xtcian

il y a vingt-cinq ans

3/2/06

Exactly Twenty-Five Years Ago: March 1981

If you never been to Eastern Iowa at the beginning of March, you've never known wind chills down to 70-below zero, never known holding a Bic lighter to your car's keyhole in order to get it to thaw, never known snow drifts that block your front door closed for two days. As a kid, you think these things are cool, but as a thirteen-year-old like me, you were beginning to truly feel the misery.

To say I was the "class reject" is to do a disservice to losers in grade schools across the country. I was not only ignored and reviled, I was singled out for after-school brutality. These two kids in particular used to ambush me on the way home from school, and thus I'd vary my schedule wildly in the hopes they'd eventually give up.

I had one friend named Brad, and he got me into Amateur ("Ham") Radio, an activity where I could receive Morse Code from someone in Brazil, but never actually meet another human being. I trod to school with my violin and tried to stay as invisible as possible, praying not to be called on in class. Even the orchestra wasn't safe - the lead trombonist "called me out" to the bike rack. I hid in the practice rooms until 6pm.

What made it worse, curiously, is that I knew a better world. We had just lived in England two years before, where I excelled at sports, commiserated with girl, had a best friend in Adam Regis (hey, Ad!) and was actually revered as a cool foreigner. Even a few months before, I'd traveled to Africa, met Richard Leakey and was basically adopted by a Kikuyu tribesman who showed me how to make food and play their version of the violin.

But here I was, wiser and ready to expand, yet thrust back into Iowa a second time, and things had gotten worse, because the bad guys had gotten bigger. I was so demoralized that I sank into a deep, unmitigated depression in January and didn't speak to anybody for a month. The worst part? Nobody noticed or cared. They all had their own fish to fry. My parents' marriage was disintegrating, and my sister and brothers were all in states of vociferous cantankerousness.

Besides, let's be honest. It was 1981. It didn't have the barefoot flavor of the seventies, and none of the cool trappings (or music) of the eighties had filtered to us yet. We were stuck in Reagan's "Morning in America," a limbo cauterized by John Lennon's assassination and hostages in Iran. If I'd had the internet, things might be different, but I didn't, so I sat in my room, and when I ran out of things to read, I stared at the ceiling.

Twenty-five years ago this week, my Dad got us together at the dinner table and asked us what we thought about moving. I knew better than to imagine this was a democracy, so I braced myself for the truth: we were relocating to Norfolk, Virginia, where he would conduct the Virginia Symphony Orchestra. I had talked to someone in Tidewater on the ham radio, so I knew it existed - a warm marshy place? A beach?

And I still can't believe my reaction: I begged him to not take the job, I wanted us all to stay. I was willing to fight for this pathetic life, this turgid, go-nowhere, wretched existence with all my heart. I was in a living hell, but it was a living hell I understood. That's the curious thing about depression; in a way, you don't want to get better, because you believe the only thing holding you together is the predictability of your misery.

Twenty-five years ago tonight, I was staring out the window, the future murky as soup. I had no idea I was about to get a scholarship to the prep school that would introduce me to actual friends, then get me into an amazing university, then on, through the ragged hopscotch of all the blog entries of this week to where I lie right now, at thirty-eight, writing this blog in Venice, California.

That night, everything was about to change for the better, bless me with more providence, love and luck than I could possibly imagine... and I didn't want it, any of it. I wanted to stay right there and let the cold window fog up with my breath. The Lord may punish us by answering our prayers, but maybe he - or she - blesses us by knowing when not to listen.

venti anni fa

3/1/06

Exactly Twenty Years Ago: March, 1986

I had always seen the "makeover" scenes in movies, you know, like the one that had just been in "The Breakfast Club" a year before, but I always figured they were for other people. Twenty years ago, I was eighteen years old, and Christmas 1985 had been one of the worst scenes you could imagine: my parents throwing antiques at each other, culminating in my dad walking out forever, and my mom descending into temporary madness. When I trod out into the snow in Morristown, NY (where we were living for that brief period), I looked at the heavens and decided I needed a makeover.

