I think when I sit down to write, I now spend more time trying to figure out what I want to listen to than I do actually writing, and that’s a problem.  My mind bounces between two solutions: one is to spend some inordinate amount of time and money finding all new music that moves me.  The other is to declare iTunes bankruptcy, and either delete every song in my iTunes library, or rate every single one at zero stars, then put it on shuffle and re-rate everything until the 11,000-some tracks more accurately describe what I like, instead of the current rating situation.  I think I “finished” rating all of my music, aside from new additions, in about 2007, and I would like to think I have evolved since then, but who knows.

( A few more facts.  Total tracks: 11,397.  Added in 2011: 426. In 2010: 504. Added since the beginning of 2007, which was my last big iTunes crash/rebuild: 5334.  Number of tracks that are “from” 2011: 122.  Number from 1989-1995, when I was in college: 2114.)

I think when I’m at the height of my collector snobdom, my worst fear is that I will become one of those people that lock into a certain artist or time period and never acknowledge that there is any music outside of that sphere of influence, ever.  I dated a girl in college who was like this with Billy Joel, and it (plus the fact that she was bat-shit insane, but there’s a cart/horse situation here) were the reason I walked away from that relationship like an unemployed person walks away from a $500,000-underwater mortgage.

But keeping up with new music is work.  I briefly tried to do this when I was reviewing new music for a now-dead web site, and it seems like the easier it is to get music, the harder it is to find music.  I can turn on iTunes genius and fire up Pandora or Spotify and point my web browser at a million different news sites and fan sites and get up-to-the-second email blasts from my favorite artists, but it seems like I find about 4% of what I used to find by wasting half my Saturday going from A to Z at a half-dozen different local record stores.  And it seems like the more I buy or download, the less potent the music is.  When I was in high school and could only afford to buy a tape a week, almost every one of those tapes was gold.  Now. I can add a hundred tracks at a clip to my library, and I still can’t name an album I bought in the last year that can stand up to repeat plays.

Albums are always time machines for me, but I’m finding the harder it is to find an album, the higher the chance of it being powerful to me.  An example: I accidentally found out about Gary Moore in 1988, while on a record buying spree in Canada.  A guy working at a store in Stratford told me I should really check him out, and I did, and I loved it.  A couple of those albums were indelibly marked on my past, and of course those tapes got lost or fell apart, and I went for years wishing I could hear them again.  And in the 90s, finding those things was next to impossible; they were out of print, or were “imports” and I never could track them down, and doing a web search on Gary Moore (Alta Vista back then, I think) would turn up maybe four hits, none helpful.  When I eventually found those albums, they were absolutely efficacious, and transported me through time like I suddenly had a Delorean with attached flux capacitor.  I think if I would have been able to just type two words and a credit card number into a browser and instantly hear those songs, it would have been nowhere near as powerful as spending months scouring every non-chain record store in Seattle.

But now I worry about listening to those tracks so much that they won’t work anymore, just like how I worry about drinking my twelfth diet coke of the day and still feeling lethargic.  I wonder if I should set aside that discography and find something new, and hope it will someday be my bridge back to 2011.  I hope that someone else out there is making something as mind-altering as the music I cherished 20 years ago.  And I wonder how I will find it, especially when I mention this to people and they say, “Oh, you need to listen to Arcade Fire.  They have like ten members or something.”

OK, now take this entire article and replace music with books.  Same thing.

Whenever I get writer’s block, I hit wikipedia.  It’s arguable if it’s better or worse to fall down an internet k-hole by reading every single serial killer article you can find on wikipedia, but my hope is that I’ll eventually mine all of this for a good reference to throw in a story.

Here’s a short list of wikipedia articles that I’ve read recently that are truly bizarre:

