The apartment is still a bit too hot, but it’s a nice oasis from the weather outside. With temperatures at about 30 degrees and winds in the 20-30 MPH range pulling that down a dozen or so notches, it’s not the kind of weather to lounge around in. I went out for a while today, and endured the biting cold for a few hours, and it felt good to get out and do some shopping, but it felt better to return to a nice warm apartment with an armful of stuff I just bought.

Yesterday, I went to a screening of Night of the Living Dead at AMMI with my friend Julie. It was extra-cool because George Romero himself was there, and did a Q/A session after the film. First, it was cool to see the film on a big screen, with a sold-out audience. People laughed at a lot of the corny lines, and clapped for some of the more over-the-top stuff. Romero came out, and he was pretty cool. He reminded me of Bukowski in some ways, the tone in his voice or his articulation. He talked about Tom Savini’s craziness, the possibility of a fourth zombie movie, the fact that he was a director on Resident Evil but was fired after ten months, and a lot of other stuff. A bunch of suck-up people asked obvious questions and complimented him on obscure films that nobody’s seen, and that’s always a pain in the ass. Overall, it was a very cool screening, and the only bad part was that when I took out my camera to get some pictures, the damn batteries were dead. Oh well.

I spent part of today trying to hunt down these camera batteries. They are a lithium battery the size of two AA batteries, and I can’t just pick them up at the corner bodega. I ended up going to three different stores before I snagged two sets of batteries at a Staples. I also went to a Barnes and Noble and picked up some new travel books, and this totally fucked up Air Force survival manual. It was like $12 and is about 600 pages of information on how to skin rabbits and build shelters and what plants are edible, and tons of other stuff. It’s a very interesting read, the kind of thing I can open to a random page a thousand times over and still not get enough. It’s also the kind of book that makes me think I should be in the deep woods somwehere, digging a hole in the ground and covering it with branches while my campfire roars.

Not much else. I am watching this TV movie about JFK Jr. with some sort of sick fascination. It’s interesting, although I never really followed what happened with John John and I don’t really have an accurate mental timeline on the whole thing. I do remember when he died, because I was in DC visiting Larry, and a lot of people there were all bent out of shape and leaving flowers at the Kennedy grave. It’s an okay show, but not incredible.

I can’t believe I will be in Vegas on Friday. I better start getting my crap together for the trip…

My mom moved recently (for reasons I don’t really want to get into) and told my sisters to basically get any of their shit that was around her house a month or so ago. I’d already been through this in 1997 when my mom was preparing to rent out and ultimately sell the house where we grew up, and I’m pretty sure I even wrote about that experience here. Basically, at that point, I thought it was last call and I got what I thought were the last of my mementos, old books, and keepsakes from the piles of old stuff in the basement. Well, I was wrong, and my sister found amidst a bunch of garbage a rather interesting little item that she sent to me, and it arrived today.

The item in question is my baby book. I don’t know if this is a unique tradition to the Catholics or the people in the Midwest or particularly Better-Homes-and-Gardens-type parents, and I’m interested to hear if anyone else has one of these. Basically, it is a pre-printed scrapbook with various pages dedicated to clippings, photos, and tons of statistical information that new mothers love to gather on their baby, like when they first sat up, when they first held their bottle, when they first asked if Alan Greenspan is actually the head of a tribunal Masonic government that secretly runs the entire world via the monetary system, and so on. Mothers then write down all of these factoids and save birthday cards and kindergarden grades and locks of hair and so on. In a sense, it’s almost like a throwback to the entire blog concept, except it’s not on the web, and it’s not full of ads for vitamins.

So I guess my mom bought one of these books about 32 years ago, and I completely forgot about it. I do remember as a child that this book hid away in the buffet in the kitchen, along with commemorative candles from baptisms and bibles given to us at first communion and real silver silverware that never saw the light of day. My book was very late 60s looking, although I was born in 1971. I seem to remember Monica’s book being much more Gerald Ford-esque 1970s, and I don’t even remember Angie having a baby book. Angie was the Polaroid child; my parents had a crappy 126-camera that took slide film, which means there are about a dozen photos of me before the age of four. Monica was born when the 110 camera was the shit, and there are a fair number of shots of her in the family album. When Angie came around in 1976, my dad’s new toy was the Polaroid, and we have dozens and dozens of photos of Angie doing about everything. I think this novelty replaced the novelty of the baby book in the same way that email has replaced the novelty of writing a letter and sending it snail mail, so Angie’s childhood is in a sense much more documented, but it’s a much different experience. And now that everyone has a video camera the size of a book of matches, I doubt anyone but the most dedicated mother is still using the baby book concept. And I’m sure most of them have gone to the web.

