xtcian

10/12/02 Whilst inside Columbia County's best-kept

10/12/02

Whilst inside Columbia County's best-kept secret the Book Barn, located deep in the forest near our farm – I stumbled upon Columbia County's other best-kept secret: the crossbeam about 6 feet up between the Mystery and American History section. I walked into this crossbeam with such force that my skull resonated throughout the bookstore and made ordinary shoppers gasp with horror. At the time, I was holding two full glasses of water meant for the coolant system of the misbehaving Land Rover, and even though I was almost knocked clean out, I managed to stumble to the car with water intact.

Thus began nine hours of a Top 15 Lifetime Headache, a drowsiness and pain rolling over in waves, the sort of throbbing nightmare that three Advil could scarcely penetrate. Staring a 2-hour drive in the face, I resorted to the old tried-and-true Three Excedrin Plan, which wired me up like a fake Christmas tree all the way down the Taconic State Parkway. Now I sit in bed still in a sort of cerebellic hangover, still buzzing from all the caffeine in the Excedrin, praying it will stop raining in time for hoops tomorrow so I can work this shit out of my system.

The courts we use on the weekends are terrible: right off the Triboro Bridge, it's a sloped, cracked asphalt hoops playground with 9.5 foot rims guaranteed to fuck up your shot (and if that doesn't do it, the rims cruelly bent down about 15 degrees - takes away even the most casual layups). But it is hoops, it is outdoors, and it keeps you from being complacent. God knows I don't get complacent – I've hurled some of my best larnyx-shredding profanities at these courts, much to the embarrassment of my fellow players. Maybe another 10mg of Celexa on the weekends might curb the Poisoned Squirrel Dances slated for each botched basketball shot careening off the most unfriendly rims in the tri-state area.

10/11/02 I had a real

10/11/02

I had a real good blog worked up for tonight, about the nature of complacency and staying interesting as we grow into our 30s, but Tessa suddenly woke up at 4am and corralled me into shopping for beds online. I suppose that could be considered ironic, or at least poetic.

So I'll save that for tomorrow, but for now, I have one last picture of the living room to bore you with, leave you glassy-eyed and drooling, gasping for interest.

I mean, when I do these home improvement projects, you all know I still rock in the free world, right? I'm not some aging boomer in a suburban shithole obsessing about his microcosm du jour! I had four Finlandia and orange juices last week and danced, danced, danced! And yet, I still had the energy and yea, verily, the nads - to fix the living room. Raging against the dying of the light, I am, sir!

the living room before humans (left), and after them (right)

10/10/02 Hey kids, and welcome

10/10/02

Hey kids, and welcome to Ian's Boring Household Project Korner !!! Today we're discussing floors, and how much I hate working on them!!!

Wait, dont leave just yet!

So you walk into our farmhouse, right, and it's this amazing structure from 1815 except that every room was furnished and decorated in 1951 and left that way. Wall to wall early shag rugs in every room, replete with clocks, cherubs, wooden owls and everything else your Gramma had upstairs. I have a profound respect for Virginia Nelson, the previous owner of our farmhouse – she lived to be almost 90, and until her last days, she kept a garden that was the pride of the Berkshires. There's touches of her all over the place, including a small recipe book in one of the drawers (the contents of the house's drawers has not changed in forty years – we bought the place "as is") that says "this book is fifty-two years old!" as if she knew Tessa and I would be reveling in her things years later.

But her major undoing, her Waterloo, was floors. Apparently she along with the rest of America in the 1950s – considered wood floors to be somewhat declassé, and probably drafty to boot. So she hired men to nail-gun pieces of plywood on top of it (thousands of nails; a nail every two inches) and then glue-gunned carpet on top of that. For decades the real floors lay hidden, until Tessa and I came along to free them to their natural state.

I don't know how much of my small, disturbed readership has ever pulled 784 nails out of a floor with a cat's claw hammer, but let me warn you now: you'll be paralyzed for weeks. Today's nightmare concerned the living room, and once the floorboards were up, ancient paint from the years preceding Virginia (before 1948) was on the wood, lazily painted around a long-gone carpet (see pics). Now you have three choices lay down toxic Zip Strip on the floor and risk having kids with fourteen testicles; rent a drum sander and sand sideways with the coarsest grit they sell; or say "fuck this" and watch cable. I chose option two.

Then came the cherry stain (smelly, very smelly) and usually, two or three coats of tung oil. I had done this with three other rooms, but the living room was pissing me off. If you look at the picture, you can kinda tell where there used to be a closet and a load-bearing wall, and how they lay down a bunch of non-matching wood to make up for it. There's also the problem of painted wood, stained wood and bare wood all on the same floor. Bored yet? So was I. I'd pretty much lost patience with the whole forkin' thing.

Then I rallied and drum-sanded only the painted part, spread cherry stain over the whole damn thing (including the stained wood from 1929), and then, with a glorious "fuck it" heard all the way to Connecticut, wiped on HIGH GLOSS POLYURETHANE. I'm no fan of polyurethane I think it's cheating, it's bad for the environment, and made of shit that comes out the back of nuclear submarines. But this stuff is water-based, and dries in HALF an HOUR. I allowed myself to get complacent this time.

