I have the History Channel! See, I have cable, but not really. I plugged in the cable in my apartment and I get some channels, but not any good ones. I don’t actually pay for anything, so I’m not sure if this is the “basic” or “local” package that you get for free, or if I’m getting half of my neighbor’s feed or what. But I get all of the local network channels, and a bunch of the throwaways, like TNN, SuperStation, Food Network, Shop at Home, etc. I was dicking with the TV programming the other day, and found out I get the History Channel! I’m completely psyched because I could probably watch the History Channel 24 hours a day and never get bored. There’s nothing better than watching an hour about Chinese opium trade, then going into a special on guys restoring planes they found in a glacier in Greenland. So I might not be getting much writing done in the future, depending on their programming schedule.

I’m pretty pissed right now because I lost an eBay auction. I was bidding on a Tandy 102 computer, an old and primitive laptop that still works pretty neat and only uses 4 AA batteries. I had the winning bid up to the very last minute, and when it was 0.00, someone else came in and bid twice as much and took it. I was so pissed, I thought for sure I had it, because I was reloading the page every minute and watching. I think they used some kind of program to bid in the last minute. I also got run out on an auction for an Amiga 500 bundle that isn’t over, but that I didn’t want to pay too much for. I got onto another Tandy 102 auction, and I have a bid on an old MicroVAX. I don’t know if I will get any of them, but I hope that at least one of the auctions works out.

I watched all of the Blind Date DVDs and it pretty much reconfirmed my belief that I can never, ever, ever, date again. That doesn’t change that I want to, so the self-confusion level is still pegged.

And a freelance writer from AOL just used some of my pictures of St. Pete for an article, so I can add professional photographer to my long list of occupations. (writer, tech support, developer, designer, graphic artist, dishwasher, master paint specialist, truck loader and unloader, telemarketer, painter, landscaper, salesman, tutor, babysitter, game show contestant, cameraman, followspot operator, and fake advice columnist.)

The history of Lear jets is on. I better go.

The heatwave has ended, pretty much. It was pretty hot all day, but it cooled off last night, so I shut off the AC and enjoyed a real night of sleep, without the aid of over-the-counter drugs. It meant an okay day here to go to Chelsea and wander around the Best Buy for some DVD damage to the plastic. I spent most of this evening going through that Blind Date uncensored DVD, and the Old School movie. So, an evening of high entertainment.

Last night I saw 28 Days Later, which is a pretty weird British movie that’s basically about zombies and a post-apocalyptic England. But instead of the classic Romero zombie theory, these guys were created from an blood-borne, AIDS-like virus that creates pure rage and self-destruction in the host. Some dumb-ass, Greenpeace types try to liberate a monkey lab and basically end the world SARS-style when they unleash the shit. The movie then starts 28 days later when a guy wakes from a coma, completely islated in a hospital from the complete destruction of London. He goes around and finds other survivors to eventually journey to a military camp that promises a cure, only finding that the military junta is about as bad as the infected zombies. It was a well-shot, very humanist film, concentrating more on the plight of the post-destruction man, the lack of hope and desolation of living in this world. A lot of American films in the 80s themed after a Soviet-US war (Red Dawn, The Day After) have a similar setup, but this captured it much more three-dimensionally. There is gore, but the film is cut much more artistically, so you get shocked more by the jumpiness than the animated corpses vomiting blood onto their prey. It’s a great film and gave me a few ideas for the next book. Unfortunately, I wasn’t into the ending. But at least it wasn’t Charlie’s Angels or anything.

Not too much else is up here. I’ve just been reading the new Ultralight Flying magazine, wishing I had like 15 grand to blow on an ultralight, and maybe some more money to go to some place with a good flight school. I might save my pennies and try to take some kind of vacation to a place in Florida or Louisiana or something where I can try to rack up some hours. The FAA is changing some things around with a new classification called Light Sport, which is basically a step below the most basic general aviation license, and is easier to obtain. Most importantly, it does not require a medical - if you have a driver’s license, you can apply. It’s very limited, and only applies to very light planes, during the day, with good visibility, and so on. But it means I could get a license to fly something much bigger than a powered parachute or powered hang glider or something. I could potentially have a two-seater with an enclosed cockpit and everything. So that’s where my future earnings may go.

