For only $159,000, you can buy the last place I lived in Bloomington:

http://www.homefinder.org/public/buy-details.asp?sTransactionNumber=20101620&sCRecord=147

This is the 1005 W. 6th house, where I lived from 1994-1995.  I lived here with Simms and Matt Liggett, and it’s a weird little place.  It’s five bedrooms, but they’re odd-sized little rooms, so you can only really get three people in there.  We each had a tiny upstairs room, with a computer room up front and the Simms music studio in another room.  It had 1.5 baths, but in a weird configuration; there was a room with a toilet, sink, and non-functional tub; the other one had a shower, sink, and no toilet.  I bought a sign that said NO DUMPING and put it on the toilet-less room.  This also became a metaphor for distributed computing in a long and somewhat irrelevant story that I’ll skip.

The place also had a giant kitchen, big enough for a drum set and full band without compromising on keg location or chili distribution.  I have a lot of strange memories of that place, like when I tried to grow tomatoes in one corner with a bunch of grow lights, or the birthday when me and Larry went to K-Mart, bought two copies of this board game where you built castles out of bricks and then launched marbles from catapults siege-style to try to level your opponent, and then played on the kitchen floor, proceeding to lose little marbles all over the place.

I really did like my room there, too.  It was a cape cod, and my room was upstairs, so I had a low ceiling with weird angles on it, and bookshelves built into two walls.  I spent many late nights on my mattress on the floor, reading Henry Miller and scribbling in notebooks, listening to rain on the rooftop or running the little electric heater in the cold.  I loved living in this little closet-sized womb of a room, books on three walls, journals all over the creaky wooden floors, a busted-up PS/2 386SX computer I borrowed from work and only used to play solitaire in Windows 3.1.  (It was a literal doorstop; it was not networked and I had some crazy idea that I’d type away on it in Notepad and write down thoughts and turn them into books, and of course that didn’t happen.)

Anyway - I’m not in the market for a second house these days.  And if you really want some Konrath history for about $158,985 cheaper, you could go buy a copy of Summer Rain.  (And that book was based on a different house - the one at 414 Mitchell - but I did start writing SR at the 6th Street house, so there is a connection.)  But I’ve been thinking of B-town a lot lately, and it seems five forevers ago since I was there.  So it gave be a chuckle and a brief trip through time when I saw this.

Before I forget. John Sheppard has a new book out called Loner, which is a collection of short stories originally published in Air in the Paragraph Line, plus a new one that’s absolutely incredible.  It’s on lulu.com here: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/loner/11784165.  They’re also having a summer sale with free postage for orders over twenty bucks, so do yourself a big favor and pick that up along with his other books In Between Days and Tales of the Peacetime Army.  Or check out any of my other books at http://stores.lulu.com/jkonrath, as long as the shipping’s cheap/free.

As long as I’m pimping stuff, I should mention that I dumped a bunch of my old books on scribd.com.  So now you can go read or download stuff like Summer Rain, Rumored to Exist, Air in the Paragraph Line #12, and a bunch of other old AITPL issues.  Check em out, and if you like them, please do me a favor and throw a link up on your facebook or whatever else you’re using these days using the handy buttons on scribd.

It’s always good to see John’s work, although it also makes me start thinking about putting out another POD book, or getting some of the old stuff on Kindle, or who knows what.  I am starting to accumulate a lot of short stories from AITPL and other places, and maybe there are enough to put out a volume of them, but I don’t know how it would sell or how I would market it.  I would also like to have a bunch of new stuff to go along with the reprints, and I’m not churning out a lot of writing at this second.

I also keep thinking about what to do next with AITPL.  I was looking at hooking up the submishmash submission manager thing, which looks like a good idea, but then I was reading this big essay on their site about why it was so great, and it said some stuff about the current climate, about how everyone’s a writer and nobody’s a reader, and that really stuck in my craw.  I mean, the worst part of that statement is that it’s true.  I wish I had a hundred good writers giving me stuff that I publish to a million eager readers, but it seems like those numbers are the other way around right now, and it makes me wonder why I should do more issues, or why I should publish my own stuff, and it gets depressing fast.  I swing between maybe moving AITPL to a model where I publish stories regularly online, maybe even daily flash fiction and the weekly roundup of longer fiction, and then do a quarterly print version of the best of that stuff.  Maybe that’s a good idea, but I don’t have time to write now, let alone sift through submissions.  I think if I had five dedicated readers willing to help me with the slush pile, I’d do this.  But right now, I’ve gotta write.

