xtcian

5/11/02 I don't know if

5/11/02

I don't know if they give out awards to the Dowdiest City in America, but Cambridge would definitely be in the run-off. All the middle-aged women here wear sackcloth browns and grays, loose baggy linen pants, and they all walk around with a humorless earnestness. I mean, I know Harvard is here and all, but it really made me long for the dumbasses in Chapel Hill. I judge a city by two things: the amount of rednecks wearing colorful stirrup pants, and the number of disaffected youths breaking their coccyxii while skateboarding down a stairwell.

Today we walked around Harvard Square, which is about as focus-group tested as a public space gets. There are four coffee places, two corporate record store chains, an Urban Outfitters, a Gap and 45 places to get American bar food. The difference is that all these businesses are crammed into buildings erected in 1673, giving the town the perfect melange of Class and 21st-century convenience. Americans love to consume things that don't surprise them, part of the "ubiquitopia" experience, but they really love thinking they're getting some historical perspective at the same time.

I know the first New World settlers tried out St. Augustine, FL and Roanoke Island, NC first but why did all the permanent settlements take root in places like Boston, where they were guaranteed to freeze their asses off seven months of the year? Was it the mosquitoes or something?

Later in the day, Sam and I went to the local hoops court to give the natives a little what-fer. I think they were a bit chagrined to see an 11-year-old boy walk on the court with only one arm (watching people's first reaction to Sam is fascinating), not knowing whether they should try not to look, or play a little softer, or try not to look as though they're trying not to look.

That lasted for all of twenty seconds before Sam and I challenged them all to a game, and a few minutes later they retired defeated. Sam had a sweet give-and-go that he finished with a reverse no-look swish. If he learns to use his "disability" Tessa said to call it "armlessness" – in a special way, he could really be an interesting kind of point guard down in the paint. He just needs to find out how to use his special body in a way that confuses the hell out of everybody. I want him on my team.

Sam at the Friends School giving his report on bone anomalies

5/10/02 One of the hidden

5/10/02

One of the hidden upshots about getting engaged is that you suddenly enter a new hierarchy of respect amongst some of your friends and extended family. It's no secret that Uncle Chris, Aunt Marilyn and Auntie Donna, among the other thousands, have wanted me to get married roughly since there was grass on the field, so to speak. In their case, I think it has something to do with the Celestial Kingdom, but moreover, it gives you a Mark of Approval and the whiff of legitimacy.

Being here in Cambridge where Tessa's sister Michelle lives – I'm reminded that I gain new family as well, and they couldn't be cooler about it. Michelle, who is not known for being flamboyant, is downright buoyant about the prospects of a wedding, and the kids seem pretty psyched about it (Katherine even said, "I'm so happy you're joining our family," which was actually one of the best moments I've had yet).

In that vein, Tessa and I went to Sam's Quaker school today for "Significant Elders Day" (they don't use ageist, ableist, family-firstish words like "grandparents" there) and it was truly a stunning experience. The level of racial and lifestyle sophistication at the Quaker school is nothing short of a miracle: we both welled with tears in front of a poster that asked "Why is there Gay Pride Day?" with the answer "Because that's the day they aren't afraid." Written by a second grader.

The day was not without its hitches: the "silent meeting" took about a half-hour longer than most kids could stomach, and some goofing off was had by some (later, there was a serious, closed-door scolding given to the entire 6th grade for "resisting the natural law of personality growth" that was so stern as to make me feel bad for eavesdropping). But the classrooms were full of respect, and Sam who with one arm, would have been repellent to my 6th grade class in Iowa – is the natural leader of the class. Other kids (who again, would have been pummeled senseless for their sensitivity and intellect) gave great reports on bone and muscle diseases, each cheered on by their classmates.

I'm sure there's some vague underbelly of flaky resentment going on there that we can't see in one afternoon, but I think about all the Celexa and therapy I wouldn't need right now if I had been allowed to go someplace like that. It almost makes me mad.

The Celextant, May 10, 2002

I've decided to write a Celextant entry only when I feel as though something interesting is happening with the drug. The one thing I feel right now is more of that lack of "waking up grogginess" I mean, when I got up at 7:30 this morning, I was UP.

Hm. Maybe that wasn't particularly interesting after all.

sample poster from the 2nd grade class at the Friends School in Cambridge

I propose...

5/9/02

The short version of the story is this: I met a girl in 1987 who I thought was amazing. Fifteen years later, today, I kneeled on the uppermost knoll of a hill we'd bought together, and asked her to marry me. She said yes, and subsequently, we were surrounded by 85 cows.

