xtcian

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1/31/05

Believe it or not, but in the 31st week of our pregnancy, we're switching doctors. Not because our old doctor was bad or anything - in fact, he is world-famous at his position - but the thought of going into labor in Park Slope, Brooklyn and trying to get through the worst rush hour traffic in America to 168th Street in Upper Canada, Manhattan was too much to fit into our puny four-dimensional minds.

While at the new doctor's waiting room, I was sitting near this gigantic old woman who erupted into that wet, gargantuan, disgusting Medieval cough that was SURELY laced with typhoid, cholera, yellow fever and The Grippe. It was one of those coughs where you try to hold your breath for a few minutes to let it dissipate; if my pregnant wife weren't so damned hearty, I would have whisked her out of there and sprayed Purell into her lungs.

All of which reminded me of my Favorite Places to Get the Flu. I've lived a little while longer since I made the first list, so I'd like to add a few sites that might do the trick:

1. the sneeze guard at the Elizabeth, NJ Ikea cafeteria
2. the M23 bus pole during morning rush hour along 23rd st
3. our pediatrician's office on Joralemon Street
4. the pen for signing Visa bills at the Yaffa Café on St. Marks Place
5. the copy of New York Newsday on the seat of the 2 train heading out of Manhattan
6. the cab door handle out front of the Chelsea Clearview Cinemas
7. the divot where the cashier tosses you a subway token at the 125th St. A-train station
8. the game basketball at the W. 4th St. courts
9. the "START PRINTING" button on the Rite Aid copy machine on Hudson Avenue
10. the open vats of salsa at La Taqueria
11. the enclosed Room of Plastic Balls at the McDonald's Playland
12. the "going up" button on the elevator at Columbia Presbyterian Hosptial
13. the public phone, platform 2, at the LIRR station on Atlantic Avenue
14. plastic tub of not-individually-wrapped forks, 8th Avenue Deli
and yes, the best is still
15. tonguing drunk sailor at the Manhole during Fleet Week!

Have I missed any?

daily dairy diary diarrhea

1/30/05

Welcome to xtcian 3.0, the third major overhaul in my blog since I first logged on in June 2001. To be honest, I didn't start writing religiously until April 2002, but I get credit for early adopting, right? Actually, no: my brother Steve does. He has been spot-on in some of his technological predictions, and blogging was one of his best. He made a blog for the Pink House movie that I thought we were all going to use, but by the time our lead actor was in the hospital and a typhoon washed away our set, I figured that probably wasn't going to happen.

Steve did get one thing wrong - I think he once said that people will stop using home PCs with any sort of computing power; they will simply be dummy boxes with the main processing unit outside the home. Perhaps he underestimated the video game culture, or the security concerns of having all your secret documents (porn) outside your immediate control. Or maybe I'm misquoting him and he didn't say any of that.

Anyway, you'll notice no real external changes here, but my ability to post and DELETE SPAM has taken a quantum leap forward into the 21st century. Coincidentally, this happened on a weekend when blogs themselves became the topic of conversation (again) in the New York Times and Slate - two very different articles, but both offering predictions of where the medium will go in the next few years.

When people start talking about the Power of the Blog, I get that same uncomfortable feeling I had in the early '90s when I was pretending to speak for Generation X - trying to force any movement to your liking is a one-way ticket to heartbreak and cringe-worthy prognostications. I don't feel like any particular blog will ever have the power of say, Fox News, but the living organism of the "blogosphere" - which will include one nugget of info from 4,000 different blogs - will. For instance, I've written in this diary for a long fucking time, and it's my belief that when all is said and done, I will have provided this entry, this entry and perhaps two future entries as my tiny contribution to the national debate on anything.

Which isn't bad. But I certainly don't believe that my power as a modestly-popular blogger extends any further than that.

Besides, the mercurial vacillations of Americans never cease to prove paradoxical. What if someone came to you in 1990 and said: "there will be a forum called the Internet on all computers by 2004, and every little theory and rant on the Powers That Be will be accessible by millions at the touch of a button." You might be tempted to think, "well, I guess that will be the end of all government shenanigans, and our leaders will be held to a higher standard, and the voice of the people will drown out the agenda of major corporations!"

And yet, the opposite has happened. So while blogs may be some mitochondria of future power, but they could also be just one more way that your voice is ever more meaningless in a cruel, uncaring universe. Here's to my futile stab in that black, gaping existential maw!

Room to Breathe

Steve, here, with the first posting in Ian's upgraded blog.

Notwithstanding my whining comments about Movable Type last week, I did finally manage to migrate Ian's web site to Movable Type 3.14.

Why do you care as a reader? Well, I hope this will boost Ian's morale, by making it easier and more fun to keep this blog!

The new MT will, we hope, reduce the time Ian spends defending against comment spam. There's comment moderation now, and a new version of MT-Blacklist that can do lots more, easier.

At the same time, I made a few other improvements. We're on a much faster server now, with pretty much unlimited disk space. (That'll make my job easier, since I won't have to constantly manage the disk space.) I also switched to a faster, more capable database.

I put a lot of time in on this. I hope it helps Ian stay enthusiastic about blogging, and I hope it helps the readers stay engaged.

Let me know how the new system works for you!

tour my amygdala

1/27/05

The Buddhists say that if you really hate something, you should lean into it and truly understand your feelings. Don't avoid it: revel in it. The only way around is through.

It is with this in mind that I present today's blog. Case in point - I hate brown slush. Sure, a snowstorm is terrific and skiing is awesome and winter has its charm, but the brown, diesel-colored sludge churned onto the road for three months puts me in a state of apoplectic depression.

I have hated it since I was a kid, those frozen mountains of black snow backed into the corners of all the parking lots in Iowa. I want to get a giant hair dryer and melt them all. I despise walking in it, then seeing my own footprints re-frozen day after day. Just thinking about brown sludge can make me stop what I'm doing and force me to think about other nice things, like daisies or blue jays.