For some reason last weekend, I read some thing about GTD and thought maybe I should do some GST (Getting my Shit Together) and maybe try to organize things a bit.  So I looked at this list of how to do these things, and step one is “empty your inbox”.  Well here’s the deal: I forward my 34.216.9.77/ email to a gmail account, and then read that with IMAP from my home computer and iPhone, and also use the web interface during the day at work. And since I started doing this in 2008, I have not filed away a single message, so my inbox has maybe 5000 messages in it.  But I also realized that now that I’m 100% using IMAP, I can now keep my folders on gmail and file things away there.

My big problem with that before: I used a Windows Mobile phone, and it could only POP mail reliably, even though its exchange support is supposed to be hot shit.  Using IMAP caused some weird problems, so I would pop my mail.  That led to this huge rat’s nest email configuration with multiple gmail accounts and ISP redirection and all of this garbage.  Now with the iPhone’s great IMAP support, all of that is gone.  And also, my Windows Mobile phone is gone - I actually sold it last week for $26 online.  Felt a little sad packing it up, because it reminded me of fall of 2008 and how ideal things seemed moving to the bay and getting a new job in Silicon Valley and how proud I was to be working for the company that made my phone, and to be working on software for that phone.  Then I actually had to use Windows Mobile.  That lasted about six months, before I finally gave up and paid full, unsubsidized price for an iPhone and threw my BlackJack II in a desk drawer, only to come out when I had to work at a trade show and was not allowed to use my iPhone in public.

Anyway, I started hacking away at the email situation last weekend.  First, I had to move stuff from one gmail account to another. You can just drag and drop messages between two IMAP accounts in Mail.app and it works well, except for some hidden mystery transfer quota in gmail that kills your connection for 24 hours if you move more than about 500 messages.  Then I had to actually sort through my old mail.  I could prune out a lot of obvious stuff: Amazon ship notifications, AT&T junk mail, alarm notifications to myself, and newsletters I never read.  And then I could file away the obvious one-to-one things, the frequent correspondence that could easily be tucked away in a folder with the person’s username.  But there’s still thousands of messages to go, and I think it will take me maybe a month to get to step 2 of GTD.

Actually, I have been writing down more stuff, ideas and thoughts and parts of stories, in a moleskine notebook, which is filling fast.  I think a big part of GTD is just capturing this stuff that would normally fall out of your head.  I don’t know what the next step is, but it feels good to get some record of this stuff.

Not much else.  Listening to Sabbath, plotting the weekend with a cat sleeping on my feet and “Hand of Doom” going through the headphones.  I’m finishing up hour four on the laptop and the battery says I still have another 1

, which isn’t bad considering all of the churning Mail.app is doing with the IMAP transfers.  But it’s time to hang it up and go get some lunch.

The kindle is good, but I found a key problem the other day. It pissed me off because I was in a doctor’s office and had to revert to reading a year-old Sports Illustrated.  Glad it wasn’t on a flight to Tokyo:

Last night I booked the big annual pilgrimage to Denver to catch some Rockies baseball at Coors Field.  We’ll be going August 12-15th, to catch two of the games in the series against the Brewers, which should be awesome.  We’re staying at the Warwick again, which was a pretty decent place, although it’s a little weird staying in an area right by our old default grocery store, our old default Chinese restaurant, our old default Mexican restaurant, and so on.  I mean, it’s weird in general to be staying in a city where I used to live, and I always get weird, conflicted thoughts when I’m in Denver.  It’s usually stuff along the lines of “it would have been really great to stay here, IF…”, with the if part having to do with easy-to-attain stuff (if I found a better job, if Sarah found a better job, if we bought a cool house, if we scheduled more vacations to beat the worst of the weather and to break up the various ruts), and the impossible stuff (if there was an ocean nearby, if I wasn’t floored by allergies, if all of the rednecks packed up and moved to Wyoming and left behind all of the cool people.)

It will be cool to go back, though.  And the baseball part of it - the Rockies are doing well right now.  And I bought the most incredible tickets.  On Friday night, we’re up in club level (239, I think).  But on Saturday night, I bought Coors Clubhouse seats on StubHub.  These are the seats immediately behind home plate, five rows back.  That’s the little “special” section ahead of the field-level general seating, next to the tunnel entrance to the clubhouse areas.  It’s the seats you see when you watch the game on TV, and you’re closer to home plate than the pitcher is.  Also, you go back that little tunnel and there is a private restaurant with a buffet set up, and the whole thing is included in the ticket price.  And the club is air-conditioned.  And the seats are nicer.  And I paid an insane price for these seats, so much that I can’t actually admit how much they cost, except that I think my World Series tickets were cheaper.  (And if you really need to know, I think I have a picture of my WS tickets on my flickr page.)

