xtcian

the ladies, they know what time it is

5/27/10

Everyone please have a fantastically safe Memorial Day weekend, and I'll see you on Tuesday with a report on all my schemes, both hare-brained and sanguine.

Lucy and Tessa, week of Memorial Day in 2005 and 2010, in the same room at the restaurant by our house

man clones himself, then dates his clone, ensuring hilarity

5/25/10

GFWD asked a good question - no, not the one about this blog being "just a dream inside of a snow globe of some little kid's mind", although that's pretty awesome - but about the bigger scripts we've worked on every year since we started. When you work in our business, you have to be cagy beyond belief, since there's always the fear someone will come and hijack your material, but shit, I've been scooped so many times I barely care anymore. I'm sure Tessa would be okay with me giving a very, very small description of these, since they're either too bizarre to steal, or too convoluted to translate.

Here's a partial list of what we've been working on, and some of them are still in the game, so I'll be vague:

2004: Hogwarts School in America. Sorta.
2005: Tessa's documentary set to drama.
2006: A fighting couple can fix anyone's problem.
2007: A paranoid conspiracy thriller romance mixing the ideas of "Griffin and Sabine", "The Tipping Point" and my then-fear of flying.
2008: Comedy about a family rallying around a dysfunctional brother.
2009: Spooky police procedural set in a "Twilight Zone" Manhattan.
2010: Four or perhaps five projects vying for first position in our collective heads, but one is autobiographical, one is political, and one is supernatural.

Sound interesting? Okay, I'm off to suck frosting off candles! As it were!

we don't look; we overlook

5/26/10

Let me be brutally honest. It's my birthday in a few days, which always brings on big-picture musings. Maybe if I just say it out loud, the solar disinfectant will do the rest.

I'm not particularly happy in California, and I realize most of this has been my fault - I haven't gone out of my way to make friends, and despite constant meetings in the Biz, I'm a bit of a shut-in. Sure, you can always decide to be happy with a place, but then again, anyone who knows me knows I enjoy being pissed off much more than showing magnanimous restraint.

As Tessa calls it, New York is my oxygen. Being at the farm, seeing my family, cavorting with old friends and just being back on the East Coast provides constant joy, but I can't be a whale, spending my life underwater only to rise to the surface to inhale great gulps of air. I need to be able to breathe where I live.

Besides, leaving California is an impossibility right now. Lucy just got into the kindergarten/grade school of her (well, our) dreams, Tessa is thriving, and we live in a great spot on the ocean. And coming back to NY now, as much as I don't want to think like an un-evolved twit, would feel like a massive failure on my part.

As writers go, we've been super blessed. We've gotten a great script deal almost every year since 2004, which meant food on the table, bigger meetings, and still being a player in the game. Twice we've come close to shooting our own pilot. Lots of people in our avocation would consider us living the dream, but for Tessa and I, we never cared about the Hollywood thing, the incidentals, the starfuckery... we only wanted to be working on great shows.

And so I live in the liminal between two places: a dreamland I can't let go of, and a homeland that won't let go of me. I spent 25 years making my friends, I just don't know if I have the energy to make any more. Your people are your people, your tribe is the only one that can make you laugh.

I sat on the deck I made today, staring out over the expanse of the Taconics and the Catskills, and tried to breathe, but it's hard to relax when you feel like your time is on loan from another place. Like all long-distance relationships, there's too much pressure on the fleeting weekends, and too much imparted during the longing looks at airports. I want the same thing as the Buddha, Confucius and Buckaroo Banzai: to know that wherever you go, there you are.

I think Lucy snapped this pic with my camera

oh, neonta!

