I am participating in NaNoWriMo 2010.  I just decided this, and I have the vaguest of ideas for a book, and I really need to flesh out an outline, but I’m having trouble getting the thoughts into an outline this second, and I’m glad my copy of Call of Duty is not in the house, because this is typically the point where I’d switch on the PS3 and spend the next three hours “thinking about my outline”.  This is a story I’ve gone back and forth on for the last year, and reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch earlier this year made me realize I totally need to do it.  So I’ll get there.  I have two days to start an outline, or at least have enough of an outline that I can start typing on Monday.

So yeah, that probably means I won’t be updating on here much for a month.  I’m sure both of you readers will be okay.  If not, there’s a thousand old posts here.  And if you get really desperate, you could always go read a book.

I’ve been listening to Sabbath’s Master of Reality on repeat for the last couple of days.  I think it’s one of their best albums, and for whatever reason, you can’t get it on iTunes.  You can in the UK, but you can’t buy music in the UK iTunes store if you have a US account.  I realized I did not have a copy of this on CD, and it was missing from my iTunes library, even though I am certain I had a CD of it in the mid-90s when I went on this Black Sabbath fit of purchasing and bought everything of theirs I could find.  (I think this was around the time I had my first root canal and got Vicodin.  I also think this was around the time I was interviewing someone for a tech writing position, and the whole thing went south, so I started asking them trivia questions about Black Sabbath.)  Anyway, I got a copy of it - it was re-released in the UK a couple of years ago with more bonus tracks than original tracks, which is great if you want to hear a version of “Orchid” where Tony Iommi starts the track by coughing and then counting in, but maybe that’s a bit obsessive if you’re just a stoner rock fan who wants to hear “Sweet Leaf” because it’s been covered by 84,238 other bands, who probably all think it’s pretty damn original when they decide to cover it.  Probably the hardest part of assembling a Sabbath tribute album is 90% of the tracks submitted are covers of “Sweet Leaf.”

Okay, I really need to do at least a token amount of work on this outline.

As a writer, I spend a lot of time at desks.  And I have some strange obsession with the workspaces of writers, which is why I always seem to be snapping pictures of my desks.  And every time I go back and look at it, I can tell the era and the project and the general zeitgeist by seeing what things I needed to keep within arm’s reach during the marathon stretches at the typer.

Here’s a bunch of pictures of my desks over the years.  Why?  I don’t know.  A good way to waste a Friday afternoon, I guess.

Here’s where I spent a lot of 1999: in Washington Heights at Marie’s, my first stop in New York, and where I hacked out the ending of Summer Rain. This must have been soon after my arrival.  There’s my Polaroid, which I bought during the cross-country trip, and some Hi-8 tapes, probably also from the journey.  That silver thing between the speakers is a MiniDisc recorder.

That winter, I moved to Astoria, and got my own place.  Still working off the office table, but I have a real chair now.  This must be in mid-2000, because I’ve got my surround sound speakers installed.  I probably got the bulk of my work from 2000-2005 done at this desk, where I used to type from nine to midnight over the sound of Jersey Shore wannabe douchebags screaming at each other outside my first floor window (hence the speakers.)

My desk at Juno, from 1999-2001.  I didn’t do as much fiction writing here, but I pumped out a lot of tech writing.  It was my first cube, after years of Seattle offices with closing doors.  There’s some xmas lights up; they told us we could decorate our cubes, so I went to K-Mart and bought $100 of lights, including one of those blinking strands that played 24 different holiday songs from an annoying watch-type speaker.

By 2001, I added this stupid aquarium to my desk, in some effort to be less stressed out or something.  I was too lazy to buy fish though, which is probably for the best, since they would have died after 9/11 when my power went out for a week.  You can also see the corner of my beige mini-tower computer on the floor, the case I bought back in 1992.  I must have replaced it a few months later.

In 2002, I started writing on the road a lot more, taking last-second fare deals every time we had a long weekend, so my “desktop” looked like this a lot.  That’s my Latitude LS, the first “real” computer I bought new.  A screaming Pentium III with 256 MB of memory and Windows 98, for a only $2500.  I dual-booted into Linux so I could fire up emacs at 40,000 feet and type away.  No, no wifi.

