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What It Is: 4/5/10

What I’m reading: Indignation, by Philip Roth, and The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. I finished David Carr’s The Night of the Gun last week, and enjoyed the heck out of it.

What I’m listening to: The soundtrack to Moon and A Friend of a Friend.

What I’m watching: Not a lot. We never turned the TV on in the hotel last week. I watched some of the NCAA final four and the Yankees-Red Sox season opener, but otherwise, meh.

What I’m drinking: After the 4 cups of wine at last week’s seder, I’ve actually been dry. Apparently, there is a gin that’s kosher for Passover, but I haven’t been too motivated to hunt it down.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Spending a couple of days with their girlfriends Ruby & Willow while we were away, and then getting back into the swing of things here at home. Which meant lots of sleep. They also managed a 3+-mile walk on Sunday around Skyline Lake. It was Otis’ first time, and he was zonked by the end.

Where I’m going: Nowhere! Wel, maybe NYC for MoCCA.

What I’m happy about: Celebrating Chip Delany’s 68th birthday at a Sunday brunch in NYC.

What I’m sad about: My pal Sang isn’t around to help us celebrate it.

What I’m worried about: Fast zombies vs. slow zombies.

What I’m pondering: What I’ll be doing in 5 years. I take this stuff seriously. If I really took it seriously, I guess I wouldn’t have bought a new car last week with a 5-year payment plan, but hey.

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What It Is: 3/15/10

What I’m reading: Ask, by Sam Lipsyte, and The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.

What I’m listening to: Night and Day, Nighttiming, A Friend of a Friend, and my latest Mad Mix.

What I’m watching: Why We Laugh: Black Comedians on Black Comedy, Monsters, Inc.

What I’m drinking: Hendricks & Q-Tonic.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Well, they’re happy that the snow is gone, but they’re bumming over the flood-level rain we got over the weekend. I cheered ’em up by buying ’em some mini-rawhides on Sunday.

Where I’m going: Nowhere, although I was almost press-ganged into a biz trip to Orlando this week when my boss came by my office Friday and told me that one of the other staffers who was supposed to go to the event couldn’t fly because of a stress fracture in her foot. “You wanna go?” he asked. “I got stuff to do,” I told him.

What I’m happy about: Celebrating our fourth wedding anniversary this weekend with some fine dining, some meh dining, and some just-chilling-the-heck-out. It felt so great that I think we even lost an hour by the time the weekend was over! Oh, and I’m happy that I cleared out all those tabs in my RSS reader on Saturday. I know it seems silly, but they were really vexing/mocking me, because I’m insane and feel like I owe The Writing every post I’ve ever half-considered.

What I’m sad about: That I’ll never write those posts.

What I’m worried about: Will Steve Zahn single-handedly bring down Treme?

What I’m pondering: The viability of literature of the modern workplace, courtesy of these essays/articles in the NYTimes, the Boston Globe, and the Telegraph.

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All the things you try to hide

One Saturday morning in the spring of 1998, I woke up and thought about Stacy Guess. I hadn’t kept up with him in the five years since I’d graduated college, and decided to look him up online. This was pre-Google and pre-Wikipedia, so it took some effort. Also, computers were powered by coal back then.

Stacy and his girlfriend Holly came to Hampshire together from North Carolina. She was a dance student around my age; he was five years older than me and the coolest guy I’d ever met. I’m talking Chet Baker cool, not Fonzie cool. He was a trumpet player, a philosophy major, and a good conversationalist. He was incredibly thin, with Peter Weller cheekbones, and could wear a fedora without douchebagginess. He was hip. I was the guy who looked like Napoleon Dynamite.

Stacy and I lived in the same dorm, the “silent floor” of Dakin house, a 10-room hall nicknamed “The Morgue.” Despite our age and coolness gaps, we got along well, trading music and shooting the breeze along with another Morgue-mate, Mark F. Stacy returned my copy of Thomas Dolby’s Astronauts and Heretics CD all scratched up and unplayable, but I was too much of a pussy to mention that to him.

I graduated, and five years later I woke up and wondered what had become of him.

Within a few minutes, I discovered that Stacy was in Squirrel Nut Zippers, the NC Dixie, jazz, swing, klez-fusion band that had scored a hit the previous year with “Hell.” That’s the one about how in the afterlife, you could be headed for the serious strife. The album, Hot, went platinum. David Gates wrote a neat little piece about it. I thought, “Awesome! You made good, pal!”

A few clicks later, I read, “Stacy had left the band by the time they recorded Hot.” I thought, “Dumbfuck! You got out right before the getting got good!”

I kept searching and then discovered that Stacy had died of a heroin overdose just a few weeks earlier. I thought, “. . .”

I got in touch with Holly the following Monday. She told me that they’d split up long before the end, but that she was still devastated at the news. She told me she and Stacy had stayed in touch with Mark, which I’d failed to do because I was a dick in my last years at Hampshire.

She got me Mark’s info, and said he’d like to hear from me. He told me some anecdotes of Stacy’s manipulative, self-destructive behavior in his last years. I felt sad for Holly, Mark, and Stacy’s family. Of course, I thought about that Squirrel Nut Zippers song, but not in a “drug addicts go to hell!” kinda way; it was more in a “man, that guy’s life must’ve been hell” kinda way.