5/23/10

I just pulled into our farm in upstate New York, having driven from Iowa City in a minivan with two apple trees, a little girl's purple bicycle, a deflated redneck above-ground pool and a tiny dog. Any of you found yourself in surreal circumstances over the last few weeks?

if you remember, then follow follow follow

5/20/10

Tessa walks through Wilson's Orchard, 2004

In September 2004, Tessa and I were driving to Los Angeles through Iowa, and my brother Kent took us to Wilson's Orchard not far from their house in Iowa City. I've always had a thing for apple orchards - the simplicity, the overflowing of fruit, even the apples-gone-bad smell in mid-October - but Wilson's is truly a legendary place.

We sampled at least a dozen different varieties, but when we came to one particular tree, I was thunderstruck. The particular apples on a tree they called the Song of September were the most amazing I'd ever experienced. All the crisp tartness of a good Granny Smith, the sweetness of a Fuji and Braeburn, the spice of those New Zealand "Jazz" apples, and an extra spice all its own. I picked about 20, feeding them to random horses in Wyoming as we made our way westward.

That tree has never left my consciousness, and last year, I did the research: its other name is "Sweet Sixteen", and it was a hybrid of very old trees developed by the University of Minnesota thirty years ago to withstand their brutal winters. The stunning flavor was basically a happy accident.

Very few places carry the Song of September tree in semi-dwarf form (normal apple trees grow 30 feet tall, and make picking a big problem), but I found two: a nursery in Wisconsin, and one, conveniently, on the other side of Iowa City. I called and reserved the last one they had.

Instead of flying back to New York like we usually do right now, I flew to Iowa City today. Tomorrow, I'm going to hand with my brother Kent, then I'm going to fetch my semi-dwarf apple tree (along with a different varietal for pollination) and drive the rest of the way to our farm in New York. And, god willing, Lucy and Tessa will help me put it in the ground somewhere wonderful, as part of their birthdays and Mother's Day. O sweet Song of September, I pray you shall be mine!

Song of Sept. apple, Wilson's Orchard, 2004

now with extra chunktastic yakberry shavings

5/18/10

The winner of our cute li'l NIT pool (god, please spare us from that ever again) ended up being someone anonymous... well, actually, *I* know who it is, but I'm not sure he can out himself. So until we get that little bit of no-fun behind us, I'm going to hand over the reins today to "once a heel" from the comments section, given his expertise on last week's human body topics.

Given all the crap we're fed (as it were) about supplements, diets, and what to put in our esophagii, I wanted someone to break it down for us Young MC-style, so here he is:

***

Ian asked that I write a blog about nutrition, but I don't feel comfortable giving advice about individual eating/exercise regimens (talk to your doctors). However, I do know a little something about metabolism and biochemistry and, like many of you, share an interest in why things are the way they are. I also prefer to remain an "internet expert" which means I value my anonymity and as such there's no reason for any of you to ascribe credibility to anything I say here.

So instead I'm going to recommend you watch this:

It's a 90-minute seminar given by Dr. Robert Lustig to students at UCSF arguing a major factor contributing to the obesity epidemic in this country (and spreading worldwide). Now I know what you're thinking... but give it a chance. The guy is fairly entertaining. There's some technical biochemistry stuff in the middle (which he actually undersells, IMO) but any good Carolina grad should be able to follow the rest of it.

Disclaimer: the guy is trying to drive home a point, which means he uses inflammatory language, only pays lip service to other contributing factors, and in some cases, ignores some data that doesn't quite fit the hypothesis. So while what he says here shouldn't be taken as the be-all and end-all about why we're so damn fat, he does highlight some interesting issues in the course of telling his story.

In a nutshell:
1) a key change in our diet began in the 70's.
We reduced the amount of fat we ate while dramatically increasing the amount of fructose consumption (by as much as 5X).

2) the change was driven by political, economic, and scientific forces that were (at least partially) well-intentioned.
Nixon, who was fighting a "War on Poverty", didn't want the cost of food to be a political issue in the elections - food prices needed to get lower (and more stable). Around this time, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) hit the US - it was so cheap (and sweet) it quickly made its way into everything, including baby formula. Finally, in the early 80's, health professionals all said we needed to reduce the amount of fat consumed in our diets from 40% to 30% to reduce heart disease.