Not much else. Time to get back to the DVDs.

About the boat shoe story - if you’re reading this, it wasn’t about you. It was about mixing Nyquil and Tylenol PM, which has left me in a haze for the last 24 hours. A post-work nap seemed to help to a certain degree, but I woke up so tired and confused, I couldn’t remember what city I lived in.

It’s officially hot here, at least 90 out long after the sun has set. There’s a heat advisory, and I’m spending the day in a various patchwork of air conditioning and heat. The bedroom starts hot, and I take a cold shower. I take a long, sweaty walk to the train, and the subway car is like a meatlocker. Then I get another hot walk to the semi-cool office. It’s weird how you can walk past some stores on the street, and a wall of cryogenic mist pours out onto the street. Some parts of New York are supercooled, almost in denail of the climate in the asphalt jungle. And others, like my place, don’t even have basic climate control, and bake like a century-old village in a third-world country.

About the Tylenol PM/Nyquil thing - it amazes me how, on the very edge of sleep, I have an almost idiot-savant ability to think beyond my normal ability, in the most creative context. Right before I fall into the darkness of sleep, I dream, almost sleepwalk in a totally lucid state, and sometimes think of the most asinine but complex concepts. The design of a time travel device seems as simple as pasting two Word documents together, and I know every detail, but then I forget it as I drift into sleep. Last night, it felt like I wrote an entire book, a sequel to Rumored to Exist that made total sense, had incredible depth, and then I forgot all of it. Sometimes pieces of it come up in the dreams I have, especially the more detailed ones I remember that happen right before I wake. I think I am going to write a book where I lock myself in a hotel room with a crate of Tylenol PM and try to write down every dream I have.

It’s too hot in here to keep writing. The bedroom is twenty degrees cooler with the new aircraft engine fan, so I better go in there and read for a while.

I stayed home from work today, to ward off this cold and to catch up on a total lack of sleep. The douche crew was outside my window at midnight, talking and keeping me awake until about one, and then they were back after the bars closed. Can’t these people get their own living room to loiter in? Wait, they all live with their parents. Anyway, at about 8

AM, I heard a horrible buzzing sound, and in a half-awake nightmare, thought it was a hundred-year old fire alarm for my apartment and that my death was imminent. Instead, it was a concrete truck about ten feet from my head, making some horrible, 110 dB screeching sound as it shot concrete into some slum landlord project across the street. Probably burying a mafia hit. I put in earplugs, closed all of the windows, called in sick, and went back to bed. I woke up at noon with a horrific sinus headache, ate baloney and crackers while watching the windshield murder case on crime TV, then went back to bed. Woke up again at about four and started a day of adjusting fans, being bored of TV, and laying down but not falling to sleep. And here I am. Apartment is 90 degrees, and I can barely see in my left eye from the inflamed sinus pressing into my brain. Let me start over with a story, and stay with me for a bit.

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I’ve always worn boat shoes as a standard-issue summer shoe. I wear the Nike high-tops when I’m wearing a pair of jeans, but in the summers when I wear shorts (and I’m not a shorts guy by default, it takes a good hundred-degree wave of Hoosier heat to get me there) I like to wear a pair of old, beat-up boat shoes with no socks. No mess, no fuss, and no complex lacing or socks underneath - I can put them on when I wake up from a nap and need to walk to the corner store for a two-liter or a copy of the paper. They fit well, they matched anything, and they were easy to find on the floor. Those kind of simple qualities make anything a default in my life, from my trusty leather jacket to my trusty Timex watch to my trusty grey IU backpack that lasted me ten years and then some.

I think I got my first pair of the shoes when I started working at Taco Bell back in the summer of ‘87. They had a dress code, and most of it was made up of their uniform: the maroon pants, the dumb little visor, the blazer shirt that got covered with beans and cheese during each shift, and the tie-behind apron that wore every ingredient in the place. But we had to wear dress shoes, and that meant no sneakers. And I couldn’t wear the typical black dress shoes that cut off the circulation in my toes after five minutes that I had to wear to weddings and funerals. I needed something as comfortable as tennis shoes, but that looked like a dress shoe. And I didn’t know anything about shoes, but I went to the Thom McAnn and told the dude there all of this, and he produced a pair of low brown shoes with a standard tongue, a laced rim with eyelets around the back heel, and rubber soles that actually gripped the floor, unlike most death-trap dress shoes that were damn near teflon on the sole.

