For the last week, I’ve been a bit of a cripple. I seem to have injured my right knee in some way, but I don’t really have a good story to go with the injury. Basically, a week ago, I was really asleep, and I somehow flipped onto my side, but my legs did not fully twist around or something, and I slept a couple more hours with the right leg pinned in some odd position. I woke up with a bad pain and a bit of a limp. This progressed through the week, until I ended up on a cane and really fighting to walk. I woke up Saturday morning at about four in the morning, in total pain and unable to find any sleeping position that let my leg go to a neutral and pain-free state, and decided I needed some professional help. I went to a clinic first thing Saturday morning, only to find their x-ray guy was out. A doctor looked at it, said “yeah, it’s messed up” and told me to come back on Tuesday (damn holiday weekend) to see an ortho and get it worked up. The only good news is I got a script for Tylenol-3, and codeine is my pal.

The weekend has been extremely boring, except for the parts when I’m on the T-3 full-force, which is pretty decent. But I’ve done nothing except watch TV and DVDs nonstop. I haven’t been able to read much, and writing is out of the question. I have found a comfortable combination of pillows and supports to keep the leg in a good position, and I’ve found ice packs on a constant basis help a hell of a lot. (Luckily we have a fridge with an ice machine.) I still don’t entirely know what is wrong with the knee, but I’m 90% certain the doctor will waste my day and then say “soft tissue damage. keep icing it.” In a perfect world, the doctor would shoot some kind of steroid into a tendon and all would be well. We’ll see.

Nothing else to report. I think the most interesting thing that has happened to me lately is I caught about half of Back to the Future II this afternoon…

We’re snowed in. I think it snowed like two feet in the last 24 hours, which doesn’t mean much, since I’m sure the subways are running. I haven’t left the house all day, so it’s been nice to watch the total wall of white swirling outside the window. It won’t be as nice tomorrow morning when I need to hike through it to get to work.

I’m still scanning slides, although the worst of it is probably over. I have maybe 60 more to do, but I’ve stopped for now. It’s very strange to take a look back at my very early history. It’s amazing to see all of my relatives who are now gone, and see my other relatives in a much thinner version, with full heads of hair and skin still tightly affixed to body. Seeing my parents in their mid-twenties, dressed in bad 70s fashion, is also a trip. I also enjoy getting a look at the little house in Edwardsburg, Michigan where I spent my early childhood, until 1978. It was a total dump, a cinderblock square with a roof and a very rough interior that my parents managed to buy for something like ten grand. But they spent a lot of time and a lot of spare marked-down, leftover building supplies adding onto it, painting things and enclosing a porch, and putting in new windows. I never thought about any of this as a kid, since I didn’t know any better. I thought everyone had a bathroom vanity made out of spare lumber and a set of living room furniture that came straight from a garage sale. It’s interesting to look back and think about how rough things were when my parents were starting out, and then look at how easy I have it here.

Speaking of old school, I read John McNally’s The Book of Ralph and greatly enjoyed it. It’s yet another one of those coming-of-age, back-in-the-day, I-was-a-childhood-loser sort of books, but it’s done with a real charm and finesse. It’s basically about a kid named Hank who reluctantly hangs out with this guy Ralph, who has flunked two grades and is basically a real version of Nelson from The Simpsons, except with much more hilarious lines. It reminded me a lot of Joe Meno’s Hairstyles of the Damned, and oddly enough, it takes place in about the same neighborhood, so there are some common landmarks. McNally really developed some characters that were the same exact ones you went to school with, or the dad character which is either exactly like your dad, or you had a friend with a dad just like him. But once he got the base of common events and characters, he punched it up with the greatly uncommon and insane that made it a great read.

I’m still chipping away at the next book, which is now above 50,000 words, of mostly just notes and observations, and little finished writing. At the very low end, I’d like to scrape by with 100,000 words and call it a day. An average guess is to have three books of 50,000 words for a total of 150k. The pie-in-the-sky goal is to write another book like Summer Rain, which was just over 220,000 words. Anyway, the book is underway, and is going good.

I forget what else. I should clean up the millions of slides all over my desk.

I am scanning photos endlessly. I’ve got a lot of 93 and 94 done, and a good deal of my Trip East in 99. I’m mostly scanning with no regard to how I’ll get shit in iPhoto or ordered up yet, but I’ll eventually be adding stuff to my photos page. For now, you can go and look at these pics from my 1994 trip to Knoxville with Larry. I also got a shitload of slides from my mom from 1970-1973, so lots of pictures of me naked in a bathtub. Scanning slides is a major pain in the ass; at least with film, I can load in a strip of 4 and go away for 20 minutes. With slides, I have to constantly reload. I wish this thing would let me load up one of those Kodak carousels and leave it for a day or two.

Not much else to report. Gotta go change slides.

Damn, my Loompanics order got here fast. I thought the whole going out of business thing meant they would take forever to fill the order, and 87% of the books would be gone already, but everything I ordered showed up in about four days. I was home sick on Friday, and spent the day going in and out of nap-state on the couch while reading a book about a guy who homesteads in the desert in a little house he built for about $300. Pretty crazy, but interesting. (And no, I can’t do this on my land - we actually have zoning that explicitly prohibits this sort of thing.)

