Kije Questions

Posted 9:51 AM by sean
At 12:11 PM -0500 4/3/03, Dan Kois wrote:
1. What is your pet's name?

Kije Von Williams, Aka Mr. Dog, Aka, Squeejee Frog, Aka Sir Poopsalot, AKA Mom's Dog. More often 'Mom's Dog' than anything else, because he was attached to my mom in the way that only a dog who never gets to see his master is. My mom has been homeless for the last fourteen years, and the dog, for the last ten years of his life, was more accustomed to hotel rooms and the back seats of rental cars than he was to any one specific room.

2. What is your pet's breed?

Pure bred Yellow Labrador. And look what that got him, hip dysplasia, early onset cataracts and one of those maudlin regal disease deaths that goes on for too long and leads to embarrassing periods of kings unwilling to relinquish their thrones to their snotty children. Fortunately, Kije ruled exactly nothing, not his own backyard or section of bed or home, not even his own appetite.

3. What is your pet's age?

I think he has currently reverted to his most perfect self, when he was about eight and a little fat and living in Chapel Hill, either with me or with Ian, or (for about four days) with a sorority that he ran away to and returned only because the girls walked him up McCauley and he was stupid enough to recognize Ian and run to him. He was wearing a Carolina blue kerchief 'round his neck.

4. Gender?

Disputed. Initially male but quickly derailed of any kind of gender training. He was the only male in his brood and had no idea that there was a way to function other than female. He was in his fifth or sixth year before he realized he could lift his leg while peeing.

5. Where does your pet spend most of its time?

While alive, Kije spent all of his time pining. He was not a satisfied animal. He pined for my mom whenever she wasn't there. When he wasn't eating Pepperidge Farm raisin bread, he was pining for... I mean, I would say he was pining for the taste of Pepperidge Farm raisin bread, except for the fact that he would swallow whole slices of raisin bread without chewing or tasting anything so maybe he was just pining for the feel of white bread and raisins dropping down his gullet. After he had eaten the bread, he pined for the time just before, when there was no punishment imminent.

Physically, it's impossible to say where he spent most of his time. He was always in motion, which for a large fat lazy dog is really extraordinary. Mostly he was being moved, either in a carrier or in a car or on a leash.

6. Where did you get your pet?

He was purchased at a farm in LA that grows dogs like him. It isn't something any of us are particularly proud of, but the circumstances are pretty unique. We had not been allowed to have dogs growing up, my father was terrified of them and, mostly because of that, so was I. When my dad left my mom, it was decided that she should get a dog, a real statement of independence etc., but I was still terrified of dogs. The only dog I had ever been around was my friend Tom's dog "Lady" who was a large yellow lab. So, despite the fact that my mom was making this grand gesture to help her deal with her divorce, she was actually, as she always has, doing something with her kids absolutely in the forefront of her mind.

When she got to the breeder, the black lab mom and the black lab dad had a litter of black lab puppies, except sleeping in the corner was this weird mistake, a sleeping yellow lab male puppy. My mom asked something of the breeder, and when Kije heard my mom's voice he woke up, climbed out of the box and went to her. As if he had been waiting for her to come along. It was pretty much all he did for the rest of his life.

7. How did your pet fill out its bracket?

I asked Mac to come over because I wanted to help him fill out his bracket. I had done a lot of research this year, and I had a couple of hunches (including Maryland losing in the first round), and I *really* wanted Mac to win. He came over with some other friends and we were talking shit and suddenly the war started. We all watched the TV for a little while and couldn't really look at the brackets.

Mac should be *kicking* himself now.

Once I realized that I couldn't do anything for Mac I decided to enter my dog. That might sound disrespectful to Mac, but I think he sort of considers me his pet bulldog as well, so it all works out. I tried really hard to pick good stuff for Kije, because I really wanted him to win. It was less Kije's pool than my homage to Kije, and what his pool would have been if he had been a guy and knew basketball and, y'know, wasn't dead.

8. What is your pet's favorite food?

Pepperidge Farm Raisin Bread, but that's like asking Madonna what her favorite sexual position is. Kije wouldn't eat lettuce, but he liked everything else. He would *chew* lettuce, certainly, but then let it drop out of his mouth like gum when he was done. He loved broccoli, he loved red bell peppers, and he had a fondness for cooked meat of any kind. He liked melons and he really liked grapes. But man, he loved bread.

We would put a loaf of bread on top of the refrigerator and leave. We would come home and Kije would be hiding in our bedroom, even though he *really* had to go outside, and in the middle of the kitchen floor there would be a plastic bag that had been surgically opened with one canine tooth running the length of the top without a single crumb of bread still existing in the bag.

9. What will your pet do with the prize money once it wins?

No-one anthropomorphizes their animals more than my family does. But when Kije died, he did it on September 17, 2001, and we all had the sense that he had waited until he wouldn't hurt any of us when he went. We were all so worried about the thousands of people who had just died on 9-11 that he could just slip away without us weeping and wailing. My brother Steve (who had to bring him in to the vet because my mom, naturally, was in Eastern Europe) dropped us an email saying

"So many people have lost so much this week. Walking away from Kije's still form, I couldn't imagine the pain others must be feeling. Let's all imagine that Kije is romping on a new, green field in Manhattan with 5,000 new friends."

