I wasn’t set to go down the military history wormhole and start reading books about Iraq, but while I was going through one of the Henry Rollins journal books, he mentioned Buzzell’s memoir, and I picked up a copy.  Going into it, I knew nothing about it, none of the background, his history, and I never read his blog.  I didn’t know if he was a staunch anti-war type, or a flag-waving republican.  I didn’t even know if he lost his arms and legs from a car bomb, or if he was now a regular commentator on Fox News.  All I knew was that Rollins liked him, and the book was well-blurbed.  Even Vonnegut gave it a good blurb.  So I was hoping for the best.

Then I started the book, and found out that he’d kept a blog during his time in Iraq, and this was a book made from the blog, and my heart sank.  I hate when people repackage blogs into books.  One reason is that blog to book people rarely repeat their performance; they’re almost always one-shot wonders.  And I love to be proven wrong by this, but it’s just an issue with the format.  You put your all into a blog, every part of your life, and you only have one life, so you only get the one book.  Sometimes you get a follow-up, but it’s always the same book, the confusion and the grind of the post-blog-book world, dealing with publishers and press and all of that junk we don’t care about.  I especially don’t like the blog-to-book when I’ve already read the blog in question.  It’s like getting a greatest hits album from a band that’s got every single song you already have from them, and maybe a shitty live version of the one song you can’t stand to listen to anymore.

And yeah, part of my hatred for this is jealousy.  I’ve been blogging since 1997 here.  I did put out a book of the first three years of blog posts here, and nobody bought it.  I think I could probably get a decent book out of the thousand or so entries I have completed here, but I doubt it would sell.  And yeah, you’re saying, “but Jon, you didn’t go to Iraq and get shot at.”  No, I didn’t.  But it isn’t about the action as much as it is the character presenting it.  Buzzell presents himself in a way that makes him very likable to a certain segment of the population, and that translates into a story that people can relate to and that people will follow.  My likability… we’ll leave that for another discussion, although I think you know what my perception of that is already.

All that aside, the book is interesting because it’s hard to figure out who Buzzell is.  He’s this sort of boomerang kid, a former skate punk not into going to college and not into the popular scene like the rest of his high school.  He’s not pro-war or anti-war, but decides to enlist because it’s better than sitting on his parents couch or doing a data-entry job for nine bucks an hour.  You get the idea now that anyone volunteering for the army at a time when it was almost a guarantee to get sent into war was some bible belt Republican who loved God, guns, and George Bush.  And Buzzell shows that this isn’t entirely true, that you could come from some other background.

The story continues through basic training, on to a Stryker brigade at Ft. Lewis, up near Seattle.  A Stryker is a big 8-wheeled combat vehicle, way bigger and more armored than a Hummer, but not as heavy or treaded like a tank.  He worked as an M-240 machine gun operator, first as the guy hauling the ammo, then working up to the guy actually firing the thing.  Buzzell’s writing is solid; his two main influences are Bukowski and Hunter Thompson.  He only has some of the fluid poetry of Bukowski at his best, and it’s not the kind of rapid-fire manic energy Thompson wields, but fans of both authors would settle in well with his prose.  I think the unfortunate part of this blog-t0-book thing is that his earliest posts were not as polished or refined.  It seems like he just started to find his voice by the end of his time in Iraq.  So the additional stuff he wrote afterward, and any articles you find of his post-book are much more excellent in style and quality.  But the writing is solid enough, and it reads fast, so I appreciated that.

The politics of the book are mixed.  In some ways, it seems like Buzzell would be the typical W-following line-toter.  In other ways, you’d think he was some Berkeley radical anarchist more interested in throwing the system.  It’s hard to tell where his loyalties lie, and I have no problem with that, because I’m the same way.  I think if you adhere to the far left, you’re going to have problems reading this, hearing about shooting people and the implied cultural insensitivity here, like Buzzell’s insistence on using the term hajii to refer to any Iraqi people, which some would consider derogatory.  It’s probably a bit too war-porn for the die-hard Nancy Pelosi fan.  On the other hand, it probably contains way too many f-bombs for those of you who read the bible six times an hour.  (That’s a constant complaint in other reviews, and I honestly don’t give a fuck if he uses the word or not.)

