Category: general

Marie’s cat and my friend, Mungo, passed away yesterday. He had a rare heart disease, and his passing was sudden and a surprise to everyone. I loved him very much, and he was greatly loved by everyone who knew him as a unique, intelligent, and beautiful cat. I feel very sad about this loss, and my only comfort was that I was lucky enough to spend time with such a gifted animal.

I know it sounds really stupid for me to write something like this when I’m usually writing about execution-style murders of cashiers at McDonald’s or throwing live cattle out of helicopters or whatever. But even though it’s true that you are what you write, I think it’s also just as true that you aren’t what you write. And even though the carpetbombing of a country halfway around the globe hasn’t appeared to phase me in my writing, it is amazing that sixteen pounds of fur and feline can register more emotion in me than anything else. I feel very bad for Marie and her loss, and I feel bad in general.

There’s a page about Mungo here with some very good comments about his life and passing.

It’s October 5th, 59 degrees outside, and I’m listening to holiday music already. (“Christmas” music to you non-atheists.) I don’t know why, but it’s chilly enough in here that one of the Windham Hill winter’s solstice albums seemed apropos. I really love listening to one of these albums when there’s a foot of snow on the ground and it’s a Saturday and I don’t really have to go anywhere. Today, all of the leaves are bright green and still on the trees, so I’ve got a ways to go before then.

I haven’t done much today, and haven’t left the house, with the tail end of this cold in my system. I didn’t really feel like stressing myself out by rolling out of bed early and climbing onto the petri dish train to get into the city. So I’ve been spending the afternoon ripping a round of CDs for the iPod. I keep running into CDs that will not rip on my CD/burner combo. Some eventually work on my old CD drive, but at a painfully slow rate (sometimes less than 1x.) And no, these aren’t CDs with any of the new, hare-brained copyright protection schemes; these are discs I’ve had in my collection for 10 years or more. It might be that the burner is an el-cheapo generic house brand, though.

I’ve been reading Gray’s Anatomy pretty much constantly all weekend. (The link goes to a fairly cool online version, but I have the half-foot thick paper rendition put out by Barnes and Noble, which works better in bed.) Every once in a while, I start to wonder stuff like “what is a gallbladder, and how can you live without one” or “how exactly is blood and urine exchanged in utero with a fetus?” I mean, I know there is an umbilical cord, but where does it go? It’s not like there’s an umbilical cord hookup jack inside of the uterus, like an RV sewer hookup at a trailer park. So whenever I get on one of these kicks, I spend hours going over the pages, trying to cut apart the latin doctor-speak and figure out what goes where. It’s the same sort of instinct that makes me read a road atlas for hours, except instead of knowing where I’m going or what’s around me, I sometimes like to know what I am, at least in the anatomical sense.

I’m slowly trying to re-order some of the books in the house, which is sort of a joke project, because there are enough of them and there’s no space for all of them, and many books are filed by size instead of any sort of subject matter system, because my shelves are of various heights. I don’t know, I have this book called At Home With Books, I think, and it has a house where the library, which is at least ten times bigger than mine, is sorted BY COLOR. So I guess my quest to get all of my travel books in one place isn’t as much of a windmill as that.

OK, I think a trip to the grocery store is in order.

Well, I guess it’s winter now. It seems strange that only moments ago, I was trying to think of a way to turn my refrigerator into a giant dehumidifier, and now I’m thinking it’s time to turn my stove into a giant humidifier. So let us begin the season where I bitch about the fact that my landlord is an idiot because I don’t have heat, and where my first concern in life is not getting a cold, or toning down the one I have.

I’m actually sick right now, although I hope I’ve stemmed off the worst of it. I’ve been taking huge amounts of vitamin C, beta-kerotene, multivitamins, all but eliminating any sugar from my diet, and drinking a fuckload of grapefruit juice. In the last 24 hours, I’ve seriously drank a gallon of the stuff. That plus the Indian food I had for lunch Friday to try and burn out the sickness has made my gastrointestinal situation something that you really don’t want to know about.

I also slept all day today, from about midnight last night to about 7:00 tonight. In a sense, I don’t like sleeping that much and killing an entire day, but if my body needs it and it helps, it sure beats sitting around the house. I slept without any drugs or cold medicine, and had bizarre and self-referential dreams, where heavy REM sleep usually takes items from everyday life and replays them, but because of a lack of anything but other sleep in recent memory, it turns dreams into total chaos.

I actually like that kind of thing. I remember at the end of 2000, I had a bunch of “use it or lose it” vacation, so I took something like two or three weeks off, and had no real plans except to hang out, and maybe write a bit. I got really sick and spent most of the time sleeping, sleeping all day and then waking up at three in the morning and drinking a quart of juice and eating a grilled cheese and playing Gauntlet on the Nintendo 64. Then I would go back to bed for another 20 hours, and have these bizarre, self-referential dreams where I was writing down my dreams in a journal, and then writing down that I was writing down dreams in a journal. It was fairly fucked up, but I wish I could have written it all down into a book.

