I’m 36 today. It’s another nice round number, and I guess I think about that every year. 30 was big, 35 was halfway between 30 and 40, and 36 means I’m approaching 40. I like 36 better than I will probably like 37; I didn’t like 27 either, for some reason. But it always has me thinking of different intervals, points of life, and whatever else.

For example, I remember when I was 23. I had pneumonia and I was stuck in my apartment in Colonial Crest in Bloomington. 21 was legal drinking age, 22 was a nice even number, and then there was 23, normally not significant. But when I was born, both of my parents were 23. They were adults, with a kid, on the path of the rest of their life. And at 23, I totally didn’t have my shit together; I was living in a student ghetto, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with the rest of my academic life let alone my life life. My biggest aspiration at the time was to get a Game Boy. It was a real slap in the face to think about how much I needed to get myself together.

The thing that gets me about 36 is that my 18th birthday was half a lifetime away. I am 18 times two today. I remember being in the parking lot of Concord High School on January 20, 1989, a Friday, getting ready to leave for the day. I was listening to the Anthrax cover of “I’m Eighteen”, which is kindof pathetic, but I loved it. I went out with my friend Julia that night and went to the movies to see Naked Gun, which I thought was the pinnacle of humor at the time. And I guess the stuff in my head then, the desire to get the hell out of the small town and to a place where people didn’t like “book learnin’”  pretty much overshadowed everything else.

And like I said the other day, 36 is halfway to 72, and I have no idea how I will make it that far, aside from bionics or something. Maybe I should eat something healthy before I go to this 15-course dinner tonight.

My big gift from Sarah was a PlayStation 3. (see here.) It’s very very neat. My goal is now to get this book done before they get GTA 4, SOCOM, or an Ace Combat game launched, because otherwise, it will never get done.

Speaking of, I want to get in some Call of Duty 3…

Christ, it’s early. I’ve been trying to shift the bulk of my book writing to mornings before work, since I can’t work out a good block of time in the evenings to get any work done. I’d rather get a couple of hours of good writing in and go to the office exhausted, rather than sleep in, work, and then come home exhausted and try to write. Despite the early hour (I’ve already showered and eaten at this point) I have been getting a lot of work done on Untitled Book Three. I broke 39,000 words last night, and I’m trying hard to get 40K by tomorrow. The first draft is almost a third done. Unfortunately, when I finish the first third, there will be a huge amount of dicking around with the outline and story before I can really launch into part 2 of 3.

I turn 36 tomorrow. We are going to Per Se for dinner, which should be incredible. (here is a good review.) Aside from that, I haven’t even thought about the birthday much. This is the first year since 1999 I have not been in Vegas on 1/20, which is odd. We are going in a couple of weeks, but it will be weird. Birthdays are a lot less “whee, presents!” for me these days, and a lot more “christ, I am old”. This year’s current revalation is that I am exactly halfway to my SSI-mandated retirement. I have a list of mechanical problems a page long, so I don’t know how I will make it that far, let alone live happy for decades after. I need to start thinking about early retirement.

Speaking of, I got my quarterly 401K statement, which was the best birthday present ever, because for whatever reason, I’m making an insane amount of interest on that thing. I added it up last night and if I take 401K + IRA + savings + checking + value of my land + upcoming tax refunds + upcoming bonuses + flex spending account - all debt, it’s still a six-digit number. When I think back, at 26, I was at a grand total of about minus $20,000. The realization that I’m entirely in the black right now is a sudden and incredible thing, like the point maybe ten years ago when I realized that I was completely independent from my parents. So maybe I will finish before I’m 72.

I finished the Wright brothers bio. One thing that I find incredible is that their claim to being the first to fly was fiercely contested and debated until probably the second world war. And you’ll still find dickheads on the internet (probably all French or contrarians, or both) that will argue against them. Anyway, that was a good book. Now I am reading Julia Child’s book (ironically, about being in France.) Sarah read it, and I found it interesting for whatever reason, so I started it. It’s a good book, with very charming prose describing postwar Paris. The only problem is that it talks about food a lot, so it’s not the best thing to read right before lunch or anything, because it will make you even more starving.