I am also very excited to bring the new camera rig with me on this trip.  I plan on taking two and a half million pictures while I’m there.  I think I need to plan some other non-Coors side trip while I’m in town to get out and get some good snaps.

I think we’re talking about also booking a long weekend in September or October to go to Vancouver.  Sarah went there for work recently and only got like ten seconds to see the city, but she really liked it.  I drove up there in maybe 1995, but actually didn’t even get out of the car.  Back then, I had a serious On the Road obsession, and spent many late nights with my Rand McNally atlas planning some giant voyage from Seattle to Alaska, trying to calculate how long I’d have to drive nonstop in my Ford Escort to get to the 49th state.  You think Alaska’s like right next to Washington, like you just take a little jog through Canada and you’re there.  But it’s seriously like a 2300 mile drive just to get to Anchorage, which is like two days of constant driving on tiny, shitty, unmaintained two-lane roads.  I also spent almost every weekend thinking about pointing the car north and going to Vancouver.  And several times, I got on I-5, loaded up some tunes in the tape player, and headed north, only to get bored of the whole thing and turn around in like Everett or Mountlake Terrace or Northgate Mall or an exit north of my house.

But one time, I actually did get up there.  I hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch, and drove straight up on a beautiful sunny Sunday and crossed the border and ended up in Hollywood North.  And I circled around, and listened to some local radio station, and thought it would be awesome if I found some X-Files film shoot or ran into Gillian Anderson at some cafe.  And I was starving and wanted to stop to eat.  And I had to pee.  And I couldn’t figure out what neighborhood was what and where to park, so I just said fuck it and turned around and drove back home.

And here’s the funny part.  I get to customs, and of course they are huge pricks.  I mean, here’s a guy in a new car, nobody with him, been in the country for an hour, and no reason to be there.  Here is the conversation with the customs dude:

Him: “So what are you doing in Canada?”

Me: “Not much.  Just driving around.”

Him: “Just driving around?”

Me: “Yeah, beautiful day, sunny out, nice Sunday drive, you know?”

Him: “Where were you born?”

Me: “Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota”

Him: “You took a Sunday drive from North Dakota to Vancouver?”  (Note: I’ve handed him a Washington license with a Seattle address on it, and my car is plated and registered in Washington.)

Me: “No, I live in Seattle.”

Him: “Where do you work?”

Me: “Spry.  A division of Compuserve.”

(brief pause, look of stupidity.)

Me: “It’s an internet company.”

Him: “Wait are you one of those guys that posts instructions on how to make bombs on the internet?”

Me: “umm…  no?”

Him: “Pull over to bay 1, we need to search your car.”

(Spend the next 20 minutes as four guys dismantle my hatchback trunk, look under my car with mirrors on sticks, pop the hood, and have two dogs sniff every inch of my car.)

---

Other good news on the Rockies front: Sarah’s group at work got the box at AT&T Park again at the end of August, and it happens to be during the Rockies series there, so I will get to see them again in San Francisco, this time from a suite.  There are only two issues: it’s a Tuesday night game, so I’ll need to hustle to get from Palo Alto after work.  The other problem is what to wear - I probably can’t show up in the suite wearing head-to-toe Colorado gear.  (Didn’t they do a Seinfeld about that?  Also, do you remember a time in our cultural history when almost any event was coupled with the rhetorical question “didn’t they do a Seinfeld about that?”)

We went to Alameda yesterday, to find a used book store we saw in Oakland magazine, but also to just check out the island a little more.  Alameda’s a little strip of an island just over from us in Oakland, and it’s an odd curiosity, because it’s so much different than Oakland, and yet we’re all part of Alameda county, so it’s not anything to do with the government.  It’s physically a bit more isolated, and maybe that bit of insulation does it.

Alameda’s got a very nautical feel to it, partially because it’s the old home to the Naval Air Station.  It was also the location of Neptune Beach, which used to be a sort of Coney Island of the west, a resort beach with amusement park rides, boardwalk-type food, Friday night dances, and summer barbecues.  And the island as a whole survived the 1908 earthquake much more than other bay areas, so there are tons of old Victorian houses that have since been restored.