Probably the one criticism I had about the book was that in places, the writing just showed us things, and it didn’t tell us about it.  I mean, it seems like, as an Amazon reviewer put it, he started with 50 pages of blog posts and pushed it out to a 350-page book.  And that’s fine, but there were times when he could have told us more about how he felt, or how things really looked.  Like, in the epic firefight scene that’s the keystone to the whole book, there are monumental things described with a single sentence.  Like, “The Pepsi bottling plant across the street was all up in flames.”  That’s it.  You could write at least a paragraph if not ten about the surreal situation of growing up drinking soda and then having that childhood image of the Pepsi logo transplanted to this giant factory in flames, the sounds of the timbers crumbling, the glow of the glass and plastic melting en masse… whatever.  He did a good job of documenting what happened, but didn’t cover as much how those things made him feel.

And maybe that’s deliberate.  I mean, the picture he paints is that he’s this tattoo-covered, party lovin’ dude that uses blackout drinking as a stock response to almost anything, suddenly thrust into war.  Maybe having feelings about the action goes against this tough warrior persona.  And maybe that’s why people identify with it.  I mean, nobody asks Chuck Norris how he feels about punching a guy in the throat, and more than a few people love them some Chuck Norris.  But I look back to some of the military memoirs or creative nonfiction that I like - for example, Tim O’Brien - and they add this third dimension, which makes you feel more like you can relate to the tension and drama.  Maybe he hasn’t had time to contemplate what went on. O’Brien wrote his books years after returning from the shit, and he had the distance; he wasn’t liveblogging the Vietnam War as it happened.  That’s why I’m curious about Buzzell’s act two, what comes after this book.

And yeah, full disclosure: I published John Sheppard’s verisimilitude work, Tales of the Peacetime Army, which I liked a lot more for the depth of the writing, although it wasn’t about the war of the moment, which is probably why it didn’t sell.  (I’m not trying to snake-oil you into buying a copy - go read it for free at the above link if you want.)  John also wrote the most excellent In Between Days, a novel about returning from Iraq and dealing with PTSD and the bleakness of America these days, which I keep saying is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.  But it also didn’t sell.  (Maybe John needs to get some tattoos and do some blackout drinking.)

All in all, this is a decent and quick read, although it made me have more questions than answers when I finished.  If you never read the blog, and you’re into reading military history, it’s worth a look.  It’s a good book.  Not great, but good.

I get a lot of shit for the “museum of obsolete technology” I have in our storage locker right now, the electronic toys I’m paying $30 a month to not see.  But I’ve pared down almost all of that inventory now, and it’s down to a single C-64 and 1541 drive, and a Sony Magic Link PDA that I bought on eBay and will probably never be able to connect to the internet.  I’ve given up on collecting, but I’ve still got that collector’s gene, and if I had unlimited space and unlimited budget, I’d probably spend all day and night on eBay, trying to buy back every piece of electronics I ever owned and every gadget I ever coveted, until eventually the hosts of Hoarders showed up at the house to film a two-part special on me.

I found this site a while back called Wishbook Web, and it’s extremely dangerous for me.  It’s scans of a bunch of department store catalogs, like Sears and Monkey Wards, which is great, because those things have largely been landfilled and there’s no archive of them anymore.  When I was a little kid, I would spend the entire year memorizing these catalogs, poring over the toy sections until the pages fell apart.  I guess now kids can just get on the web and go to Amazon and look this stuff up, but I would scrutinize these things like a NASA engineer trying to figure out why the latest Mars lander crashed.  Me and my sisters used to fight over who got to read each catalog, and instead of wish lists, my parents tried to institute some kind of system for us to denote what stuff we wanted that year.  It involved one of us putting boxes next to things, and the other annotating with circles, or maybe it was stars.  Anyway, I’d just mark the entire Lego section and any single thing that said Star Wars in it.  And of course, all new toys had come out before the actual holiday, and we’d have to revisit our greedy little lists based on the commercials shown during the Saturday morning cartoons.