1. Banana equivalent dose - The amount of radiation you absorb by eating one banana.  (Yes, you absorb radiation from eating bananas.  Helicopter parents: let’s ban them!)
2. Berners Street Hoax - Two men had a bet that one of them could turn a random address the most talked-about address in London in a week; antics ensue.
3. Ota Benga - The Bronx zoo had a human as an exhibit.  In the 20th century.  This is a truly fucked up and sad story.
4. FedEx Express Flight 705 - Want to read about one of the most demented hijacking schemes ever?  Here you go.
5. Self-surgery - If you ever read alt.tasteless, you already know where I’m going with this one.
6. Dyatlov Pass incident - When hikers wander off for no reason barefoot in heavy snow in the Ural mountains and are later found with fractured skulls, missing tongues, and no signs of struggle, a serious WTF situation occurs.
7. Human Interference Task Force - How do you tell people for the next 10,000 years not to screw around with a buried crypt of radioactive waste?  The US government formed a task force of scientists, anthropologists, and science fiction writers to brainstorm this.  One linguist proposed creating a religion based on radioactive waste, that would create myths and legends surrounding the spent fuel rods, which would be handed down from generation to generation and eventually produce some asshole that would take people’s money to build a water park.
8. New Swabia - Did you know Nazi Germany still has a territorial claim on Antarctica? You do now.
9. Phineas Gage - My favorite story of a railroad worker having a metal spike drilled through his skull by an explosion and surviving.
10. List of unusual deaths - This one is the god damned mother lode.  You could kill an entire day reading this.

Happy reading, and let me know your favorites, too.

It’s almost Christmas!  Or it’s almost Hanukkah, and maybe it’s almost Kwanzaa (not sure), and it’s definitely almost the Firestorm, if you worship Satan.  But it’s definitely that time of year where you spend your hard earned money on carefully thought-out presents for all of your family, and maybe get a fruit basket in return.  And a week from today, the criminally insane will converge on local big box stores to beat the shit out of each other to get a crappy DVD player made by slave labor in China out of toxic plastic, that will work for roughly 37 minutes before exploding.

So, you looking for some gifts that aren’t made by children in sweatshops that might actually promote an artist and maybe make a person think?  How about some books?  Here’s my list of books I’ve read lately that aren’t big-6 published, written by people without a massive marketing budget:

• Small Town Punk by John Sheppard - This is probably one of the best self-published books I’ve ever read.  All of John’s stuff is awesome, and maybe I’m biased because I published Tales of the Peacetime Army.  Make sure to get the original 2002 edition, and not the 1997 abortion. (It’s not in print, but there are many copies floating around for $5, which is the best five bucks you could possibly spend.)
• Mostly Redneck by Rusty Barnes - I only know him as a friend-of-friend through Timothy Gager, which was enough for me to put down the cash.  This is 18 short stories of hard living in rural Appalachia, and each one is so precisely crafted, with absolutely no waste.  He’s got a way of really haunting you, getting something wedged very deep in your head in a thousand words.  Great stuff.
• Treating a Sick Animal by Timothy Gager - Speaking of, check out Gager’s latest collection of flash fiction.  It contains 40-some shorter pieces, each just as lethal as the last.  What’s even more amazing than the quality of his writing is the tremendous speed at which he turns out this precision work.  He’s probably written four stories better than anything I’ve ever done in the time it takes me to finish this post.
• How Some People Like Their Eggs by Sean Lovelace - Lovelace is a writer in Indiana (he teaches at my sister’s alma mater of Ball State) and he has a blog that almost entirely talks about nachos.  There’s two things I like about this chapbook, aside from the quality of the prose.  One is that Lovelace has a way of coming up with very unique forms, twisting and clever structures that make me think, “god DAMN why didn’t I do that?”  (Example: the titular piece is a list of how famous people like their eggs.)  The other thing I like is that this is a real damn chapbook: a carefully designed, really printed on quality paper chapbook.  It’s not just a POD 6x9 trade paperback, which is awesome.
• Johnny Astronaut by Rory Carmichael and I, An Actress: The Autobiography of Karen Jamey by Jeffrey Dinsmore - These are both kindle reissues of the Awkward Press editor’s earlier novels.  He’s added bonus materials to both, and priced them at 99 cents each, so they’re well worth the look.
• Between Panic and Desire by Dinty W. Moore - This is truly awesome creative nonfiction, the telling of a person’s life in hilarious autobiographical sketches, knitted together in a way that tells more than the whole story, and then breaks to throw in some quiz questions or go off on a different tangent.  It’s like a mix of Vonnegut at his best, but replace the aliens with tripping acid at the top of the World Trade Center.
• Powering the Devil’s Circus, Redux by Jason Jordan - A collection from the editor of decomP, this is a dozen stories and a novella of experimental work, with plenty of mention of metal, which I of course like.
• Tomorrowland by Grant Bailie - The UPS guy literally showed up with this one as I was typing this post.  It’s a collection of interwoven stories, and looks promising.  I loved his books Cloud 8 and Mortarville, so this looks awesome.
• Fistful of Pizza by Jon Konrath - Most importantly, buy my damn book!  Nine twisted stories, and it’s only 99 cents on the kindle.  Break in that new Kindle Fire by reading about a parody of the Ben Hur chariot race, filmed with small breed dogs around a set designed like a 1970s Times Square filled with heroin addicts and pornographers.  Also available in print for you luddites.

