The Wrath of Kon

First post

Fri, 11 Apr 1997 00:00:00 GMT

This is my first entry, and I’m still trying to iron out the kinks in this thing. I have an emacs function (thanks to Bill) that opens a text file with today’s date whenever I do a C-x C-j, so I can always pull up a file for today. They are text files though, and I have no idea if they will later be html-ized in any way. I’d like to, I guess, but I don’t want to be typing this stuff and adding tags and thinking about page formatting - it’s too much of a distraction. Just straight text will work for now, and I can always reformat it later.

I also don’t know how I will index these into a master html page. I guess I could write some kind of script to run through the directory and then somehow order the stuff, make links, and slap in the html. That’s a future project, I guess. For now, I’m just going to keep journaling on a daily basis so when I do create a web page, it won’t be for like 3 journal entries.

This whole project is sort of conflicting with my regular project, which is journaling on paper. I’ve kept pretty much daily journals since November of 93, and I have odd bits and pieces of journals that date back to high school. I’ll still keep a seperate paper journal, because it’s somewhat of a different project. This online journal won’t contain any of the private information that I keep in my paper journals. I’ll talk about personal stuff in here, but there’s a certain boundary I’m going to create, since this is on the internet, and anyone with a search engine, or from work, or whatever, can look at this and read it. Also, I don’t intend for this to be as in-depth as my paper journal. But I guess the boundaries and differences will define themselves further as this whole thing progresses.

I’ve been thinking of putting my paper journals online, or at least typing them in to have a backup-able format. Also, I don’t think I’ll be able to read my own handwriting in 10 or 20 years (I can barely read it now). But I don’t think I can put my journals on-line, because of the privacy issue, and it would take forever to do. I think i figured that I have about 1200 sheets of spiral notebook paper I’d have to type in. So that project will probably wait. But last night, I did type in all of my information from a smaller 1992 diary and a 1989 daily planner, just because those two things will probably get lost or destroyed at some point.

I should probably start talking about something other than the mechanics of the whole endeavor. This is a bad time for me to start an online journal, because I’m leaving for vacation on the 15th. Karena and I are flying to LA that day. Actually, we’ll be going to Orange county and staying in a hotel near Disneyland. The trip package included a car, and passes to Universal Studios and Disney. We’ll be going to Universal on the 16th, and spend the 17th-19th and maybe the morning of the 20th at Disney. We fly out on the 20th. We’ll also try to hit any other LA touristy things each night, since the park is only open till 7 on weekdays.

I’m pretty excited about leaving for a while - this is my first ‘real’ vacation. I’ve been on school trips and parental vacations, but they don’t entirely count. This is the first time I’ve booked a flight for something that didn’t involve family or work. I have taken many roadtrips, and I have been to more than half of the states in the country, but this will be a real change of pace. Also, it has been pretty shitty in Seattle - it is always raining and dark. In the last week or two, it is almost clearing up, but it will be nice to be in California.

I am also nervous about the whole trip. I always get nervous before I travel - that I’ll forget something, forget the tickets, miss a flight, or whatever. I’m also not sure how we’re getting to the airport, since both the shuttle services and the airport parking are a complete ripoff. So I need to figure all of this stuff out. At least we are leaving in the afternoon - I really hate getting ready to fly out on an 8:00 am flight, which usually means you have to get up at like 3 in the morning to shower, pack, check everything, wait for the shuttle, take the shuttle (which is always late), check in, etc.

Today is the 5 month anniversary of me and Karena being together. I think that means this is my 3rd longest relationship. I was with Tanya for 6 or 7 months (although there was a summer break apart in the middle of it), and I was with Becky for just over 11 months. It still feels weird to be in a relationship, but I guess I am pretty settled into it now. Still no complaints or anything. This weekend will be weird because we aren’t visiting each other. Since we will be on this trip all week, we decided it would be best not to visit, save some money, get all of our pre-vacation stuff done like laundry or whatever, and just wait until Monday when she is coming up here. It will be odd to have a weekend by myself again. My first thought is that I’ll be sleeping all day, eating junk food, getting a bunch of writing done, and enjoying myself like when I was single. In reality, I will probably miss her a lot and just mope around the house and do some laundry.

