March 8, 2003
3/8/03 Chapel Hill, NC Because
Because I've been to the UNC-Duke home game for seventeen years in a row (even during miserable seasons), I packed the car this morning and drove off, the eight hours down I-95 calculated to be my 65th such trip. Like a veteran trucker, I know every crack on the pavement between New York and North Carolina; I even know which bathrooms never have toilet paper, and the only place to get a cherry-dipped cone.
Having conjured up several good magazine article ideas whilst on the ski lift last week, I thought I'd do the same during the zen-like trance that sets in around Dover, Delaware, but I just couldn't help it: I needed to rock. With the Satellite Radio on full steam, I even screamed along to "Big Ol' Jet Airliner" by the Steve Miller band, a song I usually loathe. By Richmond, I tuned to the "Top 20 on 20" station that plays the top 20 songs in endless rotation, and got caught up to speed on the latest offerings from J. Lo and LL Cool J (what a perfect palindromic pair!), Nelly, Nivea and Bowling for Soup. The big surprise is that not all of it is crap. By the time I got to Durham, I was singing along with "Air Force Ones" just like the kids wearing big pants at the mall.
Chapel Hill is warm and comforting even at night. The air down here has already been laced with trace amounts of spring, and I suddenly remembered what March used to feel like before I moved into the Tundra.
On the road, Tessa called me just as the sun was setting, and I told her I wished she could see it with me. So I took a picture. What do you think, honey?
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March 7, 2003
3/7/03 Brooklyn, NY Oh sure,
Oh sure, I had a lot of serious things to say today, but then I happened upon the best three hours of television I've watched since The Prisoner retrospective: yes, kids, your prayers are answered. It's Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel, and it's fucking fantastic. Virginia, I hope Slate asks you to TiVo the hell out of these.
Focused-group tested for yours truly, "Mythbusters" takes popular urban legends and scientifically tries to find out if any of them can be true. Now, my urban legend fetish began long before it was cool and the internet demystified the process by which these things are debunked (which hasn't stopped zillions of 35-year-olds from believing Richard Gere shoved a gerbil up his ass, but whatever). Mythbusters is my idea of The Greatest Lost Weekend Ever. Two guys both a bit Dungeons & Dragonsish, and one of them looking kinda like a jazz communist – live in a warehouse full of arc welders, rocket launchers, acid baths, roller skates and medical supplies.
To test the Mikey and Pop Rocks legend, they bought a hog's stomach, hung it in a skeleton, and injected Coke, Pop Rocks and gastrointestinal fluid into it to see if it would burst (it wouldn't). Then they tried more bicarbonate of soda, Pepsi and more stomach fluid (and it did). They also tied 40 weather balloons to a guy in a lawnchair, tested to see if a lawyer really can smash through a 42nd floor window, and strapped three rockets to a '66 Chevy on a desert salt flat. All the while, exhibiting the kind of cool geeky lack of self-awareness that comes with genuine delight.
You know these dudes. They're the two guys in the back of shop class who accidentally build a ham radio with a shoebox and a piece of quartz. They're the guys who didn't go to their own prom because the Dr. Who marathon was on. They're the guys you most want to be stuck with on a road trip. In short, they're my older brothers Kent and Steve with their own TV show.
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Kent and Steve in 1971. Note tall boy of Diet Rite Cola
March 6, 2003
3/6/03 Brooklyn, NY Alone, the
Alone, the mighty hunter awaits.
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Who, pray tell, will be tonight's prey? He scans the skyline as his forefathers have done since time was invented. Bold, courageous, filled with the mysterious inner knowledge of the world's soul. Who comes this way to vanquish the...
Hey, that's Tessa! (wag wag wag wag wag drool drool drool)
***
Anyway, all of us (including the mighty hunter) were set to go back to work in the city today, but God opened up a can of snow whoop-ass on the Berkshires today, dumping about half a foot on us by noon. Even the Taconic State Parkway closed. So I thought it would be a bright idea to go skiing at Catamount for an hour, right? We have these free passes and all, and nobody would be there.
