Author: jkonrath

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Making the Mac switch

This is my first entry from my new machine, which is a Mac Mini. I already wrote about the big switch over on LiveJournal, so read there for the political puling. I’m mostly concerned with getting everything over to the new machine and working. I think web updates are fine, I’m reading mail here, and I’ve got the music collection into iTunes, so that’s good. I still have a lot of adjusting to my workflow, but it’s working well so far. For example, instead of having a bunch of directories with photos flung into them and some half-ass scripts generating galleries, I’m moving everything over to iPhoto. That will make things prettier and easier to deal with, but it’s still a lot of work.

I think the next project might be a print book of the glossary. I am reading this book on the history of Apple computer, and it’s similar in a folklore sense, plus it’s that 8-inch square format that lulu just added to their roster, and I’d really like to do a book like that. I know absolutely nobody will buy a copy, but I mostly want one for myself. So I’ve been picking at the entries a bit. Some will go away – Ray is still convinced I wrote the entire project just to spite him, and so I will have to trim a few things. I also have a lot of ideas for new entries, and those are percolating. I now generally dislike the ones about people and like the ones more about concepts, or old stores or restaurants or whatever that have vanished. Lots of work ahead, I guess. Take a look at the site – I am making edits and syncing them to the head, so to speak, so they are all viewable. I’m also nervous I horridly fucked some pages when I moved the computer, so if you see anything weird, let me know.

OK, back to playing with iPhoto…

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AITPL #10

Air in the Paragraph Line #10 is now available! Go to https://www.rumored.com/aitpl/ for more info on it. I got the proof today, and it looks awesome. It has 14 stories, 170 pages, and looks like a real book and everything. It’s weird to see the photocopied, black-and-white issue #9 from way back in 1998 sitting next to the glossy, perfect-bound issue #10 from the present. I almost want to bind up the first nine in a little book and make it look official, but it would be easier to keep looking for good writing and put out #11 with even more stuff, so I’ll do that instead. Anyway, there’s a free PDF preview, and for ten bucks, you can’t go wrong, so please check it out.

Not much else is up. It’s hot, I’m tired, and I’ve been spending time working on the web site and doing other zine-related hustling. Aside from reading the zine, I started working on that new Douglas Coupland book Hey Nostradamus!. Well, I guess it isn’t that new – new to paperback. I like it, the writing at least, although the whole Columbine setting wouldn’t be my first choice. His writing, no matter the bad plot, always slides like butter though. I’ll probably finish it in two more subway rides.

Hot. Hot. Hot. And it’s actually pretty nice outside, it’s just this god damned heatsink of an apartment is like the center of hell. Time for another shower.

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Killing Bono

I’ve been reading Killing Bono by Neil McCormick, something I picked up on Sunday at a Barnes and Noble where I was trying to escape the heat for a few minutes. It’s an interesting little book that most people will see as a sort of first-person biography of the band U2. McCormick, now a music critic, grew up in Ireland with Bono and crew as his classmates, and he is still good pals with the quartet. But that’s not what attracted me to the book. Because what this guy did was told the tale of how he was so close to fame – in fact, he even jammed with the band a few times back when they were trying to figure out who played what, and eventually went off to leave the group, then called Feedback and playing shitty Beatles covers through Sears amplifiers or whatever. And it’s interesting to see not only that this guy had so many close brushes with what later became fame in his youth, but that he didn’t become madly famous for being the fifth U2er or whatever. When he didn’t gig with those guys, he got his own JcPenny bass and started his own shitty Beatles cover band, and although they played some second-rate gigs sixty miles out of town opening for a polka act or whatever, he never got the deal from Island or anything else. Instead, he worked a job at a crappy music weekly paper, pasting down headlines while crammed into a tiny office with a half-dozen other people. I really like the never-got-famous biographies, not of the bands who we now see on the cover of Billboard holding up gold albums, but the ones who really tried to get it going, and partied hard and slept on floors and didn’t do shit, and ended up selling insurance 20 years later. For some reason, that really gets me going, and makes me wish I had tried a little harder at getting a crap band going in high school so I could at least fake writing about it.

