xtcian

3/22/03 Columbia County, NY While 187,500

3/22/03 Columbia County, NY

While 187,500 protestors took to the streets around Washington Square Park today, the other 5 million or so folks flocked outside just to breathe real oxygen and enjoy an amazing spring day. After last night, I felt that in a time of such worldwide anguish, it is entirely acceptable to bathe in moments of happiness when you can get them.

7th Ave and Lincoln in Park Slope, Brooklyn

I say 187,500 because that's the median between 250,000 (the estimated number of demonstrators according to the protest organizers) and 125,000 (the number according to the police). I understand why anti-war demonstrators are prone to exaggerate their numbers a bit, but I don't fully get why the police seem to under-report them, unless it's a small taste of the disgust the cops had for hippies demonstrating outside the '68 Democratic convention in Chicago. Either way, it was a fuckload of people, and it got ugly in the end; demonstrators were sprayed with pepper spray, and the police were sprayed with mace. I'm not sure which is worse. They're probably both bad if you're wearing contacts.

I wanted to be a part of this demonstration, but to be honest, both Tessa and I are feeling like it's the wrong impulse. At this point, when our voices are obviously not going to be heard, it feels best to just hope that our campaign over Baghdad is very successful and very fast. And that we put the pieces of Iraq back together very carefully.

I don't trust Bush or his advisors to do anything that doesn't reek of contempt, xenophobia, and hamfisted, childlike hubris but hopefully we'll get the NGOs and the UN involved and come up with something better than Hussein (which shouldn't be hard, even with our dumb-as-a-brick-of-Gouda Commander in Chief).

Best-case scenario? Okay. We catch a few more upper-level Al-Qaeda terrorists and further dismantle their ability to use our Iraq strike as a recruiting tool. We get some great footage on Al-Jazeera of happy Iraqis cheering American soldiers as they are being "liberated." The smart bombs do their jobs with very minimal civilian casualties (which seems to be happening). Hussein is either captured or killed before he uses any of the big stuff on Israel or our troops. A massive humanitarian effort gets underway that will be as Shock'n'Awe as the bombing. We negotiate a sweeping peace deal with the Palestinians and ensure them their own sovereign country. Then, when we're sure everything is ship-shape, we dismantle our military bases in Saudi Arabia, and get the fuck out of their holy land.

Oh yeah: most importantly, we do a thorough sweep of Iraq and come up with absolutely no weapons of mass destruction; Bush and his team are humiliated on the world stage. Americans begin to think he's a liar. To distract us from this, he tries to enact some draconian conservative agenda (reversing Roe vs. Wade, etc.) to shore up his religious base, but miscalculates dreadfully. Then, one of any roiling scandals (Cheney's Halliburton, Perle's defense contractors, etc.) blows open, and a yet-to-be-named Democrat smokes him in a debate so thoroughly that even hard-core Republicans jump ship. Bush gets shellacked in 2004 and we all wake up from a terrible dream.

Wow, was that the Celexa talking? That felt good!

Fact is, nobody will beat Bush unless they can figure out how to own the national security issue, have a solid plan to rescue the economy, and radiate a modicum of charisma. My buddy Salem says "Democrats can talk about the popular vote until they are blue in the face and it will not change the fact that they are all hanging out in the same overpacked, firecode-violating club where everyone shares the same opinion." He's pretty much right; nobody I know is pro-Bush, but he has an approval rating of 79%.

Capturing the electoral college "sea of red" on election night is a rough thing for a Democrat these days; fact is, people are two things: racist and scared, and I include myself in there too. I don't pretend to have the answers.

Three things make me wonder why I bother caring:

- 45% of Americans think Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11
- Election Day 2002 made me break down and cry in the shower
- spousal abuse rates skyrocket in the hours after the Super Bowl

That, my friends, is America. I'm serious when I say I might do what my Uncle Chuck did when Nixon bombed Cambodia: he looked for property in British Columbia.

Thank god we have this little farm. It's the only emotional respite we have, and I intend to share it with every friend we've got. The picture above is the roaring Roeliff-Jansen Kill, the stream running behind our land ("kill" is Dutch for "creek"). Usually quite shallow, it is now 4-5 feet deep and churning from the rains and the melting snow. While Tessa tried to calm down our crazy shut-in dairy farm neighbors (barely seen in the background), I leaned my head against a post, listened to the rush of the water, and let my worries evaporate.

3/21/03 New York, NY What

3/21/03 New York, NY

What are you supposed to do when your life is so disparate from the experience of others? You watch the news, you see an entire city being blown to shreds, you know that there are families huddled in basements praying for it to stop and yet you are walking around the East Village, where hip boys and leather-clad girls are laughing and flirting. You want to feel helpless and full of rage, but you also understand by now that those will do you no good either.

