Today is unoffically AC/DC day in office 375. I got the Bonfire boxed set last night, and I’ve got two of the five CDs with me today. I think I now own about six different recordings of “Whole Lotta Rosie.” Time to go out and buy one of those leather caps and a Jack Daniels t-shirt.

My birthday is over. It was pretty low-key, and to anybody but myself, would have appeared depressing. After fielding phone calls last night, I went to Denny’s, ordered a porterhouse, and wrote in my journal while eating. Then I went on what was probably my biggest CD shopping spree ever. I got two boxed sets, an Ultradisc II CD, and another double album. The total: $145.96. I think I’ve had other binges close to that, but it’s always nice to set a record. I was inches away from buying the Pink Floyd uber-boxed set, but then I thought it out and realized I have all of the CDs I like from that set, many of them in their new remasters, as opposed to the 1992 remasters. So I stuck with AC/DC.

I’m thinking, since almost nobody reads this, that I might parody another online journal for a while. I don’t know if it would be a specific one or a stereotype, and I’m not sure if it would live here or on another server. I could always get a geocities account. I guess I’ve screwed it up by mentioning it already, but what the hell. I loved Stale when it and Slate first came out. Is Slate even around anymore? What a stupid fucking idea.

Slow day. I’m going to screw around for a while.

Today is my 28th birthday. It feels like any other day in some ways - I’m here at work, I don’t have any plans tonight, and I’m eating my usual sack lunch. It’s a weird year; Bill Perry has the same birthday as me, and we usually do something together. This year, he’s in Bloomington and I’m in Seattle, so that won’t happen. He will be here this weekend, though, so there will be some late celebration. Marie isn’t here either, and I wish I was in New York today, just to hang out and get out of the greyness and miserable weather here.

28 is a weird number. I didn’t like 27 because it’s an odd number, an in-between. I’m no numerologist, but it reminds me of when I was 17, which seems like the first non-landmark birthday. You get a license at 16, and you can do all kinds of stuff at 18, but when you’re 17, there’s nothing. I think you can get into R movies. 28 is also odd because it’s 10 years after 18, and so much stuff happened then. It really opens me up for more “ten years ago…” moments.

And ten years ago… my 18th was on a Friday. I went out with my friend Julia Zehr. We got into her Renault Alliance and drove to University Park Mall, which is vaguely near the Notre Dame campus in South Bend. We were going to eat someplace first and then go to the movies, but we got a late start, and ended up going to the Chick-Fil-A in the mall and eating while we waited in line. We didn’t have time to eat, and smuggled chicken dinners into the theatre. We watched Naked Gun - it was my second time and her first. The thing I remember the most were the long and strange conversations we had while driving in the darkness of the middle of nowhere. Julia is a great person to talk to and it was a great way to spend my 18th birthday.

I have a lot of birthday memories, and a lot of weird stuff has happened on January 20. I made a web page (long since deleted, sorry.that talks about other people who share my birthday and events that have happened today. The page needs some work, but it’s a good start.

I thought today would make me write scads of nostalgic and introspective stuff, but I don’t feel like doing anything. Oh well. Send you credit card numbers, I am thinking of buying a sit-down Star Wars arcade game for my birthday.

I’m starting late - actually, I’ve been writing for 45 minutes and decided (for the second time) to kill a giant rant about how unhappy I am with other journals out there. I will shut up and keep looking for other similar journals by writers that aren’t just taking up space.

I bought (on Amazon) a book that contains walking tours of various beat landmarks in NYC. Michael had this book when I met up with him last November, and it looked like a cool way to blow an afternoon or ten, not to mention a few rolls of film. I’m going to NYC on 2/10 so maybe I’ll find some of this stuff. I also ordered a long out-of-print book on the early history of Indiana University, in the hopes that their old book service will eventually turn up a copy for under $4000. I don’t know how rare the book is, but it was published in 1970. I heard a lot about it from this pictorial history book of IU I bought last year. It was cited frequently, and sounds like it has all of the details I’d like to hear about when the campus was over by the Kroger a little southwest of the current campus.

I had very vivid and bizarre dreams last night. I was at a very small and shitt theatre reminiscent of the dollar theatre in Bloomington, and they were showing three different trailers to the new Star Wars movie in a continuous loop. I was dressed as Luke Skywalker, in the white robe get-up from the first movie. I think you had to pay once to get in, but people were staying to see the trailers over and over. During a break in the loop, they had a large video projector, and Sean Penn as Jeff Spiccolli was there, playing Rogue Squadron for the Nintendo on the huge screen. (“Whoa dude, these TIE interceptors are most bogus.”) I remember studying the credits to the trailers later, and many of the people’s names were purposely obfuscated for some reason, maybe to prevent people from figuring out the plot or how many special effects were used. Maybe James Cameron was the guest executive producer and they didn’t want people to know. It was a weird dream.