So, in an effort to quell this horror, I am offering three examples of prime brown slush right here on the blog. May it be a reminder to myself in gentler times about the beast Earth and its wobbling axis.

8th Avenue bus stop trough slush

puddle slush congealed corner 7th Avenue and Union

car-spackled slush oozing on Berkeley Street

leo-nard bern-stein

1/26/05

Anyone with a bit of media savvy or a passing familiarity with Seymour Hersh's work in The New Yorker will know that he's not some flaming left-wing wacko; in fact, his reporting and bona fides (he uncovered the My Lai massacre 35 years ago and won the Pulitzer) give him a gravitas that no amount of right-wing shit-shoveling can take away.

Which is why his speech now available on the Democracy Now website is particularly harrowing. If you have 20 minutes free and want your fucking socks scared off, by all means go watch the video or sample a bit of the transcript. This man is not screwing around. Here's a bit:

It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. It's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit -- we're spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going to see enormous panic here.

Naturally, the readers of this blog who lean to the right will chime in to say how this is overblown rhetoric, but suppose for a minute Hersh is right. If the last five years have proven anything to us - from the tech crash to 9/11 to anthrax to climate change to power outages to flu vaccines - is that WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH, YOU ARE ALONE IN THIS WORLD. Don't expect a safety net or a superhero to swoop out of the sky and rescue you: if things go south in this country, too fucking bad for you.

As far as I can see, it's a good season to behave like a survivalist; I don't mean hoarding cans of Spaghetti-O's in the larder like my Mormon cousins do, I mean just being aware that you might want to have a few things in place if something terrible happens. If there were a stock market crash in 2005, you can't run down the street flapping your arms screaming that you weren't warned.

But what does that really mean? I've got a kid on the way, and when we aren't paying for our lives through writing and other projects, we rely on the occasional dividends from stocks invested in American companies. We could wildly diversify into international stuff, but will that really save our bacon?

And if the infrastructure goes, how the hell will we get around this city? You need electricity to power the gas pumps; even the Prius runs out of fuel eventually. Try leaving the country, but who would take us? In some daymares, I have Tessa and I hauling the kid around in a Baby Bjorn as we walk over the mountains into Canada like the Von Trapp family escaping the Anschluss.

We're all woefully underprepared even for the most minor emergencies. And why should the neo-cons care? Half of them are too rich to see straight, and the other half believe it's the End Times anyway. You can hope for one of two things: first, that something amazing happens that rescues us from this administration - or second, that we all live long enough to see this government vilified in textbooks as the worst thing ever to happen to the American experiment.

spiced ham

1/25/05

You've never seen the ANGER BLENDER set on PURÉE until you've seen my brother Steve get spam email. I don't think any human being on the planet gets as furious at unwanted advertisement as Steve; he's even got his entire house web connection routed through a "proxy server" so that absolutely no ads show up on any web page emanating from his Airport. And since he provides the wifi service for his whole apartment complex, that means none of 10-12 units around him are seeing any ads.

I used to think he was a bit over-emotional about the whole thing, but I'm starting to come around. I can deal with 10-20 spams a day, but now I have to deal with this:

- at least 200 spam emails a day
- around 400 spam comments in this blog per week
- 3-4 sheets of FAX spam daily from our frickin' FAX MACHINE
- not to mention entire websites being unattainable due to 100K of ads on each goddamn page.

Now, my email address (available through one of Steve's sneaky "php" programs at left) has been the same for eight years, which is a GEOLOGICAL EPOCH in internet time. I picked Earthlink when it started because I liked their moxie, and I was lucky the company ended up being a major player. But it does mean that I'm on eight years of spam lists. Mostly because when I was in my 20s and stupid, I would respond to the "unsubscribe" links in the spam emails. What can I say? I was young.

Now, I don't feel like I should have to switch email addresses just because these assholes have me pegged, but it is starting to wear on me. If I were to travel outside the country for a few weeks without internet access, I'd come home to almost 3000 unwanted emails.

Why not just delete them all with the junk filters? Because, my dear readers, when someone nice like YOU sends me an email, one or two always end up in the JUNK folder by accident, and suddenly I've missed the opportunity to catch up with an old high school friend.

Far more insidious are those bots that spam the comments section here on the blog. I'm pretty vigilant, but if you go back in the archives and click randomly, you might see penis pills, poker hotlines and more drugs than you ever knew existed. It makes me so fucking furious. Furious as... well, almost as furious as Steve.

Just by having an "online life" and contributing to this journal, and keeping my outlying friends close via email, I have to surrender entire hours of my week to spam. There has to be an end game to this. Most of the spam doesn't even have a link; it's just there to be there, like random bits of genetic code without a host.

I read that one-third of the internet's bandwidth is taken up by the distribution of spam. Why can't that 1/3rd go back to being porn, like it was in the good old days?

And as for the Web, I'd like to tell weather.com to officially fuck off. I'd suffered through their slow-ass, advertisement-laden, java-heavy caboose of a site for five years. Just clicking on the weather brought up a separate pop-up window, and at least three non-weather-related flashing ads (all at a 7-second delay). Shit, the SEVERE WEATHER WARNING even had an ad loading while your motor home was being carried off by a twister.

No more. I've discovered Intellicast. I mean, compare weather.com's forecast for Brooklyn here with Intellicast's forecast here. Take back the night!

grandmother of record

1/24/05

Tessa's grandmother Lucille - known to everyone as Nonnie - has been a regular fixture in Tessa's family lore for all 88 of her years. She came from very untrusting German stock in the Hill Country of Texas, making her a bundle of neuroses that is as hilarious as it is endearing. I think Tessa credits Nonnie with a good deal of her sanity, and her plaintive aphorisms are all over Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me.

