I finally finished my trip report from Florida. Go here to read it. _[deleted, sorry…]_Warning: it’s not terribly exciting, but at least it’s done.

I just got back from the movies and returned to a war zone. Greece won the world cup or whatever big soccer tournament is going on right now, and my predominantly Greek neighborhood currently looks like the Tet Offensive or something. Pretty much everyone with a last name ending in -opalus is driving around drunk with their car horn welded permanently on and 17 Greek flags hanging off of every side, along with a half-dozen screaming people, yelling phrases I don’t quite understand. The main drag on 30th Avenue looked pretty much like New Year’s, with people throwing paper and bottles and cops in riot gear and a median BAC of about .27 for the entire crowd. Call me a hick, but I really don’t understand the allure of soccer at all. Aside from my complete hatred of all sporting events, the game is about as exciting as watching someone repair the drain to a sink. Hopefully everyone will lapse into alcohol poisoning in the next few hours and I’ll be able to sleep in peace.

I’ve watched lots of movies this weekend. Last night, I went to see Dodgeball, and found it to be very funny, considering the fact that it has Ben Stiller in it, and I consider him to be the kiss of death as far as comedy is concerned. (You know how everyone said that if Adam Sandler didn’t do the potty humor and dumb voices, he wouldn’t be funny at all? Well, Ben Stiller is Adam Sandler minus the poo jokes and characters.) I’ve come to the conclusion that with Rip Torn, you can’t go wrong. Vince Vaughn’s also pretty good, especially when playing a jerk. And even Stiller’s stuff wasn’t bad. The film was mostly a remake of the slightly funnier Basketball, but it’s still worth seeing.

And then Spiderman 2 was tonight. I actually liked the film a lot. It didn’t have the comic book geek baggage that the first one did, in which you have to basically pause everything and take a bunch of time to explain all of the superpowers and storyline and the entire universe of the comic before you start in with the action. They did pretty good with the script, the action is very immense, and the special effects are so complex and detailed, you can’t even imagine how they did any of these shots except to totally immerse yourself into the film and imagine it is a giant comic come to life. It’s great and I hope it does well this weekend.

I added another shelf yesterday, a duplicate of the one I got a few weeks ago that has pegs and holes so it stacks on top. Now I really have extra shelf space, although I expect it to be filled in no time. I moved some of the DVDs over there for the time being. The next goal is to redo some of the CD and DVD storage, and maybe get some new floor-to-ceiling unit to eke a bit more space out of it.

That’s about it. I think I’m going to flip in a DVD (maybe part of the Simpsons season 4 set that arrived this week) and get a late snack. Happy 4th to everyone.

I’m almost out of here - I have to finish packing, then get to the airport for a flight to Tampa. I will be back in a week. I’ll have a full report then…

I have a new bookshelf! It is one of those folding 3-shelf wooden things, and I put it in the alcove by my front door, one of the only spots where there was actual floor room for it. I threw all of the books on the floor and some that were balanced in front of other books on shelves or laying on couches or whatever, and I actually have a slight amount of extra room on one shelf. Empty book storage space is a rarity, but I do have a small pile of books on the to-read queue sitting next to my bed, so it will fill up again. This shelf is equipped with pegs and holes enabling another unit to stack on top of it, so I’ll probably buy a second one when I get back from vacation, which should last me until xmas or so. I bought this thing at a local furniture store down the street for $50, so it worked out pretty good. I wanted to get a similar one at Bed Bath & Beyond, but then I’d have to drag it onto the subway, and that would be a huge mess. Anyway, I am very happy about it, and it looks weird in my room now that I got all of the piles of books off the floor.

It’s been a blah weekend sofar. We got out of work a bit early for Reagan day, and I came home and completely blacked out for 4 or 5 hours, just enough to catch the end of his funeral on TV and order some Chinese food. I ended up staying awake until daylight because of that extra sleep, which meant I didn’t get awake and get lunch until like 4

today. I watched Escape from New York with the commentary, and eventually headed into the city to buy more movies or maybe go see a movie. But there was nothing in the theater worth seeing, and even after browsing a dozen times in Virgin, I didn’t find anything I wanted to buy, so I turned around and headed home.

I haven’t been writing much, just taking notes for this next book and thinking about it. I think I might just continue with the notes all through my vacation. That’s easier than trying to work on something with no network connection to check stuff online and no emacs to write with on my Windows laptop. I’ll just take a legal pad or two and a handful of pens, and sketch out some ideas while I’m at the pool or whatever. I’ll also have a week of cable TV, so that will be good for ideas.

Okay, back to work…

Just woke up from a post-work nap, and now I’m pretty groggy and don’t feel like doing anything, but don’t exactly feel like going back to bed, either.

I met with the Fox News people today, which was a pretty weird situation. It was a cameraman guy and a woman producer. They showed up at about noon, and I quickly shuffled them into one of our nice meeting rooms, which is a fringe benefit of working in a SoHo dotcom lair. I had two letters from Gadahn, plus a bunch of assorted fliers and artwork, and the copy of Xenocide in which his stuff appeared. The camera guy had one of those huge TV camera rigs and tripod, so he set stuff up so he could tape stuff to a black piece of posterboard sitting on the whiteboard’s marker tray, and take shots of the stuff. I don’t entirely know what he was doing, but it took a while for each shot. Maybe he was zooming in and out, I don’t know. I also don’t know the specs of the camera, but it was digital and video and obviously not just a little DV toy you pick up at Best Buy to tape your kids’ birthday parties. She said they would dump the tape to some direct satellite system that would zap it to the LA office, where the guy primarily writing the article was located.