I have a pretty mixed opinion on U2, though. I first saw them back on MTV when that live video of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was played almost constantly, because they only had like 12 videos back then. I never got into the band that much, but got Joshua Tree when it came out, and was drawn to it, if anything, because the bass lines were incredibly easy to figure out. It wasn’t a great revelation or a best-ever sort of thing, just an album I liked, listened to for a few weeks, then filed back in with the rest of the CDs. The other main exposure I had to U2 before I got to college (where like everybody listened to them, as some kind of bridge to what was then called “alternative” rock) was that when I dated my first girlfriend, right before I left for school, we spent a lot of time parked in her car, for obvious reasons. And while I had all of this heavy metal shit in my tape deck, and she had all of this more punk-oriented stuff, I think two of the tapes we compromised on were Depeche Mode’s 101 and U2’s Rattle and Hum – both live albums. So I spent many an hour parked in dark areas of Elkhart listening to Bono sing “All Along the Watchtower” while I tried to figure out how to undo a bra strap.

Fast-forward about four years, and we get to one of the reasons I couldn’t stand U2 for years. This is simple: for whatever reason, there are highly impressionable girls who tend to lock onto U2 and make it their main infatuation in life, only listening to their songs and being in giggles about how dreamy The Edge or Bono were or whateverthefuck. And in 1993, I ended up dating one of them. And while we dated, it was not horrible – I mean, she wasn’t carving lyrics from October into her arm or anything, and she hadn’t planned any pilgrimages to Windmill Studios in Dublin, but it was still one of those minor things that tick you off.

And when she dumped me later, I really, REALLY hated U2, and became a real dick about it. You’d think Adam Clayton personally poured sugar in my car’s gas tank or something. This was further reinforced by the fact that after the relationship, I became heavily involved in the spoken word of Henry Rollins, who has a bit about how much he hates U2. So for years, I completely despised anything with The Edge’s jangly guitar and Bono’s vapid vocals.

For whatever reason, though, I ended up buying a copy of Achtung Baby after I moved away from college, maybe 4 or 5 years after it came out. Part of it was that the girl that I based a character on in Summer Rain was totally in love with that album when we were friends, and so maybe it was research. Also, the ex-girlfriend had once sent me a mix tape, and in some sort of horrible nostalgia, I was trying to track down all of the songs on it, one of which was “Acrobat”. And yeah, I ended up adding that album to my list of guilty pleasures, because it’s so enjoyable. It’s almost as simple as their earlier things, but they built out such a thick sound with so many things in the background. It sounds more natural than synthetic, but song to song varies so much, and the little buzzes and beats make it seem so much more filling. And one of the reasons I like the album so much is that it’s got such a happy sound to it, just this total, poppy, it’s-a-wonderful-world sound to it. But then you really drill down into each song, and some of them are so insanely personal, rather than the usual blanket political/spiritual messages, that it’s so god damned depressing, and that totally hits the spot sometime.

Of course, the story ends here, with no great revelation about how I’m now a lifetime U2 fan. Honestly, I haven’t picked up a single album of theirs other than those two, and I don’t feel a need to. I think the moral of that story is that I have so many of these damn guilty pleasures, but it doesn’t mean I need to rush out and buy someone’s complete discography plus singles and bootlegs and SACDs just because one of the CDs has a certain meaning from a certain time.

It’s still hot, by the way, which is why I keep writing these driveling musical commentaries. It’s easier than trying to work on short stories, and far more interesting than a thousand words on what kind of bottled water I drank today. Or is it?

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Moleskine, GnR

I finally picked up one of those Moleskine notebooks this weekend, after looking for one locally for a few weeks, and finally running into a stash at a Barnes and Noble. I don’t know why I’ve regressed to the point where I think the right paper and the right pen will make the right words come out or something. I went through this in like ’94 when I was first trying to get started writing, where I thought an expensive fountain pen or a cool little booklet would make the words come faster or something. I’ve since learned that a Mead 3-subject spiral and a Bic pen stolen from work will do the job just the same. If anything, they’re cheaper and you don’t have to worry about the fact that most “journal” journals have margins and bindings and fucked-up lining that means you’ll burn through $20 of fancy-pants journal in the time it takes to fill a third of a college rule 8.5×11.

But I bought one anyway, thinking it would be a good place for the occasional piece of paragraph, since I’m currently using mini-legal pads and post-its and a lot of other shit. It’s not as easy to carry a spiral and write on it in the train. It works well if you get a seat, but writing a note or two when standing is a bitch. And since the days of depressingly writing for pages at two in the morning when alone in bed seem to have passed, I feel a need to make up for the words in other spaces in the day. And as far as Moleskine is concerned, it’s the nicest little journal I’ve seen. There’s some back-story about how Celine and Hemingway and Van Gogh used the same notebooks. I’ve since read that the history is bullshit, and the company basically started making the books like five years ago, but it’s the same kind of little book you’d expect Kerouac or Burroughs to be slinging around in a front pocket, so it has a certain appeal there.