3) these changes had disastrous consequences.
We did it! Only 30% of our calories now come from fat, but obesity and associated metabolic syndromes (including cardiovascular disease (CVD), Type 2 diabetes, lipidemias, hypertension, etc) have simultaneously gone through the roof. It can't all be blamed on lifestyle choices.

4) a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing - to solve one problem we inadvertently made it worse in ways couldn't predict at the time because the body is a complicated thing and we still don't know much about how it works.
Because taking the fat out of food makes it taste like crap, we had to add HFCS as a sweetener to make it palatable. Turns out, however, there were some interpretation flaws with the fat=CVD studies, in part because we didn't know that there was "good fat" and "bad fat".

We also didn't understand that fructose is not metabolized in the same way as glucose (another prominent sugar in our diet). Only a relatively small amount of glucose gets converted to fat. Much of the excess glucose is stored as glycogen in the liver - you might gain weight this way, but you can basically store an unlimited amount of glycogen without getting sick.

In contrast, almost all the fructose gets converted to "bad fat". In other words, all the fat we took out of our diets was more than offset by the fat derived from the fructose we added in its place, and we added a lot! Worse yet, when you eat glucose you induce hormonal changes that ultimately signal to your brain that you don't need to eat anymore. The way in which fructose is metabolized may partially interfere with those signals so you don't feel as full and you keep eating more than you should.
 
 

 
 
5) "when God made the poison, he packaged it with the antidote."
But isn't fructose normally found in fruit and aren't fruits good for us? Yes, but the amount we ingest from fruits is way less than what we're putting in everything else. Fruits have a lot of fiber as well. Amongst other things, fiber limits the amount we eat and the efficiency with which it's absorbed. Unfortunately, we've also taken all the fiber out of our foods in order to increase shelf life, allow for freezing, and facilitate preparation.

6) even though we can see this was a mistake, the myths persist with many folks thinking they're eating healthy (less fat) when they're not. Furthermore, there's a whole set of beholden institutions that oppose correcting the problem.
If this stuff is so bad for us, why don't the FDA, USDA, etc. do something about it? Food is one of the few things we still export to the rest of the world (along with weapons and entertainment). Who's going admit that we intentionally make our food less safe? Besides, if you took out the HFCS and put back the fiber the food would taste worse, cost more, and couldn't be frozen/stored for shipping. You don't need to be an econ major to do the math.

7) it basically comes down to a choice between being fat or flatulent.
No one is advocating completely cutting fructose from your diet but if you want to start eating healthier, try to reduce the amount of foods you eat with added fructose (in all its various forms) and eat more fiber. You'll eat less (and feel less hungry), you won't get as fat, and you'll greatly reduce your risk for metabolic syndrome diseases.

But, you will fart more.

***

gunland über alles

5/16/10

Oh, SHUT UP. SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP.

Every time one of you people speak, you embarrass the rest of us.

Not that my pulpit can do much - and I have remained relatively quiet and sanguine about you so-called "Tea Partiers"- but something very small has broken not just my camel's back, but also any sense of decorum I have left for you idiots. You want war? You want confrontation? While most other progressives and liberals are content to wring their hands and fret, I am now nearing the point where if it comes to a fair street fight, I'll be happy to throw punches into your gelatinous guts.

Why do you get all the airtime? I've had enough of listening to your crackpot horseshit. It's like the inmates took over the nursing station and figured out the public address system. Someone needs to take you down with tranquilizer darts, chain you to your own couch, turn on "The Rockford Files" and force-feed you Double-Stuff Oreos until you go back to being the harmless morons you once were.

You are not allowed to use terms, theories or historical events YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND. You throw around the words "fascist" and "Nazi" and "Austrian economics" without any motherfucking sense of what those words mean, or who those people were. You can't be reasoned with, because you begin the argument so far away from baseline reality that "common ground" is a sick joke.