I’m sure I forgot a few others, but check these out - thanks!

I can’t believe it’s almost Thanksgiving.  Living in California has really put the zap on my ability to discern between months, since it perpetually feels like it’s April.  I guess we’re now going into the rainy season, and we’ve got more constantly gloomy weather.  This is the season where I never know when to wash my car, and it’s even worse now that I only fill up my car’s gas tank maybe every 6 to 8 weeks.  I usually go through the coin-op drive-through wash that gives you a $2 discount when you also buy a tank of gas.  The last time I did this, the person in front of me drove on the tracks wrong, then kept backing up and resetting the machine over and over.  I would have gotten out, went up to their window, and asked “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING” except I was 100% sure that the second I stepped into the wash bay, the machines would start.

I haven’t updated in a while, and it’s more of the “what should I be writing here?” sort of thing.  Earlier this year, I made a concerted effort to post more weird stories here, and that resulted in a few issues.  First, the stories were all great, as far as I’m concerned, but I don’t think enough people found them.  And because I published them here first, I basically could not submit them to other zines or journals, who typically want first publication rights.  I realize what I should have done is submitted all of them elsewhere, and then reprinted them here later, or put the rejects that nobody wanted on this site.  Or I should have saved all of them and sewn them together into a new book, then published excerpts of it here.  There is something to be said with the constant demand to put new stuff here, and how that deadline forces me to produce more.  I’d honestly love to have a weekly column somewhere that absolutely forced me to write a thousand words, due at midnight Tuesday, every single week.  I just read that latest Bukowski collection, and that’s basically what forced him to write for a long time.  But print is dead, and blogs are dying, and within a year, there will be something like twitter that only lets you post a single word per update,  and super-micro-mini-flash fiction will be all the rage, which doesn’t bode well for a guy that can barely warm up in 500 words.

The other issue with this is that I never want to write journal entries here, the creative nonfiction sort of thing where I chronicle current life or past memories.  I’ve had a long conflict with which fork in the road to take with my writing, either the ‘straight’ fiction like my first book, or the strange absurdist humor stuff like my second book.  And the answer is very clearly the latter, since that is who I am and what I do best.  But sometimes I feel like I need to write a quick status update or rant or whatever, and maybe that’s the stuff that needs to live here.

So, yeah - status.  I tried to write a book for Nanowrimo and that did not work, for all of the usual reasons.  I started by loading up on caffeine and just capturing straight brain dumps of my unconscious memories, pure automatic writing at its most random.  The first takes of this were pure genius, but as I started to think about the scaffolding needed to continue this for 50,000 words, a plot started to unfold, and it became yet another generic Campbell Hero’s Journey ripoff about zombies and time travel.  And the more I overthought this, the more it became hackneyed and cliched and stupid.  So I quit just shy of the halfway mark.  I think there are some good pieces in there that could be turned into decent shorter things, but I need to seriously set that one aside and work on real stuff.

I also switched to a Kinesis Advantage keyboard, which has been a real albatross around my neck.  The contour and the key tactile operation is awesome, but it really requires you to be a touch typist, and I am not.  I practiced with a touch typing tutor program, and used the exercises that came with the keyboard, but it is still at maybe 50% of my normal typing speed, with a lot more mistakes.  The more I type, the better it gets, but I’m noticing a lot of common actions rely on muscle memory.  Like when I copy and paste, I don’t think “command-c, command-v”; I think left thumb and the two keys up and to the right of said thumb.  Moving the command key to roughly where the H is on my old keyboard makes me have to stop and think as I cut and paste.  And I don’t want to think when I type - I want the words to pour directly from my brain to the buffer.  Thought control would be nice, but I think that’s in the same category as jet packs and commercial travel to Mars.