I haven’t been able to do much writing lately, because it’s too god damned hot to even think, let alone think of plot and characters and textures and everything else. I’m still sitting on 104,000+ words of nostalgia that covers my time in Bloomington, but I can’t get nostalgic enough to really start carving that shit up to get it from good to great. I thought about posting a story or ten here, and maybe I will, but first I need to keep cleaning.

I was listening to Guns N’ Roses – Appetite For Destruction – on the way home from work today. I don’t know why, although I’m pretty sick of all 20 Gigs I have on my iPod and I’m too lazy to go buy some more new albums and rip them, because I don’t even know what I’d buy, let alone where I’d store them if I bought them. And that made me think about how strange it was that back then, I listened to this album like every day for about six months, and pretty much memorized it, and I did that with a lot of albums, and now, I can barely find an album I want to listen to all the way through twice. I wonder if music was better then, or if it was some kind of chemical-hormone thing in my brain that made me more receptive to music, or what.

I remember hearing about GnR during the summer of ’88, when I was in the Catskills. My dad’s girlfriend had a couple of nephews that were vacationing there at the same time as us, who were these typical Italian Long Island types, not total all-out guidos, but very machismo and partied a lot and everything. And once or twice, they talked about getting buzzed and staying up late and listening to Guns N’ Roses, but they weren’t like metalheads or anything; most of the time they listened to club dance music or whatever. So I assumed that GnR was some kind of stupid Poison/Bon Jovi bullshit, and went back to my Megadeth or whatever.

Then that fall, before “Sweet Child” and all of that hit the charts, I think Tom Sample, who had gone off to college in Goshen, told me I had to check out the album, and that it was more metal than Cinderella or whatever. I bought the tape from work – I worked at Wards then, and they sold a handful of tapes and CDs in the stereo department, and I would have bought my groceries and tap water there if they sold it, just to get the damn 10% employee discount.

I listened to that album constantly, or at least as much as I could between spins of the new Metallica – …And Justice For All. My first take was that I liked how a band could be so firmly seated between pop like Aerosmith or Motley Crue and still have almost as much of an edge as more “extreme” metal like Judas Priest or Alice Cooper. In a sense, it was almost crossover, but between glam and thrash. It was a lot dirtier and banal than the lipstick bands, with a certain amount of kick-ass edge, but it was still marketable enough to play it on U-93 or MTV. It was also real AOR in the old sense of the definition – Album Oriented Rock. (And it’s sad that I can’t type AOR without first typing AOL and then backspacing… fuck!) It’s amazing how many times I could start it at “Welcome to the Jungle” and 53 minutes and 26 seconds later, find myself at the end of “Rocket Queen”.

Of course, by the time the fall semester progressed, almost everyone loved Guns ‘N Roses, including all of the jock types at my high school. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” got played at dances, and “Paradise City” was blasting out of every mommy-and-daddy-purchased 5.0 Mustang GT in the school parking lot. I got a little sick of the radio songs, and found myself fast-forwarding to “It’s So Easy” after putting in side A of the tape. I zipped around the popular stuff for a while, then gave up on the album to spend more time working on that new Metallica opus, or whatever new tape of the week I was digesting.

Going back to the album now, I still hate the radio songs, and I think that sums up the main problem with a band like this. Because face it, if W. Axl bit it in a horrible car accident today, the news networks would be playing a five-second clip from “Sweet Child”, not the infinitely cooler “Rocket Queen”, or something more obscure and Stonesy like “Locomotive” or “Double Talkin’ Jive” from their double album. But those are the kind of tracks I love, the kind of bluesy, textured songs with depressing lyrics where Rose goes from the screechy catcalls to the lower, gravely lyrics that show the holes in his soul, topped off by the wailing guitar that Slash always delivered. When I was still using MiniDiscs, I had an 80-minute blank filled with my custom all-time, all-star G’NR album. I cherry picked the best of the Use Your Illusions, and fed in the top stuff from Appetite, and it was exactly 79:54, but I wanted both versions of “Don’t Cry”, so I had to settle for the eerie alternate lyric one and call it a day.

Actually, I’ve found myself listening to Buckethead’s Population Override a lot lately. It’s also solo guitar-god stuff, but this album is less goofy set pieces and whatever, and more Satriani-style compositions. It’s actually really good to write to, and it’s on right now. And hey, he played in Guns N’ Roses, too, on that abortion of a world tour a few years ago.

OK, time for a cold shower.