I was still wearing the worst Coke-bottle glasses with a frame style from 1977, still cut my hair like Shaun Cassidy, had some of the worst clothes on earth, and terrible acne. I didn't figure I had much of a chance getting into Chi Psi, which was an amazing fraternity full of independent minds and mysterious traditions. At one of the rushee functions - well, hell, I'll just show you a picture:

That is with Kendall Crosswell (we're still great friends) before I managed to rescue myself from corduroy sport coats and knit ties for good. The day after that picture was taken, I asked Kendall's roommate to cut my hair. It took her three tries, and the dorm floor was completely covered, but I'd managed to accomplish what several tens of people in my high school had begged me to do since 1980.

That night, I noticed that the Accutane I'd been taking for five months had finally worked: I was free of zits, probably forever. After battling God on this one for so many years, pharmacology won out.

The next day, I went to the UNC Memorial Hospital optometrist and got my first pair of contact lenses - they were weighted for astigmatism, and it took me an hour to get them in, but I could see my own actual eyes for the first time since I was a kid. Then I got a sophomore to drive me and the Budster to University Mall, where I bought a couple of shirts and some awesome leather shoes from that men's shop that is surely gone by now.

And in that weekend - 20 years ago from last weekend - my entire life changed. When I went to class on Monday, nobody recognized me. I had to tell my teacher who I was, it was that drastic. That night, there was a rushee mixer with the Pi Phis (then and now an amazing sorority full of smart, intensely beautiful women), and I noticed that girls were actually looking at me.

One of them came up and smiled and talked to me. TALKED to ME. Three different women openly showed interest in me romantically and I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT. Nobody had ever glanced in my remote direction before this night. I immediately filed it under Why The Fuck Didn't I Do This in Seventh Grade.

From then on, for better or worse, I never believed I was out of anyone's league, never cared if I thought if I was cute enough. I was a quick learner, and since I'd come to the world of women so late, I decided I would go about "dating" and "sex" the way a cultural anthropologist would: trying to learn every last thing about it with my platonic girl-friends as tutors. It put me in good stead for years, even if it did ultimately eat me alive.

Twenty years ago tonight, I sat in my dorm room Hinton James, when Chip came over. This was rare, because he lived in Lewis Dorm, which was 78.4 miles away, and he got lost easily. He was supposed to pull some stunt where he would say that Chi Psi had decided to pass and I wasn't supposed to come around anymore, but he couldn't pull it off, and just told me that I had gotten a bid. And thus I hugged the Chipper.

me (with joke glasses) and the Budster, summer '86

In two weeks, I'd gone from fashionless zork with terrible skin, zero affection, and accoutrements stuck in the mid-1970s... to being a happy, wine-cooler sipping fratboy with a hot date to the pledge formal. I know it sounds like the plot to a bad episode of "The Brady Bunch," but for me, escaping the saturnine gloom and hollow-eyed asexuality of adolescence meant everything. I couldn't take my parents' divorce. I couldn't stomach another fantasy about a girl I'd never talk to. I wasn't going to be watching everything through a rainy window anymore, god dammit. The era of the violin dork who got beat up was OVER.

What dreams and joy all of you experienced at summer camp in ninth grade, I finally understood in 1986. And like the movie we watched over and over, it became My Favorite Year.

vor fünfzehn Jahren

2/28/06

Exactly Fifteen Years Ago: February 1991

I guess true poverty, like winter, is always glossed over when you're young, but those days in Chapel Hill, when the septentrional blasts were blanketing the town with freezing rain and news of war, are particularly easy to recall. I was living in the Purple House on McCauley Street with Salem, Bud, Eric G. (all wonderful commenters below) plus a few others, and the long-suffering boarding house was one rotting floorboard away from collapsing entirely.

The Purple House was the last stop for every receptacle. If you had a nasty plate that you gave to Goodwill, somehow it would end up in my cabinet. Did your VCR only fast-forward? It wound up at our house. Iron belch orange water? We used it anyway. If we threw it away, you knew that object was truly done.

