xtcian

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

6/15/02

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

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

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

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

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

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

6/14/02

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

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

6/13/02 Because of a strange

6/13/02

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

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

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

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

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

The Celextant, June 13, 2002

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

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

6/12/02 There was a day

6/12/02

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mom and Tessa gardening with the renovated wheelbarrow

6/11/02 After an abortive attempt

6/11/02

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

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

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

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

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

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

6/10/02 I have all sorts

6/10/02

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

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

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

6/9/02 So much has been

6/9/02

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

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

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

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

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

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