Sandy, Nonnie and baby Tessa, 1969

One of Nonnie's most famous quotes was delivered mid-rant to Tessa and Jason at some point ten years ago, when she summed up her entire philosophy about the vicissitudes of her fellow man: "well, you know, you don't want to get too mixed up with people..."

We thought that was one of the best things to spring out of her brain, and she and I quote it whenever some insane assholes are threatening to take over our lives. Tessa also told the always-excellent Virginia Heffernan, who managed to put it into a wonderful article she wrote about the passing of Johnny Carson in yesterday's New York Times.

It may have taken almost a century, and Nonnie - stuck at the nursing home in Huntsville, Texas - may not fully grasp it, but Lucille Tessman finally got herself into the New York Times. And that, my friends, is cause for celebration.

Nonnie, Sandy, Tessa in 2003

friends are calling "yoo hoo"

1/23/05

Blizzard of '05
If you grow up in Iowa, you're used to thinking about snowstorms that defied descriptions, you know, snowdrifts that piled up so high that you couldn't even open your front door. Well, for many kids in Brooklyn, this weekend is going to have been that storm. Too bad for them it happened on Saturday and Sunday, because this would have been a very rare DOUBLE SNOW DAY, which is every 4th grader's dream.

I went out before it got too intense, around 2pm Saturday, to get groceries at the Food Co-op. Needless to say, every other person living in Brooklyn had the same idea, and it was a fucking nightmare. Two hours later, the conditions got intolerably cold and windy:

By 7pm, you couldn't see up our old street at all:

And by midnight, the whole neighborhood looked like a quaint, frozen village stuck in an 1880s-era snow dome:

When we woke up Sunday, most people couldn't get out of their stoops, but there sure as hell weren't getting into their cars. This is a neighbor's Prius and another neighbor's VW Bug:

Deciding we'd brave the sub-zero wind chill, Lindsay and I walked over the Prospect Park, where I thought there would be very little activity. Instead, every single family from a mile radius was out there with their kids:

It has to be one of the first reported cases of "sledlock," where lines of thirty kids were waiting their turn to fly down the hill and make a quick right turn to avoid braining themselves on the lightposts. I'll go out on a limb and say this was THE BEST DAY OF THESE KIDS' LIVES judging by the screams of pleasure:

Lindsay used his 6'5" frame to get some good momentum down the hill. He handed the sled to me, and as I neared the bottom, I hit a mogul that threw my cap over my eyes. While I was struggling to see, I hit a HUGE mogul that sent the sled into my mouth, where it lopped out half my front tooth:

ACTUAL SERIOUS CONVERSATION AFTER MY TOOTH-LOSING SLED RUN:

Me: Um, dude? I have to go home.
Lindsay: Why?
(I give a pathetic smile, showing that I now look like I live in a trailer outside Gaffney, South Carolina)
Me: Because of THITH.
Lindsay: Oh no! Did that just happen?
Me: Yeth, is there any blood?
Lindsay: No. Shit. I don't believe it.
Me: I better go home.
Lindsay: Yeah. I mean - um, yeah.
Me: I can't believe it either.
(I turn to leave)
Lindsay: Hey, wait. Do you need me to say something to her? Like tell her that you weren't doing anything reckless or something?
Me: I dunno.
Lindsay: I can tell her we weren't rough-housing.
Me: No. I mean, she already knowth why I came out here.
Lindsay (dejected): Okay. See ya.

Hours later, I realized that Lindsay and I would have had the exact same conversation in 1977. Funny how shock just turns you right back into an 8-year-old. When I told Tessa that story, she couldn't stop laughing for a half an hour.

As You Live It

1/20/05

Oh, it's all so disgusting and sad. That cruel monkey was inaugurated to the tune of at least $41 million of big donor money while so much of the world is in such yawping pain, and nobody even gives a shit. Flurries of emails went around to boycott spending today in protest, but... there we were in the biggest progressive capital of the bluest of blue states, and there were TONS of people shopping at every store in New York City. I thought, well FUCK it and bought a double soy latté with caramel syrup, because if I'm going to be demoralized, I might as well be animated.

I think it's important, if you're keeping a blog for future consumption, that you give a faint whiff of the times we are living through right now. My class in 3rd grade has a time capsule buried somewhere on the grounds of Grant Wood Elementary, and I think there's a copy of Dynamite! magazine, a Fonzie doll, and a 45 of "Afternoon Delight." And the random scribblings of a bunch of 9-year-olds who just learned cursive.

I'll try to be a little more elucidative here. This is what this current era feels like - to me - as it is happening.

- pervading feeling that something horrible is about to happen in America
- total lack of ownership or control over the Powers That Be
- feeling that the Bad Guys are winning
- corporeal numbness that keeps us from doing anything about the above
- delight in having so many entertainment options to sate our collective A.D.D.
- psyched about possible medical breakthroughs
- concerned they won't happen before we get sick with something
- excitement over the possibilities of the internet
- stunned reminiscences over a time twenty years ago when there were no ATMs, VCRs or answering machines
- basic feeling that there might be too many people on the planet
- concern that our generation, born '61-'81, aren't turning into the amazing artists we were supposed to be
- irony, sarcasm and keen sense of the absurd masking our infinite sadness
- belief that we might be totally overprotecting and coddling our newborns and kids
- relief that they won't have OUR childhood, however
- most importantly, the sense that everything is going by us at light speed and we long for a set of Cliff Notes to give us our moorings.

This, obviously, is a woefully incomplete list. I look forward, talented readers, to your additions.

smear on affected area

1/19/05

I've always had a strong fascination with product names, especially those for medications. In fact, I wrote a whole play about it - or more accurately, about the fates of four English majors stuck at a pharmaceutical firm where they have to come up with a new name for a bed-wetting drug in ten minutes or else they get fired.