I just spilled chili on this yellow shirt. I should watch my eating while I’m writing…

I’ve been worried like hell about money lately - I owe the school, the dentist, and two credit cards about $500 each. Last night, I calmed down about it and sort of figured out a schedule to get it paid off. Then thismorning, the dentist calls to say he wants me to come in to get some more fillings done. Every time I think I am done there, he thinks of some other thing I should get done that will cost me another $300. Plus he wants me to get braces, will be another 10 grand and 2 or 3 years of agony. My teeth don’t hurt, they look OK, and I can eat okay. So I am just going to tell him to go fuck himself, and change dentists before my next cleaning. He is worse than the Ford dealership on this stuff (and more expensive!).

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I’m so proud of myself. My litte C program to convert directory listings to html is mostly working. It’s been almost 4 years since I worked with C on a daily basis, so it was very muddled when I started. I couldn’t remember any specifics about file i/o, and string operations were not too clear either. But it can read a file and convert it, so it is technically functional. I’ll add more to it later, but it looks like I’ll be able to work with this.

I got my Queensryche fan club stuff today - a signed photo, some stickers, and the price list for other merchandise. It was pretty quick - about 8 days turnaround time.

Life is otherwise boring, and I’m going to give in to my TV vice and watch ER.

Home for a weekend

Sat, 12 Apr 1997 00:00:00 GMT

It’s a beautiful day out and I wish I wasn’t at work. But, I just have today and Monday, and then I go on vacation. Also, we had pizza for lunch here at work, and ate out on the 10th floor terrace. The sky’s very blue, really clear, and it’s a little windy, so some boats were out on Lake Union. I hope it keeps up until 5.

I found out that Queensryche will be playing here June 21, and in Portland on June 20. I’ll have to find out if the fan club has any special deal or anything like that before I buy tickets. I’d like to go to both shows, but I might only be able to afford one.

It feels weird that I won’t be leaving tonight for Longview or waiting for Karena to come up from Longview. I’m not sure what I’ll be doing tonight, but I’ll probably just work on the video or maybe watch some videos, and get the place cleaned up. If I’m staying in this apartment for another year and a half, I need to think about how things are arranged and stored. I’m tearing apart my closets right now, throwing things out and rearranging things so I’ll have more space. If I rearrange all of the disorder, it will give me more room to live and make it feel like a new place. So, there’s a lot of cleaning projects going on before the vacation.

I’ve been reading two books lately - _Your Money or Your Life_ and _Living Cheaply With Style_. They are both good books and get me into the mindset of spending less money. If I read video magazines or catalogs, I start thinking about how I need to spend money and buy new equipment or get involved in some giant project that involves a major investment in new gear. But these two books are slowly teaching me some things about saving money. This might just be a fad and I might just give it up and start blowing money in a week or a month. But I’d like to eventually pay off the bills and live somewhat frugally. I used to exercise some of these principles when I lived in Bloomington, just to survive. I didn’t always have the money to eat fast food every day, and I did more cooking back then. But, I also mismanaged money even more back then. I need to combine the two, and start to get money in the bank.

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I want to find that Boeing surplus store in Renton or Federal Way or whereever it is, and buy a bunch of weird shit and put it together to look very Geiger-like in my living room. I wish I knew how to weld, and owned a torch. I could build facing plates for my bed and appliances, and make them look like a crashed jet. Too bad I’ve got such a hangup about steel and the touch of metal - it makes every filling my my mouth try to jump out of my face or something. If I could eat with plastic silverware every day for the rest of my life, I’d be a happy man.

