Author: jkonrath

I don’t think I’ve ever been awake this early on a Sunday morning, unless I was still trying to make it home from a Saturday night out. Even back when I was a kid and my mom used to drag me to church, there was an 11:15 mass. But I went to bed early, and I’ve vowed to get something done today, so here I am.

I started working on Rumored again last night. It’s tough – I have a lot of little ideas, fragments, but I can’t string them together so they flow well. I’m going to keep struggling with it, in hopes that it will fall into place better or maybe the stuff that I’m doing now is somehow editable at a later date. I’m trying not to throw out anything, because I’m eventually able to twist it around and come up with something more functional. It feels good to at least be thinking about this.

Not much to report here. Yesterday was a quiet day; went to the mall in Jersey City, which was probably a mistake. There are too many people and not enough good stores there, but it’s the only mall-type mall around here, unless you go to Staten Island. I wanted my Midwest fix, but didn’t really get it. The train rides were okay though – air conditioning is always a plus. I almost saw X-Men again, but decided I didn’t want to kill half the evening on it.

I think I’m going back to bed.

It’s a beautiful day out, and I woke up early, and I have a wad of cash in my pocket I can spend on anything, but I’m sick. My stomach’s bothering me, and I really want to go eat something bad, a pile of fried pierogies with sour cream or a plate of greasy hash browns and some fried eggs, but I don’t think that will happen. I hate this stomach stuff, and it’s been happening pretty much constantly for the last few weeks. I’m hoping it’s just stress, but maybe it’s a warning sign that I should be paying attention to some of the other problems in my life.

I should be working on Rumored. Marie loaned me this book (and I don’t remember the author or title) and I started reading it last night, and it reminded me exactly of what I wanted to write like. I stopped reading after about three pages because I didn’t want to subliminally rip off this dude when I got back on my own writing. It got me motivated to at least think about Rumored for a while.

The problem is getting some momentum going, to sustain it. I need to figure out the process, how I can get back to writing every night and return to that sweet spot where I can produce golden prose for three hours a night. With Summer Rain, there was this entire process, pages of notes and outlines, the music, the food I ate, the smells I smelled, that pushed me into that creative zone where I could recreate the past with words. A glass of cold Coke, a compilation tape of my favorite songs from that era, and I would be able to work. The problem with Rumored is that I’ve sometimes found that zone, but it’s so difficult. I can get so distracted by music – it needs to motivate me, but it can’t pull me away. It’s difficult to describe, but the setting has to be just right. And I haven’t found that magic combination yet.

Maybe I need to buy a new desk. I don’t know.

I’m also not in the mood where Rumored is always in my head. I need to think of ideas all day long and then write them down. The Palm Pilot is nice for that, but it doesn’t happen enough. I spend my days daydreaming about stupid shit, not thinking about the book. The book needs to be my daydream. When I worked on Summer Rain, it was easy to drift back to 1992, to replay those memories and fantasies and get far too sentimental about old flames and distant days. Then when I checked in every night and sat down at the computer to pound out another chapter or whatever, it was easy to really get into it. I haven’t been doing that now, and I need to.

There was a period in 1998, between Karena and when I met Marie, where I was 100% gung-ho about Rumored. I think it was back when Fear and Loathing was in the theatres and I was watching it constantly and never sleeping and pushing myself with tons of Coke and low-grade speed and food from Denny’s and hanging in this freaked-out state where I was the book, where I ran through reality like a machine gun firing at everything 72 times a second. I wrote a lot of fucked-up stuff back then, stuff that still makes me laugh out loud. I didn’t give a fuck about my job, and I wasn’t a technical writer by trade – I was me, writing. It was a good time, but it didn’t last for long. No heavy reasons, I just couldn’t sustain it.

I have been sober for seven months today. The medicine I just took for my stomach is .5% alcohol, but I don’t think that counts. Besides, it didn’t make me want to run to the nearest bar and get loaded. I could barely keep the stuff down – it tasted like fucking turpentine.

Okay, at the very least, I need to go to the bagel shop on 30th Ave and get something for lunch. Go visit the book site if you haven’t already, dammit.

Life is like a daze right now, a combination of exhaustion, heat, and lack of demarcating events to mark the passage of days and weeks. I wish I could find the most ideal bed in the most ideal temperature and simply sleep for weeks, with machines feeding me and stimulating my muscles and whatnot. But I know after fifteen minutes, I’d go mad thinking that I needed to figure out how the interconnects on my CD player worked and how I had to balance my checkbook, take out the trash, wash dishes, etc etc etc.

I’m listening to the Pink Floyd album Momentary Lapse of Reason, an instant time machine to my senior year in high school. I was on such a big ‘Floyd kick back then, probably because most of the mood matched my own. I didn’t realize until I got to college that everyon thinks the same thing, and it’s a pretty played-out thing to do. I still like some of their stuff, mostly the albums nobody else likes. The Final Cut is probably my favorite, but it’s far too depressing for tonight. I just like the sound of Momentary Lapse… in the new system. Very crisp and exact. Too bad the army of fans whirring at top speed cut most of the quality out of the disc. But it’s either that or extreme heat in the apartment.

