Author: jkonrath

There is a period of time that happens at about four or five in the morning on a Friday night when my neigborhood is deathly silent. I usually wake up around then to stumble to the bathroom because I have a bad habit of drinking a few glasses of water right before bed, but I enjoy this stillness so much. It reminds me of when I lived in Indiana and slept in my bedroom in the basement, where it was pitch black with no windows, and no sound could get through the poured concrete walls. This hour is perfect because it’s after the teenage tough guys who yell at the top of their lungs at each other and throw beer bottles in the street have passed out, and before the career car-movers that shuffle vehicles to avoid the alternate-side parking rules wake up and start their work. For that small period of time though, I have complete silence, the kind of quiet I could only dream of. And then, an hour later, garbage collection starts, and it’s back to normal.

Round two of the dental trauma happened yesterday. I got a titanium post implanted in the remains of my root-canaled tooth, which now holds a temporary crown, and will later suppport a porcelain crown. It’s an evil-looking thing, inches long with a close resemblance to part of a Terminator robot. I didn’t think they could jam a piece that big into the tooth canal, but they did. It hurt like hell after I left, but as the cement dried, it got to the point where I could touch it with my tongue and not feel extreme pain. I’m eating a pop-tart now, and there are no problems. I think the worst part of it all (other than paying for it) is just the general fear of dental procedures. I feel like Rambo in that scene in First Blood where the cop is trying to shave him with a straight razor, and he’s having flashbacks of the ‘Cong torturing him. Every time I sit in a dentist’s chair, I expect the worst to happen, and my blood pressure instantly doubles. I think I need to find a guy that’s much more liberal with the nitrous.

That’s all. The Vegas book is almost done, BTW.

Just when I was ready to go into full bitch mode about the hot weather, it stormed like a motherfucker, and now it’s pretty decent. Yesterday, I printed out all of the current project, got a red pen, and headed out to scavenge some air conditioning at the Neptune Diner and then on the subways for a while. On the walk to the Neptune, I saw a huge wall of black in the sky, rolling in from the West. By the time I got a seat and ordered lunch, it exploded with rain and thunder outside. It felt like the temperature dropped thirty degrees. It was still hot in my apartment, of course, and it took a day of full fans and all windows open to cool off to a reasonable level.

I’ve been working on a new project, which is a book about Las Vegas. More specifically, it’s all of the trip reports I’ve posted to my site, along with some shorter, new essays about the city that fit between those chapters. It’s intended for lulu.com, although I think I will buy a UPC symbol and the distributing option to get it on Amazon and others. I’ve run through the trip reports on a quick edit, and they need more punching up, but I think they are cool. A couple of the short bits are done, I have ideas for a couple more. Doing the layout in Framemaker is work, but it’s not much of a chore. I don’t have a cover photo yet, although I have a gazillion photos of Vegas. And no title yet. I need to think about that. One idea is something like “A Walk in the Meadows” (seeing as Las Vegas = The Meadows in espanish.) And another is some obscure gambling jargon, like “Breakfast at Harrah’s” (a nine-high, no pair hand in Pai-Gow Poker.) The byline will be something like “Essays and whatever about the New Las Vegas” or whatever. Anyway, suggestions welcome.

There are times I wonder if I can control the weather, most notably when I bitch about the heat and it suddenly becomes October in August. It’s been a very comfortable few days here, and I’ve slept like a baby with no AC or fans at all. It’s also put me in a strange mood, as I think fall thoughts and some part of my head thinks I’m back in Seattle and it’s 1997 again or whatever.

I’m still writing, still editing and trying to finish Six Year Plan, which is a collection of short stories about Bloomington. Some of them aren’t entirely stories, as much as general narrative about points in time. The whole thing isn’t meant to tell the whole story of when I was in school; it’s more of a survey of different points in time, different events or eras. I’m still trying to balance and even out some of the stories so they will all make sense in the context of one book. And some of them suck, so I need to work on them until they don’t. A percentage of the stories aren’t true, a lot like Summer Rain was not 100% true. I think I’ve said before it was maybe 80% true. I might twist some of the stuff in this book to be a little less accurate and a little more interesting.

I am dying to do another book on lulu.com. I want to do this book, but I wish I had something else ready to go, something small and obscure and neat and fun that wouldn’t sell many copies but that would look all official and cool in paperback and sitting on my bookshelf. I have been thinking about the glossary, but that would take a lot of time and work, and I’ll get to that later. I also had this crazy idea tonight that I should take all of my stories about Vegas, paste them into FrameMaker, edit them and drop in some pretty pictures, and make a quick book out of that. But I wish I had some more cohesive idea about that, like a good theme and different types of articles. Because all of my travel stories are basically me bitching about how my luggage broke and I can’t find a place to buy batteries or what problem is up with my laptop or whatever. It would be cool to have some actual STORIES about Vegas. Article-type things. Maybe that would be a good thing to do though, chop up the stories and have travel articles. Like “an article about skydiving in Vegas on your birthday”. Write 20-30 of those, put them in a book with a pretty cover, see if people will buy it.

Oh, John Sheppard has released another Lulu book, this one being both his books Midnight in Monaco and Carl Versus the Men From Mars. Both are great, and the combo is http://www.lulu.com/johnsheppard. Or download all of his books for free, as always, here.

Speaking of writing, I have to get back to it…

I have a new keyboard. I’m not entirely happy about the situation, though. I had one of the older Microsoft Natural keyboards and it worked well for a long time, but last night, after about the 14 millionth space, the spacebar died. I took it all apart, put it back together, and it worked… for about an hour. So maybe I ate one too many meals at the computer.

