Category: general

I still can’t believe the weather here. My new ‘office’ is a folding table set up by one of the windows in our living room. So immediately to the right of my monitor is a western view of Washington Heights. With a good set of binocs or a climb up the fire escape to the roof, you can see over to Jersey. But the sunny sky and the stretch of buildings below my 6th story window beats the gloom of Seattle. And with all of my books in my new bookshelves, all of the CDs in alphabetical order, and my stereo right behind me, I’ve got everything I need to write (except a Coke machine with an infinite supply.)

I’ve been blowing through the travel story lately. It’s up to about 12,000 words, and on the fourth of 14 days. I hope to HTMLize it and add some links to pictures. I’ve also been slaving on Summer Rain. Still stuck on the annoying romance scenes, but I got one of the three worst ones passably finished.

I finished rereading On the Road, by the way. I started it before the trip, to get chaged up and ready. I only got 100 pages into it before I left, and I only had a couple of chances to stop and read during hte trip. But I finished the other day, and it’s as good as ever. I manage to reread it every year or so, usually when I’m on the road myself. It’s always cool to visit some place like LA or New York for the first time, and then turn past the pages you’ve read ten times and realize you’ve been in the same places as Kerouac. While his prose wasn’t what I’m aiming for, that book is a real inspiration for Summer Rain in many ways. Maybe someday I’ll sit down and write a paper about it.

Speaking of writing, I’ve got work to do…

I’ve been working on Summer Rain. I hesitate to say that I’m working on it full time, but I have no other productive items going (except for a pay gig, which is part-time.) I am making progress towards wrapping up the final third, but it’s going slow on a couple of chapters. I try to keep a regular schedule, wordcount-wise, but this one chapter is just killing me. I worked all day on it, and I must’ve written like 1500 words. Sometimes I would write less than 100 words an hour, and I wasn’t off playing Pac-man or whatever – I was seriously sitting at the computer for 60 full minutes, struggling with how to develop this motherfucking chapter. It’s because this deals with sex, and the character doesn’t get any for most of the book, and I am not a romance author or whatever, so it’s all uphill. I’ll get through it, hopefully. But the book is getting better, and I’m excited about it, and I hope I can show it to a few people sometime soon.

I’m also still working on the travel thing about the WA->NY trip. It’s getting done, but it’s also going slow. There are only so many ways you can describe driving through the desert. But I got the pictures back – 5 rolls – and they look great. Maybe I will scan a few and post them also.

Today’s weather was beautiful – 70’s, sunny. I went for a walk for about an hour, which got me in the mood for Summer Rain. I’m hoping for many more days like this.

I am going to get back to writing this travel stuff, before I need to crash. Feel free to email me and bug me about it – maybe it will help me finish faster.

Isn’t it weird when the song in your walkman and the stuff around you coincidentally match for a moment? I was listening to Dream Theater’s latest while walking to the drug store in the rain, and on the last song there is this repeated line: “It’s raining, raining, on the streers of New York City.” I guess you’d need to know the song, but the soaked cityscape of 181st and Broadway could’ve made a perfect video for the song.

Today I’ve found my new hobby: recording music. Marie has a Tascam 4-track and a Yamaha keyboard that were gathering dust. So I got out my bass and my cable collection and set up a little studio on the living room floor. I have almost no musical ability, and just spent the afternoon playing bass lines on top of the built-in drum rhythms. It’s a lot of fun, and a decent way to practice. Plus I’m now remembering a tiny bit of my ten year old piano lessons, so maybe I’ll learn more.

Still no writing, aside from some work on the travel thing. Maybe tomorrow. For now, the Daily Show…

It looks like if I type late at night, I can almost see what I type. I don’t know what’s going on with this, and I don’t know if it’s really a fiber cut or very shitty service. But things work fine in getting back to my speakeasy account, so I many need to come up with some new scheme for writing these entries.

I’ve found from updating my paper journal that I’m sick of updating things with entries like “I went to the K-Mart. I went to the grocery” etc. Things are going good here, and I’ve had a ton of errands to do, but it’s too tedious to present a laundry list of these idiotic events. I’m doing okay in setting up shop though, and I’m sort of writing now – trying to write a huge account of everything that happened on the trip. It’s going very slow, and the story hasn’t even finished up the first of 14 days. But I’m waiting for the day when this will all pick up and I’ll blow through 4, 5, or 6 days at a clip.

I’m about underway on a freelance writing gig for an old friend from college. Go check out itList.com. [Long dead, sorry.] It’s an online bookmark manager, a way to post, share, or centrally manage all of your bookmarks. The current interface is pretty basic, but there are cool things afoot, with new programs and a totally new interface. I’ll be writing some help for it, which will be a very fun experience. Plus it’ll bring in a couple of bucks to support my new fulltime-writer lifestyle.

Although my connection is fast, I’m not in the mood to write. The Nintendo 64 is back, so if nothing’s on the tube, I’ll get into some Diddy Kong Racing or something. More later.

It appears I’m still suffering from a slow connection to my server, possibly from a fiber cut yesterday. Maybe it has already been fixed and my connection will always be slow. I’m not sure, but for now it means it’s impossible to do any worthwhile updates.