I have very little to report except that I’m slowly chipping away at the Summer Rain homepage. And I think I’m ready for bed, maybe after a long, cold shower. Maybe I’ll sleep in the shower…

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with this thing for the past few days. I’m unhappy with the entries since I re-started this journal in April, and I have no energy or content to make this any better. I have no desire to write, and I have no desire to tell anyone what is going on with my life. Nothing is going on with my life, and I know nobody reads this.

I’ve been in a really bad place lately. All I really do is go to my job, and come home. Most people say that because they hate their job and it consumes their life. My job doesn’t, and I actually like it. The problem is that I live thousands of miles from anybody that I know, and aside from editing a book that nobody’s going to buy, I have nothing to do. It’s incredibly depressing, and I can’t write entries that say “I went to the village, and looked at all the happy people, but didn’t have the guts to talk to anyone.” But that’s essentially all that has happened to me in the last few months.

I blame all of this on myself because I left a relationship and hurt someone greatly, and this was all my fault, and now what comes around goes around. So I can’t expect any amount of pity, because I’m completely responsible for the situation I’m in. I guess that means I’m responsible for getting myself out of it, but I don’t really have the energy to do that. I’m not entirely sure where that leaves me.

At any rate, updating this journal any further would be an exercise in futility. I’m hopeful that at some point, I’ll get my shit together and come back and write something meaningful. But for now, I’m just focusing on my job, and trying to find out what to do with my life. If anyone has any wise ideas, you know where to find me.

Ignore my previous interest in the www.everything2.com site. After messing with it more, I’ve found great shortcomings in using it as a reference tool. It does, however, make a great popularity contest if you miss the days of high school. Sigh.

I feel largely functional today, with almost all of the wheezing gone. The other night, the blinds in my bedroom fell down and I had no way to re-fasten them. I live on the first floor, so this was a problem. I ended up duct-taping a sheet across the window so I could go to sleep. I got that whole nightmare fixed last night. And I’m almost caught up on sleep, so maybe I’ll get something productive done in the next few days.

I’ve been in a strange situation as far as trying to figure out what to do next in life. I realize I always say this, but don’t explain it. I also realize that I make it sound like I’m going to quit my job tomorrow and go join the circus or the Marines or something. It’s nothing like that. It’s just that there’s a lot of slop in my life now, a lot of emptiness. I feel this inside of me, but it’s also in my schedule, my activities. I go to work, I come home, and there’s nothing but an answering machine with zero messages and a book that I couldn’t possibly work on for ten hours straight every night. I don’t want to watch TV, and I don’t have cable, and I don’t really feel like going anywhere. So what do I do? When I had a girlfriend, I had an excuse, a person to call or see or whatever. And I realize I was not the best boyfriend in the world and I didn’t entertain her with tons of neat, new activities on a constant basis. So what am I supposed to do? If I was religious, I’d go to church, but I’m not. And I’ve thought about volunteering but I have severe social anxiety problems related to this. I could start other projects, program computers, start a zine, something like that. But the bottom line is, I need to find a way to fill my time that will eventually help me feel better about things and give me room to grow.

I guess in the past, I would jump right into another relationship, and the fastest way to do that is to get into a dysfunctional relationship. I don’t want to do that, but I also don’t want to shun away from the opposite sex entirely for a mandated sentence until I get “better.” I wish I could just hang out with more people, experience things, do things. I don’t know, I’m babbling. But I feel a need to write, and to explain.

Everything2 really bothered me. It’s like IRC or any other BBS in that there’s a group of popular, trendy people, just like in high school. And if you’re not for them, you’re against them. People were voting down my stuff just because I wasn’t writing stupid new nodes that were chatty and useless. I can’t really deal with stuff like that. Everything2 is a good idea in theory, but it’s nothing more than a glorified chat server for a bunch of airheads.

I don’t know if I want to stay and work until the trains calm down, or go get a drink somewhere and edit the book, or just mess around for a while. I guess I’m going to go find out.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated, I realize that. I guess a lot has been going on with me mentally, although very little is happening in real life. I feel like I say this in all of my entries these days, and it makes me wonder if I should even be doing this anymore. But I’m too lazy to remove it, knowing that I will probably restart it in three months anyway.

I’m in a trancelike state, from having allergies all weekend and not being able to breathe. I was up until three AM last night, trying to find a combination of fans and blankets to get everything at an ideal temperature without too much dust or pollen or fungus or whatever the hell is making me wheeze. So I took a bunch of stuff last night to knock me out – benadryl, ativan, kava – only it didn’t do much. Now I’m hung over, feeling confused and strange, drifting from monent to moment. If I was working on Rumored, this would be great. But, I’m not.

Work on Summer Rain continues. I had a very productive week, and I got changes made to books one and two, little grammar things and misspellings. The last part will take forever though, especially if I’m all loopy like this. I want to get the book done and move on to Rumored. I feel like I’m entering a state of mind where I can really get into Rumored a bit more, and I want to finish it. It will be an interesting summer.

