Last night, in a fit of research for Summer Rain, I found some old attempts at journals dating back to about 5 years ago. I put them on here [long gone now, sorry] for people to check out, even though they’re weird and don’t make a lot of sense to anyone but me.

The oldest journal talks mostly about the tail end of my relationship with Cheryl. After scanning some old email last night, I found that I first met Cheryl five years ago to the day yesterday. It’s strange to think it was that long ago, but even more strange to think about how much I’ve changed. I feel like I was able to work with people much better back then - I worked in the computer labs, had more friends, and was more “socially honed”. If I were single today and someone like Cheryl crossed my path, I wouldn’t be able to say word one to her. I know I was depressed back then, and upset that I couldn’t find a steady girlfriend. But hell, I was pulling em in like Jerry Seinfeld on a good episode. Why the hell was I depressed?

(Don’t answer that.)

After wasting most of the evening, I started some heavy work on Summer Rain, and I feel like I’m making progress on the first book. I’ve identified that most of it sucks, and there are some really bad dynamics problems that need to be fixed. The first book is about as long as the second and third books put together. There’s a short detour in the first book where I go home for a weekend and it turns into 11 CHAPTERS. Out of FIFTEEN. A third of the damn summer is that weekend. There’s lots of work to be done.

Am I the only person who saw that most of the Jedi religion was based on Catholicism? “May the Force be with you”/“And also with you”

It is, of course, raining like hell and dark outside. It is winter! I am not a believer of this El Nino bullshit, so I won’t take any excuses about a late winter this year. I think El Nino is an excuse made up by some corporate fuckheads to give a more PC explanation for global warming. Not that I care either way, really. If the icecaps melt, I will gladly sell my winter clothes and move to the Idaho-Pacific coast.

How do you remaster a two track master? I could see running it through some kind of filter, or digitizing it and using some weird electronics or computer programs to “clean” it. Maybe there’s something I don’t know about mastering and remastering CDs.

I’m babbling because I went CD shopping last night, and one of my picks was the new version of Hendrix - Electric Ladyland. No complaints about the mastering at all - and its cool that it all fits on one CD without any problems. The new artwork is cool, especially the hand-written letters inside. I like it because I had this album on vinyl, an old copy from the sixties that had warps and skips and problems, but I listened to it anyway. I still have a tape that I practically memorized, along with the skips and problems. Today was the first time I heard Little Miss Strange without a giant gap in the guitar solo, where my needle would always go airborne and jump past a good 20 seconds of the album.

This is the kind of album I like. It’s got lots of different types of music, and it is LONG. You can put it in and sit back or work on a book or some cleaning or whatever, and it plays out for a while. One of my biggest pet peeves about the death metal scene was that all of the albums were like 28 minutes long. By the time you put it in the player and sit down in your chair, its halfway over. Ladyland is an awesome album to put in on a rainy day when you don’t want to get out of bed. Actually, the song Rainy Day, Dream Away is the perfect Seattle song to play when you’re pissed off about the weather. It lets you chill out, and then from that, you go right into 1983… and everything is cool.

My other purchase was The Beatles (aka the white album). As a long two-disc, this is similar to the above. But the white album reminds me of a different period of time - I think I talked about this before - but about five years ago, I knew nothing about the Beatles, and just decided I had to own all of their albums. So I started buying stuff and reading books, and worshipping the Beatles. Because of this, all of my friendships and memories and problems and stories from 1992 are somehow set to a Beatles soundtrack. All of my Beatles stuff went when I sold most of my CD collection in 1995 (which was stupid). Listening to the CDs now is like some kind of time machine, which is both good and bad.

I’ve been thinking about only buying CDs that are older than me for the rest of the year. Of course, that isn’t too long - 3 paychecks, I think. I’d like to start collecting James Brown stuff, but that’s a lot of stuff…

I wanted to write today, but I spent my time doing, well not much. I should try to belt out a few words before lunch is over…

BOOK REVIEW High Fidelity - Nick Hornby

I read this book about a year ago and thought “oh fuck! this guy has taken about every theme from my first piece-of-shit book Summer Rain and incorporated them into a novel that’s actually interesting, funny, and touching.” My first read made me both jealous and overjoyed. I kept the book around with a group of other novels that reminded me of what I needed to do during the eventual rewrite of Summer Rain. (other said books include John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, Rupert Thomson’s The Five Gates of Hell, some key points in On the Road, Shampoo Planet minus all of the generation X crap, and an ever-changing list of Bukowski fiction).