Hell, your actual name is a testament to how little you understand history. Do you have any sense of what the Boston Tea Party was about? At least you don't dress up like Injuns when you go to your rallies, but it doesn't stop you from blaming every other race on earth for your own problems.

And your sickening rallies, with those putrescent signs - you rail against government, call Obama "Hitler" and speak in assassination rhetoric... even though your rallies are held on government-funded lands, which you drove to in your government-buttressed American car, on roads paved by the government. Oh, and you're able to shout at your rallies because the government controlled the tobacco companies long enough to keep you from throat cancer, and your kids don't have flesh-eating bacteria because of the Center for Disease Control, and you're not at work because unions invented something called the weekend.

Truth is, you wouldn't last one hot second if your paradigm-destruction fantasies came true. Sure, you might be fine with your canned food and your rifles for a few weeks, but after that, you'll be writhing outside your home in dehydrated agony, covered in sores, with nobody to help you (because you shot your neighbors).

Honestly, I think that's a place all of you deserve to go. You need your own country. We'll carve out a part of America that'll be all yours, and to make you more at home, we'll shape it like a discharged firearm! I once offered up American Coastopia as a way to cope, but now I'd like to offer you Tea Partiers your own home: Gunland!

Yes, in Gunland, you don't have a government, no taxes, no census, and nobody telling you what to do. You also have scabies, drink toilet water, and you'll have to barter your girls for emu meat. Roads don't actually go anywhere, and it's hard to cool off when the beaches are covered with crude oil, syringes and human ears. But at least you're not being bossed around by "Hitler" anymore!

In Gunland, might makes right, and "being too smart" is punishable by quartering. You're allowed to quarantine the gays, and fire on "suspicious-looking people" near the border, because God will surely sort them out. You will have fun with your Austrian economy (as soon as you learn to pronounce Böhm-Bawerk) and you will grow old with calluses earned from a lifetime of bootstrap-pulling (well, not that old, as your life expectancy will be about 47).

But I'd be careful. There are some pretty awful influenzas going around. And killer bees from Mexico. And you're right in the path of the most powerful hurricanes in the world. As much as it pains me to say it, stranger, if the finger of God comes along and flicks Gunland's humanity asunder, you made your choices. You're on your own, assholes.

runnin' for the shelter

5/12/10

Because of some comments, emails, and Facebook messages about the last few blogs, I probably should be less callous and more honest when discussing our physical forms. I've definitely had to battle all kinds of body self-loathing issues, many of them instilled early on - I've tried not to talk about them much on the blog, but over the years, these things leak out.

My own weight ballooned after my metabolism changed around age 22, and you can see it in the pictures I took at Carolina, as I went from being a stick figure to a marshmallowy fratboy. My weight spent the next 18 years yo-yo-ing around, but I confess: I fucking hated being overweight, even if it was slight. Pictures of me from certain times made me so fucking nauseous that I would go into spasm and lose a shitload of weight out of anger.

the unfathomable 1994 "alterno-chick" Halloween pic at left prompted me to lose 15 pounds by six months later (w/ Chip), right

When I started taking Dexedrine a few months before I turned 40, I did it for lifelong ADD reasons and had no idea about its weight-loss properties. I was flyin' pretty fat at the time, having joined Tessa in 2004-05 in her pregnancy weight gain, only I wasn't actually carrying a baby in my belly:

I started the Dexedrine in October 2006, and by January, I was wondering why all my shorts were falling off. By May 2007, I had lost about 20 pounds:

...and it just made everything So. Much. Easier. I could run faster, I started working out regularly, and it heightened my mood immeasurably. Was it a cheat? Sorta. And to be sure, some of these effects weren't permanent (my depression spiked soon after, and only recently has abated) but keeping the weight off is a priority, not just because it's healthy, but because I HAVE AN UNHEALTHY RELATIONSHIP TO THE WAY I LOOK AND FEEL WHEN I'M FUCKING FAT.

