xtcian

through with buzz

1/31/06

Today's blog is cancelled due to a blinding migraine, a flight at 6:40am tomorrow morning, and a moment of silence for the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. I know it's all very funny to smug conservatives who think progressives will never win anything, but to the rest of us, days like today make us very, very sad.

tippecanoe and tyler too

1/30/06

I'm sorry, but I'm finding the hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing over Hamas' huge victory in the Palestinian elections to be largely flatulent. Certainly a group that wants to overthrow Israel should be shamed beyond recognition, but here's the thing about elections: no matter how much you hate who wins, you gotta play with the hand you're dealt.

The Bush Administration got its panties in a wad when sections of Pakistan also voted in hard-line America-haters in 2003, but the Brits who oversaw the elections shrugged, "It was a fair election, all the votes were counted, and the victor took office. Sounds like 'democracy' to us."

My feeling is that Hamas will continue to shout out a few "Israel Sucks" favorites to keep it Old Skool, but when it comes down to the nitty gritty, they're going to quietly take back everything they said about their neighbors, and things will progress fine.

Why? Because if you believe democracy works, as I do (and as Bush Co. say they do), that kind of extremism goes out the window pretty fucking fast. Yes, the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, but they weren't a democracy. There are only two countries with a "democracy" run by tyrant thugs, and one of them is Italy.

If you want to see someone drop all plans to blow themselves up, give them a country to run. Hamas will be up to their elbows in people wanting parking passes, school bus crossings, weird trade agreements with Chad (the country), and their drycleaning. They will find their old notebooks from high school with "I HATE ISRAEL" written on the binder and wonder how they ever had the time.

Terrorism is the natural byproduct of people who have no voice and have resorted to nihilism. When you let a would-be terrorist vote, they usually stop being a terrorist. No matter how much a democracy may hate America (like the localities in Pakistan certainly do), the mere fact that THEIR VOTE WAS HEARD will keep them from actually doing anything about it.

Again, the fine print on the Hamas brochure has always been sickening. But America wanted there to be democracy in the Middle East, and now America can suck it up. They may think Palestine accidentally elected a racist, violent, corrupt government with a lust for blood, but they'll just have to learn to live with it. God knows us liberals have.

sand turns to glass

1/29/06

I had much more pleasant things to say, but after seeing Ed Bradley's report on "60 Minutes" (see the wrap-up here), I am in a state of flabbergastation. Any of you who have followed this blog since the Pleistocene era know I had a big nervous-breakdown-PTSD after being in downtown-ish Manhattan on 9-11, leading to an obsessive fear of nuclear terror - it got so bad that we moved to Brooklyn, and so did the rest of my family.

A good dose of reality, time, information and 40mg of Celexa cured me of the paralysis, and I don't really think about it so much, but I do feel as though we'll experience something nuclear in this country before I turn 80. God, I hope not, but there's something inevitable about it.

Now, I hate to get gruesomely technical, but those in the direct blast zone of such an unthinkable event will never know what hit them. However, anyone more than a kilometer away has a fighting chance, as long as they behave intelligently. Consult the literature of your choice on what you would do - my family has an emergency stash, and a place to meet, etc.

But what if there were a wonder drug that would stop almost all major forms of radiation sickness - bleeding, organ damage - thus rendering you relatively safe for evacuation? Turns out a great little company called Hollis-Eden in San Diego did just that. After 9/11, they perfected their drug Neumune and waited for the government to buy the 100 million or so doses to protect YOU and YOUR KIDS and ME and MY KIDS in case this ever happened.

And what did Bush's appointee for biological prevention do? He bought 100,000. Roughly the population of Cedar Rapids, IA.

This guy - Stewart Simonson - was a Republican lawyer for fucking AMTRAK. And now he is in charge of Project Bioshield, the agency keeping you from getting smallpox or anthrax. If you thought Michael Brownie was a disaster in New Orleans, wait until you're trying to run away from a nuclear-devastated Chicago with pieces of your flesh falling off.

His reason for only getting 100,000 doses? Because he says doctors can administer it in hospitals. AFTER A NUCLEAR ATTACK? Jesus fucking Christ: if ONE GUY can close down the 405 freeway IN BOTH DIRECTIONS for two hours (like on Thursday), can you even imagine how stupid that is?

Do any of you remember the traffic jams trying to get out of Houston during Hurricane Rita, a town that has about forty ways to leave? And they had three days warning! And this dipshit Simonson thinks we're going to saunter over to a doctor in midtown Manhattan after they've blown the Chrysler Building to Uranus?

Read the article above, it will show you what we're up against. It's like the Bush Administration just wants the world to end already. I want this Stewart Simonson asshole to come explain himself to Lucy.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: you don't have to be an apocalypse-minded worrywart, but you had BETTER BE FUCKING PREPARED. Because NOBODY IS GOING TO HELP YOU. Your government believes in some kind of awful Darwinism that only befits either the very rich or the very prepared. Nobody is coming for you. You must find your OWN way out of this mess.

Live to tell stories later. Live to joke about how they bombed your city, but you survived. Live to get your sons and daughters into their twenties. But whatever you do, live. We inherited the worst possible government at the worst crossroads in history, and they don't give a fuck about you. Live to outlive them.

#2 pencil

1/26/06

Please fill in your answers on a sheet of paper, then enter in comments section. Do not look at other commenters' answers before entering yours. Please remember the Honor Code as you take your test. Good luck!

1. The best topping is _______, except when it is covered by _________.

2. _________ is by far the sexiest planet.

