xtcian

7/12/03 Columbia County, NY (28

7/12/03 Columbia County, NY (28 days until wedding)

We got our marriage license today from the Town Clerk, a very nice woman named Ruth who had a delightful sarcastic streak. She told us the story of the guy who sounds the fire horn (the kind you can hear for fifteen miles - we had them in Iowa for the tornadoes). Apparently, he's so enamored of his job that he refuses to stop testing the horn every Saturday even though the firemen all have pagers now. Every time it goes off, Ruth bolts upright, locks the windows and holds onto the plates, just like the Banks family in "Mary Poppins" when the Captain fired his cannon.

"We all got together and asked him to stop," she says, in her upstate farmers accent, "but he only turned it down a notch. He says he has to keep it going in case the town intersection has a problem, but then I said 'if there's a problem with the streetlight and the horn goes off, how is some guy from East Overshoe gonna know what to do?'"

I couldn't answer her question either, but the fictitious town of East Overshoe sounded very exotic.

Speaking of exotic, this picture was not taken this afternoon, as it might seem, but a few minutes ago at 2 in the morning on top of our hill. The moon is brilliantly full tonight, and the camera has a great "night setting" that lets the exposure go for 5-6 seconds. What you get looks like a Van Gogh painting (click either of these pics for bigger).

that's Mars in upper right

I demanded that everyone go to the top of our little hillock, even though they had just seen a play and were dog tired. Even Chopes was dog tired, and he usually looks upon the hill as his own private teacup ride at Disneyland. We were rewarded with a nightcap visit by the lady cows, who gathered round and snorted with pleasure. Something about a moonlit field filled with sleeping cows is unbelievably pastoral and happy-making.

7/11/03 Columbia County, NY (29

7/11/03 Columbia County, NY (29 days until wedding)

I know I spent all day driving through the woods of Massachusetts, but a discussion on one of my email lists and a fascinating afternoon of politics made me wonder about a few things. George Tenet, the director of the CIA was hung out to dry today by taking blame for the "Iraq has been trying to purchase uranium from Niger" part of Bush's State of the Union speech in January, even though any American with a pulse have got to figure there's way more to this than meets the press. Either Tenet is the biggest fuck-up in government, or else he has been told to take a dive by the Powers That Be. Or, more interestingly, he was told to take a dive, and did so, but has some revenge cooked up. God knows the CIA had to be under a shitload of pressure from Cheney's crew to find evidence of Hussein's "Al-Qaeda connections" or some other bit of ephemera, so Tenet may be folding in order to play a longer hand of poker. Both Nixon and Johnson (and JFK, if he'd lived long enough) found out what happens when you blame the CIA for your own screw-ups.

Now, I'm mindful of my friend Bill's consternation of a few days ago, and I'm not trying to be an un-nuanced gadfly in the ointment, but I just have to ask: at what point are rational people allowed to call Bush a liar? I'm not being original here, so allow me some simplicity. If you go to war because you say that a country has weapons of mass destruction, and then you kick the shit out of them, and it turns out they didn't even have a program devoted to WMD, it either means you have presided over a colossal failure of intelligence, or you're a hornswoggler. Conservatives can't have it both ways: either Bush is unfit for office because he's a liar, or he is unfit for office because he's willing to kill thousands of people in a faraway country based on worthless information.

Now he's trying to appeal to the average American's dim-bulbed idea of bad guys vs. good guys by saying that the world is better off without Hussein no matter how we did it. Even Rumsfeld, backpedaling faster than Lance Armstrong about to smash into the Louvre, said that America attacked Iraq NOT because of new information, but because of old information distilled "through the prism" of September 11. Gee, I sure hope that's good enough for the six thousand and fifty eight Iraqi civilians killed so far, as well as the two-hundred and fifteen American families who have lost a son or daughter in the last five months.

If Bush had said that we were going to oust Hussein for humanitarian reasons, I could have swallowed it, no questions asked. But the way he did it - along with his cabal of hawks - should be an insult to every American. He not only lied to you, he expected you not to care when the truth came out. He has no respect for you as a thinking nation, and that kind of cynicism is responsible for every holocaust foisted upon the modern world.