In writing it, I realized that drug companies follow strict, dopey rules when they name their drugs: among them, the drug has to subconsciously sound like what it treats, it has to have the vague anagram of a solution, and it has to have a every expensive Scrabble letter in it, like a K, X, Y, Z or V.

So I'd like to list my favorite medicine names, because I think a few of these are truly brilliant:

1. Vioxx - Violent treatment against pain, and not one, but TWO X's right in a row. Too bad it makes seniors fall down dead, because this drug is named for ACTION to the EXXTREME, baby! Celebrex or Bextra? Boring. My back spasms cry VIOXX!

2. Ayr (saline nasal spray) - Oh, how simple yet sneaky. Take the most innocuous word in English; indeed, the most innocuous thing in LIFE - air itself - and jack a 21st-century "Y" into it. If you're not breathing Ayr, you're not breathing!

3. Paxil - Not my anti-depressant of choice (I take the more selective Celexa), but combining the Latin word for peace in a little parcel of a pill was a stroke of genius. Honorable mention goes to Zoloft, for lofty reasons.

4. Castor Oil - You have to give castor oil balls for staying castor oil. Nothing sounds worse, nothing has quite the same greasy viscosity combined with feeling like a castaway on your own island of abject misery. And yet, with a name like that, you know it fucking WORKS.

5. Allegra - It's almost a straight-ahead anagram for "allergy," but also combines the Italian music direction "allegro," meaning a spritely, fast tempo. With your sinuses feeling this gay, how could you not gambol in the pansies?

6. Desitin - Destined for your ass, maybe.

7. Rogaine - The subconscious anagrams abound: Are you that rogue who gained all his hair back? How does it feel to regain rows of thick hair? Grow again, Rogaine!

8. Zyprexa - Are you kidding? It has a Z, a Y and an X! This medication for schizophrenia and "acute bipolar mania" has a name as fucked up as its patients, and that's pretty awesome in my book. Too bad Zaxxon was already taken.

Oh, you'd like to know my LEAST favorite medicine names? Well, there are two, really. Two products whose names should have been axed at the design stage. You have to remember that someone heard these names at a board meeting, and said, "Yes. Yes, let's go with that. Brilliant work!" Designs were laid out, plans were unveiled, thousands of crates were shipped, and nobody said anything about:

rhymes with australopithecus

1/18/05

It's been another scorcher here this week - last night at the farm, we sweltered through wind chills of 27 below zero, frigid enough that basic shit stopped working. Sometimes it seems so cold that I'm surprised that our cell phones work, that the microwaves actually get through that air and make it to the antenna towers.

Getting over this throat infection took the wind out of my sails for nearly five days now, making each step a little more laborious, the invisible chain mail jacket of lethargy weighing a few pounds heavier. I'm finding that political issues are really getting to me again: to whit, ABC News reported that 61% of Americans believe the biblical story of creationism as actual truth.

I could go on a rant about this, and in fact had a juicy one planned up, but I'm recovering, and news like this makes me feel so inexorably sad. I seems like it's just a matter of time before all the thugs take over, and the few innocent men and women of science and truth are given swirlies so bad that they drown head-down in the toilet of superstitious bullshit. Weren't we supposed to be working towards a greater understanding of the world around us?

It's times like these, glaring into the the dark maw of Bush's second inauguration, that the concept of Coastopia stops being a clever, sarcastic idea and becomes the only life raft I can hold onto. I need to believe there is a rich, full community out there that takes science seriously. My Mormon uncle tells us that dinosaur bones were put on Earth by God to test our faith - is that what 61% of the country thinks of Java Man and Lucy?

I look out on the skyline of Manhattan and pray that although we live in an Age of Morons, that our city is not. Oh Manhattan, home of anti-folk, gay riots, performance art, the Rose Planetarium and trannie waitresses: please, my darling, tell me, may I not count you among the 61 percent?

at sunset today, 2 degrees Fahrenheit

life explained, insert 25¢

1/17/05

An interesting discussion came up over dinner last night, as we were sitting with Tessa's sister and her family (and, of course, the delightful Kelly W.) - namely, our niece wondered if we would mind switching the table conversation to abortion. Always ready to tear into a ripe sociological subject with the wide eyeballs of a lion ripping into a gazelle, we told her to go for it.

Our niece, whom I'll call "K" and is 20, said that she's been talking to a right-wing friend of hers about abortion, and basically got out-flanked argument-wise. She wanted to be reminded why we are all pro-choice, and to give her some encouragement, because arguing with this guy has been giving her fits.

An hour later, we were all discussing the finer points of our own personal feelings - there are always the pro-choice folks who say "I abhor abortion, but I stop short of telling others what to do" and those who say "thank god for abortion! YAAAY!" Speaking as someone who participated in one roughly sixteen years ago, you can probably guess on which side of the spectrum I landed.

I don't really give a shit about the "when does life begin" and "potential for a human equals a human" discussions and the other Dred Scott Decision bullshit that conservatives like to bandy about, nor am I particularly interested in what religion OR science has to offer. All I know is that when you outlaw abortions, women die. Period. They will kill themselves trying to have one, whether they apply some homemade trick, or go somewhere for a messy infection. And when they go, the fetus goes with them.

Right-wingers have a hard time with this one. That's where I usually stop arguing, because my other argument is a little more ethereal - basically, I feel like pro-lifers are far more interested in keeping women domesticated and telling them to fucking SHUT UP ALREADY than they are in the health of the fetus - but let's discuss that some other time, shall we?

The upshot, stepping back, was this: the Internet™ should have repository for all the arguments about every controversial subject. There should be a constantly-maintained web page - or series of links - to give both sides of the story. Our niece K should be able to go to abortionargument.com and get all the ammo she needs to go after this right winger. She should also be able to research his side too.

