Another day. Not much has been going on, hence the lack of journals. I’ve been really lax about writing in journals, reading, etc. I don’t know if it is writer’s block or apathy or just a wandering of the mind. I’m not worrying about it too much - either it will come back, or it won’t.

I’ve been messing with rockets more. On Thursday, I bought a starter set with an Alpha III rocket and the whole pad and launcher. On Saturday, we went out to a Soccer field in Longview, and I launched 6 times. Unfortunately, I lost on the 6th launch, which was a bummer. I have 3 other rockets though, so my fleet will soon be underway once I build them. I just hope I have enough space by then - there aren’t many big fields in Seattle.

Not much else is going on…

I totally spaced writing yesterday, and forgot to write in my paper journal the day before that. It’s been a weird week, a lot of work, something going on every night, and I have not been sleeping at all. It is hot enough out that I have to open the patio all the way to cool the place down. This leads to a lot of noise, and I wake up 3 or 4 times in the night when there’s an ambulance or some weird traffic on the highway. Those dual-tank trucks with the long bar between the trailers get going really fast down James Street and then have to stop, and the rear trailers bounce and jerk around and when I’m asleep, it pretty much sounds like a car being thrown around by an out of control tanker truck or something. So I wake half-up and wonder if there will be an explosion, and there never is. The product of this is that I don’t get enough REM sleep, so I start having dreams all the time, weird dreams. Last night I woke up and looked at the sky and because it was like 4

it was all grey. Somehow, I instantly had a dream right before this where I was dying from some sort of nuclear holocoust death-gas attack or something, and thinking “well, this is it. I can’t run away because I’m too tired and I need to go to work in 5 hours so it looks like I’m going to die in bed, which is probably better than being in my car.” Then I realized I was just loopy and went back to bed for a few more hours. I guess I did think about going in to work at like 5am and leaving after lunch, but I’d be dead from exhaustion.

Last night, I had to bring Bill to the airport, so we hung out and he bought me dinner at Black Angus. The place was fairly cool, because I got ribs and he got steak, but we also got this sampler, plus we got soups and bread, and we ended up with a giant, long wooden table covered with food. Of course we had long, disjointed conversations about life and money and who is working where, all of that stuff.

I just made a ninja throwing star with a CD and a pair of scissors. I cut these points out of the CD, so it looks like a sawblade or something. It is truly unreal. I wish I had a shittier CD player because I would try to play it.

This is weird… this is my first entry in html. I have further screwed with the code a bit to let me enter stuff in html. It takes me more work now, so I need to automate things a bit…

I spent a lot of today screwing with a sparc5 at work, trying to get it to talk to the network. It was fun playing with solaris, but a pain in the ass to get it to work. Made the day go by faster anyway.

I heard from my friend Zara today, someone who I lost touch with about 6 months ago. Someone also told me my old roommate cut his hair and moved to Boston or something. I wonder what’s up with that.

It is pretty distracting to write in html. It’s much nicer to just plow across a blank page. This makes it feel more like editing, not writing. Oh well - I fucked things up enough that I can’t roll back.

I am running an edit of this movie I am making, which has been a pain in the ass. I am sad because I put so much into creating like 2 hours of footage and it looks like it will edit down to about 15 minutes. Bummer…

I should get back to this thing though…

I had to sleep with all of the windows open last night - spring is here. With the fresh air, 6 hours of sleep felt more like 10. I just have this fear of the temp dropping 60 degrees while I am asleep, so I wake up with pneumonia or something.

It’s the time of year that reminds me so much of summers in Indiana - 90 degrees in the day, but a cooler nighttime. My drive back from Longview last night was a flashback to so many summer nights from years ago.

I should probably explain this strange system of memory that I have. It basically has two parts. First, I always consider my life in the present tense to be very boring. I think that in the life of Jon Konrath in May of 1997, nothing is going on. I never think “wow, I am at the place to be”, regardless of what is going on. The second part is that I reminisce heavily about some point in time, usually 2 or 3 years ago. For example, in 1995, when I was working on my first book, I wished it was 1992 again. I missed all of the people from that time, and thought about how great it was, and noticed how much things had changed. Now, in 1992, I had a lot of fun but I also was stone-poor, depressed, and unsure about what direction life was going.

Anyway, it basically comes down to having a lot of memories of a lot of eras of my short life. Sometimes, the weather or a cologne, or a lost notebook, or a song or just a sudden realization will make me think about the past. It’s just odd sometimes.

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I just got back from seeing Fifth Element again with Bill and Marc. It isn’t as incredible the second time - the annoying radio DJ gets more annoying. but the minor details were even better. Some of the edit cuts were also more obvious, good stuff.

I’m going to try to make a video now. More later.

We saw The Fifth Element last night - it is an incredible film. It has a level of depth beyond anything aside from maybe Blade Runner. Truly incredible. I will write more about it later - now we have to leave.