3. [in redneck voice] "What are you, some kind of _________"?

4. I asked for no _________, and yet you put ___________ on it. Do you not know they are one and the same?

5. Bum de de dum, dum-de dum-dum de-dum, da __ __ __ _____.

6. If you think that's nice, you should see my _________.

7. "__________ and __________ is what's kept me young."

8. French fries are to venetian blinds as cold comfort is to _________ __________.

9. Fuck you, you ________ __________.

10. Enough about me, let's talk about ______ ______ _______.

now i know that i'm needed for the symphony

1/25/06

Hi there little Lucybug!
This is one of your first self-portraits, taken last week as you turned nine months old, precisely the amount of time you spent in the womb. It's hard to remember which has felt longer, but having you on this side of the muscle mass is definitely more fun.

I know other bloggers write to their kids every month, but that seemed a little too much for an on-the-go tyke like yourself, so I'm sticking to the "every season" motif. I did so in the summer, in the fall, and now here's a little message from the winter.

at one month, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months

We have been remiss in noting every little developmental leap you take, which is kinda sucky, in that we sometimes look back as adults and would like to know the first day we actually knew what words meant; the first day we called our parents what they were; the first moment that would decide who we'd be attracted to for the rest of our lives.

I look into your eyes a lot and wonder if you're experiencing something unbelievably profound, but those are the mysteries left in the embers of the fire long after the camp has moved on. Mostly I look into your eyes because they mesmerize, like Kate Bush sings, "the sort of blue between clouds when the sun comes out, the sort of blue in those eyes you get hung up about."

I'll tell you this, however: you're all about standing. You never met a floor you didn't like to stand on. Or a lap, or a side of a chair, or anything else that promises a swift blow or two to the head when you fall (which is not often but often violent). I watched you as you made your first crawl the week before Christmas, and the next day, you pulled yourself up to a stand without any coaxing from your peers.

These days, if it doesn't involve standing and shouting incomprehensible syllables involving the "click" sound of the African bushpeople, you are Not Interested. You went from the slowest, crappiest crawler on earth to setting land speed records over the course of a week. Just watching you figure your own body out is better than anything on TV or the movies, which is cool because we hardly ever get to see either.

The "stranger anxiety" thing set in around eight months, but if the stranger has, say, a whisk, or an wireless car key, or better yet, a Treo with the Big Money game on it, you could give half a shit where Mom and Dad are. You are pretty fearless with everybody, no fading flower, no shrinking violet. You've got a smile for pretty much everybody, although it is looking way more like flirting, if'n you ask me.

The biggest change at nine months? You actually look like somebody. The Yorkshire pudding of your early months is actually setting into this pretty little lady; you have gone from five expressions to 437; your babbling has become consistent with your activity. For instance: "whuh?" equals "what is this new thing I've encountered?" Then "bah bah bah bah bah" means "this project is going swimmingly." My favorite? The whispered "doh doh doh doh," which means "This is more complicated than I first suspected."

Bonus: "Wheecka doh doh BDRDRDRDRDRDR!!!" means "I'M NAKED!"

Tonight, as I was perusing old archives, I came across a huge folder full of diary entries that start in 1992 and go roughly to 2000 (after which, this blog basically took over). Those little files are full of stuff I would never put on this blog - profane-laced self-loathing, calling out people by name, clandestine fellatio - you know, the usual.

What struck me, even in the depths of unmitigated poverty and despair, was that I always had my eyes on you even when it seemed hopeless. I had suicide as a constant, silent companion riding in the back seat, barely in the rear-view mirror, and yet I never took him seriously.

I feel like I was counted out, left for scrap metal, many of my friends not believing that I'd ever scrape together much of a real life. But I never lost faith in you, always figured that I'd make it to your bedside in time.

My buddy Matt McMichaels had a poster in his bedroom during those dark days, an R. Crumb reprint of Mr. Natural on a tractor surrounded by fields, saying "TWAS EVER THUS!" That's the trap we fall into, as we look at how blessed our lives are, gazing into the bright sun in our mid-to-late thirties - it's hard for me to remember a time not so long ago when my personal life was one car wreck or cuckold away from disaster.

I like to think, Lucy the Light Bearer, that your blueberry eyes shone the way for me in the back romances of my darkest thoughts, and made me sure that all things were leading in the right direction, despite all evidence to the contrary. I don't think I'll ever thank you enough for that. Perhaps thirty-two hundred diaper changes will come close.

walking pneumatics

1/24/06

Christmas: 12 or so of my family show up from around the country. Everyone has a cold.

Boxing Day: I get the flu despite having had the shot. In bed for four days.

New Year's Eve: Flu subsides for a few minutes, then comes back full blast for another week. Lucy gets her first cold and can't sleep.

First week of January: I get a full-blown throat infection. Can't swallow. Lucy gets ANOTHER cold. Starts sleeping less and is clearly miserable.

Second week of January: Tessa's lungs start to close up and she needs asthma medication to breathe. Lucy still has dreadful cold, waking up from her own coughing.

Two days ago: We fly to California. Lucy throws up all over the kitchen and the hallway. Tessa and I are so tired we fall asleep at 9pm.

Last night: Tessa throws up roughly the same way Lucy did.

We can't stand it anymore. Please, please, let us all be well.

quadruple lutz!

1/23/06

Okay, CODE WORD. We are just getting over being sick and settling into Venice (80 and sunny here!), and I have a Top 25 Migraine, so today's question is this: what reality show do you recommend, and why? Make it good and don't be salacious or petty, damn it.