So at least two of these catalogs came out during the prime of my childhood, and I can still tell you almost every damn thing on every page.  Going back to these again is like going back to a home town after twenty years and still being able to find your way around.  It’s also interesting to see how much the times have changed as far as copy goes, because I could write better stuff in my sleep.  Anyway, when I first found this URL, I went through every page, trying to find the stuff I used to own, and the things I really wanted but never got.

Here’s a good example of this: the stereo I had as a kid.

When I was little, I had one of those crap record players with the removable lid and the plastic handle on the side, the kind with the speaker built into it.  My parents had a “real” stereo record player with separate speakers, but I had to listen to my read-along books and Disney records on this orange cardboard piece of shit.  When I was in maybe the 6th grade, I asked for a “real” stereo for Christmas, and I got item #2 from the picture above, taken from a Sears catalog.  And at the time, this was about as technologically advanced as the computers from Minority Report.  It had a record player AND a tape player AND a radio AND an 8-track.  Not only could I record songs off of the radio, but I could make tapes of albums.  And the speakers were separate, the kind of thing you plugged in and sat on shelves in the corners of the room.

The 8-track was a bit of an oddity; this was like the last death rattle of the failed format.  This stereo had a front-loader, and it had the program button, which jogged the tape heads sequentially across each of the four tracks of an album.  But it didn’t even have a fast-forward or rewind button.  Our family had no 8-track tapes, so we went to the Sears at Pierre Moran mall, and found them liquidating the remainder of their 8-tracks at some ridiculous price, like maybe four for a dollar.  These were all “cut-outs”, items with a groove cut in one side because they were returned or whatever, and they were pretty picked over.  I think I ended up getting a Steve Martin comedy album, a Ringo Starr solo album (I had no idea who the Beatles were, except in the most conceptual of terms), and a Jefferson Airplane album.  Much later, my mom’s second husband had a collection of a few 8-tracks, with the only notable ones being the first Cheech and Chong album, and Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick.  (Albums with only two side-long tracks didn’t work as well for a format where an LP was essentially divided into four; I’m not sure how they handled that.)

I had almost no budget for music, so I spent a lot of time trying to record songs off the radio, which was a maddening process.  I’d listen to U-93, the local top-40 radio station, and hope some song I liked would get played.  There were a whole slew of problems that would occur: the tape would not be queued to the very end and I’d erase some previously recorded treasure; the idiot DJ would babble on about being the 93rd caller for a set of free tickets to a monster truck rally; I wouldn’t recognize the song until 30 seconds in, and then only record half of it; the song would fade into some other stupid song I wouldn’t want, and I’d have a pristine copy of this Journey song I really wanted, except the last ten seconds would be fused to the beginning of a Toni Basil song.  (Yes, that song, which I won’t even mention by name or it will be stuck in your head forever.)  It would take me maybe a month or two of diligent listening to fill one side of a C-90 with useful tunes.

The big shortfall to this new hardware was that it only had one tape deck.  Most of the new stereos coming out had two decks: a play-only unit, and a player-recorder.  And my unit was a “closed” system, without an AUX input or any sort of input jacks.  Most of my friends would buy their albums on cassette tape, and I had no way of making copies of them.  My best hopes were either to have a friend that had a dual-tape deck who would be willing to make a dub for me, or find someone who bought everything on vinyl and would let me borrow their album.  Another problem was that I had no way of recording from the TV.  I watched an insane amount of MTV back then, and I would have given anything to capture some of their new music on cassette for repeat listens, especially since they played much cooler stuff than the behind-the-times station in my redneck Indiana town.  I remember trying to record a Genesis concert off of MTV by holding my sister’s little jambox up to the TV cabinet, which worked about as well as taking a picture of the night stars by dragging a photocopier outside and making a copy with the lid open.  (My sister later tried recording some song on MTV - that “don’t put another dime in the jukebox” song, and every time it would come on, I would yell at the dog and she’d start barking, totally screwing up the recording.)