Here’s what it looked like in action: a hotel room in they Hyatt connected to the Pittsburgh airport, on Good Friday of 2002.  There’s also a Handspring Palm-clone PDA in action, something I bought to jot down ideas and read e-books, but ended up using primarily to play Dope Wars.  I was probably finishing edits of Rumored to Exist around then, although I was also mostly getting drunk and thinking of stupid movie ideas.

When you’re a bachelor for too long, this is what happens.  This is probably early 2005, and the mail collection has gotten out of control.  I think the browser window is opened to my old /photos directory, running its hacked-together PHP gallery software, before I finally gave up and just started using flickr for everything.  If you look carefully, you’ll see a PlayStation 2 on the floor, which is responsible for my lack of writing output for most of the 2000s.

Hey look, I got a Mac!  This is from spring of 2005, and I also got an ergo keyboard.  And I must have started dating Sarah, given that I felt the need to clean the apartment so it didn’t look like a serial killer was there, or maybe they were filming a special two-part episode of Hoarders.  Don’t worry, the stacks of unopened mail are still there; I found a spot on a bookcase to hide them, which is a miracle, given the number of books I had at this point.

New house, new desk.  This was late 2005, when I moved in with Sarah on the Lower East Side.  That desk was brutal to put together.  That red phone followed me around since maybe 1988 or so; I’ve still got it in storage somewhere.  There’s also the receiver for a Microsoft wireless mouse, a wretched little pointing device that ate batteries faster than a walkman with a 20-inch subwoofer.

That desk followed me to Denver, and in 2007, this is where I spent most of my time writing an unpublished book about time machines, and hacking at Ruby on Rails code.  The thing in the center is a full-spectrum light; I hadn’t sold the Mac Mini yet; this was well into September and going into Rocktober, given the order form for postseason tickets sitting in the corner of the picture.

In 2008, we moved to LA, and I worked from home again, this time with a place back in Denver.  I spent my days in VMware, slogging away in a Windows virtual machine, which is shown.  This was during my massive weight loss campaign, as evident by the 100-calorie pack and the diet Sobe Lean pink grapefruit soda.  I had an okay view from the window, with lots of California sun and the occasional crow on the tree outside.

Here’s my officemate for much of my writing.  Loca loved to crawl on the desk and crash, especially when I had documents spread out.  It’s always nice to have cats around when you’re writing, though.  You can also see how I hid my laptop on a keyboard tray, and a close look at the whiteboard shows some Ruby on Rails for hackers cheatsheet, which I probably looked at once and then ignored.

A bad stitch of some pictures of my office at Samsung.  Note the early 80s decor, like the old-school cubicles.  I didn’t have much on my desk, because any time a senior exec from Korea came to visit, they would go apeshit if anything was out of order, so everyone would panic and hide every single thing on their desk in an effort to make it look as sterile as an operating room.  Well, an operating room with early 80s wood paneling.

I wish I had pictures of my desk from 1992, when I lived at the Mitchell Street house and worked off of an old card table, the same one I used to use to build model airplanes in my early teens.  I also had a pretty kick-ass Sauder L-shaped desk in 1993, where I really started my writing career.  I either sold it or gave it away when I left Bloomington, but it was a nerd command center, with plenty of CD storage and a keyboard tray and plenty of room for 3.5” floppy disks, since you needed roughly 87 of them to install Linux back then.

I broke my arm in 1992.  It was stupid - I was riding my new-ish bike that I bought because my Volkswagen’s brakes went out and when I got it to Meineke, they couldn’t put it on the lift because the Indiana winters rotted through the floorboards and frame, and the hydraulic arms would have popped right through the bottom of the West German toy and snapped it in half.  So I bought this bike, with the hopes of just using it instead of a car, although you can’t buy groceries on a ten-speed, and you can’t bring sixteen weeks of laundry to the laundromat, and you definitely can’t get laid if you show up for a date on a Huffy.