We just watched "Skating With the Celebrities" and I have to say, that show was CREATED FOR MY WIFE. What an awesome, sweet thing to watch. It should be pathetic to watch "Diff'rent Strokes" star Todd Bridges skate around with an afro, but instead, I was just cheering for him.

Did I ever tell you Tessa was almost a professional skater when she was a li'l tyke? She can still do an axel and a great spin and that salchow thing.

with mom Sandy circa 1981

luck is the residue of design

1/22/06

I imagine most of you - even you writer types - found yourself watching sports this weekend, and we were no exception... however, because I'm a Saints fan, I had no interest in the NFL playoffs, and instead directed as much positive energy towards my beloved Tar Heels playing a tough road game in Tallahassee, Florida.

Lucy wore her UNC onesie-with-culottes, but due to our recent brain farts, we can't remember which of you gave it to her! Either way, she looked smashing, and screamed on cue every time Tyler got hacked down low. Those of you who followed this particularly harrowing game, you know we one by one point.

Tessa, much later tonight, sat next to me in one of her "I have an important question" poses, and said, basically, that all modern Western sports fall under the same category: the end makes the story. Or, more interestingly, the End makes the Middle and the Beginning, no matter what they had been at the time.

In other words, because we won the game by one point, everything that we did inside the 40 minutes of that game was positively skewed to represent a story in which our winning was inevitable. I thought that was pretty fascinating.

Only one point meant this:

- we're getting more mature, handling pressure better
- we stopped FSU's inevitable 2nd half comeback
- we made just the right amount of free throws
- we're "back on track"
- our hopes for an invitation to March Madness are looking good
- the UNC tradition continues, even having lost our top seven players

Whereas, if FSU's desperation last-second heave had gone in, the story would look like this:

- we've lost maturity, can't handle being on the road
- we played "their game" instead of "our game"
- David Noel's two missed free throws tanked us
- our season is slightly coming apart at the seams
- our hopes for postseason play are much murkier
- even UNC can't handle losing so many players to the NBA

It is, in one of Sean's favorite expressions, a sport with a "bivalent" storyline, you know, where all the AM sports buffoons say stuff like "It's W's and L's, baby" and "horseshoes and hand grenades," etc.

But back to Tessa's point, it is interesting that everything that happened up to the last shot - about 39 minutes and 55 seconds of basketball - did not have any intrinsic definition without the last five seconds factored in. It is decidedly un-Buddhist.

I could make some sort of tangent to the NFL playoff games today, but none of those contests were close enough to warrant emotional ambivalence: the storyline was pretty much set before halftime.

It is curious, as I look at the things in my own life: my own failures that led to success, my sometimes asinine reductivism concerning eras that were quite complicated, yet I still shrug and say "it all sucked." Especially as we are trying to be "artists," for lack of a less unbearably twee term, and in many cases, close is not only good enough, but a huge victory.

And yet, when it comes to my Heels, I lose all this perspective. Roy Williams, as Dean Smith before him, has about eight different plays for each possible permutation of end-game situations, making that the final score less arbitrary than it seems. But my mood, still spirited and delightful and sing-songy all evening, is held in place ten feet high by that one gorgeous, tremulous basket.

oh, the rogue - the red, red rogue

1/19/06

We're off to LA on Saturday to check in with all our career goings-on, in our hopeful bid to be openly bi-coastal. Being a resident of both coasts wasn't so hard back when I was a singly young buck with nary a care and a $145 round-trip ticket from Priceline, but now with the Tessalations and the Lucypants, it can not be undertaken lightly.

Parental blog readers, I'm sure you know what this I'm about to describe, but Lucy has had a terrible, virulent cold for almost three weeks. Actually, it's two separate colds, and I know the poor sweetheart is trying to be in a good mood, but she's just so sick of being sick. Last night was our hardest night as new parents: we slept from 7am to 9am and had a meeting at 11am.

This is the traditional "downtime" for TV writers, as they wait to see if their pilots are going to be shot, or picked up for airing. We're going to take advantage by seeing Tessa's mom in San Antonio next weekend, my dad in La Quinta, CA after that, and then the Dook game in Chapel Hill.

I find it odd that Lucy could come to last year's game because she was in utero, but now she has to wait a while in order for the crowd not to freak her out. If this year's outing is anything like years past, there will be violent mood swings, much screaming in adulation, and hopefully a belly full of redemption.

Have I ever told you how much I hate Duke? Remind me sometime.

be fooled by the rocks that I got

1/18/06

Perhaps nobody's still interested in this topic, but the James Frey "A Million Little Pieces" brouhaha is still on heavy rotation at our household. Lucy refuses to shut up about it.

Actually, I'm having a change of heart when it comes to this guy. After seeing him on "Larry King Live," he strikes me as the worst sort of dissembler. Let me give a somewhat unrelated example. After invading Iraq, imagine Bush saying this: "Because of September 11, one Arab country was going to go down, and Iraq has pissed us off for forever, so we fucking went in there and did our thing. We had to cook up evidence or else you wouldn't have let us do what we know is right."

Yes, it would have been horrifying in its own gruesome, Orwellian way - but I might have an inkling of grudging respect. I would disagree with him on every aspect of his plan, but at least I'd know the plan.

That hasn't happened, of course - it's lie after white lie after deception after disinformation after "we create our own reality," and you're left with a man whose war has gone to shit and whose ratings will never see even fifty percent unless he delivers Bin Laden bound and gagged to Congress.

