfort of the UNC swim team) and we all sat around to watch fellow bro Ali Farahnakian do a little bit on Conan O'Brien. Pretty cool that Ali was there to watch it with us – that must have been amazing for him to see himself on TV while surrounded by brethren that had been with him through both thick and thin.

As we were about to leave, Eric Gribbin stopped me and said he'd like to bury the hatchet, something about a basketball game we'd played a long time ago where I booted the ball down the hill in a rage, and he said "you're pissing on the brotherhood" and told me I had no idea what it was like to be fraternal with people. I barely remembered it, but it did occur to me that we'd had a run-in long ago, something that was now deep in my subconscious.

I told Eric that I was an immature asshole in 1989 with a lot of time left in the oven, then I looked around the bar and said, "frankly, I'm surprised most of these folks still talk to me." Which was a bit of a hyperbole, I guess, but I am thankful that we are all awarded second acts in our lives, and that your fraternity is not defined by a physical structure located on some campus many decades ago, but by the small crowd of people willing to keep faith that you'll eventually turn out okay.

7/25/02 I did something kind

7/25/02

I did something kind of shitty this morning I totally forgot that I was supposed to be in Brooklyn attending my therapy session with Dr. Bloch. Instead, I was in a bed in Eastern Iowa, tending to a sinus infection, trying to block out the rays of a harsh farming sun. I'd meant, all week, to call Jonathan, but for some reason that was the one thing that slipped through the floorboards of my subconscious.

Due to an overweening guilt, I found myself unable to go back to sleep, so I packed up the trunk, cleaned out the car, and spent a few minutes with Chopin, telling him no, I wasn't going to leave him in Iowa where he would sold into white slavery.

The trip to Chicago seemed less daunting, not because it's so short, but because I have continued the tradition of my forefathers and glommed onto the latest technology... that's right, ladies and gents, Satellite XM Radio!!! Okay, so exclamation points are the domain of those with nothing to say (and eighth grade girls signing yearbooks), but this thing is pretty cool. I got the Sony model for a discount Iowa proves itself good for something - and it's portable enough to take in the house, which is perfect for Columbia County, a town that considers itself lucky when the Christian Rock station comes in clear.

It's the size and shape of 2800 baud modem circa 1993, and the antenna looks like something you put inside nice shoes to keep their shape. Reception is a bit of a problem if you ham-n-egg it like I have - there's no way I'm mounting that thing on the outside of the car whilst living in New York. You might as well put up a giant sign that says "steal our cool stuff" and leave the doors unlocked. For now, the antenna sits on the dash and tends to slip out of reception whenever you pass a truck closely on the right, which can be rectified by giving truckers a wide berth. I have some other experiments pending.

As for channels, there are about 140 of them, ten of which I like, which is a damn good batting average for me. I heard Midnight Oil on the "80s Alternative" station, a cool version of "Stoned Soul Picnic" on the 60s station, a discussion about Ogg ("mp3s better watch out") on CNET, and the news in London on BBC. They even played "You're the Biggest Part of Me" by Ambrosia somewhere on there, which won my heart right away. Although my tireless searches through late night AM radio stations has become a lost art, this thing will keep me awake on long road trips, something especially meaningful to my family.

Rocking to "Wig" by the B-52s, I pulled into downtown Chicago, had a joyful reunion with my beloved Tessa, and went out to dinner with a number of my Carolina friends. The reunion of my fratbagger extended family begins in earnest tomorrow, and even Chip will be there!

7/24/02 I was treated to

7/24/02

I was treated to the opposite ends of the American Cultural Experience today; I spent the day at the Coralville Mall, and the night at an experimental electronic music performance. There was no cross-pollination between these two crowds, but both paid extreme imagination dividends.

First the mall: it's the same old sad story that every small town will tell you. "The mall moved in and ruined Uncle Pete's Bait Shop Downtown!" I understand the sadness that accompanies the development of a mega-mall, having seen downtown Chapel Hill gentrified to the point of utter meaninglessness, but you have to understand, I grew up in a mall. I came of age scooping ice cream for disgruntled shoppers at High's Ice Cream, I first saw "Poltergeist" and "E.T." at the Military Circle Mall, and my favorite place in all of London whilst growing up besides the London Dungeon – was Brent Cross (where, as family lore now has it, we always agree to "meet by the fountain" if lost). I don't see anything wrong with a mall – it has all the stuff you want in one place, and it's air conditioned. The outside of a mall is always dreadful, but you're not there for artistic reasons.

Iowa City has one such supermall on the outskirts of town, technically in Coralville, IA, and it's a fucking space station. There's a Best Buy, a Walmart, a Target, a Barnes & Noble you could land a plane in this thing. The Best Buy is unusually large (land in Iowa is cheap) and houses every gadget you could ever want in a testosterone-addled warehouse. It's the next best thing to porn for a guy; nowhere outside of a strip club is there a place where every single new object merits lingering attention.

I go to the mall not just because I like it, but because I think it's important to immerse yourself in regular America often, to keep you honest and to make your artistic ambitions realistic. While it's true that Tessa and I could only find a home in the hyper-intellectual ramblings of our friends surrounding New York, we do want to make movies and write books, and these are the people that are going to do the ticket-buying (god willing).

Clothes are continuing their southern migration to the bottom of the typical mall-going body; girls wear virtually nothing on top and low-slung jeans that flare out heavily near the ankle, and they spend shitloads of money on shoes. Breasts are everywhere, and skimpy shirts make the most of them. It doesn't matter if you're pudgy everyone is – the roll of tanned fat protruding out the bottom of the baby-tee is part of the plan.

This is Iowa, so you're not going to get the mind-bending horror fashions of the lines at Disneyland or the DMV (nor the circus-clown makeup of the Mormon chicks at the Orem Mall in Utah), but let's be honest: we're a fat fucking country. What's worse, you can see the "gonna be fat" pre-teens, the ones that would have been stick-thin in 1983, but have started on a trajectory of Biggie-size McNugget Meals that will end years from now with countless late-nite TV diet cures and prescriptions for Zocor.

I walked behind a gaggle of 15-year-olds, and I have to say, not much has changed since I did the same thing with Hampy, Lynn and Steve Shapiro. Replace my short O.P. shorts with huge, black, billowing denim jeans and you've got the same conversations about the same stupid people in your grade, the same longings to stake out a meaningful kiss with the girl at the cookie store, the same acne. The only real difference between the Coralville Mall and my own experience is the cell phone kiosks every fourteen feet.

Upon arriving home, I forgot to go to the Radio Shack, so Kent directed me to the other mall, the old Iowa City mall still limping along on Sycamore Avenue. The minute you walk in there, you know something's wrong: there's nothing like the fetid stench of a dying mall. Entire storefronts were up for lease, gangrenous empty husks threatening to spread their disease to the other stores. I actually had to walk into the sad, sad Radio Shack and ask, "Um, do you guys still sell stuff?"

Kent was psyched to house the seven or so guests from Pittsburgh, the touring experimental electronic gurus known as the Circuits of Steel. They're on the last leg of what looks like a massive tour, replete with hundreds of pounds of computers, dials, knobs, wires and mikes it's like a Wendy Carlos explosion. In order to truly understand their show, you need earplugs, a healthy desire to accept new expressions of art, a small understanding of what happened to music after techno, and the love of that gut-rambling punch a good speaker will give you when it hits the bass notes. They set up at Gabe's with Kent as sound mixer.