Anyway, the book showed up today, and it smells like the inside of that buffet drawer, and like our old house in Michigan. The first thing I found that amazed me was… my own receipt! The bill from the hospital was in there; the Grand Forks Air Force hospital charged Sgt. and Mrs. Konrath a grand total of $10.50 for a seven-day stay, including food. Also included are my hospital tags that went around my foot (with a US military stamp on them); the slip that was on my hospital crib; the front page of the Grand Forks Herald from January 20, 1971; the newspaper announcement of my birth; some photos showing me and my mom and dad in the wood-grained trailer where they lived when my dad was in the service; and a chunk of my hair from my first haircut.

Aside from the initial birth stuff, there’s not a lot that would be interesting to anyone but me, unless you find the fact that I walked when I was nine and a half months old, and I used to call making the bed “changing the bed” when I was a kid. It’s still a very neat little discovery for someone who is as nostalgic about the past as I am. I’m glad my sister was able to liberate it for me.

Not much else is up, except that I’m busy as hell at work, and that makes the day go by faster, but it makes the time off seem much shorter. The Rite-Aid by my house can’t get a god damned thing done right, and every single prescription I bring there gets fucked up somehow and they either don’t have the stuff or they forget to fill it or the insurance company needs some super-secret approval and they don’t fucking call me and ask for it, even though they ask me every single time what my phone number is in case they have questions. The fact that I run into stuff like this in pretty much every avenue of my life makes me wonder how things ever happen at all. I wish this generation had a saying like “they can send a man to the moon, but they can’t _______.” But the thing is - they can’t send a man to the moon anymore. They can’t even install a public toilet in the largest city in the country, and I pay them $30,000 a year in taxes. You can buy a toilet at Home Depot for $100. Thiry grand times everyone else who has ever had to take a piss buys a lot of toilets.

Okay, gotta go see if Ray actually bought a region-free DVD player or not.

I just got a copy of my phone bill dated December 1, which is due on December 26. (Yes, last December 26.) I don’t know if this was a screwup with Verizon (very probable) or a screwup with my online bill payer situation, which recently was merged or bought or otherwise shifted over, resulting in massive disruptions in .05% of their customers, which means me. Hopefully I will get another bill shortly that is double, and I’ll pay it, and in the meantime, my phone won’t get disconnected. That’s my hope, anyway.

This is one of the kinds of situations that throws me for enough of a loop that I spend days wondering, “why does anyone ever pay their bills?” and I start wondering about grandiose systems to replace all international monetary functionality, and then I realize that the people I work with are just trying to upgrade a tiny, tiny, tiny facet of the banking world, and the amount of incredible bullshit involved with the infrastructure is tremendous. On one hand, I look at a bank (mostly when standing in line) and I think, “why can’t they replace all of this, and have it work for a fraction of the cost?” and on the other hand, I have no idea how trillions of dollars can flow through the system without catastrophe on a daily basis. It’s like when I’m washing dishes, and I think I’ve found a way to invent an entirely new dishwasher - no, an entirely new concept in dishes that is custom-engineered not only for comfort, but for maximized, automated washing and sterilization. Meanwhile, I can’t actually finish washing my own fucking dishes.

I’m still playing with this Ethernet adapter on the PlayStation 2. I still can’t get the Navy Seals game working. Tony Hawk 4 works great, although I can barely play it against others. I am slowly learning more about different tricks, but it’s complicated, and requires more manual dexterity than I can muster. But it’s an excellent game. I didn’t realize how good the PS/2 is until tonight, when I got Quake 3 going on my work machine. The graphics are very blocky and crappy-looking, compared to something like Medal of Honor. Maybe I don’t have them maximized fully, but they look very primitive to me. Quake is interesting, but playing games with a mouse and keyboard is very counter-intuitive to me, and ergonomically disastrous. Still, it’s fun to play networked with other people at work after hours.

Not much else. A lot of trouble sleeping, and I took Tylenol PM last night, so I was out of it all day today. I heard from my PSA at the book publisher, and I should have proofs in a few weeks. That could mean the proofs are done when I’m on vacation, but I told them to push back until I get back so I don’t have to try to download them over a modem or anything.

OK, gotta go play a bit more before bed…

I’m watching a TV movie about Enron that’s both compelling and stupid, and I’m not sure which of the two keeps me watching. It also has Shannon Elisabeth from the American Pie movies, but she looks somewhat terrible, and is playing the role of a whiny, two-dimensional Enron wife, which pretty much kills any sort of sexual attraction she would normally exude. Anyway, it’s the only thing on TV right now, so here I am.