Kelly asked me what my current feelings on global warming were, since I'd been reading (or listening to) A Short History of Nearly Everything, and I thought there should be a dual web page for that too. Is it bunk, or are we all going to drown in de-salinated sea water?

No, I don't mean going to the NARAL site or the RNC or the Sierra Club or a place where the agendas are obvious. I mean an outright independent source for all controversial subjects. Isn't that what the Web is supposed to be? That genie whom you give a quarter, and he tells you everything?

time enough for countin'

1/13/05

"Say, Ian, didn't you win $600 off twenty bucks a few weeks ago?

Why, yes. Yes I did.

"Mind telling us what you did with the money?"

Why, no. I always believe that money you get through windfalls like gambling and Bank Errors In Your Favor should be spent on nothing but fun stuff, you know, assuming your rent is paid. In 1993, when Wachovia accidentally gave me $200 (just like the Monopoly card) I bought a leather bomber jacket I'd been coveting forever, even though I was broke. Tessa informed me last year that it is "way too 1980s" and made me give it to Housing Works.

Anyway, here's how that $600 got pumped back into the economy!

$100 to pay for Tessa's pre-natal workout. Yessir, she got to bounce around on her big belly and do weird sit-ups and god knows what kind of grundle exercises to make her rock solid and ready to pump iron on April 2. Get your tickets now!

$100 to my shrink. I got a good hour in which I complained yet again about my childhood, worried that I was going to be in agonizing sleep deprivation when the baby is born, and wondered when this all stopped being about ME ME ME.

$200 for the new Adidas One shoes for Tessa. That's right, that shoe with the computer in it. This was supposed to be my Christmas present to her, but Adidas delayed the release until February, which was nice, because I pre-ordered it and now I can actually pay for it. This shoe is going to make her post-partum life AWESOME because it also TELLS FUNNY JOKES and GIVES YOU BACKRUBS and WRITES POETRY.

$100 to MercyCorps for tsunami relief. Yeah, that wasn't so fun, but when you win $600 on the same day so many people were swept to sea, you have to do something. MercyCorps came well recommended - friends of friends work there - and donating online was easy.

The rest for baby shoes and Carolina crap. When I said that old gambling phrase "baby needs shoes," I wasn't kidding, and carried that money all the way to Chapel Hill where we bought the Nikes for Newborns with an awesome Tar Heel logo on the side. Our kid is going to look SO RAD in these, and it's going to make Lindsay's kid cry 'cuz we're so much cooler.

We also got a Carolina bib, a mini basketball and even cute drool-proof refrigerator magnets. GO HEELS!

verdict: not guilty, yr'honor

1/12/05

Okay, I am going to step up to the plate and say it: I really liked Elizabeth Rohm. For those of you without cable (or an appreciation for the Dick Wolf oeuvre), she played the assistant D.A. Serena Southerlyn on "Law & Order" for the last four years, and thus will be seen ad infinitum on TNT until the Sun turns into a "red giant" star and dwarfs us all.

The internet is a perfect place for shit-talking, and the brave anonymous souls over at Television Without Pity have been heaping opprobrium on her since tonight's episode, where her character came out as a lesbian, and was summarily fired for being a loose cannon. First off, that's a ballsy move by "L&O" to actually fire somebody rather than have them quit or get killed off, and the lesbian thing seemed like a perfect choice.

I was always drawn to Elizabeth - she looks a little bit like my wife, for one, and her mother is close to my stepmom. I thought she was sexy on "Angel," and her stint as Serena added a little confusion to the fire. I do know she was roundly disliked by many of my friends as something of a robotic actor, but I think the female assistant district attorney du jour is always a hard role to pull off without being too cute (Jill Hennessey), a trifle dull (Carey Lowell) or scarily skeletal (Angie Harmon).

Personally, I was charmed by her weird delivery, and in the context of her character's sudden lesbianism, it might be interesting to look back at the past few episodes and see if her blank exterior was actually masking volcanic rage. She didn't seem to have chemistry with Sam Waterston, but in the end, I think that turned out to be a good thing - he's at his worst when he has a cute lapdog to waggle tail the minute he fixes up a nice dinner of righteous indignation.

And so now we're on to Annie Parisse as our new female A.D.A. - does it seem a little sexist that "L&O" eats up little hotties and spits them out after 2-4 years? Why can't another woman besides the venerable Epatha Merkerson chew the scenery for a decade like all the rest of the guys?

stopping by woods

1/11/05

Somewhere in the air of a subway cabin
Or a party hors d'oeuvres or the unheard cough
Of a patron at "Tea and Sympathy," a tiny pathogen
Made its way to me, and lodged in the back of my throat.
And there it sat for a few days before taking action
Finally coming into its own, last night
I saw it for what it was, and thought
I have to get home to my baby.

Two hours north of her, however, the skies opened up
And I knew it was going to be a race between
The twin goals of Nature's biggest and smallest;
Thousands of miles of sleet on one side and
The tiniest microbe I can imagine on the other

On a mountain between us, on tops of two hills
My car hit a patch of ice, and stayed there
With the front wheel spinning, going about one mile
An hour.
Ghosts of past journeys with the same car
Whizzed past, blurs of red in warm seasons,
Barely noticing its future self struggling for just
A few more inches, and each revolution I repeat,
I have to get home to my baby.

My girl is blonde and 35, the daughter of a tyrant
And a queen, and knows how to give relief
With the solidity of one and the milk of the other.
With such a blizzard, you can't see much but the
Faint shimmering of the sky in the South, no doubt
Caused by some obvious white blue eyes.