Another book I got that I was flipping through last night talks about the ins and outs of buying houses and then moving them. It’s a pretty interesting book, because I’ve always had some fascination with that process. When I was a teenager, the US-20 bypass got built, just a short distance north of our subdivision. Where it crossed, there lay a different, slightly older division of homes, and they were all bought by the government at fair market value and the owners given the boot. Most of these were fairly new ranch-style homes, maybe ten years old or so, and after The Man got the land, they auctioned off the structures for a pittance. In the year or two following, I saw a lot of homes being hoisted onto steel frames and pulled by huge trucks to their new locations. I remember one time, riding my bike to the Concord Mall, I started down a hill on Sunnyside Drive, and as I gained speed and popped over the crest, I saw a giant house blocking the whole road! That’s a pretty unusual sight to behold. They put in the house on that land, and from what I remember, they either added a smaller house to make it an L-shape and grafted the two together, or maybe they just built the new wing from scratch. Anyway, the fact that they bought these houses for hundreds of dollars (if that) and then installed them to make a house costing maybe $50K more is pretty enticing.

The author of this book talks about people bidding on houses that are being struck out to expand airports and ending up with $100K homes for something like $25. Of course, you have to pay to move it, but depending on how far you go, that could cost you only five or ten thousand dollars. You hire a mover, and they pop the house off the foundation with jacks and mount it to steel girder framing to keep it from twisting or buckling. They’re also going to do the other dirty work, like sever that electrical and wiring junk, and deal with any outcroppings, porches, decks, garages, verandas, or other pieces that are going to worm lose during the whole trip. They talk to the local PO about traffic, and maybe work around any power lines or other problems on the route. Then the whole thing goes mobile, and they prop the house up on the new site with a shitload of huge oak timbers.

Depending on if your movers are just taking you point-to-point or if they are a turnkey place, the movers will either take their money and run, or they’ll do the next step for you. The next step involves basically building a foundation under the house that’s now hanging in the air. Maybe you were able to dig a basement and pour footers and walls, in which case you’ve got a nice sill on which to drop the bitch and start wiring and picking paint for the living room. Or maybe not, in which case you do your digging and concrete work while the house sits above you. You then have to go through every system of the house (wiring, HVAC, plumbing) and get it all up to code, which might take some work if you’ve just moved a 200-year-old plantation house or something.

And despite what people thing, moved houses are not fundamentally weaker than new houses. I know that misconception sounds like it would have to be true, but for whatever reason (probably the fact that they have to jack all of the house to the right level and build a new foundation around it), the new houses are often stronger. And they don’t buckle or bend as much as you think, because of that steel below it.

I wish the Alamosa airport got some huge grant to expand and put the nix on a bunch of houses so I could buy one. I’m guessing with all of the crazy homesteaders out there though, it would cost a lot more than it would if I lived in Elkhart. (Not that I’d want to live in Elkhart…)

In unrelated news, I got a Nikon Coolscan V ED film scanner, and I’ve been pulling in a bunch of my 35mm negatives. It works well, although it’s slower than fuck. Also, I cannot find some of my negatives, which I thought were all in one place. I don’t feel like digging around for them though - I have enough to keep me busy until summer. Also, my mom has a warchest of old slides, containing a lot of my baby pictures and other early stuff. She’s going to ship those off so I can restore them and get them onto CD, hopefully.

Still writing. Still not talking about what I’m writing. It’s getting near the 50K word mark though.

As I’ve said before, if I’m not updating here, it means I’m busy writing on a real project. And I have been picking at something for a little while, and making okay progress. I’m still at the beginning though, and too scared to jinx it to mention anything about it. The best explanation to this phase of the writing would have to do with the metaphor about swimming across a mile-wide lake. If you swim out a hundred feet, it’s pretty easy to turn back and swim another hundred feet and then go home. If you swim out a thousand feet, it takes some work to quit and go home. If you’re out three or four thousand feet, you might as well just finish. I need to get down a solid layer of wordcount on this before I even make any decisions on what stays and what goes and how the plot will unfold. I have become the king of false starts in the last few years, and I really need to stick with this one and keep it going, until it’s to a length where I figure I can’t put it down and quit anymore. When Summer Rain was a bad first draft and I gave it up to work on my second book, I eventually had to come back to it and start the next draft, because I invested 80,000 words into it.

(That’s probably not a great metaphor, because I can’t swim.)

Speaking of Summer Rain, I got the hardcover, and it is pretty amazing. I love that it’s done with a color jacket and the actual book has gold lettering on a cloth binding. Very classy. I know nobody else will give a shit to buy one, but I’m glad to have it on the shelf, with the others.

And speaking of buying books, Loompanics is going out of business! For those not in the know, they are (were) the big one-stop catalog for all of your paranormal, fake ID, lockpicking, drug, sex, and spying book needs, many of which you can’t find in stores. They used to put out a great zine-like catalog, and I could just read the catalog itself for hours, poring over all of the strange books they sold. They were located in the Pacific Northwest (Port Townsend, WA - a bit north of Seattle) and I first got their catalog from a zine show or the book fair or something about ten years ago. They’re the kind of store where I would put in a mega-order for a half-dozen book every once in a while when a bonus or tax check came in. Anyway, they are closing shop, and are running a 50% off all stock sale. I placed my order, and I hope I get at least some of it before everything runs out.

I’m still reading as much as I can, as I work on this new book. John Sheppard’s Small Town Punk is currently going - the original version, not the new-and-(un)improved IG Press version which will come out in the future.

Okay, back to work…