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Ten years of unhoosierdom

I was just thinking about this the other day, and I realized this weekend marks the ten year anniversary of when I packed up and shipped out of Indiana for Seattle. It’s a nice round number, which is the only reason I thought about it, but it is pretty weird. I guess ten years seems like an eternity to me, and it doesn’t seem like that long ago that I left. On the other hand, living in Seattle does seem like forever ago to me, and my whole time at 600 7th Ave and working at Spry seems like another lifetime.

Lots of other little flashbacks remind me of things, but it’s more about Seattle than Bloomington. We went to Newport mall out in Jersey city yesterday, and that little area right around the PATH train station looks so damn much like Bellvue or Redmond, the east side of Seattle. It’s all of those office commercial buildings with mirrored glass outsides that look like airport motels, plus the subtle roads and open skies. It looks just like the area surrounding the Bellvue Mall, the building I used to work at in Factoria, and all of the other stuff around I-405 in Seattleland. And sitting here in Sarah’s apartment, looking out toward the skyline from a few floors up with lots of sunlight from a couple of big windows, it almost reminds me of the time in my place in Seattle, except it’s not raining and there’s no Kingdome anymore. But sometimes the weather’s just right and it makes me think for a half second that I should go down to that ’94 Ford Escort and take a drive up I-5, and then I remember I made my last lease payment on that thing 7 years ago, and all I’m driving is a MetroCard these days.

Ten years… I still haven’t written up a suitable story for that cross-country drive. I wrote a story for this Bloomington short-story book that probably will never see the light of day, but it covers all of the events up to me leaving, and not the actual trip. I drove nonstop, by myself. I went through so fast, there was no real vision of a trip, as much as there was a huge blur. It rained a lot in part of Montana; I blew through all of South Dakota in the darkness. I stopped at Devil’s Tower at about 2AM, technically on the 4th of July. I don’t remember Wall Drugs, but I do remember a few other gas stations with slot machines and nothing else. I listened to every tape I packed at least five times. For every meal, I stopped at McDonald’s, because I didn’t want to hunt around for some other alternative 19 miles off of the off ramp. Montana was really shitty, 12 hours of uphill and curves, almost no roadstops, the few around were no more than barns with a single gas pump that was overpriced and so low-octane, you could safely drink it. Then I crossed into Idaho, and it was all downhill, all beautiful. I regret not taking the trip slower, spending some time and money exploring the nature, taking a few more pictures, relaxing for a couple of days before I reported for duty for my first real job. But I regret a lot of things, and I made it here, so who cares.

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headache

My head is killing me. I don’t know if it’s the heat or a lack of sleep or everything else, but the tylenol I just took aren’t doing much. It’s funny – well, not ha-ha funny – but I am allergic to both aspirin and advil, and for the longest time, I also thought I was allergic to tylenol, too. Back then, I never really got headaches at all. I am not even sure what I did when I got one. I “discovered” tylenol back in ’96, when I was getting my teeth redone and had a bunch of harrowing dental appointments, resulting in every nerve in my mouth and head being lit on fire. I think it got so bad that I decided I didn’t care if it caused my throat to swell shut in ten seconds flat, and I took tylenol. No problem. Now I take it way too much, to the point where I have giant Costco barrels of the stuff on top of the fridge.

I have a bunch of new stuff on the photos page. One set of pictures is from the Boston book reading and Maine roadtrip, although I took almost no pictures on the whole thing. And this weekend, we went to Ellis Island and I took a bunch of shots there. The only thing that sucks about Ellis Island is that it shares a ferry with the Statue of Liberty, so there are ten million people in line for that bitch, and about 7 that want to go to Ellis Island. You can’t even go up in the statue unless you camp out at four in the morning and get special tickets, and none of these people had them, but they were all like “D00D WE ARE TOTALLY GOING TO THE TOP OF THAT STATUE OF GEORGE WASHINGTON’S WIFE”, no matter how many signs and announcements the park rangers made.

It is brutal here. I spent all weekend in the AC, and now it feels like I’m in Vietnam. I think I’m going to take a cold shower and go to bed with a bag of frozen peas in my pillowcase.

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Reason #8,234,123 New York City Sucks

Reason #8,234,123 New York City Sucks:

June through September.

Seriously, summer blows here. Find me a person that thinks it’s great to live here in the months between spring and autumn, and invite them to my place for an hour, and they will cry faster than those pieces of shit in Guantanamo after the CIA torture technicians crank up the Britney Spears albums. This city is a giant heatsink, and all of the office buildings that need to keep their giant unused conference rooms at a frigid 56 degrees are pumping out even more heat that gets absorbed into the concrete. Add to that the fact that people here shit, piss, and vomit pretty much everywhere as if it’s Calcutta, and the streetsides are giant open-bake ovens for garbage that is put out on Mondays and then possibly picked up a week later. And if you have the wise idea to get the fuck out for a weekend, forget it. Central Park is a baby festival on the weekend, intermixed in with the occasional gangbanger race war. And that’s on the weekend when there isn’t a parade, festival, street fair, mass protest, concert, gathering, or something else throwing a wrench in the traffic situation.