There, I said it. I know I may sound like a petulant teenager, or someone not well put-together. It also may sound like I judge others for their weight - after all, if you hate your own weight so much, what's stopping you from hating theirs? I assure you, it doesn't work like that.

And so now I can ask you, the world at large (if you will): Do you find yourself hating a part - or a characteristic - of your own body? And specifically, how is your weight and how do you deal with it?

You may answer as yourself, of course, but anonymous animals are always honest-er.

nothin' a few whale placenta caplets won't fix

5/11/10

While we're talking about the whole getting-into-your-forties-gracefully thing, I should get a word in about vitamins or supplements, which remain something that a) someone in their 20s thinks is insane, and b) someone in their 40s will think is a waste of time until they truly start believing there's a shot at extending their stay on the planet.

My biggest problem about supplements is not the cost (which can be prohibitive), or if they work, but just remembering to take the fuckers every day. And if the supplement demands to be taken more than once a day, I find it offensive. A life that demands shark cartilage capsules every four hours is a life that doesn't deserve lasting longer.

The misinformation and hype around vitamins and supplements isn't much better than it was on the Oregon Trail circa 1842, and it tends to originate from some pretty desperate websites and un-rigorous anecdotal evidence screamed in comment sections. Which leads you to Wikipedia or medicine journals, written in language you can't possibly fathom (check out Wikipedia's entry on the popular N-A-C supplement).

Thank god for the internet; it views such deficiencies as a virus and works around it. Behold the best graph I've seen on the subject yet... the size of the circle is determined by Google hit popularity, and the closer the circle is to the top, the more scientific evidence that it works:

 
 
But this is just a snapshot for today. Click on the image itself for the interactive version, updated all the time, with all the relevant info ported into the graph as it comes through trial studies. Kudos to the fine folks at Information is Beautiful - actually putting in a "worth it" line? Brilliant!

generation XL-ies

5/10/11

It used to be that TURNING FORTY had to be expressed in all caps, and was mentioned either in an existential moan, or as the punchline to a joke. This was the residue, obviously, of an American society that didn't live past 60, rarely got taller than five-foot-six, and drank asbestos cordials whenever they got the grippe.

In that society, back when our grandparents ruled the earth, forty basically meant the inexorable slide towards the buttery green beans at the steakhouse buffet, and they acted like it: the zoot suits, crazy nylons with the calf seams, and snappy dialogue was instantly replaced by horn-rimmed glasses, blue hair and the failing strength to say something racist from the Barcolounger.

If anything, we've overcorrected. The average 40-year-old in today's urban environment might wear a suit to work, but on weekends, he and his lesser-employed friends don the same shit as early twentysomethings - even if they're immediately distinguishable by the paunch and that particular thick-neckedness that afflicts every single one of us. The unmarried 40-year-olds are still in skate shoes or unflattering Pumas, cracking wise with chicks half their age over small vials of Jaegermeister. Unfortunately for these ladies, these dudes are actually old enough to be moderately funny.

I can tell you this, however: there is middle ground. In terms of medicine, dietary knowledge, exercise and attitude, 40 can actually be the new 27 without you looking like a total moron. There's no magic bullet for everyone's success, but if I were forced to give a bullet list, it'd look something like this:

• don't be the one who gets fat
• really. don't get fat. you gained weight around 35, and if you can lose it - in whatever way possible - you're way ahead of the game
• know yourself. don't stay up late, drive that extra 150 miles, or play that last game because you think you have to. you don't have to. you've earned the right not to have to.
• don't wear white sneakers with jeans
• take Vitamin D3, Omega-3/6/9 fish oil tablets, and Co-Q10
• don't be a luddite. don't instantly hate new technology just because everyone's talking about it. if you don't like Twitter or Facebook or the iPad or something, keep it to yourself, because your complaints are BORING
• remain emotionally elastic, able to absorb new things without instant rejection, take everyone's viewpoint seriously for at least 30 seconds
• DO NOT LOSE TOUCH WITH OLD FRIENDS. EVEN IF THEY HAVE KIDS. EVEN IF YOU HAVE KIDS. The hive still needs you, and you need it.