By the time we got to the top of the mountain, I began to think it wasn't such a hot idea. The visibility was about twenty feet, and the wind was blowing so hard that if you smiled, your mouth would freeze open. And can somebody tell me what's so cool about "fresh powder"? I know there are skiers who get choppered onto the tops of mountains in British Columbia and Chile in order to break fresh powder, but to me, it was a goddamn nightmare. I busted my ass four times on one easy slope alone. You can't turn, you can't stop, and you can't go very fast.
Tessa said it had something to do with the giant layer of ice right under the powder, but whatever. I looked like the "agony of defeat" skier they used to show at the beginning of the Wild World of Sports.
The ride home was icy, harrowing, and no fun, but was saved by the appearance of an incredible sunset, poking out from under the storm, shimmering like the aurora borealis, reminding us that perhaps spring will actually bother coming someday.
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March 5, 2003
3/5/03 Columbia County, NY This was
This was one of those days in the Northeastern Part of America that made you want to read some Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton, find an icy length of rope, and hang yourself over a bridge. It was so dark, cold, wet and awful that the streetlights stayed lit all day. The brown puddles of slush, skimmed with oil as viscous as maple syrup, were everywhere you could walk. It's the kind of day so depressing that you can't even get warm inside your own house.
I suppose it doesn't help that your favorite basketball team lay down and died at Wake Forest; that the president of your country is an intransigent, monkey-faced, bible-thumping nimrod, and that you have septoplasty surgery to look forward to in the coming weeks.
You want a weather forecast, I'll give you a weather forecast!
March 4, 2003
3/4/03 Columbia County, NY Hey kids!
Hey kids! Get ready for another rant!
I'm sorry, but I am going to find the Chief Operating Officer of some long-dead dot-com who invented the term "generating content" and kick his ass. Yeah, yeah: I know that there had to be a word for "all the stuff you read on a website" but surely they could have done better than "content" and SURELY they could have done better than "generating."
Back at my dot-coms - both of them, in fact – we would be sat down in conference rooms and told to "generate content quicker" or "make your content really zip." We were English Majors, Journalism Grads and Thesis Writers listening to this crap, by the way, folks that had spent years trying to find the beauty in the written word. Now, I'm not trying to be all precious about the Art of Writing, and I'm supposed to be thankful we had jobs at all, given our sleep and drinking habits – but the way we were marginalized was almost criminal.
At one dot-com that will remain nameless - suffice to say it is still around and limping along – the editorial team was shoved into one corner of the building, given shitty desktop computers that ran like they had hamsters in them, and paid almost nothing for creating the vibrant words and gorgeous pictures that brought people back to the site. The business folks, however, had zippy wireless laptops, were always jetting off to Australia and Copenhagen to seal deals, and got bonuses that would have allowed many of us to retire in a vat of bourbon.
They were the same age as us, too, which turned the whole business into a John Hughes movie: a subset of Molly Ringwalds and Jon Cryers having to take a bunch of shit from a gaggle of James Spaders in suits. Oh, the management occasionally threw us a bone - "content is KING, folks! we couldn't do it without you!" - but their truest tongue was monetary, and we saw none of the profits. I suppose if you were able to withstand second-class citizenship for six years and finagled some stock, you could have made out nicely - but who could have held that job for that long? We had a world of screenplays, comedy festivals, TV specs, novels and shit to DO, yo!
But "content." It conjures images of us writers "backing up the content truck" and dumping a pile of words onto a site. I used to think that senior officers were intimidated by the creative process, and sought a term that would demystify it to the point of keeping us in line. Now I know they just never really gave a shit, and wanted just enough words on their website to separate users from their wallets. After the Content is King era was over (1997-1999), we were all told that nobody will ever pay to read words on the internet. "Oh and by the way," they went on, "don't you dare write something long enough that requires scrolling. Users hate to scroll."
Well, they were right about paying for words on the web; you'd never do it. But that you got this far means that you scrolled, and this particular content generator lived long enough to prove them wrong about something.
