Life is like a daze right now, a combination of exhaustion, heat, and lack of demarcating events to mark the passage of days and weeks. I wish I could find the most ideal bed in the most ideal temperature and simply sleep for weeks, with machines feeding me and stimulating my muscles and whatnot. But I know after fifteen minutes, I’d go mad thinking that I needed to figure out how the interconnects on my CD player worked and how I had to balance my checkbook, take out the trash, wash dishes, etc etc etc.

I’m listening to the Pink Floyd album Momentary Lapse of Reason, an instant time machine to my senior year in high school. I was on such a big ‘Floyd kick back then, probably because most of the mood matched my own. I didn’t realize until I got to college that everyon thinks the same thing, and it’s a pretty played-out thing to do. I still like some of their stuff, mostly the albums nobody else likes. The Final Cut is probably my favorite, but it’s far too depressing for tonight. I just like the sound of Momentary Lapse… in the new system. Very crisp and exact. Too bad the army of fans whirring at top speed cut most of the quality out of the disc. But it’s either that or extreme heat in the apartment.

I have very little to report except that I’m slowly chipping away at the Summer Rain homepage. And I think I’m ready for bed, maybe after a long, cold shower. Maybe I’ll sleep in the shower…

Well, I think it’s time to start writing here again. Aside from the number of people that keep writing to see if I’ve jumped off a building yet based on my last entry, there’s been a lot of nothing going on in the writing world, and I don’t want to resort to other less savory methods of wasting my time after the 9 to 5, like watching prime-time TV. So here we are.

The biggest news is that my book is done. I sent off the masters on July 5, and now I’m just waiting for the designers to send me proofs to correct and approve. I’m also working on a site (located here) that all of you should check out and keep up with as I add more great new content and news on what’s up with the publishing process. I think I’m looking at a mid-September release, so start saving your pennies.

The lack of the book means my daily process has been screwed. With no deadline and no project, I’ve been drifting. Everyone keeps asking if finishing the book is exciting, and honestly, it isn’t. I think if I would have kept writing and rewriting for another ten years, I still wouldn’t feel done. So it feels like I submitted an incomplete work. Secondly, this wait is killing me. I want instant gratification, but at least this is much shorter than most publishing cycles. And most of all, it’s hard to not be immersed in a project. I know I should be working on Rumored, but I can’t force myself to get started, and it will take some time to get back on it. So until then, I will drift.

Today I bought a new stereo. Actually, it’s one of those home theatre in a box things - five surround sound speakers, a 100 wattx5 receiver with DTS, Dolby Digital, and many functions, inputs, and outputs I will never fully understand. It also came with a huge-ass 50 watt self-powered subwoofer. The receiver does a good job of powering its 5 matched speakers plus my old 12” 3-way Pioneer speakers when I’ve got a CD in the player. I’m listening to the Zappa Au20 gold disc for One Size Fits All and it sounds better than ever, especially with the sub to pull out all of the bass. And _Top Gu_n and The Matrix in AC-3 both made me glad I don’t have neighbors underneath me. I can’t use my remote for my CD player anymore (long story having to do with proprietary Kenwood system interconnect crap) and it’s sort of difficult to jockey the volume sometimes on Dolby Digital movies. When you lower things so the Terminator’s motorcycle isn’t waking the dead three houses down, you can’t even hear peoples’ dialogue. There is a special mode to correct this, but it also flattens out all of the ass-kicking sound that I just paid a bunch of money to have. I guess you can’t win there, unless you live in the middle of nowhere.

I still haven’t found any magical answers to life, although I’m getting a little better at dealing with things. I’ve had rough spots, but I’ve also been slowly figuring out what’s bugging me and why. I still basically have nothing to do in my life except my job, but sometimes doing nothing can be enjoyable. Nothing’s better than cooking some dinner, reading a book for a while, and making a few phone calls. It’s not the way to Carnegie Hall and it won’t earn me any Nobel Prizes, but I think this downtime is important. I seriously need to regroup, figure out a few things, and get a little more comfortable with my surroundings.

Case in point: like an idiot, I bought the DVD for Singles. Okay, Bridget Fonda is nice with the first-season-Agent-Scully haircut, and as long as you don’t think about the Kevin Bacon thing, Kyra Segwick ain’t bad, either. And I was at Virgin and there was some “buy 4, get 1 free” deal, and it was the first thing I saw. So I put it in the player tonight, and all of this imagery of Seattle hit me like a sniper’s bullet to the temple. It made me wish it was a Saturday night at 7th and James and I was climbing in the Aqua Ford Escort to drive around in the darkness and do a lot of nothing. All of those comfortable memories hit me - the places I used to hang out, the scenes I used to stroll through and the drives I used to take. After about three minutes of this, I tore the movie out of the player, and spent a long time thinking I needed to get the hell out of New York and go back to Seattle so it could be 1997 all over again.

Then I realized how stupid this was. It’s not 1997. And I can’t go back to Seattle, any more than I can go back to high school or the third grade or living at my mom’s house and working at the mall for my pizza and CD money. I have strong memories of the Seattle experience, and maybe there was something magical about the scenery or the people I knew, but I think a lot of it was how I perceived myself there. Because I wasn’t happy in Seattle - in fact, I was pretty depressed a lot of the time. There were many Saturday nights I went to the Barnes and Noble to sit around and read magazines because I didn’t have anything better to do, and at the time, I thought it was pretty pathetic. So why don’t I go to Borders or whatever in Manhattan and do the same thing? Good question. And that’s what it all comes down to - I have all of these convenient memories of my past, but they are of mundane activities in a glamorous setting, and the whole thing is blurred by time. So if I went out every Saturday and wandered through the streets and ate at 24-hour diners and went to bookstores and maybe even picked up a copy of the Voice and found something slightly more interesting to do, maybe I will create the same memories, the same experiences. I can’t expect to talk to people or make lifelong friends or meet the lover of my dreams, but I can expect to get out, and expect the occacional weird stuff to happen.