The most infamous story from exactly fifteen years ago was Salem's rottweiler dog Bear, who crept into my room while I was away and peed into the back of the heater fan, sending piping hot urine spraying over the entirety of my bedroom. Posters were welded to the wall, my entire LP stuck together in a fetid mass, and I had to throw away most of my blankets. I called Salem (who was managing Spanky's at the time) in a furious rage, but after a few seconds, we were both laughing so hard we started to cry.

My car, a 1968 Volvo that had to be started with a locker key and had windows held in place with screwdrivers shoved into the upholstery, made it as a finalist in USA Today's "Worst Car Contest." We routinely used it for pranks and indie movie shoots, you know, like this:

In short, I was not on the grid. Not living an actual real life. The high ecstasy of being a campus celebrity translated very poorly to sticking around Chapel Hill after graduation, and I went from having a bright future to being a punchline, usually uttered by myself.

This was brought into sharp relief by my financial situation; in order to make our $180/month rent, some shenanigan must be performed. Mostly Bud and I "appropriated" cookie dough from his job at the pizza joint and used it as cash - you'd be surprised how far you can get amongst 21-year-olds with a bucket full of Otis Spunkmeyer chocolate chip cookie dough.

Finally, I began to sell myself out to medical experiments. Why not, right? The EPA had mobile sheds set up behind the hospital, and there were always five or six big drug tests going on at any given time. All you had to do was take the MMPI and prove you weren't crazy (and didn't have AIDS) and you could make A THOUSAND BUCKS just by giving yourself over to science.

I signed up for a doozy. Basically, I was to breathe ozone - O3 - for a half-hour while jogging, then perform some tests, followed by a bronchoscopy a week later. I had already lived in LA for the summer, so I figured it wasn't much different, and hell, I'd always wanted a camera shoved down my lung so I could see my brachioles, so it was a win-win. Besides, this one paid $1200 for a week's work!

I did the test - it seemed fine - then I went in for the bronchoscopy. They sprayed my throat with a novocaine solution, then slid the camera in... and despite my attempts at cavalier nonchalance, I began to shake. Then I began pounding my fists in fear. And then I nearly passed out with abject gagging, gargling terror. Quickly, they whisked the camera out and sent for a pulmonologist and a heart specialist.

A routine procedure became a conundrum for the esteemed heart department at UNC Memorial Hospital, because apparently my heartbeat "reversed polarities" or something for a split second. Grad students were poking their heads in, having heard the gossip, and I was still dressed in a butt-less paper gown.

Finally, they gave me some Valium and had me lie down on a bed by myself for an hour. And during those minutes, I had a conversion experience. I couldn't keep living like I was living. My life needed meaning, I had to get better, I had to resurrect my confidence. I had to escape the trap of what AA calls "the halo of early promise."

A few months earlier, the New York Times had done a story featuring me, and literary agents had called - I was now going to do something about it. On that bed, I decided to write a book proposal about "my generation," get it sold, and write for a living. On the way out the door of the science lab, the manager handed me a $2000 check for my troubles. I was rich, full of purpose, and the snow was melting.

hace diez años

2/27/06

Exactly Ten Years Ago: February 1996

To be honest, my "generation" was running out of options. We'd already bitched and complained about the terrible job market, and a few of us had already gone on Oprah to be derided by a national audience. It was one thing to be 22 and facing another temp job or working scab labor at IBM (like my buddies were doing), quite another for me at the age of 28.

I'd missed my window for leaving Chapel Hill. If I'd moved to New York in '93, riding the wave of small-but-easily-parlayed success of 13th-GEN and Next, I might have found a niche writing non-fiction books and doing freelance journalism, living in the then-drug-infested East Village and playing gigs with Block in dusky bars. But even in 1996, I was scared shitless of the big city - I mean, I was dating a hot sorority girl, drinking boxes of Franzia at the Pink House and Vince & Antawn had just shown up to practice.