My last book, Fistful of Pizza, has continued to sell at the rate that makes this most definitely a labor of love.  But I have been getting some very good comments on it from people, which is nice.  I have about enough stories to publish another collection like this, and I’ve been editing and messing with that a bit.  I have no title and no idea on the cover, and I don’t want to sink my productivity by spending all of my free time browsing stock photo sites forever.  I also don’t want to pay someone hundreds of dollars to design a cover for me, so this might take a while.

Things have been otherwise quiet.  Sold the old house, just about to finish buying the new one.  I’ve been reading a lot of independent authors lately, and should probably post a list  of all of them.  I got the new iPhone, which I like.  I had to upgrade to Lion, which I do not like.  It’s cold here now, although I now define “cold” as 50, whereas I was born in a place where “cold” was roughly -60.  I will feel the wrath of this when I do the usual Midwestern holiday visit next month, which typically involves a temperature change of at least 50 degrees, an almost mandatory head cold, and some amount of shoveling snow.  It should be interesting.

I somehow got sucked into watching this documentary about the Foo Fighters yesterday.  I have a generally neutral attitude toward Dave Grohl and his band; I vaguely thought he was an interesting guy, based on the fact that he later did some work with Lemmy and other heavy metal icons in Probot, and he could have just fucked off after his time with Nirvana and played golf or something, but he decided to keep going with music and keep grinding it out, which is more endearing to me.

I was probably too busy trying to collect every obscure Carcass bootleg to really pay attention through most of the Foo Fighters’ rise, but I found a lot of the music in it oddly familiar.  Back when I worked at Spry, a fair amount of CD swapping went on when we spent long hours locked in our respective offices, and someone had a copy of the band’s first album, which I must have spent some time playing while toiling away at whatever Windows Help project I was screwing with at the time.  I think I also heard a lot of the songs on the radio back in the late 90s.

That part of the documentary set off the nostalgia works in me, the stock shots of mid-90s Seattle that reminded me of my time there.  I lived in two different Seattles, and one was those cutaway shots of Belltown coffee houses and the old Moore Theater and a monorail in the background, the Seattle of Singles and Sub-Pop bands and freaky art galleries and experimental films in the back of the Speakeasy bar and grill where 17 people showed up to watch a video of a guy from Idaho dressed as a very unconvincing Olivia Newton John singing badly at a talent show.  (Seriously.)

(The other Seattle was the one that, I think, made me eventually leave, which was the October to March solid grey sky and pissing rain and constant 48 degrees depression.  I liked my time in Seattle greatly, but that part of it, that seasonal affective disorder catalyst really put the zap on me, made the walls close in on me.  I think if I would have moved to a bigger apartment, would have gotten into the habit of jumping on a flight to Vegas for a 4-day weekend every once in a while, and would have bought a full-spectrum light, I probably would have hung in for much longer.  But I didn’t, and I lasted four years.)

I used to listen to a lot of radio back then, which seems strange to me now, especially since radio has all but died.  But between tapes, I’d listen to 107.7, which was the big “grunge” station in the 90s, when Seattle was the capitol of alt-music fame.  I never really got into grunge, and by the time of my arrival in 1995, the movement had all but died, but Marco Collins and the rest of the KNDD staff still pumped out a lot of now-classic alt-rock that got stuck in my subconscious.  I had my own very specific programming for writing and in-car music, but I would fall back to whatever The End played, especially during late nights.

I remember many Fridays when I’d do the usual routine of Denny’s and Tower and Borders and back home for hours and hours of trying to write these god damned books.  I’d load up my 6+1 CD changer, and after those ran through, I’d flip on the radio.  And all of these songs would play: Smashing Pumpkins, Presidents of the United States, Everclear, Beck, Garbage.  And the Foo Fighters would always appear in the mix too.  At that point, that late at night, or early in the morning, I wouldn’t be paying any attention to the lyrics or artists or whatever, because I’d be so burned into the words and the muse, but now I hear some of those old songs and it reminds me of those late nights, trying to get the rest of a chapter done before the automatic sprinklers seven stories down would switch on and fill the background with their hissing and clicking, signaling that it was once again 5

AM and the sun would start burning across the horizon and it was time for me to dose up on Tylenol PM and quit for the night.