I’ve seriously been thinking some surplus military radio gear would be almost perfect in my apartment. I should explain, since this is a new journal. I live on the 5th floor of a 5 floor building in downtownish Seattle. It’s technically called “pill hill”, the area between Pioneer Square and Capitol Hill, and it’s home to about a dozen hospitals. My deck overlooks James Street, which is 7 floors below me (2 garages), and The Thing They Didn’t Tell Me when I moved in was that about 400 ambulances come screaming up the hill every night, in addition to the helipad that’s just across the way at Harborview hospital. So when summer rolls around and all of the drunken rednecks who don’t wear helmets wreck their motorcycles, waves of helicopters come rolling in to attempt to save part of the pathetic people’s spines, maybe so they can still wrap their hand around a Budweiser bottle without the help of a nurse. Anyway, if I had a good enough radio, I could listen to these emergency radio bands and maybe even broadcast on them.

On a vaguely related note, I was changing channels after watching ER last night, and at about midnight on the public access channel, they were showing all-out porno. Not that I’m against that or anything, but it was pretty surprising to see it on regular cable. It was some sort of artistic statement about having sex in public or something. It wasn’t just a couple people in swimsuits under a blanket or something, though. It was full-out, penetrative, no-holds-barred stuff. I guess they will let you play anything on public access cable.

Disneyland on two broken legs

Sun, 13 Apr 1997 00:00:00 GMT

When I woke this morning, it felt like my neck had been snapped. I started thinking about Christopher Reeve and this conversation I had with my girlfriend the other day about a kid who wrecked his ATV, ran up $125,000 in medical bills, and was a quadrapalegic (sp?). But I could move, so it was just a sore neck from my fucked up bed. I’m getting worried that with $1000 in nonrefundable plane tickets, that every single biological system in my body will completely fail in the next 3 days. I’ll be in Disneyland with two broken legs, no control over my own bowels, bubonic plague, and a blood clot over the part of my brain that controls my ability to discern the difference between being at work and being on vacation.

Well, I did get some rest last night. I watched Raising Arizona and Queensryche’s Operation:Livecrime concert tape. I also did a lot of flipping through channels and a bit of writing. I was thinking about doing some video stuff, like editing together a bunch of crap to send to my friend Simms back in Indiana. I saw a show on cable access where two guys took some horrible Burt Reynolds film and replaced the sound to make it like a cross between MST3K and a 70s porno. It completely ruled, and I started thinking of how I could do the same thing with some of the movies I have here, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Eventually, I’ll have to do something like that.

Overall, it was a strange evening. Now that I’m gone or have Karena here every weekend, spending an evening without her made it feel like a ‘school night’. I kept watching the clock, thinking I should hit the sack so I could get to work the next day. And this morning - I forgot that without someone or something to get me out of bed, I don’t wake up until noon, and it takes me another 2 hours to take a shower. It’s 1:40 right now, and I still haven’t eaten. I think I’m going to go grab something, unload all of the CDs the Columbia House Club sent me that I don’t want anymore, and then maybe catch a matinee. Or just wander - who cares, as long as it doesn’t involve sudden neck movements.

ObFlashback: I was eating shelled peanuts last night, and remembered a moment when I was a kid, maybe 6 or 7. My parents, sister, and I were in St. Louis, staying with some of my Dad’ friends from the Air Force. (My parents met in St. Louis, when my dad was stationed there). Anyway we were with my ‘grandpa’ Mamola, at some bar where there were free shelled peanuts and you just threw the shells on the ground. It was the coolest concept in the world to me, aside from that show ‘Rescue 911’ and maybe Godzilla. Also, grandpa Mamola was the first person I ever saw who put salt in his beer.