Manherringbone did some amazing stuff by swinging the mike around and letting the feedback loop into fascinating beats, making him the logical endgame of Roger Daltrey and a theremin. DJ's Climax Street and Syne Lapse Variate were amazing noise artists as well, but it will be a guy who calls himself Holocaust that will stick with me on this trip. To a backdrop of images alternately bucolic and horrible, this guy unleashed a torrent of noise so upsetting as to be cathartic. It wasn't post-apocalyptic, it was during-apocalyptic. He calls his music "digital hardcore motivated by political activism" and I fucking believe it.

You can't even see this stuff in New York City unless you're super-clued-in to it Manhattan has largely priced itself out of artists like these. They came from Pittsburgh and are performing in front of twelve people in a little club in Eastern Iowa. They are the cliff edge of where music and noise meet, and right now, at 3am, they are downstairs with Kent jamming on his Prophet. If anyone wanted to know where the most groundbreaking artistic expressions in the world are happening, the most bleeding knifepoint of new cultural thought, I think they'd be quite surprised. It's been Kent's basement for decades now.

7/23/02 When Melissa got home

7/23/02

When Melissa got home from restructuring The Second Act (her clothes consignment business) for the autumn season, we sat in their living room discussing the various pharmaceuticals we're on, or had been on, or wanted to go on. Kent and Melissa's bathroom closet looks like something out of Kelly Lynch's suitcase in Drugstore Cowboy; the sheer diversity of pills has a candy store appeal. Kent had gone on Celexa for a while, but it gave him a pot-like hangover every morning; Melissa's on Effexor, and seems to like it, although I've heard a few disappointing things about the drug recently.

The interesting revelation, however, is that Lucas has been on Zoloft since he was in 2nd grade, experimenting with its efficacy off and on until now (he starts 8th grade in the fall). Melissa has had her share of dirty looks from meddlesome Iowa mothers much like those chicks on the radio who breastfeed their daughters until the age of four – but Melissa is unrepentant, and I'm beginning to see why.

I've always been afraid for Lucas, because he is just smart enough, just surreal and brilliant enough, to be abjectly vilified at school. He's a big dude, runs into stuff like Kent did, has a hummingbird-quick sense of the absurd, and is just plain weird. As a young kid, he had to be the most hilarious li'l squirt on God's green earth. He once had me teach him the "boi-oi-oi-oi-oing" noise for two hours until he perfected it. Once, while he was going to bed, he asked me to tell him a "ghost story." I thought he said "gross story," so I recounted the tale of a fictitious man who kept eating his own body parts and barfing them up. He thought this was the coolest thing ever, and for years, I had to keep making up stories that were ever more and more disgusting.

Now, if he had grown up in the 1970s like I did, the first day of school would have brought forth a pack of dirty-boogered 5th-grade thugs, roving in packs, waiting to pounce on him and beat every last vestige of humor out of his soul. But he had a small dose of Zoloft on his side, and started school not caring what anyone thought of him. Can you imagine what that might have been like? His unwavering commitment to his own personality, along with his gregariousness and surrealism, has made him the most popular kid in school.

Lucas still has incredible anxieties from time to time, and being a sensitive kid, things still really get to him. And I'm not advocating the full-scale drugging of every maladjusted nine-year-old, since there are plenty of problems for which the drugs offer little respite. But I think to my own childhood, which was riddled with anxieties, abject fear, self-loathing, jealously and fits of uncontrollable rage, and I wonder how much more adjusted would I be to the world now? I invented such a labyrinthine web of obsessive-compulsive game-playing in order to keep my "magical thinking" world afloat that it turned me into a tangled control freak that had to wait 19 years to kiss a girl, and 22 to make love to one.

When I found out that Tine Buresh had a crush on me in 1979, I rode my Huffy home, ran to the bathroom and threw up from the unbelievable weight and responsibility that it had foisted on me. Is that much different from the stomach disaster that I wreaked on myself in January? If I had walked into Grant Wood Elementary in the third grade, with a head full of red hair, a cassette player that wafted Shostakovich, and a violin tucked under my arm and said "what the fuck are you looking at?" to the first person that questioned my cool, it would have set me on a completely different course, one with friends, sleepovers, and an active summer lifestyle. Instead, I reacted with fear, tried to hide everything that was special about me, then lashed out in rage whenever the bullies got close. I didn't have a true friend until I was 14, and even then, I was barely integrated as a person until well into my 20s. Even now, I find myself getting furious when it seems as though I'm being second-guessed or judged, especially by Tessa, who more likely just wants to know something innocuous.

Would a little bit of an SSRI made the difference? I don't know, but sign me the fuck up. In 1975, when I was in Miss Norton's class, the only options open to a misfit dork were frequent trips to Miss O'Banion's counseling closet, and the option to skip a grade - I did both. Neil and Bill were right about one thing; I grew up in an interesting age for kids. Too modern to be beaten, yet too close to the sexual revolution for the parents to notice much; we were largely left to our own devices. It's a sharp contrast to the Millenial kids of today, being fetishized and coddled by their hyper-attentive Boomer parents.

I suppose I have enough room in my heart to feel some sorrow for the intensely-scrutinized kids of our present time bereft of some major issues, will they ever have something to write or sing about? Will Paxil rob us of a great future novel? Do I remain interesting on these pages you read right now because Greg Hyder forced me to eat potting soil in Miss Kasparek's social studies class?

7/22/02 I've done a lot

7/22/02

I've done a lot of driving in my life I bet it's one of those statistics that would show I've driven halfway to the moon. Yet in all my cross-country trips and myriad journeys, I've never driven through two thunderstorms like the ones I slogged through today. It's official: they rank as #1 and #2 in the All-Time Scary Fucking Storm Countdown. Lightning was striking either side of the highway, and the hail was so thick you couldn't see past your own hood. Half of Indiana had pulled over to the side of the road, but not me – I learned to drive as a young kid in Iowa, where you just barrel through the worst of it because stopping can be even less safe.

The problem is, I have a dog that ought to be on Zoloft anyway, and storms give him what can only be described as a psychic break. By the time the hail started coming down - making it sound like we were in the interior of a snare drum during the final bars of Ravel's "Bolero" - Chopes had crawled into the front seat, put his paw into a cup of Sprite, and began to shake like a little bunny. This picture, taken because I couldn't let the moment go undocumented, doesn't do it justice:

Chopin mid-storm. Click on the picture for a movie of us on the road after the deluge

Stopping in small towns across America is just as quaint as it was in the '50s, it's just that the quaintness happens in monolithic fast food chains. I had the pleasure of getting to know the fine folks at the Taco Bell near Ashtabula, Ohio, and I have to say it was the finest fast food experience in memory. A gaggle of kids were genuinely excited that I had purchased the "large" Sprite (the one Chopin defiled a few hours later) because it had an Austin Powers contest peel-off. I peeled it off for them, and when it said "sorry try again" they seemed genuinely disappointed. The last kid there said, "Don't worry, you'll get it next time." Yes, my friend - I bet you're right.

I made it to Iowa City at about 10:30pm and kicked back a bourbon & coke with my brother Kent while their dog Marge took offense to both me and the Chopes. Now I lie on my 13-year-old nephew Lucas' mattress, reading a book I found under the bed: It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex & Sexual Health, the book you buy for your kid when he starts getting hair down there. Sean, Michelle and I had a book like this too, but this one is way more sophisticated, even including sections on homosexuality and masturbation! God, if I'd had this book... I mean, I had to discover masturbation by accident. Oh well, many of the great masters were self-taught, right?