Many people have taken part in the subterfuge over the last few days, between the dual-functioning surprise party for Tessa and Sean, and the selecting/buying/Fedexing of a ring that seemed elusive until the last minute. I don't know when you decide you want to marry somebody; I think it occurs to you the same way that hiccups disappear - without total consciousness. I had inklings after our Pink House movie shoot that I would think about marriage if she and I managed to survive what I titled the "Electric Larry and the San Frantastic Road Trip," a journey to be taken around the country between the end of production and the beginning of editing. Of course, September 11 and her father's death intervened, and we ended up travelling more, under more somber circumstances, than we imagined.

The prelude to getting the ring was a three-month odyssey in search of a perfect opal necklace for Christmas. After looking in fifteen different states (and finally finding it in the French Quarter) I had a good idea how to get around a jewelry store. The initial queries took place at a custom jewelry shop in the East Village, but ultimately, the rings there were too contemporary for my tastes - they buried the diamond in a "today's active lifestyles" setting that looked a little too Ikea. The antique jewelry store up at Macy's had a gorgeous diamond, but it had dinky diamond brochette thingies on it, and it was really GOLD. I hate to be a snob, but there's something about gold-colored gold that gives me hives. Fortunately an Indian woman waited for me at Fortunoff, who had the perfect white-white-white gold simple diamond. Sean said you'd know when you found the right one, and it was obvious.

Why does anyone get married? It's the wrong question to ask, really; it should be "why do YOU get married?" I had to think very carefully about it, not for the obvious reasons, but because it was a situation I honestly never thought I'd experience. I never had a template for it, never fantasized about it, because I believed it to be unrealistic. I had way too many problems, was filled with too much loathing of myself and the world around me, you know, all the problems of ego and dorkdom wrapped into one. It was during my worst moments back in January, when I lay immovable on a bed, full of the worst sorts of dread, unable to eat for two weeks, in a full nervous breakdown, when Tessa said to me, "I don't care how bad this gets, I'm staying with you." And from then on, like everything else in our relationship, it just seemed as obvious as oxygen.

Many of the weddings we've attended seem engineered solely for their parents' friends. Historically, marriages were mostly a business transaction for dowries, but it did purport one idea that I find meaningful: it's a celebration in front of your community, who is then responsible for helping ensure its longevity. I like the idea of a brain trust consisting of my family, Lindsay, Chip, Scott, Salem, Rick, Ann, Jon, Bud, Kendall - and Tessa's cohorts - who are there to help see you through. As Best Man of Sean's wedding, I remember ushering him through his problems with Tamara, giving him deadlines for her behavior, getting him drunk when she finally took off. The same went for Scott (and hopefully, the upshot will be happier). I love the idea of all of us shaming, cajoling and joking each other back into occasional shape. I want to live the life examined. I want the possibility of having kids. I want to do it with Tessa, who, by all accounts, is pretty much the coolest chick on wheels.

And so the ring went from 54st Street to 26th Street by way of California, Fedexed around the country to avoid taxes. Of course, it ended up being the only Fedex ever to be "unsuccessfully delivered" - causing me, my Mom and Steve to lose valuable millimeters of our stomach lining. After the second try, I got it, and bolted upstate before Tessa got there, determined to hide it in the lone, hollow tree on the farm as a birthday surprise.

Last night, as I drove up the hill to the farm, I saw the tree - which has stood its ground for 50 years, despite being struck by lightning - knocked to the ground! What's worse, the cows had come back to our land, suddenly turning our hill into a messy petting zoo. Tessa was due to arrive in an hour, which is past dark, so she wouldn't see the tree, but how am I supposed to propose to her in the middle of cow poop with our favorite landmark sadly crashed to the ground?

So today, on her birthday, I figured I would do it anyway. I told her there was a surprise for her on the hill, and I brought a newspaper to kneel on. We trod up the grass, and it was then I realized that the tree, by falling, presented the most beautiful bench on earth. She sat, I genuflected, and I asked. The commotion afterwards piqued the interest of the cows, who all came running to see what we were doing. Chopin, being more Border Collie than Labrador, seized his chance for glory and began to herd like he's never herded before. All eighty cows began to run, but since Chopes didn't know where to herd them, he came running back to us, with all the cows after him in a thunderous swell. I'd just proposed to Tessa, and now our dog was going to have us trampled by a mad herd of giant milk cows.