I don't know if it's possible to recreate the feeling "the internet" gave us in early 1996. We'd already been on email for about three years, but hardly any of us had computers that would run a decent web browser, and we were all on dial-up anyway. When I heard my old fraternity brothers were starting an "online yellow pages with editorial viewpoints" called CitySearch, I failed to grasp the importance, but convinced them to create a job for me anyway.

My first day at the office, I had my virginal broadband experience. Pages loaded lightning quick, I could watch movies on the internet, and suddenly the future exploded into an effulgence too bright to contemplate. I was IN LURVE. They asked me what I wanted to do, and I told them I wanted to be their movie and theater reviewer. I also wanted to review the actual theaters themselves. Oh, and I didn't want to come into the office until 1pm. They said fine.

Those early days at CitySearch have to be the happiest I've ever known in a work situation (besides "From the Hip") because we were all young, drinking a lot, loved our boss Martha, and truly believed that we were starting a revolution. There were fierce debates over this chimera called an "advertorial" (which got squashed, temporarily), and we began our meetings with moments of meditation in Morrisville, and ended them in Carrboro at the Cradle listening to The Cardigans.

The Research Triangle Park, which had hitherto only been a triangle and never a park, began to do research. There were Web companies springing up all around, and by 1997, if you had a pulse and some discernable talent, you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a job. It helped that CitySearch had a Dream Team full of editorial people who were about to be huge in their fields: David Surowiecki, Dana Terebleski Bowen, Alan Benson, even Lindsay, Chip and your fave Lars - not to mention incredible minds like Dani Moore, Ashley Farrell, Jerry Salley and everyone else.

early CS masthead pic, 1996 (by Lars Lucier)

I thought the internet was going to change everything, how we thought, how we shopped, how we made every decision, and I wanted to be on the front lines. Our site, when it debuted later in the year, was a non-functional disaster, but I didn't care: I was happy to take the arrows as the first soldiers storming the castle. What we didn't understand was that we were too early.

The internet - besides email and early games - simply did not make any sense at all until people had broadband in their homes, and in February 1996, that had to be about .1% of our clientele. We had people telling us they didn't think the Web was really going to "pan out," and the IBA's (Internet Business Advisors, like Lee!) had to convince, say, Spanky's that they would actually need a website.

This story ends like so many others: the exuberance shown in the beginning is in direct inverse proportion to the disgust shown to you in the end. Everyone was either sloughed off through attrition, fired, re-assigned to something they hated, or asked to move to a city they didn't know as soon as CS went international. The company was bought, then bought again, and now it shows almost zero resemblance to the editorial juggernaut we designed it to be. I was one of the last originals, leaving in 1999.

By then, I was in Los Angeles and my life disintegrated, beginning a depression spiral that wound up in yesterday's blog. But lo, that moment in early 1996, I saw that everything was truly going to be different. It may have taken until... well, now, really ... for the Web to be what we envisioned, but I'll never forget the instant I saw my generation's Get Out of Jail Free card flickering on a 14-inch screen in the piedmont of North Carolina.

vijf jaar geleden

2/26/06

Last night, while frittering away my sleep hours in another bout with insomnia - an affliction I never had until very recently - I was thinking about how crazy shit has happened to me in Februaries going back 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 years ago from this week. Thus, as I fling myself bodily into a golden shower of boiling indulgence, I'm going to use this week to go back into time those specific number of years, and as always, you're free to do the same.

Exactly Five Years Ago: February 2001

If you loved "Back to the Future" when it came out in 1985 as much as I did, you might have been looking forward to the two sequels a few years later. Those later movies were Crispin Glover-less and therefore cruddy, but another problem was that Michael J. Fox's "present" was stuck at 1985, and the third movie was released in 1990.

So there we were watching the movie in 1990, and I had gone from being seventeen (like Marty McFly) to being twenty-two, and thus 1985 felt like an entire geological epoch ago.

