xtcian

11/2/02 It was around 5

11/2/02

It was around 5 in the morning that my fever broke, something that is always such a primal comfort ancient cave dwellers must have known the same feeling, to roll over in their bearskins while everyone is still asleep, let one eye open, and sigh with the relief that they will indeed live to hunt another day. The only thing more impressive than my ability to get every fucking disease coming down the influenza expressway is my body's ability to heal. I've always been a good healer. I always get over things. The only things I don't get over are emotional issues and I'm throwing all kinds of drugs and therapy at those as well.

Tessa lies beside me right now, struggling to sleep, as she battles the same damned flu I just did. If the incubation period is indeed only 1-4 days for this virus, then she no doubt got it from me on Wednesday, and I no doubt got it from Matthew Kinney, whose water I shared at hoops last Sunday. I really do hope several people including my therapist and the folks at Jessica's Halloween party – don't get this one. I was very careful not to touch anyone, washed my hands religiously, and coughed well outside anyone's personal space. Note to people reading this blog: you may want to get a flu shot this year, because this one sucks.

A nice crowd of people are with us at the farm right now: Shelagh Ratner, Liz Mann, and her friends Laura and Jasmine. Dana and Lindsay came over for a rousing chili dinner and an abortive game of Celebrity, then I was left downstairs sitting by myself for a while. With everyone long asleep, I looked outside and was struck by a lovely, surprising snowstorm. I took the new digital camera outside and got this little gem:

the first snow of the year click on the image for a bigger version

Such a soft, reflective, lonely, beautiful moment, I almost wanted to run in and wake everyone up, especially Tessa. I find it hard to enjoy moments on my own, which is very un-Buddhist I guess, but you don't always have that choice. So I share this tiny moment on a windswept hill at 2am with you, whomever you may be.

11/1/02 Let me not obfuscate

11/1/02

Let me not obfuscate this issue: I'm really, really sick. Tessa led me to bed a few minutes ago while I was shaking from a fever/chills combo that harkens back to the days of youth, when my mom would put me to sleep with a vaporizer and a spoonful of Dr. Barthel's magic cherry cough syrup. That syrup came in a bottle no doubt manufactured in the 1880s, and the label was typewritten and glued with mucilage:

COUGH SYRUP
Dr. Barthel

If I didn't know Dr. Barthel was a strict Mormon, I'd suspect opiates, LSD and "eyes of newt" in there, because nothing came close to the sleep of a hundred virgins offered by this elixir.

Oh how I wish we still had that bottle somewhere. Dr. Barthel, where have you gone? I mean, I know how you died, but... metaphorically?

10/31/02 People who hate Halloween

10/31/02

People who hate Halloween - and I've known a few of them - suck. This is truly one of the greatest holidays Americans have, free of relentless commercialization (only Hershey's and Spencer Gifts at the mall make any money), plum full of pagan symbolism, and virtual carte blanche for every man, woman and child to splatter themselves with green makeup, sprout boobs and sashay around town. I'll go ahead and say it: Christmas is fine, but Halloween is my favorite holiday.

Around 4:30pm in Manhattan, the freaks truly started to come out - guys on unicycles, various goth chicks, and my favorite, the "first to the party" Uncomfortable Girls who have dressed up but haven't gotten drunk yet and feel disgustingly self-conscious. Manhattan doesn't have the same village feel of Chapel Hill (still your best Halloween night out, for my dollar), but the mass lunacy bubbling up from under the subways is downright palpable.

After getting my wig from Ricky's on 23rd St., I got back to Brooklyn in time for the first wave of kids brave enough to punch every buzzer on a 5-floor walk-up. Dutifully, we all traipsed down to see their costumes, which I know is very "gee I hate Mondays" of me, but ever since my brother Steve started making me robot costumes for Halloween, seeing kids dressed up fills me with contentment.

thank god we're irresponsible and had a bunch of Mr. Goodbars lying around, cuz these kids meant business

I needed a prescription at the local pharmacy, so I walked down to 7th Ave., where the whole street had been blocked off so kids could amble wherever they wanted. Which was a good idea, because most of the toddlers dressed as Spiderman couldn't see through the face mesh and kept running into fire hydrants.

By then, the second, meaner wave of trick-or-treaters came by, most of them from other neighborhoods, and a few of them, shall we say, a little too old to be going door-to-door for Bit-o-Honeys. They're the kids who will probably pull an actual "Trick" part of the "Trick or Treat" if you're not careful. Michelle called from Astoria and said she'd actually been egged. I know it sucks to be egged and all, but there's something about the darker parts of Halloween that fills me with contentment as well (rent Meet Me in St. Louis for a good example).

my favorite costume on 7th Ave was a girl dressed as a black Converse High-Top. How cool is she?