7/21/02 You know, if you

7/21/02

You know, if you pick the right angle to go across it, New York is a big goddamn state. I learned this the honest way tonight, leaving from Columbia County at 7pm, determined to sleep in a different Commonwealth by night's end. So here I lie at the Ramada Inn in Erie, PA at 4am, unbowed by the deceptively wide girth of New York. Sure, people talk about "the City" and "upstate" and the "finger lakes," but there's a whole other chunk of New York where there aren't even gas stations. With the Land Rover running on kerosene fumes, I finally pulled into a tiny village with one drunk guy manning a press-key register - thank god they had Super Unleaded, since the Rover is a prissy car that can't take the hard stuff.

I think I got everything done I was supposed to do at the farm, which is a rarity for me. I even put up Japanese Beetle traps, which caught about 50 of the suckers in the first hour. I don't know how much of my small, disturbed readership has had truck with Japanese Beetles, but they suck. They'll destroy any flower they can get their metallic little hands on they're the entomological equivalent of the Borg.

We had a great weekend at the farm, just the three of us younger kids, strangely sans our romantic others. Michelle doesn't really have a romantic other, but I have faith that'll change sooner than later. She's off to take a 9-week first aid trek across America it was a huge deal to be asked, and is something that will mean a lot to her – but more importantly, it means she has no internet access and I can talk all the shit I want right on these pages, my friends.

Speaking of shit, there must be a business school equation that correlates "how decent your establishment wants to appear" vs. "how ugly you can make stuff so customers don't steal it." Bowling shoes are the most obvious example of something made so unattractive as to render them useless to anyone except the most ironic hipsters, but the bedspreads at national motel chains have to be a close second:

all this for $60/night beady-eyed devil-dog not included

James Lileks has a site that chronicles the worst motel postcards from every state (this one from Iowa is one of my favorites) but I'm pretty sure that the eight-steps-down-from-Ikea furnishing of any major hotel chain room is worse than anything from the 1960s. It's so bland, so sad, so criminally without joy, that I'm going to post a picture of the best flower in our garden just to give this room a little lift.

Tessa's dahlia had a coming-out party today (just like Tessa herself did in 1987 and 1994!)

7/20/02 Why is it that

7/20/02

Why is it that I view the farm as a place to relax? Every time I come up here, I fancy myself "kicking back" and "letting the shit hang out, yo" and such, but more often than not, I'm involved in hours of backbreaking labor. Don't get me wrong, I love being up here, but a brief sojourn to a swimming hole today reminded me that it was the first time I'd just sat and enjoyed nature without a pressing secondary activity – since I got here.

Of course, it was hard to think about much else than the excruciating pain of walking barefoot on tiny jagged rocks all around the water note to self: wear flip-flops next time. I remember a place south of Mombasa, Kenya where we stayed for a week on the beach. We were told by some prescient soul to bring tennis shoes to wear into the water, and it was the smartest thing we did in Africa. You could walk a mile into the Indian Ocean and it would only be up to your waist, but your feet would have been long gone, shredded to bits on the coral.

Speaking of almost losing body parts, I tried sanding the the upstairs office room today, and it was even tougher than the library. Thick coats of 1964-vintage polyurethane gummed up the drum sander every few feet, making the whole thing pointlessly sisyphean. During one particularly disturbing brawl with the edging sander, I stepped backwards onto an ancient venting shaft in the floor, broke through the plaster, and half my body ended up downstairs in the kitchen. Sean said he looked up from his book and saw a disembodied leg hanging over the lunch table. God knows what kind of insulation ended up exploding all over the kitchen, but in case it was asbestos, Sean and Michelle hosed the place down. Needless to say, Chopin the dog saw the whole thing and will probably need therapy.

view from the top floor, through the old vent shaft, into the kitchen Michelle and Sean clean up

Chopin, by the way, has been a real handful. He played fetch yesterday for a half an hour, which is more than I've seen him do in a year. Tonight, he came upstairs in the barn and ran around in a giant circle - during our game, no less for almost two hours, barking at the top of his lungs. It must be the Rimadyl I've been slipping into his salmon. Without Tessa around, he has hyper-imprinted onto me, following me from room to room like he has something for me to sign. Every time we go outside, he finds a way to get in the car; when he's sure we're not going anywhere, he bolts into the cow pasture at 73 mph and starts eating weeds. I need to get him a good book or something.

Chopes offers me his advice during a game of Oh Hell

7/19/02 Sean, Michelle and I

7/19/02

Sean, Michelle and I drove up to Columbia County this afternoon, and the bogged-down traffic made for a perfect four-hour session of gossiping about pretty much every friend we have, and of course, every family member. Apparently there is some discussion that a particular couple in our extended familial tree is about to get divorced, an act for them - that seems as inevitable as the rain.

Naturally the discussion turned to Sean's own failed marriage, something that we conjure every week or so when we're low on other topics. Sean still keeps in touch with T_____, even four years after she cuckolded and humiliated him time and time again, even as she still lies and leads others down the usual well-worn gutter of failed Hollywood relationships. I partially understand why he continues to keep in touch with her (my own desire to keep friends, even unreliable ones, for decades makes it seem less nuts) but it works Michelle into a fine froth.

Michelle pretty much hated T_____ from Day One, back in 1991, when the three of them toured together with the Citrus Singers all over the world and got to know each other's foibles, pore by pore. I had an excruciatingly difficult time with T_____ myself, for personality reasons, but I always had a respect for the way she overcame her background and sought to better herself. It turns out "bettering herself" was the whole point for her, fidelity and shame be damned. It takes a drive that surpasses kindness into cruelty for her to have escaped her family's vacuous lunacy, but I am disgusted that she had to use my brother as the first stepping stone.

T_____, me and Sean at the beach during a hurricane, circa 1993

When I think of her, all I can think of are the loud lives of desperation that middle-of-the-pack actors radiate throughout the sad, beating heart of Los Angeles. There are 24,000 T______s living between Venice and Los Feliz, all of them thinking they are one party invite, one one-night stand, one chance appearance on Change of Heart away from stardom. And that's what it is to these people: stardom. They can't think about anything else, which is why they went to LA instead of New York, where they might have a shot at actually "acting." Sure, they'll go to workshops and do little showcases in front of C-minus casting directors, and gossip about auditions after yoga, but these folks live off the invisible heat emanating from an alternate life where they are already famous.

I've directed a movie, which, even if it's a failure, gives me pretty good perspective on getting parts in a film (and if The Pink House is a success, you better have listened to every word I say, beeyotch!). If I were an unknown woman actor in the five-year range north or south of 30 years old, I would be single-minded, almost to the point of medication. And this would be the schedule:

- start your own work-obsessed community of writers, directors and a few, carefully-chosen fellow actors and have a relentless schedule of new works. One of your writer or director friends will get a movie eventually, and you will be in it. meet like clockwork.

- stop fucking drinking. stop it right now. even if you don't drink that much. you can fucking drink when you have something to celebrate. if you want to drink, go work in investment banking; those motherscratchers drink all the god damned time.