I headed home from work at Ballantine one day, and took the ramp that connected the two levels of the parking garage, which had one of those giant arms blocking the entrance, unless you had a magic cardkey or you were a pedestrian.  As I rode downhill toward the two-foot gap between the gate and the wall, this dude came toward the gate on foot.  So I slowed down and moved to the left, and he moved to the left.  I should have just gotten off the bike, but this was a racing bike with toe clips, and I hated pulling my feet out of them, so I slowed down and moved to the right.  Then he moved to the right.  So I slowed down and moved to the left.  Then he moved to the left.  So I slowed down and moved to the right.  And he moved to the right.  And then BAM, I was flat on my ass, my feet still stuck in the pedals, because I had slowed down to zero and whatever laws of physics keep you balanced on a bike when it’s moving forward no longer applied, because I wasn’t moving.

Here’s the only saving grace: I never took my hands off the bars.  Your first instinct is to put your arm out and stop your fall, and if I would’ve done that, I would have snapped all of those tiny little bones in the wrist, the ones that never, ever heal right.  Instead of slamming 180-some pounds of weight into those little bones with names I will never know even if I go to Wikipedia and look it up (because I am sure some nutjob has removed all of the English names in a revert war, because they promote sexism because the 16th century doctor that named all the bones was a man, or whatever), all of my weight hit my elbow, which from a nerve ending standpoint is probably worse.

I got back up and pushed my handlebars back in place from the 40-degree angle they got knocked to, and rode my bike home.  But the arm felt worse and worse, and this was an aluminum road bike that you pretty much couldn’t ride one-handed because it was way too balanced and stiff.  So I got home at like 4

and called my then-sorta-girlfriend-but-not, and told her I thought I broke my arm.  She worked for a year at a loony bin in Chicago, which made her a medical expert, and she asked if I could move it, and I could barely move it, maybe a sixth of its normal motion.  So she said “you didn’t break it, you’ll be fine.”  And she said she couldn’t make it over until later (which I later found it was because she was dating another guy at the same time) and so I hung up, and fretted and fumed and finally said fuck it and got my wallet and set off for the Health Center.  But I couldn’t ride my bike, so I had to walk across campus, now holding my busted up left arm with my right arm in an impromptu sling.

Everyone called the Health Center the Death Center, and the only good reasons to go there were:  1) birth control 2) Prozac 3) antibiotics and 4) you could send your bill to your bursar’s account and not pay it until the end of the year.  I didn’t even know if they could treat breaks and sprains, but the real hospital was miles away, and I didn’t have insurance, and I definitely didn’t have a credit card with more than $3 of open credit on it.  By the time I got there, the pain seared through my body, the kind of thing where you fantasize about being tortured at the Hanoi Hilton by Soviet-trained Viet Cong interrogators, because that might take your mind away from the millions of flaming nerve endings turning your entire body into a throbbing vessel of pain.

I don’t remember what the hell I had to fill out or how long I had to wait or what decade-old issue of Reader’s Digest I got to flip through before they wheeled me into an x-ray lab with a machine that looked like it came off the set of a 1940’s science fiction serial.  The radiologist wanted to hold my arm in 528 ways on this table, and of course 475 of the poses were impossible without moving my elbow, which wasn’t happening anymore.  I sat and wallowed for another twenty minutes, then a doc came in with a couple of floppy translucent sheets of film that he slapped on one of those light-up glass things on a wall.

“See that shaded area on the radius,” he said.  “That’s a break.  It’s just a compression fracture, but I bet it hurts like hell.  You won’t need a cast, but we can give you a sling for it. Let me get you something for the pain,” he said, digging for a prescription pad.

“I’m allergic to aspirin, advil, and tylenol,” I said.  I also rattled off the short list of various mind-benders the shrink was feeding me on a regular basis so he could get that Aruba vacation from Pfizer.

“Um, how about you ice it, and keep it elevated.  Come back and see me in a month, okay?”