From there, the horrifying wallpaper tore off in easy sheets. We painted the room "linen" colored, and tonight, I'll be damned if the place doesn't look half bad!

above and below: the floor unfinished, then finished (from two angles)

10/9/02 Ask yourself this: are

10/9/02

Ask yourself this: are you really going to see Sweet Home Alabama? If not, then you won't mind the spoilers ahead, which probably won't matter since any sentient ape creature could probably surmise what happens at the end of the movie. As we walked into the theater, I said to Tessa, "You know how it ends, right?" and she said, "Of course!" and still we went, sat in our chairs, consumed popcorn, the whole bit. With today's film fare, the act of going to movies is truly a grudging celebration of the process, and not the goal.

Let's take this movie, for instance. The trailer tells you that Reese Witherspoon's character a successful fashion designer - is due to be married in New York to a swanky charmer with a politico mom, but Reese needs to go down to Alabama first to divorce what we call a "UEM" (Unfortunately Early Marriage – a term usually reserved for gay men, but we'll be generous with it here), who happens to be very good-looking, and the two fight with that Romantic Comedy Repartée.

Obviously, two things need to happen: fish-out-of-water wackiness, and a reunion with the old husband. The question is, how do you get there? Back in the pre-equivocation days of the early 90s, you'd make sure that the NYC groom is privately an asshole, bent on marrying a high-society baby machine. Or at the very least, you'd make New York itself an antagonist, full of soulless backstabbing and high fashion jealousy.

But this movie is trying to be "smart" by not giving us a proper bad guy; the NYC fianc is actually very sweet, and her life in the big city is rich with personal and financial success. The only drag is his mother (Candace Bergen) who is so rude and impolitic you wonder how the hell she ever became "mayor of New York City." The hometown, by the rules of old movies, should be sweet and full of barbecue, and god knows it is. But there's also something desolate about the place, something eerie and depressingly familiar, a bit like a Smiths song (or perhaps that's just my own take on my grade school homeland of Cedar Rapids, IA).

The curious thing about having no proper antagonist is that what it makes up for in subtlety, it loses in tension. You don't really care where she ends up, because they both seem basically okay. Not to be a chick movie aficionado, but at the end of "When Harry Met Sally," you really want them to be together, and here, you can take it or leave it.

But there's something more disturbing afoot here. The mayfly-like attention span of American audiences have pretty much eradicated a slow-burning plot, which means that we are forever stuck with romantic comedies that give us zero indication of why our two lovers should be together. In "Sweet Home Alabama" and My Big Fat Greek Wedding (both of which we've seen this week), I had no fucking idea why any of these people should be with each other. In "Greek Wedding," a tiny montage of them in the car is supposed to make up for months of genuine affection; in "Alabama," you know that Reese and her redneck boyfriend should be together because they can't get along. Ask yourself this second question: when was the last time you really wanted two movie lovers to be together?

And yet, both movies are huge hits. I told Tessa that it was probably America's desire to be utterly unchallenged by their entertainment, but it's more: they are both very inward-thinking, don't-stray-too-far-from-home stories about women whose entire lives are consumed by their ability to marry. In the movie world, that's fine, as it's all very filmic - but a generation of young girls watching these films kinda makes me sick. You can't help but think these flicks suggest that having a career is fine, but only if their waking moments are spent dreaming of another blind step down the easy path of numbing domestication.

10/8/02 Dear Old Boss: It

10/8/02

Dear Old Boss:

It has been years since we last spoke to each other, but today I thought of you again, and again, I was reduced to mutterings of rage. We were friends once, you and I, had the same education and lay in similar beds about town. You were a close confidante, and we shared many stories and had an unconscious understanding of sentences left incomplete. When we lived across the country from one another, you offered hope, and promises of making a mark in our profession, even though to do so would be very difficult. I was more famous then, had a following, and I know I must have looked and felt a lot cooler than I actually was.

Someone in 1989 or so once said to me, "I've heard that you are an amazing person, but it wears off quickly." In that instant, I was horrified that anyone would say that to anybody, but I have since grown to appreciate the comment, as it has rescued me from complacency. I fight to live now, and stay interesting, and hope that my love and service makes a positive difference among those who meet me. I could probably say that his comment led me down a road that let me fall in love with an amazing woman.

But still I have terrible foibles: fits of despondency, anxieties over the uncontrollable, stupid bursts of profanity during basketball. And I have never made peace with you.

You brought me on as part of the team when I was at my lowest point; offered money and a chance to work so deep in the business that my head spun with delight on the first day. But almost immediately, you sided with your own bosses against me, offered nothing but admonition for my work, and used me as an easy target to further your own ambition. You told me my Big Project was worthless.