- do not go to any parties to further your career. a good party is fine once or twice a week to keep yourself from going batty, but going to parties every night to ostensibly "meet industry people" is the quickest way to utter, hopeless defeat. Sure, you'll get a lot of cards and numbers (especially if you have big tits) but NONE of them will lead to real work.

- go on as many auditions as you can, and expect to get none of them. you need to be seen by as many people as possible, but not for the reason you think. you need the input of strangers to make yourself a better actor, and you get better every time you set foot in a strange room.

- extend your social circle as large as you can, and take your intense writing/directing coterie to Big Bear or La Jolla to pound out a show or two. importantly, always take one or two people with you whom you don't know entirely - they will tell their friends and build up heat around your endeavors.

- if you date for love, then date for love... but if you're dating for fun, don't date another actor, even if they're really hot. they can't do anything for you, and they're usually self-obsessed, crazy and come saddled with a myriad of affirmation issues. like the eviction man said in Roger and Me: "one poor person marries another poor person, you end up with two poor people."

- lastly, try to be really good. take the advice of non-actors seriously when it comes to your performances. don't let your ego get in the way of getting better. take classes and study yourself on film. On "The Pink House," we had 61 speaking parts, and two kinds of actors: our friends, and the persistent. and we will work with the talented ones again, believe me.

There, I just saved you $21.95. You won't need to buy that book.

7/18/02 Tessa left for Texas

7/18/02

Tessa left for Texas today, off to help her mother, whose house in the Hill Country was among those lifted off its moorings during the awful floods that ravaged the area a couple of weeks ago. Sandy's guest house was moved about ten feet to one side, and the water was five feet deep in the cottage. The place is pretty well fucked, and Tessa went down there to move her mother out of Texas as much as anything. What's interesting to me is that we spent a week in Center Point, TX a few days after September 11, and I thought, "jesus, nothing could ever possibly happen here..."

me, Tessa's mom Sandy and Tessa atop Mt. Greylock on Sept. 4

Our apartment in Brooklyn is normally huge, but it feels like an airplane hangar without Tessa here. I forget how little room I actually require, and the kind of shoeboxes I was accustomed to living in. Every once in a while, I think back to my lifestyle up until she and I got together, and I'm stunned at how badly I ham'n'egged it for so long. When I moved to NYC, I took the place with Lars sight unseen, and sleeping on a loft four inches from the ceiling seemed perfectly acceptable. Now I have to think for three: me, Tessa, and the weird nether-space our relationship takes up. Oh yeah, and the dog, but Chopes is happy with being stuck in a kennel anyway. It makes him feel secure. O, Chopin Tessa's gay, twisted, sensitive, conflicted dog.

They say "clothes make the man," but if that were the case, I'd have played basketball a hell of a lot better tonight. On eBay I acquired my beloved Vince Carter Nike Shox hoop shoes, which have a "medial-side anti-ankle inversion TPU structure" and a "a full-length Phylon midsole." I brought my "maximum-traction herringbone exoskeleton" and promptly bricked about seven lay-ups, whiffed countless jumpers, consistently lost my man on defense, and one time I dribbled the ball off my "gleaming synthetic shroud lace cover." Fuck.

7/17/02 Some may find my

7/17/02

Some may find my habit of recreating pictures to be fairly depressing. After all, not many people look "better" to themselves as they age, unless you happen to have gone through a caterpillar/butterfly-like metamorphosis or lost a ton of weight. The thing about getting into your middle thirties is that you start to take on the physical characteristics that define you as "old" and make you visually unappealing to anyone under 25. There's just something about you that's creepy to them the same way you felt about 35-year-olds when you were their age. I suppose this aversion to age has its roots in primal Darwinian survivorship; you want your mate to be able to stick around for a long time to help raise the kids. It may also be disheartening to learn that a man's "biological relevance" ends at 27 in our species, meaning that there are usually enough healthy males younger than him to make his existence irrelevant, at least procreation-wise.

Having dealt with my biological irrelevancy eight years ago, I'm more interested in the aging process, and not just stuff like how bad my back hurts now. I like watching my friends go through a "nesting phase," trying out a "existential crisis" or two, or even "I'm dating a 20-year old this summer" syndrome. Pictures are one way of looking at us age, and the videotape of the "General College" reunion I described in last night's blog gives some broad strokes to work with.

Basically, everyone looks the same as they did twelve years ago, except now they all look like they've been filled with about six liters of water. Everyone's cheeks, necks and bellies are waterlogged, gurgling from one scene to the next. Notable exceptions are Tessa, who looks about fifty times better now; her best friend Jason, who lost his Roland Orzabal haircut and got buff; and Todd Walker, who went bald but now manages to look even better, like a young Ed Harris (who, incidentally, was my babysitter in the early '70s betchya didn't know that, huh?).

The jury is out on my own changes the last few years, which have been rough on me emotionally. I'd be interested to know if one's mood can affect one's visage in the long term, much like Tessa's grandmother Nonnie has etched deep lines of worry into her forehead from decades of anxiety.

This is me in the fall of 1996, having turned 29:

And this is me a few weeks ago, having turned 35:

Six years between them, and though something is different, it's hard to tell exactly what. Perhaps that little Darwinian push that tells 20-year-olds that better breeders lie elsewhere. Maybe it's the eyes with six years' more information being processed. Maybe it's six liters of water gurgling around. Or maybe I'm just squinting back at 1996, trying to find my relevancy.

7/16/02 I might as well

7/16/02

I might as well admit it: this it "retro week" on the blog. I left my digital camera upstate at the farm, so I can't illustrate the things that are happening this week, which is fine, because so far I've done well just getting to the living room. Most of the last three days has been spent going through boxes in my office: giant, unopened behemoths containing both the mundane and crucial mixed together on the "pure" setting. I found my passport next to a receipt for a USA Today purchased at the Louisville airport in 1999.

I lug so much crap around with me that I'm surprised I haven't taken on some sort of celestial gravity. Fortunately, the farm has acted as a shit repository, but I promised Tessa that I'd go through it and throw away stuff that won't be missed. When she saw the amount of detritus stacked up in the garage on Beachwood Avenue, she actually cried. Tears came out of her eyes. I filled up a U-Haul trailer.

The thing is, everything gets used eventually, even if it is the spark of a tangential idea that leads to a great turn of phrase, or an old pamphlet that reminds of a screenplay I'm supposed to write. I regret that there is 70,000 lbs of this stuff, but it does have its place in my life. The key is to distill it down so that only the germinating idea seeds are left. Akin to "thinning out the pumpkins" so that the vines grow stronger, I guess.

Speaking of lugging things around for 12 years, we watched the "reunion" episode of UNC's General College soap opera, which supposedly tied up a bunch of plot lines left hanging well-nigh through the decade of the 1990s. Mostly, it was just fun to see Tessa on film, both now and back in 1988. Her bangs back then had their own agenda, flying north-northwest and thither and yon. She had big hoopy earrings, wore her Oxfords with the collars up, and had a "shra-shra" accent inherited from her father.

"General College," like most artistic endeavors at UNC, created way more brilliant professionals than it should. From humble beginnings (playing coke whores at the Student Union), GC'ers have gone on to helm "Guiding Light," become respected agents, artistic developers, and commercial producers not to mention the careers of Tessa, Billy Crudup, Dan Cortese, and yours fucking truly.