My writing is slowing down a little, although I think there’s a direct correlation between my diet and my muse. I made shake and bake chicken last night and ate until I was about reado to drop. Then, it wasn’t hard to start working on the book. I think I need to keep the fridge stocked to finish this book on time.

Well, I’ve screwed up - I’m out of time, and spending 45 minuted on my previous aborted entry means this is it for now.

This weekend wasn’t very productive for me. I had tons of stupid stuff to do - laundry, bills, cleaning, groceries, shopping, etc etc etc and I spent the whole weekend getting caught up on errands. I never got in the mindset to do any writing all weekend, except for a few occasional scraps. I do my best writing when my apartment’s clean, no pending errands are nagging me, and everything is in a state of calm. I don’t write as well when my todo list is full and I feel like I shouldn’t be on the computer. And I don’t get much done when other tasks run into my scheduled writing time.

All of this is sort of a precursor for the big discussion about writer’s block. I don’t know how much I can just jump into this, since every writer and aspiring writer has their own opinion on it. My basic theory is that I tend to freeze up when I don’t have enough structure and I have too much writing ahead of me. When I was blocked on Summer Rain last year, it was usually when I didn’t have a good outline of the chapters I was trying to start. I’d have lots of ideas and thoughts about what needed to be included, but I didn’t know how it would happen, so I couldn’t write. I’ve known writers who don’t have this problem, and a few who don’t even use outlines. But for me, planning is the key. That’s why Rumored to Exist has been such a hard book to write. Because it’s non-linear, it basically has no outline, and I write the ideas that come to me each day, or things I have in notes. I have some pacing, an idea of how much to write each day. But it has been hard to keep up. I used to write more words per day, but a lot of the writing was shit and required major revisions or simply got junked. I guess I’ve been going slower to prevent that.

I was looking through my current paper journal - I use those 120 page, 3-subject spiral notebooks. It’s interesting, because I’m in the final stretch of this one, but I started it at the end of July. I went to the front of the notebook and read some of the entries last night. So much has happened in the last six months, with my relationship with Marie, the summer of extreme heat, getting rid of the Escort. It’s weird that those entries and my current ones are still in the same book. I guess I need to start writing faster. Historically, I go through two of the 120 page notebooks a year, but the last few times, It’s taken me about 7 months to fill one of them up. I think my pace has quickened in the last couple of months, though. I should probably mention that what goes on in my paper journals never crosses over to here. I know some people form their electronic pages by forming a “best of” from their paper stuff, but I’ve found it easier to avoid that.

Still listening to Snap Judgment. I think I’m going to go buy some books online.

Thank you to Ray for my early birthday present, which I got in the mail today. It’s the best three demos from the Chicago hardcore/Death band Snap Judgment, all compiled together on a CD-R. Ray put the whole thing together for his own evil intentions, but he also made me a copy, with a nice laserprinted package that has scans of the original three covers and very comprehensive, anal-retentive track info that a fellow audiophile would love. The first demo, Tomorrow Will Be Worse reminds me most of a trip to Chicago I took with Ray during spring break of 1992. There’s a funny and tragic story that goes along with this which I need to tell at some point, but these six tracks remind me more of other imagery from March 92, like my VW, my old girlfriend Patty, the spring break trip home I took with Ken Rawlings along for the ride, the new Realistic cassette-only deck in the dash of my car, and Eternity cologne. The second demo, Hey! Soul Classics reminds me of Jan/Feb 1993, when I was dating both Kim and Danielle, and walking everywhere because I didn’t have a car. I only heard the third demo, 1993 once or twice, and never got a copy. Around that time, I was going to Chicago a lot with Ray, almost every weekend, and I must’ve met their lead singer John Tekiela a few times, but I don’t remember for sure. I never saw them play, but I heard many times the fable of when Ray saw them on his birthday. They threw together an impromptu cover of the Motorhead song “We Are the Road Crew” for him, and when John didn’t know the words, he gave the mike to Ray and let him sing.

Memories like that make me wish the music scene hadn’t gotten so stupid in the last five years. At least I’m finding more old, cool stuff on CD so I can listen to it until the next wave of decent stuff comes out.

I hate to cut this short, but I just got home and ate dinner, and I have a new Nintendo game waiting for me. Maybe I’ll write more later.