Around 10pm, we met everyone at Jessica Arinella's place on the Upper West Side for a perfect, small Halloween gathering where conversations could actually be had. I dressed up as Tessa or at least I meant to, but I got the wrong color hair. And my boobs didn't move. And she's actually pretty. In the end, I pretty much freaked everyone out and made all the guests 3% uncomfortable (apparently I looked like a successful transsexual) so I consider it a job well done.

me with Karmen Helms

My voice is shot from this flu, making me sound a lot like someone choking Harvey Fierstein, so I couldn't even carry on decent conversations. Just sat around looking pretty. I'd show more pictures of all of us, but my digital camera fell off the top of the refrigerator, making the above shot the last picture my digital camera will ever take. It's just as well, really, don't you think?

10/30/02 Yeah, I know this

10/30/02

Yeah, I know this week in the blog looks like the 2nd-year class notes of someone at Columbia Med School, but y'see, I'm trying to get better. We pay so much for health insurance that to not do these things seems downright criminal. Today's big quandary was "why the hell am I getting recurring kidney stones?" which can only be answered by the fine folks at Diagnostic Radiation on 17th St., underneath machines that look like they cost the gross national product of Finland.

My procedure was an "IVP," which goes a little like this: the night before, you have to drink either 2 oz. of castor oil, or 4 oz. of magnesium citrate. The castor oil tastes like whale barf, and the magnesium citrate tastes like Mountain Dew. You be the judge on that one.

Anyway, that pretty much flushes out your system in ways that would be a great gag in any of the early Adam Sandler oeuvre from the mid-90s. Then you can't eat until the next morning, when you lie flat on a table, get injected with dye, and spend an hour getting pictures of your insides taken. I saw the X-rays later, and I couldn't even tell which way was up it all looked like a roiling cumulonimbus cloud churning across Iowa farmland. Which is to say, it was "normal."

Of course, nothing feels normal right now with the 1-2-3 punch of a deviated septum, a possible kidney problem and a big fat flu but we still managed to rally for Mac's play The Sky Over Ninevah, which was a marked improvement over the original reading and featured some genuine talent that wasn't even in our regular Carolina gene pool, especially Gwen Bronson and Ben Scaccia. Not knowing Equity rules, I tried to take a clandestine picture for my records (no flash, no shutter sound) but the director happened to be behind us and gave me what-fer about it. I tellsya, being a relentless archivist can rub some cats the wrong way.

10/29/02 In the year 2000,

10/29/02

In the year 2000, about three months before I moved to New York, I was pushing one of those wheeled garbage bins up my driveway, a steep hill on the Hollywood mountain. The wheels gave way, and the sharp lip of the trash can caught me across the bridge of the nose so hard that I was almost knocked unconscious. Blood spurted out of my face about four feet in every direction, and my stoned roommates could barely get it together to drive me to the hospital. Once in the LA emergency room (God bless you if you've ever been in that circle of hell) they did X-rays and determined that my nose wasn't broken, but my social life was pretty much over for the summer. Still bleeding, miserable, weak and in excruciating pain, I went back to my room that night and fucking cried.

That, fortunately, was my last humiliation in Los Angeles in that era, and I came to New York still self-conscious of the scar, which has now largely faded. It serves as a reminder of everything arbitrarily bad in a bad place with bad luck and bad times. But it wasn't over.

Early this year, I started getting blinding headaches behind my eyes, and by March, I had to squirt Afrin into my brain just to breathe. An MRI showed that I was suffering from a deviated septum, something you usually get the fun way by playing football or snorting cocaine. I got it from Hollywood trash.

By the summer, I could only sleep on one side, and finally, today, I went in to see who New York Magazine called one of the Best Otolaryngologists in the City. Dr. Blitzer took more pictures of the inside of my sinus passages, and came up with this:

The black arrow shows a tiny ridge of cartilage that has been the source of all my misery. When I took the blow from the trashcan, the cartilage buckled and the air has been trying to get around it ever since. I'm scheduling surgery in November so that I can breathe again and finally be physically free of all reminders of those terrible times. I'll be able to smell the snow of December.

Honestly, I don't know how Early Man survived a blow to the face, I mean, it must have happened all the time.

Oh yeah, they only lived to be 27.

10/28/02 My friend Oliver and

10/28/02

My friend Oliver and a few other people who check into this blog wondered where the hell I actually live, since my definition of "here" seems to change every couple of days. And sometimes it's good to write down exactly where you are whilst writing these things; too often you reread an old diary from high school and it drones on about your solipsistic, hormone-addled crushes and half-baked musings on the meaning of existence when all you want to know is "where were you writing that, and what shirt were you wearing?"