Much the same could be said of James Frey. Look, dude, your ship has sailed: the Smoking Gun did so thorough a job debunking everything you wrote that you need to just say, "yep, there's some factual things in there, but it's mostly fiction, and should be read that way. Sorry for the confusion, but my publisher said it wouldn't sell as a novel, and so here we are."

Instead, he (and his lawyers and the publishers) has tried to redefine what a "memoir" is - you know, "remembering things to the best of your knowledge" - and thus cheapening every memoir ever written. As Tessa said, he has to be a full-scale schizophrenic to be remembering things that didn't happen to the best of his knowledge.

Worse yet, his book acts as an open repudiation to the "12 Steps" of Alcoholics Anonymous, saying that he beat addiction without kowtowing to the AA bullshit. I'm no drunk, but I'm friends with and love many who are, and I know they owe their very sanity and existence to the steps of AA, despite how much fun is had at their expense.

It's one thing to have a fictional character eschew something that can save lives, but to pretend to have a real character do it is fucking irresponsible. If Frey has a bone to pick with AA, then he should have the balls to take it on without hiding behind a pretend protagonist. Maybe he can bring his mommy with him like he did on Larry King.

I stand by my earlier conviction that he is probably a fantastic writer, and if we had no inkling of the backstory, "A Million Little Pieces" would still inspire, I guess. But now the cat has shredded the bag, it's time for him to come clean, or at the very least, promote all future TV and movie deals as fiction.

You want to know why I came back to this rant? Because of something on his website - he said "let the haters hate." Samuel Johnson said that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel, and my civics teacher in 10th grade said that sarcasm was the last refuge of an empty mind.

I'd like to add one, if I might: calling someone a "hater" is the last refuge of the clueless, merciless shill of the 21st century. The epithet "playa hata" stops all debate in its tracks because you are no longer talking about the subject matter, you're attacking the critic. When it happens in professional sports, the music industry, and now the high-falutin' world of books, you know that honest discourse has come to an end.

I don't hate Frey for his success - I know how hard it is to get anything published, and at some point in my life, I would have resorted to anything to achieve notoriety. But Jesus, I'm so sick of our peer group's constant need to keep lying long after the truth is so painfully obvious. AA is a miracle for most, but they admit they can't get one type of person sober: the man who is constitutionally unable to be honest with himself.

blogging to distraction

1/17/06

I've read the books, I've noticed the road signs, now the wife and I have come to grips with it: if I'm not the perfect candidate for ADD, then ADD probably doesn't exist. I've oft lamented my absolute inability to conquer fatigue over the last five years, but now it's really getting in the way of basic household and administrative shit, and it's time to go seek the help of a professional, preferably one that spent many years in a good graduate school.

There's one episode from my childhood that I've held close to my chest for many years, and I might as well recount it here: for about three or four months, I lived in constant, apoplectic fear that my parents were going to die. Couldn't stop thinking about it, even though I must have been no older than eight.

To counter the fear, I set myself to a task: I was going to recreate and copy the mileage table in the back of the Rand McNally Road Atlas, the one that tells you the distance from every major American city to every other major American city. Why did I choose that Sisyphean task? Perhaps I wouldn't be so afraid if I gave myself something that big to do.

My mom even helped at first - she showed me how I could take colored pencils and lightly shade in each column so they were easier to follow across rows. I probably got to about Dayton, OH on both sides before I was paralyzed with the enormity of the task. And then just thinking about the mileage chart filled me with dread. And the spiral continued.

Never mind that copying such a chart was redundancy personified; I should have known then I was a major obsessive depressive with ADD, but the only treatment in 1976 was either electro-shock therapy or the Ford/Carter debates.

I'm ready to do something about it now. Anybody out there have experience with their own ADD and can describe being on Ritalin or Adderall? I'm all ears.

spitting out my placebo

1/16/06

Okay, that's it. I'm tired of buttons not working. If I have to push a button or a flap, I expect results. And I'm not getting them. First off, in elevators, the fucking "close door" button DOES NOT WORK EVER.

No matter how many smelly, creepy bastards are running for your personal space, they always manage to make it. I'd like this button to start working NOW.

While we're at it, can we stop with the con and make the crosswalk buttons work again? This "illusion of control" is making me want to go up into the bell tower with a rifle. Please just turn all of these back on.

And thermostats at the work place? Are you just trying to fuck with us for fucking with us's sake?

And you already don't make CD jewel cases that stay together after a year, yet make it impossible to open any electronic gadget encased in hard plastic, so maybe you want to fix the little things in life - like this "resealable battery dispenser" on the back of the package? Stuff like this is just depressing.

You know every single box of cereal in the world? They don't close. Any of them. I blame you.

Sports are not exempt - this is the ball I keep in my car, and that "self-inflating pump needle" is a carafe of crap. I have pumped that mother until I got repetitive motion disorder, and the ball never gets any more air. Were you just hoping we wouldn't notice?

And lastly, none of these buttons seem to work:

I keep pulling the ones for smart progressive politicians, and none of them ever win. I think those buttons are broken too. Please fix by end of election cycle 2006. Thank you.

really sick of sushi, i'd imagine

1/12/06

I had another rant all saved up, but then I happened upon this site that concerns everything about the show "Lost," and then I looked up and two hours had passed. All this while I'm trying to alter my schedule and get my circadian rhythms to be like other people... Old Well, as they say where I'm from.

Count me among the bigger fans of "Lost," made even more special because in LA, we work a few hundred yards away from the writers in their bungalows, feverishly slaving away over the next plot points. If you take them at their word, everything in the show is explainable without resorting heavily into the occult, which makes their high-wire act all the more daunting.