But let me not get too carried away. I just want to know this simple question: if Bush and Co. lied to us about starting a war, why should he remain president? And if he didn't lie, but has disastrously bad security intelligence, why do I still take the Q-train over the Manhattan Bridge every other day?

7/10/03 Columbia County, NY (30

7/10/03 Columbia County, NY (30 days until wedding)

I write to you tonight by candlelight, on the last remaining few ounces of battery from my beloved Powerbook, connected to the internet through a shaky landline towards Albany. A tremendous windstorm swept through Columbia County tonight just as we arrived - a series of three small explosions erupted just to the east of us, and suddenly everything was black.

And I mean everything. There is not one powered object, not one streetlight, in view from our hill, which gives us a vista of 5-6 miles. Nothing but the raging wind blowing through the trees at a full gale; when it stops, the silence is so profound that you hear the high-pitched frequency of yourself living.

Tessa and I fired up an old tiki torch and sat outside for the show. I managed to snap one time-release picture before it got too much for us.

Inside, all is as it was when this place was built sometime during the presidency of James Monroe. We have a cavalcade of people coming here tomorrow: contractors, electricians, wedding consultants, laborers - but when you are left without power, things can suddenly seem so simple.

And so I will load this onto the net and blow out the last candle and sleep the sleep of my exhausted forefathers.

7/9/03 Brooklyn, NY (1 month

7/9/03 Brooklyn, NY (1 month until wedding)

Seeing as we'd get in trouble for using some of the songs that are currently in our movie, Jamie Block and I trekked out to Mix-o-Lydian Studios in rural Western New Jersey to lay down a track we'd wrote, as well as make one of my older songs sound like actual musicians were involved. Doped up on gout medication, I pulled into the studio - which is actually a house nestled in miles of deer-infested acreage - and had flashbacks of the years we spent here with Mom whilst doing the Macmillan songbook recording sessions. I actually had my 26th birthday at the studio, and I think we (depressingly) went to Denny's and she bought me a Two Moons Over My Hammy or something.

Don the Engineer is now sans ponytail, and looks like he's swerving into middle age very gracefully. He still swears with the kind of New Jersey accent that could stop traffic, but his patience and general coolness is unwavering.

Block and I lay waste to some hard drive space

Back at Carolina, Jamie and I had our unique brand of seduction songsmithing down to a science; whenever there was a lull in the evening, one of the girls would notice the guitars, and though we tried to act as if we didn't want to, we'd start singing together, and usually one of us (or both) ended up... you know, having more fun than the subdued circumstances might indicate. A particular favorite was Simon & Garfunkel's "April, Come She Will," which sounded WAY too much like the guy on the stairwell during "Animal House," but I had to admit it was pretty effective.

We tried several times to start a band together, but each of us was always knee-deep in some other project. One of my biggest regrets was not going to New York with Jamie in 1991, when he asked me to be in his original lineup. It would have been a disaster, but a fun disaster nonetheless. I definitely would have hung out with Tessa earlier, and probably tried a lot more drugs. It is nice, however, in a quieter moment, to meet old friends and play together now that we're a little bit more grown up and can actually appreciate the huge projects we're building, eh?

7/8/03 Brooklyn, NY Call off

7/8/03 Brooklyn, NY

Call off the festivities and lock up your anti-inflammatories, because I just had my first attack of the gout in nine years. Yes, I know gout is a disease for Medieval French kings, and it's usually and Old Guy affliction, and it's all very funny (like goiters, the grippe, the bends and shingles) - but if you're in the middle of a gout attack, it kind of sucks.

Just so you don't have to go googling or anything, gout is simply when your body produces too much uric acid and your kidneys can't get rid of all of it. It leads to two things: kidney stones (click here to get a first-person glance at one of those), and gouty arthritic attacks, which means that the uric acid crystallizes in one of your joints, leading to unbearable pain.

I last endured one of these babies in 1993 while we in Nag's Head eating crabs. I thought those days were pretty much over, and in fact, I stupidly stopped taking allopurinol, the miracle medicine that keeps all this from happening. Then, whilst walking around the Home Depot in Albany last night, I experienced a stabbing misery, like stepping into a shard of glass. The pain was like an old friend from simpler days, and I knew what to do immediately: stop walking and start popping Advil like they were Pez.

