It is sixty-eight degrees out! I don’t know how the fuck this happened. At lunch, it was mild out, but after work, I practically needed a jacket. I might actually be able to sleep tonight without taking a fistful of sleeping pills. It’s not even muggy or anything. I wish it would stay like this all month. (I hope I didn’t just curse it.)

I officially have too much stuff to read. The Asimov books are great, and I’m almost done with the first one. But I also got a copy of The Watchmen from Amazon the other day. It’s a graphic novel (i.e. comic book) from DC that everyone keeps telling me I really need to read. I don’t collect comics - I did for a little while in college, but got out of it when I was spending way too much money on Spiderman stuff. But I do occasionally like to read something when it’s good. The last good thing I read was the new Punisher title in the Marvel Knights series. I really like the faux-Mack Bolan anti-hero character, although he got a little too cartoony and weird during his run in other various Marvel comics. Ray told me to pick up the hardcover anthology of the first dozen or so of the new series, and they’re excellent. The art is much more realistic and gritty, and the stories have much more of a raw human feel to them. Like I said, I’m not the greatest fan of comics, but that book did it for me.

As far as other reading, I got a new book on flying ultralights today, but I forget the author/title. A quick flip on the subway showed a lot of good info about the meteorology side of things, which is good. I have a whole slew of books on my Amazon wish list. (If you’re curious, it’s here.) And then the other day, the guy who sits next to me ordered a shitload of books on Barnes and Noble, and they couriered the books to him THAT DAY. FOR FREE. Only in New York…

I think I’m back on the book of Bloomington short stories, and I’ve officially killed off any thought of working on my book called The Device. I did steal about 4,000 words out of it that I might use in a short story though, so that’s cool. I have 65,000 words of this book written, but much of that is in first draft format and horribly needs a rewrite. I hope I stay on this project, because I really need to get writing.

OK, that’s it. Time to sleep.

Still hot as hell here. I think I hit my upper bound on hot food, too. I never really got used to spicy foods, as I lived in the Midwest and ate a lot of really bland stuff. In college, I worked with a lot of people into the cult of the chile pepper, which seems to be prevalent in computer geeks for some reason. I had horrible stomach problems for years, so I didn’t get started on this, though. Since I moved to New York, I’ve slowly tried to introduce hot food to my diet, but I can only do it to a certain extent. I do okay with a chicken vindaloo, and I’m to the point where Tabasco is pretty middle-of-the-road. But I’m nothing like a coworker who is both New Mexican and of the aforementioned chile/tech geek cult, who can put ten ounces of pure nuclear habanero sauce on a single taco without flinching.

I don’t know if I mentioned that I bought a Tandy 102 from EBay. They are very neat little machines, especially given their mid-Eighties vintage. They have a full keyboard and a 40 by 8 character LCD display. Their 8-bit processor and up to 32K of RAM ran a tiny OS with BASIC, a text editor, and some other basic stuff like an address book and calendar. What’s cool is that the whole thing ran on 4 AA batteries for twenty hours, and when you hit the on switch, the thing immediately came on, more like a calculator than the five-minute wait on a current Windows laptop. It has a serial port to connect to a real PC, and should be a neat toy to play with on the train or while sitting in bed. Maybe I’ll run a serial cable from it and use it as a dumb terminal off of my Linux box. Of course, I have a real VT240 collecting dust in my closet, so I probably won’t do much with it. And the size on this places it smack-dab between my SideKick and my laptop. But for only $45, it’s not too bad.

I’m currently in the process of re-reading a bunch of Asimov stuff in order. In my senior year of high school, I only had to take a couple of classes in the last semester, so I had a few study halls, an hour that I worked in the theater, a piano class, and a lot of other filler. I had high hopes of reading every book in the library, or at least the ones I found interesting. After I read every World War II book cover to cover, I started reading all of the SciFi they had in the place - Bradbury, Orwell (okay, not really SciFi) and I worked through a lot of the Asimov. I don’t think they had any PKD, which would have been great too, although it seems like all of the good anthologies of his stuff have come out in the last decade or so. Anyway, I am reading through the robot books (I, Robot,The Robots of Dawn, The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun) and I’m considering going into the Foundation books, but it depends on how I do on the other stuff. I did some digging around, and I never knew that Asimov actually died of HIV complications. He had a heart bypass in 1983, and he got a bad blood transfusion. It was kept secret at his death, until a biography that came out last year. Pretty weird.

OK, I need to go write, if that’s at all possible in this heat.

It’s hot as hell, still.

I did manage to get out today and find the new location for Coliseum Books. This was a pretty cool, non-chain bookstore up on 57th Street where I spent many a dollar on new books back in the day. Not only did it have a good location, but they had a cool selection, especially of history and literature. Unfortunately, they lost their lease, and the location is now a Fleet bank. I thought that was that, but on my walk the other day, I found they have a brand new store on 42nd Street, near the public library. I went in today and dropped about $50 on some new stuff, including a John Fante reader and a bunch of Asimov that I read back in high school, but really want to re-read. So that was nice, as was the air conditioning.

I thought that maybe eating hot foods from hot regions would maybe help me out here, so I had Mexican tonight and Indian the night before. I figured if they ate hot food all of the time, maybe they knew something that I didn’t. It didn’t help much, though. I think I really need to move, or build some kind of astronaut suit that has air conditioning.

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.