I could say the same about early 2001. At that time, I was working at That Internet Job in way-downtown Manhattan, eating two or three lunches a week at the World Trade Center salad bar in the foot of the North Tower. In fact, about five years ago this week, Lindsay, Jon and I went up to the Windows of the World and got a seven-dollar Coke. The maitre-d wouldn't let me in unless I had "good shoes," so I went down to the mall in the basement beneath the towers and bought black leather shoes at the Banana Republic.

Whenever I look at those shoes in my closet, I feel like I rescued them. It's very odd to own shoes that ought to have perished. But I digress.

That Internet Job was a curious beast: we were the last true speculative dot-com from the halcyon days, the last one afloat, the only spaceship in orbit that still had oxygen. We noted other companies falling around us, but we were still flush, still had an incredible pool table, still rolled around in Aeron chairs.

I started that job as I did all such endeavors (more on that tomorrow), with boundless energy, high hopes and working very hard at making the company look flawless to the outside. I was the senior editor, meaning every word on the site would be mine, and even though I had been crippled with a debilitating back injury that made "sitting" a living hell, I "generated content" like nobody's business.

There comes a moment when you find yourself and your co-workers talking a fair amount of shit, then a lot of shit, and imperceptibly, your entire feeling towards the job changes into an us-versus-them dynamic. Feeling adrift, I began to look for things to do, and not finding them, began to slack horribly and engage in office shenanigans of the rudest, moderately shameful and most myopic variety.

By February, almost all of the big dot-coms had imploded; our site wasn't done yet, and I got the feeling that I was going to be fired every day I walked in. Surely they were noticing that there was nothing for me to do but re-arrange deck chairs, and I'd be found out. My stomach lining began to wear away, and my entire department became populated with fatalists, sure that they would be yanked before the stock options came into play.

By the time the ax fell on us, it was almost June, and the HR people led us into a room one by one. It was bloody intense. There was a "heavy" in there to make sure nobody went postal, and another to watch each of us clean out our desks. When the main HR woman asked me "how I felt" about being let go, I was proud of my response: "Frankly, I was wondering why it took you so long." I remember how they all smiled, and the whole room relaxed. Needless to say it did not go that well for everybody.

Side note: two days after the towers came down, I was at Union Square with Tessa, in a crowd, welling with tears at the memorials, candles, pictures and brotherhood that had overcome the city. I looked next to me, and there was the HR woman, crying next to me. She had just been fired herself, and we hugged, all pretense gone.

But back to February for a brief second. Because Brendan Haywood sank those two free throws to beat Dook at Dook, Tessa got me in a good mood and made me agree to go visit her dad in Houston for the weekend. I'm forever glad I did, because it meant I actually interacted with her inimitable father. For his part, they say I might be the last person he ever met and remembered. I played the piano for him, and he was still clapping and nodding as I left his house for the plane. I peeked back at him knowing it would be the only time I ever saw him alive.

Remember Tessa and I were only dating at the time, and our future had yet to be divined. But I remember thinking that if we did happen to end up together, it was an incredible stroke of happenstance that I met the man himself. Hell, I didn't even see Five Wives until a month later at the Academy screening, but at least I went in knowing the major players.

with Blakey, Feb. 2001

Five years ago marked the beginning and end of a few things: for one, I'd fully released myself of what Tom Waits called "these old tom-cat feelings you don't understand" by contemplating an actual future with Tessa, something that I wouldn't have thought possible even three months before, believing I was so romantically damaged as to be unsalvageable.

The other was the beginning of the end of my unmanaged and thoughtless hubris (meaning, of course, my present hubris is managed and nicely scheduled). Some of the things I did during That Internet Job truly boggle my present-day mind, such petty and asinine bullshit. There are two things in particular that make me white with shame, and all I can cull from the experience is that it ended.

That month set a spiral that culminated in my job termination, the disastrous shoot of the Pink House movie, losing all the money I'd saved, enduring a clench-throated PTSD following the 9/11 attacks, and suddenly realizing that I probably wasn't going to live forever. Man, as soon as you get a bunch of niggling stuff like that out of the way, it's easier to breathe, huh?