Two days into the Shock and Awe campaign, you have muffled experiences of both, but nowhere to put them. You can't possibly order the Tandoori Mixed Grill at Haveli's on 2nd Ave, and laugh with old friends, yet you do so anyway.

You think that after watching World Trade Center towers came down, the world would have enough of falling buildings. You think the world would have enough of silly love songs, but in both cases, you look around and see it isn't true.

Baghdad today under missile fire

Ground Zero tonight as the fog rolled in

3/20/03 Brooklyn, NY Stayed up

3/20/03 Brooklyn, NY

Stayed up all night putting the finishing touches on today's Ian R. Williams Salon article (check it out, wontchya?), which was a piece that wasn't as much my cup of tea, but is also a nice clip to show that I can do more than pontificate wildly about Mormons. Although if I had my druthers, everything I'd write would be wild pontifications, half-baked truths, sweeping generalizations and theories that break under the weight of their own horseshit, but that's what the blog is for, right?

There were several protests in New York today, especially one in Times Square, but Tessa and I were holed up in the editing booth, trying to finish our movie. I know all the arguments about the need for demonstration, but this country and its leadership – broke my heart over the last year, and frankly, sometimes I think America is too dumb to be worth saving.

Don't get me wrong; I love my friends, I love American technology, and you can't beat the scenery. I'm sure there was some time, perhaps 1986 or so, when I felt unconditional about being an American but after the last three years? Fucking forget about it. I know that the greatest things in life always come with occasional doses of confidence-shattering ambivalence, but perhaps this country has gotten too big to have a soul. When we were kids, our population was 200 million or so; now we have almost 300 million. Somewhere in there, a pre-Cambrian, simian mob took over; a tipping point was reached that has robbed us of the desire to achieve greatness. This country reminds me of Goya's painting of Saturn eating his children, that dead-eyed, tragic stare of a once-great god knowing only the opiate of ghoulish consumption.

I leave you with a picture I took tonight of the one place I still feel very vulnerable in a time of terrorism and war: the middle of the Manhattan Bridge. I know the Brooklyn Bridge is more symbolic, and more people are on the George Washington, but I always floor it across this mutha.

out the front window, Manhattan Bridge, 45 mph, second day of war

Now stop reading this blog, and go read Dave Ball's recounting of the march in San Francisco. I love that he still has the passion to scream "remember non-violence!" at a mob of protestors swarming a phalanx of cops. He's one of the few dudes left in this country who still mean it, and he's a great writer to boot.

3/19/03 Brooklyn, NY Wow, so

3/19/03 Brooklyn, NY

Wow, so many things swirling in my head at once. First off, since a diary is supposed to give off the flavor of the day's events and perhaps I will be reading this years from now, inshallah – I should mention that we went to war tonight. My fatigue on the subject is such that I can barely talk to anyone about it anymore; I think I've been mired in a Celexa-addled somnambulism. I mean, I've ranted and kvetched and waxed historic and belched forth flames of acid, but it never really made me feel any better, and it always inspires a flood of emails from people telling me to fucking relax.

Tonight at dinner, Rick Gradone told me that Geminis always get fed up when they feel they aren't being listened to; somehow, his astrological acumen is the only celestial viewpoint I can stand. The minute anyone else starts talking about their moon being in Libra with Leo Rising, my eyes glaze over in disgust, but I think Rick's just dreamy. Plus, I've always had this irrational lust for the Tarot, which is arguably just as oochie-goochie-goo as astrology (albeit with better pictures).

Tessa and Rick discuss storyboards at Two Boots in Park Slope

While we were bombing the shit out of some palace in Baghdad, we screened a pretty-damn-close cut of The Pink House with the new edits Jessie and Tessa had accomplished while I finished these Salon articles. And God, does it rock. Just having Rick in the room reminded me that yes, when I wrote that stupid line in 1999, it actually was funny, and may be funny again someday soon.

It's truly stunning how much vicarious pleasure you can get from an audience's response, even long after it becomes deathly boring to you. I remember being in the pit orchestra for "The Sound of Music" for three months of rehearsal ("The Lonely Goatherd" still gives me goiters), but the whole thing came back to life when the audience showed up and started laughing.

Tonight we joined the rest of America in front of the warm, crackling glow of CNN to watch the playback of a war so abhorrent that it beggars description. I'll say this now: please, soldiers, get this shit over with and come back home. And to Providence, Yahweh, Allah, the Buddha and Warren Buffett I ask: please keep my family, friends and faithful readers of this humble prose safe from harm in the coming weeks and months.