7/15/02 Whilst dicking around in

7/15/02

Whilst dicking around in my office tonight, I came across two boxes that haven't been opened in the better part of two years. Besides the usual depressing stuff, I found the playlist for the cover band my brother Sean and I were planning in 1994. It has to be seen to be believed:

Honestly, I don't know we pulled any of these off with just two guitars and two voices. Specifically, "Goody Two Shoes" by Adam Ant must have sucked, and I refuse to believe we were serious about playing "Round and Round" by Ratt.

But the medleys are pretty terrific: "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" segue into "You Don't Want Me Anymore"? "Moondance" into "Summertime"? Musical sweetmeats, I tellsya. I recall our covers of Duran Duran's "Is There Something I Should Know?" and Elvis Costello's "Oliver's Army" were pretty awesome, as well as "Brandy" [which, of course, segued into "Jenny (867-5309).]"

That cover band was a rare but horrifying miscalculation into the hearts of my generation, who were by then much younger than I had thought. In 1992, Matt and Jon and I had actually earned thousands of dollars playing shit like "Dance With Me" and "I'm Alright" (the "Caddyshack" theme) to throngs of adoring fraternity and sorority houses in Chapel Hill. However, two tiny years later marked an incredible "cultural memory" difference in the students at UNC. Folks who had loved "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)" in 1992 were replaced by vacuous morons who looked at us like we were from Neptune in 1994. Of course, college juniors in 1992 were eleven when that song came out but in 1994, they had been eight, and had no cultural recollection. These "mini generations" are fascinating and frustrating all at once, like the microclimates in an otherwise cohesive San Francisco sunny day.

So our 1994 model cover band died a quick death, and we concentrated on doing original stuff, and then due to my overbearing perfectionism, that died a quick death as well. From that moment forward, I never collaborated with anyone else, making my own tortured, solipsistic 4-tracks until my buddy Jamie Block asked me to join his band. We'd talked about playing together since about 1987 and until I left to make a movie and he left to make a fortune on Wall Street, we had a lot of fun playing NYC gigs. The year 2000 started miserably for me in Los Angeles - I was friendless, alone and pissed off – and in a few short months, I'd moved to NYC, got a great apartment, started a fantastic new relationship, had a play performed, and played gigs at Arlene's Grocery. I'd landed in heaven.

me with Block at Arlene's Grocery, December 2000

7/14/02 The thing about having

7/14/02

The thing about having short(ish) hair these days is I can't dress up like a woman anymore. I guess I could make a really scary bull-dyke transsexual or something, but my heart wouldn't be in it. Indeed, one of the sad things about getting older is the lack of opportunities to get dressed up at all, and I don't mean putting on a tie or a tux. I mean parties where you wear crazy-ass shit, smear rouge all over your body, and pretend to be something you are definitely not. We had a Halloween party last year during one of those stupid terrorist alerts JUST so I could dress up as William Henry Harrison (our 9th U.S. president) and Tessa could be Mary Tyler Moore. The joke in that getup was "Tippacanoe and Mary Tyler Moore too" which would only be partially funny to American History grad students, but at least we're trying, for chrissake!

The cross-dressing thing is just a lark - lest my small, disturbed readership think I'm some sort of basement Ed Wood but I confess it's way more fun than it ought to be. I was an Indie Rock Chick for Halloween 1994, complete with nose ring, baby Gap dress and tights, and I got "hit on" by the dude who ran the 7-11 in Chatham County, NC (which made me consider the night a success). My friend Sage Hamilton took a picture of me that night, and when they got the film back, her ultra-Southern mother looked at my image and said, "oh, that unfortunate woman."

In Chapel Hill, there was always a reason to dress up for one reason or another, I found myself as a "Clockwork Orange" droogie, John Lennon in the "Beatles for Sale" era, the Heatmiser from "The Year Without a Santa Claus," Amadeus' bastard brother Ed Mozart, and about five really horrifying women.

Usually, Chapel Hill's best getups are a group project, and no, I'm not talking about three sorority chicks dressed up as "black-eyed peas" or "white trash" and thinking they were fiendishly clever. Ours were brilliant. One of them was the recreation of the cover of "Abbey Road," but the best was the representation of the entire cast of "The Dukes of Hazzard":

Clay as Bo Duke, Matt as Luke, Jon as Waylon Jennings, me as Grandpa Jesse, Shay as Daisy Duke, Frisch as Cooter, and Lindsay as Boss Hogg. Not pictured: Ted as Flash the Dog

Okay, so we didn't have Roscoe P. Coltrane or Enos, but given that it was the coldest Halloween in history, we showed incredible nads pulling it off at all (Clay said his hair was in "full Wopat"). It was a weird Sunday night Halloween, and people downtown were getting a nasty kind of drunk. In my only act of willful battery ever, I actually had to knock a guy unconscious with Cooter's toolbox, but that's only because he jumped on Daisy Duke and then drunkenly lunged for my testicles. I felt bad because he was so wasted, but if you're dressed up as someone else, pretty much anything's possible.

a random '70s party: me, Stephani Holzwarth and Doug Bryant, circa 1991

7/13/02 Chapter XVIII of the

7/13/02

Chapter XVIII of the never-ending tome called "Projects for the Columbia County Farm" was in full swing today, as I sanded the floor in what will someday be the library. Any of you who have operated a rented floor sander knows what kind of dreary work this is, especially in a place like ours boards laid in 1867 don't respond so well to being fucked with. The floor is puddled with sixteen coats of paint and polyurethane, most of the planks are bowed in the middle, and several of them are hammered into the floor with some sort of ancient nails that rip the sandpaper all to hell if you don't bash them within an inch of their lives. Three abortive attempts into the ordeal, I put on the "super grit" sandpaper - you know, the kind the hardware sales clerk only lets you have with a prescription – and had to sand crossways against the grain. Yes, I've transgressed every rule that Master Carpenters hold dear, but so far it's: Ian: 1, Ancient Floor: 0.

None of this was easy, since I am pretty much full-fledged sick ironic, since I spent last night on here yammering about the placebo effect. It seems like I should be able to will myself better, or give myself a sugar pill or meditate or something, but I largely suspect that it's my stupid-ass deviated septum getting infected or something. This is the kind of thing, left unchecked, that used to kill medieval astronomers and such, so it looks like I've got to find a General Practitioner before my face falls off.

In other farm news, the tomatoes I planted look like they're thriving, and the newly-thinned pumpkin vines are beginning to rock. Ever since my days worshipping Linus, I've wanted a pumpkin patch, and to grow my own jack-o-lantern for Halloween (my fave holiday). Fortunately, the internet has several pumpkin dork sites (check out this message board or the Pumpkin Nook with it's shameless pumpkinization of history!) so I know precisely how to make my pumpkins have sex with themselves (more on that when I actually do it).

I took a break today mid-sanding and just sat in front of my garden while the sun prepared to set behind the Catskills. Probably twenty minutes I sat there, trying to feel better. Seeing plants you've grown with your own hands, from tiny seeds to a flowering vine, makes you believe that at least one part of your life is purely honest.

7/12/02 Before the "pledge marathon"

7/12/02

Before the "pledge marathon" drowned out any chance of decent public radio broadcasting on my drive up to Columbia County, I heard an astonishing bit of news about arthroscopic surgery on knees: basically, it's a useless procedure. A double-blind study over the last ten years has shown that patients who get the surgery do exactly as well as those who get a "fake" surgery (where, I assume, they make little scars and douse it with saline solution). Coming on the heels of the recent revelations about the neck-and-neck efficacy of antidepressants and placebos, it begins to make you wonder exactly which medicines work the way we think they do. It's a bit scary for doctors and patients alike, because any time the placebo effect works, we're tapping into our unconscious abilities to heal ourselves, and there's nothing more unnerving to Westerners than flaky, holistic, touchy-feely solutions when there's so much laser surgery just waiting to be had.