It’s always interesting to me how we have such a tactile nostalgia for old technology like this.  Like I’ve got an old cell phone sitting on my shelf, a Windows Mobile phone I used for maybe six months before I wised up and got an iPhone.  And I hated that phone at the time, but it was my daily driver, and I used it constantly, for email, google maps, web browsing (or what approximated web browsing in a crippled version of pocket IE).  And I pick it up now, and its heft, and the feel of its keys, and the glint of its display remind me so much of that period in late 2008 and early 2009 when this thing was permanently attached to my hip.  And I get some of that when I look at pictures of old technology like this.  I remember the smell that stereo had, the new electronics smell of components heating up for the first time.  I remember the snap of the silver knobs going across their detents as I cycled through the inputs.  I remember playing with that tuning knob endlessly, trying to get a clear signal on WAOR so I could record Dr. Demento on Sunday nights.  I haven’t seen this stereo in at least 25 years, but I think if I found one at a garage sale, it would instantly transport me back to 1983 again.

Anyway, that’s my story.  Now I must go waste the rest of my writing time finding this stereo elsewhere on the web.  I’ve just found there are a ton of eBay sellers with demo videos of their wares on youtube, with many similar stereos.  Not sure which is worse, the waste of money and space hoarding this stuff, or the waste of time finding it.

Last night, we took the night tour at Alcatraz.  The night tour is the best time to go; it leaves the dock at about 6

, and they have more tour guides there, plus you get to see everything at night, or when the sun’s setting, which lends to some amazing views.  Unfortunately, we went during some horrible weather.  It was like 47 degrees, pouring rain, and extremely windy, and it got even worse when we were on this little clump of rock in the middle of the bay.  It’s hard to get tickets to the night tour, and we ordered ours months ago, so we bundled up and decided to power through it and go anyway.

Most of the tour itself is indoors, but we couldn’t spend any time wandering around the island itself.  Also, you get there at a dock at the low point of the island, but the cell block itself is at the top of the island, which means you have to climb up a steep switchback trail that’s the equivalent of hiking 13 flights of stairs.  And maybe that would be a decent workout, but not when you’re soaking wet and cold and being blown sideways by gale-force winds.  Even when we were inside, winds and rain whipped through the giant barred windows.  It’s not a climate-controlled resort, and you appreciate how miserable it must have been to do time there when the weather’s this bad.  And you know six months out of the year, it’s going to be this downcast at night.

The cellblock itself is a lot smaller than I imagined.  It’s really only four rows of cells, with one, the solitary wing, having cells on only one side.  I think the maximum number of people they ever had there was about 300, which was the size of our tour group.  There’s a library, a cafeteria, a control room and warden’s office, and not much more.  I guess there were some other buildings, like a place where they did work duty, but the other stuff was either closed off or is long gone.  A couple of the buildings burned down during the Indian occupation, and a couple were torn down when they were on the verge of collapse.

There’s also an apartment building, where workers lived, some with their families.  I never realized that kids actually lived on the island, and took a boat to school every day.  That seems unusual - now, nobody lives within miles of those supermax prisons, like it would be an amber alert field day, or a steady supply for hostage situations.  But I guess the families liked the small-town feel and the fact that they looked out at this incredible view of the city.

I wish I could have seen more of the history of the place.  It’s like New York City in the sense that it’s many-layered, hundreds of years of stuff built on top of other stuff, going all the way back to when it was a civil war fort.  There are areas that used to be moats and sally gates, and buildings built on top of the foundations of other buildings.  I guess when you have to haul in all raw materials, you tend to reuse things.  They tell the story of this at the various exhibits, but I wished it was a clear day so I could get some more pictures of this construction.