I went to CompUSA today to find a replacement, and it’s pretty much the story of my life on the keyboard shopping front. There are a few different major features: nice key action, wireless connections, a color other than institutional beige, the natural split ergo layout. I wanted to get a decent-feeling, wired, black, ergo keyboard. You can’t. You can spend five times as much on a complete wireless, bluetooth-enabled, mouse-included, does-everything-but-bakes-bread model. But you can’t get what I want, which means compromise.

I ended up getting a cheapo $20 model that had black keys and a silver case. (The whole color thing is only important because I spent so damn much money on a huge LCD monitor with a black case, and putting a stock white keyboard in front of it is akin to buying a brand new Porsche and putting those stupid blue-LED windshield wipers on it.) So I’m typing all of this as a sort of break-in for the new keyboard, and I don’t like it. My wrists already hurt, but maybe I will get used to it. It feels much sloppier than the old keyboard, like my fingers slip off of each keycap, and I’m typing a lot of the keys next to the key I want to hit. I guess it will just take time. Or I will have to just buy a better keyboard online or something.

Oh, also this keyboard has a cluster of lame “extra” keys, like play an MP3, search the web, take out the dog, etc. in a little group at the top of the keyboard. They are all marked with completely illogical international logos; like one, as far as I can tell, is a button you push to prevent yourself from getting hit by lightning. A few others are used to change the seasons of the year. Maybe it’s some Taiwanese thing I don’t understand. Anyway, none of these work in Linux, and I don’t want to start down the trail of tears to get this stuff to do anything, because I’m certain you have to recompile the kernel or do a complete reinstall to get it to work, and it’s much easier for me to just move my hand one inch and use the damn mouse.

It is hot as hell here, by the way. Between that and the lack of a space bar, I have not done much writing. I have been working on the book of Bloomington short stories, and I am making progress, though. I have mostly been trying to finish first drafts of stories so I can set them aside and then review and edit them later. It’s sort of the “code complete” level of completeness, and then the editing is going to be working out the bugs. I have about 56,000 words of complete stories, and about 35,000 words of partially done stuff. I want to keep the book under 100K, so I am doing fine.

I saw both Manchurian Candidate and Bourne Supremacy this weekend. Bourne was pretty good; Manchurian was a good remake with some clever updates for the modern day, but the original is much better. The big thing I did not like about MC is that even though the politics were kept neutral by not naming the party involved in everything, both sides are going to point fingers and say it was supposed to be the other side. I can certainly see the left saying it was supposed to be a “neocon” conspiracy and the Limbaugh idiots say it was supposed to be Hillary Clinton. Sigh.

I’m sure I have more to write about, but I seriously need to get out of the house or into the bathtub, because it’s a pizza oven in here. I also need to get a USB extension cord for this thing because it came with about a three foot cord on it, and that doesn’t do much good…

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Postscript: I just ran down to Rat Shack and picked up an adapter to use my old old keyboard, which has been in storage since I upgraded my computer in 2001. It has an AT connector, so I had to buy an AT to PS2 connector. Unfortunately, that blocks the PS2 mouse connector on my machine because it’s a right-angle adapeter, so I had to move the mouse to USB, and that totally destroyed Linux. Now everything is fine, except that my mouse is moving five times as fast as usual, and that will take an evening of grepping to fix.

This keyboard is one I bought in Seattle, when the keyboard I bought back in 94 or so finally died. It’s the keyboard on which I wrote most of Summer Rain and Rumored to Exist. It’s a basic white keyboard, no extra hyper keys, no funky wrist supports, no split or ergo feature. It’s actually not white anymore though; after about seven or eight years, it has faded to a sickly yellow, and there’s a lot of gross dirt stuck everywhere. I would clean it off, but I know the worst thing you can do to a working piece of electronics is clean it. Anyway, it feels weird to be on this one again. The keys are dished a lot more, which is good, but the spring action is a bit stiffer, and my hands spend more time on the wood of the desk. My last desk (actually, a kitchen table) in Seattle had worn all the way through the cheap laminate to the particle board crap, and I did a lot of improvisational placement of pieces of plastic, cardboard, or paper in the zone below the space bar to keep myself from wearing straight through to the floor. Maybe I should do that again.

I also added a new fan to the family, a 16″ oscillating number on a stand that cost me about $18. I am sure it won’t last more than a summer or two, but it’s sitting next to me by the desk, and it makes a world of difference. I am pretty sure I will trip on it in the middle of the night and kill myself, though.

I haven’t been eating all weekend, either. It’s just too damn hot. I went to McDonald’s after the CompUSA trip and tried their chicken strips, which were marginal. This was the one on 58th and 8th, which is one of the worst franchises in the city. It’s full of the sort of uppity people who always order the most finicky stuff, trying to order a garden salad with no carrots and lactose-free cheese and then 20 minutes into it, they ask if there are gluten-free croutons or not. Get a clue people – McDonald’s isn’t Whole Foods. Pick a number, pay your money, and shut up.

Anyway, I got all of my food and then the guy puts the large Coke on my tray as I was turning to leave, and I’ve got a keyboard in a giant bag in my left hand, and I’m trying to hold the whole tray in my left hand, and someone gets in my way so I turn further to dodge them. And in slow motion, I watched the giant, 200-ounce drink, barely balanced on the tray, as it twisted, and spun, and went airborne, and… BAM. The explosion of Coke and ice was huge, and mostly went behind the counter. They gave me another Coke, but the whole thing was hilarious for some reason (probably heatstroke.)

I think I will take another shower now.