Do I always follow all of these? Fuck no (except for the white sneakers thing). But it's as good a place as any to start, when (in the words of Captain Aubrey) the "blue devils" begin to weigh on your self-perception. If you're still in the game, you're still in the game. I remember back in my twenties, when folks in their forties would say "I'm in better shape now and feel better than I ever have," I'd think "Bullshit, you old fart." Yet here I am, very clearly able to beat the shit out of myself at 24.

The forties are the age of judgment, when people start to wonder if you are actually going to make your mark, like you said you were all those years ago. It's the time when you yourself are wondering if you're still capable of phases, or if this is accidentally who you are. If you want to affect culture, it might seem like time is running out. It has been a long time since you were a teenager - to paraphrase Morrissey, do your songs say nothing to them about their lives?

Probably not, but some truths are universal, and one is that confidence is contagious. To all the wonderful people recently embarked on their forties, add your thoughts if you still want your yawp recorded for posterity, and a very happy birthday to not just my incredible Tessa, but the other of us May babies: Chip, Salem, and especially my brother Sean, who TURNS FORTY today. Whoo-hoo!

Sean, Barnaby and me, March '07

catherine wheeled

5/9/10

This one goes out to all of you who carried one or more babies in your belly, or came along to swoop up and save a li'l pumpkin who needed you, and how insane it is that a card manufacturer had to give you a day of your own, when we should take fifteen minutes out of every day to bask in the incredible awesomeness that is all of you.

And when that same Mother's day falls upon the actual birthday of the mother of Lucy, well, then, that's a celestial event in my household. There was once a time when I pushed my rock up that hill, when I felt Zero at the Bone, and the skies modulated from gray to grey.

I was a little troubled
Hookah with my senses bubbled
All Edward leared
Then she appeared

And the moon which formerly shone
On the marbled midnight mile
Suddenly just packed its bags
Now shines from her bright smile
Then she appeared.

photo by Lucy

quiet, i'm visualizing my future porsche

5/5/10

I watched just twenty minutes of Project Runway this season while Tessa was convalescing on the couch. However, it was the finale episode, and it was long enough to see yet another contestant behave in a way I find utterly stupefying. For those of you who don't watch the show, don't worry, it's only a metaphor.

Anytways, "Project Runway" had winnowed the contestants down to four designers: two had already made it to Fashion Week, and two others were competing for the third spot: Mila (a vaguely dour 40-year-old woman from Dallas) and Jay (a 31-year-old slightly-queenie guy living in San Francisco). During one of his tête-a-têtes with the camera, Jay was utterly derisive, positively dripping with disdain for Mila, saying he wasn't even thinking about her, and was only really competing with the two guys who were already in.

 
Jay vs. Mila

Of course, Jay doesn't beat the other guys - he doesn't even get past Mila, and doesn't go to Bryant Park. Obvious enough, but it led me to thinking: Yes, I know it's a reality show, but once you look at it philosophically, why the fuck do people say such stupid fucking things? In what way was he helping himself? He obviously believed it would have cost him something to stay silent, or to offer even faint praise (as Mila did to him).

While talking to Tessa this afternoon, she summed it up: all of us have a very complicated relationship with the things we don't have yet. Entire industries have sprung out of the psychology of want and the self-help of desire, the business of getting things you think you deserve. The most prevalent right now - and the easiest to mock - is The Secret, with its pseudoscience and blaming the victim ("you didn't want it enough!"), but like all belief systems, it contains shreds of truth.