I’m rewriting Summer Rain now, for a lot of different personal reasons. Hornby’s book fell into my hands again, because I was too cheap to buy new reading material, but mostly because I wanted to keep thinking about Summer Rain, instead of buying some book about futuristic bug aliens that read minds and colonized the planet Mars or something. Reading his book kept me on track, and made me think much more about the new edits to my book. But, his story made me think of some other themes, and this is one that haunted me:

You can look back, or you can look forward.

Here’s the deal: this book is about a guy named Rob who is in his mid thirties and lives in the UK. He runs a beat-up record store out of the way in some dark alley, and works with two other characters who are total music bigots. I mean they have 40,000 records in their house, they listen to walkmen constantly, they are making top 5 or top 10 lists all the time (top 5 blind performers, top 5 side one, track one openers, worst 5 bands, etc). Anyway, the book starts with Rob talking about his top 5 breakups. Why? He just got dumped. And now he’s 35, pissing away at some tiny shop, wondering what’s next.

Hornby’s got all bases covered here. He’s hitting you with the hilarious and screwed up antics of this small record store, sort of like a UK version of the movie Clerks or something, and you’re also getting the quite real and touching story of this guy trying to figure out what it all means. He messes around with an American folk singer woman, and tries to look up all of the women he’s dated in some self-masochistic ritual of trying to find out what went wrong.

Like I said, this all reminds me of what went on in Summer Rain - the main character got dumped, and he spent the better part of a summer trying to find out what path to follow in life. But what hit me more was how Hornby had detailed a lot of the strange emotional conditions that had led to my writing of Summer Rain. I became a writer because I got dumped by somebody, and needed to find something to do besides sending her emails about every 20 seconds and asking what was so wrong with me or what did I do or would therapy help or is this something that happened to me as a child. And Summer Rain became a vehicle for me - instead of looking up my old girlfriends and asking them what was wrong with me, I could animate them, and watch them interact with the other characters in my book, and find out what went wrong during the course of the novel. I don’t know if it exorcised any demons, but it kept me writing.

Anyway, it is a good book, and worth reading. End of book report.

I went to see the band Dream Theater on Saturday night. It was a totally last-second plan; I heard about it on the radio that afternoon, and it was only $20, and right down the hill from me, so what the hell. The club is called the Fenix, and it’s massively small for this kind of deal. As a dance club, it’s pretty huge, but get a couple of big-dick drum sets and about 28 tons of amps in there, and it gets small fast. They sold out of tickets (lucky I got down there around lunch to buy one before then), so it was wall-to-wall leather jacket in there. I went by myself, and didn’t really talk to anyone, but I got there just as the opening back started, so I missed any awkwardness there.

The opening band pretty much sucked - some amalgam of the most annoying and marketable parts of U2, Pearl Jam, and Blind Melon, or something. They weren’t horrible, but I didn’t find them too noteworthy, and if you listened to 5 seconds of both bands, you could tell that this was the doing of some record exec. I was standing by some fratboys that were really into this band, which sort of proves my point. Anyway, it wasn’t as bad as seeing the Cult open for Metallica, but it wasn’t like seeing Primus open for Rush, either.

[Editor’s note: the band I mentioned above was actually Creed.]

I’m really into Dream Theater’s first two albums and their EP. I got an advance copy of their first album long before it was out, and played the damn thing thin. I wasn’t into their second-to-newest album, Awake, and I didn’t know they had a new one. So there’s my problem - they played a lot of new stuff, and I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. Granted, it all sounded cool, but it was unfamiliar to me. After a LONG time, they did some stuff from the EP, then the first two albums, and I was into that.

The band’s pretty tight and all of the musicians are more than talented. It was weird to see them on such a small stage, but reassuring that so many people showed up. They did a lot of weird improv-melody type stuff. Long drum solo. Chapman stick. Lots of guitar. A keyboard player. Instrumental stuff. High-end operatic vocals. It was all there.

If you’re wondering why I don’t paint a broader picture, it’s because I am weird about concerts. It’s so anti-climactic in a sense, and although I recognize music perfectly, I can never remember the damn names to songs, let alone lyrics. So I’m not the kind of person that can memorize a set list and post it up here and talk about all of the exact technical stuff that went on. Either it was good, or it sucked. This concert was good. Not as good as the G3 tour, but pretty good.