I went out last night to see Bowling for Columbine and go eat in Times Square. The Times Square thing was unusually busy and very strange, given the ghosts I see of my two years or so of working there. But many of the stores are changing, and many new things are opening up. One new good thing is this huge Toys R Us store, which is where a cheap theater and a bunch of those annoying junk camera stores used to be. One bad thing is that the food court next to the AMC 25 on 42nd is now gone. That sucks, because it was one of the open, public, and no-hassle restrooms in the area. And speaking of ghosts, I once again ran into former coworker and standup comedian Matt Daly, handing out fliers to his comedy show at a club right off of Times Square. We didn’t have too much to say other than the usual catching up, but he’s always a cool person to talk to, and I really hope I manage to catch one of his shows.

After dinner at the Howard Johnson’s, which was pretty unmemorable, especially my $16 faux stir fry, I went to the AMC 25 for the movie. I resisted going to this movie for a long time. I am not always down with Michael Moore’s confrontational style. I did like Roger and Me a lot, but I saw The Big One in the theater, and found it to be uneven at best. There was good information in this one, but it didn’t really offer any kind of a thesis or solution. And while some people might consider it some sort of in-your-face vigilante justice to corner a company spokesperson in a lobby while waving a fake check in their face and telling them they laid off too many people, I ultimately don’t see how it does much of anything, especially when you consider that most company spokespeople and other talking heads are brainwashed and functionally useless.

Given all of this, I thought Bowling for Columbine was interesting and entertaining. I would have done a few things differently, but I dug it overall. I was going to write much more about this, but I have no energy to do so right now, so I’ll stop.

I bought the Ethernet card for my PlayStation 2, along with Tony Hawk 4. I can’t get the card to work with Socom Navy Seals, but I read online that it’s because Sony fucked up on their servers and they never let people log in because of load. They should get that shit figured out if they’re going to run commercials constantly. The Tony Hawk game is pretty cool, and it’s incredible to play it online. It doesn’t use that much bandwidth, and there you are skating along with other dudes in the same skatepark. It’s a very hypnotic game, the sort of thing where you can play forever, going back and forth on the same level, trying different tricks over and over. A very good time-waster.

Not much else. I need to get out of here and think about going to bed in a few hours. I was up till about four or five last night, so getting up at seven tomorrow will be a real trick.

Happy New Year. I think I’ve figured out all of the associated issues with knocking the journal over to 2003 without completely mangling access to the old archives. There are still broken bits and pieces, and the UI isn’t wonderful, but it looks like it’s at least mostly functional.

And what did I do to usher in the new year? I was mad at work trying to finish things for my next book. And now, I’m happy to report that Tell Me A Story About The Devil: Selected Journals, 1997-1999 is on its way to the publisher and will hopefully be available in a few months. It’s a collection of old journals from right here, edited and pulled together into a nice, bound copy. I’m very happy about making this a book, and I really do like all of this old writing. Of course you can get all of this stuff for free on this site, but it will be a different experience to be able to sit in bed or on the bus or whatever and read a copy on real paper.

The last few days have been a real bitch, pulling together the manuscript, dealing with the little bits like the back cover text, marketing summary, and all of that, and getting the cover ready. (It’s here if you want to look at it.) Ray did the cover again, and it took some work to find a photo that I liked. But I think it looks good, and I’m happy that after two black book covers, I will have a bright red book to put on the shelf next to it. Anyway, I haven’t slept much, and my food schedule is way off too, so I feel like shit. After finally submitting everything to the publisher at 10

this morning, I got a few hours of sleep and went out in the pissing rain to get some Subway for lunch at about 5. Now, only a few hours later, I really want to get supper, but I really don’t. And I don’t want to work tomorrow, but I have to go in. At least it will be a nice, short, two-day work week.

Not much else is up. I am not going to ramble on about resolutions or look back at the year in review or anything like that. I do too much of that stuff on a daily basis. Right now, I need to clean the disaster in my house from working at full-bore for the last week or so. I’ve got a bedroom full of photos everywhere, a living room covered in red-penned printouts, and a sink full of dishes. I doubt I will do too much damage to that tonight, but I would like to get things returned to normal so I can get started on the next book.

And yes, there is a next book! I have an idea, but I won’t jinx it. For now, I need to get thinking about the trip to Vegas in about two weeks. I just ordered a new battery for my laptop, and I hope that fixes the problem so I can get mobile and running. If it doesn’t, I think I’m going to buy a used PowerBook and go Mac. But I hope the battery fixes everything. It’s weird to think that I used this laptop for the last 40 or 50 hours almost constantly, scanning photos and plugging away at the manuscript, but it won’t work without a cord.

Okay, time to look at this dinner problem again…