Category: general

I am working on Summer Rain as much as I can right now. Actually that’s not true, but I am working on it several hours a day. I find that after 4 or 5 hours of it, I can’t go on any more, unless I’m really on a run with it. I was hoping to finish a draft before I moved, but it doesn’t look like that will happen now. But it’s still going good.

I am thinking of recording a “leaving here”/”on the road” MiniDisc with a bunch of songs appropriate for leaving one town and going to another. You’d be surprised – it’s like the second-most popular song topic behind the sappy “[s]he left me, boo hoo” sort of thing.

My sleep schedule is so bent out of shape – I’ve been staying up till 5, and I need to be waking up by 5 or 6 next week. I need to get out of here and go to bed.

I have so massively behind on shit I have to do tonight that I’m bleeding out of my eye sockets. This is just a short one. Go check out my top level site, www.rumored.com and let me know what you think of the new layout. The last few items in the list will go somewhere else eventually. I’m esp. interested in how it looks in IE since I don’t have a copy. Netscape doesn’t do the mouse-over highlighting on links. And I did a bunch of stylesheet hacks which are supposed to be browser-independent, but never are.

Summer Rain, book 3 = 66268. That needs to be 85000 soon. Like I said, gotta go.

[2020 – long ago, rumored had its own layout, and this was under one directory. Now, the home is the blog. Weird to still see these old entries, so I’ll leave them.]

Today felt like a day in Bloomington back in 1992 – the weird vibe you get when it’s about to rain and it’s light out, but the clouds are trying to stomp it all out. Although I ignored this in my book describing that summer, the first week or two was filled with cold and borderline rainy weather like this. I didn’t have a job, the girlfriend had split, and I was stuck taking a political science class that looked pretty daunting. For about the first 10 days, it felt like the entire world was going to collapse in on me. And that weather helped reinforce the feeling.

I read in one of the Bukowski letters books (I’ve been reading both of them on and off, just opening to a random spot and reading for a few minutes or hours) and when he quit the post office to write full time, he went on a ten day terror ride of drunkenness, hangovers, no food, and despair. I guess things have been somewhat easier here, although every time I go to Safeway and drop a fiver on a couple of 2-liters or something, it makes me cringe a bit and think about money. It’s going to be an odd trip across the country.

Ryan’s party on Friday was pretty decent. I got there early and we were both a little freaked because nobody showed up for a couple of hours. I guess everyone learned their lesson on his last party, when there was no food and he was still cleaning an hour into the thing. But the whole gang showed up, plus a bunch of other people I didn’t know. It was pretty fun because everyone knew it was my going-away party so all sorts of strangers were coming up to me and talking to me. I had to tell the whole story a thousand times, but it was much better than doing so with the people at work, because these were all people that thought the whole adventure was cool.

So I shot a bunch a video, talked to everyone, drank a fair amount of beer, and got home around 5am. Since that has been my new bedtime lately, everything worked fine.

All I’ve been doing, aside from sleeping and wandering around aimlessly, is working on Summer Rain, or throwing stuff out. I’ve been shuffling through various shelves, boxes, and corners and pitching more and more stuff in the garbage. I sort of feel like those guys who pushed helicopters over the edge of aircraft carriers during the evacuation of South Vietnam.

Oops, I went off and started reading something for like 45 minutes, and now I forgot what I was talking about. I guess this would be a good place to stop.

I removed myself from On Display because I’m sick of every other journal except mine. Is that wrong? Maybe I will start a ring for text-only journals written by people who don’t read other journals and don’t care about graphics. If you think your journal fits the bill, email me. Also, it helps if you like Black Sabbath.

I’ve been reading Bukowski’s two books of letters, in an effort to think more like a starving writer. It’s made me realize I need to think more seriously about my books and get stuff done. Today I went to Virginia Lore’s and gave her the first two parts of Summer Rain and a recent draft of Rumored to Exist. She read part of Summer Rain and seemed into it, so hopefully that means another dedicated reader to give me detailed feedback, along with Michael, Andrea, and Marie. BTW, if you are reading this and want to review any of my stuff, it’s on my web site. But you have to email and ask for the password. I’m warning you in advance though that it’s a daunting task – thousands of pages, but maybe you’ll enjoy it.

