This Just In: I have issues

My doctor is frighteningly thorough. In the 3 years since I moved into Manhattan proper and was forced to find someone to annually check my cholesterol and weigh me, I've had an echocardiogram, an ultrasound, and multiple blood tests for diseases I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be exposed to even if I were licking the seats on the A train.

The first time I had a consultation with Dr. Thorough, she sat down at her desk, looked at me and said, "Has anyone ever mentioned to you that your thyroid is enlarged?"

Now I could see where that's a catchy opener at a bar: "Whoa! That's a pretty impressive thyroid you've got there!" But no - up until that point in my experience of being medically assessed, no one had ever seen fit to make me self-conscious about the size of my thyroid. But thanks for that, Dr. T. Nice to meet you, too.

As a matter of fact, I had always been secure in the fact that I was relatively healthy. I take my vitamins, I'm reasonably fit, and I'm still in possession of my tonsils and appendix. After that unpleasant little episode with the boils 10 years ago, I was just trucking along, biding my time until I got whatever brand of cancer the genetic lottery was going to throw my way sometime in my 60s.

Not so, it seems. Sufficiently troubled by my massive killer thyroid (stop! don't look at it!), Dr. T referred me to an endocrinologist up the street. He had been in New York magazine's Best Doctors in New York issue, so I felt like I was in reasonably good hands. It turns out that I have what's elegantly referred in the medical culture to as Hashimoto's thyroiditis (I know, it sounds like it should come with fried rice). Oh, and a goiter. Who knew? Thanks to Dr. T's keen eye, I now have to visit New York's finest gland shaman every three months so he can draw blood, poke me in the throat and tell me that "Let's just keep an eye on that." Yeah, let's, because paying $25 for privilege of hanging out with your creepy man-nurse Gary rocks my world.

On a different occasion, Dr. T mentioned in passing that my posture was not the greatest. Yeah, well, I'm carrying a lot of extra weight up front, thanks. Like an idiot, I said that, as a matter of fact, my upper back does bother me when I try and sit up straight for long periods of time. The next day I'm sitting in the office of a holistic physical therapist who's telling me that I need to undergo 6 weeks of weird bending and possibly be medicated with anti-inflammatory drugs.

So mostly for that reason, I avoid going to see Dr. T unless it becomes absolutely necessary. I might end up having a prostate exam or losing my gallbladder, and who needs that?

For the last week, I've been having headaches. Not your standard issue headaches that one would expect from regularly being subjected to bad unsigned bands at high volumes or drinking large amounts of brown liquor. Every morning, there would be a dull ache behind my left eye. It was annoying, but I didn't think much of it. It felt more like bad eye strain than anything else, but I'd just had the prescription checked on my glasses a few months ago. I still can't see for shit, but not any differently than last year. So I'd just been self-medicating with a daily dose of Tylenol and going about my business of general bad assery.

Then on Tuesday, someone unseen started stabbing me in the eye with an icepick. I couldn't concentrate and was reduced to sitting at my desk with my head in my hands for about a half hour. I took some Advil, which sort of took the edge off. But I was officially concerned. Maybe I had a tumor. Maybe some residual nastiness from the sinus infection had leaked into my brain. Unable to think of a better option, I called Dr. T.

She shined a light in my eyes and up my nose. She looked at my chart. "This is what I think," she said. I was fully prepared to be sent off for a CAT scan or possibly an exploratory lobotomy.
"I think it's one of two things: the weather or stress."

This was kind of a relief since it wasn't going to cost me money in co-pays or hours of my life in a specialist's office wearing a paper dress. Or so I thought.

"But it sounds from what you're telling me that it's probably caused by stress," she said, giving me a look that I'd seen many times before. "Is something going on recently that's particularly stressful for you? Maybe at work?"

"I work in the music industry," I reminded her.

"Oh. Well. That sounds like it's fun."

"It's not."

She wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to me. "This is the name of someone that you might want to see. I think it might help."

"Is it an eye doctor?"

"No, he's a psychiatrist."

Holy shit, did I just get referred for therapy?

"I told you last week you needed therapy," Mark said last night when he called me. "You just thought I was being mean. Why don't you ever listen to me?"

I'm hugging you, but I'm hitting you!

I thought very seriously about going to see Reign Over Me this weekend. I even went so far as to check show times at Battery Park City and rope Leslie into going with me, even though I knew she would rather endure a continuous loop of babies crying for two hours. I spend a lot of time fully intending to do things, like when I convinced myself that I was going to learn to play the guitar. I bought a guitar. I bought Guitar For Dummies. Maybe it would have helped to instead buy Guitar For Lazy People Who Will Never Get Beyond The Three Chords Needed To Play "Kumbaya": An Inspirational Guide.