The placebo effect is also hard to harness, as it relies on deception, and there's not one doctor in the world who will risk the malpractice suit of a fake surgery, even if it works. But jesus, does it work - apparently, the subjects of the knee experiment were actually told that many of the surgeries would be fake, and yet the placebo still did as well as the real thing.

This raises some fascinating stuff: first off, it illuminates an incredible lack of unity in our mind-body connection. The placebo effect only works because we want so desperately to be well - yet at the same time, left "unmedicated," our conscious finds a way to keep us sick. I assume our longing for health comes from a survival instinct, but our ability to stay sick is more mysterious. I imagine it's a lack of self-understanding, a belief that we're far removed from the mystical times when we could heal ourselves. But now, give us a sugar pill, call it "Zyxafifor" or something, and we can stave off cancer. Other cultures must find us laughably inept at self-knowledge.

But what is the one thing that unites all of these fabulous placebos together? I'd say it's the hour or so of time spent on the patient the surgery, the physical therapy, just the fucking attention may be all we're really looking for. When a psychopharmacologist prescribes a medication, and a doctor performs a surgery, what they are really saying is "I understand you hurt, and I believe you, and I believe you enough to use my skills to make you better." Since sickness is such a subjective thing (we can never truly express how bad we feel to others), it is only through the active belief of a respected figure that we can actualize our pain, and if Freud is right, that alone can make it go away.

This isn't to say that all drugs are suspect. My sinuses are only unblocked when I spray Afrin into them, and my mom's hip actually does need the oil changed. But I accept that everything I feel from the Celexa may be induced by my own character. I begin to feel anxious, and then I stop, telling myself, "you can't feel anxious you're taking a powerful, expensive drug!" and sure enough, it stops. It could all be a sham, and maybe Sean's knee surgery was also a sham, but this I know to be true: I was miserable, then I took a pill, and now I'm not so miserable. Sometimes the destination is the destination after all.

7/11/02 Excuse me, but is

7/11/02

Excuse me, but is there a decent size 13 basketball shoe left in the five boroughs of New York? I've been to seven different stores, including Paragon, and every time I ask for my size, the hapless, underpaid shoestore employee comes back and says some shit like "the biggest we have is a 9 1/2."

9 1/2! I haven't worn that size since the NBA gave up on Chuck Taylors, for god's sake. When the shoe guys return from the bowels of the store, they're usually holding a size 14 pink women's volleyball sneaker and gossiping about how fucked up the shoe racks are. They remind me of the scene in "Raising Arizona" when Glenn tells Hi how he had to wait five years to adopt a healthy white baby ("I said 'Five years? What else you got?' Said they got two Koreans and a negro born with his heart on the outside").

The shoe I really want, poetically enough, is Vince Carter's signature line, the heel of which looks like something off the draft table of a 19th-century carriage designer. All I desire is something that has ankle support and doesn't jar my back when I land, and unfortunately, those are the shoes that cost the most. Tessa and I have a little rule about things we'll spend good money on, and one of them is "stuff that will be constantly touching your skin." Technically, shoes don't count for me, as there are socks in the way, but it's still in the spirit, right?

Other rules include "stuff that impacts your career," "places where you fall asleep," and "experiences that don't come along that often." You'd be surprised how often these things come up.

Having failed on the basketball shoe quest, I wore my old high-top Nikes to hoops tonight, mindful that these were the same shoes I wore every day to the Pink House shoot last year. They have zero bouncy-ness left (you wouldn't either, if you'd been at that shoot) but I still managed to play relatively well. Dripping with the sweat of my compadres, I trucked over the Brooklyn Bridge to Brooklyn Heights, where I got to descend into an already-full-steam gossip session with Tessa, Lorraine Tobias, Nell Casey, and Virginia Heffernan - four of the reigning queens of media in full dander. Most guys don't get such pleasures as to hear these women swap stories, and I consider myself blessed to be surrounded by such company. I mean, but for the grace of god, I could still be fixing ham radios in Brad Loney's basement.

7/10/02 I went through a

7/10/02

I went through a period from about 1997 to 2001 where there are virtually no pictures of me, or taken by me. I think I can honestly say that I've made up for it in the last few months.

The digital camera just makes everything too easy, and now that I'm not ensconced in a particularly self-loathing mode - and, god willing, living an interesting life - each day is getting way too much documentation. For instance, this is Tessa sleeping (or whatever you call "sleep punctuated by nonsensical phrases every five minutes") next to me right this second:

she just said "he IS very particular"

But mostly, it's fun to have a camera in a city where something cool happens every millisecond or so. I know I have a dorked-out thing for ghost ads, but there are also the fleeting moments you can catch if you have an eye for preservation. Right now, the summer solstice has two curious effects on my world in New York: it sends a brilliant shaft of light through a tiny hole in the roof of our brownstone's stairwell, a la the Egyptian scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark"; and the sun sets right in line with the crosstown streets of Manhattan, blinding every westbound cabbie for a few days. The sun, passing unabated across town, nothing in the way, brilliant magenta in gorgeous pollution:

18th St. at 5th Ave., 8:19PM click for a larger, much prettier version

And then, if you're truly kissed by the muse, you can catch the human form at the zenith of its actualization. The flash of the camera in synergy with the perfect moment. Lesser photographers have trouble with the capture of their subjects, but a masterful eye always knows when to pull the trigger. To whit:

Sean and Jordana in glorious tandem at Haveli's Indian restaurant. What are they saying? What am I saying?

7/9/02 Sometimes I think this

7/9/02

Sometimes I think this is less of a journal and more of a semi-private rant space with little or no connection to the world on a daily basis. I suppose that's what happens when you live a life of lugubrious internal dialogue like I do, but sometimes it's necessary, in the interests of posterity and archivism, to actually say what I did on some of these days.

I made a private agreement with myself that I would never open one of these blogs with the word "Today," as in "Today I..." or "Today was..." or "Today we..." because that's the first tripwire in the minefield of clich. I know I'm not being graded on any of this, but avoiding trite shit can't help but make you a better writer. Sure, I'm not getting paid for this, and I have naught but a small, disturbed following (hi Mom!) but blog writing is the same as being in a cover band: you may not be playing what you want, but you're getting better at your instrument.

My Auntie Donna, though I love her to pieces, may be one of the most insane diary/letter writers ever to grace the Earth. Being the anti-Buddhists (and therefore obsessed with permanent records), Mormons make for exhaustively detailed diarists, right down to laundry loads and hedge clippings. My Aunt Marilyn, who spent 1972-1981 with the CAPS LOCK key stuck on, shouted her family letters with an attention to detail that was almost savantly autistic. I love her letters and find them impossible to out down.

But Donna (ne Idonna, due to some weird linguistic quirk of my great-grandmother Pearl) is the queen of the crop. Her letters were best described by Kent as "Joycean in the extreme, even as her subjects are mundane - sentences roll on for 40 or 50 words or more, and subjects, objects, tenses and verbs bob in a sort of goats head stew." Indeed, when she passes beyond the veil in a decade or two, Idonna completists will have roughly 15,000 typewritten pages to sort through, each with their own litany of Relief Society meetings, the installation and removal of Christmas lights, and of course, the melons she did – and, in some cases, did not – throw away.