There’s little to say about my personal life except that it’s depressing. I bought a mountain bike, but it has rained every day since I got it. This is my latest obsession. There’s a new Motorhead CD. That’s all.

It’s hot. That 90-degree kind of hot that tells you it’s summer and makes you wish for cold weather, like last week. I just spent money on a spring jacket, and I got to wear it about three times. Sigh. At least the apartment isn’t completely unbearable. I’ve got the windows open and I just bought a fan, so it’s functionally cool, but not entirely comfortable. I’ll survive.

Things have been strange and I haven’t been able to concentrate on much of anything lately. Still getting used to my new life, and I’ve been running into glitches. There are huge voids of time where I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with myself that bug the hell out of me. I know, I should be working on the bok, but sometimes I just need to relax, or talk, or socialize, and I’m still trying to find a social structure to relax in. It all sounds stupid and petty, but it’s also very depressing and it’s one of those situations that can consume your soul if left unchecked. And it’s very unchecked at this point.

I haven’t been doing much work on the book in the last few days, because of this sickness thing (I think it was bronchitis – mostly better now) and everything else. I did print out most of the draft and started carefully red-penning it for one last pass. I don’t want to drag this out forever, but it deserves one more chance before I start the publishing process.

I had a very strong Summer Rain deja vu the other night, Saturday night. I ate dinner at the Neptune and then came home around 10 or so with absolutely nothing to do, and an apartment that was too hot for me to just sit around for 3 or 4 hours. I got on moviephone and found out American Beauty was playing at the new 14-plex that’s about a mile and a half from my place, at 11:40. So I got all recombobulated and hiked through the night. The walk reminded me so much of the book, of 1992 in Bloomington. The streets in Astoria are like the nice houses just outside the student ghetto in Bton, houses all clustered together with no yards and old cars in the driveways. That, and Joe Satriani in the walkman was a temporary time machine – both to 1998, when I was working on the book so much, and 1992, when it actually took place. Very weird, very cool.

I didn’t like American Beauty. It had its moments, but the time structure of the film distracted me. It was so long and drawn out, two and a half hours for something that essentially had as much plot as a 22-minute episode of Three’s Company. Oh well, it was a nice walk.

I’m too hot to be slaving in front of this monitor. I’m going to go sit in front of the fan with my clipboard and red pen and read some of Summer Rain.

I feel sick.

I mean the kind of sick where you think you should go to the emergency room, but then you remember the last time you spent an hour on the subway to go to Columbia’s emergency room and the attending nurse just stared at you for twenty minutes without even asking your name or if you’ve been shot or were in the middle of a heart attack or anything. I feel like I’m crawling out of my skin, like I can’t focus on anything for more than three seconds. I think my body is having some adverse reaction to Claritin. I also feel like I have pneumonia. I want to sleep for a month. I think I slept about an hour last night.

Summer Rain is finished, more or less. I hate it. I’ve read the book so many times, it makes me physically ill to even open the files now. And it sucks. I would give it a 5 out of 10, and I think it would take a year of heavy edits to get it to a 6. I just need to get the thing out of here, and finish it. I want to get back to work on Rumored to Exist, which I think has much more potential. And so does everyone else, I guess, because nobody ever reads drafts of Summer Rain. I don’t blame them – it’s 500 pages of mediocrity.

I mean, you should still buy a copy when it comes out. Just don’t read it. Like that copy of Pale Fire you’ve never opened.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about this thing.

I’ve been pretty off lately. For the first time since I was a kid, I’m getting allergies. I spent all weekend in bed, suffering and taking Benadryl. I went to the doc and got set up with Claritin, and I also got a HEPA air filter. Plus the bit of rain and temp change has calmed things down a bit. So I’m mostly feeling better, but I’m slightly off from all of the rollercoaster ride of Benadryl and Sudafed and everything else. Now that my brain is programmed to completely shut off at night with the Benadryl, I can’t sleep well without it. So, things are weird.

Since I finished the last Summer Rain draft, life has been much more unstructured. I really hate reading stuff for the 19th time, trying to fix “i before e” crap. I wish I could just hire someone to do this for me, but I’m too cheap, and I’m not sure it’s worth it. So I trod along, reading chapters with my red pen.

I’ve reached a point where editing Summer Rain is pretty much the only thing in my life outside of work. That’s okay, but I’ve realized that if I do anything else, it seems unnatural. Last night, I didn’t want to edit after about an hour of work, so I sat down and tried to watch some of The Matrix. It was cool and all – the DVD has so much extra shit – but I felt nervous, like I was trying to get away with something. I stopped, and tried to go to bed early, but I just paced the apartment like there was something wrong. I also feel weird because I’m not reading anything else these days. Reading Summer Rain is pretty much a full-time job, so I can’t sit back with Tolstoy or whatever when I’m not working. It would be counterproductive, and it would make my edits resemble whater I’m reading. So I will look forward to the point when I can stop reading this book and actually start something new.

Of course by then, I’ll be reading Rumored.