I’ve been working more on Summer Rain lately, trying to get the third book in shape before I move. It’s at about 62,000 words, and my goal is 85,000. (That’s for the third book – the whole thing is currently like 220,000 words.) I’ve been piddling around with how the ending works. The whole thing needs to come crashing down pretty fast, like within a couple of chapters, and it’s not exactly smooth right now. It happens too fast, and out of nowhere. I’m trying to hid little clues and sort of pull back the duration of this final hammerblow to the chest so it’s not too formulaic or something. Although the word count is getting there, some of the final chapters still look pretty fucked.

In the last day or two, I’ve been looking back at older pieces of Summer Rain and doing some housekeeping. I’ve been working on the book almost constantly for a year now, except for the sporadic vacations I’ve taken with Rumored. So there’s writing I’ve done from like last May or even older that I haven’t looked at or messed with in a while. In fact, there are bits and pieces in book 3 I haven’t touched in months. It’s always nice to go back to something you’ve written and forgotten. When I go back to old parts of SR, I see pieces that make me laugh, prose that I think is strong, and stuff that works. That’s good, because in old drafts of SR, I cringe at the stuff I find. Rumored takes the cake though – after I set it down and let it ferment for a few months, I pick it up and find stuff I forgot I wrote, stuff that usually makes me laugh out loud. I love when that happens.

The big party is tomorrow. I don’t know who will be there, except for the usuals. I hope it’s a lot of people, but even if it’s just me, Ryan, Todd, and Keiko telling old stories about Spry, it’ll be fun. Every time I say I won’t miss Seattle, I think of another person that I will miss. And today, me and Virginia went walking, and went to this park up on Queen Anne hill, where she lives. It overlooked EVERYTHING – all of Puget sound right in front of us, the waters going off to the San Juans on the right, with little tugboats and ferries going back and forth below. And to the left, you could see all of downtown Seattle – Belltown, the Space Needle, the buildings, Alaskan Way, Key Arena, and if it would have been clear, even Mount Rainier. Virginia told me this story about how that spot was her first view of Seattle, how when she was going to school in Olympia, she had a crazy blind date that drove her up there and it was the first time she saw the city. It’s kindof sad to think that it will be one of the last times I get a good look at everything at once.

I videotaped it, of course. Making lots of tapes before I leave. I’m going to bring the thing to the party. Having a bunch of drunk people pass around a camera and make commentary is usually a pretty good view later when you’re sober. I have 3 more two-hour tapes to fill on the way out. I have no idea what I’ll do with them once I finish taping them – I still have about 4 hours of Disneyland circa 1997 that I’ve only watched like twice.

I promised myself I’d write until I was tired, and now I am.

Ryan Grant is having a party/wake for me this Friday. If you’re in Seattle, it would be terrific if you could show. Here’s his message:

Party! Friday the 19th, 8pm. http://www.seanet.com/~rgrant/party.html <– more info, map, directions. Jon Konrath is, as some of you may have heard, leaving the state. In fact, he’s moving to the Other Coast. All of you can do something about this. You can show up at my place Friday and, well, do whatever you want to about it. Most of us will be mingling, eating, drinking (to various degrees), and anticipating the Volkswagon giveaway. The rules are basically: bring yourself, invite friends, and if any self-immolations happen, they have to be out on the deck. – Ryan

That’s all for now. I’m supposed to be working on the book. Maybe I’ll write more in a bit.

Today was my first day of freedom, job-wise. Too bad I spent the whole day dragging hundreds of pounds of books down to my car and over to UPS. I dropped about $250 on shipping today, but now my apartment looks amazingly more barren. I started to pack more books tonight, but I’m down to one more box, and then I need to buy more.

It always feels odd to be hanging out on a day when the rest of the world is working. It’s like seeing a world you never knew existed. When I went to college and I skipped classes or otherwise found a way to screw around for an afternoon, I never felt the same sensation – college towns have their busy times, but so many people are vaguely employed or full-time students. I saw the same thing in Elkhart, though. I’d work at Monkey Ward’s during the day some summers, and when I went to get some lunch at the hot dog stand in the mall, the concourses would be completely barren, save a few senior citizens. During my first trip to UPS, Seattle felt like that – fewer cars on the road, the yuppie contingent was absent, and it just had a strange feeling, like you could tell at a glance that the majority of the city was behind a desk or at a factory.

