xtcian

6/8/03 Brooklyn, NY Nothing gives

6/8/03 Brooklyn, NY

Nothing gives you a better crash course in Buddhist impermanence than springtime up in Columbia County, NY. The previous owner of our farm was Virginia Nelson, who had lived there since 1948, cultivating some of the most amazing flowers in the valley. But she was heavy into perennials, which make you pay for their eternal steadfastness by only blooming for about a week. The bearded irises (above) are some of the most beautiful plants a tyro like me has ever seen, but they already began to wither away today. I post these pictures just so there is at least one place where they can exist in semi-permanence.

Chopin by the rhododendrons, which are also, sadly, fading away after a fortnight of craziness

6/7/03 Columbia County, NY Not

6/7/03 Columbia County, NY

Not to be a creepy white guy or anything, but I've picked up a small habit over the last few months. I thought it would be cool to have some old team pictures of basketball squads from the years gone by, you know, to hang near the hoop in the barn for the wedding - and it turns out eBay has a few gems tucked away in the attics of America.

click on any image for a bigger version

The great thing about this one is not just the weirdly cute pose, not just the basketball bonnets they're wearing, but that it was taken in goddamn 1911. This was only a few scant years after the game was invented; UNC fielded its first basketball squad that same year and played the likes of the Durham YMCA. Some scribbles on the back of the photo suggest this was taken at a high school in Iowa.

This picture was shot in 1926, so there's a slight chance that one of these girls is actually still alive (albeit 97 or so). The basketball says "L.C. '26," which must have been a women's college with a forward-thinking sports department. Dig the white Chuck Taylors - those shoes were used in the NBA clear until the late 1960s.

As suspected, this is my favorite. This is the 1913 team of either Mentor or Minford high school in Southern Ohio (even though Minford says their first team was in 1923, I think they might be wrong). A nattily-uniformed bunch of dapper young men, it looks like they were fierce on the court - and if you concentrate on the front right two guys, it seems that things were just as hot when the final horn sounded. Ah, the roaring twenties!

6/6/03 Columbia County, NY At

6/6/03 Columbia County, NY

At the beginning of yesterday's graduation ceremony, there was a call for the pledge of allegiance. Like an automaton robot, I shot up like everyone else and even intimated to put my hand over my heart, as I had done every day for a decade in elementary school. Then, as the words started, I realized it was making me sick.

I pledge allegiance to the flag
And to the republic for which it stands...

And my first thought was: if the flag stands for the republic, and the republic is now on the hands of zealous morons who don't share one single belief system with me, then why the hell am I standing?

One nation, under God...

I know they've been trying to take this part out of the pledge, but when I heard "God," all I could see was George Bush's monkey face, jerky half-smiles of lunacy, his Alfred E. Neuman ears, his presence at the ovens of Auschwitz on the cover of the New York Times with that blank look of vapid discomfort, his sanctimonious horseshit gagging me in the back of the throat-

...indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Except if you're a darkie, of course. Before Dennis Miller became irreparably full of crap, he said of anti-abortionists: "they believe the right to life begins when you start agreeing with them," and it couldn't be more true now, for almost everything else.

On cue, the choir at graduation launched into "America the Beautiful," and I, alone among thousands, slumped back into my seat. I don't mean to be precious, but I just can't take it. I don't give a shit about our amber waves of grain anymore, and though the purple mountains' majesty is very beautiful, I am so ashamed of being an American right now, I want to cry. I know it isn't the fruited plain's fault, nor the spacious skies: it's my goddamn fellow Americans who are to blame for this. For their lack of intellectual rigor, for their ability to fall for cheap sloganeering, for their easy slide into nascent racism, and for their utter inability to think for themselves, my loved ones are trapped with this government, and will be for at least nine more years.

In my pretty damned prescient best-case prediction of the Iraq situation before it was fully underway blog entry, I predicted - or hoped for - the following:

"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."

The first sentence has come true. But everything from "Americans begin to think he's a liar..." has not, nor will it. Americans don't fucking care. As long as the Fiddle Faddle gut-buster bucket stays on sale at Wal-Mart, Iraqi boys can get their arms blown off and screw themselves.

I have seen more of this country than anyone else except truckers; I have tacitly loved it since birth. I've fully lived in six different states, all four time zones, and broken bread in each of the "lower forty-eight." My great-grandfather came from Wales and walked to Colorado with "some books and an old violin." My accent is a mix of California orange, Iowa soybean and North Carolina barbeque. I am as American as it gets.

And now I can't even bear to stand up during the pledge of allegiance.