Unfortunately, today I had to get from New City, NY to Brooklyn without a car, and spent hours hobbling from one train to the next. This looks like a normal train platform:

...but try limping all the way to the end with a searing unpleasantness shooting up your body. Grand Central Station goes from Gorgeous to Unmanageable in seconds.

Fortunately, I can comfort myself that this is sometimes called the Disease of Kings. Also, 18th century philosopher David Hume used gouty toes to exemplify man's cruelty to man. If you're going to have a disease, make it one rife with metaphorical meaning, or why bother, right?

7/7/03 Columbia County, NY A

7/7/03 Columbia County, NY

A fellow Carolina alum named Bill wrote to me today, and I hope he doesn't mind that I will respond to his long, thoughtful letter here on the blog. He had two things to say - first, regarding yesterday's entry, he proffered that artists don't betray their fans, they just move on and follow their muse elsewhere. When you say an artist betrays you, it is way more about you than the artist. While my opinion was simply an emotion - "I feel like [insert '80s artist here] really let me down" - I think Bill is totally right. I didn't have the perspective in 1986 to understand that my favorite bands (who were entering their thirties at the time) were changing focus, while I was still being 18. He's right, also, that there was a cottage industry that sprang up around REM, and "the album where they started sucking."

Bill's second point was that I have essentially done the same thing to him. To paraphrase his letter, most everything I've written here on the blog pales in comparison to the writing I did back the college newspaper, and he wants to know what the hell happened to me, and transitively, my writing.

First, a little backstory to those who weren't there: I wrote a column called "Wednesday's Child" in the school newspaper back in Chapel Hill that was a wilder success than I could have ever imagined. It covered all topics diverse and irrational, allowed me access to the social realms of UNC that I'd thought unapproachable, and got me into the New York Times (and ultimately, into my first book). Somehow, writing a weekly column on a vibrant campus came easily to me, and it gave me the confidence to do this for real.

livin' the Carolina high life with Debi Teitelbaum, Laurie Dhue and Tom Dunphy, spring '89

After I had two books out in rapid succession, in 1994 I nosedived into a deep depression, culminating in a novel that would never see the light of day. Overwritten and suitable only for cannibalizing, I wandered into the late '90s doing the occasional magazine story and then concentrating on the screenplay for The Pink House. I spent three years in Los Angeles that were so bad I have a hard time recollecting it, even now.

Moving to New York in 2000 changed everything in a heartbeat. Not only did I start dating one of the greatest women in the solar system, but also I wrote two short plays that were enthusiastically received by great crowds. It was the first kudos I'd had for my writing in about seven years.

Not long after the World Trade Center attacks, I was thrown into an anxiety-ridden depression that had much to do with unresolved kiddie issues and the usual apocalyptic dread. I fought my way out with three things: therapy, Celexa, and although it was supposed to be just a personal side project, this diary.

If you look back at the early entries from 2001-2002 (I mean, why would you bother, but I'm just saying) they are mostly about the drug, and how it was affecting my psyche. Gradually, I stopped obsessing about Celexa, and just wrote what was happening. Then things got political, they got weird, we went on mammoth trips, I ended up being a Google favorite (still don't know why) and now there are a lot of you coming here every day, for which I am terribly flattered and thankful.

But let's be honest about what a blog really is. It is not a weekly column. When I was writing Wednesday's Child, I purposely steered clear of all politics, kept the mood joyous, and even had a rule that I would discuss no romances of my own - all three of them being favorite topics of the other columnists. I was careful to create the persona I wanted - and while it was about 85% me, I was definitely leaving out the rest of my being, which contained the horror of my parents' breakup, gnawing illness, deep affirmation issues, and what was probably a low-level sexual addiction.

Now, I think I could write a fun column like "WC" again, and in fact, have plans to do so soon. But anyone coming here expecting it to sound like the raucous insights of a senior in college waxing insane about the day he visited Duke will occasionally be disappointed. First off, you can't keep up that energy every day in the blog. I think I've done pretty well, having written in here almost 450 days straight, but you're occasionally going to have to read about my pumpkins.

