xtcian

1/18/03 Day XXVIII of the

1/18/03

Day XXVIII of the Vast, Gorgeous, Azure Tension of Two Worlds Colliding Road Trip of Rousseau-like Romanticism

Mt. View, CA to Needles, CA

It didn't particularly make sense, but Tessa and I decided that if we spent a month driving to the other side of the country, we had damn well better get our toes in the water. So Mom and Steve took us to a beautiful part of Half Moon Bay, where we took off our shoes, went into the unbelievably frigid Pacific, and made Chopin the Dog fetch a giant piece of lumber into the riptide until he eventually told us to fuck off.

The Pacific felt great, by the way. I think it's something primeval, something all adventurers need to do; sense the tension that is naturally created when two distinct parts of nature meet, and YOU are the liminal. The Atlantic is certainly vast and beautiful, but the Pacific stretches out beyond our imagination there is truly nothing out there until Hawaii, a quarter of a world away.

I lie now in a motel room in the nonsense town of Needles, CA, which is known to me only because Snoopy's brother-in-law Spike lived here in the Peanuts cartoon strip. We made that turn, you know, the one that says you are on your way home. We head east from now on, and even though we have another god-knows-how-long on the road, getting wet in the ocean somehow filled me full of subconscious accomplishment.

1/17/03 Day 27 of the

1/17/03

Day 27 of the Mold Spores Attaching Themselves to the Memories of Ancestors Long Gone Road Trip of Furious Scannin'

St. Helena, CA to Mt. View, CA

A quick (except for the Bay Bridge how do you San Franciscans deal with that shit?) jaunt from Napa and we were at my mom's place, where I am exhausted from zero sleep, but still stayed up long into the night doing what I did at Dad's – scanning archival stuff from the misty (actually musty) past.

I can't speak much due to the siren call of a hotel king size bed, but I did want to post a couple of pictures on here to show that I'm not just saving the ones that make me look like I need a good pantsing and a swirlie.

four generations on my mom's side: my great-great grandfather, great grandfather, grandma and mom in 1934 notice how the defeat kicks in from right to left

Sean and I welcome our new addition Michelle to the dysfunctional unit, June 1972

1/16/03 Day XXVI of the

1/16/03

Day XXVI of the Some Picture Albums are Better Left Uncracked Road Trip of Long-Abused Epiphanies

St. Helena, CA

We spent the evening doing laundry, packing up, making investor packets and rooting through all of my dad's archival pictures for scanning.

Sometime I think the unfathomable dorkiness of my youth is a bit of a convenient whitewash of the complexities of childhood, but then I see a picture like this:

Amy Wellso, Zorkbutt, Leonard Rose and my dad, circa 1979

1/15/03 Day XXV of the

1/15/03

Day XXV of the Millions of Sperm Dying from What We Call Simple Leisure Road Trip of Poetic Juxtaposition

St. Helena, CA

We had a break between two meetings today that allowed us to go to Meadowood for a round of physical activity (I ran 1.75 miles, which is pretty huge considering my utter lack of movement since we went skiing) and then we collapsed into the hot tub. The jacuzzi at Mammoth bleached my Carolina shorts from God's Sky Blue into a weird 1887 gray, so I didn't spend too much time ruining more clothes. Plus, there's something about being Welsh that makes hot tubs a good experience for about five minutes before I start to feel both angry and faint.

We spent the evening at the Witt's house just down the mountain from Dad; they live in a modern architectural dream made of forced earth. They had ordered a bunch of dungeness crabs, and we spent the evening digging food with our hands, something I haven't done since my silly lobster meals back at the Purple House. As I looked out the window to the suddenly-clear night skies, I realized that Tessa and I may be broke in fact, totally in debt – but we were eating crabs and had been soothing in a hot tub, and therefore we must be doing something correctly. Let's just say the irony is never lost on us.

1/14/03 Day 24 of the

1/14/03

Day 24 of the Faint Rumblings of Wanting to Live in the Town You Visit Road Trip of Beseeching Our Elders

San Francisco, CA

I should say last night's rumblings of discontent coming from the other side of the bed (no, not Chopin farting, although that too has been a problem) was assuaged by Tessa and I playing a game of Brax, which is apparently an ancient version of checkers. I lost handily because I didn't read the rules, a deep-set metaphor for pretty much everything I did up to about 1985.

We rose early to truck into San Francisco to meet Tessa's friends Michael and Thilde, apparitions from her Houston life who have set up shop in Fog City, far away from the maniacal family lunacy that seems to be the end equation of (Texas + $$$). Thilde is the survivor of a botched carjacking some years ago, where she was shot point-blank in the chest outside an ice cream parlor. Having started med school, she saved her own life by knowing exactly what to tell the parlor employees (direct pressure, cold towels, which hospital to call) which made me wonder how I would have coped if it had happened outside my own high school ice cream job. Nothing like that ever happened to us; the biggest emergency we had was when Josie Paolucci bled into the Black Walnut and the shift manager thought the flavor was haunted.

From there, we lucked out and caught up with Dave Ball and Farah Brevli, two of the smartest folks we know on this great planet of ours, already out getting coffee after taking their baby Zaid to the pediatrician. Dave and I immediately did what many of us from the Lodge do descend into a deconstruction of the days when we were morons. I was Dave's "big bro" at the fraternity, and I always felt like I let him down a little bit. I could have come to his defense more often, and given more sage advice about the rough waters surrounding several Lodge personalities, but I was so bursting with shit at the time, I could scarcely tie my shoes.

