xtcian

5/24/02 This was, as Todd

5/24/02

This was, as Todd and I described it at the end, a "manly day." He installed chicken wire all around the cupola of the barn to keep the birds from turning the place into a scatological aviary dump, and I spent hours scrubbing bird shit off the basketball floor. We mended windows, dragged mattresses across town, finished the floor in the dining room and traded up our dining room table. I was too tired to fully enjoy Salem when he finally showed up (eight hours on the New Jersey Turnpike with a newborn - god, the horror) but by the time we all started playing pool, I was really glad to think of all my old friends gathering together.

Now Sean, Jordana, Salem, Elizabeth, their nanny Bethany, the baby, Sandy and us are here and the hordes show up tomorrow. And we caught another nice sunset tonight - it's like a great TV show that rarely disappoints.

we look west at 8:21pm; Michelle looks east

5/23/02 Spent this afternoon at

5/23/02

Spent this afternoon at Jonathan Bloch's place undergoing my bi-weekly psychotherapy, which has so far produced some abatement of my "condition" but (if you've been reading this blog) obviously I'm still not very healthy. Perhaps if the news organizations currently surrounding me could go one week without mentioning fucking nuclear terrorism, I'd be able to digest food properly. I mean, come the fuck ON already. I even got angry at myself yesterday and vowed to just press on and approach my anxiety with fury and frustration (something Jonathan endorsed) and start my writing career again. And still the fantasies exist ("fantasy" always seems to be a word that denotes good things, but I'm not quite sure what else to call them—daymares?). Anyway, I can't imagine not printing these stories, when it could potentially the worst thing to happen to civilization since the last plague—but then again, what good does it do? How are we supposed to act when it happens? Assuming we survive, where should we have put our money? Will we have to walk to Columbia County?

Fuck it. I really can't stand it anymore. I wonder when my body and brain will say "enough."

Speaking of walking to Columbia County, Todd Walker and I drove up today and it took us damn near four hours, unheard of in these parts. Note to self: do not take I-87 off the Triboro Bridge, even during the Apocalypse.

When we arrived, the fields had been cut, and it was seventy degrees. Lord, please let the weather hold and let us frolic at night under the delight of the full flower moon. Okay?

western part of the Columbia County farm, about to become a softball field

5/22/02 After wandering through the

5/22/02

After wandering through the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens all day, I wasn't particularly psyched to go to the Brooklyn Museum of Art - it was about to close, and the Star Wars exhibit required an extra ticket. But when Tessa and her mother stopped at the fifth floor to search for the noted Sargent paintings, I was awestruck by something I saw on the wall.

A TV monitor was on a loop, playing a movie by Thomas Edison, filmed in 1899, with the title "New Brooklyn to New York via Brooklyn Bridge." It is simply a camera mounted on the front of a train, starting in Brooklyn and ending in Manhattan. People in bowler hats and top hats with petticoats pass by on the left, and carriages amble by on the right. The towers of the bridge, which was only 16 years old at the time, pass over the top of frame in gothic wonder. When you pull into New York, you don't recognize a thing; even the venerable Woolworth Building was 14 years away from construction. The camera jostles, then fades to white.

So simple, this trip from Brooklyn to Manhattan, delicate lines on a slow train track, people hoofing to work, just like we do, every day, across the same stretch of water. And I couldn't take my eyes off the movie. I watched it four times until Tessa and Sandy took me away.

still from the 1899 Edison movie of the Brooklyn Bridge. Click here to watch.

5/21/02 I think the time

5/21/02

I think the time has come to take a "fearless inventory" of the problem plaguing me, and I suppose this place is as good as any. The fact is this: I'm not doing so well living in an age of heightened terrorism. Something about the situation in the world right now, and the threats to the town in which I live and work, is unearthing severely painful feelings in the base of my gut, and the combination of therapy and medicine is, so far, only quelling the beast.

In the days immediately following 9/11, I thought I'd never leave New York. There was something so beautiful in those moments, scary yet teeming with a spiritus mundi that was excellently rhapsodized in our first-hand accounts of living in lower Manhattan in those days. The whole city shut down and our brownstone on 8th Ave. could only be entered with proper identification, but I didn't feel scared, only hopped up on the sense of history and the tangible feeling that we were really helping people in need. My sister Michelle really shone in those precious moments after the attack, unleashing an epiphany that still glows in her today (she just finished her training and is now officially an EMT).