I love the backstories - especially Locke's and Eko's - but the coincidences are really piling up and will reach critical mass before March. I don't know why I found this last coincidence (the plane used in 1992 for Eko's drug smuggling crashes on the island where he will crash in 2004) so hard to take, but like any fanboy, I reserve judgment until it all comes out in the wash.

Working in LA has given us incredible humility around people working in television: try renting a DVD of any show like the first season of "Deadwood," the third season of "The Shield," the second season of "24" or the second season of "Alias," and you realize the sheer storytelling genius required to make these things work. It's an undertaking not unlike any of Verdi's or Puccini's greatest operas.

But "Lost" is another beast altogether. Say what you want about the show's shortcomings (Tessa thinks it can be a bit flimsy), but when you've got a fanbase that obsessive, your room for error hovers around nil. Every single frame is captured, analyzed and bandied about in chat rooms.

Not only must they keep the island frighteningly mysterious while making everything within the realm of explanation, the peccadilloes of each plotline - the 16mm film, the hatch computer, Walt's "ghost" - have to be as intelligent as they are bizarre. They also have to keep the show human, offer redemption at every turn, and throw love triangles in the mix as well.

But the biggest accomplishment, should they pull it off, is this: they have no idea how long the show will last, so they must prepare to pace themselves for at least four - but maybe seven - years. Without endlessly frustrating their audience. If they can make it work, the show will put Scheherazade to shame.

How to do it? With each season, everything must, in some way, utterly change. The hatch has altered this season somewhat, and this year has been much more human, but by this season's finale, something very different needs to happen.

The other shows that ultimately failed this challenge - "Twin Peaks" at one end of the spectrum, and "The X-Files" at the other - inform these writers on a daily basis. Perhaps there's no way they can win (I'm already sensing a "Truman Show" vibe on the island) but man, the ride so far has been so worth it.

Bonus question for Heels fans: what do Bobby Frasor, Vince Carter, Michael Jordan and Sean May have in common with "Lost"?

and i've brought some corn for popping

1/11/06

Since my blog occasionally doubles as a scrapbook for whatever we happened to be doing at the time, I needed to make an entry with pictures for the extended family and friends in far-flung places. So here's a few pics with short explanations.

First off, we took Lucy ice skating in Bryant Park, but they wouldn't allow her on the ice. What a bunch of ageists! She didn't seem to mind, however:

This is me with (from left) my mom, Sean, Michelle and Jordana. This was probably about four drinks into our Xmas gathering:

I love this picture of Michelle with the Bug at a diner in the meatpacking district:

On Chopin's last day, I carried him to the front door, where the sun had just come out in a brilliant display. I wanted him to have one more afternoon with that feeling against his fur. Tessa comforts him while commiserating with old friends that knew him well:

Between me, Melissa and Neighborhoodies, we were determined to have A Very Symmetrical Christmas™:

Norman Kent holds Lucy Kent:

I've tried many of these shots with the timer - I have to set the camera, then run across the living room to the back of the table - but the chances of getting an 8-month-old to look at the camera when the timer goes off? Astronomical. At least I thought so, but:

I got one of the best presents of my entire life for Xmas - my entire family chipped in to buy me a drum set. It is so cool that I feel like I just got my first 10-speed:

This was the first Christmas for a lot of our little friends, so we got together with (from left) Laurie and baby Polly, Dana and toddler Jackson, Nell and baby Hank, and, you know, the usual suspects:

Couldn't resist posting this pic of the two coolest women I know, taken by Block matriarch Susan Stava:

While we were taking this, I didn't realize we'd end up looking so... um, Mormon:

lie at your feet

1/10/06

I know plenty of you are avid readers of fiction-ish non-fiction and non-fiction-ish fiction, so you've heard about the two revelations currently sending tongues a-waggin' in Manhattin': first off, JT Leroy was outed as a middle-aged woman using a fake prostitute transgendered road whore as a mouthpiece. Then there's James Frey, who apparently made up about 78% of "A Million Little Pieces."

Don't ask me to list the last two years' worth of cultural dissembling, because I've got a nine-month-old and I'd still be writing when she wakes up at 6am. The act of LYING has become deliciously rampant in all aspects of our culture, but like Mark Twain said about the weather, nobody does anything about it.

That's because they're all in on the game, and it is readers like you they'd like to meet, or at least, they'd like to separate a little bit of money from your debit card. I'm surprised nobody's written a book about the explosion of The Information Age and the opposite chain reaction of The Lie, since the two are obviously dating. In America, there are so many sources clamoring desperately for your attention that the only way to be heard is to be a fucking liar.

Nobody knows liars like a liar, and god knows I was one of the best in my day. My pathology was rampant, and to be honest, I only stopped lying when my life got as interesting and bizarre as the lies were. These days I have no need, but I'm sure there are at least two times per blog when I'm lying and don't even know I'm doing it.

***

I just checked what I wrote and found one. Lucy actually sleeps until 7am most mornings, but that wasn't as funny, and besides, I don't want to make other parents feel like we've got it easy. After all, baby habits are like what Mark Twain said about the weather: if you don't like it, wait a few minutes.

***

To go back to Leroy and Frey, however, I see their prevarications as only a temporary transgression. The only real reason their lies mean anything is that you know about it. Not having read any of their work, I can only report second-hand, but millions have enjoyed the way they strung words together, and in a few hundred years, who gives a shit? Like Mark Twain said about the Bible, it doesn't have to have happened in order to be true (actually, that was UNC's Dr. Bart Ehrman).