Needless to say, I ended up not seeing the movie. Instead I went out to dinner at a restaurant in Tribeca that considers Asia's "In The Heat of The Moment" an appropriate soundtrack for partaking of chicken scarpariello. Part of my decision to bail was the fact that I had read mixed reviews: it's a 9/11 movie that never actually addresses 9/11, Adam Sandler looks like Bob Dylan (surprisingly a dealbreaker in some critical circles!), its resolution is trite, and so forth. The cost of movie-going being what it is these days, I figured that I could safely wait until Reign Over Me made its way to On Demand - only $3.95 and I can bring my own snacks.

In truth, my interest in seeing it in the first place was based almost entirely on two things. Some of the TV trailers used Embrace's "Ashes," which gave my inner music supervisor a big, honking boner. My other motivation was even more perverted.

I have a man-friendship fetish.

Maybe this sort of thing goes both ways, I have no idea. Maybe there's a contingent of men who watch Thelma & Louise, hoping to glean some insight into female bonding. These are no doubt the same men who read Glamour in order to understand women and simply can't fathom why their girlfriends aren't vapid, passive-aggressive and wearing the season's hottest trend - bold prints! On the other hand, they probably are because men make bad choices.

When I was in high school, I was mildly obsessed with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - initially because I enjoyed all things BBC and Jeremy Brett was tremendous. But eventually I became utterly fascinated with the dynamics of Holmes and Watson's relationship. Watson got shit on a lot because, to be honest, Holmes is arguably a malignant narcissist and definitely a drug addict. But for some reason Watson stuck around and dealt with Holmes' crazy because he knew that Holmes needed him, even if the he would never admit it. Very occasionally, when he wasn't busy using $3 words and wantonly casting withering disdain in everyone's general direction, Holmes would give Watson some backhanded props for deciphering a clue or scoring some good dope (because, let's remember, Watson was a doctor and probably had access to quality shit). In those moments, it becomes evident that Holmes and Watson love each other in the glorious, non-sexual way that two men in Victorian England can without every having to say it out loud. Man friendship at its co-dependent finest!

Friendships among women, for the most part, are relatively uncomplicated. And not only because we just sit around drinking Appletinis, discussing our birth control side effects, or comparing vibrators. Right before we have a pillow fight in our underwear and make out in front of a webcam. Women are pretty emotionally articulate, in the grand scheme. We travel in packs. We will talk to each other incessantly about whatever random thing happens to come into our head. We can hug each other without doing that back-thumping move - one step above the fist bump, by most calculations, on the hierarchy of social interactions - to feel secure in our sexuality. There is little challenge in sussing out the subtext in the behavior of women friends. And even if there were, we would happily explain it to you because we've already had a discussion about it amongst ourselves complete with a Powerpoint presentation.

This is precisely why I find the dynamics of male friendship utterly fascinating. Men, having a chromosomal aversion to Appletinis and emotional forthrightness, somehow manage to forge intense, platonic relationships with each other based on the most indirect communication. They can cultivate some innate understanding with each other, expressed only through talking about hockey or watching Clint Eastwood movies. It's a completely alien way of relating to other people, and I'm always suckered into any fictionalization of the whole process.

The funny thing is that the majority of my friends have always been male. I remember once complaining to my mother that I wished I had an older brother. That turned out to be rather ironic, since when I grew up I suddenly found myself with about 10 of them. Considering that I'm pretty much for shit when it comes to lots of the standard man pastimes - drinking beer, watching sports, calling each other gay - it amazes me how much I enjoy hanging out with my man friends. And while I'm quite certain I've become gender-neutral to them in many ways, I'm simply too willing to say things like "You're really awesome, I'm glad we got to hang out." At which point they remember that I possess fallopian tubes, and any chance I may have had to see true man friendship in its natural habitat is gone.

No matter. Eventually someone will make a movie where Daniel Craig and Clive Owen form an deep, outwardly dysfunctional bond that goes largely unexpressed until one of them has some sort of personal tragedy. At which point they get drunk together and give each other shit about who's better at pool. Like Beaches, only with dudes. That would be worth $11.