Oh, when we were upstate this weekend, we went to a mammoth aircraft hanger grocery store, and I found 20,000 products I never knew existed. There were at least a dozen flavors of Doritos I’d never even contemplated. I got a box of Cheez-It crackers that are both cheddar and ranch in the same thing, a product I will probably never see again. And that’s probably a good thing, because they are insanely good. If I lived within striking distance of one of these huge stores, I would probably need to be cut out of my house by the fire department two or three years later.

Crap, I’ve wasted too much time here. Gotta get writing!

I mentioned a while ago that someone from the New Yorker was talking to me about the whole Adam Gadahn thing. The story is the lead article in the current issue of the New Yorker, here. It’s by Raffi khatchadourian, who did a hell of a lot of research on the subject. I think he was the one reporter who “got it” more than others, with regard to the whole death metal thing. And he managed to dredge up a lot of details I never heard about, and I’ve read pretty much every article about him in the last few years. The article’s online, so check it out.

I babbled about the iPhone last entry, and that led me to get a Sidekick 3. I know the two are barely related, but I figured I’d rather get something for $200 and $30 a month that did 90% of what I wanted right now, as opposed to waiting 6-12 months for something that cost $800 plus $100 a month for something that did 70% of the things and looked neato.

This is my second sidekick - I was an early adopter of the first version, and it was pretty neat back then. It came in especially handy on my first trip to hawaii, where I was able to keep up with AIM conversations and email and web browsing without bringing a laptop. It was also nice on my jury duty stint, so I could spent my lunches outside reading the web, instead of sitting in an ancient building watching soap opera reruns on prison TVs. The new one has some plusses: it has a camera, more updated software, and it’s color. It also has a music player (worthless to this iPod owner, but still) and it uses SD memory for its junk. The big difference is that now I can get a $30 unlimited data/no voice plan instead of a $60 unlimited data/crappy voice plan, which is a noticeable savings for me, and I never use it for voice calls anyway. (I can if I need to, it just costs .20 a minute.)

Downsides to the 3 versus the 1: the keyboard has slightly glossy keys, as opposed to the slightly rubbery ones in the original. It uses a tiny trackball instead of a scroll wheel on the right side, which I don’t like as much, but I guess it’s better for games. The phone controls are more awkward, and I will probably accidentally dial more calls than I legitimately make. And the styling is not as neat as it once was. The original grey on grey looks made it more of a Star Trek device than a consumer ugliness device. Oh well.

If you’re so inclined, you can now reach me on this thing by sending email to my gmail address. If you don’t know it, it’s not hard to figure out. It’s basically the same as my rumored address. If you don’t know that, you probably stopped paying attention like ten years ago. Actually, even more than that, since it was also my username at IU since like 1989.

Still reading the Orville and Wilbur Wright bio. Good stuff. And we were out of town this weekend, but no huge stories. Just a good dinner, a night in the country, and hanging out with friends. We also shopped at Target, which is a moral imperative anything I leave this tiny island for a place with real shopping and groceries.

Tuesday night, right before I left work, I broke a filling in one of my molars. It’s the third tooth up from the back, on the bottom, and it has a silver (or silver-color) filling that’s sort of bowtie-shaped on the top of the circular tooth. It has always bugged me since I got it, because food gets caught between the teeth and I have to floss it out. Well, this time, when I went to floss it, it felt like a giant seed or pit or something was stuck in there and I couldn’t get it loose. I went to a mirror and saw that the entire back part of the filling was loose, and I was actually lifting that out with the floss. Cue panic.

I called my dentist, the guy who is right next to my house and who did the half-ass work, and he was just leaving and said he couldn’t do it unless I came in on Thursday and sat around all day. I had visions of swallowing the filling and having white-hot pain for days and the inability to eat solids, so I started googling “emergency dentist New York”, cost be damned. I eventually found a guy who would take me at 9

the next morning, for $300 plus the cost of any repair. I then went home and ate macaroni and cheese, which you can pretty much drink if you make it soft enough, and went to bed with great worry in my head.

The new dentist was good. Fast, courteous, he took an x-ray and explained the situation. The old dentist did a shit job of putting on the filling, and it didn’t fit flush to the tooth in the back. So all that food from the last few months got caught under there and eroded away the tooth underneath, making it come loose. Even I could see the problem on the x-ray. (Of course, I’ve had a little more practice looking at dental x-rays than the average person.) He drilled out the back part of the filling, put in this temporary cement filling stuff that looks like thick white-out, and we made an appointment to do a real repair this month. I thought of going back to the old dentist, bitching him out, and trying to get some work for free, but if he’s going to do a piss-poor job on the repair and make it all repeat itself in three months, forget it.