We are occasional attendees of this great storytelling event in New York called The Moth, where people - sometimes famous - have to get up in front of a huge audience and tell a true 15-minute story without notes.

One of them, a friend of Tessa's who may or may not have written some books you like, told a rapturous, torturous tale of a lost love affair he had in Africa. I thought it was absolutely incredible.

In cab ride home, the organizer sheepishly admitted that she knew his story to be utter bullshit. That memory made me mad for years, for actually feeling feelings about this guy and his story, and then realizing none of it had happened.

But really, what was my problem? At least I felt something. Many of you have expressed jubilation when Lucy was born, but you are thousands of miles away, and many of you don't know me from a box of oatmeal. And yet because you live and breathe, you commiserate, you felt something, had an experience. I feel sad when commenters who don't even give their real name sound sad. Shit, I get lost in stories that were supposed to be made-up - I mean, I know Aslan kills the White Witch every time, but DAMN!

Having an emotion is worth the sleight of hand, in my opinion. The rest is gossip.

impromptu

1/9/06

It was just a little window, a brief, flitting afternoon, but if you were outside today in New York City you would be hard pressed not to mouth "thank you" to the skies. You have to be mindful of these little gifts, a 60-degree present in the middle of so much bitterness, and in turn the hats and coats and scarves and mittens all flew off, wrapped around waists and dangling from back pockets.

You are reminded that there are other seasons, that there was a time (and will be again) with laconic, sexy afternoons of chance meetings and schedules overturned in favor of a beer outside. The sun will one day decide to set near 10pm, and rise not too far after.

I felt sick this morning, and one warm breeze up 7th Avenue and suddenly I recalled what it was like to be seven years old, red tricycles, Big Wheels full of warm water.

Sure, the skies will close again, the sun will retreat, darkness will fall, records will break, the white drifts will pile high - but not today. Most winters never even give you a hint that better times are possible, but this one just showed its cards and gasped hot air in defeat.

gout, goiters, lumbago, bends, grippe, ague

1/8/05

I don't usually talk about getting sick on the blog, mostly because:
a) it's boring
b) it's boring
c) it's unbelievably boring
d) and,
e) if I wrote about every time I was felled with the flu or some shit, you'd all have me zipped up into a plastic bubble. I get pretty much everything that is going around, regardless of a flu shot, regardless of Purell-ing my hands until they squeak with sterility. I did have a period in 2003-2004 when I went about 18 months without getting ill, but usually, my body is a willing receptacle for whatever airborne crap you've got going.

I don't like being like this, in fact, it pains me to write it. There's always the judgment that I could be doing more: changing my diet (yawn), getting to sleep at a different time, scarfing down anti-oxidants, "having a better attitude," whatever.

One thing I do know is that my threshold for misery is about .008, so even the little things fell me completely. Perhaps other people get the same amount of sick and just don't know it. If that's a flaw in my character, then, well, you got me, soldier.

There is one thing I'd REALLY like to complain about, however. I am suffering through the worst sore throat of my storied career - every swallow is agony, and there are white spots on the back of my throat. I've been careful: never breathing directly on Lucy, handling food away from people, not even hugging Sean and Jordana when they came over tonight.

That's not even my complaint. My beef is thus: I woke up with this thing on Saturday morning, and I knew what the weekend had in store. I knew this was strep throat and I knew I needed antibiotics. But just because it was the weekend, there was no way I was going to get them. The only recourse would be to sit in some hospital emergency room in Brooklyn for seven hours behind four gunshot victims. Even the urgent care centers had 5-hour waits. No fucking thanks.

I have good insurance, and I know lots of people. Why did I have to wait for this thing to worsen before getting any kind of treatment? The last two days have been well nigh unbearable, all because of the LUCK of getting sick on Friday night, and that's pathetic. My car runs on corn oil and rabbit poop, and I can't get a Levaquin unless I "Drugstore Cowboy" my way into an Eckerd.

That's it for today's entry. I'm pissed off, tired and my throat is shredded. Please, bacterial agents and viruses, can you just fucking leave me alone for a decade or six?

mazurka in C sharp minor

1/5/06

Amidst some of the unbelievably sad news going on this week, I'd just like to say one more word about little Chopes, our black Lab/Bordie Collie mix dog that passed away just before Christmas. I know he already wrote something on here, and many of you wrote wonderful things back (Just Andrew also sent us a beautiful book), but there are no gravestones for dogs, no museum wings named after them, and their memoirs tend to be unreadable.

What does last forever - at least in Google's archives and the Wayback Machine - is a blog posting, and I don't think one is enough. So I am here to say that Chopin Blake was born on June 9, 1990 and died peacefully on December 22, 2005 in the arms of those that loved him. Tessa, who writes about one comment per year, may want to add something, but this is my little paean.

The benefit of experience is that it keeps you from contemplating redundancy. So often, before you have a child, many of your questions will begin, "Yes, but how will I know..." and then fill in the rest. When you go ahead and have that child, you will realize, like we did last night, that Lucy was sick with a 100-degree fever, without even using a thermometer. We could tell by the way she slept and a soft hand on her back, and we knew.

Of course, we went ahead and took her temperature, because we're completists, but we didn't need to.

Much the same happens before any Big Life Moment, when you are unsure of your instincts and will not know if things are really happening or not. Will I love him? Will I know if she is the one? How will I know when it is time? And for the last few months for us, it was "How will we know when Chopin is truly dying?"