I’ve spent the whole day running errands, and I didn’t even leave the house until fourish. There’s still a lot of unpacking, setting up, and other miscellaneous work. Plus I had to fill prescriptions, deal with banks, and dig through luggage to find things. I guess I didn’t do as much as I planned, but some stuff is happening.

And I started writing today. Actually, my first test run just showed me that I had a lot of work to do at my writing area. I started writing, got about 3 words in, and then realized that I had to readjust stuff, or find my scrap paper notebook, or look for a pen, or whatever. Eventually, I got enough done that I could write for maybe an hour, which is decent. I’m trying to write all of the trip stories down, but it’s going slow. Maybe next week will provide for some better working conditions.

Speaking of which, I have more to do, so I better split.

I’m here – New York that is. It also appears I have the slowest connection in the world to this server, so it looks like I either need to yell at the new ISP or find a way to do this writing on my home machine and then FTP it in, like the rest of the people out there do.

This connection is completely useless, so I need to cut this short. I’ll be writing a comprehensive report on the trip soon, and hopefully I’ll get this connectivity problem fixed by then. Until then, drop me a line.

04/15/99 21:25

It looks like it isn’t the new ISP’s fault that I can’t type. There was some sort of fiber cut today that affected pair.com, the folks that host my site. Things appear somewhat better, although it’s not a zippy connection.

I now have a computer table – one of those folding tables from Staples. And I am getting more set up here. Soon I will type in an account of my entire trip, I promise. Until then, I have to answer lots of mail and keep unpacking. More later…

This should be my last entry from Seattle. Unfortunately it won’t be a great one, because I am sick, running a fever, having stomach problems, still have a lot of packing to do, and I leave in only 12 hours. If there is any one sure thing in life, it’s that I will get sick right before a trip. It looks like I will be seeing the great southwest in a dayquil haze now.

I got the rental car thismorning. It is an Oldsmobile Intrigue, in old-person white paint. It has auto-everything, and will be a real rest to drive it. It’s quite a bit different than the rabbit, which had manual-everything, except for the things that just didn’t work. I already took it for a test drive up to Lynnwood and back, and it seems great. I don’t know how good of mileage it gets, but the needle barely wavered int the 40-something miles I drove, so hopefully that will be OK.

Almost everything is packed. I am backing up the computer, and then it gets powered down. The apartment looks REALLY vacant now, just my air mattress and a bunch of piles of stuff awaiting the car or the dumpster.

I was going to write some kind of great ending at this point, but I’m trying not to get too sentimental about Seattle. I just want to get this shit in my car and get it behind me and think about it later. The cold isn’t helping me either. So I’m going to cut this short while I can still type. Maybe I’ll type in some entries from the road. If not, you’ll get the whole story when I reach New York on the 16th or so. Keep in touch, and wish me luck.

The VW is gone. I turned over the title for a mere $100 to someone who answered my usenet ad. It’s the end of an era. At least this time, the person buying it intends to fix it up and keep it on the road. When I sold my last Rabbit, the frame was rusted through and the brakes were gone. The guy who bought it, also for $100, intended to use it as a parts donor for other stuff. This one went to a kid who worked at a Jiffy Lube and wanted to put in a bigger stereo and do other stuff to it. So, I hope it went to a good home. It served me well.

I’m trying not to get sentimental about this stupid shit. I’ve got a pile of junk awaiting the dumpster, including a comforter (you know, bed sheet) that I got for christmas 92. The pattern reminds me so much of the past, the different houses and beds on which it rested from 1992-1997. It reminds me so much of a certain ex-girlfriend, of the last era of the Mitchell Street house, and of my first years here in Seattle. Luckily, it smells like hell from being in storage, or I’d be sniffing it and thinking even more. This is what my life has been like lately: throwing out things that need to go in the trash, even though they are instant time machines to events and memories of my past.

Bill Perry is here, and just got back from a trip to Japan. He’d been awake for about 24 hours straight, but gained a day on the return flight. I went to Chang’s Mongolian Grill with him and Duffin. It was the last trip I made with the car, which I guess is a good way to end things.

I hate to say it, but I feel like I’m getting sick. I don’t know, I was moving stuff on my balcony and kicked up a lot of smog dust, so maybe I’m just coughing that back up. But I would hate to get bronchitis the day before this fucking trip. I already know my digestive system will massively rebel an hour before I’m scheduled to leave – that’s a given. I think that some kind of hypnotism or aversion therapy might make these medical problems go away. I know that I occassionally use a meditation tape for depression, and it actually works fairly well when I’m trying to fall asleep and 80,000 things are going through my head. I doubt there’s a similar tape for respiratory infections, though.

It seems like there was something else I had to write about, but I’ve got to haul some more garbage downstairs, and then try to go to bed early. I’m not going anywhere tomorrow without a car, so I’m sure I’ll write more then.

Very tired. I did more cleaning, and tried to do some trip planning – maps, directions, etc. I think a GPS is going to help a lot. I’ve also been working on Summer Rain, but I ended up doing some structural changes, continuity things. I didn’t add many words, but I fixed some problems.

I should sleep. I think I breathed in a bunch of smog dust and now I’m coughing like I have TB. Anyone who thinks Seattle has clean air should check out my patio. That’s all for now.