Calmly, we spoke gently and the cows slowed, then quieted. We walked back to the house and called everyone we knew. It wasn't until I heard Tessa screaming with Michelle that I truly knew how great it all was, that I was able to provide the kind of sister that Michelle never had. I understood how important this was to everyone else, not some pained, tortured decision of my own, and despite being such a dork, despite dodgeballs and iceballs, despite some wrenching desire to be perverse and self-sabotaging, despite an egoistic need to be so different and special - the most wonderful girl in the world said yes to me and it was okay, for a day, to be just like everyone else.

Tessa and I, post-proposal, trying to find our way out of the cows

5/8/02 Immediately upon arrival in

5/8/02

Immediately upon arrival in Columbia County this evening I was presented with eighty cows. The dairy farm had let the cows wander back onto our land, and they had congregated right next to the back door of the farm to see what the hell was going on. I made friends with a few of them, feeding them tufts of grass and such, and I gotta say, they're pretty cute. It's like a giant chorus of female dancers backstage at a country production of "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers."

Chopin, of course, looked at them and immediately the weight of the world was on his shoulders, as if there were some ancient duty lurking in his hindbrain. You know how you have nightmares of being in school, taking tests, years after you graduate? I think the Chopes sees a gaggle of cows in the same light.

It's Tessa's birthday again, and as I have oft said, the limitations of this blog are again apparent.

The Celextant, May 8, 2002

Met with Jonathan Bloch today and we discussed more about antidepressants and the placebo effect. I'd like to know one more thing: does the placebo effect work on a patient when the patient knows the drug has a high placebo effect?

5/7/02 I guess it's just

5/7/02

I guess it's just a case of being 34 and 11/12ths, but I woke up this morning with unbelievable back pain from the two straight days of intense hoops. I used to play three and four days in a row in Chapel Hill, but I was in excellent condition then, not to mention merely 30 years old. This is sucky. I obviously need to start behaving nicely towards my body if I expect it to last until the middle of the century or so.

Not that anyone cares, but my 3-month long odyssey of getting the second phone line installed finally came to fruition this evening. I had to string phone cord through a wall, across the ceiling of a giant room, around four corners and into the back of the apartment. In all, 108 feet of wire, and for some reason, it hadn't worked for weeks. Finally, I replaced a nondescript length of cord and the line sprang to life. Half of me wanted to celebrate, the other half wanted to throw the phone out into the fucking street.

Which reminds me: one night in about 1992, during one of the particularly low biorhythms of the Purple House (which was known for several), Matt and Clay were watching MTV downstairs. About seven bad videos in a row came on, and Matt said that if the next song sucked, he was going to destroy the VCR. Of course, Mariah Carey or some such shit came on, and Matt yanked the VCR out of the wall, took it outside, walked to the middle of McCauley Street, and throttled it on the pavement until there was a crater of electronic parts spread about fifty feet around. He spoke for all of us that night, and got a huge gash on his forearm that bled for days. What was really funny is that it was Clay's VCR.

The Celextant, May 7, 2002

There was a report today that stated what I'd already known since a similar study was done on St. John's Wort: the placebo often works as well or better – than a major anti-depressant. Boy, I believe it, too. What is interesting to me, however, is how long a placebo keeps working. Dr. Gorman intimated that the placebo rates were high for SSRI's, but that they didn't work on the long term.

Regardless, the whole thing causes me to wonder: how much of my little observations here are complete horseshit? It seems unlikely that all of "better feelings" are due to simple psychology, if only because I often forget I'm even taking a pill. Can the placebo effect work on you if you don't really know you're taking it?

5/6/02 When I was talking

5/6/02

When I was talking about the limitations of this blog, I was mostly referring to the events of this evening, when I planned a surprise party for both Sean and Tessa, both of them engineered to think the party was for the other. Tessa was thoroughly stunned to find a congregation of her friends at Phobang in Chinatown, but Sean had suspected something all along, and actually came up with the winning idea. I suppose we think enough alike to make things like that difficult to conceal. That, and Michelle getting into the car with a stack of presents didn't help matters.

Lots of good people were there Jamie and Susan, Nell, Billy Strong, Ned Eisenberg, and of course, Gill brought two 19-year-old hotties from somewhere deep in Long Island. One has to appreciate Gill for his consistency, if nothing else. The man just knows how to have a good time.