Before you start on the WHY DON’T YOU GET AC diatribe, here are the ground rules on what is known as the misery of my apartment:

  1. Bars on windows. No way to put in an AC unit.
  2. All wiring is from about 1812. We’re talking about that cheap aluminum, paper-wrapped, total catastrophe stuff, with the whole apartment hooked into two 10A breakers, which are conveniently located in the basement in a locked utility room, meaning if I trip a breaker, I have to get the landlord to come over (we have no super. yes, that’s illegal) and he’s out of the country for months at a time sometimes.
  3. Yes, I know they sell free-standing air conditioners. I have one. It’s the most expensive one that the most expensive Italian company produces. It barely works. It’s like making ice with a toaster.
  4. All of the windows are on one side, so there’s no breeze, and no real way to get one going with fans.
  5. I live on the first floor, so when I leave all of my windows open, I am treated to the sounds of the neighbors dealing drugs, screaming at the tops of their lungs, and/or smashing cars in the windshield with a brick to set off alarms and see which ones they can steal.
  6. For the 347 reasons outlined in Konrath publication 456-763-2A, entitled “why I cannot up and move at a split fucking second like all of you geniuses in towns in the Midwest with a 47% occupancy rates and rents under a hundred dollars for a 4-bed house,” I can’t move in the near future.

In another futile effort to make the situation better, I spent $100 on a Vornado fan. Oh wait, I mean “room air circulation unit” or whatever they call it. I just got it set up a few hours ago, and it’s actually working slightly better than my regular high-volume fan, but it’s much quieter, and doesn’t knock this high stream of sickness-inducing air into my face. (Yes, I know that allegedly, exposure to a draft or cold air or whatever isn’t supposed to cause a cold. But whenever I point a fan right at my head and go to sleep, I wake up with a cold. And when I don’t, I don’t. That must have to do with Jesus or dinosaurs or my Tarot card reading or something else, right Mr. Scientist?) So maybe the Vornado will help. I’m hoping if I fire up the anemic AC unit and put the Vornado right next to it, I will get some kind of better cooling. And if all else fails, I will just spend way more time at Sarah’s, since she lives in an apartment built within the last two centuries that actually has AC units, ceiling fans, and no Sopranos wannabes three feet from your head playing with their shitty ringtones on full volume at three in the morning.

I have been working full-time on Air in the Paragraph Line (aka “the zine”), or at least as full-time as I can with a real job and almost no energy from constant heatstroke. But the layout is looking good, a lot of the text has been placed, and the guts are close to ready. The one person holding up the issue is, of course, me, because I can’t decide on what to include, and I think everything in the current inventory kinda sucks and I need to write something new, but any new effort is basically a tone poem that goes like this: “MUST / DRINK / MORE / WATER”. But seriously, everything is looking good and it’s a good read, with a lot of decent fiction, some longer stuff, and I like it.

You’ll also notice some slight changes to the layout here. I’m just trying to make things look a little better, work better, whatever. If you see something horrifically broken or wrong, please let me know. And if you have any ideas or thoughts on the look, I’d love to hear your thoughts. So drop a “you should have an xyz” comment if you have any wise ideas.

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Kid in a vending machine

So those of you who are up on your news of the weird probably heard the story about the three-year-old kid who got stuck in the crane game vending machine at at Wal-Mart a few weeks ago, right? (If not, read here.) Well, I wasn’t sure at first, but I found out that the kid’s dad was actually a good friend of mine back in school, Jim Manges. And there are some weird twists to the story, too. First, the family went on the Today show, and it turns out that mom Manges was on probation at the time (grand theft auto), and doing stuff like crossing state lines when on probation is a no-no. Second, a few days after their appearance on TV, Jim was arrested for allegedly breaking into a factory or warehouse or something and trying to take off with a cash drawer. So he’s got some legal “issues” coming up soon, too.

I’ve mentioned Jim before in the NecroKonicon and maybe he’s come up in stories, but he’s an interesting character. It’s too bad that he got in all of the trouble he did, and that pretty much everyone in the world thinks his wife’s a fucking idiot for getting their kid stuck in a vending machine or whatever, but I met Jim way back in the sixth grade, and despite his problems, he was one of the few people I could really sync up with mentally. I don’t believe in souls or any of that, but I think we had some kind of ethereal connection there, because despite our difference in background, we got into some very heavy discussions back in the day, and he could grok the ideas from my head better than almost all of the other idiots in our redneck, backwater, Indiana town.