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my masthead picture at one such dot-com
March 3, 2003
3/3/03 Columbia County, NY It's 4
It's 4 degrees outside today, so having an internal dialogue was not only desirable, but necessary no amount of layering, bundling or wicking fabric can hold out against those odds, so I retreated into my boxes to get a bunch of old pictures scanned. This is by no means a quick process, as every photograph drop-kicks ya into another universe: a traffic jam in 1984, a swingset in 1973, a terrible date in 1996. Believe me, the happinesses I feel now - with rich oak frames and devastating colors - are of a much more substantial quality than anything from Chapel Hill, but they are a different tint than the ones we had when we were 21 and full of girl drinks.
I remember one week when Laurie Dhue lent me her car, and I listened to the tape of Ella Fitzgerald singing Gershwin endlessly. I was hopelessly in love with another girl named Tracy, I was taking (and acing) the best classes of my UNC career, I was writing a column for the paper, writing short stories for Jill McCorkle, and attending salons at Jenny Offill's house where I would commiserate with my future wife, Tessa.
I'm so proud of these women: Laurie is doing great things on TV (despite my problems with her network's philosophical bent, she always comes off non-partisan and gorgeous), Jenny is the first of us to publish a novel, and my adoration of Tessa's cirriculum vitae is well-known and well-documented (and she's pretty cute too).
I don't know why today's blog is so self-indulgent, but sometimes you have to follow where your mind takes you. Follow, follow, follow. I'm reminded of the lyrics from "The Fantasticks," and even though it's not December, its cold; and though I'm certainly not mellow, today I felt an endless reflection on a mellow mood:
Deep in December it's nice to remember
Without a hurt, the heart is hollow
Deep in December it's nice to remember
The fire of September that made you mellow...
March 2, 2003
3/2/03 Columbia County, NY The thing
The thing is this: when I write a blog like the one from three days ago, I instantly get a bunch of supportive letters and people thanking me for putting their thoughts into words (which is very flattering). But then, as the week drags on, the other letters trickle in, the ones that tell me to fucking lighten up, that they don't come here to be ranted at, that they know all this shit already. So this one goes out to my buddy Salem at the Jasper Family Steakhouse (where he is no doubt reading this right now), who wanted me to say something soothing about childhood in America. He correctly observed that the Super Soaker - the water gun that shoots about fifty cubic feet of water with a single trigger - could only have been invented in America. Even if it wasn't, only in America could Salem and I have filled the tank full of triple sec, vodka and lime juice for Spring Break and shot kamizakes down people's gullets all week.
Truth is, our childhood games have come up a lot because I found the 25th Anniversary Atari Game Pack for the PlayStation, and I've been hooked on it all week. Asteroids is fabulous, Tempest rocks, even Gravitar has its moments. Space Battle is always a bit nervewracking, and there's something about the horrifying paranoia of Missile Command that has always scared me shitless, right down to the apocalyptic "THE END" sprayed out in nuclear radiation colors when you finally screw up.
But curiously, the game I have played for three straight days, unabating, is Pong. I was introduced to Pong sometime in 1978 by my brother Steve, who had it hooked up to a blackand-white television in his apartment in Cedar Rapids. I wasn't much for sports at age 11, but Pong was something I was instantly good at, and I played with Steve deep into the Iowa winter nights.
A few years later, I was at the forefront of the arcade revolution, spending every last dime at Flipper McCoy's in Norfolk, VA on Galaga, Defender, Gyruss, and my personal favorite Track & Field, where a lifetime of playing trills on the piano rendered me virtually unbeatable.
Then we got a ColecoVision, and so on up to the Playstation. I've played countless games with the most intense you-are-there graphics hundreds of megabytes can render. I've been a gaming aficionado for 25 years now... and yet, all I want to do now is play Pong. There's something so serene about it, so zen and simple. The computer is brings you Pong like it brings you a warm carafe of hot chocolate; just you and it, swiping away at each other with blips and blaps. First one to 15 wins. It's the warm embrace of an old friend.
Speaking of old video games, I was reminded of Frogger today while on the shores of the Hudson. This brutal winter has frozen the Hudson almost all the way down to New York City, but up here near Poughkeepsie the ice has broken up into hauntingly slow-moving floes with severe jagged edges. We just sat there and stared at the gorgeous gloom until it got too cold to think. But I did begin to wonder if I could have walked across the Hudson, jumping from floe to floe like an arctic Frogger. It would have sucked, but I think I could have made it.
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