During my second trip, around 3:30, traffic was already nearing a peak. I don’t know what the hell’s up with this city. They should’ve spent half a billion on a monorail, not on two stadiums.

I’m supposed to be working on Summer Rain, so I’m going to get back to it.

The cycling has begun. I’m talking about temperature cycling, a feature of my wonderful apartment. Here’s how it works. It’s colder than hell out, or at least cold enough that being indoors is a better option than being outside. But it’s not snowing or anything – we’re talking maybe 47 and pissing rain. Normally, I’d run my heater a little and keep my room at a nice, cozy temp. The problem is that I live on the top floor of the building. And the assholes below me have their heat on the “solder” setting. And heat rises. So without my heat on, my apartment is about 115 degrees. This means I need to open all of my windows and let my apartment cool down to 47 degrees. And when I close them up again, my apartment is at an ideal temperature for about 3 minutes. Repeat this over and over and over until you feel a great need to buy a firearm and hunt down other people in the building like wild game in the forest.

I spent some time with my friend Virginia, at her incredible top of Queen Anne house, talking about some short stories of her. For a long period of time, she swore she would not be a writer anymore, and stayed heads-down at her day job. It’s good to see her mad at work on a bunch of stories and sending them out. I wish I would’ve brought bits of Summer Rain for her to read. And I wish I could spend more time talking shop with her or talking about anything, really. I think I can count the people in Seattle I’ll miss on one hand, and she’s probably the first on the list.

My day otherwise has been so off-center and odd. Not sleeping (due to the temp. cycling, mostly) threw me off majorly. But I saw the new taco (“El Taco”) at 7-11, which was not exactly as memorable as hearing about JFK or the space shuttle, but now Ray has another reason to drag me there at 3 in the morning. In a city as dead as Elkhart, 7-11 is the nocturnal person’s mecca.

I packed a bunch of stuff tonight. After my Monday drop-off(s) at UPS, the apartment will really start looking bare. Many books are now gone – most bookcases are in the trash, and about 7 big boxes are stacked against that half-wall. Plus, I got rid of another little shelf, and my last two bookcases are down to about 70% capacity. A few more boxes, and all of my books will be on the way. I’m also working on clearing out closets, and that’s more done than not. My next big, messy project will be sorting through CDs and tapes. I want to ship ahead anything I won’t need, and drive with about half of my discs in the trunk. I also need to get stuff recorded onto MD. I have a 45-cassette holder which I will fill with longer stuff, spoken word and whatnot, and that will be the backup to the 80-some MDs I will have pre-recorded. I’m glad I’ll be home all day during the week to figure this shit out.

It’s two and I feel like I’ve been running all day. I’m going to finish recording an MD and then get some shuteye.

It’s my last day at this job. Since this is the end of an era, I guess I have a lot of ground to cover.

First of all, I work for WRQ, Inc. It’s a software company that’s best known for Reflection, a line of terminal emulation products. I’ve worked here since June of 1996, when my job at Spry/Compuserve basically fell apart from under me. I started work here on the Macintosh version of Reflection, writing balloon help and other online help. In January of 1997, the Mac team was used as the basis for a Java team, and we started work on what became EnterView, a Java-based terminal emulation program. I was on the team for the first two releases – the second release just went out the door on Monday.

Why am I telling you this? Because if you search my journal archive, you’ll find no direct reference to where I work. I’ve always had a fear that if I offhandedly said something bad or top-secret in my journal about my job, that I’d show up for work the next day and get handed a pink slip. And I don’t really consider this job to be part of my identity or a part of me. I have no need to tell the world about what I do here or my office politics. When I leave this building, I leave behind my job. I never work on weekends. I never spend all evening talking about what I need to do at work. I try not to talk about my job when I’m at parties or other social functions. I work when I’m at work, and I spend my paycheck. As a human being, that’s how I think it should be. I could see why companies would want to brainwash their employees into thinking about their job 24 hours a day – it allegedly keeps them focused, makes them work harder. But my #1 priority is my fiction, and I’ve tried hard to make sure my technical writing does not contaminate it.