While the cameraman did his thing, I talked to the producer, mostly just more repeating of the stories and little details. She seemed younger than me, red hair and very cute, more like the English major type than some kind of TV anchorwoman you’d see on the news. I felt really nervous about the whole thing and wished I had more to chat about, especially because I didn’t want to seem like some bizarro Satanist metal dude or whatever. After they got the paper stuff pulled in, we both sat down and she asked me a handful of questions on video, just the basic stuff like how I started the zine, how I met Adam, and so on. I had to wear a wireless mic, which was odd, and I also spent the whole thing oddly uncomfortable, knowing that I’d look like a dork on video. I also had a vague fear in the back of my mind that if my likeness ever showed up on TV, I’d end up with molotov cocktails thrown through my apartment window from nutbag jihad fundamentalists, or angry heavy metal fans. Finally, they taped a b-roll image of me sitting at the desk, shuffling through the papers, which seemed kind of silly. The whole thing took about an hour, and the people were very nice. She told me she’d get in touch when anything became of the report, but I’m also hoping the reel gets shelved away in a vault somewhere and forgotten.

I’ve been very vaguely thinking about trips west again, to see the property and maybe get some work done. I get two or three emails a year from people who have also bought land out in the San Luis Valley, and when I do, it rekindles the thoughts of getting some money together to get a well dug, maybe set up a wind-powered water pump and a shitload of garden hose and sprinklers, and plant a few dozen saplings so there are more real trees there by the time I get around to building a place. I have no idea how much getting a well drilled costs, probably thousands of dollars, and I don’t know how they will ever get a drilling rig out there, since the access road is dirt and is about as soft and fluffy as a good angelfood cake, which isn’t conducive to heavy trucks. Speaking of, I was just digging around (pun intended) ebay motors and saw an old D6 cat dozer with a busted block but still running for a grand. It would probably cost more like five grand once you got one in good shape and hauled it out to the property, but that would make one hell of a toy. I’d have a 40-acre sandbox with a really nice shovel. I could improve the hell out of that road, and then dig some kind of giant underground catacomb.

Or maybe not. Anyway, I heard about a place in Albuquerque that rents out VW campers, the newer Westfalia Vanagon ones. It would be a lot of fun to rent one out, drive up to the property, hang out there for a week, and maybe plant some trees or do some other digging around. I could also maybe buy one of those little metal sheds at the WalMart in Alamosa, drag it out there, and have a building to hide my ammunition cachegardening tools.

Man, this Indian food TV dinner I made tastes like garbage. I need to go find something else to eat.

I think all of the FBI business calmed down by Friday or so, and I spent most of the weekend moping around, trying to make some progress on things, but mostly just passing the hours from when I got out of bed to when I got into bed, and then making sure that I was sufficiently passed out for the in-bed hours, which always seems to be a trick, except when I take a mid-day nap that demolishes my sleep cycle. I didn’t have any grand Memorial Day plans, other than to not do anything. That always seems to be the plan on most weekends, and it never really seems like it happens.

I don’t know. I watched the movie Orange County this weekend. It’s not that incredible or mind-blowing of a flick, although Jack Black’s character is pretty good in it. It’s mostly the sort of build-up-tension-with-fakeouts sort of plot that would make a Julia Roberts movie look sophisticated. But the one thing is that it’s got a main character, a kid who wants to become a writer, and becomes obsessed with writing almost constantly. It’s similar to one of the things I took from the movie Almost Famous, the Lester Bangs character that talked about how on some nights, he just sat at the typewriter and wrote and wrote for hours. And both of those made me wish I was spending all of my free time writing for hours, just scribbling in notebooks until every blank page turned filled, or chipping away at some mystic novel and before I turn back to look, I’ve got a quarter-million words behind me.

But I don’t do those things, and I almost never write anymore, and that depresses me. And part of it is the lack of projects on my horizon, the lack of any concrete thing that I should be filling with words. And part of it is this general apathy because so many things around me are eating away at me, each one taking a tiny part of my energy. When it comes down to it, I sometimes have the hours to write, but I simply don’t have the motivation to sit in the chair and put my hands on the keyboard and make the cursor spit out words as it coasts from left to right in my document buffer.

I spent part of the weekend trying to think about reorganizing media in my apartment, trying to find places to put new shelves, trying to find new ways to stack books or hide boxes of magazines under other furniture or whatever else. I’m not saying I DID any of these things, I just thought about it, and then I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond to look at shelves and other storage solutions meant to provide my life with more completeness. I didn’t find anything that worked that I wanted to buy that second, but I did see many things that I would buy at some point if I had money burning a hole in my pocket and wasn’t going on vacation in 19 days. Instead, I spent twenty bucks on a zen rock garden fountain for my desk, and rearranged the piles of bills and papers and other crap to get the thing assembled. It looks nice sitting next to the black-framed ViewSonic flatscreen LCD, since the bigger slate pieces are also black, and although the most frequent complaint about these things is the sound of the pump, it’s more quiet than the Athlon power supply under the desk, so no worries there.

Actually, I’ve always wondered about combining the two technologies: a water-cooled manifold on a CPU, with hoses that run out of a case and are connected to a display fountain up on the desk. The fountain would cool down the water, and it would cycle back into the case. Has anyone done this? It’s a thought.

Okay, awaiting food so I can eat so I can write…