The snow turned to rain and the rain turned to misery
And a trip usually two hours reserved a block for nine.
Even as book read aloud spoke of the ancestors we needed
250 from year 1800, sixteen thousand from fifteen hundred
And how they all craved each together at precisely the right time
To produce you
And me
And whatever is inside you
It was a number high enough.

dish best served cold

1/10/05

A little under two years ago today, I sat through the most miserable sporting event of my lifetime: my beloved University of North Carolina Tar Heels were shellacked by the University of Maryland to the tune of 40 points. Fortunately, I've been keeping this blog a while, which means I can go look at that night's entry any time I like, which makes our current circumstance all the more sweet.

That season, two years ago, I finally started turning off the TV before games were over. I always considered that dreadful karma, but by 2003, three years into the Matt Doherty coaching debacle, I knew it was robbing me of precious stomach lining.

That night, I posted a picture of Michael Jordan, "to remind us of what once was, and what could be again." Which is proof that if you live long enough you get to find redemption in unlikely circumstances: we pasted Maryland this weekend by 34 points. It would have been 50 points had Roy Williams not called off the dogs and put our "C team" in with six minutes to go.

I consider myself fairly enlightened, and have a pretty good sense of my place in the world. I've studied Buddhism and tried to stick to positive thoughts. My anti-depressants have tended to curb the highs and lows, and I'd say, with my wife, I've even tried developing a working spiritual ethos.

That said, HOW DOES FUCKING PAYBACK TASTE, YOU MARYLAND SHITWADS?!?!?!?

PREPARE FOR MORE DEFEAT, O FOES OF THE ACC! THE TAR HEELS ARE ON THE 2005 REVENGE TOUR AND YOU'RE FUCKING NEXT!!!

just one thing I wanna know

1/9/05

Sorry about another political post, but one of the commenters from Friday said I was against the war in Afghanistan and against criticizing Islamo-fascists in general because I believe terrorism to be largely America's fault anyway. Not that my opinion about this matters much (god knows my vote didn't), but it's actually a little simpler than that.

I need to come clean about my own personal response to 9/11, which is on my mind since Tessa and I lay in bed and recapped those awful months last night. I think I was basically fine for the month of September 2001, still jacked up on the "high" that accompanies a war zone, but as the days grew shorter and colder, living in downtown Manhattan got a lot tougher.

By November, I was having small waves of apocalyptic dread; by Christmas, they were tsunamis. The last time I fought with my brother Sean was around New Year's 2002, when I was filled with rage that anyone could go back to the city and get on with their lives when I was so paralyzed. In January, I stopped eating for two weeks and lost about fifteen pounds. I turned to the internet for solace, figuring that my "research" on terrorists using nukes or biological weapons would edify me, but the more I read, the more I descended into madness.

In February, I checked myself into the Washington Square Institute psych program, and met with two of the worst therapists in the history of psychology. They sat and stared at me, asking no questions, until I couldn't stand it anymore. As I was broke, and it was free, I guess I got what I paid for.

By March, we were editing the Pink House movie and took a few road trips, which put my devastating anxiety on "pause." In April of 2002, I made a pact with myself to do two things: a) illegally start taking some of Tessa's old Celexa pills, and b) keep this blog regularly, which I have done since that day.

But back to the topic at hand. In those early days of my dread, I wanted to blow the Middle East off the face of the fucking map. I felt like they - whoever "they" were - had taken my sanity away, and I wanted them to pay. I hated that I had to live in a world with nuclear weapons that could EVER be used by terrorists, and I told Tessa that no matter what happened with us (we weren't even engaged yet), there was no way I wanted to bring a child into a world this fucked up.

When Bush started bombing Afghanistan, many New Yorkers were ambivalent. Not in the "couldn't care" sense, but in the "someone has to pay for this but we can't take any more death" sense. We knew the blowback, if any, had a really good chance of hitting us again, and we were exhausted, still ravaged by the remains coming up from the steaming ground by Battery Park. My anti-war stance was, in the beginning, fueled by self-protection in a target zone.

Even now, more than three years later, Afghanistan is still a shithole, warlords rule any lands outside of Kabul, the Taliban is regrouping, Mullah Omar and OBL are still at large, and Afghanistan's biggest export is opium. Nice.

Let's not even get into the Iraq mess. We can't see how colossal a fuck-up it is, because we're living in it, like ants roaming the Great Meteor Crater in Arizona. Maybe some of you conservatives are cool with living in the Dark Ages, but let it be known that a few of us tried to say something.

Eventually, what fueled my hopelessness was the realization there was NO WAY to fully stamp out this kind of terrorism with force. The only way to ensure my family's survival was to TAKE AWAY the things that made this part of the world furious with us in the first place. America had to stop behaving badly; that's not some gooey flower-child mantra, it's the truth.

Deep, deep inside themselves, I think every conservative has a healthy dose of self-loathing, because they know America to have been very, very bad to a lot of the world. They know all the shit we've pulled, all the governments we've manipulated, all the dioxin we've dumped in the ocean, and they sublimate this horror with heavy doses of furious denial, and a two-decade assault on liberals. No wonder they're more interesting on cable TV, these guys are as conflicted as Shakespearian antagonists.

Okay. Yes, yes, there are a few intractable bad guys in the Middle East, people hell-bent on killing as many Americans as they can, and they need to be taken out. But there aren't very many of them.

That's the lie I fell for. The lie of "the enemy" took away almost a year of my life. You conservatives are so fucking sure of yourselves, so convinced you're right about "how the world really works" and how us liberals can't accept the threats we now face, and how we blame America first and sympathize with terrorists.

Honestly, I can't fathom your hubris - it takes a boggling amount of self-delusion to think you can predict our future. I'm a pacifist, as faggy as it sounds. I don't like killing humans, and I'm humble enough to accept that I can't know the future. Wars like Afghanistan and Iraq are fought in a way to force the future into our liking, but it never works. Thousands are dying on BOTH sides while you snicker with derision at us clueless lefties, but seriously, I've lived in your world for a while now, and I'd like to know what's so fucking goddamn funny about peace, love and understanding.

outta sight, outta mind

1/6/05

An interesting discussion erupted from yesterday's post, and yet again, someone mentioned how great it was that "America came together" following the attacks of September 11. I don't mean to belittle this feeling, because I was there (or quite close), and it felt like the entire world came together for those incredibly surreal days following the event.