Better to receive

Alex Dezen keeps a blog that's vastly superior to mine. His band is also better than mine, mainly because I have much more fun naming my band with nonsensical word combinations - Vintage Twix and Equine Ambulance were early front runners - than I ever would writing songs or performing. And because his band actually exists.

After spending an evening with an old friend, he made the following observation:

She tried to refuse my money but I insisted. That's what we do sometimes. We insist on giving our things away to other people because we can't give them the world.

Two years ago, my grandmother suggested that, in lieu of the rampant, overindulgent gift giving we generally engage in for Christmas, we all draw names and only buy one or two things for our assigned recipient. This went over slightly less well than the time we tried to establish family Scrabble night. My grandfather spent 30 minutes arguing that "thusly" was so a word, and he didn't care what the goddamn dictionary said since he speaks goddamn English just fine. We hid the wine in the vacuum box and put a temporary ban on board games.

It's worth pointing out that I don't have a particularly large family - in fact, my genus is likely to be extinct in roughly one generation. It's not as though there's an abundance of small children that we must placate with large quantities of disposable plastic. We may not be breeders, but we're all givers. Christmas in particular is our license to run wild like fat kids at McDonald's. We gorge on shopping, demanding to know each other's wish lists. The problem, though, with a family of givers is that none of us is especially good with receiving. "You bought too much!" someone always mutters, shifting awkwardly beside their mountain of packages. Every year we sit around the living room and stare uncomfortably at each other, unwilling to make the first move.

"Open your gifts, Mom, " I urge.

"I just want to watch you," she says.

Maybe the idea was to save as us all some money, but it was more like being told that we weren't allowed to eat for a week. Unacceptable. In the end, there was an ugly argument between my grandmother and my mom, Christmas was cancelled, and I nevertheless bought more gifts for everyone than I was fiscally able, as I always do. We've all since resumed our wallet-crippling spending for the holidays, and my mother clucked disapprovingly over the TiVo I bought her.

Being a giver is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it's a self-sustaining industry. It needs no willing audience, unlike attention-whoring. It becomes a code of sorts in how we deal with the people we care about the most. We get the next round of drinks to say we know you'd have our back if someone was talking shit. We loan you $5 for a cab to say thanks for listening to our sad story over dinner. We buy your lunch because it seems more socially palatable than actually saying "I'm glad we're friends." Sometimes that upsets people. It's easier to pick them up a coffee since you're going out anyway. No, it's cool, whatever.

Every year that I've been at my current job, I've bought a gift for everyone in my office before we all disperse for the holidays. I do it because I enjoy it, but also because I would feel remiss in not doing it. These people are, for better or worse, very much an extension of my family. And like my family, the $10-limit Secret Santa feels insufficient. "People like you just make everyone else feel bad," Leslie told me this past year. She had received a rather generic bath set from a secretary in her office that she didn't know very well.

You can talk yourself into a certain noble victimhood, if so inclined. But the truth of it is, being a giver is as much a pathology as being anything else. We feel like we're getting away with something. Not because we expect returns - we'd prefer there weren't any, actually - but because we're scratching an itch, secretly feeding our own need. We're the one drinking Wild Turkey out of a Pepsi can at the family picnic - who's it going to hurt? No one needs to know. But in our heart of hearts, it feels selfish, which is ultimately at odds with our very nature. Walking paradoxes, all of us.

Sometimes we come face to face with the fact that what we're offering isn't so tangible after all. There's really no limit to what we can give away, contrary to how it might seem. We always find more. There is no bottom, and there is definitely a point where we start to wish for one, if only to save ourselves.

"I wish I wasn't this way," I complained recently, realizing that I had been yet again throwing good money after bad - among other things, like time and patience - toward something that was a essentially a black hole. "The alternative doesn't hurt as much."

"It hurts differently" was the reply.

The position has been filled

Once you realize that there exists a strapping 6'2" Scotsman who fronted a band while getting his legal degree, anything less is pretty much settling, no?

Thanks for your interest.

How (Not) To Pre-Pay A Rental Car

As far as my job is concerned, the SXSW Music Festival in Austin is arguably the least important thing that happens every year. But it happens every year, and every year we scramble to have our bands accepted, get good slots at showcases that involve free beer and pulled meat, and someone usually takes his pants off in an airport. I don't know that we've ever gotten a band signed as a result of SXSW. Or that anyone from my office who goes actually remembers anything that happens. And every year something - often more than one thing - goes wrong. This year was no exception.