I first met Jim from his brother Brian, who wandered around the subdivision on his Huffy bike soon after his family pulled into town. He talked a lot about his older brother, who I mentally depicted as looking like Angus Young from AC/DC or something, based on his tall tales. A few days later, I actually met Jim, who was nothing like the stories. He was my age, maybe a year older, but he seemed more than that. He told me I should only call his brother Booger, and for the most part ignore him, and I did. We became quick pals, and over the course of a summer between sixth and seventh grade, became quickly cemented together.

Jim had deeply fundamentalist Christian parents. His dad worked constantly at some slave labor job, and his mom, much like the universe, was infinitely large and expanding at a rapid rate. She tried to rule the family with an iron fist, often banning Jim from all kinds of things in the name of Jesus, but that meant he was just that much more rebellious. Our big vice back then was Dungeons and Dragons, a game that could kill days of time spent in my basement or at my kitchen table. His parents thought this was highly satanic, meaning Jim often had to leave his books and dice and whatnot at my place, and playing at his place was out of the question. The other evil we discovered was metal music, and although now it seems silly that we had to hide our Van Halen tapes from his mom, given that the once-mighty VH is now lamer than Tiffany.

In junior high, Jim slowly became involved with a rough crowd, started smoking pot and popping speed, and spent most of his time shoplifting and trying to score low-octane weed. We drifted, and I didn’t keep in touch with him for a while, but I did know he somehow ended up in rehab. In my sophomore year, he suddenly reappeared, sporting a ripped-up jean jacket covered in Suicidal Tendencies lyrics penned-on during study hall, and an impromptu mohawk. This was Elkhart, Indiana in 1987, long before the faux-hawks of today, and wearing a mohawk was a pretty big “fuck you” to the rednecks and jockos of the era.

We started hanging out more, and it became a new era of Jim. He was in NA and AA, trying to wrestle with the deep emotional ties with his addiction and his family. That’s tough to do at 40, but at 17, when you’re supposed to be worrying about acne and talking to girls, that’s a real ball-breaker. I drove him to meetings, spent many long nights talking to him about the theories of life at the back of a 24-hour Perkins, and tried to give him an alternative to drifting back to his old life. We drove around a lot in my old Camaro, listening to Metallica and talking about some grand plan to get the fuck out of Elkhart someday.

Jim did relapse, and I didn’t hear from him for a while. I caught up with him once when he was living in a shithole apartment downtown, dating a 14-year-old, dealing speed, and looking like death. He had long since given up on school, and we mostly talked about old times and pored over a video of a Charles Manson interview. Then he vanished for months, again, continuing the cycle.

In my senior year of high school, he came back again, living at home, clean, working the program. The old Jim was back, and we went to meetings and talked about Black Sabbath and metaphysics, and damn near kept that Perkins in business, a pitcher of coffee at a time. But this time there was a secret, a problem that hit just before we found each other again. Jim had been hanging out with a couple, a man and wife who were low-end dealers, and everyone was fucked up. One thing led to another, and somehow Jim got ahold of a two by four and beat the shit out of the guy. He didn’t remember any details or anything, but he was certain that the law was only a step behind him. As I applied to colleges and finished my last semesters of high school, waiting anxiously to leave this cesspool of a town, he nervously awaited that one traffic stop or search warrant that would bring him to meet a different kind of destiny.

The next spring, I guess the pressure made him snap. He hitchhiked to Florida with about three bucks in his pocket, and then made his way all the way to Las Vegas, mostly sleeping in shelters, on beaches, in the desert, or wherever he could find a flat surface. He met tons of strange people, smoked a lot of dope, and then called his grandma and got a Greyhound ticket back from Elkhart. He was pretty much on the run from there, and I went off on my own to college, always wondering what happened to him.

On my first Thanksgiving break home, my mom gave me the newspaper article that answered the question. He got arrested on attempted murder charges, and when put in the county lockup, his parents wouldn’t make bail, so he spent months in the horrible temporary holding cells, awaiting his trial. He got four years in prison, and served a couple before coming out a much more hardened and bitter guy.