But let's be honest, shall we? On the actual day of September 11 in New York City, the intensity of caring dissipated the farther north you walked; in Chelsea, I remember people still laughing about other topics and actually flirting. It wasn't until the media started their week-long coverage that everyone in Manhattan suddenly got the enormity of it. Could you entirely blame them? After all, it was something of a binary event: you either knew ten people that died, or else you didn't even know ANYBODY who knew ANYBODY that died.

And I have to say, it is true that the rest of the country engaged in a civil lovefest unseen in American history before or since. I was in Texas eight days after the event, and when I showed my driver's license to a shopkeeper, she looked at me in a stunned silence with tears in her eyes, asking me if I was okay. We were objects of talismanic affection for people who had never even been to the City.

But anybody who thinks this moment of national unity was long-lived is fooling themselves. I took another trip about six weeks after 9/11, and by then, the AM airwaves were already burning up with incandescent rage, aching to bomb the holy motherfucking shit out of some Arabs.

For our part, New Yorkers were not that interested in war, not even with Afghanistan. We'd smelled the ashes of 3,000 people, and we were sickened by the whole concept of any more death. I saw the following graffiti in several neighborhoods: "our tears of grief are not cries for war." That may seem fruity to some of you red-staters, but it was the beginning of the country's divorce from New York (and reality, but that's another rant).

Soon thereafter, the government decided to tell New Yorkers to fuck off, and gave friggin' WYOMING more money to defend themselves. If it weren't for our stunning home-based terror system - built with scarcely no help from Washington - I wouldn't even take the subway. As it is, I feel safer than ever, but only because we came to the realization that we are basically going it alone.

Looking back on the episode from the vantage point of three and a half years, I would conservatively suggest that our "national unity" lasted about four weeks, give or take a few days. I wished it had been longer, but our fear was instantly hijacked. I want to remember what that taste of togetherness was like, but now, whenever I hear anybody wax nostalgia about America coming together, my first thought is "yeah, that was a wacky month, wasn't it?"

Michelle and I pass out salads to victims' families at the Armory, 9/12/01

turf and surf platter: $9

1/5/05

Working up a good political rant has been hard for me since the election; the American Coastopia brouheehee sated my desire for immediate discourse, and of course, I've been on a self-imposed media blackout so as not to hear Bush's voice even for a nanosecond. But America's reaction to the tsunamis has, in my humble opinion, been utterly shameful.

The second those waves hit Southeast Asia, we should have had a disaster-relief program ready to go, funded by at least 500 million dollars, on the level of a sped-up Manhattan Project. If we can put people on the moon (35 years ago), we could have some massive humanitarian project that kicks into gear in the case of mass casualties, like the hundreds of thousands of souls lost two Sundays ago. I don't care whether they are Sumatran, Norwegian or American, that shit should be ready to rock.

Why us, you ask? Because we're the richest motherfucking country in the world, gobbling up 26% of the world's resources with only 4% of the world's population, that's why. We fuck the world every day, so when Nature fucks back, we should call for the ball. Any other response is abject racism, tribalism and greed of the most repugnant variety.

But what did we do? Barely anything, initially, and when we were criticized, we dished out a comparatively paltry $350 million. Australia on the other hand, whose Gross National Product IS A THIRD LESS THAN OURS per capita, is already pledging $810 million. Yeah, sure, Australia was nearer to the tsunami than we were, but we're all human fucking beings, aren't we?

More sickening was Colin Powell, who thought the U.S. response would give us an image boost in predominantly Muslim countries. Only the United States could stage a P.R. move on the drowned backs of 170,000 floating Asians. It's enough to make you want to gargle Listerine for three hours just to get the taste out of your mouth.

Bush, for his measure, has donated $10,000 - which seems gracious only because we can't contemplate his personal wealth: $26 million, and an eventual inheritance ten times that. Bush could find $10K between the naugahyde cushions of his La-Z-Boy if he had the maid look for it. If that's his definition of personal sacrifice for the global good, then by all means, I encourage all of you to send .0004 of your income to tsunami relief as well. For most of you, that's about nine bucks. Get cracking!

oh, tannenbaum

1/4/05

This is that magical day in Park Slope when everyone drags their dry-ass brittle Christmas trees into the street and leaves them there for the garbage guys. First off, can anything be more depressing? And secondly, I wonder how much sap those guys get on their gloves, because all those trees are covered with it (oh, and dog urine).

This is the time in New York City that makes people move away. The holiday lights have faded, the Upliftin' Christian radio stations have stopped playing "What Child is This?" and there's nothing left but the prospect of freezing rain and 4:30 sunsets. I fully understand why restless seniors say "fuck this" and buy an Airstream to stick at the Roarin'Hollow RV Park in Pensacola, Florida.

My least favorite part of winter? Brown, diesel-colored snow. I look upon dirty snow the way Sisyphus looked upon the giant rock as it slid past him down the hill for the 44 billionth time. For me, dirty snow reminds me of the parking lot at the Hy-Vee supermarket in Cedar Rapids, IA circa 1979 - I burned my pinkie with my brother Steve's soldering iron, and it hurt so bad that I had to hold my hand in the brown slush just to dull the sensation.

Frankly, I don't know how people live in places like Duluth, Cleveland or Detroit. I'll suffer through these winters because I'm 15 minutes from the Museum of Modern Art and a Broadway play, but how does the rest of northern America do it? Perhaps I am kept warm by my abject snobbery.