One could say Jay was just thinking in the Secret's own vernacular of violent positivity; if he put his sights higher than Mila, he would surely pass her by. Tessa mentioned all the visualization work done by modern athletes, "pre-enacting" both the race and standing on the podium. There's no room for losers on Sportscenter or at auditions; hell, there's not even room for people who think they might lose.

I tend to think Jay suffered from one of the more tedious character flaws of young artists - the belief that your own hubris is part of the art itself, and if you drop your pretense, the art will suffer in kind. Kind of like "of course I'm an asshole - I shatter preconceptions, just like my novels! If I offer pleasantries to you, I'm not being honest to my work!" I say this as someone who has no doubt pulled something similar out of my ass.

But here's the thing: that shit don't work. It always comes back to the art in question, or the actor in question, or, in business, your sales, your profit, your performance. If you say something asinine en route to your end result, that doesn't make you a wunderkind or a failure, it just makes you asinine.

There was only one person who said he was the greatest while he was the greatest, and that was Muhammad Ali. All the other greats let their work do the talking: Michael Jordan may have been a dick, but he never went on record. Wayne Gretsky, Dean Smith, Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, The Beatles and Jim Henson all behaved with grace, and acted like they'd been there before.

Demurring and acting graciously doesn't just endear you to your fellow man, it actually relieves pressure on yourself, allowing you to work without additional loss of stomach lining. To those who say they need the extra pressure to turn in brilliance, I say horseshit: if you're meant to be what you seek, there's more than enough pressure.

I know being well-mannered about your goals makes for boring television, and you're never going to sell a book entitled "The REAL Secret: The Universe Doesn't CARE What You Want" but I've seen enough nice guys (and girls) finish first to wonder why everyone else is being such a dick about it.

hammer a six-inch spike through a board

5/4/10

We just got done watching Real Genius this evening, and watched Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the one with the whales) last week - Tessa had seen neither, which in my circle of '80s accomplices, was required viewing. Up next will be Overboard and Spinal Tap (I know, right?)

Do you have any cultural touchstones you love, but your significant other has yet to experience?

I loved Michelle Meyrink with the blue-hot fission of a thousand supernovae

and when president fillmore said jump, we said-

5/3/10

I'm not that fucking old, people, I swear I'm not. I know being 42 sounds ancient to you folks in your twenties (as it did to me back then) but trust me, at 42 you're dating a cousin of the same bullshit you used to be dating at 28. Yes, there are a few physical changes, but they're mostly restricted to hangovers and love handles. As a guy, your precious daydreams have wavered little; they usually manage to come back to boobies without too much fuss.

However. When I explain the peculiar habits or technology of my youth to Lucy, I sound like I should be churning butter for the Mormon Handcart Brigades across 19th-century Wyoming. Consider the recent things we've discussed:

• When I was a kid, there was no ATM machine, so my mom waited in line with her car at the drive-thru bank, where she would write a check for cash, then insert it into a metal canister. The canister would be sucked through pneumatic tubes to the teller, who would then put a stack of $20 bills in it and shoot it back to us. This happened every Friday afternoon, and the line of station wagons without air conditioning stretched forever.

• We had three channels of television, and a fourth PBS station came in fuzzy. In order to watch Sesame Street, my dad had to roll up tinfoil into big snakes and stick them on the aerial behind the TV. You couldn't go to the bathroom during it, or you'd miss something. And it was in black-and-white, which was all washed-out until you put this plastic cover on the screen that made the picture look better.

• Kids didn't have car seats, and when I was three years old, I traveled from California to Iowa sitting between the front two seats - on top of the emergency brake - without a belt, in a 1966 squareback Volkswagen.

helping my dad wash the VW

• Nobody had a phone in their pocket until about ten years ago. Before that, you just had to leave messages at people's houses and hope they checked them. But when I was a kid, there were no answering machines, so sometimes you'd let the phone ring fifteen times until they could get to it. When we moved to London when I was nine, we arranged our friends to pick us up by writing letters called aerogrammes.