The new guy, oddly enough, is the team dentist for the Yankees. He doesn’t keep a regular practice, just this emergency service and other appointment-only work. He’s also a baseball photographer, and googling his name brought up a million SI and API photo credits, which is pretty weird. At least I’m not a fervent Red Sox fan or anything.

So between the stress of my back (which is almost better, but not quite), the stress of my tooth, the stress of my stupid job, and don’t forget tax season comes soon, I haven’t been getting much done. I’m still reading journal entries, making minor snips and edits, and pushing them into one of the howevermany categories. I think there will be a rather large “other” category, though. I’m also reading this biography of the Wright brothers, which is old but very good. Very weird to hear the stories of their ancestors; I can’t imagine moving to Richmond, Indiana and having your entire family killed by Indians.

I’m also working my way through the Beatles Anthology DVDs, an episode a night. (There are, I think 8 episodes plus extras, two per DVD, each one being about 80 minutes long.) I am three episodes in, and the beginning of Beatlemania has happened, along with their first movie. It’s all good, but it’s also somewhat annoying that at this point, they play pretty much the same eight songs over and over. I can’t wait for another album or two to come out to get some more stuff going. But the interviews are great, and they’ve spliced in a lot of home movies the band took on trips abroad, old TV footage, fan-shot movies, radio recordings, the whole nine yards. They must have some heavy-duty archivalists at Apple Corps.

Speaking of Apple, no, I’m not getting an iPhone. They look very nice, but at ~$700 plus maybe $100 a month on the calling plan, that’s a hefty chunk of change just to browse the web on a tiny screen. I think if I was so inclined, I would just get a Blackberry or a Sidekick. I think a Sidekick is like $200 + plan, which is $30 for data and then whatever for voice. I dunno, maybe.

Okay, time for work. A short day, and then a long weekend. We will be going out of town on Saturday/Sunday, so that’s good. That’s all.

Compiling this journal book has been harder than I thought. I have a million journal entries, but they all fall into one of the following categories:

• The weather
• How I’m sick
• What I’m reading
• Music
• Movies
• Long, rambling stories about the past
• Travel diaries
• Bad stuff that happened
• Why I hate New York
• What I miss about Indiana/Seattle
• Unfinished or rejected stories I decided to post to get rid of them

Or a combination of the above.

I’m now trying to categorize things into each of the above and have a section of the book of each, which is similar to that Mikal Gilmore book of old articles, and isn’t as boring as a straight-up chronological thing. The trip essays from when I crossed the country in 1999 will be in there, maybe as an appendix. And I’m trying to dredge up either some paper journal entries, or some of the stuff I write in my not-published journal, so there will be new stuff that isn’t on the web. (Yes, I keep a journal on my computer that isn’t online, mostly for when I’m so disgusted with writing online, but I need to write about something.)

I’ve been taking codeine lately. Not large doses, but in Tylenol-3, for my back. The good thing is, it completely blows out the back pain, and makes me feel all nice and neat. But I can’t take it at work (or maybe I should) and it completely weirds out my dream cycle. I have a lot of really vivid, really abnormal dreams, but within five minutes of waking, I completely forget them, but still remember that I had them. I also wake up in the middle of the night with an incredible thirst for something really sweet. On Friday, I woke up in the middle of the night and drank half a gallon of Tropicana fruit punch without even thinking about it. The back’s just about better, so no more weird dreams.

I went back and re-read The Device, or at least what I had done, and it’s largely unusable. There are line 9 chapters of setup, before the plot starts. Then there’s no plot, no notes on the plot, nothing. I vaguely thought of stealing some of the premise of that book for the second act of the current book (not the journal one, the real one) and there’s no way. I might steal the most basic premise of it, and the title. It will mean this is the third book attempt with the same title, which might be bad. It’s like the car stereo I had that I used in three different cars, all of which ended up totalled. I think that happened with the parts off of James Dean’s car, too. Or maybe that was a Twilight Zone, I’m not sure.

Oh, I got the first Air in the Paragraph Line with a bar code yesterday. Neat.