This hasn’t been a horrible place to work. It’s right on lake union, in two of the nicest buildings I’ve ever worked in. (Although the Musical Arts Center in Bloomington probably takes the cake.) I made good money, I got good benefits, and the company really took care of me. I got offices with doors, nice computers, free soft drinks, good dental insurance, garage parking, paid vacations, and lots of other stuff I never even had a chance to use. The people here are professional and treated me decently and I have no horror stories about the management or other coworkers, other than tiny pet peeves and boring meetings. No real complaints there.

This is the paragraph where I’m supposed to start the downslide, the one that starts with “But…” I can’t think of many problems with this job that weren’t my fault. Not that there’s any fault or blame, but I never felt like I fit in. I mostly work with people about ten years older than me who are interested in rock climbing and bicycling and saving the environment and doing Bob Vila stuff to their houses and going to little league games with their kids. If you know anything about me, that isn’t me. And I’m not saying that stuff is wrong, if that’s what you want to do. If you are a family person and interested in your community and everything else, that’s fine. But I’m not, and I’ve been afraid that if I didn’t conform to that, and think about my job 24 hours a day and make it the focal point of my life, that things would never work out here. And I was afraid that if I stayed here long enough, I’d wake up one day and have two kids, a minivan, and a Volvo stationwagon. So it’s not the job or the employer or anything like that. I think that most companies this size in Seattle have a similar demographic. And it required a drastic change for me to escape that. So here I am, packing up my shit and moving to New York.

My office is almost empty. It’s pretty new to me – I think I moved in this January. There’s an older building at 1500 Dexter that is very huge, very beautiful, with terrace decks overlooking the lake and a ten story tall atrium in the middle. I was over there until this recent move. My last office was on the tenth floor, and I could see the space needle. But the office pick situation got very screwed up this time, and now my office in the newer 1100 building is in the center of the floorplan, with no windows and no light except for the fluorescents. It’s a bummer, but since I’ve basically been hiding out and counting days since the move, it’s a good place to be. It’s not on an arterial hallway, and it’s rare that you see anybody walking past. It’s been a convenient location for being a short-timer.

When we moved in January, I hadn’t given notice, but I knew I was leaving. So I packed up almost all of my personal stuff and took it home, under the guise of streamlining my move. So my books, coffee mugs, Internet Bowl trophies, photos and everything else I accumulated over the last couple years are at home, waiting to get UPSed to New York. Actually, the trophies are already there. And last night, I brought everything home except my page of phone numbers. The place is now pretty bare.

It’s the end of a long era, and I feel that I should be saying more. The summer of 1996 seems like a hundred years ago. But, I’m excited to get out of here, pack up my shit and hit the road. I guess that’s all I’ve got to say about it. Maybe I’ll add more after I go home. For now, I’ve got to make some phone calls and get ready to leave.

It’s time to do my next collab for On Display.
“write about where you are. paint a written picture of where you live, and of the random people you meet during a typical day. walk through it, looking with a visitor’s eyes.”

I live in Seattle, Washington, in a small studio apartment in a fairly new building. It’s on the hill between Pioneer Square and First hill, which gives a decent view of the Kingdome and the area immediately south of downtown from my balcony. It’s also unofficially called “pill hill” because it’s right by Harborview Hospital, and near Swedish, Virginia Mason, and a dozen smaller hospitals. That means that at least a dozen ambulances a day pass below my fifth-story studio, and I have the best view in the house of Harborview’s helipad. I’ve lived here since the summer of 1995, so I don’t even notice these things, but if you’re a new visitor, chances are you’ll get freaked out by the incoming choppers and ambulances.

I guess Seattle is beautiful and everything, but I didn’t move here because I’m the outdoor type. I can’t explain the clubs or museums or mountains, because most of my tenure here has been in front of a computer monitor or at a Denny’s. And in three weeks, I’ll be done here, and on my way to New York City. All I can tell you about the outdoors and Seattle is that no matter how far away you drive, the natural scenery will still be overwhelmed with yuppies, driving Land Rovers and Volvos, dressed in overpriced REI gear, and hauling around their precious children in expensive European strollers that cost more than my car. Don’t come here to spend time by yourself.