So I guess that’s the plan. Except it’s raining and shitty tonight, and I stayed in all day running wires all over high hell to get this surround sound stuff working. I am exhausted now, my arms hurt from hauling in a hundred pounds of wood and plastic, and I feel about ready to drop off to sleep. But before I do, I’m going to keep cleaning, rearranging electronics and cables, and wear myself down a bit so I’ll drop off like a baby.

I don’t know when I’ll update next, but if it’s not for a while, just assume I’m still trying to program all of these remotes. Why can’t they write decent documentation for this stuff? Wait, I should know the answer to that one.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with this thing for the past few days. I’m unhappy with the entries since I re-started this journal in April, and I have no energy or content to make this any better. I have no desire to write, and I have no desire to tell anyone what is going on with my life. Nothing is going on with my life, and I know nobody reads this.

I’ve been in a really bad place lately. All I really do is go to my job, and come home. Most people say that because they hate their job and it consumes their life. My job doesn’t, and I actually like it. The problem is that I live thousands of miles from anybody that I know, and aside from editing a book that nobody’s going to buy, I have nothing to do. It’s incredibly depressing, and I can’t write entries that say “I went to the village, and looked at all the happy people, but didn’t have the guts to talk to anyone.” But that’s essentially all that has happened to me in the last few months.

I blame all of this on myself because I left a relationship and hurt someone greatly, and this was all my fault, and now what comes around goes around. So I can’t expect any amount of pity, because I’m completely responsible for the situation I’m in. I guess that means I’m responsible for getting myself out of it, but I don’t really have the energy to do that. I’m not entirely sure where that leaves me.

At any rate, updating this journal any further would be an exercise in futility. I’m hopeful that at some point, I’ll get my shit together and come back and write something meaningful. But for now, I’m just focusing on my job, and trying to find out what to do with my life. If anyone has any wise ideas, you know where to find me.

Ignore my previous interest in the www.everything2.com site. After messing with it more, I’ve found great shortcomings in using it as a reference tool. It does, however, make a great popularity contest if you miss the days of high school. Sigh.

I feel largely functional today, with almost all of the wheezing gone. The other night, the blinds in my bedroom fell down and I had no way to re-fasten them. I live on the first floor, so this was a problem. I ended up duct-taping a sheet across the window so I could go to sleep. I got that whole nightmare fixed last night. And I’m almost caught up on sleep, so maybe I’ll get something productive done in the next few days.

I’ve been in a strange situation as far as trying to figure out what to do next in life. I realize I always say this, but don’t explain it. I also realize that I make it sound like I’m going to quit my job tomorrow and go join the circus or the Marines or something. It’s nothing like that. It’s just that there’s a lot of slop in my life now, a lot of emptiness. I feel this inside of me, but it’s also in my schedule, my activities. I go to work, I come home, and there’s nothing but an answering machine with zero messages and a book that I couldn’t possibly work on for ten hours straight every night. I don’t want to watch TV, and I don’t have cable, and I don’t really feel like going anywhere. So what do I do? When I had a girlfriend, I had an excuse, a person to call or see or whatever. And I realize I was not the best boyfriend in the world and I didn’t entertain her with tons of neat, new activities on a constant basis. So what am I supposed to do? If I was religious, I’d go to church, but I’m not. And I’ve thought about volunteering but I have severe social anxiety problems related to this. I could start other projects, program computers, start a zine, something like that. But the bottom line is, I need to find a way to fill my time that will eventually help me feel better about things and give me room to grow.

I guess in the past, I would jump right into another relationship, and the fastest way to do that is to get into a dysfunctional relationship. I don’t want to do that, but I also don’t want to shun away from the opposite sex entirely for a mandated sentence until I get “better.” I wish I could just hang out with more people, experience things, do things. I don’t know, I’m babbling. But I feel a need to write, and to explain.

Everything2 really bothered me. It’s like IRC or any other BBS in that there’s a group of popular, trendy people, just like in high school. And if you’re not for them, you’re against them. People were voting down my stuff just because I wasn’t writing stupid new nodes that were chatty and useless. I can’t really deal with stuff like that. Everything2 is a good idea in theory, but it’s nothing more than a glorified chat server for a bunch of airheads.

I don’t know if I want to stay and work until the trains calm down, or go get a drink somewhere and edit the book, or just mess around for a while. I guess I’m going to go find out.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated, I realize that. I guess a lot has been going on with me mentally, although very little is happening in real life. I feel like I say this in all of my entries these days, and it makes me wonder if I should even be doing this anymore. But I’m too lazy to remove it, knowing that I will probably restart it in three months anyway.

I’m in a trancelike state, from having allergies all weekend and not being able to breathe. I was up until three AM last night, trying to find a combination of fans and blankets to get everything at an ideal temperature without too much dust or pollen or fungus or whatever the hell is making me wheeze. So I took a bunch of stuff last night to knock me out - benadryl, ativan, kava - only it didn’t do much. Now I’m hung over, feeling confused and strange, drifting from monent to moment. If I was working on Rumored, this would be great. But, I’m not.

Work on Summer Rain continues. I had a very productive week, and I got changes made to books one and two, little grammar things and misspellings. The last part will take forever though, especially if I’m all loopy like this. I want to get the book done and move on to Rumored. I feel like I’m entering a state of mind where I can really get into Rumored a bit more, and I want to finish it. It will be an interesting summer.

There’s little to say about my personal life except that it’s depressing. I bought a mountain bike, but it has rained every day since I got it. This is my latest obsession. There’s a new Motorhead CD. That’s all.