All of Sean's NYC posse were there as well, representing themselves well. Everything about the evening was cool, except for the bill, of which I paid $60 (but it could have been much worse I think I paid $120 extra for our reading at Jeollado). We took Matt Dawson and Jen Albano home to Cobble Hill, and played with their terrier puppy Henry, who has the never-flagging entertainment value of running around the yard like a baby kangaroo on steroids. We decided to let Chopin play with Henry, but instead the Chopes tried to disembowel the little fella. Our dog is really getting hard to explain to guests.

Oh yeah, this morning I played five games of one-on-one with a dude at Chelsea Piers who is clearly one of the better players. I played him close each game, then won the last game in the stretch. I felt really good about that, even if my back isn't.

The Celextant, May 6, 2002

I'd like to say that my days have become largely free of anxiety, but today has made it hard to muster. I still have the same old ever-conscious fears, and they exhaust me. It seem like every time I have a little spark of paranoia and anxiety, three things come along to make it 100 times worse. I'll go into the whole thing once I feel like writing about it, but for now, it continues to fill me with sickness. Dr. Bloch says such worrying makes a man brittle, and I'm feeling it. It is time for a new way of thinking about these things, but I'm having an awful time letting go.

5/5/02 It's Cinco de Mayo

5/5/02

It's Cinco de Mayo today, a date that figures prominently in the Pink House film, because it's the actual day the movie is supposed to take place. They say research cures writer's block, and though I've never been terribly afflicted with the latter, the former has taught me that Napoleon III the one you never hear about – is the major antagonist behind Mexico's day of glory. I like holidays that are set on actual days, like the Fourth of July or Christmas. Labor Day, Easter, Thanksgiving and Mother's Day slither around the calendar far too much for my liking.

I played basketball in Astoria for the first time in months this morning, and actually did pretty well. Probably something to do with confidence (the guys at Mulberry St. can be rather judgmental) and the fact that I'd just played on Thursday. Finished some pretty freaky shots that I was glad to see back in the arsenal.

That didn't stop me from hurting the rest of the day, but it was the good kind of hurt that tells you you're getting somewhere. Later, Sean, Jordana, Dani and I saw Spiderman, which was really fun but a little lazy with the scriptwriting. Not as lazy as Woody Allen's decidedly limp Hollywood Ending, but it feels like nobody west of Interstate 15 has a sharp eye and a red pen. Of course, "The Pink House" will be called a mess too, but at least it'll be an inspired one.

The limitations of this blog have never been so obvious as right now. Save it for later.

The Celextant, May 5, 2002

Okay, so the "take the pill at 3am" idea wasn't one of my best. I spent half the night in a sort of half-dreaming haze, sleeping the half-sleep of a cat, my dreams melding quite confusingly with plain old morning thought. There used to be a delineation between the dreamworld and the waking one, but that border has been photoshopped into a blur. Actually woke up from a nightmare the other night, but I was due for one of those anyway.

5/4/02 After walking a long,

5/4/02

After walking a long, circuitous route around Prospect Park today, Tessa took off on a run, and I found myself at the little flea market that springs up every Saturday on 7th Avenue around Carroll Street. On one of the tables I found a notebook full of stamped, used postcards from about 1898 to 1919. One such postcard from 1909 had a woman sitting on a man's lap, neither of them up to much good, and underneath it said, "Just a spoon, my dear! A spoon is no overdose!" Superimposed above them was a silver spoon hanging in the ether.

I'd love to know what the hell they were abusing, perhaps one of Freud's seven-per-cent solutions, or some kind of absinthe drip, or even the still-used version of cooking heroin. Fuck, it might even be molasses for all I know. On the back of the card was written (with the florid fountain penmanship of the time): "Dearest Ernest: Is this how you did it back in the old days?"

The "old days" to the writer of this card probably meant the 1870s. Other ancient artifacts were on the next table, an entire box brimming with pictures of the now-dead, expensive collars on fresh laundered shirts in 1921, babies born in 1897, a team of some indeterminate sport in 1918. The sheer volume of these pictures is staggering, each of them so long gone, even the person remembering them dead for years. I imagined a line stretching along 7th Avenue for miles, all the people who were in the pictures, or those who knew of them, in their uniforms and hats and hoop skirts, all there to explain each picture to me, who they were, and why it was important to them.

I think about my own box of pictures in Columbia County and understand that the same fate may befall all of them. I think about this paragraph I write, stuck on a server somewhere in a distant place where I do not live. I'm overwhelmed by the impermanence of it all, and yet I keep typing.

The Celextant, May 4, 2002

I just took my pill. Is it obvious?