A few years later, in a used record store on St. Marks, I found Legacy, a compilation CD of Stacy’s music from different bands and solo recordings. Proceeds went to a music scholarship at his high school in Chapel Hill.

On Facebook, Holly posted a note that Stacy died 12 years ago today. She’s doing well: living in NC, a couple of cute kids, likes to sing. At least, that’s what I glean from her FB page. So that’s why I wrote about it. Sorry to be so deathy this year.

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What It Is: 2/15/10

What I’m reading: Alec: The Years Have Pants, The Troublemakers, and Consider the Lobster.

What I’m listening to: You Could Start a Fight in an Empty House, by Angela McCluskey. I’m hoping it’ll tide me over till the next Telepopmusik record.

What I’m watching: I Love You, Man, In the Loop (again, oh, and hey, look! The screenplay is posted on IFC’s site!) and some more Sopranos episodes.

What I’m drinking: Old Raj & Q-Tonic.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Celebrating Rufus’ 5th birthday on Sunday by, um, playing with some new toys and eating porky-slices.

Where I’m going: Taking my dad out for his 72nd birthday next weekend, but no plans otherwise.

What I’m happy about: All these choices.

What I’m sad about: All these choices.

What I’m worried about: That someday it’ll make sense to me to buy a pair of $425 shoes.

What I’m pondering: How long I’ll keep this new template for my blog.

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What It Is: 2/1/10

What I’m reading: Finished Cloud Atlas and went through some back issues of Fantastic Man.

What I’m listening to: This Is How It Feels, and Pure, by The Golden Palominos.

What I’m watching: Monsters, Inc., The Philadelphia Story, and Thief. Also, I watched the first two episodes of Season 1 of The Sopranos. I’ve only watched the first season and the final episode (c.2001), so I recently bought the whole shebang. I may try to blog about the series, but I doubt it’ll be as long and rambling as my old Montaigne posts.

What I’m drinking: D.H. Krahn and Q-Tonic.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Not a lot, thanks to the single-degree temps we’ve had the past few days.

Where I’m going: NYC on Tuesday, to interview a guy from the majorest of major pharmas. It’s a 9 a.m. interview, so I’ve gotta head in early in hopes of not getting stuck in traffic.

What I’m happy about: My favorite books of the decade post (still in the works) won’t have to be revised post-Cloud Atlas. Also, I think I came up with a great opening paragraph for a short story.

What I’m sad about: I didn’t do much work on that post in the last week.

What I’m worried about: I’ll never write the rest of that short story.

What I’m pondering: Whether to trade in my 2003 Honda Element and buy a 2010 Subaru Outback. The Element’s at 114,000 miles and I’ve had it for 6 years. It’s still running fine, but I’d rather get something new (and capable of hauling two greyhounds in comfort) while I’m in a relative position of strength; that is, I’d rather not have to get a new car because the old one’s failing regularly, if that makes sense.

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Unrequired Reading: Jan. 22, 2010

No Unrequired Reading for you this week! That’s due less to my malaise, and more to my laptop being in the shop. It suffered the hinge-break that first-generation MacBook Air models are prone to (“so take / this broken hinge . . .”). Apple is replacing the monitor and hinge gratis, but the laptop has all my RSS feeds and saves, which is how I compile Unrequired Reading each week.

So you’re outta luck! Why not just check out my blogroll over by clicking on that Sites To See link instead?

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Reprieve

Well, dear readers, your Virtual Memoirist has a confession to make: I’ve been in denial about how badly my pal Sang’s death has affected me and I belatedly realized that I am in the midst of depression. I’ve been chalking up my symptoms to some other cause, as if there’s some clearer  reason that I’ve been emotionally flat, unable to craft a sentence, sullen, and physically cold for the past two weeks. The world itself has felt like it’s at arm’s length. If it weren’t for Amy’s love, I think I’d have drifted away.

I don’t know when I’m going to write another post. I’m trying to get myself writing, but everything I’ve tried has come out lifeless. It’s all just a collection of mundane events, with no magic, no song. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and I’ll just feel right again. Maybe I unburdened myself a little when I cried to my wife this evening. Maybe I need to cry more. I really can’t tell. I’m 39 years old and barely know myself sometimes. I honestly didn’t attribute all this to the most obvious cause there is. I feel like I’m in a mist.

I took Tuesday off and went to the city to visit the Morgan Library and Museum and have lunch with a pal. I added some more stops after that, and managed to turn everything into a race; I had to get back to the car by a certain time, to try to miss the traffic and get home in time to take care of the dogs. In my heart, I knew that I’d created that compressed timetable deliberately, because I wanted to worry about the immediacy of something, to be in a race. I was creating anxiety because I didn’t want to address the angst that’s been lurking since Sang’s death.

I got almost nothing out of the Morgan; it was a limited exhibition space, but I still flattened out the experience almost to nil. My only moment of joy was when I discovered that JP’s old library contained a 1595 edition of Montaigne’s Essais.

Lunch with my friend was better, because he’s known me so long, but I fear that I was somehow absent in that conversation; rather, the part of me that’s beset by grief was absent. And without that, what’s left?

So you may be getting a reprieve from this heap of broken images while I try to feel what I’m feeling.