I took my last vacation day for 2002 today, and I’m glad that I did, because I started to come down with a cold, or at least the horrific sore throat part of a cold that usually happens when you live in a dry heat environment and have to run around in the cold and then get on a crowded subway with a bunch of sick people. So I went to bed at about 8

last night (not on purpose) and essentially slept until 4 this afternoon. I did wake up in the middle of that to eat a can of Dinty Moore stew and watch another episode of Band of Brothers. And after a shower and about a gallon of juice, I finished the last disc, aside from the special features. Overall, I liked the series a lot, although it’s probably going to be like that Moon series that Hanks did for HBO in that I won’t crack the DVDs again for another year.

The book of journal entries is slowly progressing, but it’s at the point now where I really need to worry about the end-game issues, most of all how I’m going to sell the damn thing. Part of me wants to send it to the publisher and then not tell a god damned person about it. Nobody will buy it, but it will be out there. I still need to finish editing, and then get together the cover and marketing crap. Luckily, the editing is going fast, and I’m not finding a lot of corrections. Of course, if I were to rewrite it, there would be lots of work, but I’m just fixing major mistakes. I’m not even fixing the fact that I used to use em-dashes like a motherfucker five years ago.

Not much else. I feel pretty fucking tired for having slept almost 20 hours, though.

Christmas.

I don’t have any giant, special, holiday issue of the journal ready. I didn’t do much for the birth of the baby jesus or baby santa or whatever. I mostly slept, and had some macaroni and cheese for lunch, and then ordered some Indian food for dinner, and fielded a couple of phone calls, and talked to my nephew about nintendo, and that’s about it. It was a nice day off of work, and I couldn’t ask for anything more, really.

My sister and brother-in-law’s gift to me was the Band of Brothers DVD set, which includes 6 DVDs inside a cool metal box, for a total of about 863 hours of viewing. It’s a Spielberg-produced HBO miniseries about the 101st Airborne in World War II, akin to Saving Private Ryan, but a different story. I also got the special edition of Platoon the other day, and spent all of Christmas Eve watching that with the commentary.

It’s snowing out, one of those winter white christmas wonderland snows. It was just raining with cold temps, then it started hailing, then slush, and now it’s white enough for Bing Crosby to start singing about it. I went out earlier today to go to the drug store (and the god damned pharmacy was closed even though they said they would be open) and I had to battle through some impressive downfall to get there. The wind is the worst - it cuts through everything when it hits. 25 mph gusts. Not fun.

I’ve been editing and slowly working on the book of journal entries, and it’s getting there. I think I will try to get it to the printer by the end of the year, and then it will take them a couple of months to figure it out.

So that’s Christmas. Back to work tomorrow, then a three-day weekend. Hope your holiday worked out.

I had another weekend of doing almost nothing, and then I decided to go out today and spend a few bucks on DVDs. I went down to J&R’s, and for some insane reason, decided that I really needed to go see ground zero. I’d previously said that I would never go down there and be one of those stupid tourists looking at a hole in the ground like it was the largest ball of twine on display in the middle of South Dakota at a roadside marker or whatever. But I did decide go to once I was down at City Hall, so I walked over there.

I don’t think the site would be that impressive to someone who hadn’t been down there before, when the towers were standing. Aside from the banners and displays and signs hanging on a fence, the place doesn’t look much different than any other construction site. And I didn’t spend a lot of time down there before, but I did have a mental image in my head of the pre-9/11 layout. So when I started walking down Vesey and got my first clear shot of the area, it was like being hit in the chest with a lead plate. It was so dramatic, seeing that big piece of the landscape plucked clean and replaced by a giant pit of nothing. I really wasn’t even thinking that much about the people who died there or the greater symbolism. I just looked at the surrounding buildings, the things that were made famous by the videos and the news stories; the giant pit of the WTC 7 foundation, the fucked-up Verizon building, and all of the surrounding structures that are now pretty much back to normal. There are still a lot of fences and opened-up manholes and torn-apart sidewalks and stuff like that, and that’s the biggest indicator of the area to people walking by. You can’t really see into the bathtub from the street, and you can’t see the same shot that every aerial photo on the news shows. It doesn’t look that impressive or huge when you are standing in front of it - the whole area is only 17 acres. But it was there. And it was pretty weird.

That was the only noteworthy part of the weekend. Other than that, I sat around, edited this journal book, watched a lot of dumb movies, and that’s about it. I have to work this week, but only Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. No holiday plans, just editing and Grand Theft Auto, which isn’t too bad. Our Xmas weather is going to be in the 40s and raining. I can deal with that.