I limped home, the third time that day I’d self-propelled myself across the campus with a broken arm.  I called the not-really-girlfriend and told her I went to the fucking hospital and the fucking doctor took a fucking x-ray and told me the fucking arm was fucking broken.  No fucking painkillers.  I think she came over, maybe with food, maybe not.  I don’t even remember, I just remember trying to sleep that night, and not being able to get anywhere close to a minute of shuteye.  I was a restless sleeper back then, and couldn’t stay in one position, so laying on my back with my arm propped up on sixteen pillows didn’t help the situation.  Holding the arm above my heart and putting ice on it was like wrapping yourself in crepe paper streamers to prevent a flamethrower attack.  I counted the minutes until 8 AM, when the stupid health center opened again.

I called them up at exactly 8:00

.00 and said “I BROKE MY ARM YESTERDAY AND I AM EXPERIENCING PAIN OF BIBLICAL PROPORTIONS.”

“What did the doctor prescribe for the pain yesterday?” the phone-nurse asked.

“PITHY ANECDOTES AND WORTHLESS ADVICE ABOUT ELEVATION AND ICE.”

They said to come in.  I got there (I walked again, except this time at least I had a real sling) and a group of four or five residents all converged and flipped through a big book of pills and potions and finally decided on something that would not give me seizures or cause my throat to swell shut in fifteen seconds.  “Okay, I’m going to prescribe some codeine cough medicine.  I know you don’t have a cough, but it doesn’t have any aspirin in it, so you can take a higher dose and it should help.”  Sold.

Man, I love me a good opiate.  I’d never taken one before that, and didn’t take aspirin or any of that stuff, because I had a weird allergy to it, and my eyes would puff up for days and I’d wheeze like an asthmatic at a Cypress Hill concert, so when I got a headache, I’d just think peaceful thoughts, and maybe drink 19 Cokes.  I sat in the pharmacy on the second floor, arm in sling, waiting for that magic bottle, and checking out all of the people waiting too.  (The only two prescriptions they really filled there were birth control and Prozac, and the place was always crawling with hot co-eds and I constantly wondered if they were loose or batshit crazy or both.)  They gave me this brown glass bottle that looked like it contained an old-tyme remedy formula, and I walked home (again!) and doubled up the suggested dosage.  The syrup tasted like an industrial adhesive mixed with something you’d wash your dog with when he contracted an outbreak of a strain of African disease-carrying lice.  So I hit the syrup, then downed half of a Coke, and put in a CD on repeat, and went to lay down in bed, and it felt like that three foot drop from standing to prone took about 45 minutes, like a slow escalator ride through a wall of clouds.

Suddenly, every lyric on every Black Sabbath album made perfect sense.  (“‘sleeping village/cockrels cry’… of course!  of course!”)  I stared at the half-deteriorated suspended ceiling patterns for a few minutes with visions of Ozzy dancing through my head, Mr. Francis Anthony Iommi’s fingers sticking out of the air ether emanating from the speakers, manipulating the molecules in my brain with his detuned zombie notes. Then the girlfriend-not-girlfriend walked in to check up on me; I thought ten minutes had passed, but I’d listened to the titular first Black Sabbath album nine times and it was lunch and she wanted to bring me to Subway or something.  (She was on Nutrisystem or one of those things where you eat their food, although she was at her goal weight, but she wasn’t into my diet at the time, which consisted solely of whatever meal at Burger King cost $2.99 that week.  So Subway was the compromise lunch place.  Of course, the first time we go to Subway, this friend of mine who happened to also be a stripper comes in and sits on my lap and starts asking me about my summer and flirting with me and playing with my hair which freaked the fuck out the not-girlfriend, who was the jealous type, although as I mentioned, I don’t know how many people she was dating when we were “dating”.)