But as the weather turned gray, cold and ugly - and the war on Afghanistan started - more supposed details about the terrorists bubbled to the surface, and I began to get genuinely freaked out. People were contracting anthrax, the efficacy of our smallpox vaccine was called into question, and the rhetoric started to flow from bin Laden and his cohorts: suddenly my shoebox apartment in the East Village, where I slept about six inches from the ceiling, stopped seeming "cute" and became almost sarcophagan.

By December, I was spending much of my day thinking about the threat of nuclear terrorism; by January, I stopped eating more than a few bites a day. I lost seven pounds, wrote desperate emails to my family, begging them to move out of the city, and in a coup, managed to move Tessa and I to Brooklyn. We picked Park Slope not just because Tessa had always loved it, but also because I looked on a map, and it was at least three miles from downtown Manhattan.

Since then, I have been getting better, but I've been stuck in a holding pattern. Part of the problem is that I thought researching the news of terrorism would make me feel better; instead, most news sources, anxious for ratings, lavish the public with only the worst warnings imaginable. Each time I feel a panic attack coming on, I seem to find a newspaper article or magazine blurb talking about suitcase nukes; even my friend Colin and his Newsweek pal Mike told stories about the destruction that could await New York; "I wouldn't be on the five-year plan," one of the government spooks had told them.

And it leaves me here in May, about to turn 35, with a new fiancee and the possibility of a life ahead of us - and I can't even think about the wedding next year, because to be frank, next year sounds like an excruciatingly dangerous place. I'm having a birthday celebration up in Columbia County for Memorial Day, but I feel like the whole thing is some Control Freak Fantasy of mine to get everyone in one place where I know they won't be hurt.

Obviously, this line of reasoning goes nowhere. The only path to happiness is letting go of the weariness of control (what the Buddhists call "somsara") and trying to find solace in the realm of impermanence. But there something about the Empire State Building, which now makes my stomach hurt every time I see it peeking from behind a tree or over the river, that makes me long for something permanent. I don't like having my family in New York City; I don't like having Sean on 35th Street and Michelle on 11th. It seems clear that our country will be sorely tested at some point in the near future, and I don't want my family fucked with.

I want to move Asset Pictures to a place in Brooklyn, accessible by all subways, but off the island. I want my family to look at Manhattan the same way I'd like to: a place to have fun, ingest art and soak in nightlife - but not a place to be during working hours. And I know that's largely impossible, so I feel stuck. Unbelievably, irreparably stuck. It's a terrible analogy to contemplate, but sometimes I feel like we're Jews living in 1935 Berlin, and ghostly voices are calling from the future, "get the fuck out of there!"

Tonight there's another vague yet sweeping warning to the residents of New York that "city landmarks" are targeted for attack. In a way, I'm almost heartened by the specificity of them, because the thing I'm truly worried about is a radiological bomb taking out lower Manhattan and radiating over the boroughs. I have two scenarios, actually: a bomb that is designed to take out the financial district, or one that will take out Midtown and the Empire State Building. I go through the scenarios in my head all the time: is Michelle close enough to be hurt by a downtown bomb? Would a midtown bomb get all of us at Asset and Sean? It's so exhausting that the thoughts themselves have taken on character, so that I no longer even have to be reminded of the specifics, just the vague sense of doom.

In essence, the terrorists have accomplished a victory over me. They've forced me to abandon normal waking thoughts, driven me to the therapist, and shoved milligrams of Celexa down my throat. I'm still functioning, and I'm back to eating normally, but this heightened state of alert, where the sympathetic "fight or flight" hormones rage through me with the regularity of desert prey, sits awfully with my psyche.

Perhaps my greatest fear is that I've always considered myself a lucky product of the late twentieth century; there's simply no other time when I would have survived. If a six-week premature birth didn't get me, the appendicitis, croup or various other childhood afflictions would. There would be no laser surgery for my eyes, no allopurinol for gout, no neurontin for a slipped disc. I am an artist, a writer, and no matter what Hollywood - or Arts & Leisure writers for the New York Times - tries to tell you, artists are not going to be very useful in the apocalypse. I want to believe in a world where the dork has a chance to survive and thrive, where sensitivity and intellect are valued. A world full of terror brings all dorks, including me, back to the pavement-pounding trauma of third grade, and I'm having a very hard time going through that again.