I don’t mean this to be some huge eulogy for Jim. I saw him once or twice more, and I know he’s been in and out of prison, in and out of rehab, married and with kids. I think I last talked to him a little bit before or maybe after the vending machine kid was born; he isn’t consistent with having a phone, and I guess trying to call him now would be futile. I guess I just find it odd that a dude that I used to dungeon master has gone through all of this. And I still do have some pretty good memories of hanging out with him back in the day. I think if I was with him now, sitting in a Perkins (not the same one – it went out of business, maybe because we stopped going there) I would have a good time with him. Who knows.

Okay, gotta go get my laundry, and then maybe a pizza…

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general

Summer Rain flashbacks

I’m having a total Summer Rain flashback right now. It’s hot and muggy outside, about twenty degrees warmer inside my apartment, and I’ve got a box fan running on overdrive. I’m listening to Chick Corea and eating a bacon double cheeseburger meal from Burger King. It makes me think I’ve got a radio show shift coming up at WQAX and it’s going to start pouring rain two minutes before I have to leave. Although I don’t enjoy the weather, I do enjoy the temporary glimpse back 13 years. For whatever reason though, I don’t look back at it as fondly as I did before. I mean, nothing’s wrong with it, but I’m just getting bored of looking back and being nostalgic. It’s something I do too much, and I’d rather look forward. And that means I’m sick of writing these books about the past and about my life, because they always seem mediocre to me, and there are too many problems involved. I try to write something that’s a metaphor for youth and age and whatever the fuck, and the only comments I get back are “D00D MY CAR HAD 15 INCH RIMS, WTF?” and it makes me wonder why I don’t just take up golf and fucking give it up.

That’s why I haven’t been writing here. I don’t know what you expect out of me, but this isn’t a blog. And I wish it wasn’t a “here’s the latest news on Jon’s personal life.” When I first envisioned this, I thought it would be just a bunch of writing exercises; a chance for me to sit down for twenty minutes during my lunch break and hash out some writing. But then it became a personal journal, but not really – I don’t like to write about all of the intimate details of my life online, unlike many LiveJournalers out there. For example, I never, ever write about my dating life here. That’s pure suicide right there. And I never talk about my job. I also don’t post the kind of pure brain diarrhea that most blogs do, like a bunch of links to other content, or political links, or whatever else. A blog is a (we)b log, or basically just a list of favorite bookmarks you see during your daily surf. It isn’t content, it isn’t creative, and it isn’t art. Okay, there are some good blogs that consolidate content and showcase news stories or whatever, and I read them, but I’m not a new-age journalist. I’m a writer.

I also recently discovered that I’m really sick of writing travel journal stories. The Hawaii one just about broke my back, and I think about three people read it. Writing about my own life has become akin to eating my own shit. It’s something I really hate doing now. And it sucks because I have almost an entire book done, a bunch of short stories about Bloomington, and I don’t even want to share them with anyone because I already know what the reactions will be, and looking at them makes me retch as much as if you somehow turned up a Dungeons and Dragons-themed paper I wrote in the 7th grade and then forced me to read it to a stadium of people holding cartons of rotten eggs.

I think that Rumored to Exist was/is the one book that I am truly proud of, although I see that as my first real book, and the next one needs to be more of the same, but exponentially better. And I’m working in that direction. But it makes me wonder what I should be doing with this journal. I see the marketing potential of having a little thing where I can tell people what new book is coming out, or where I am reading, or what friends of mine have released new stuff worth reading. But I feel like there’s a lot of bad energy in having all of these archives of old shit, with people coming here thinking I’m going to write some giant diatribe about my girlfriend or whatever the fuck people think blogs are supposed to have on them. And I worry that people see this thing and think it’s my life’s work, much like how every hipster doofus starts up a blogger page and then that’s their big project, and that’s going to get them a hundred grand publishing deal. This isn’t my life’s work. For every word I write here, I probably write a hundred in my real books.

In the last month, I’ve thought about entirely removing this thing from the web, and leaving a big 404 sunken crater to greet all of you. I’ve thought about making this page a symlink to a livejournal with only the occasional update. I’ve thought about scaling everything back, mothballing the archives, and coming up with something stripped down to put in its place. I still don’t know what the solution is.

I do know that I need to clean all of the Burger King wrappers and bags off the desk, start up another fan or two, and start work on the layout for Air in the Paragraph Line, which will be coming out soon…

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general

Ear infection

Yes, I’m alive. Well, mostly. I got back from Hawaii a week ago, but I flew back with a very tiny cold – minor enough that I barely even thought about it as I got on the plane. But I thought about it a lot as we descended and my head just about exploded like that dude on Scanners. I now have two horrible ear infections. Actually, the one in the left ear has been about 10% infected, and usually doesn’t bother me at all. But the right ear has been 95% infected, and feels like when your ear is full of water when you swim, but permanently.