So my geography lesson is this: I moved to the East Village in the summer of 2000 and worked at the Woolworth Building (see arrow) downtown. By the time September 11 happened (click here for the same picture on that day), I was basically living with my erstwhile-girlfriend-now-fiance Tessa in the West Village. A week after the attack, her father passed away and we set off on a giant cross-country trek to attend his funeral and try to put our frayed nerves into a beta state.

Of course, Tessa's dad Blakey, ever confounding, secretly left her a wheelbarrow full of Mexican Libertad silver coins behind some suits in a closet. It seemed like a fortune (and if you've ever lifted pure silver, it felt like a fortune, but let's just say that silver is not gold.

At the same time, we began talking about getting a house somewhere cheap up in the country our friends Dana and Lindsay had just bought a great place in Millerton, NY for next to nothing - and for the cost of a 10-foot storage unit in Manhattan, we could be paying a mortgage on an actual house. The minute we got back to New York, we started looking for houses away from the city (and America started bombing Afghanistan; the two seemed quite related). The very first place we saw was an 1820s farmhouse in Columbia County, NY with a basketball court on the second floor of the barn. This place had me at "hello," but Tessa, being a completist, made sure we saw another 25 possibilities. Obviously in love with the Columbia County place, we would find ourselves driving past it even when it wasn't on the way.

Metaphorically, we dumped the wheelbarrow full of Blakey's silver bullion into a downpayment on the farm, and closed in February this year. Keep in mind that Tessa was still living in her West Village digs, and I was still paying rent for the shoebox in the East Village. The same week we closed on the farm, I mentioned that one of my favorite bloggers Gus lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and asked Tessa if she liked that neighborhood. Three weeks later we were living there. Tessa rented out her entire place, I bid a sad adieu to Lars, and we moved half our stuff to Brooklyn, the other half to the farm upstate. Impulsivity is where it's at, man.

Both moves were done at one of the worst times in my life; I was driven by an apocalyptic frenzy that ensured that we lived at least three miles from any major target zone in New York. Although Celexa and therapy have quelled those beasts somewhat, I still think it's the Survivalist Mormon in me that keeps me from thinking too permanently about any one place. I grew up with family members hoarding cans of green beans in secret apocaly-closets where a family could live for a year. It's not necessarily such a bad instinct, but I could do without the day-to-day worst-case scenarios rushing through my head.

One thing is for sure: my paranoia drove us to live in some pretty fucking awesome places. Park Slope, especially where we live (near Grand Army Plaza), is a constant delight. The people are really cool, it feels like an actual neighborhood, and Prospect Park is the best-kept secret in New England.

And Columbia County, 2 hours north, where we spend the weekends and the occasional week, is too cool to imagine. I long for the place like people long for ancient homelands. The sunsets are unfathomably gorgeous, and the fields are English-moor magical. The farmhouse itself keeps surprising me with secret beauty hidden under bad paint and inexcusable wallpaper. And there's a pool table and a basketball court and darts! I feel like going back to my 10-year-old self, alone on a playground, and telling him not to worry.

our street in Brooklyn

Oh yeah, I'm in my room at 2:15am and I'm wearing a Carolina T-shirt. Just so my later self knows.

10/27/02 A much-needed night out

10/27/02

A much-needed night out with members of my phylum tonight; my friend Ami Vitale happened to be in New York from New Delhi, and a small group of compatriots gathered at Von on Bleecker Street to celebrate her making it here in one piece. More amazingly, she isn't even living in New Delhi anymore, having traded plush digs in India for the wilds of Kashmir, where she lives among the embattled people stuck between India and Pakistan, two countries threatening nuclear war over the little province. She moves from hotel to hotel, never sleeping in the same room more than three days in a row, just to keep the Islamist militants off her scent.

And why? To take pictures and document the unbelievable suffering of this people, and it looks like she's one of the few photographers still trying. I've never known anyone from our generation with such talent and such a revulsion to self-advertising, making her the opposite of most so-called "artists" I've been unfortunate enough to meet of late. She truly takes pictures from some other place inside her, something very pure and scrubbed free of any kind of marketing sensibility. I'd imagine it allows her much more intimacy with her subjects, something that comes across in many of her photos (click here and peruse them for yourself, especially the Kashmir set).

me, Lindsay, Ami, Dave Surowiecki, Darren Ching and, of course, Lars Lucier

Ami seemed very relieved by our conversation, in which I convinced her that many if not most – Americans really are capable of media criticism, and we don't believe everything we hear about Middle East from Fox News. She was also heartened to hear of our disgust with George Bush; there's so much anti-Americanism in her neck of the woods, I think she has had trouble remembering how complicated we all are, even back here in our Biggie Fry-sized bloatedness. I was going to ask her more about the Kashmir situation, but after three red wines and fifteen time zones, I figure I'd let her unravel that ball of yarn later in the week.