We also stayed for a presentation about the myths of Alcatraz, where they talked about how most of the stuff you see in movies is total bullshit.  Like, the whole system of tunnels under the island in The Rock does not exist.  And the myths about the man-eating sharks and impossible swim to the mainland are also just myths.  There are no sharks in the bay (other than little bottom-feeders), and a good swimmer could make it to the shore.  But if you spent your days rotting in a tiny cell with no exercise and no access to a YMCA pool and a daily diet of bulk-up powder, you probably couldn’t.

The trip was very cool, but it was photography hell, because of the low light and moisture.  The trip back was also not optimal - the ship was pitching and bobbing every which way, and water was splashing up over the boat as we crossed back.  I wasn’t sick, but a few people were, which wasn’t pleasant.  Anyway, I’ve posted the pictures to flickr here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkonrath/sets/72157626183337637/

I’m sick.  Strep throat.  It happened suddenly, this urge to drink a gallon of water every five minutes, then a difficulty swallowing.  I didn’t wait for it to play out, and got in to a doctor right away.  They’ve had so many cases of adult strep throat, they were out of the test kits, and had to dig up an ancient kit that was almost at the technology level where you had to kill the rabbit and look at its ovaries to determine if it was positive or not.  Okay, not that bad, but it was one of those things where we had to sit and stare at a little stick in a vial of chemical solution and wait to see if it changed colors.  And if I wasn’t sick, I would have come up with a great punchline containing “the last time I had to sit and wait to see if the blue line appeared…”

So I got an antibiotic, zithromax, and I googled out all of the side effects, and it’s not much except the usual stomach stuff that you’d get from ordering the five dollar box at Taco Bell.  I don’t take antibiotics that often, because I’m allergic to penicillin and all of the other -cillin drugs.  I think I last took penicillin when I was five or six, and that ended with a stay in the hospital.  I think this was the first time I ever spent a night anywhere away from a parent or family member, and I know it was the first time I’d ever seen a Mennonite kid with his arm cut off from a tractor accident, which was the case for my roommate during part of my stay.

I think the last time I took any antibiotic was maybe ten years ago, a bad cold that I probably wrote about in here somewhere, a thing that eventually turned into strep, or maybe it always was.  All I remember was that it was during a time when my stupid piece of shit landlord in Queens was not running the heat, and it was definitely a time when you needed the heat, and then the hot water also gave out, so instead of taking a shower or a bath, I’d put every pot and pan on the stove, fill them with water, and then bathe by standing in a plastic bucket in the kitchen and sort of washclothing it and pouring this hot water from the stove over me, which is damn fine behavior to engage in when it’s 48 degrees in your house and you’re hacking away at a death cold.  I also remember trying to drink diet soda and loathing it, because someone told me at some point that drinking regular Coke was just going to feed sugar to that bacteria colony breeding in my tonsil area.  And I tried to gargle with apple cider vinegar, which is supposed to be some kind of damn miracle cure, but it usually just made me gag.

I haven’t been writing much in here, because I’ve been saving all of the crazy for this book I’m writing, which is well underway, aside from the whole thing about being sick.  If you graphed my success at writing versus the word count, it’s definitely a bell curve with the middle being in the thousands-word range, which means writing a hundred thousand words is definitely way out there to the right where that bell threatens to hit the axis again.  I’ve found that if I just write and write, by the time I get 30,000 words into it, I’ve completely forgotten what I’ve written in chapter one.  And when I start to keep an outline is when I start to get distracted, because I start to think about plot and arc and proportions and golden ratios and Joseph Campbell’s monomyth theory, and I get derailed dealing with all of that shit.  So it’s a balancing game.  And it’s hard to keep writing here with all of that balancing going on, but I feel a need to get back to it.