Oh wait, I was going to say something about what I did today!
It rained, and I took a picture!

passing over the Manhattan Bridge during a squall

7/8/02 Sometimes you go so

7/8/02

Sometimes you go so long without seeing your inspirations that you forget how much you've stolen from them. I sat Tessa down tonight and got her to watch Sixteen Candles, one of the best of the early-80s genre. It was, unfortunately, a network broadcast, which bowdlerized all the good lines, making it a lot less dark and freewheeling than the original - but she dug it nonetheless. In 1983, Tessa was busy reading Anne Sexton poems in her room at Choate while the rest of us were going to the googleplex, so I take it upon myself to fill her in on crucial missing elements of the American experience.

Anyway, I saw some things I'd subconsciously pilfered for The Pink House without remembering where they had come from. For instance, in the bathroom scene where Anthony Michael Hall reveals Molly Ringwald's underwear to an awed crowd, the freshmen all go "ahhhh" in a recoiled fascination. In our movie, the sorority girls do the same thing when Heather Matarazzo shoves the nose ring onto Michelle (at my behest, of course).

In our movie, I envisioned a prop that would marry Pink House past and present: a lawn jockey. The 1929 Pink House would have a lawn jockey with a horse tied to it, and the present-day house would have the same statuette painted rainbow colors with toilet paper strung on it. Of course, "Sixteen Candles" has a nice panning shot at the beginning of the party sequence... of a lawn jockey, crap strewn all around it. Tessa vetoed the lawn jockey from our movie, saying it had too many racial implications (I still disagree, but didn't want to press my luck with audiences), but the Pink House lawn still looks quite similar:

The Pink House has homages to other movies there are some very subtle Animal House references (Murray saying "that makes sense" when the Nazis storm the party) and some outright obvious ones (Charlotte's speech to her girls - and to the Pink House residents - is straight out of the Dean Wormer playbook). But I hope these thefts don’t get in the way of the Pink House's overall goal, which is to give off the same feeling of brotherhood that was the benchmark of all the great 80s comedies. I also want it to be quotable, I want people to watch the movie and desire to live there, with those people.

Neil and Bill predicted in 13th-GEN that our particular generation would be an immensely creative one, much like the Silent Generation (born 1925-42) and the Lost Generation (born 1883-1900) before it. So far, our track record has been pretty abysmal, especially where movies are concerned. While codgers like Woody Allen and Boomers like Spielberg get all the screen time they can handle, virtually nobody from our age group has stepped up to create something profound. Only Wes Anderson, M. Night Shyamalan and the Coen Brothers have any visual style (and the Coens are actually baby boomers age-wise).

Only abject cynicism and a commitment to irony could possibly shackle an entire generation to such mediocrity. 30-year-olds who grew up on "Sixteen Candles" and "Ferris Bueller" are painstakingly trying to recreate these movies without bringing anything else to the table except much lamer dialogue and "plot" twists that can be seen an hour and a half away. Piffle like "Can't Hardly Wait" and the other legions of three-word movies ("Down to You," "She's All That," "Whatever It Takes," etc.) have fully destroyed the genre, making possible "Not Another Teen Movie," which was dreadful itself. Peyton Reed's Bring it On is the best of the lot, wonderfully directed, full of great performances and overall pretty delightful, but damned if I can remember one quote from it.

Which leaves me with the hope that we've done something interesting with the Pink House movie, that we're not some derivative, shrill xerox of a bygone era; that we've managed to say something. In "Ferris Bueller," Cameron stares deeply into a Seurat painting at the Chicago Museum of Art, connecting with a small boy made of blurred dots, while the Smiths play softly in the background. It's a gorgeous moment that needs no explanation. I pray we have such ammunition in our movie.

7/7/02 Looking at the sun

7/7/02

Looking at the sun is so forbidden that actually doing so is like stumbling upon a superhero while they sleep. It's rare that something in nature takes on such perfect form, and ever since I was a little kid, I've been mesmerized by the flawless circle of the Sun. The Earth looks oblong and messy, even from space, and there something about the Moon's craters, as well as its waxing and waning, that offsets the sphere. But if you get to observe the Sun on those lucky days when it won't microwave the back of your occipital lobe, you will see, from nature, the perfect circle.

Of course, you have to wait until days like today to do it. Due to some freak fire up in Canada, visibility up here in New England has been substantially reduced by smoke, making every landscape look like those Polaroids from the 70s that have been exposed to air too long. While pictures don't do it justice, I snapped a quick one of Tessa gardening our urn (boy, that sounds like a euphemism, eh?) with the sun hanging in the background:

It reminded me of a day in 10th grade calculus class, when our teacher Mrs. Baird was explaining something on the chalkboard. In the middle of a mess of graphs and formulae, she accidentally drew the most perfect manmade circle any of us had ever seen. It remained on the board for a few minutes during her lecture until someone in class raised their hand and said, "Um, I think you just drew a perfect circle." She stopped, and the whole class continued to stare at it. Everyone looked for a flaw, even a slight one, but we couldn't find any. She left it on the board for weeks until a custodian, not knowing, washed it away.

7/6/02 There's an awful lot

7/6/02

There's an awful lot of "lying on lawns" going on lately, and I, for one, am submitting my approval. This is the third night in a row I've been expected to lie back on a lawn and behave socially, and I might make it a nightly ritual.

lying in Lime Rock, CT on July 5 for fireworks

lying in Lenox, MA on July 6 for the Tanglewood music festival

jesus, we're wearing the same outfits in those pictures

We didn't know who or what was playing at Tanglewood tonight, so it was a shocking delight to show up to see Itzhak Perlman play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, then get to hear them finish up with Respighi's Fountain and Pines of Rome. The greatest living violinist of our time, and easily two of my favorite pieces ever written. It rocked. The basketball equivalent would be like watching Michael Jordan play for a Heels alumni team.

It was especially cool because we had used so much of both the Fountains and Pines of Rome for the Pink House scratch soundtrack back in May, so Tessa recognized a lot of it. The "Pines" has an especially strong place in my heart because I felt it was the piece that best defined the intense charisma of my Dad. When he conducted it, he pulled a stunt with the trumpet and trombone sections during the "Pines of the Appian Way," by placing them in the loge and box seats for the giant groundswell effect of the Roman army approaching. On cue, he would whirl around and point at them in a tousled fury, and they would bleat forth in one of the most amazing aural experiences those yahoos at the Virginia Philharmonic would ever hear. It is one of the few great childhood memories of my dad that is unjaundiced by the vicissitudes of his character, the revelation of his transgressions, or the death of his myth.

7/5/02 One thing you can

7/5/02

One thing you can say about humans, they have a well-crafted sense of the absurd. As full of defense mechanisms as we are, we still love to celebrate holidays by aping the very things we hate the most. In England, Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament, and the Brits respond every year by trying to blow up everything else. Americans live in fear of war on their own turf, but we celebrate our Independence with mock cannon fire and torpedoes racing across the sky in fireworks. I wonder how soldiers returning shell-shocked from WWI or even Vietnam – felt about the sound of fireworks; it must have freaked them out.

