I think one of the occupational hazards of only updating this thing every week or two is that I tend to forget what happened over the last however many days, and it causes me to sit down and think “well, nothing’s happening.” The same tends to happen when I update every day, though, especially because I don’t like to simply write about day-to-day crap or work politics or whatever. Sometimes I get ideas for a journal entry, but I don’t have a fixed time to write anymore, and the ideas come and go. I should be writing them down, but I never do. And most of my ideas happen in the shower, so even if I had a special pad of paper or something, it wouldn’t work in there. I think I saw an underwater slate type thing that scuba divers use, but I’d probably spend $40 on it and never use it.

The zine is done, I think. The cover and PDF are uploaded, and I ordered the proof, and if that’s OK, then it goes live, and can be ordered by all three of you that actually buy this stuff. Actually, I ordered two proofs, because I fucked up and uploaded a PDF I made from a week-old directory, and didn’t catch it until after I placed the order and got past the no-cancel point of no return. I am sure I will keep this one on the shelf as a “rarity”, just like the messed up proofs of various other books of mine. I say rarity because technically all of my books are rarities, since they sell so few copies. And I doubt there will ever be a point where I become famous and they go onto eBay for thousands of dollars. But Jack Kerouac never kept drafts of his books, and they would now be worth millions, so my impulse is to keep them.

Anyway, the zine is done, except for the part where I pony up some insane amount of money to buy a bunch of copies and then send them to each contributor. I am happy to send copies to people, especially if this makes them happy or they are impressed with seeing their words in print. I am not happy to have to order them, wait, get a bunch of envelopes, then drag a hundred pounds of books to the post office and give them a ton of money. And please don’t tell me some shipping shortcut that is supposed to save me time and money. New York post offices are all equally horrible, and are never open, and I have no car, so I can’t drive to the suburbs. I used to think the post office in Bloomington was bad, but it’s seriously like the Millenium Hotel compared to the places here. I just have no choice, and I have to suck it up and pay the price.

I don’t know how to feel about finishing an issue of the zine. It is exhilarating to get it all finished. It’s a small amount less than when I do my own books, because I always have a fear that I’ve fucked up something in someone’s story, and they will get pissed about it. It’s another half-inch of shelf space taken on the Konrath shelf of my home library (actually 1” here, because of the dud proof) and I am always happy to get more volume there. This book is blue, a very deep cobalt blue, and it is my first blue book (black, black, red, black, black, green, grey, red) and I am happy to get something that really stands out but is also unused. I will be happy to hear from people who were contributors and write to tell me they liked the zine, or even better, liked a story by another contributor. Believe it or not, I actually pay for the costs and typically lose money, and I have people that send in stories and never write back to acknowledge that they ever got their zine, let alone that they liked it or thought that sucked. And with 18 other people in this one, at least one of them will do this, and it always pisses me off, even though it probably shouldn’t.

There are two things I don’t like about finishing the zine. One is that it will go out and become available, and nobody will buy it. It’s very hard to sell an anthology, and I never expect to get many orders, and I never do. I plan these things by trying to pick people who have their own little bit of fame, be it a book or band or blog or something, so their completist fans will buy a zine, maybe find another writer they like, and start writing to them or reading their web site or book or whatever. I don’t know if this really happens - probably not, or I’d sell many more copies. But that’s the intent, and like I said, there’s no way I could recoup my costs unless each writer got like 15 or 20 people to buy it, and I think the average is closer to 1 or 2. So all of that hanging over my head sucks.

The other big problem is that the project is done, and it’s time for me to move to something else. And I don’t know what that is at this point. I have all of these other ideas that are half-dead, and I think I need something totally new to waste my time. Who knows what, but that’s going to keep me neurotic for a while.

I’ve been reading a lot more than writing lately. I’m working on the Jonathan Ames book My Less Than Secret Life, which is pretty decent. I really liked his book What’s Not to Love?, and I really wish I could write something like this, except I don’t have that many embarrassing episodes compared to him. Scratch that - I don’t have that many that I’m willing to write about. Maybe the statute of limitations on some of the older episodes has expired. I don’t want to write about Bloomington for the sake of Bloomington, or Elkhart for the sake of an entirely complete historical whatever. (Like the Necrokonicon, which seriously has sold exactly two copies at this point.) I think there’s some inner issue I have to get through to do this, though. I can’t write funny stuff about all of the other crazy individuals in my life, because even though I can tell these stories to other people, I can’t tell them to said individual’s face, and I think you need to have that ability to proceed. If you’re going to talk about your crazy uncle Freddy, you have to be prepared for the consequences if he reads it. (And if those consequences include a lawsuit, you have to deal with that too.) The other problem is that I feel there was a great deal of stupidity and awkwardness in my life - I’ve done a lot of dumb shit, and I’ve never been able to come to terms with that. I have a horrible shame issue to deal with. And I guess if you can’t tell any of your friends about that time you shit your pants in France, you can’t write a book about it. (The pant-shitting thing is a Jonathan Ames story, not mine, btw.)