So all of the windows are closed in the house, and it makes it feel much more isolated, but also much warmer. (It unfortunately, is not warm, because the heat isn’t on). But it has a much different vibe to it than the summer, and I’ve noticed it a lot more since the two were so close together this year. In the summer, I’m much more a part of the life right outside my windows, which I don’t entirely like. Now, the house is more of its own sealed ecosystem, like being in a space station or something. I think I like that a lot more.

Speaking of space stations, I’m done reading Red Mars and now I’m working on the very beginning of Green Mars. The book moves to the next generation of people, the kids that were born on Mars, and are now becoming adults. The first book takes place over an extended generation, maybe 50 years in all. It’s amazing, like reading the Lord of the Rings books, except I’m not a fan at all of that stuff, and this has been a more compelling read for me.

I think I’m running down on working on the glossary. I mean, I am still doing the limited-edition print book when CafePress starts doing perfect binding. But I don’t feel like adding more material now, I need to get back to writing. I am working on the next book, the “next Rumored”, and even though I am not writing, I am thinking. Unfortunately, because I am sick, I’m not thinking. I’m sitting in front of the TV with a comforter over me and a million empty grapefruit juice bottles, flipping the channels. I actually watched a big chunk of that Josie and the Pussycats movie last night. One show that I did watch tonight that was interesting was this new NBC show set in Las Vegas, about the life of a casino worker. It’s very catchy, well-filmed, and gives you this insider look at a huge empire behind closed doors in the same way that ER gives you an insider look at the adrenaline rush and horror of working in an emergency room. They showed two episodes of this show tonight, and I really did like it. It also makes me really ancy to get back there, which I will later this month.

Not much else. I’ve put a heating pad on my computer chair, and it works well. My back is a little torqued out, a mix of doing nothing and this cold. The heat coming from my chair feels great though. Now I need to move it to the couch and fire up the Playstation 2 for some old fashioned lighting people on fire with flamethrowers in Red Faction.

It rained like Noah and the flood today. I think it started about ten seconds before I got ready to leave. When I looked outside, it was dropping in heavy sheets, propelled sideways by this wicked wind. I put on my army jacket even though the thermometer said 71, just so I would have a hood and some coverage over my body. By the time I got to the office, it looked as if I had forded a river up to my crotch level. The jeans took all day to dry; luckily, I had two pair of new socks left from a three-pack I bought the last time this happened.

Not much is going on. I think the glossary will be printed by the end of the year. I will use cafepress, they have a new feature for doing custom books. It will not have an ISBN or bar code, and will only be available from their site or from me directly (no Amazon, B&N, etc.) This is a downside, but the good part is that I will be able to do any format I want for the book design, so I will use lots of photos and make it look good. And the book will probably be a hair cheaper than what iUniverse has been doing. I don’t expect to sell many at all – this is a custom job, mostly so I can give away some copies as a thank you to those who have helped me.

The other cool part is that it will be my press that “puts out” the book. So I need to make up a name and a dumb logo to put on the spine of the book.

Anyway, go read the glossary and give me your ideas or edits. I am going through it, adding new things, checking my spelling, looking for new pictures to scan and add. That’s all.

I’ve been sick all week. Not a horrible kind of sick, where you cough up bucketloads of stuff and need to drink NyQuil like sodapop, but just this real low-level thing where I had a slight wheezing and gunk in the back of my throat, and felt dead-tired constantly. I went to work each day, but every night, I would eat two grilled cheese sandwiches and two packets of Cup-A-Soup, then pass out. So the whole week felt like one continuous day. On Thursday, I slept 11 hours, then I got home from work Friday, fell asleep for 4 hours, then ate Chinese food and went back to bed for twelve hours. Now I don’t feel so bad.

Not much else is up. I have run out of steam on the self-help book, and I’ll get back to it later. I’ve been in a weird Summer Rain sort of mood, something about the smell in the air. (Not the urine and sewage smell of New York, something else.) I even read a few pages of it last night, just to see how it matched up with the pictures in my head. I’d really like to finish this book of short stories about Bloomington, but I feel like there needs to be one core story, one or two things that really pull together the whole book. I just don’t know what it is yet.

And yesterday, I was somewhere – maybe the machine room at work – and I smelled this air conditioning smell, the smell of a totally pure, filtered, and way cold AC unit that reminded me exactly of what Ballantine 308 used to smell like. That used to be a big Mac lab, full of II ci’s, I think. I spent a lot of time there, both as a consultant and as a regular. I don’t remember what it was about that room, but it had a really heavy-duty AC system in there or something, louder than in most rooms, and it looked very artificially bright, like the ceiling had different lamps or tiles in it. I don’t know, but I think they long ago gutted that room and filled it full of generic PCs, so I’m sure that whole era is lost.

OK, I just ate two hot dogs from Mano’s Papaya, so I’m going to wait for my stomach to explode.

I’ve been busy lately – actually working on book-type writing. Also deleting a million mail messages an hour because of spam generated by that latest virus.

Two neat things I learned today:

1. If you want to find out what direction is north, hold the 12 on your analog watch facing the sun. North is halfway between 12 and the hour hand.
2. To determine when the sun will set, measure the distance from the sun to the horizon using the width of your four fingers held at arms’ length. Each of these four finger widths is an hour from the current time to when the sun sets. Each finger width is 15 minutes

I need to sleep now.