I tried all the basics: yawn, shower, gum, sutafed, nasal spray, heating pad on throat: no dice. Sometimes I could get the stuff to slosh around a bit, but I was looking for a huge POP, a clearing of everything, like when your ears are clogged from swimming, and an hour later, BAM, you’ve got a clear ear and a bunch of shit on the shoulder of your t-shirt. Finally, I dipped into the stash of prescribed but never taken drugs, and started a regimen of Flagyl, thanks to my dentist and root canal. It didn’t do much, so I finally had to call in the last resort: the doctor.

I hate doctors. Doctors never solve anything, unless you show up at their office dead, and then they say “yeah, he’s dead” and sign the death certificate. Otherwise, a doctor usually can’t tell you anything you didn’t already know from google. And believe me, I read every damn entry about the inner ear last week. I could pretty much do surgery on someone’s inner ear if my hands weren’t so shaky from drinking Coke all the time. Anyway, doctors can only do one thing, other than cut people up legally, and that’s prescribe drugs. You’d think keeping the mighty power of dispensing medicines locked away in the hands of the few would be great, but it introduces the problem that drug companies turn these people into drug fiends. I don’t mean they will be shooting heroin into their eye (although the might.) What I mean is when I come in for a hangnail, the doctor’s going to suddenly say “hey, your cholesterol is a point high, and instead of telling you to get off your ass and run around the block a few times, I’m going to put you on Lipitor.” Why would he do that? Is it because he cares about my well-being? No. Is it because someone from Pfizer will take him on vacation in Aruba? Probably. Is it because he’s an enabler for a drug industry that will now collect a few hundred bucks a month from me for the rest of my life and possibly subject me to horrific side effects just in order for me to get at the bottom of their pyramid scheme? Dingdingdingding, we have a winner.

It was bad enough when I was in my twenties, and every therapist and shrink I talked to wanted me to take about 12 different mood enhancers, probably so Eli Lilly could take them on golf vacations. I didn’t need to be heavily medicated as much as I wanted the answers to some common questions about how my brain worked and how I reacted to others and how I perceived the world around me, and how I could change that. It was basic “teach a man to fish” stuff, and everyone wanted me to get addicted to fish pills for the rest of my life. And now that I’m about at my mid-30s and not in great shape, admittedly, every time I see a doctor, they want to lock me into a long-term contract for cholesterol-lowerers and blood-pressure lowerers, and sugar-lowerers, and everything else, and IT PISSES ME OFF.

I have an endocrinologist, who I might not have anymore as I stopped going to him, who pulls this drug freak shit on me every time I go there. I have a potential thyroid problem, or maybe I don’t. It seems enlarged, but it tests OK. They run another test to see if it’s some rare exotic autoimmune problem, and it tests OK, but they say the test doesn’t work 50% of the time. I, of course, use some Lewis Black logic that if I didn’t go to my job 50% of the time, I wouldn’t have one. But anyway. He says, well, take the thyroid medicine anyway. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, you’re just making your piss that much more expensive. I can almost live with this logic, but then he wants me to come see him constantly, and take blood tests constantly, and miss work constantly, and the most he can come up with is trying to get me on another prescription.

ALL OF THIS IS INSANE. I AM NOT 94. I DO NOT WANT TO HAVE 17 PRESCRIPTIONS THAT COST 25 DOLLARS A MONTH, EACH. That’s a fucking car payment. Not to mention that it’s a full-time job to get the fucking yo-yo down at Rite-Aid to actually fill the shit correctly, because they completely fuck up one in four prescriptions. You know what? I bought a fucking bike. It cost $300. My blood pressure as of Friday was 120/80. FUCK THESE DOCTORS. FUCK THEM ALL IN THE HEAD.

But I had to go to the doctor anyway. I went Friday and he gave me eardrops and a Z-pack antibiotic to nuke the thing from orbit. ($50. And that’s with insurance. Whoever raised our copay to $25 should be taken outside and hung from a streetsign by his dick.) I feel a little better, on day 3 of the new stuff, but still can’t hear.

So there’s that. I haven’t finished the Hawaii trip, although I’m sick of writing these things and I’m not even sure if people read them or if the hits are all spam-bots using my pages to up the hit counts on their stupid “discount Hawaii we don’t sell anything, we’re just a referral passthrough trying to up our pagerank” type of shit. I will eventually get to it. The photos are there, though.

It’s very nice outside, but humid. It looks like it could break into a rain at a moment’s notice. I want to go ride my bike, but the lack of hearing and lack of balance make it difficult. And walking is too boring.