If someone would’ve explained the futures market to me when I was 18 years old, I’d be a fucking billionaire by now. If I had the money to do it, I mean. I’ve been trying to figure out my money situation lately, especially since my average daily balance in savings in 1996 was 4 cents, and someday I’ll get sick or laid off or will want to buy a new pair of shoes and I’ll be fucked. I’ve been thinking about a mutual fund or something like that, where I can put in a few dollars a week and when I decided to buy a house or whatever, I’ll have the cash.

Anyway, I found out how futures work and it’s all highly skeptical and everything, but sounds incredible. It’s about like betting on the world money market - horseracing but slightly more legitimate. I’d probably do bad, since every prediction I’ve made about the business world has gone under. But it’s the thought that counts.

It’s been one of those days where I am so miserable that I wonder what I’m doing and why I’m not doing something better. Yesterday, I spent the whole day on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and I couldn’t even blame it on anything. Maybe it was diet or this stomach sickness or food or lack thereof or something, but I had complete and literal tunnel vision, and couldn’t do anything as simple as open my car and get something off of the dash without formulating a complete battle plan and executing it at a movement per five minutes, like some kind of lunar probe being controlled from a million miles away. And when I can’t even watch TV, I can’t do things like write, think, etc. So it’s been frustrating and tiring. Sleep hasn’t helped a lot. I think my glasses are going, or I need a new prescription, or I scratched mine up too much.

Shit, I didn’t know USWEST really had their yellow pages online. I thought the commercials were some kind of stupid joke, and when you went to the URL, it would say “Use the yellow pages!” and then have a phone number where you could call to get a paper copy of them (if anyone ever answered the phone).

Okay, so I now have an appointment to get new glasses, which is somewhat of a scary thing. First, I have had glasses since I was in first grade. And not some little token, about-as-distorting-as-plate-glass glasses, but big, thick, coke-bottle glasses. So from a young age, I’ve always thought of having to buy new glasses as something like having to replace the engine in your car - an expensive and time consuming process that 99% of the people out there probably don’t have to deal with. I know a lot of people that get all kinds of Brooks Brothers, Anthony Edwards-looking glasses to correct their 20/29.5 vision, and they love new glasses like they love a new pair of $300 shoes. That isn’t me. First, nobody can fill my prescription right. One time I went to a place in the mall where their ad said “we will fill any prescription in an hour!”. It took them 9 days to grind me a pair of glasses, and when I got them, they were not perfect. So I’ve always had problems with getting new glasses. Plus now, it adds the fun element of dealing with my cryptic and impossible to decipher insurance coverage. I think this will be a fairly cheap thing, but we’ll see. If it does work out, it will be nice to finally have a new pair of glasses…

My zine is at this crucial stage where 99% of the text is pristine, and I am now just screwing around with graphics and margins and fonts and all of that stuff. It’s easy at this point to rush it to press and throw everything together fast, and then get it back from the printer and find a bunch of stupid mistakes. (or even worse, shove them all in the mail and 2 weeks later get a bunch of letters about your stupid mistakes). It’s also easy to spend another 4 months nit-picking with stuff, looking at issues of Newsweek and Playboy and Details for more layout inspiration, while the articles rot and date themselves. And it’s also easy to completely fuck everything up, and delete one text frame that forces 25,000 words of text to all be imprinted on top of each other on the cover page. So it’s a matter of balance, and I’m still shooting for that Tuesday deadline.

I just had the sudden urge for rolls, potatoes, and turkey gravy. Potatoes and gravy are one of the only guilty pleasures I can enjoy these days. After eating a week’s worth of lunchmeat and salads, I want to sink into a steak or a pizza with a lot of stuff on it, or some Denny’s fare, but I can’t anymore. Potatoes have enough starch and texture for me, though, and it’s amazing how infrequently I eat hot food these days. Enough of my weight watchers stories…

I wish life had a search engine like AltaVista. Whenever I want to find out about some obscure band or spaceship or country or whatever, I enter it into a search engine and see what comes up. Some things, like music, work great for this - even the most obscure garage bands are usually listed somewhere. But sometimes you get a bunch of ads instead of information, which is somewhat annoying. I don’t always trust the info I find on the web - I seldom do. But it makes for good reading.

I can’t stay awake. It’s been a long week, but I’ve been pulling long days, so it’s sort of a twilight zone thing. I can’t believe it’s already Thursday, but it also seems like 7 weeks since the last weekend. I don’t know - time passes fast now, and will continue to speed up for the rest of my life. Now that I have no concept of seasons anymore, it all blends together. A second ago, it was April, and a second from now, it will be October. Kinda pathetic…

I finished reading Red Mars last night. Things get pretty weird and intense at the end of the book, and I really liked how it went. It made me think a lot more about capitalism and historic themes. Mars was a neutral place like Antartica, and then when big companies found out they could mine the fuck out of it, they broke treaties and lured human slaves to the strip mines with promises of money and good work that never happened. I read somewhere that any colonization happens not because of a lack of natural resources, but because of a lack of freely available natural resources. It took less firepower to steal land from the Indians than the French or British.

I bought Blue Mars and Green Mars, so I can keep going with the trilogy. I also saw Mark Leyner’s new book and Vonnegut’s new book, but I didn’t have the cash to buy them both in hardcover - maybe on payday. I think I’ll be busy reading for a while.

There’s a Jello Biafra interview on The Onion, and it’s amazing how much he repeats himself, sometimes in the same interview. I’d be afraid to interview him again in person and find that 50% of what he said is stuff I’ve already printed in the zine. But he has a lot of good things to say. He’s very anti-punk, in the sense that most punk rock these days is as brain-dead as the disco scene was in the 70s, and that scene was why punk was formed in the first place. Most rap is more punk than punk these days.