I should mention: I've been awake since 5:30AM this morning. So was Leslie. She had to organize a rally against the governor's proposed health care cuts. I had to go to the doctor. Leslie has a real job. I burn CDs and make sure the drummer will show up on time to his meet & greet at the go-cart track. Perspective is everything.

There were 4 missed calls on my cell phone when I finally got to work around 11:00AM. One of my bands was flying out to Austin this morning, and I had a suspicion that all would not be well. Because, well, I have travelled before. And because putting any band on a plane unattended by a tour manager, mother or other supervisory figure of some sort generally guarantees that it will be delayed, hijacked, diverted or run out of kosher vegan meals. No one in a band is equipped for these kind of crises, except maybe Henry Rollins. He seems resourceful.

Three of the missed calls were from Mark, my lead singer - he never leaves a message, which I find both irritating and a general indication that whatever he wants isn't that important. One was from Jenny, our online coordinator, who happened to be on the same flight as the band. She did leave the following message: "Hey, we're in San Antonio. They might be letting us off the plane. Call me back."

San Antonio was not on the itinerary. The flight was supposed to connect in Houston before going on to Austin. Simple. Mark's band had a gig tonight, which was why I put them on an ungodly early flight in the first place. But nevertheless, ATA had made the executive decision to divert the flight into San Antonio. Due to "low cloud cover." This sounds suspect, even to me, and I've had flights delayed for everything from "broken plane" to "missing flight attendant" to the Continental Airlines specialty "You're going to board like everything is fine and then sit on the tarmac for 3 hours."

"They might be letting us off here," Jenny told me. "Can you book us a rental car? I guess we can just drive to Austin."

Not a bad solution, considering. It's only about a 90 minute drive. The band would still make their 5:00PM gig, assuming they managed to collect all their gear off the flight in one piece and in a relatively timely manner. Yeah, I know, I said I'd travelled before, but bear with me. It was still early in the day. I reserved a mini-van on Expedia and emailed Jenny the confirmation.

Jenny called me back 15 minutes later. "Never mind. They say they can't let us off the plane. It would be illegal." Oh, ATA! You kidders! You certainly had us going there for a second! So it seemed they were all doomed to linger in the purgatory of San Antonio until the vicious assault of cumulus clouds abated. However long that might take.

Still holding out hope they might make their connecting Southwest flight in Houston, I called ATA Customer Service, which routed me (naturally) to India. India did not help me. India put me on hold for 3 to 5 minutes every time I asked a question. India was really not the right way to go at this point. Both India and Texas were slowly working their way off my list of places near and dear to my heart.

Next I called Southwest Customer Service, which connected me to a very nice woman who probably wasn't working in a windowless room in Asia Minor. I explained the situation and asked what was up with the weather in Texas. "That's really strange," she said. "I mean, we had some fog issues around 7:00AM this morning, but everything should be fine now." But Southwest wasn't going to hold the connecting flight. Clearly they're well aware of the general importance of SXSW to any of our bands' careers.

It was just after lunch. Jenny called. They had made it to Houston, but there were no flights available to Austin until 8:00PM that night. If they rented a car and hauled major ass, there was still a chance that Mark would make his gig. That is, if the band could find their gear. Which wasn't happening at that precise moment. ATA had apparently eaten some guitars and possibly a set of cymbals. It seemed par for the course. Maybe India has a racket going on "misplaced" band equipment. I made the reservation on Expedia for another mini-van, not thinking that someone who was physically in Houston was going to have to pay for it. This became an issue rather quickly.

At this point, it had become a little hard to contain that something is wrong and that I was having trouble fixing it. I have a corporate American Express card with an insane credit limit that is essentially useless to anyone in this situation. People in the office are yelling at me. The fundamental lesson that I learned from this entire episode is this: you cannot pre-pay a rental car as a third party. No way, no how. Unless your ass is physically sitting in the motherfucker in some capacity, you cannot pay for it. I tried. I almost cursed out the woman at Alamo. I even called our trusty travel agent to see if she knew any super-secret backdoor trickery that could be used (she didn't). It became clear that my only option was to somehow get money from me to Jenny, so she could pay for the rental car. This meant going to Gina.

Gina never wants to hear that you need money. Especially not emergency money.

"I need to transfer $850 into Jenny's bank account, right now," I explained, which - to the already beleaguered CFO of a small company - sounds sort of like "I want to set fire to your dog." She reacted accordingly.