The arm healed up fast, and I was back on my stupid bike within a month.  I think the sling did more damage to my neck and back than the fall did to my arm.  It always felt like I was one of those GI-Joe dolls where the torso was attached to the pelvis with a piece of elastic, and if you didn’t turn it the right way, the torso would be dislodged and stuck at like a twenty degree angle off center until you pulled the whole thing apart and let it snap back together the right way, except this was the arm-ribcage joint, and I had no easy way to pull my arm four feet out of the socket for the correctional manipulation.  I didn’t need to take the codeine after about a week, although I then found out that in addition to stopping the pain of a broken arm, it stopped that horrible overwhelming feeling you get when you’re absolutely sure your girlfriend is not really your girlfriend and she’s probably fucking that guy in her study group she keeps talking about.  Things completely fell apart with the not-girlfriend around the time I got to the bottom of that brown bottle, and I didn’t do a Rush Limbaugh and get a hundred different croakers to write me scripts to different pharmacies; I just went on to the next potential dating disaster.

So that’s the opium story.  I was thinking about this and realized that my old roommate Yusef also broke his arm, maybe a year before I did.  And when he came home, I told him it probably wasn’t hurt and he shouldn’t be such a pussy.  Key differences: 1) he was stoned out of his gourd when he rode home; 2) he fell on his wrist because he was carrying home this $800 classical guitar he hadn’t paid for yet, and he wanted to protect the guitar; 3) he really, really broke the wrist and had to be in a cast for the rest of the semester; 4) he was a guitar performance major, so this totally screwed him up for the better part of the year.  I could still fart around on the computer with my arm in a sling (this was before the conquest of the mouse, and everything was either DOS or unix), but he had studio and recitals and stuff he had to reschedule.  And 5) he had to pay for that guitar even though he couldn’t play it.  (Or maybe he returned it - I don’t remember.)

So we went to Daiso yesterday.  Daiso is maybe the Japanese equivalent to a Big Lots or something, where everything is $1.50 unless otherwise marked, and everything apparently comes from Japan.  This would obviously be a huge boon to the type of Japanophile who spends a lot of time watching anime and eating Pocky in their mom’s basement, but based on the signage, it also seems like it’s a popular place to shop if you’re Japanese-American and miss the trappings of home.

It was too rainy to do anything interesting yesterday, so we drove to Union City to find the Daiso down there.  When we lived in South San Francisco, we had one in San Bruno, across from the parking lot of the Target.  We went there in 2008 and filled a couple of carts with odd stocking stuffers at $1.50 a clip, stickers and Japanese bubble gum and candies made in flavors that maybe candies should not have been made.

Some of the stuff at Daiso is interesting in the sense that everything in Japanese housewares, or at least what we saw there, carries these common traits of extreme efficiency, cleanliness, modern design, and a compactness that’s appealing if you don’t live in a 28-room McMansion.  But the real draw here is the absolutely horrifying Engrish on everything.  It’s not just the marketing copy or the product instructions, which are also pretty poorly translated; but even the logos and slogans on things like coffee cups and stickers and magnets and things.  There are many other examples of this stuff on the web, but I felt a need to defy the “no photography” sign (which probably said something like “nothing of taking of the photos a person shopping”) and whip out the iPhone for a few shots.

It makes me wonder - do they know the stuff is so horribly translated, and keep it for the kitsch value?  Or is it done on the cheap, and they’re like “fuck it, ship it!”?  Or do they honestly not know?  I wonder how bad the Japanese copy reads, if it’s equally as appalling, or if it’s a slick as an Apple ad, and then gets mangled by some machine translation software.

Engrish like this is a mixed reaction for me now.  I mean, I remember when my friend Reece spent a year in Japan in high school, and came back with stories of the Japanese fetish for English-texted clothing, even though they didn’t know what it said.  (Like a guy walking around with a fancy jacket that just said DRUGS on the front of it.)  I’ve always found the stuff hilarious, until I worked at a certain company where I spent my entire day immersed in very poorly written English, often with little or no opportunity to change things because of a lack of time or because my corporate overlords across the Pacific were too bull-headed to let you change their work.  Like I remember having to work an all-nighter once, not because of a lack of time, but because a web site had to be QAed and launched, but the team flipping the server’s switches was in Korea, and of course us lowly Americans couldn’t be trusted to do this ourselves, so our entire San Jose team had to be there for the jump from staging to production.  And even though we spent months going over beta stuff and copyediting every line of the site, when it went live, we got tons of “improvements” from the web design team that were absolutely gut-wrenching, like a giant banner ad at the top of every page that said “blow your brain cell up!”  And for maybe every dozen things like that we yelled and screamed about, maybe one or two would get changed.