I wore the shoes every day I worked at The Bell, and kept them after I quit and moved on to my short career as a dishwasher and my much longer-term career as a paint salesman at a department store. The first pair wore out, and I found that Payless had the same damn shoes for about $15. (Yes, as a writer, I am irked by the fact that Payless and Pay Less are two different things, and the first one means “without pay.” Anyway.) I think it was when I had a new set in front rotation for the job and an older, more worn set of the shoes as my backup, around-the-house shoe that I noticed how comfortable the things actually were. By the next summer when I wore the old ones without socks, I found that they practically molded to my feet. My soles ground an imprint in the inside of the shoe, and the little ridges and seams and whatnot that had once itched when the shoe was new had now worn away almost perfectly. I kept these old pairs of shoes until I drilled holes straight through the soles and needed to go back to Payless for another $15 recharge.

So I have a lot of good memories of these shoes. Most of my first book Summer Rain, or at least the truth behind the fiction, was walked in shoes just like these. Almost every picture of me from back then had those $15 pieces of leather and fake leather stuff on my toes. I really do miss waking up at 414 South Mitchell, Apartment 13, after a post-work nap, slipping on my boat shoes, and walking over to Lindley Hall for some air-conditioned VAXing. I don’t wear boat shoes that much anymore, and I’ve found they are hard to find these days. In all of my days of driving to and from everywhere, and never having to dress up anymore, I found that I never wore out my one pair of boat shoes; I wore Nikes everywhere. I still had one pair, but I never had the time to wear them.

So today, I had to go to the store for some juice. I was in shorts, and I didn’t want to find some socks and get all laced into the Air Jordans. So I dug out my old boat shoes, a pair that I think I bought when I was interviewing for jobs maybe four years ago. And I put them on, and I found out… they weren’t really that great. My toes didn’t feel right, the finish was too slick, the laces seemed too wimpy or something. The thing that was so great in my head was really not that incredible.

Why the huge story about some fucking shoes? It wasn’t about the shoes. Truth is, I’m sort of pissed off at someone, someone who doesn’t even know I’m pissed off at them. And pissed off isn’t the right word; maybe frustrated, or even jealous. I guess it’s one of those things where you think that something is great and comfortable, and maybe it is. And maybe you think it was right all of those years ago, and suddenly you realize that it’s just a pair of fucking shoes that don’t fit anymore, and it’s time to go find some that do.

I’m officially sick. I really don’t feel great, and due to the fact that I drank about a gallon of grapefruit juice today, my digestive system isn’t doing well, either. I think I’m going to sleep about 10 hours tonight, or at least try. Being sick is not fun in the summer. And yes, it’s about summer now - I think we had hot temps for the first time all year.

I did hack away at the new journal program, although it isn’t done yet. I fixed most of it, but I am trying to streamline the stuff that handles what year is what. When I’m done, it should work so that each year is in a directory, and it will generate the archives links to the left automatically. I’m having trouble with getting the right order of years, though. I need to mess with it more when I can think straight.

I keep forgetting that I have a Furby in my closet somewhere, that I got at a K-Mart for about $5 after the end of that fad. I want to take it apart and do something evil or interesting with it, but I’ve heard that they are fairly useless despite the amount of stuff that it does. All of the firmware is in one chip that melted shut and virtually useless for reverse-engineering purposes. And all of the mechanical stuff, like the eyes and sensors and so forth, are all made of plastic gears interconnected in such a way that you can’t do anything useful with them. It’s like that old Radio Shack Robotron arm; the whole thing was driven off of one motor with a shitload of gears, and it was all mechanical, so you couldn’t just wire in a DB-9 connector and a cable and then hook it up to your computer and drive it with a BASIC program or something. I did see someone wire one of those up digitally, but they basically gutted it and totally regeared the thing with 4 or 5 RC airplane servos. It would have been easier to start from scratch.

Man I don’t feel good. I really feel like sitting down and watching TV for an hour or two, but absolutely nothing is on. I think I’ll sit in bed and read the PC Connection catalog until I pass out.