The next thing I know, I am RUNNING IN THE RAIN up 6th Avenue to the closest Bank of America. It's very cinematic. Someone somewhere ought to be playing "Chariots of Fire." After barreling 2 blocks at full speed, I had an uncontrollable coughing fit during which I'm fairly certain I lost control of my bladder. Yes, I have pissed myself in the line of duty. I have had better days, to be sure. Bank of America, fortunately, was deserted and the very nice teller very pleasantly took $850 in cash off my hands without commenting on the fact that I looked quite deranged and couldn't breathe. I suppose had the transaction been reversed, it probably wouldn't have gone as smoothly.

Jenny called me 5 minutes after I got back to the office.

"Please tell me that you're in the car," I said.

"...can I get a strawberry margarita...?" she said to someone other than me. "Hey, hi. So let me start at the beginning and just tell you the whole thing." The beginning, as far as I was concerned at this point, was not a very good place to start. And yet. Previously on...Hipsters In Houston:

As it turns out, they missed their connection in Houston by all of 13 minutes, which is enough For the love of Christ! to be irritating but a long enough time not to conjure images a la Home Alone of a rag-tag bunch of New Yorkers tearing through the Houston Hobby airport on their way to the gate, only to left behind, dejected.

"And then Mark left his boarding pass and luggage claim stub on the plane," Jenny continued. Oh, of course. Mark is a lot of things. Excellent front man. Undercover metrosexual. Armenian. And not least of all sort of useless in times of stress. Which, I suppose, is where I come in. Or where I would come in, if I wasn't saddled with the black death and 1500 miles away.

As it turned out, Alamo didn't have any mini-vans at all, despite letting me make a reservation online. Oh, ha ha! Joke's on me! They did, however, have an SUV that Mark was able to rent and get the band on the road. Immediately after he found out that his gig was cancelled anyway. Jenny managed to negotiate her way onto another Southwest flight into Austin.

"So I'm just going to sit here and get drunk and wait for my flight at 6:00PM," Jenny concluded. "I'll get the car receipts from Mark tomorrow and give him cash for the car."

I would very much like to get very drunk as well - in triumph as well as in solidarity with my wards, who I doubt are going to know their own names in a few hours. But I'm still heavily medicated for another few days.

For the moment, though, all seems well on the SXSW front. Or at least as good as it's going to get.

As for me, I'm going to go home and change my pants.

Getting down with the sickness

I have been sick, in one capacity or another, for roughly 3 weeks now. It started out as what I thought was a just cold, then bronchitis, then a lung infection (complete with hacking up slimy yellow chunks while making a noise not dissimilar to a gagging dog), and has now morphed into an ungodly sinus infection. I was also sick two weeks prior to Christmas, and before that, I was sick in September during my vacation in Las Vegas. Someone must have signed me up for the Disease of the Month Club. I think malaria will be in season soon. Looking forward to it.

Once I was past the requisite tangle with chicken pox, I almost never got sick when I was growing up. On the rare occasion that I did catch a cold, it would kick my ass for about 3 days and then I'd be fine. None of this low-level symptomatic shit, fucking with me for weeks on end, while still allowing me to be functional enough to go to work. It seems like the warranty on my immune system has finally run out.

I'm becoming well acquainted with the following process:

Denial: "I am not sick. I'm just tired. I am going to willfully ignore this sore throat. I mean, really, what are the odds that it will morph into a full-blown chest cold in 15 hours? If I don't actually take any cold medication, I don't have a cold, right? Besides...I feel fine. Just a little phlemgy is all. I'll go to bed early. Or have another scotch. I'm fine."

Anger: "Why am I fucking sick AGAIN? Jesus Christ on a motherfucking crutch! And could everyone stop telling me I sound congested? I'm sick, not deaf. I know I sound like Joan Rivers in a gas mask. But thanks for bringing it up, asshat."

Bargaining: "Okay. If it gets really bad, like I start coughing up blood or passing out, I'll call the doctor. Okay, well, maybe I won't have to. If Mucinex is on sale at Duane Reade, I'll get some. But only if I don't feel better by tomorrow. I think it's getting better."

Depression: "I feel terrible. My head feels like it's in a wet blanket. I can't even bring myself to enjoy this episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. And it's even a Vincent D'Onofrio one. And I've only seen it three times, so I forget how it ends. Damn, man. I think I'm out of cough medicine. I've been through 2 bottles since this started. I'm going to be sick forver. The terrorists have won."

Acceptance: "Hey, Mom? Can you send me those antibiotics you offered to send me two weeks ago? I know I said it was going away. Yes, you were right. Thanks. What? Yes. I know I sound congested."

The best band you almost heard of