Eric Gribbin apologized this summer for a hoops incident I hardly remembered from 1989, so I passed on the favor to David I said I was sorry for the "Big Bro/Little Bro" hoops tournament in which I remember being a butthole... but he didn't recall any of it. Still, it's good to keep your side of the street clean, even if all the work you're doing is subconscious. I feel amazingly blessed to have all the friends I still have from back in those days, and even though Dave has hesitations that he doesn't have that many, I think both of us realize that time and maturity has cut away much of the underbrush that made our peers seem judgmental in the past. Pretty much all of us remember everything quite fondly.

Anyway, I don't like talking of past friends as such a done deal. I am always looking to the future, when I can gather all of us smart folk, old friends and new, together in some utopian spot where we can take care of each other's kids, embark on lengthy road trips, and churn ice cream with solar power. I am determined to get us all together again, even if our wedding acts as a small reminder of how many fabulous human beings with whom we've broken bread.

But more on that later. After seeing the Ball/Brevli clan, we dashed to a meeting with the Gamble part of Procter and Gamble, a fabulous older man named Launce who we'd approached as an investor. He asked us many questions that I hadn't thought about since the early days of my involvement with independent film, obvious queries into how much we think the movie is worth, how we picked our lawyer, even how Tessa got from studying Latin (or how I got from being a violin major) to making movies. It was a great, albeit exhausting, retrospective of what we're actually doing, something that will serve us well as we meet more of the heavy hitters.

We got stuck in a traffic snarl on the way back to Napa, so we broke out the Scrabble game for the Palm™ 515. The best Tessa could come up with was "ANOINT" and my best was "INSTANT," proving to us that our day's work had left our cognitive processes one biscuit shy of afternoon tea.

1/13/03 Day XXIII of the

1/13/03

Day XXIII of the Surmountable Odds, Brave Faces and Ulterior Desires Road Trip of Connecting Eyebrows

St. Helena, CA

We've had a rough go of it today; Tessa has hit something of a wall with this movie-producing stuff, and I don't blame her. When we dropped her off at the Kinko's in Napa with a pile of investor packets to xerox, she looked so unhappy that I had to turn around and make sure everything was okay. It didn't help that we saw Frida tonight, which got us thinking about the nature of what we want to be doing instead of what we are doing.

Put simply, neither of us like raising money, and in fact, Tessa can be really hurt by it. She's much more at home in a simpler artistic life, like the lone poetess exemplified by our lovely Ann Humphreys down in Chapel Hill, or even our ducks-in-a-row non-fiction friend Colin Beavan in New York. The problem with making independent films is that you spend three weeks making the movie, and four years raising money around it. We're so far away from the creative process right now that it's hard to remember when we were actually exercising that part of the brain. Tessa expressed a desire to get a real job, which, as I am desperate to tell her from experience, opens up its own gaping maw of turgid depression.

Believe me when I say we're actually pretty good at courting the financial end of this movie. Nobody engenders more trust and has more cogent things to say to absolute strangers than Tessa, and more amazingly, she actually means it. I think she would gladly talk to most potential investors even if money wasn't in the picture. And I can always be counted on to deliver a zinging bon mot every ten minutes or so.

But she has reached a point where she doesn't know where she's going to get the energy anymore and we're only halfway through with our trip. Like me, she needs to be creating something right now, and there aren't any outlets. I'd feel the same way, except that I have this very blog, right in front of your eyes, to expunge creative torment. The best I can do beyond that is to help her produce in any way possible.

Before we went to bed, I reminded her of one thing: we are attempting the hardest thing to do in all of art. I would put the writing-directing-producing of a commercially-viable first-time independent film up there with the completion of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Both required an amazing sense of perspective, four years' patience, the occasional lack of belief in what the hell we were doing, and impossibly sore backs. We have to find value in attempting to do something very few people try because it is just too damn hard. I don't think either of us had any choice in the matter; we had to aim that high, and as Tina Modotti said in the movie, to do so even in the face of knowing what we know, is both radical and romantic.

1/12/03 Day XXII of the

1/12/03

Day XXII of the Clanking of the Best Wine in the Best Glasses in the Entire World Road Trip of Digging Past the Phylloxera Bacteria

St. Helena, CA

Well, they don't call it Napa for nothing. After a great brunch, where we gorged ourselves on the brunch menu at Brix, I came back to Dad's to do work but instead slept clear into the late afternoon. I was so disoriented by the experience that I bolted upright in bed yelping "whaddya mean?!?" after Tessa sneezed on the couch.

I got my act together in time to accompany the troops to a lecture at Meadowood concerning the life, times and watercolor angling of Winslow Homer. Sound boring? It wasn't, really but it was a cool study in the life of someone who was gay (as was our lecturer) but nobody (including the lecturer) would actually come out and say it. We got to sit with Daniell, the speaker, and talked for a long time about the state of art in America, and why certain people think San Francisco sucks.

my favorite Homer of the night: "Fog Warning" or "Goddamn Well Better Get Back to My Boat In Time"

We met a few cool people at the party, one of which is the "Gamble" part of "Procter & Gamble." My dad keeps beating him at tennis; it's nice to know he isn't cowed by a couple of billion dollars coming at him with a backhanded slice.