My apartment is small, and without any of my stuff, it would look more like a hotel room – nice beige walls and light wood trim that looks very institutional. It’s not much bigger than a hotel room, really – it does have a huge bath and a kitchenette that overlooks the main room with a little bar-like counter. There are some big closets, one of which contains a washer and drier. The place is carefully constructed to facilitate a single person who doesn’t entertain much.

There’s one big room, which is my bedroom, office, living room, practice space, and library. It’s nice to have everything combined, really – I love sitting in bed, getting up and taking two steps to get another book, or three steps to go to the computer and log on. It’s a very comfortable space for me to get lost in.

Right now, there’s a lot of chaos involved with the move to New York. About half of the 500 or so books in my collection are either in NY already, or in boxes waiting to be carted to UPS for their shipment. My book collection covered two walls on a ragtag collection of shelves, but it almost looks sad in its current state. There are a lot of other boxes and gear that’s getting ready for the shipping truck, and many storage areas and closet shelves are now bare. In the next two weeks, everything will end up on the truck or in the trash, so it’s an odd picture right now.

Next to the books is my computer. It’s not much to look at, a home-built Linux machine sitting inside a case I bought back in 1992. But the desk under it is like a timeline of everything I’ve been doing lately, covered with all sorts of shit. A 35mm camera – a wind-up metronome – Strunk and White’s _Elements of Style_ – the new Adversary CD – a Timex Datalink watch – a Sony MZ-R50 MiniDisc Recorder – instructions for Shanghai for the Gameboy – a checkbook from 1992 – Burger King Ketchup packets – a ginsu steak knife – Denny’s receipts from last December – a small notebook that I filled with obscene haiku – an address stamp for my zine – two masters from my old band Nuclear Winter – a highball glass from Kilroy’s bar and grill in Bloomington, Indiana – a 1995 promo from the Japanese hardcore band United – a word count log from December for my second book, Rumored to Exist – a ton of notes on index cards from my first book Summer Rain. Oh, and a keyboard, mouse and monitor. The desk is a kitchen table, small and originally from an RV or modular home, not sure which. It’s a piece of shit and will soon be broken up for firewood.

My stereo is almost always on. Right now it’s playing track five of Dream Theater’s latest album, Falling Into Infinity. All of the stereo gear is Kenwood, except for a JVC tape deck and the aforementioned MiniDisc. My “entertainment center” is an endtable, which used to house a TV and some VCRs. The TV got sold a week ago, one VCR got returned to my ex, and the other is packed. Now the table is covered with about a hundred CDs. There’s a rack next to it with another 300, and another 100-odd discs are on bookshelves next to my computer. If you’re feeling industrious, go to my homepage and take a look at my collection sometime; it’s a real study in obsessive-compulsive disorder. I love my CDs though. From Anal Cunt to Frank Zappa, they’re all cool.

On the floor just next to my left foot is a pile of MiniDiscs, labels and cases, in various states of recording-dom. I’m dubbing as many CDs as possible for my two-week roadtrip across the country. There’s also the master pile of notes and sketches for Summer Rain. Oh, and my Hi8 camcorder and tripod are also there. And about five degrees over is a Hartke bass amp and my current bass, a Cort headless with the Steinberger Sound licensed tuner setup. My very first bass was an identical model, although in worse shape, so when I glance at it, I sometimes think it’s 1989 again.

I have a patio door over there which opens to a soot-covered balcony – I live right by I-5 – and I can see the Kingdome and all of that other stuff from there. Next to it is one of those huge sideways-sliding windows. When I open the shades, the place looks more like an air traffic control tower, but it’s a great feeling on one of the three days of the year when it’s actually sunny out. It’s cool to have that much glass facing the sky when it’s a clear night and it’s dark out, or even better, when the sky is dark grey and the clouds are light grey and quickly racing across the sky.

