Rain. Despair. Bleakness. Running through the twilight.

Sorry, just trying to sound all gothic. It really is raining though. It’s almost May and Seattle thinks it’s only February.

Things are somewhat confusing here, but not things I’d talk about in a journal. It’s hard for me to censor myself about things, since I’m so used to writing everything in my paper journals. But my paper journals are not readable by 50 million people, so I limit myself. Sorry.

I finished reading that Rupert Thomson book last night. It felt great to finish it with the windows open, the dark horizon of west seattle glowing through the rain. The book itself felt like it took place in the same atmosphere, the same bleakness. I wish the guy had more similar books, but I think he got into historical fiction or something…

Anyway, I should end the lunch and start the work. Cheers.

I was going to write last night, but by the time I remembered, it was today. The trip back felt like a daydream, the darkness around me. I drove from Longview to Seattle in about an hour 45, pretty good for the slight drizzle that dewed the hills of asphalt under me.

It was a daydream because it was so hypnotizing. The music and the solitude removed the thoughts from my head, let me relax. I got into a rhythm with the spinning tires, the squeaking wipers, and the passing reflectors marking the road I ventured.

When I got to Seattle, the tranquility was broken as I checked my mail and removed a pile of bills. My financial situation is so fucked right now - I spent the rest of the night restless, thinking of the things I’d have to give up to keep afloat for the next few months. I figured a schedule that would involve some heavy payments in the next couple of paychecks, and would involve me eating soup and cooking at home pretty much all of the time. I guess it isn’t too horrible - I spent a lot of time last spring doing the same thing while paying off my Visa card. I think I can pay off my debts by the end of the year, and start figuring out what I really want to do with my money and my future.

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Every night I eat 99 cent pot pies for dinner, I am dollars closer to financial independence. Maybe.

I’m listening to Rush - Counterparts. It reminds me of a strange time - my entrance into exile. Every song tells a story, but “Cold Fire” tells the strongest. It’s juvenile of me to spend an evening listening to songs that remind me of people from the past, but it’s either that or spend the evening thinking about money.

I should get back to reading…

This is my first journal from Longview - I drove down last night. The trip isn’t too bad, but getting out of Seattle was a real bitch. I spent an hour going about 20 miles and then the next two hours going about 100. It’s nice that the trip is all in the daylight now. I really hate the drive south of Olympia when it’s raining and pitch black. It gets so dark out there in the middle of nowhere that you can’t even tell what direction is up - it’s like you’re in a tunnel or something. That’s the area where I had a blowout last month. It was PITCH black, pouring rain, and a narrow, two-lane section of I-5 where everybody is going 80. It took me a few hours to get that little baby spare onto the car, because I’d have to time it with the traffic. I’d wait for a break, run out, loosen one lug nut, and then dive behind the car as a herd of semis drove by, creating hurricane-like winds that would rock my poor little car, almost off the toy jack that comes in the back of Ford Escorts.

So that was all cool. I saw the show Sliders last night, and had the chance to see where they filmed it last week (okay, I just saw it from the outside). I always thought they filmed that whole show on location somewhere, but if you watch it, you can sort of tell that 90% of it is filmed in a sound stage. We also rented the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High since I saw the commercials for it and realized I haven’t seen the non-tv version in quite a while. I had a carbon copy of Mr. Hand for US History when I was in high school, although we had no Pat Benetar lookalikes. Many of the girls in my high school did look alike, or at least had the same hairstyle, but I don’t know what they were trying to copy.

I should get out of here. This keyboard won’t let me use the backspace key as a delete - it keeps opening up the emacs online help.

I can’t wait to get all of my journals into HTML, so I can change the font so they all look like Motorhead album covers.

Last night, I taped about an hour of my rambling about Summer Rain. I set up the camera and taped it on the VCR using a VHS tape running on the slow speed. I don’t care about the picture too much, I just needed the audio. So this way, I can put 6 hours of discussion on each tape. And after an hour, I realized it will take a lot of fucking discussion to get this thing rolling. I am hoping that by the end of May, I will have enough notes to start an outline and a completely new draft of the book.

I brought Bill home last night and hung out at his place a bit, caught up with Jen and saw Liam. He was running all over, and talking about steamshovels. I guess he read this book, which I sort of remember from my childhood, about this steamshovel that digs this basement for a building and gets stuck at the bottom, so he becomes a furnace. Oddly enough, I had a dream last night where Liam kept saying “Boba Fett” over and over.

I started re-reading this Rupert Thomas book, to get an idea of what I want to do with SR. There are a lot of fine details about his writing that make it memorable. I think it’s because he never directly builds up his characters - they are built through strong incidentals. Instead of saying his characters’ age or height or looks, he’ll talk about the cigarette they smoke or their mannerisms in such a way that you build up the character based on your expectations of a person that would drink that kind of drink or whatever. And the characters really build in your head, come back to haunt you long after you set down the book. I like that.

I’m hoping to re-read about 5-10 books that contain pieces of SR that I like, and take a lot of notes on them. I also hope to collect together a bunch of music that will help me to write. I want to make tapes containing songs that I listened to in those periods, or songs that remind me of then. That’ll help me write a bit more. It’s too easy to listen to music that distracts me, or puts me to sleep.

More Motorhead today. I wish I could put the little umlaut above the o - there’s got to be some way to do it, but it will end up being a \647 in most people’s browsers or something. Motorhead, new leather jacket, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing at work. I should go out and steal a Harley.

I had a very intense dream where I was playing with a cigarette lighter for a long time and I couldn’t get it to spark or light. I messed with it for a long time, got it to strike, and started lighting stuff on this kitchen table, sort of as a joke. There was a piece of wood, or a box, or something, and it was burning with an immense but slowly wisping flame, like a scene from Backdraft. I tried to stomp it out, and freaked out because no amount of suffocation would stop the fire - it spread and hovered with a lazy precision over the surface of the whole table, and later the floor. I was screaming and trying to beat out the flames when I pulled myself from the ether and back to the real world. But when I woke up, I could only see in black and white, almost a posterized image. I looked at my window and miniblinds for several minutes, and couldn’t see any hues at all. I got my glasses, and started looking at other things in the room, and my color vision was fine.

I’ve begun reading these 20 year old encyclopedias (encyclpediii?) of mine, as leisure reading. It’s interesting to grab one and randomly browse through the pages, reading about countries you’ve never heard of. Most reference materials contain a certain political bias, but they also have so much useless demographical or technical data, that they’re better for me. I mean, you can’t find out about the Bahamas from travel agents or web sites or the media, because you’ll get this totally sterilized, promotionalized version of the story, wereas an encyclopedia will tell you the number of acres and average rainfall and chief economy and other items with relational values. Grated, they are all fucked up because this book came out in like 1973 or something, but ancient history doesn’t change too much. I mean, in recent years people might say that Abraham Lincoln fucked slaves or was a homo or smoked dope, but at least I can look up when he was born and died, and that hasn’t changed too much.

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On a logistical note, I started the first step of shifting everything around and getting it ready for html. I will eventually have a batch program that converts these text files to html. I don’t know entirely how I will do it - something with replacing blank lines and tabs, and slapping on a predefined head and tail, like I do with the index. We’ll see.

I subscribed and then unsubscribed from the Diary-L mailing list. It seemed like a bunch of chattiness and no real talk about the mechanics of journals. Just the “what time of day do you write?” sort of stuff. Who cares.