I’ve decided I need to buy more CDs. And I need to get a new stereo someday. Hornby’s book reminded me that I was obsessed with the Beatles 5 years ago. Now, I don’t have any of their stuff on disc (I do have Revolver on tape). The White Album is this haunting return to this time when I lived in my tiny Mitchell Street apartment, hit on every woman that moved, and tried to program in C with every chance I could get. But, like Hornby taught me, you can look back or you can look forward…

I’m at the point where I’m thinking more about the novel than other trivial things when I’m in the shower, eating, driving, etc. Today, I brushed my teeth, and then rushed to the spiral notebook for a pageful of ideas. Now I need to do the same with my amount of writing.

I used to tell people I would write for three hours a night: from 9 to midnight, and maybe more. It’s a romantic gesture stolen from Charles Bukowski’s fiction novels, and one I tried to live by. It never worked - I would eat dinner late, get in a phone conversation, go to Denny’s, shopping and Barnes and Noble, whatever, and not get started by 9. And I’d screw around on the computer, get distracted by CDs, and otherwise avoid the writing sometimes. But some nights, I’d burn away and write until dawn. I tried to write 2000 words a night back then, and I’d usually make it. My mistake was that I never wrote 2000 good words. I read so many books that said ‘get your first draft finished, no matter how bad, and then you can edit it). It doesn’t work like that - I can’t edit for shit, especially the jumbled mess I wrote two years ago.

Now, I’m lucky to get an hour of writing done during lunch, and maybe an hour later at night. I’m working on improving that, but it takes work…

I really liked last night’s episode of ER - I’ve always felt that the gutsy surgical bullshit got in the way of the human emotion behind the characters, and not the other way around. I guess I like the medical stuff to an extent - it’s better than exploding rocket launchers and stuff. ER is an addicting show, and aside from the dramatics, the writing really hooks me. It’s also how a show like Seinfeld can drag me in every time. For a show about nothing, it sure is loaded with a bunch of really catchy plots full of self-referential material.

I found out that if you put four whole apples and a whole lemon in a juiceman, it makes a kick-ass lemonade. The apples sweeten it, but the lemon’s taste overpowers it. It’s sort of slushy, like a smoothie. I think I might get some strawberries and try adding them, too.

It’s Friday. Time to finish up the work day, and get out of here for the weekend…

I’m already hitting various mental roadblocks during this new rewrite of my first book, Summer Rain. My new outline is not much more then a mental recollection of how the book is supposed to work. The problem is - sometimes I forget. And when I go back and try to reference the old draft, it corrupts things and I go from creating this new, more functional structure to just rehashing all of the old shit that’s in the book.

I read pieces of a year-old draft, and the amount of work ahead of me is overwhelming. Writing shifts from bad to poor, the story drags with no real ‘hook’ to it, and everything is sloppy. It goes from describing everything too much to having no descriptions at all. I like bits and pieces of it, but some of it is pretty corny. I’ve tried editing it, but I think it would be easier to just start over.

I got my stupid checkbook from Seatac airport. It cost me $2 to park there for 20 seconds and get the thing. But I was able to balance everything and pay another round of bills last night.

Does a cross-section of celery look sort of like an MRI, or is it just me?

I got a kick-ass Camaro catalog in the mail - I must’ve put my name on a list a few months ago. It’s mostly stuff for 67-69, and mostly original with some repro stuff. So it is all expensive, for people who want to pay $175 a tire to get the original Firestone red-wall tires for their totally restored 69 Z-28. Anyway, it’s got me thinking more about buying another Camaro after I unload this piece of shit Escort. I’d need garage space, though. We’ll see…

I had a weird dream about my ex-girlfriend Tanya. I was at some unknown house watching Apocalypse Now with Simms, Andrea, and this guy who lived down the street from my parents. He was on the phone with someone, and then hung up. I asked who it was, and he said it was Tanya and that they were going out. I told him that I dated her a while ago, and he started telling these stories about how they slept together on their first date and how she was really wild in bed, and I was getting insanely jealous about the whole thing. It was like being a Giants fan back when they totally sucked, and you give up on them, and then they get incredibly good. I woke up and thought it all was real, and I was still all jealous about it. I don’t think jealous is the word for it - I didn’t want her back or anything. It was more like a betrayal. I don’t know - maybe it was because I ate right before I went to bed, who knows.