It makes me think about heavy metal - there was a long period where I thought heavy metal was a thinking man’s music, because my only exposure to it was reading Iron Maiden liner notes in the basement of my mom’s house. There was no metal scene in Indiana, and everyone else was listening to Warrant or whatever, so I bought my Slayer and Megadeth and Anthrax albums in the equivalent of a Musicland, and thought that with all of this anti-war stuff, that metal had sort of a moderate-left political position. Then when I started doing the zine, I found that most metalheads were mostly drunken rednecks and far to the left by default, and they listened to anti-war lyrics and thought they were pro-war and the coolest thing in the world. And it’s a strange hypocrisy - there are all these Swedish bands who bitch about the high taxes, but live off of welfare illegally while they tour America.

I’m not a hippy or anything - I guess I’m angry about such non-cerebral people taking a fake political stance and thinking they’re infallible. Most punks who hate corporate america and subscribe to that whole prefab belief are probably more conservative than your average NRA member. And most gun-slinging gangsta rappers are probably more to the left with Clinton - they all have this giant communal posse, and spread the wealth when they become famous. The first thing a rapper does when he gets signed is build a house for his mom. The second thing he does is buys a mercedes or bmw for each of his friends. It’s almost like socialism, redistribution of wealth. It’s rare I agree with rap artists, but if I had more money than I could spend, I wouldn’t just sit on it, either.

Speaking of which, how about that Ted Turner deal? That’s the first thing he’s ever done that I’ve agreed with. He loses a billion but I bet he gains it back on his stock prices. Despite the arguments from the black helicopter crowd, I think it’s a good cause. It’d be nice if the UN had the cash and the balls to figure out some thing and to get some damn money and aid to some of these poverty stricken country. It’s amazing how some countries have life expectancies that are half or even a third of ours. And despite what Sally Struthers’ fat ass tells you in a commercial, a dollar a week or whatever won’t fix those peoples’ problems. That dollar never makes it to the adopt-a-kid, because there’s some fascist puppet regime opening all the mail and eating fat on the proceeds. People gave millions of dollars of food to Ethiopia 10 years ago, and none of it got there. They should’ve starved out the fat cats and gave them a taste of their own medicine. If the US wants to do something worthwhile with their trillion dollar aircraft carriers, they should liberate some of the starving countries in the southern hemisphere - you know, the ones without oil.

Enough of the political bullshit - that Biafra interview got to my head…

I went home sick yesterday, with something stomach-related that felt like the flu or something. I don’t know. I’m here today, and I feel a little better. I spent the afternoon in bed, reading Red Mars and/or taking a nap. It’s a very cool book, and it covers a lot of details about Mars colonization that people wouldn’t think about, like money, religion, different countries competing against each other, and that thing.

Things I’m wondering about include what kind of power outlets they use, if the TVs are PAL or NTSC, if the women take birth control or something else is used during these frequent plot-building extramarital affairs, and so on. It also seems odd that they’ve been there about 20 years (at page 360-some) and they can build about anything. Assembly lines can build complete rover cars and biosphere domes, but there are only 10,000 people on the planet. I guess it’s the robots they have, and maybe it’s just easier to build stuff with less gravity. Who knows.

I’m eating toast for lunch. It was in the fridge all morning, so it’s pretty awful.

This morning, I started thinking about what would’ve happened if back in 1989, I would’ve hit myself in the head with a brick, started studying 40 hours a week, and changed to CompSci right away. I don’t know why I torture myself like this, because I’m sure when I turn 40, I’ll be wishing I would’ve had a moment of clarity in 1997 and started saving every damn penny I make.

So I’m thinking about this, and then I start thinking about computers and artificial intelligence. Would a computer know its limits? In a sense, even the most basic computers know their limits - if you divide by 0 or enter a number too big, it will stop and give you an error. Why can’t humans know their limits like this? Is it because our greater ability to think stops us? I mean, even our bodies know our limits. If you drink 20 shots of rum back to back, your body will make you puke. But your mind didn’t make you stop after shot 2 or 12 or whatever. It might just be a bad analogy - with a computer, it is a simple matter of checking a circuit, whereas with a human, it is a more complex and fuzzy process of making value judgements.

I need to read more about AI before I go off on these weird tangents… And I need to go finish my applesauce…

I’ve been reading about the Artemis Project, which is this effort to launch people to the moon in the next 10 years or so. (You can read about it here) It’s a pretty cool plan, really, and involves a lot of commercialism and a lot of volunteers. I guess if you are a rocket scientist sitting around doing not much of anything and an opportunity comes to design a giant booster or something comes up, you probably would decide to work on it.

I’ve been on this SciFi bent lately, and I don’t know if it is because of all the Mars stuff, or the Commodore 64 is bringing back repressed memories, or all of the talk of old SciFi zines sounds cool, or what. When I was in high school and took many study halls in order to avoid becoming an overachiever, I read about every book in the library to stay awake. This meant a lot of SciFi - old school stuff like Asimov, and Bradbury, and Clarke. Now, it’s hard to get into some of the junk science-based SciFi, but some of it has enough spirit in it to be readable. I’m reading the book Red Mars now, which talks about settling on mars, and terraforming, and all that, but it’s well done. I think I want to check out the whole trilogy.

I’ve always been into the whole space exploration thing, too. In grade school, I memorized all of the books about the manned space missions. Even in college, I followed all of the shuttle missions on the internet, and kept up with the construction of the Endeavour. It’s a fun bug, but you can’t exactly finish college with a 2.1 GPA and go work for NASA. Oh well..

I’m having a real non-day, and I’m feeling a bit sick. Maybe I’ll skip out for the rest of today.