Watching Platoon. It’s on TNN and is “uncut”, which means they can say “shit”, but they still bleep out “fuck”. I haven’t watched this movie in a long time, and I forgot how many now-famous people are in it. It’s quasi-realistic and okay looking, but it also suffers from the Vietnam Cliche Syndrome like most other movies of its genre. They all have the same soundtrack, the poor black guys that don’t want to fight, the obligatory drug scenes, the out-of-nowhere VC ambush, the My Lai analog, and so on. Still, it’s an interesting waste of a few hours, at least for free.

I haven’t been writing much lately, haven’t been doing much of anything. Last night, I played Sim City for like 6 hours. I tried to build an entire city supported by nothing but rail, but then I gave in and had to build some roads. I got up to about 60,000 people, and then the fucking program crashed, and didn’t save anything. I haven’t played it since, mostly because I have to reboot my computer to Windows, and that’s a huge pain in the ass because I can’t get the stupid GRUB bootloader for Linux to work, so I have to open the BIOS and set a different drive, and that’s about a step away from opening the case and soldering a jumper or something.

Nothing else. No transit strike, BTW. Now I just need to brave the cold every day to get to the damn train.

I had tickets to see Ronnie James Dio at Roseland last night, but I was so tired and miserable by the end of the day Friday, that I just wanted to go home, order some food, and sleep. It was a long week, there’s this looming MTA strike, it gets dark at 4

now, and it’s rainy and 40 degrees pretty much all the time, so I didn’t feel like waiting in the rain for an hour to see four shitty opening bands all for Dio.

Instead, I got some Indian food and watched a DVD I forgot I hadn’t watched yet. I got this three-DVD set of documentaries about atomic weapons by Peter Kuran a while back. They’re pretty cool; one is called Trinity and Beyond and it’s your basic “about the atomic bomb” movie, but with a lot of new footage I’ve never seen. It also includes some 3D footage and the red and blue glasses, but it’s not a very good effect - maybe either my TV or my eyes are not calibrated correctly. There’s also Atomic Journeys, where they go to various places bombs were tested, including the test sites I visited in New Mexico in 1999.

The third movie, which I forgot about and just watched last night, is called Nukes in Space, and it’s all about various high-altitude nuclear tests by the US and USSR, plus a lot about the history of the ICBM and ABM. This is incredibly fucked up stuff and I never knew about a lot of it, but the US did tests where they tried to inject bursts of high radiation into the Van Allen belts to see what would happen. These top-secret tests, called Project Argus, were (at first) from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and they basically found out they could completely fuck up radio waves with the EMP that would be carried through the belts, which they thought could eventually develop some kind of all-out radio and radar fuck-up weapon against the Russians. A later test in the Pacific fucked up radio transmission across the ocean for three or four days and even knocked out the power grid as far away as Hawaii.

Lots of other weird footage on that DVD included LOTS of failed rocket takeoffs, which you can see in The Right Stuff, but they had a lot of alternate views and other launches. They showed two launch failures in the Pacific that WERE ACTUALLY CARRYING NUCLEAR WARHEADS! The warheads did not explode, but they did get consumed by the huge fireball of hot-as-the-sun propellant, which probably did something to the value of property within a 100 mile radius. Oh, also they showed the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, better known as America’s only (formerly) operation ABM base. It’s located very close to where I was born, and was in fact designed to protect my birthplace of Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota. (They did not build this to specifically guard the base because I was born there; although I’m sure some of you appreciate my contributions to American literature, I don’t think the military does.) The SRMSC is a really fucked-up looking place, and looks more like a Mayan burial ground or some kind of 70s sci-fi movie set, because of the strange buildings and antenna. It was built, but then when Congress was dealing with the 1972 ABM treaty and the fact that newer Russian missiles would probably get around the highly complicated and expensive system, they scrapped the program - exactly one day after it was fully operational. Now, it sits dormant and maybe someday if someone decided we need to spend another 40 billion on anti-missile programs, they will reopen it.

While digging around for info on the SRMSC, I found a cool site called Cold War Leftovers that has some excellent pictures of the Safeguard site, plus a bunch of other stuff like abandoned Nike Missile sites and planes stored in the desert. Pretty cool stuff.

Not much else is going on, other than the threat of an MTA strike. If it happens, I will stay at home and work. I have FrameMaker and Windows on another partition, and I have all of my work stuff on a CD-R. I really don’t know if they will strike or not, but everyone seems to be ready for the worst.

Anyway, I’m arguing whether I should go into the city and get something to eat and either brave a movie or pick up some DVDs, or stay here, order some food, and rewatch some old stuff. It’s raining on and off, so it’s a tough choice. We’ll see…