• I went to the doctor and he zapped my eyes into seeing clearly about ten years ago. Before that, I had to wear glasses, but I hated my glasses so much that I would take them off for almost every picture. So there's hardly any pictures of me wearing glasses, and there's hardly any pictures of anybody from that time because you used to have to drop your film off at the drugstore and wait a week before you could see photographs.

• When I went to the University of North Carolina, I got a Macintosh for my junior year, but my sophomore year, I was using a typewriter. One night I was fixing a stuck key when the typewriter ribbon fell out of my bunkbed (I was on the top bunk) and it rolled around the room. I had to get Uncle Chip and Uncle Jon to help me roll it all back up, and our hands were all black.

And thus starts the questions: "what's a typewriter ribbon?" "how do you write an aerogramme?" "why is there a brake for emergencies?" Oh, I'm not old, I'm NOT. I STILL ROCK AND/OR ROLL! But some anecdotes make me feel like I'm a three-hundred-foot oak tree that has seen empires rise and fall.

wonderfully wonderfully wonderfully wonderfully pretty

5/2/10

In the middle of April in 1987, my mom and 14-year-old sister came to pick me up at Carolina en route to a beach house they'd rented in South Carolina for Easter weekend. My 16-year-old brother Sean had already been on campus for a few days, doing some underage drinking and hooking up with a chick in Cobb Dorm, which I thought was pretty impressive.

Mom and Michelle walked the four flights of stairs up to 407 Grimes, where they saw my roommates Chip and Jon, all of us in a room that defined being nineteen years old in 1987: Cure posters, Springfest t-shirts on the floor, blue cups, sugar cereals and a map of America where someone in the dorm had drawn an arrow above Maryland saying "girls above this line fuck".

later that day in a field near Dillon, SC: Michelle, their friend Jessica, and Sean

It was there my sister first saw Jon Vaden, and I doubt either thought much of it; Michelle was middle-angst, post-parents-divorce with half her head shaved, and Jon had RTVMP homework (usually defined by Chip as "having to watch 'Three's Company'"). It was a brief encounter, but whatever seedling was planted took twenty-one years to germinate, and I should know - a few months later and a few blocks away, I met my own wife, and it took us thirteen years to get our act together.

Jon feels an incredible amount of pressure, most of it self-inspired, to behave honorably, and in many cases it came at the expense of his own happiness. He has always stuck with situations long past his sense of self-preservation, because he knew it to be the right thing to do. We used to give him nicknames like "Needles" and "Will You Stop Touching Me" because we thought he was emotionally halted - the truth was, he was feeling things far too much.

My sister, for her part, wandered the Land of Dudes, where she temporarily sacrificed the absurd, intense delightfulness of her pre-teen psyche to the numbing mediocrity of guys who had no business keeping up with her. Finally, she packed it in, moved to Napa Valley and resurrected its Arts Council before being whisked away to Santa Cruz to oversee a million-dollar budget in one of the best metropolitan arts communities in the country.

They have always seen each other at various farm get-togethers and Jartaculars, as my close friends and family have wonderfully blurry lines, but they began their courtship over a feature not directly intended for marriage: the "chat" function on Facebook's old Scrabble™ application. You know, the one that was good.

on Saturday, with Sean officiating

If there were ever two needs met, two souls actualized by one event, Jon and Michelle getting together defines not just love, but the efficiency of love. In one act, my sister finally finds the man she has been looking for, no longer having to slow herself down so that the stragglers can keep up... and one of my best, oldest friends in the world can finally be content, be sated, be blissful, and relax.

Not that he will relax, nor she, because Michelle and Jon are inherent doers of stuff, accomplishers of things, and wranglers of interest. But tomorrow, we'll drive them to the San Jose airport, where they will board a plane for Hawaii, and for a few days, may the gentle swells of a warm ocean tell them both their wait is over.

(photos by the amazing Lars Lucier)