xtcian

8/2/03 Columbia County, NY (1

8/2/03 Columbia County, NY (1 week until wedding)

We saw the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Jacob's Pillow tonight, arguably the best place to see modern dance in the world outside of the ADF in Durham, North Carolina. To me, modern dance joins sculpture as the two art forms I know least about, but a thorough reading of Cunningham's ethos is fascinating, if not frustrating.

MC went to school with the composer John Cage (infamous for his 4'33" of silence), and both were heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism, and rejected popular notions about what a dance or a piece of music should be. After dicking around with Martha Graham in the 1930s, Cunningham jettisoned the idea that dance should tell a story, or even have a specific emotion attached to it. The dances would start even before the curtain would rise, and there was no nod to a "beginning," "middle," or "end." Like the Buddhists say, you are simply in the moment, and there is no past or future.

John Cage was saying something similar with 4'33", when he brought a pianist onstage and subjected the audience with four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. The ambient noise - the rustling of programs, the occasional sneeze - was the real "piece." Likewise, tonight's performance featured a musician who could not see the dancers and the dancers could not see him. Occasionally, there would be no music for a few minutes, and thus we heard the gulping breaths of dancers, feet hitting the floor, etc. - and that was the "piece." Any time the music seemed to be working in confluence with the dance, you reminded yourself that it was all luck.

My brother Kent does a lot of work like this, taking random sound loops and musical algorithms and putting them together until something incredible happens. He would have liked tonight's music, too - a hodgepodge of keyboard noises, sine waves and the occasional violin scraping.

Yes, but was the performance any fun?

No, it was boring as hell. The music made Tessa and her niece want to claw their faces off, and the motions of the dancers, while beautiful, could occasionally lapse into "I seen them do this already." The whole concert was a test of endurance for both us and the performers. And 75 minutes straight is a long time to sit in that kind of heat. But occasionally you need a total academic experience that pushes you to the limits of your idea tolerance.

That said, I am now craving the sight of some breakdancers spinning on their head while Kurtis Blow plays on a jambox.

8/1/03 Columbia County, NY (8

8/1/03 Columbia County, NY (8 days until wedding)

I just finished reading the initial trilogy of the Griffin & Sabine books - I had intended to do wedding chores tonight, but the minute Tessa handed me these books, I was hooked. Yes, all you sorority girls out there, I realize I am about 12 years late to the party (the first book was released in 1991) but these volumes are even better when they are discovered, like a long-lost secret that had remained dormant under your nose for years.

They aren't so much books as a "visual correspondence," in postcards and letters, between an artist named Griffin in London and a girl named Sabine on a Pacific island. She claims she can see his paintings as he draws them, even though they have never met. They fall wildly in love, and a round-the-world adventure ensues. Pretty soon, you're not exactly sure if either of these two people are real, or if they have both descended into a blissful madness, or what. Even at the trilogy's end, you're left precious few clues about what ultimately befalls them.

But you don't really care. What the book evokes is what my Abnormal Psychology professors called "ludus," the crazy, unconsummated, passionate love that we have all felt at one point or another, usually in our teens and 20s. The letters in G&S were uncanny reflections of my own epistolary relationships from the early 90s, when I would correspond with women I had never met - and they, in turn, would write back screeds of heartfelt passion.

I participated in four or five such relationships over the course of my 20s; one in particular became about as intense as Griffin and Sabine. I couldn't walk down the street without being paralyzed by a need for her, I couldn't eat, my sleep was fitful, and I concocted schemes of elaborate, Byzantine grandeur in order to impress her. My life was consumed by someone I had never met, and the internet, then a nascent technology, made it even worse. Email only gave it a more intense focal point.

Ultimately, as with all these relationships, we would meet, and I would freak out and run off. Not because they were physically unattractive by any means - I think I was just aghast that they actually existed. It didn't matter what they looked like, it's just that they looked like something.

Over and over I repeated this cycle until a few experiences deadened my heart so thoroughly that I retreated into myself, sought no company at all, became desperately cynical, and then concocted a future without any true love. I would just give it up, say I gave it the ol' college try, and figure I was ruined beyond repair. I'd move to New York, get a high-paying job, find girls with big boobs with whom to have random sex, and hope to get some movies made. I was done, really. Calm. It was settled. Then I met Tessa.

As I round into this last week before I get married, I am coming to terms with what constitutes "mature love." What we are told as teenagers, and what none of us want to hear, is that a certain amount of passion must be let go in order to have a lasting relationship. I think the underlying idea is correct, but the terminology is loathsome. What we should tell teens (not that they'd listen, cuz I sure didn't) is that a certain amount of madness must be let go in order to have a lasting relationship.