So I think if Kije won any money, he would probably want us to blow it on a bottle of wine (a cheap bottle at this point). Or probably, he would want us to buy a loaf of bread and eat it with my mom.

10. Have you seen your pet exhibit any new behavior since it entered the Pool?

He's actually not been doing much since he died. We have his ashes, and the last time I saw them they were, no kidding, on Ian's nightstand right next to his bed. It's just a box, it isn't a creepy urn or anything. But still, that's weird, right?

11. Does your pet have anything he or she would like to say to the other pets in the Pool, or to the Pool at large?

The two questions Kije normally asked of everyone were the following, and in this order;

"Are you going to eat that?"

and

"Can I have it?

The two answers he expected, despite years and years of getting the opposite, were 'no' and 'yes', in that order. I have to assume that he would ask the other pets on the list the same thing. The advice I think he would give the pets from the great beyond? "Life is short. Don't chew, just swallow."

God, Dad and Basketball

Posted 12:24 PM by sean
I don’t believe in God, and I think that is a real shortcoming on my part. It isn’t a matter of disagreeing with people who believe in God, it’s just that I simply can’t. They say there are no atheists in the trenches, but the times in my life when I have truly despaired, when my fear went beyond the rational and I found myself saying "Please" out loud, I never for a moment believed that I was asking something of a God, and I never expected any kind of deliverance. I simply had reverted to the most scared and desperate that my conscience could recall, and that was probably as an infant crying out for my parents. I am more trying to get my Dad to help me than I am believing that God will.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t have stupid irrational things that I do believe in. I believe very strongly in cognitive resonance. I believe in it so much that I blame it for why I am incredibly bad in movies and at auditions. I can only really act when I am surrounded by an audience. Even if they hate me, I am suddenly listening and aware and alive. I am a really good actor, and I am goddam dreadful in movies. Seriously. My head looks like thirty human teeth swimming in an unset pudding covered in hair, and I act like Pee Wee Herman behind the desk. But in front of a theater audience, I am damn near superhuman.

This cognitive resonance inspires me also to believe that my rooting for a team will actually change the outcome of a game. I alone can’t, but if thousands and thousands of us are rooting for the same guys to win, then maybe something extraordinary will happen. For instance, maybe Shane Battier will get called for a foul that he would usually get away with. Maybe Brendan Haywood would knock down two free throws. Maybe the dookie’s shot would fall in, but it would leave his hand a few tenths of a second too late. If I scream and try hard enough, maybe Carolina will beat Maryland in the ACC tournament again next year.

But I don’t know how hard I will be pulling. I don’t know who will be on the bench coaching these kids that I love. Doherty was fired, despite my blog from last week. I believe that both cognitive resonance, the fact that so many people wanted him to fail, and plain old fashioned lack of popularity drove him out. He was a hard man to love, and that made me love him even more. He was a strict disciplinarian, and that is what I always felt I was missing. If everything they say about him is true, then he is still the coach I want.

He was mean to the kids. But he bled Carolina Blue. Some kids transferred, but it was half because they didn’t like Doherty and half because they knew no-one else did either. I know, I was there. I hated my director at Citrus, and the more shit I talked the more the higher-ups tacitly accepted it. He ended up hating me, and I learned one half of what I should have learned because I was hating instead of listening. I was wrong.

My father was mean to me as a kid, a real task master. But now, I come to him with my ideas, or he sees me in a show, and he thinks I am amazing. No-one is casting me, no-one is seeing my shows, but my Dad comes and tells me that I should focus on being an actor, that no matter what anyone says, he thinks I am brilliant. Matt Doherty came home to Chapel Hill and his father, Dean Smith, never had his back. If people thought I sucked, and my own family agreed, I would resign as well.

Look, he should have gone, and now that he’s gone we can get a coach with more experience. And my belief in Carolina, unlike my belief in God, is still there despite the lack of logic, despite the lack of proof, and despite this latest disappointment. But to think that those guys did what normal guys do just makes me sad. I want us to be better than everyone else, and when Dean and Gut were there I believed it.

One last thing about my dad and God. My dad used to tell us he was Jesus Christ. He would answer our small child disbelief with, ‘Prove it! Prove that I am not Jesus Christ!’ When I was in my early twenties and mad at my dad, I used that to prove what a bad guy he is, but now I find it so unbelievably delightful. I hope I do the same thing to my kids, although I doubt Jordana would let me get away with it.

Posted 5:11 PM by sean

Some people thought I looked a little fat in that picture of me at my job. Here is proof of how fat I am not.


This is Jordana's reaction to my concept of "Not Fat"


I think if you look carefully at the picture of me, you can still see the scar on my lip from when I passed out in Brooklyn. Oy, what a night that was!

Listen, my coach got fired and everyone seems happy about it. I am crestfallen, pictures of me naked is the best I can do.