So now when I see a warning label that says “when itch and the like it occurs”, it makes me chuckle, but also makes this part of my brain go “oh shit, I need to file a bug report and spent ten hours going through this entire thing only to later have all of it ignored, and every single sample for my writing portfolio is going to look like it went through Google translate, and also they won’t let me use a red pen here, on the off-chance that I will accidentally imply that someone is actually dead.”  And it’s funny when said company gets called out on their Engrish skills on Engadget, or I see one of their press releases and think “oh man, nobody in the American branch read this, or maybe they did but were powerless to change it”, it makes me feel helpless and small again, and then a couple of cycles later, I remember I don’t work there anymore, so fuck’em.

Anyway, I didn’t buy anything.  Then I came home and we had no power, so I spent a few hours digging up flashlights and the hand-crank radios and all of that crap.  And we went to Home Depot and bought $40 of glow sticks and flashlights, and of course when we got home, everything was back on.

It’s almost dead quiet here, except for the hum of the HEPA filter, which we just found and got online again, and the distant hum of traffic on the 880, which doesn’t look horrible for a Friday evening, but give it another hour. The house is somewhat clean now, and Sarah is going to pick up her sister, who is here from Milwaukee and will spend the next few days with us. I actually have a few minutes to relax and do nothing and sit on the couch in this cavernous new loft and take in the light grey sky from a misty October afternoon.

The weather reminds me of Indiana Octobers and Seattle Octobers (and basically October to Aprils) and why I always liked that season. I don’t care about the turning leaves or apple cider or any of that crap, but there is something about the melancholy and undecided sky that always made me like this part of the year. When I got smart enough to stop going back to Indiana in December, I started taking these preemptive-holiday trips back in October, and always liked walking around the Bloomington campus this time of year. A lot of my best memories of IU involve this period of the calendar, of long walks from the Mitchell house to Lindley Hall with leaves all over Third Street sidewalks, and just enough chill in the air to require a jacket, but not so much that it made walking a chore. It was this time of anticipation, the start of a school year before I torpedoed the whole thing by skipping too many classes, when I was still enthusiastic about getting good grades and doing well, instead of researching the drop/add policy to find some medical loophole and exit without total carnage, because I spent too many late nights trying to publish a zine or trying to hack unix or whatever else stopped me from actually going to school.

I have not been writing at all lately. Things have been busy with work and various house projects, so I can’t even think about it. I need to, need to get back to reading more and try to get the ideas flowing. I theoretically have the time, and this whole ipad thing is supposed to revolutionize my idea collection process, but all it has done so far is revolutionize how I play this stupid risk-type strategy game I found the other day. I did find a good app to read all of my google reader feeds today, so that will hopefully plug me in a bit more there. And this is my first try at actually writing an entire post here without my ‘real’ computer, and it is going okay so far.

The Whirlpool warranty repair guy was here today to fix our stove (it works, but the cooktop is cracked, so they will replace it, but it’s seriously going to take them at least five appointments to do it, because, well just because. Murphy’s law, I guess.). Anyway, the repair guy had this computer that looked like it was seriously from like 1993. It was some kind of ruggedized thing, but it was maybe three inches thick. I thought at first there was no way it was any newer than twenty years old, but then i saw it had a built-in WAN connection of some kind, maybe a 3G card or a radio back to the truck. But it seriously looked about as thick as three regular laptops, maybe something built in Soviet Russia right before the 1991 self-destruct.

I installed a new router, a gigabit thing with 802.11n and the whole deal. I now have a total of four routers, wireless points, and/or switches around the house. All of the ethernet is working, and I think all of the computers are talking to each other, although i am sure there’s some routing disaster waiting to happen.

Just got a call that Sarah is en route, so I need to fire up yelp and find us a place to eat tonight.