When we're younger, we fetishize madness, we love how crazy we are, we deliberately put ourselves into situations that further torment us into paroxysms of social insanity. I think this is mostly a way to generate gossip and soothe our narcissistic sunburns, but we also forget the two ancient forces of the universe that govern everything: entropy and enthalpy. The former states that life tends towards chaos, and the latter states that heat tends to dissipate. This is true for romance as it is for celestial bodies. And anyone about to go into a long-term relationship had better fucking get used to enthalpy, because it is the way the world works.

The only way I am able to be with Tessa now is to make friends with enthalpy. Madness is heat, madness is energy, but madness has ruined every relationship on earth. When I was younger, I fought tooth and nail against the idea that any amount of passion being lost was akin to "settling" and furthermore, spiritual death. What adults fail to tell you is that there is something better than having a crush on somebody. There is something better than the mad rush of delirious love you have on that first weekend with a new partner. I never would have believed it, especially given how "ruined" I thought I was, but it is true.

Dylan Thomas can fuck off with raging "against the dying of the light" - that shit, like most bad advice, is only good for yearbook quotes. We are sold a bill of goods in this country, every day, about the nature of love. It is so much better than anyone would have you believe, but the way to get there is a quiet sign leading to a basement with a hidden key.

7/31/03 Columbia County, NY (9

7/31/03 Columbia County, NY (9 days until wedding)

What's that you say? You want large squash and zucchini? Hells, I got zucchini so big it put a gourd to shame, yo. Don't bring your pussy fruits into my pantry, muthascratcher, cuz me 'n' my baby gonna hit you on the head with one of our yellow beasts. Shit, I DARE one of y'all to bring your flowering pumpkin-family (Cucurbitaceae) self-pollinating seed plants around here - we're gonna open up a can of SAUTEED SQUASH on your ass.

7/30/03 Columbia County, NY (10

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

While in New Orleans I probably consumed 20 drinks over the course of two and a half days, something I hadn't done since the New Year's Eve Y2K party we had at my dad's place in Napa. I had stopped drinking almost entirely over the last few years, partly because Tessa doesn't drink at all, and mostly because the physical part of a drunken aftermath just isn't worth it. My buzz in New Orleans, however, was brilliantly attended and lasted two days, but only because I was meticulous during my bliss: each drink/shot was followed by two glasses of water, the occasional Zantac, and a bi-daily dose of aspirin. It sounds terribly high maintenance, but I'll bet if you ask anybody who was there, they won't remember me doing any of that.

I'm also pretty good at slipping the clandestine Lactaid pill during a dairy meal, but that's another tremendously boring story altogether.

Being in such an altered state provided the perfect prelude to Larry Smith's excellent Salon column on Ecstasy that ran today, a well-cobbled-together piece that was one part science, one part anecdotal, just like the drug itself. For the record, my email address (at left) and this site's name has nothing to do with the drug, just my affinity for the word "ecstasy" and the love of my favorite band XTC.

As I've written here before, my first ecstasy trip was actually in New Orleans as well, back in 1995 during a performance art show. Being something of a pussy, I held the ecstasy liquid under my tongue for a long time, so as not to swallow the drug whole. Of course, as any heart patient with nitroglycerine can tell you, this is the fastest way to blitz your brain. After ten minutes of genuine, freakish fear, the waves of happiness began to move into high tide, lapping over my body until I was completely submerged. It remains one of the best nights of my life.

Matthew Klam wrote a wonderful article about E back in 2001, and part of his thesis struck me as thus: everyone needs one ecstasy experience. There is a possibility of an epiphany, a life-altering burst of self-knowledge that can be revealed if you are allowed five or six hours' freedom from the usual self-loathing all of us carry around. My own experience did not give me insight into myself, rather, it allowed me to think of the world as a brotherhood of which I was part. I think it provided the impetus for the Pink House screenplay and allowed me to let myself off the hook for letting everyone down as a Fallen Generational Spokesman. It may just have provided such intense happiness that it lasted for years afterward.

I know that sounds like the usual 1967 treacle that Baby Boomers trotted out about LSD, but ecstasy is, logistically, way less of a roulette wheel than acid and generally points your compass in a magnetically-happy direction. I am way too much of a control freak to recommend doing it more than twice a year (if that) but this last weekend has proved to me one thing: you are never too old to leave your body behind. Despite being chained to my dopt kit full of pharmaceutical crap, it is still possible - and perhaps important - to find a place where you can't feel your eyes. Some people have Jesus, some people have the internet, some people have AA, and some people have ecstasy, but even the best of us need an hour here and there when we can see through a glass, brilliantly, and stop hating ourselves.