A couple of years ago, when he first had his vestibular syndrome, a chance meeting with a holistic veterinarian gave us this following nugget: "What you want in any animal's life is HAPPY, HAPPY, HAPPY, DEAD." I hate to sound like a Family Circus cartoon, but that isn't a bad scenario for any of us.

On December 21st, the longest and darkest evening of the year, Chopes and I walked out onto the frozen-topped snow and sniffed around. Back inside, we play-fought like he was a puppy, he scrounged through the trash and almost devoured one of Tessa's breastfeeding pads, and he paced around the farmhouse about fifteen times - the usual - before curling up to sleep.

The next day, while Tessa and Lucy were spending the afternoon in the next town over, I was trying to build the new crib, when I noticed I hadn't seen Chopes in a while. I found him curled up on the bathroom floor, and in one millisecond I knew he was dying.

He wasn't laying that differently, the breathing may have been a little weird, but in that moment I gained the weird of experience of just knowing something. I called Tessa, bade her come home immediately, and we spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening with him as he drifted away. When it was apparent that he may actually be suffering a little, Tessa went with him down the country road to the vet, and while Lucy and I stayed home, he put Chopes to sleep while Tessa stroked his tummy.

around 1998

That was a tiny moment in all that Chopes was. He spent his years, however, doing the following:
- disrupting Millie Barringer's drama classes by howling outside Graham Memorial
- jumping out of the car while making a left onto Columbia Street
- shivering during every thunderstorm and cathecting into Tessa's belly
- trying to tell Tessa that someone was stealing her bike (and she ignored him at her loss)
- making hundreds of laps around the lake in Stephentown, NY in order to guard the perimeter
- herding 80 stampeding cows into us the moment I proposed to my wife

But I think his greatest moment came the day five years ago when our friend Neal visited our apartment and revealed he was about to get open-heart surgery for a mitral valve prolapse. After staying stoic for a few minutes, Neal got very scared and suddenly broke down in tears. None of us knew exactly what to say, but Chopin, usually standoffish and fearing intimacy, walked up to Neal and gave him a big wet kiss on the lips.

He did the same to Lucy the first time they met. He probably kissed four people in his life, but they were well-chosen.

And so here is his little blog entry, a testament to a great animal who blessed us with almost 16 years of trash-ransacking, weirdness and his own brand of quirky, undying love. Every crumpled sweater in the corner of my eye, every clicking noise like claws on the wood floor, every sigh of the radiator makes me think you're still here. It will be a long time before that fades.

summer 2002

stopbath

1/4/06

I'm changing hard drives tomorrow - getting a kick-ass 120 GB internal drive for the Powerbook - and doing so means backing up every single thing I've done since 1987. I still have English papers written for Doris Betts at Carolina in Microsoft Word 1.0 on the Mac Plus.

In backing up all the photos, I came to realize two things:
1) 98% of my pictures are not printed, and thus utterly ephemeral
2) I have more pictures than I could possible ever look at.

The big cliché of the Japanese Tourist in the '80s was the relentless picture-taking and movie-making of useless American objects, leading everyone to imagine how boring their get-togethers were back in the home country. But having seen the collections of my friends, and my own obsessive-compulsivity, I have to say we are much worse.

Now, granted, she is my first child and she's such a little pumpkinboots, but in Lucy's first nine months, I have taken 1,066 pictures that include some combination of her solo or with others. You'd think that would make her the most photographed human outside of a Beatle or Michael Jordan, but having perused a few other first-time moms/dads, I'm probably only on the 75th percentile.

In contrast, in the year 1971, there are four pictures that exist of me, and only one in color:

And so that picture has defined that year for me, a time I can't remember, glumly waving goodbye to my mom as dad takes me out into the snow. I should mention that I had been wrapped up with fourteen layers and thus dying of heat exhaustion, especially since I knew the zipper would get stuck when I came in. Cue mom rubbing a candle on the zipper and then having THAT not work either, and then I pass out in a delirious heatstroke. But that's for another blog.

I look at our scrapbooks and baby books, and while certain events are bizarrely over-represented with 35 pictures, entire eras would pass without being recorded. Our childhoods become a connect-the-dots visual picture rendered by occasional photographs.

Think about your parents' wedding in the 60s, or better yet, pictures of your grandparents when they were dating. If you're lucky, ONE PICTURE might exist. For instance, here is the one picture of Tessa's grandmother in her 20s that exists:

Now go back even further. I have one picture each of all my great-grandparents, and some of them were taken when they were ancient, and thus impossible to recognize. Those pictures limp from box to box until they are destroyed in a basement plumbing accident, or someone relentless archivist like me comes around to scan them.

But mostly, where do these pictures go? Here:

We bought this picture at an antique store in Chatham, NC in 2001 because it fit a scene in the movie we were shooting. To quote Morrissey,

all those people, all those lives
Where are they now?
With loves, and hates
And passions just like mine
They were born and then they lived and then they died
Seems so unfair, I want to cry.

That is a picture taken of well-to-do people at some event that cost a lot of money, at some large house that spent a fortune in its day, and yet none of that money or effort could buy their way out of sheer anonymity.

I know that all my thousands of pictures of my little tribe of friends and family may well pass into nothingness. And when the time comes, hopefully a hundred years off, Lucy's great-grandchildren may have a slight inkling of who I was or what I looked like, maybe because of this picture in the New York Times archive, but with my luck, it'll probably be this:

banned from green gables

1/3/06

Back in 2003, Tessa and I attended the Zap Your PRAM conference up in Prince Edward Island - a wonderful get-together of technophiles and folks in the know who agreed to come to this tiny town on a tiny island during a slightly miserable time of year. Of course, it was fantastic.