And it’s winter, which sucks. It isn’t even real winter - it’s 50 and pouring rain winter, with sundown at like 4

. I’m back in Seattle, I guess. Except in Seattle, I had a car and there were covered garages everywhere. Now, it’s a jacket and the wind cutting through your clothes. I’ll probably like the first snow, but other than that, I’m waiting for spring. The only good thing about winter is avoiding it - sitting inside, under a blanket, reading, watching everyone freeze their balls off outside. I guess that’s okay, but I like fall much better.

Oh, and we saw the Borat movie yesterday, and it was so totally fucking funny, it was unbelievable. If you haven’t seen it, go do so.

I’m back. Pictures are on flickr (although I’m liking that site less and less the more I use it.) Not everything is captioned, and yes there are a lot of pictures that are blurry and fucked up. Museums with low light, no flash allowed, glass cases, and my piece of shit camera will do that.

I enjoyed the trip and seeing new things, but I’m so glad to be back. My main two problems were food and drink. I thought I liked German food, but it turns out that I like German food made with American ingredients. There are some real differences in the quality of food in Europe. The meat is much tougher, and the pork products are cured way more, so they have this horrid taste, like if you’ve ever had shelf-stabilized bacon in a can from a camping trip or an MRE. Vegetables are all non-GMO, non-big agra, and not that incredible. I’m sure the eurotrash contingent would disagree, but I like tomatoes that are bigger than a golf ball. What was frustrating was that there are many American chain places that use German ingredients. I went to a McDonald’s hoping for the same burger and fries I’d get back home, but the meat was tough and gamey, and the potatoes in the fries didn’t have the same magical starch composition as Idaho spuds back home, making them taste odd. If I lived in Germany, I would lose 50 pounds in the first three months, because I simply wouldn’t be able to eat fast food anymore. (In fact, I lost about five pounds since we left, but I’m sure most of that is dehydration from the plane ride.)

And not all food was horrible. On our last night, we went to a more traditional German restaurant, and I had the best damn potato soup I’ve eaten in a long time. We also went to the fancy-schmancy restaurant in the hotel one night, and I got an eight-course dinner that was pretty incredible, if not a bit weird. The best dish was a cajun scampi that was lightly fried in spices, but was as tender as baby food inside, and served with a wasabi sorbet, which sounded odd, but was incredible. The main dish was three types of ox: tongue, shoulder, and breast, done up with some kind of reduction and cooked to the point where they were almost jelly. I also tried a lot of stuff I’d normally never eat, like duck liver, caviar, mackerel, and a few others. It was a strange meal, but very memorable.

Oh, the drink part - I think Germans don’t consume as much liquid as Americans. That eight glasses of water a day thing didn’t make it over there. I can understand the lack of fascination with large soda sizes; I went to a Burger King and got a super maxi size, and the soda was like 16 ounces, which is the child-size at an American fast food place. It’s hard to even find a 12-ounce Coke, let alone the 16 or 20-ounce big plastic bottles. The most popular size was a .2 liter or .33 liter. And that’s fine, but the water sizes are even more scant. Go to an American Safeway or Kroger, and you will find a million bottles of water that are a liter, if not more. (“Sport” sized.) I never, ever saw that. They don’t serve water with meals, they don’t have drinking fountains, and the water they do have is some kind of carbonated mineral water. No Dasani, no Evian, just the stuff that tastes like it will give you lead poisoning. And I drink like ten glasses of water a day, plus three or four American-sized Cokes. After a day or two of begging and pleading at restaurants to get a second four-ounce glass of water, things got old fast.

Nice things: the mass transit. There are two types of subway (S-bahn and U-bahn), plus streetcars, busses, light rail, longer rail, and the Eurail. The subway was a bit daunting at first, but it was also odd because there are no turnstiles to stop you from entering any station. There are just little paper tickets - you buy one, then stamp it in a validator machine to show you’re riding the train now. If you get caught without a validated ticket, there’s a fine, but nobody ever checked ours. If they did this in New York, there would be 40,000 people living in each station in a matter of seconds. The stations were clean, maybe as clean as a PATH train, so not sterile, but decent. Each station has digital signs telling you where the trains are going, and when the next train will arrive. (Same with bus stops.) Let me repeat that: THERE ARE SIGNS THAT TELL YOU WHEN THE NEXT TRAIN IS ARRIVING! Not “eventually,” not “at some point”, but “in two minutes.” They could never, ever, fucking ever do this in New York. And before you ask, yes the times were accurate. Trains regularly showed up a minute before the time. I never saw one run late. Another odd thing is that subway doors don’t open or close at each stop - you press a green button on the inside or the outside to open the door, and they close automatically as the train leaves. What’s weird is you can open a door as the train is slowing down for a stop. In New York, that feature would kill about 9 people a day. The trains were very nice; the S-bahn is more long-haul, above-ground stuff, while the U-bahn is underground, but more transfers to get from point to point than a NY train. But figure in that New York City hasn’t been divided and reunited and leveled by bombs over the course of the last 50 years, so their routes can be a bit more static.