7/29/03 Brooklyn, NY (11 days

7/29/03 Brooklyn, NY (11 days before wedding)

I would like to take this little moment of detoxification to thank my buddy Salem for putting together one of the best weekends we've had since filling the Super Soaker guns full of vodka our senior year. Everyone pitched in, of course, and my brother Sean was also heroic in corralling the herd of cats I call my best friends. But nobody enables conversations, paves the streets with fun, paints the hands of waiters with $20 bills and contains the solar-powered fission of energy like Salem.

When I first met him in 1989, my friend Carwile said he might annoy me as soon as we all moved in together. What I soon realized was that I was having the time of my life, and we were both annoying Carwile. Coming from a background of moneyed Charlotte prep school football and more than a few indiscretions of youth, Salem should have been the kind of person to which I was genetically repelled, but instead we found common ground in almost everything. He had suffered at the hands of a social circle (and old friends) at Carolina, and humiliation was an emotion I'd known all too well. Salem talks a mile a minute, he could sell salt water to the Old Man of the Sea, and doesn't mind starting a long story, but if you drift off even for a second you might miss something fabulous.

We lived together twice; the first house became Chapel Hill's greatest party gathering spot due to his massive Klipsch speakers and healthy dose of "Cosmic Thing"; the second house was made famous by the first 80s party ever documented in history (1991) and the fact that he put his head through all the windows in time with the songs.

Salem (with ice cream) and I (with bowling shoes) dance in the afternoon sometime in 1990

After brief stints in restaurants and food-related jobs all over the South, he wound up in Jasper, GA, owning the Jasper Family Steakhouse, arguably the best family dining experience in the Appalachians. He married Elizabeth, a beautiful, strong-willed woman with two awesome kids of her own - and Salem adopted them in a heartbeat. Last year, they gave birth to another daughter, Lillie-Anne, who is the cutest child this side of Parenting Magazine.

And throughout this, he - like me - has tried to create a world that would have satisfied his 9-year-old self. He has an air hockey table, an 8-foot basketball goal for dunking, and the kind of stereo we used to lust after. On the adult end, he has aged scotch and humidors for the occasional puff of the world's best cigars. And we can still go down to New Orleans and have a great time, regardless of age. I think Salem and I just always wanted to have fun and have a big project, unapologetically with both hands outstretched, which is why we'll always get along.

Lillie-Anne befriending the animal kingdom

7/28/03 Jasper, GA (12 days

7/28/03 Jasper, GA (12 days before wedding)

Finally I am able to make coherent thoughts and actually write them down, here in the gorgeous hollows of northwestern Georgia. Bachelor parties, in general, have always confused me. I didn't know if the bachelor was supposed to have sex with somebody, or if strippers were an ironclad requirement, and if your best women friends were allowed to come, etc.

My worst bachelor party experience was probably Sean's first marriage, when his horny ex-brother-in-law hired some Orange County white meat to shake her fake thingies in his face while he became more and more embarrassed. Being the best man at that wedding, I suppose I should have put a stop to all that and done something cooler, but clearly, I was not in charge.

The idea of a bachelor "getting one last one in before being shackled by the ball and chain" has to be one of the more utterly pathetic and depressing traditions of the American psyche. I hardly believe it is possible to have any meaningful sexual contact with someone other than your bride within a few weeks (or hours) of your wedding, and expect it to be a satisfying send-off from the world of crazy singles. Yes, I saw some boobs this weekend, but THANK GOD that has long become more of a National Geographic special for me, rather than the 4 Jack-and-Coke purpose of every evening. Plus, for me, strippers are just about the least sexy creatures in the animal kingdom; I have never been attracted to things I can't have.

The bachelor party has been redefined in this day and age to be an excuse for your best friends to gather somewhere they don't currently live and roll back the atomic clock about ten years. I'm pleased to say that we did so quite effortlessly. While we were at Coop's Place at the bottom of the Quarter in New Orleans, I had a private moment while watching the various seminal attendants interacting with one another, playing pool, doing shots of Jaegermeister, talking shit at 30 words per second - and I was struck by how young we all still were. At a time when I have to deal with so many stupid physical ailments and career stuff and health insurance and the impending possibility of children, we have not substantially changed our social behavior since 1987. All we have now is a little more money.

Both Sean and Michelle have weighed in on the weekend, but I just have to state this here in a semi-public place: along with those two, my friends are truly incredible. When I met these people, all I brought to the table was social rage, paralyzing self-awareness, acne, diamond-edged cynicism and a middling jump shot. They took what I had and melded me into the kind of character that deserves somebody as amazing as Tessa, which is all you could possibly want from a party of people surrounding a bachelor.

7/27/03 New Orleans, LA (13

7/27/03 New Orleans, LA (13 days before wedding)

We will return you to your normally-scheduled blog after I detox a few more hours from my debauch-filled bachelor party. Until then, one more picture for the ladies and lads at home so they know we are still surviving.

amongst the Proteus Krewe artifacts at Antoine's Restaurant