Outside of work, the humiliations added up at each party, each interaction with our higher-ups. I couldn't do anything right. Finally, I stopped coming over, understanding that I was a waste of time to you. Then I was fired in the most unceremonious way possible, scarcely allowed to get my things into a box.

Did it surprise you that I struck out on my own? Did it offend you that I had to make something work, anything? Our last interaction told me everything I needed to know, that you thought I was a ham-handed fool, that I was not to be trusted, that all that time had been wasted.

You probably read this and think the same thoughts you did back then. You probably think this is another over-emotional, uncontrolled lashing-out. You never enjoyed the best parts of me. Your mean-spiritedness and betrayal allowed me to rise to greater heights than I could have possibly imagined. You dont get any of it, you never got me, you never gave an inch, and that's why you'll never get close enough to read this letter.

10/7/02 One of the best

10/7/02

One of the best things to happen to our car in the last year was the addition of an XM Satellite Radio, and not just because it further negates the chances either of us will fall asleep at the wheel. It provides is a real time machine back to the 1980s by playing the actual playlists from that era, and not some cooked-up horseshit "80s night" heard regularly on normal FM radio. The "80s revival" wasn't for those of us who were in high school and actually bought copies of Freeze Frame, it was for kids who were born the year it came out (1981, for those playing at home). Which is why the 80s revival was really only a revival of about 35 songs, including "99 Luftballons," "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," "Hungry Like the Wolf" and "Borderline," most of which I hated the first time.

Nope, the 80s station on the satellite plays all those in-between songs that didn't quite make it across the decade, stuff like Planet P's "Why Me?", the Payola$ "Eyes of a Stranger" and "You Ain't Worth the Salt in My Tears" by Martin Briley. Those other obvious 80s songs ("Take on Me," "Down Under," etc.) have been ruined by repeated bludgeoning, but the lesser ones are the true emotional time machines that can still afford you the djà vu of 10th grade biology homework. "Turn Me Loose" by Loverboy came on today, and I swear I felt like I had a algebra quiz tomorrow.

That song in particular was part of a genre of 80s songs that made me feel as though "growing up" meant "fucking everyone I possible could" and it all seemed very scary. Mike Reno of Loverboy sings "I'm even on my knees, making love to whoever I please, I gotta do it my way or no way at all." Then Foreigner would play "Urgent" and Lou Gramm would sing "I'm not looking for a love that will last – I know what I need, and I need it fast" and I pretty much surmised that I'd better get used to a life full of hard, fast wanton sex, because that's what growing up was all about. When Jackson Browne sang "out on the boul-e-vard, they take it hard" and then Bruce Springsteen talked about having hungry hearts and heading out on the back of a motorcycle, I further imagined that growing up meant having hard, fast, wanton sex under neon lights in the parking lot with a host of emotionally inaccessible characters, but that was okay, because I would be hard, fast and loose and ready to do it my way or no way at all.

Meanwhile, I didn't even touch a girl in four years at my prep school, and it took me almost four more years after that to lose my virginity. More on that some other time.

10/6/02 You start to wonder

10/6/02

You start to wonder if it was like this in the mid-70s, the relentless barrage of terrible news every fucking day back then, it was the daily count of American boys being slaughtered in the Vietnam War, Nixon's latest idiocies, the OPEC embargoes, the gas lines, and economic stagflation. These days it's terrorism, a stock market gone to shit, a non-sensical war in Iraq, droughts, and a job market that has today's college graduates either prolonging their adolescence through grad school, or working the french fry timer at the mall McDonald's.

Every morning last week we had to set the alarm in order to make it to the IFP Market on time, and every morning the news station blared forth more horrors. This is what we heard each day:

Monday: "...officials said two children were killed in the uprising..."
Tuesday: "...was unbelievably bad, much worse than expected..."
Wednesday: "...suffered a long, protracted illness..."
Thursday: "...screams were heard from the lower floors of the apartment..."
Friday: "...and the long-term damage is believed to be irreversible..."

Fortunately, I have a very quick "snooze button" response, and managed to turn that shit off before we could hear what the hell they were talking about. I always forget to turn the radio alarm to the easy listening or country station, two genres guaranteed to bolt my ass out of bed every morning. Bad news just makes you more tired.

I remembering feeling pretty shat-upon back in 1990-91 or so, when we were at war with Iraq the first time, and the job market was terrible. Most of my friends and I totally opted out of the whole goddamn thing we stayed in Chapel Hill and got jobs driving pies, bussing tables, or doing scab temp work at IBM. We spent what little money we had on Jim Beam, started a lot of bands, and continued to marginalize ourselves until 1997 or so, when the diaspora to Real Life (New York, LA, San Fran) occcured.

I wonder how long this generation of kids (although technically, they're the last remnants of our generation) will do the same: decide the world is so fucked up that they might as well stay in the cocoon of the microcosmic college towns and hometowns, make digital movies, play techno at the local joints, and drink long, slow, bourbon & cokes while flirting with the restaurant hotties on a dilapidated porch. I wouldn't blame them a bit.