In general, people in Berlin seem to be more trusting and self-policing than what I’m used to in New York. There were many times when I saw something and wondered “why doesn’t someone just steal that shit?” Like eating at a buffet restaurant, the German approach might be “just take some food, then tell us what you ate and pay for it,” where the New York version would be “Pay for the shit before you even touch it, then go through the metal detector, pick up the food, and get the fuck out of here because we’re not running a hotel.” There were many coin-op public toilets on the street (like the kind that clean themselves between uses) and it made me wonder if they could ever do that in NYC, or if people would just put in the 75 cents and move into the bathroom and never leave.

People were largely nice, and I never got called out for being an American, and didn’t have to pretend to be a Canadian or whatever. Not everyone speaks English well, but a lot do. The main problem is that we both look German enough that people assumed we were German and would start babbling away rapid-fire into conversations with us. The other problem is that German is alien enough to me that I can’t tell if a person talking in my peripheral vision is talking to a friend, talking on a cell phone, trying to get my attention, or frantically trying to tell me to stop what I’m doing because I’m about to massively fuck something up. I can tell people are talking, but I can’t tell if they are talking to me, or what the tone is. I don’t understand much Spanish, but I know enough that I can figure that out when I’m here. But it really started to make me paranoid, because I was always worried there was some small social thing that I was fucking up, like if I didn’t take off my jacket when I sat at a table, I was disgracing the owner of the restaurant and he would have to challenge me to a duel. Or whatever.

The big thing about Berlin is the wall, even though it’s largely gone. Every gift shop sells little pieces of the wall, which are probably just cinderblocks smashed up into little pieces, just like the Mt. St. Helens ashes you used to be able to buy in Washington. A lot of the former lines of the wall are now outlined by twin brick lines embedded in pavement and sidewalks. Most people envision a single, long wall, like a castle wall, but it’s a lot more complicated than that. The wall zig-zagged all over the place, and it was actually two walls: a taller one on the east side, a smaller one on the West, and a DMZ between the two. We went to the Checkpoint Charlie site, which is now a Disneyland for hucksters selling cheap shit to tourists. Want a picture with a fake army guard at the checkpoint? A bath towel? Snow globe with a piece of the wall in it? Former commie t-shirts and hats? Come on down, bring your Euros. We went to the museum there, and it was the most tacky and ghetto (no pun intended) museum I’ve seen since me and Larry went to that John Dillenger museum in Brown County a decade or so ago. So yeah, the wall is a big cottage industry. And I bought a fridge magnet, so I guess I’m just contributing to it.

I can’t even begin to describe the museums we went to, although I took some photos. The German historical museum was my favorite, and did a good job of describing German history from before christ up to present. The up-to-WWI collection was an excellent primer on the early days of Romans and Huns and Emporers and Napoleon and everything else. The 20th century part was Nazi central, with a lot more than I’d expected. They had a lot of original third reich stuff, which was interesting for a bit, but after a few rows of it, it was like watching the History Channel’s WW2 marathon on repeat for days on end. It was odd that the Treaty of Versailles was called the “treaty of shame” in all of the exhibits. It was also eerie to see a display of an engine from a British bomber that was shot down over Berlin. I’m desensitized to seeing these “spoils of war” displays in museums; it was weird to see one from the other side.

We also went to a couple of art museums, which were interesting. I don’t know a lot about art or modern art, so when I see something I think is neat, I’m not thinking “wow, what does this represent?” but rather “wow, how did he do that?” I’m more interested in large-scale modern art from the welding/carpentry/stoneworking point of view than the actual art, so maybe that doesn’t make me the best critic. But the museums were great. I saw a lot of Andy Warhol at one, Picasso at the other, and Felix Gonzales-Torres had a huge showcase at one place. I also saw a Damien Hirst in there, “The Void,” the one with all the pills. That museum also had a huge display of video-based pieces, all of them incredibly odd and interesting. Like one guy was showing the movie Psycho over a 24-hour period. Maybe I should get a video projector and start filling out grant forms.

Oh, I also saw the world’s largest model train layout. There are a bunch of blurry pictures of that in there, too.

I am sure there’s more to talk about, but I need to either take a nap or try to get started on the day…