We went to the main strip on Park street, where you dump out after crossing the Park Street Bridge over the inner harbor, and wandered around the little restaurants and old shops a bit.  We found a taqueria that looked good, a place with an old timey sign out front, a lunch counter, and a menu board that looked totally pre-war.  I got some enchiladas for lunch, and really dug the food there.  One of the things I really miss about LA is the good Mexican food, and this place reminded me of the taco joints we used to hit when we lived down south.

The book store - I forget the name, but it took a bit of a hike west to get there, into a strangely-zoned neighborhood, where the businesses quickly dropped off and it became a mix of schools and churches, and the occasional house.  We wanted to go there because the article in the magazine showed a picture of the black tuxedo cat that worked there, and when we got there, we immediately found her, or rather she found us, meowing and then plopping down in front of us, demanding that we ignore the books and pay attention to her.  But the shop - it was one of these places not much bigger than an apartment, filled with stacks and stacks of old books, heaped on top of each other, the smell of old pulp paper in the air, shelves stacked three and four deep of old detective novels and scifi serials.  There was no coffee bar or greeting cards or overpriced pens or anything else - just books.

Book stores like this remind me so much of Seattle.  I mean, in New York, a used book store has to be an empire like The Strand to make the rent.  There were some good new book stores, or places with collectibles, but not things like Seattle’s Twice Sold Tales, the dumping grounds of all things used.  And back when I lived in Seattle, my only goal, besides reading constantly, was to buy as many god damned books as I could buy, even if I would never touch them again.  If there was a chance I would ever pick it up, if I would need it on my shelves.  I used to spend a lot of time in dive book stores like this back in my Seattle days, especially when I was single and had absolutely nothing to do every weekend, except pad the hours between meals and my writing time at night.  That musty smell of rooms full of rotting paper and ink pretty much defined the entire year of 1996 for me, and I felt almost transported back to then.

I say “almost” because I don’t really buy books like that anymore.  I mean, I don’t get to read as much anymore, and my reading has become more focused because of that.  And I have two huge piles of books to be read that I have not shelved, and feel bad about never getting to those.  And half of my reading is on the Kindle these days, which is completely removed from this experience.  I don’t know if that’s good or bad - I know a lot of people will go on about missing the print, and needing those books around me, but I’m so on the fence now.  I mean, if someone offered to take away half of my books and give me the same books in e-format, I might actually do it.  There are some books I will never get rid of, but I also sometimes look at the shelves and wonder “when the hell am I ever going to read a book about the roads the Army engineering corps built in Manchuria during the big one?”  I’m sure back in 2000, that seemed like vital information, but now that this book has moved from Astoria to New York to Denver to LA to South San Francisco to Oakland without its cover cracked, I wonder if it’s next and last trip will be to the Goodwill bin.

But I did dig this little store.  An old guy started talking to Sarah about the cat, how it was a rescue and he raised it before he gave it to the woman who ran the store.  He hung out at the store constantly, and he mentioned that he actually lived on a boat nearby.  Then it made total sense, why this place had so many damn paperbacks - it must have been the place where sea-bound residents came in to trade their old paperbacks they consumed on their last great sail, and swap them for a new set.  I know if I lived in a boat, I would probably do the same - only store a dozen or two books, and constantly swap them out for a new set at the next port.

Back in the old days, I’d look in my wallet, see how much cash I had, and say “okay, this is how many books I’m buying”.  But now, I eyed a lot of curiosities and put them back, books like the 2000 Oakland A’s press book and a bunch of Asimov paperbacks I probably read twenty years ago and would not read again, but that I maybe wanted to read again.  I did want to get something though, and help the place out, so I picked up a Howard Hughes bio I haven’t read yet, and a book of World War II fighter planes that’s part of this series of British plane books, of which I had one back in high school, and have since always bought on sight any of the other related books in the series.

Today’s the 4th.  I have written many other journal entries on the 4th that talk about what I did on previous 4ths, which makes me want to write some other epic entry about today, but I’ve got too many other pots on the stove right now.  Feel free to click on the dates to the right to find them, though.  I wish I was in Denver to see the last game in the series against the Giants, although after last night’s big blowout, I’m not sure if I have the nerves to watch.  I’m really upset they put Ubaldo on the cover of SI - I have a terrible fear that’s going to jinx the rest of the season for him.