So I'll let my mind wander where it is still nice and balmy: down in rural Georgia, yards from my buddy Salem, is the Woodbridge Inn, owned by Hans Reufort. Hans' father was an East German soldier who threw his gun down and ran for the Berlin Wall, dodging bullets all the way. He made it over, and settled with his family in Jasper. Now Hans is a very eccentric, wonderful fellow who is NOW A FINALIST to be the NEXT FOOD NETWORK STAR.

I've eaten there: the lamb is unthinkably good. Now the inimitable Hans has a chance to be on the Food Network, but it can only happen if you vote for him on the site. Just look for "Hans from Talking Rock, GA" and give him a little click. He's one of the good guys. Not a bullshit whiner like me.

MMIV précis

1/3/05

Like I said last year around this time, years have their flavors, and you never know quite what that flavor is going to be until you're a long time hence. I have a feeling that 2004, for us, will seem like "The Time Before the Babyâ„¢" and have the patois of Unthinkable Freedom. At least Tessa and I got through eighteen months of being married, and we still laugh in the car, so we're doing something right.

Career-wise, it was fascinating, if you are fascinated by the various forms of failure. I like to think I failed at every big form of media there is: we had the funding for our motion picture ripped out from under us; our sitcom was universally-lauded, but we were still ultimately told to go home; I was up for a big-time book deal that dissolved; we auditioned for a gig at the NYTimes that we didn't get; and I had a can't-miss comedy play that, apparently, is going to be missed. The only art form I didn't fail at this year was sculpture, mainly because I didn't attempt any.

However, this is the important thing: we are failing at HIGHER and HIGHER levels each time. We aren't making any money, but the amount of money we aren't making is more every day. If, like many actors say, the life of a successful artist is getting rejected at a higher level, then we're doing much better than last year. Plus, nothing is for nothing; we were signed to a major agency, our TV spec scripts kick ass and I have another, better book idea on the table. Nobody fails forever, not with THESE love handles, baby.

And here's the real deal - at some point in late July or early August, against all odds, the collective luck of 2.6 billion years of single-cell amoebas, amphibians, primates and humans came together to produce a little baby that Tessa likes to carry around in her belly. It is hard to think of ourselves as anything but absolute winners when we know we're capable of such magic.

Despite unending weeks of frustration, I think I know the flavor of 2004 already, and for us, it was a toasty hazelnut. We got to see a lot of our favorite people often; I ate at Salem's restaurant in Georgia three times, I ate at Mama Dip's twice. I got to see Sean and Jordana in "Lucretia Jones," and I got to bike the Santa Monica pathway. Hell, I even saw the Budster twice. Some of our friends had babies; others got pregnant when they were given no chance. Three gay couples got married; so did three straight ones.

My mood is curious, even to me. That fucking punk-ass chimp was re-elected in November, our government swayed even more to the right, 140 thousand people died in tsunamis (so many I can't even comprehend), and the world seems more dangerous, arbitrary and cruel than ever. And yet, I feel content. Angry, but resolved. Venomous, but magnanimous.

Perhaps 2004 is when the Celexa really kicked in.

at Chip's wedding, New Year's Eve

ccc+cac

1/1/05

Jane, me, Bud, Chip, Jon and Jill - New Orleans, March 1987

All of the above were attending an event none of us ever dreamed we'd see: the marriage of Christopher "Chip" Chapman last night to anybody, let alone someone as cool as Cathie turned out to be. It is a testament to Cathie's spirit that she fully "gets" Chip, because, well, he's not always an easy sell. I always understood him to be something of an awkward genius, but it took a few more decades for the girls to catch on.

When Bud, Jon, Chip and I met each other in September of 1985, we had many things in common: a certain prep-school prissy-pants judgment of our surroundings, the love of good shit-talking, and a common inability to talk about any feelings. "Opening up to each other" wasn't quite our style, even as my parents continued their horrible divorce, and all four of us churned through the insanity of ages 18 through 22. I think we sublimated our problems through rapid-fire rancor.

Chip, in particular, was easy to make fun of. When he took showers in the dorm, he would pace around the faucet, talking to himself, only getting wet occasionally and by accident. When he shaved, he'd leave a blood bath that would have the Resident Assistant making sure he was okay. He left his toothbrush bristles-down in his cup of loose change, and his towel had hardened in the shape of the door it hung on. In short, he was a mess.

But if you tried making fun of him, he would always counter with something much more funny and devastating about your particular peccadilloes, and god knows we had them to spare. He gave as good as he got, and in many ways, he knew how strange he was, and didn't particularly give a shit. After looking in the mirror next to me in 1986, he proclaimed, "my hairline isn't receding, it's RETREATING!" And retreat it did.

After Chip graduated Carolina, he spent two years in Washington D.C., where he got a Real Jobâ„¢ and an apartment. Not so coincidentally, these were two of my least favorite years in North Carolina, and I was sublimely relieved when he came back to stay.

One of the first weekends he was back, we went for a long walk around Chapel Hill, talking about all modes of philosophy and what the hell we were going to do with our lives. The next day, he left a message on my machine, actually thanking me for doing that with him. This was not something us too-cool-for-school boys would ever have done before, but I realized he was growing up faster than me.

He was the first of us to really begin questioning his life and doing something about it. His depression led him to Buddhism five years before I tried it; he was searching around for answers to the Big Questions when I was still making fun of people for believing there were any Big Questions. He obsessed over every new reading, and there were days in the Pink House when I would get my monthly dose of philosophy just by poring through his leftovers.

As Bud so eloquently said last night, Chip's search led, in some way, to finding Cathie. Like I said a few weeks ago, we are all dorks, we are all very special, and you better get on it, because there are only a few of us left. The Chipper is off the market, and those of us in his greater penumbra are breathing sighs of happiness and relief.