Posted 12:34 PM by sean

Superlatives are often the only comparison in my family. My friend Jonathan, who got his masters in poem writing, explained it best when he said, ‘There is no reason in being a good poet.’ That resonated with me. I don’t want to be a good anything, I want to be great or I guess I don’t really want to do it. There are exceptions, but that is true of a lot of things.

Four years ago today, or roughly today, I kissed Jordana for the first time. She was sleeping on the couch downstairs at my house on Beachwood Drive in Hollwood (why are there so many (blank)-woods in LA, a place without trees?) and I had theoretically gone to bed. I tossed for about five minutes and then I came back downstairs. I was sitting on the couch where she was sleeping and I asked her if I could kiss her. She laughed at me and said Sure, so I did.

We think it was the first of April. Either way, it’s nice to have a relationship based mostly on laughing start on April Fool’s Day.

Jordana is not the smartest person in the world. It’s hard for me to admit that because she is so much smarter than me, but I realize there are people who understand recipes and who got perfect scores on their SATs and can memorize whole plays in a glance. To be fair, she certainly remembers everything, every single detail of things, and she scored a 1070 when she took her SATs in seventh grade (although it was her mom who told me that, she thought it was funny). When it comes to following directions she is hopeless. But her grasp of the world is vast, she always knows Irving Berlin from Harold Arlen, she knows all three rivers that feed into the Elbe, she does math in her head as fast as I do. But I know she isn’t going to be offered a Nobel Prize in anything.

Jordana is also not the most beautiful girl in the world. Again, it’s hard for me to admit that because she is so incredibly beautiful compared to me. But she is a little too tall and she has the kind of broad strong looks that some men are not attracted to. I mean, she is definitely the most beautiful woman I have ever dated, legs-butt-breasts-eyes-neck, all that stuff is just unreal piece by piece. When I watch her watching a movie, or if I catch her changing, or especially when I see her laughing at our friends, I am amazed at the sheer physical beauty of her. But if you catch her dancing, or trying to play basketball, you wouldn’t consider her a paragon of feminine beauty. You might think she was a little awkward.

And it has always been hard for any of my brothers and sisters to be with someone who wasn’t an absolute, who didn’t have some kind of clear indication that they were better and more special than anyone else we could possibly be with. The woman I married when I was in my 20s was someone who was so obviously unlike anyone else, she was so clearly superlative in so many ways, it was easy for me to bring her in the fold, despite the fact that my family, each and every one of them, could barely tolerate her.

But there is a thing about Jordana that goes beyond her mind or her body, and I won’t be able to describe it here. All I can say about it is that she loves the people around her with the kind of abandon that is infectious. The cliché maintains that love begets love, and I have never understood it before now. I find that with her in my life, I have the obligation and the ability to be a better man, not just to her, but to everyone I know.

In the time that I have spent with her, I have lost the necessity for cruelty. I am still cruel, but now it is a choice, and one that I always regret immediately. I have also lost the necessity for dishonesty. I still lie sometimes, but mostly because it is funny or because I am about to admit I am lying. I have lost the impetus for dominance, I have lost the need to prove myself, I have lost that constant craving for acceptance and understanding and success. I feel like I have that all the time now, just in being with her.

The kind of happiness I have with Jordana requires more than I will possibly be able to write, it should be the only thing my blog is about. So, I’ll stop. I just want to say, I am so glad that I asked her if I could kiss her, and I am so glad she said yes.

Posted 12:33 PM by sean

I've been trying to do this for a while, so let me see if this works.

This is a picture of me at my job...

Pools and Trains

Posted 12:04 PM by sean
The NCAA pool this year is sort of boring. It’s boring every year, but the group that I get in to is filled with people who don’t know anything about basketball. It is actually filled with monkeys and dogs and, y’know, girls… people who make their picks by how cute the point guard is. My friend Mac chooses his team by which name would make a better play title. Gonzaga takes the whole thing, Holy Cross is a close second.

So the fact that my final two are still playing should be cooler than it is. I never pick this shit right. But I have Kansas and Syracuse in the final game. It won’t happen, but it’s cool to be close.

The N train was stopped at Queensboro plaza this morning and Jordana switched to the 7 to go into the city. I decided that, since there were already 150 people waiting for my seat I would just hold off and go into the city later. It dawned on me only once we were in separate trains and the doors were closed that the "police action" which had stopped the N from going in to the city might be the thing that kills her, and I watched her disappear into the tunnel.

She called me on her cell the minute she got out of the train, and then she called me from work to tell me about another Food Trade Show that we are invited to. But it sucks. Every time we do our daily shit, it feels like it could be waltzing us into a bad situation. Michelle is too scared to take the train, Ian and Tessa are almost never in the city, and we have devised a plan for what to do when the attack hits and our phones don’t work. It isn’t If, it’s When.

But it is still New York. It’s still home. It is still the Mecca for people like me. I kind of understand why some Jews won’t leave Jerusalem, no matter how bad it gets. I still see the Empire State Building every day, so it just doesn’t get any better.