3/18/03 Brooklyn, NY Yes, it's

3/18/03 Brooklyn, NY

Yes, it's 5:29am, and I just spent the night writing another article for Salon, although the kicker is this: it might not see the light of day. I pitched a sort of "War and Generation Y" piece last week, and it was accepted, but in the meantime, Bush drop-kicked Iraq in the nuts, giving everything in the news pipeline the half-life of an unrefrigerated raw egg. So I got all the quotes I could, transcribed hours of dialogue, and wove it into a fabric that may or may not provide literary warmth.

Which is okay. One needs to be challenged, and I haven't stayed up all night writing a paper since Philosophy 32 in 1990. It feels the same, the vague sense of light appearing, the citrus wafts of long-flat Coke (actually Red Bull), the realization that you will probably be lacking a few motor neurons tomorrow.

I don't know why, but I'm reminded of this picture:

me and Sean zonked out after one of Mom & Dad's enchilada parties, circa 1974

3/17/03 Brooklyn, NY First, the

3/17/03 Brooklyn, NY

First, the good news: I got my first article in Salon Magazine. Click here to go straight to the story; in order to read the full piece, click on the "one day free pass" ad it's very short. Or just subscribe to Salon Premium, which allows you access to a fantastic daily webzine that is – together with Slate - some of the best writing on the internet. And that was true even before your humble servant got his digs in.

Either way, it's a great clip to have under my belt, even though I had severe misgivings about selling out my Mormon heritage in order to write it. The idea came from a French Toast... excuse me, Freedom Toast dinner we had at the Park Slope Caf two nights ago, when I went to the bathroom and suddenly saw the images of John Walker Lindh and Elizabeth Smart before me. They came from vastly different circumstances, but both ended up part of a "cult" in the eyes of most Americans. I distilled the idea down to its barest essentials, pitched it at noon today, and by 10:30pm, it was on the front page of Salon. The internet is crazy like a banana.

And now, the bad news: we all woke up this morning and George Bush was still our president. It was not, as I'd hoped, an opiate-infused dream caused by the lingering molecules of Jaegermeister shots tucked away in my love handles.

My mom called me tonight while I was playing hoops on Lincoln Street, and told me that Bush had given Saddam 48 hours to blow his popsicle stand, that terrorist retributions were probably to follow, and that we're back in Orange Alert status. My first thought was how nice it has been to boost my dose of Celexa to 40mg a day.

Then I told the guys on the hoops court, and they all reacted with disgust. These guys are not prissy Volvo drivers, nor are they lining up for tickets for Ani DiFranco. They are Brooklyn-bred first-time-dads from blue-collar families, their accents indecipherable, and they are uniformly against this shit. "You might as well draw a big freakin' bools-eye on New Yawk," one of them said, "This guy Bush is a freakin' mo-ron."

Like the guys that work the elevator on 26th Street, like all the cabbies, like the guy that sells nuts on Prince Street, they all think this war is a dangerous load of shit. On CNN tonight, they reported that 66% of this country backs a fuck-the-rest-of-the-world strike on Iraq. I will be willing to bet than very few of them live here in the big freakin' bools-eye.

3/16/03 Brooklyn, NY I wish

3/16/03 Brooklyn, NY

I wish Tessa could have been with me today upstate, but no doubt the weather was just as good in the city all I can say is that it was splendiferous in the glowing Bershires. Determined to get all I could out of my free March 2003 pass to Catamount, I went skiing in naught but a shirt and snowpants, as it was almost 60 degrees on top of the mountain. Combine that with two feet of snow on the ground, and it truly was the best of all possible worlds. I mean, I guess ski purists would complain of a slight slushiness, but fuck it: it's the closest I've come to being on the back of a motorcycle in summer since... you know, the last time I was on the back of a motorcycle. In summer. Which was probably 1982.

you can feel the winter beginning to lose grip

Because of my relentless archivism, I wanted to take some more pictures of our house, two miles away, from the top of the ski lift. I tried one on a "high quality" setting, and another on a "super damned high quality setting." These are carefully cropped from HUGE images, but take a look at the super hi-res pic here and the normal hi-res pic here. I'll be the first to tell you that there is absolutely no difference. Perhaps somebody with digital picture intellect can explain that one to me.

Back at the farm, it was so liberating to be outside that Chopin the dog and I spent the rest of the afternoon frolicking. I mean hard-core frolicking, the silly skippy-doo bouncing around the acres reserved for young puppies chasing tennis balls. When you've had the winter we've had, you frolic as hard as you can before the next freak winter storm comes to dump two feet of April snow on your ass.