It’s also starting to get nice enough outside to crack open a window or two during the day, which throws me, because that smell of fresh air, the beginnings of spring, the mid-afternoon sunshine after a brief Bay area rain shower, that’s the kind of stuff that throws me down an emotional k-hole. It has me teleporting back to random spring days in 1993 or in Seattle or whatever else, and I can spend all month digging through old journals or old emails trying to find some thread to pull me back into that.  And that also makes me think about writing about some of that nostalgia, about trying to find some structure again like the NecroKonicon that I can use to briefly riff about those times when I think about Garcia’s Pizza or the guy I knew at Ball State who was growing weed in the suspended ceiling of his dorm room, or the feeling when I got into a primer-black $300 Camaro in 1987 and drove to drive nowhere, just to get through that side of a Black Flag tape and kill another 88-cent gallon of gas.  Sometimes I think I should start another blog or maybe a wiki or tumblr or something else as a way to link together all of this shit.  I’ve tried multiple times to write a big epic novel containing all of this, but I also think in many ways the big epic novel is dead, or at least in deep sleep, and it’s all about the randomness of small pieces.  Maybe.

I’m writing this from the comfort of my bed, while on my old computer, the 2007 MacBook.  Talk about nostalgia - I remember being in Denver that summer, selling off all of my old, dust-collecting toys on eBay to get together the cash for this thing.  Seems like yesterday, but this machine is slowly yellowing and wearing and that little beach ball spins more and more every time I try to load two things at once.  That brand new, top-of-food-chain MacBook Pro is about to turn a year old, and is now displaced by a faster, sexier model that costs less.  In three more years, that thing will be the backup beater machine, and some 32-core beast with 64 gigs of memory and no moving parts whatsoever will be business as usual.  This is the dance we do.

1. Zombie Jesus
2. Zombie Ernest Hemingway
3. Zombie Mama Cass
4. Zombie Jethro Tull
5. Zombie Joey Ramone
6. Zombie Jesse Ventura
7. Zombie Jerry Lewis
8. Zombie Veterinarian
9. Zombie Les Paul
10. Zombie Ayn Rand
11. Zombie Kim Jong Il
12. Zombie Slum Landlord
13. Zombie Transvestite hooker picked up by Eddie Murphy
14. Zombie Illegal immigrant
15. Zombie Midlist genre author
16. Zombie Tax preparation assistant
17. Zombie Hipster taco truck worker
18. Zombie Indian casino blackjack dealer
19. Zombie Pro-Microsoft internet troller
20. Zombie Weatherman
21. Zombie French-Canadian baguette baker
22. Zombie Has-been child actor turned junkie
23. Zombie Build engineer
24. Zombie Incontinent old person
25. Zombie Herpes sufferer riding a mountain bike in a drug commercial
26. Zombie Civil War re-enactor
27. Zombie Cooking show hostess you want to slap but you also want to fuck
28. Zombie Death metal fan who has really long hair but is bald on the top
29. Zombie Wal-Mart greeter
30. Zombie Blind guy who plays accordion on the subway for change
31. Zombie Larry King
32. Zombie High school gym teacher
33. Zombie Al Bundy
34. Zombie Editor at Huffington Post who posts content from other places as if they are new news.
35. Zombie Ruby on Rails developer who talks about how great the ORM model is but doesn’t acknowledge scalability issues.
36. Zombie Used car salesman
37. Zombie Fred Flintstone
38. Zombie Alexander Haig
39. Zombie Eli Whitney with interchangeable parts
40. Zombie Herbalife salesman who posts Zombie “Lose Weight Now/Ask Me How” signs at grocery store.
41. Zombie Tattoo artist
42. Zombie Guy who always insists that autotuning is killing the music industry
43. Zombie Congressional Budget Office Assistant Director of Health and Zombie Services Division
44. Zombie Yoga teacher with really hot ass
45. Zombie Dog show groomer
46. Zombie House painter
47. Zombie David Lee Roth
48. Zombie Left-Handed Setup Pitcher
49. Zombie Alien abduction survivor
50. Zombie Steven Spielberg

(Feel free to use any of these, but please let me know if you write a book or screenplay based on them.)