There’s not much more to go – just a bed, endtable, and dresser. My paper journal is on the floor – it is vastly different than this guy, and I’m much more religious about it than this. There’s usually a huge pile of books next to the bed, stuff I’m reading. But I haven’t been reading much since I’ve been so busy with the move. I think there’s a New Mexico tourism magazine and the Rand Mcnally atlas, and the Grimoire of Bass Guitar, a music theory book.

I was supposed to walk you though my day, but there’s not much left. I work for a software company about two miles away, but my last day is Friday, and all week I’ve shown up late, left early, and done nothing. I don’t have much human interaction because I am a shorttimer, and because I have the worst office in the world, tucked away in the bowels of the building. I talk to the guy across the hall, and every day we walk down the road and across the street to a deli to get sandwiches for lunch. Not much of a picture to paint though, I’ve been in my office planning my trip, writing email, and surfing the web.

After Friday, this will be my office for two weeks. When I’m not packing it up or throwing it out, I’ll be at the computer, trying to finish as much of Summer Rain as I can before I head out. That’s cool, though – I’ve done so much writing in this same exact spot, it’ll be good to get a decent run in before I left. I figure I’ve probably written close to a million words while sitting in front of this table. I hope to get another twenty grand in before the 31st.

This is turning into less of a description and more of a nostalgic garbage dump, so I better stop for now.

The start of a headache. Not sure why I’m at work at all. I want to go home, drag everything I own to the dumpster except the computer and stereo; put the rest in my piece of shit VW and start driving until it breaks down. Then fix it or get a rental car and leave its silver and rust carcass to die at the side of the road in the Nevada desert.

I almost typed Nevada dessert.

More open spaces are forming in my apartment as more stuff goes into moving boxes or garbage bags. I saw the top of my bookcase for the first time – since 1995, it has been a storage area for zines and assorted vomit bags I’ve collected from different airlines. And more stuff in the closet keeps vanishing, so you can actually see the shelves. It’s a good feeling.

I think I made it to bed by three last night. The night before, it was closer to five. That night, I was actually working on Summer Rain and had a reasonable excuse. Last night, I didn’t. I think I opened a file and looked at it, but not much more.

I’ve been feeling what I’d previously define as a low-grade depression for the last few days. It might be withdrawl from not having a TV to fill the empty spaces every night, but sometimes I get like this when there’s a slight gap in life and I don’t know how to fill it. I’m ready to be in New York, but I’ve got time to kill until then. If I was sentimental about this city at all, I’d be going to restaurants and crying about how much I’ll miss Discovery Park and the Space Needle and all of that. But I’m not that kind of person. I just wish I was moving tomorrow. The extra time gives me an opportunity to worry, or flash back to 1995 when I moved here. Then I think about how I first wanted to finish Summer Rain, pay off my student loans and credit cards, buy my Escort from the lease place, etc etc etc. I’d rather just leave in a hurry and not think about any of this.

It’s like the lesson of Summer Rain, which nobody really knows because I haven’t finished writing the fucking thing. But in that book, John (i.e. the fictional me) decides to stay in Bloomington for the summer and makes a bunch of promises to himself about what he’ll do for the summer – the justification – the job, the classes, waiting for his estanged girlfriend to come back to him. Over the summer, none of these happen. In fact, he fucks some of them up in fairly significant ways. But other things happen – he meets other people, he works other jobs, and he tries to start dating again. And in all of this, the book’s moral is that life never goes the way that you want it to, but it goes on. And after it goes on, you still look back at things that are technically mistakes and cherish them, maybe even more than if you hadn’t screwed things up.

And then I think about when Henry Miller left for Paris with five dollars in his pocket and nothing else in the world, and I think that at the very least, I have 550 CDs I can sell for food if I completely fuck things up.

I’m listening to Queensryche – Promised Land, which is their darkest and most introspective album, IMO. Songs like the title track and “Disconnected” have such a depth, but also a certain frequency which makes me want to sit on the deck and look at the traffic jam on I-5 and the red sun creeping through the clouds to vanish for the evening, and just sit there in depression and solitude. I don’t know, it more of a low-level thing like I was saying. Just a deep, heavy feeling. Maybe it’s just anticipation. I think I’m repeating myself.