We screened an early cut of the "Pink House" movie, engaged in hot discussions over the future of this here internet with some famous netizens, and basically chilled out while the distant October sun wafted across the shores of the northern Maritimes. They even had a basketball hoop.

One of the conference leaders was our friend Dan, whose parents owned a large bed & breakfast in Cavendish, so he installed satellite internet, gave us each our own bedroom, and during the day we'd hunker down in the conference room like an extended slumber party. Old timers to this blog may remember the trip home as the time when I got detained by Homeland Security and had to write an essay to free myself.

I mention this because we were seriously considering going back up to P.E.I. for Zap Your PRAM 3 (which is named a little like The Thompson Twins or Ben Folds Five) because it has become one of our favorite places in the world, and you get to take this humongous catamaran to get there. Also, Peter himself - along with Dan, Daniel, Steven and any other Islander you meet - are fabulous, fabulous company.

Then we got an email today saying that this year's conference was called off, due to a "lack of fire" in their bellies. The first conference had come together so organically, and this one was proving a struggle. Besides, they didn't know exactly what they would talk about.

This was a fascinating thing to do, in my opinion. Tessa called it very Taoist. I'm so used to forcing things to happen, like the Jartaculars or other random events, that I would never contemplate calling anything off. The fire in my belly is self-generating and seemingly inextinguishable, and I'm always afraid that if I don't make something happen, suddenly "not making something happen" would be okay, and then nothing would ever happen again.

As for not having things to talk about, I always assume that if you get more than two interesting people into a room, that sort of shit takes care of itself. When we have guests at the farm, the place turns into a lefty think-tank (or in the case of my family, a fartgasm of fart jokes), and all it takes is an outsider to get things going.

Yet still, the decision to pull the plug on something they love is a decision by the P.E.I. folk I have to admire. It's Buddhist in its calm understanding of human currents, and brave in its faith that another gathering could still happen one day. Maybe all the commenters here could meet on Prince Edward Island and get seafood.

I should have been so circumspect about things in my own life. I've forced the issue so many times, and occasionally it has come to near disaster. I have seen the writing on the wall telling me to go home and pick my battles, and decided to tell the wall to fuck itself. I have plowed on with losing hands, going further under.

It's hard not to mistake perseverance for self-destructive bluster. I have something to learn from these wise islanders.

the beautiful, dark beach - late autumn 2003, Cavendish, PEI

MMV précis

1/2/06

Most of my life has been spent living down what my family always called The Poisoned Squirrel Dance, which was apparently some rage-filled capillary-busting freakout screamfest I used to perform when I was a child and not getting what I wanted. I chalk all these things up to being born into a large family, where you have to fight to make sure your french fries aren't stolen, and moreso, being a kid in the 1970s when you couldn't get anyone's attention.

Accepting good fortune has never come easily to me, because I live in some sort of bullshit Puritan/Mormon dread that all good things must be paid for, and also because I'd cultivated my doom so perfectly, nourished my Garden of Sullenness with so much mulch, that anything else would be a little embarrassing.

But getting a year like 2005 renders all those things irrelevant. To paraphrase the Jewish prayer, it would have been enough to have such a beautiful little girl, but winning the National Championship and getting a little TV deal? Not to mention a few hundred thousand Americans coming out of their Bush-induced coma? I know blogs are by nature self-obsessed, but I'm going to go ahead and mark this one a winner for our little tribe.

Nonetheless, I would like to take a little moment for Chopes this week... and all this talk of victory does not, by the way, come at the expense of the bigger picture: it's obvious our world is fucked, perhaps permanently, by every wrong thing we've done since the Industrial Revolution; our kids keep dying by the score in Iraq; a hurricane took out the Last Interesting Place in America; and the bad guys are still in control of everything.

But that's the beauty of our parallelism - we can be utterly horrified by the macrocosm while delighting in our delicious little spheres, plucking them like chocolates. Ambrosia, nipples of Venus.

2005 was the first year where I was PAID TO WRITE in a long, long time. I used to be very scrappy about career things, always managing to scrape together a healthy living off the most bizarre writing projects, but I suffered a paralysis - not of block, but of will - since my Great Nervous Breakdown of 2002, and for now, I've inoculated that demon with liquid paper.

I will also come clean about our National Championship: I was a little distracted (Lucy's due date was that night). It was not my favorite UNC team, not even in my top five. But the way they pulled through for Roy Williams, and the spirit of Ray, Sean and Jackie alone is enough. It was a victory for Dean's way of doing things, and thus the heavens aligned after a very rough retrograde.

But what can any talk of 2005 be without the sweet little girl? I realize I may have turned into the blogger that I never wanted to be, always posting pictures of the li'l one, and doling out advice on sleep training and solids. I used to look upon friends with babies as a sort of curiosity, even with a little dread, because their patter was so predictable. I have tried not to be thus, but man, that's an uphill battle.

Tessa did something in April that millions of women have done. Hell, my mom did it five times. Yet still I think of those moments just before the final push, and it makes me so proud and in awe of her that tears roll down my face. Then to see that little Lucy take her first breath and scream at the doctor with such lust - if she ever gives me a Poisoned Squirrel Dance in the future, I swear to take it smiling.

I hope all of you can give me your quick - or not so quick - take on 2005, good or bad. I used to think the anonymity of the internet doomed it to cruelty, but sharing the last year on here with your unseen faces has been a weekday delight. Every time I think of stopping, I think of all the fun and right-wing heckling I'd miss, and get back on the horse.