Second, if "journalism is the first draft of history," then blogs are the first draft of your own emotions. If you're writing daily, you have no perspective on your own feelings. I already wrote where I thought blogs fall in the list of levels of expression, but I'm not even sure they are all that useful to determine a writer's true character.

Bill thought my recent rants about Republicans and the Bush administration were no more original or trenchant than the "talking points" issued to Democrat figureheads before a Sunday talk show. I'm here to tell you, he's exactly right. Part of a blog's incredible healing power - like banging on a piano with both fists - is the way you can find instant release of your fury. Anger is the least subtle of emotions and makes a hash of all nuance, which is why my political diatribes are among the silliest stuff in here. All I can say is this: our government makes me furious, and in the first draft of emotions, the diary will often runneth over with rage.

But mostly, Bill, I want to say this: to borrow your point, it might be you that has changed. So much of what you love comes from the environment where you discovered it, and even if I were being the most observant, powerful, funny motherscratcher in the blogging world, if you're not 19 years old, it's going to sound a little different.

In the last few weeks, I've thought about stopping this blog altogether. At first, I swore to write an entire year, every day, and after I reached that milestone, I continued out of habit (and probably some weird ego shit about the page hits). Perhaps when my brother Steve changes this over to Moveable Type and I get some "comment" buttons, this will get easier, but for now, I feel like I'm shouting in a vacuum - and it probably reads like that as well.

For now, however, I want to thank everyone who keeps coming here, regardless of my sour, damaged moods. And for suffering through long, self-involved entries like this one. And for people like Bill, who obviously care enough about strangers to wonder what has happened to them.

7/6/03 Columbia County, NY I've

7/6/03 Columbia County, NY

I've been in the barn all day painting wainscoting for the upstairs bedrooms, a task that cannot be completed without constant music. After suffering through the SAUGERTIES DODGE DEALERSHIP commercial for the fifteen time, I slammed the radio off and set up my li'l iPod to play tunes for seven hours straight. One of the albums it happened upon was Squeeze's Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti, a now lamentably out-of-print work by some of the last century's greatest songsmiths.

When this album came out, it was the soundtrack of my existence through my freshman year of college. The chords and loopy vocal lines are dazzling, and despite the occasional misstep, it's the kind of album that still thrills even years later. Nothing has ever sounded like this album since; it's like pop music on Neptune. Good luck finding it - it's not even on Amazon.

I bring this up because I read an interview with Squeeze about a year after the album came out, where they bemoaned the "diarrhea-like chord changes" and "meandering bullshit" and set out to make a pop record free from such pretention. Of course, I felt utterly betrayed, having given so much of my unconscious over to this record, and sure enough, the next album was Babylon and On, featuring the hit Hourglass, which most of you would remember if you heard it. "Babylon and On" was a fine record, but it never entered the pantheon of my psyche, and the band soured for me from then on.

The biggest musical betrayal I ever suffered was at the hands of Billy Joel. Now, I realize there are millions of you who have a genetic predisposition to despise every thing this man has ever sung, but there was a time when he was playing with the edges of what pop music could handle. Forget the loungy hits like "Honesty" or "Just the Way You Are" - he was also capable of incredible pathos like "Vienna," piano screamers like "Sleeping With the Television On" and "All for Leyna," and he could out-McCartney the original with "Rosalinda's Eyes" and "Through the Long Night."

After his brilliant homage to Magical Mystery Tour with "The Nylon Curtain" (forget "Pressure" and "Allentown" and listen to the rest of it), I was pretty psyched to see what he'd do next. When I heard the opening strains of "An Innocent Man," I thought I'd bought the wrong album. By the time I suffered through the whole thing, I was going to put a hole in the LP and take it back to the store, demanding my money returned (my brother Steve wouldn't let me do it).

Something happened to Billy Joel, and it wasn't just Christie Brinkley. He stopped giving a shit, and that's when the Muse said "see ya." I think it's next to impossible to get the Muse back once she's left, which is why I always plan on caring. And one more thing I never plan on doing: talk shit about a past era, your past work, that might mean something to somebody. Like Morrissey said,

But don't forget the songs
That made you cry
And the songs that saved your life
Yes, you're older now
And you're a clever swine
But they were the only ones who ever stood by you.