xtcian

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!)