I'll try to end on a positive note: that the future is an ever-changing realm where truly anything can happen, and among the things that can happen is absolutely nothing. All I know is what I read from news sources that have been filtered by corporations and our own government to suit their needs, no matter how subtle. The future is also notoriously tricky for predictions; the truth usually ends up being more interesting. And despite my overweening belief that the next attacks will again be in New York, this is a big fucking country and there are plenty of other places they can go. Besides, destroying part of New York would not only kill thousands of Muslims, but why flatten the only beautiful things in America? I mean, why can't they bomb shit like this:

one more strip mall cleared out of an ancient forest somewhere in Wherever, VA

5/20/02 downtown NYC as viewed

5/20/02

downtown NYC as viewed on the Manhattan Bridge at sunset, 40 mph

5/19/02 Some of my anxiety

5/19/02

Some of my anxiety issues have been blossoming out of control again, despite the therapy and Celexa, and tonight I had just sort of "had it" with the whole thing. It's really quite boring - and worst of all, exhausting - to keep dealing with the same problem for months on end. Perhaps it's the ADD in me, but after about two or three weeks of a problem, I need a new one to keep me interested.

Sean called his knee injury "boring" and I thought exactly the same thing about my back. You just get so sick of hearing the internal dialogue, and yet the pain forces you to confront it all fucking day. That's the analogous experience I'm having with this anxiety, and it doesn't help that I read the news all the time, feeding the beast within. Tessa and I lay on the bed and talked from 11:30 to 1am about all this - and she's had many of the same things in her life, except that her control issues led mainly to anorexia and bulimia. I told her that I dont have any healthy outlets like that.

Either way, we talked about the steps she took in AA, and I tried to see if I could, in any way, shape them to fit my experience. We got through three:

Step one: We admitted we were powerless over X - that our lives had become unmanageable.

Well, that's easy enough. I can't seem to control my anxiety, fears, and obsessions (hereafter known as AFO). And while I think my life is barely manageable, Tessa's definition of a healthy psyche didn't allow for it. So yes, I'm in on the first step.

Step two: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

This one is as hard as it looks, because it forces you to confront the necessity of a spiritual life. And getting one of those (especially as a rabid dork intellectual) is pretty hard to accomplish unless you've aged a bit and seen that all other roads ultimately went nowhere. I've always been perfectly willing to accept that there exists a Power greater than me, but have needed convincing that the Power can restore sanity. After working with Buddhism (in the cursory, dilettante-esque way that I have) I think I've sensed a palpable freedom in their ways of thought, so without getting into the 400K download of heavy philosophical lifting, I'll say that I can imagine a world where a Greater Power can provide relief from pain.

Step three: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

This was always the step that had me convinced that AA was simply a way for Christians to get their wily hooks into more man-meat while they were drinking shots of bourbon, but Tessa has convinced me otherwise. It is an excruciatingly difficult step either way, because very few people raised in our country have the sense of perspective - and flexibility of ego - to accept the mercurial ways of "god." The serenity prayer is probably a much better way to go here, with emphasis on the "grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change" part. Which is inherent in Buddhism, too; true happiness comes from accepting and loving impermanence. And Americans hate impermanence; it's why they invented freezers.

I don't know if any of this works for me or not, but I feel better just talking about it. I even told Tessa some of my obsessive-compulsive tricks, silly little things I do to keep myself from dying, things I'm not quite self-actualized enough to write here. She talked about shining the light on the dark spots and letting them shrivel up and disappear. Perhaps this is why the placebo effect works so well on depressed patients; getting the drug means someone is paying attention.

The Celextant, May 19, 2002

I had pretty awful dreams last night, full of little zaps and mild fits. I largely suspect it's my brain thinking I'm coming off the Celexa, since I've missed 3 out of the last 6 days. I've really got to be more present of mind and TAKE THESE DAMN THINGS or else I'll never know if it's working!