I adore fireworks, but the fourth of July has traditionally meant bad things for me last year I got a kidney stone and spent 15 hours in retching pain; in 1987 I broke up with Jane, sending me into a depressive tailspin; a few years later, Tracy and I effectively ended our relationship when we weren't prophylactically careful. The other 4ths seemed mostly hot and full of bad food at other people's houses. But this time I thought a lot about our country, and mostly felt guilty. I'd go into why, but it's nothing you can't hear from other bleeding-heart knee-jerk leftists still willing to write about such things. Suffice to say I wish we had a government with an ounce of compassion; a president that wasn't a right-to-life monkey; a populace that didn't hate fags; and decent cheese.

In a quirk indicative of the region, the fireworks were held today on the 5th of July, and half the Berkshires drove to Lime Rock, CT for the show. It was pretty awesome, and the sound of the loud white fireworks (you know, the ones that are there just for the bass response) echoed through the Taconic hillsides like Mahler's One Billionth Symphony. Tessa, Shelagh Ratner, Lindsay and I traded quips, and for about 6.5 seconds, I was a happy American.

But I don't allow myself such luxuries. Like a true whining wet blanket of pinko sentimentality, I wondered to myself, what is more America to you? These twinkling red lights:

Or these?

7/4/02 With the sweltering unabated,

7/4/02

With the sweltering unabated, we ditched the farm for a while and trucked down to the flooded ore pit next to Bish Bash Falls, where many of the locals had congregated for an intense holiday swim. We brought all the American items we could carry Fritos, a frisbee, Gatorade, Doritos and Coke. It was a decidedly un-precious 4th of July spent with ordinary farming folk, a far cry from what Sean and Michelle are doing right now in Napa Valley. It was sticky, people were yelling in different languages, and you could actually see young kids making those "summer acquaintance" relationships that you can take clear into college.

We brought the coolest thing, though. Baby Nora, child of Lorraine Tobias and Alex Draper, had her first public swim, and she was delightfully bewildered. The meanest strangers in the world smile at Nora. And you probably would too.

mom Lorraine, baby Nora, friends Nell and Jesse after a dip in the mine

7/3/02 There is a Heat

7/3/02

There is a Heat that feels like the inside of your Brain has been stuck in a Microwave, gradually rising to a Liquified, Boiling Magma from the center on out. Usually the copyrighted domain of Southern states like North Carolina, this kind of heat descended on the New York area today, and even the Berkshires were totally unbearable. When we got out of the car, sweat poured forth immediately, and I'm not even that much of a sweater.

We tried to install the air conditioners, but of course, the farmhouse's prissy little circuit breakers couldn't take Tessa's behemoths, leaving us with a couple of puny AC units and a lot of misery. My reaction to heat has always been a bit overwhelming; I don't know if it's the whole Welsh thing, or just that I'm High Maintenance Boy, but I really can't function past a certain point. Playing ball and getting sweaty is one thing, but sitting and talking while you begin to melt is quite another.

It made me think about the ways in which I need certain Products in order to be functional as has been cerebrum-numbingly documented here, I think a lot about some alternate future where we don't get the things we want. Here's a partial list of things that, if unavailable, would make me miserable:

1. air conditioning. Obviously. I know AC ruined Southern fiction and all, but how did Eudora Welty get any work done from June to September?

2. Celexa. Don't know if this is quite that big a deal, but a world without antidepressants strikes me as faintly hopeless. Then again, I'm not even sure how much a sea change has been in my life since April 10 when I committed to writing here every day. But not getting better would be very unhappy-making.

3. Afrin. I'm getting surgery for my deviated septum (caused by a trash can don't ask) but meantime I wouldn't be able to breathe without it.

4. Lactaid tablets. Sure, it's easy to make fun of "lactose intolerance," since it sounds so swooningly hypochondriachal, but if you really are lactose intolerant and have ice cream, you're fucked. These little tablets make all the difference, and I really love ice cream, so fork off!

5. Excedrin. What is it about the tantalizing mix of Tylenol, aspirin and caffeine that make Excedrins so good? Some people need coffee to survive the morning, I need two Excedrin.

6. Refresh Tears Eye Drops. Ever since LASIK surgery, my eyes were pretty dry – now with the damn sinus thing, they hurt all the time. Refresh Tears™ are cool, 'cuz you can use them all day long, unlike Visine, which makes you wait.

7. Really Good Basketball Shoes. And not just for playing, good hoops shoes can keep you dry in the rain, have great support, and are really soft where you need them. Back when I used to mull about such things on an hourly basis, I wondered what kind of shoes I'd be stuck in during a national emergency, and I always hoped it would take place on hoops day.

8. Access to the internet.

That's about it. I can do without that awesome Kiehl's body wash, the shaving cream with benzocaine in it, sugar cereals, those linen shirts I've been craving, Coke, American Crew Fiber hair stuff, the cell phone, Chelsea Piers and tuna. Even though I love all those things. You can probably even take away the hoops shoes, the Excedrin, the eye drops, the antidepressants - and I won't eat any dairy products.

But I need the Afrin and air conditioning, by God.

from the "How Does She Put Up With Me" dept.

7/2/02 In other people's blogs,

7/2/02

In other people's blogs, I usually find the mundane stuff to be the most interesting. Of course, this site got a huge bump in traffic because of the story of my proposal to Tessa which got picked up by the legendary Ev on his website, but for me, you don't always have to write something life-changing in order to be fascinating. I think the stuff The Gus writes down the street is better when he's dealing with extension cords and shitty neighbors.

So if mundane stuff is your cup of tea, here's a treat: I spent the entire day on the phone with Earthlink and Verizon. As I write this, I have DSL coming in on ALL THREE PHONE LINES. "Most people make do with one," I hear you say. No fucking duh! THAT'S why I was on the phone all goddamn day!

By the time the sun set, I had set up our new Earthlink service, got Verizon to give me a kickback of $147 (wow!), installed caller ID and a rollover line, cancelled Verizon DSL... and tonight, I can actually send email from my own computer. Notice to Verizon: your policy on sending email fucking blows. By not permitting residential customers to use any email address they damn well please in the "From:" field of sent emails, you are insuring that no patron with their own domain name - or an old email address they wish to keep sacred will bother to sign up. Earthlink doesn't care what your email address is, neither does Taconic Technology up at the farm - hell, Time Forkin' Warner didn't even care. Why do you? Don't you know that the internet views censorship, even the technical kind, as a disease, and finds a way to work around it? Tonight, I am a bacterium, and I just mutated into something more powerful.

Speaking of powerful bacteria, it is 90 degrees at night here in the city, so hot that John Lasala, his friend Melissa, Tessa and I abandoned our dinner at the un-air conditioned Prune and opted instead for Chez Es Saada, which rocked. We sat in the cool, cool basement and swapped stories all night, something I love to do with the esteemed Mr. Lasala. John is truly brethren, and it's even more amazing that he and Tessa went to Choate together back in the Bronze Age.

Afterwards, we concluded our East Village fandango by meeting Sean, Michelle and the Astoria boys at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge, truly one of the more depressing holes in Manhattan. It reminds me of the bar George Bailey stumbles into during the nightmare Potterville sequence of "It's a Wonderful Life" I'd be surprised if they even had mixers like Coke and orange juice. It's the kind of place where you knock back three shots of Ol' Grandad after being fired from your job three days before Christmas. Funny, though, we always have a good time there.