6/5/03 Boston, MA We drove

6/5/03 Boston, MA

We drove up to Boston today to see a family member graduate from a public high school. I mention that it is public because graduations dealing with these sorts of numbers are very different from the small, neurasthenic gatherings we endured in prep school - this event was the Wal-Mart of commencements. I was fascinated to see the usual cast of characters present, from the A-V Girl who doesn't know her own power yet (even though her fellow A-V geeks have been pining after her since 10th grade and won't have the nads to ask her out until they're 27):

...to the lovely-yet-self-conscious blonde who spent the entire ceremony looking for people who might have missed her:

Although the evening was interminably long and featured a not-too-terribly-funny comedian, Tessa and I agreed that the valedictorian was worth the price of admission. He had a curriculum vitae a mile long (that included sports and the debate team), but his actual character was magnanimous and unassuming. After a few minutes of putting the day into perspective, he launched - and I mean launched - into the Bush administration's idiocy, cruelty, lies and overweening hubris, to the cheers of the crowd below. He told us that as long as his generation was around, there was hope that everything could be fixed. I thought he rocked.

If Neil Howe and Bill Strauss had come with us, they would have seen a twisted fruition of their Millennial Generation prophecies - although this kid was deeply anti-government (N&B say that Millennials tend to toe the party line), his optimism and civic duty was truly stunning. This dude would not have survived a day in my generation. He would have been thwarted by ennui and rage, and his valedictorian speech would have been akin to a giant "FUCK OFF."

I thought of my own graduation, a morass of sweaty, miserable 18-year-olds stuck in ill-fitting tuxes down in the sweltering June heat of Norfolk, Virginia. There were only 99 of us, but it seemed like thousands. One detail: every year, the graduating class has a "joke" they pull during commencement; one year, every graduate had a marble, and gave it to the headmaster, who was fumbling to hold them all by the end.

My year, everyone was given a cigar - and everyone gave them to the headmaster until about fifty people had done so, then they started giving them to all the teachers. Being a Williams, and therefore next-to-last in everything, all the teachers had a cigar by the time I got my diploma, so I thought it would be cool if I threw my cigar into the audience, where no doubt someone would catch it.

Instead, a deathly silence fell over the crowd when I threw it, and it fell several rows from the back of the gymnasium. Nobody budged, and I actually heard it drop behind some parent. An uncomfortable silence ensued, and everyone just looked at me like I was a total fool. I walked out of there utterly embarrassed and wondering what had happened; a perfect metaphor for my high school career.

I have never been back.

6/4/03 Columbia County, NY Look,

6/4/03 Columbia County, NY

Look, I'd love to chat and all, but Tessa gave me an iPod as a belated birthday present, and I've been making sweet, sweet love to it all night long. There were dinner napkins and the finest sparkling domestic wines. There were votive candles scented from the rare flowers growing along the flooded Nile. There was corn.

Here's the thing about the iPod: it becomes the living embodiment of the eternal mix tape. It is the fruition of every night I spent up until 4am in 1984 trying to find just the right track off Seven and the Ragged Tiger to win Marcie Montagna's heart. It is the platinum end game for all of those brilliant mix tapes I made - and left - in the tape players of various rental cars at O'Hare Airport. With this baby, road trips are not only do-able, they're must-able.

You just have to live long enough to experience all the cool shit getting invented. My grandma told me about the first time she saw a car in Utah, circa 1919. She thought it was the most beautiful thing she'd even known, instantly seeing the possibilities and developing a lifelong habit of embracing change. Me and my little iPod can only hope to capture an iota of her attitude.

Klea Worlsey, my grandma, circa 1928

6/3/03 Columbia County, NY I'll

6/3/03 Columbia County, NY

I'll say this: at the farm right now is my brother Sean, my nephew Sean, his friend Jesse, and me. Four guys with 21 acres at their disposal. So far, we have:

- tried launching half-court hoops shots from the middle of the barn

- set up tiki torches and ate red meat outside

- farted

- tried to hit the cows with a 3-wood from about 50 yards away (unsuccessful)

- played pool where Sean the Elder had to relinquish the "Sean" name if Sean the Younger beat him

- watched "Reign of Fire" for the 4th time

- farted

- ate Wendy's at 1am after seeing "The Italian Job"

- made waffles with twice too much vegetable oil

- learned side-arm dart-throwing method (wildly inaccurate)

- clogged upstate New York internet bandwidth with Strong Bad's emails

- slept through 8am joist-banging from our housing contractor

- and then, yes, farted

6/2/03 Columbia County, NY Staying

6/2/03 Columbia County, NY

Staying up late one night on eBay, I started rummaging through the ancient postcards section, and landed upon one from 1908 - of our very own town here in Columbia County. I won it, and today I got a chance to scan it into the computer:

Route 23 (then called the Columbia Turnpike) and the old Harlem Valley train run across the middle of the picture

It is sent from here, addressed to an M. Burke on Tompkins Street in Brooklyn, not far from where we also live. The writing on the back says "Love, Uncle Dudley 8/13/08."

After scanning it at 300%, I noticed that our own farm is included in the picture, the last bit on the right. I blew it up and found this:

See that red arrow? That's where I am lying in bed right now, 95 years later.