Chasing Amy, recording CDs

Mon, 14 Apr 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I ended up seeing _Chasing Amy_ last night with my friend Virginia. It was a pretty good film - a new direction for Kevin Smith, but a lot of the old humor and ideas that made _Clerks_ and _Mallrats_ so funny. I’m glad I saw it while it was in the ‘limited cities’ stage of release though, because I think the moral majority is going to pipe-bomb the View Askew offices to keep this film out of the multiplexes. And it’s funny, because all of these lesbian or chik bisexual lipstick lesbian wannabe riot grrls were at the film, and it was not some sort of anthem for the lesbian nation or something. I was getting ready for half of the theatre to walk out during the middle of the film when they realized the picture realistically showed both sides of the story.

I should disclaim the last statement a bit by saying I have nothing against people who follow their hearts when they are finding their sexuality. I do have problems with people who define their sexuality by some flavor-of-the-week trend, or political agenda. It’s especially bad in Seattle - it seems there are so many people in this town that are ready to jump on the next bandwagon just to prove they are not part of the mainstream. Remember kids, it’s not nonconformity if everyone else you know is doing it.

I was just thinking - I wonder what it would’ve been like if the internet was in full swing when the space shuttle Challenger blew up. There would have been two years’ worth of conspiracy theories about missiles shooting the thing down, explosive payloads, aliens, and CIA payback theories. Now that the internet propagates the most unofficial theories as official documentation, I think everything has a conspiracy theory behind it. I wonder if this fuels or sinks the paperback conspiracy theory book trade.

The weather isn’t as nice today - pretty windy. I’m also still having sore neck problems, which makes me much lazier about the cleaning and packing chores. I might work on some video stuff today, and try to figure out what gear I’ll be taking to the park. That is, if I ever get a shower and some lunch…

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I’ve been taping CDs all day, since I won’t see a CD player for the next week. It’s so annoying - remember back when everyone’s albums were like 38-40 minutes long? Now it’s more like 60-72 minutes. So I bought some of those CD-IT tapes from Sony, mostly because they were on sale. Well, the commercials say “these are so custom engineered to be the length of your CD, you couldn’t do it better if you were loading the cassette shells yourself!” Anyway, after closer inspection, these are 94 minute tapes. So you get a whopping 2 extra minutes per side. TWO FUCKING MINUTES! Maybe these were custom designed for people recording Peter, Paul, and Mary albums, but 2 extra minutes doesn’t help me much when I’m recording this 74 minute Henry Rollins album, does it?

Anyway, packing for this trip hasn’t been advancing too much. I did get my suitcase out of my storage closet, and my laundry is largely done, but otherwise I haven’t thought of things. It shouldn’t be too bad though - since I leave every other weekend, I should be able to just do the same thing I do on Fridays and throw a few changes of clothes in a bag, dump everything from my sinktop into a Safeway bag, and make sure the camcorder is ready to roll in its case. It’s a little more involved than that, but my typical philosopy when traveling is that if you forgot it, you can just buy another one. As long as I don’t forget something impossible to find like prescription medication or impossible to afford like eyeglasses, I will be okay.

I didn’t mean to knock the Henry Rollins album. If I was putting out a CD, I would use every single bit possible on the media. It’s sort of sad that the longest CD in the world is a Depeche Mode bootleg.

I need something to read for this trip, so I’m going to the bookstore. I haven’t been reading anything at all lately - I should get back into reading books on a regular basis. TV has doomed me, I’m thinking of disconnecting my cable just to get my mind back.

On the Road tradition

Tue, 15 Apr 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I think I finished packing last night, but I still have to go buy some more stuff, like sunscreen. I can go from white to red in 15 minutes at dusk. I need the SPF-1000 stuff.

I started reading _On the Road_ last night, a regular tradition before I take a big trip somewhere. (_Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ is also a favorite) I read OTR when I went to San Francisco last year, and it was great to read about places and then see them myself. I read all about North Beach while I was on the plane, and then when I was wandering around town, I saw all of the same landmarks. Someday, I’d like to read the book and write down all of the exact roadtrips that Sal took and then take the same voyages. I’m sure someone with more spare time than me has done the same thing already, and a lot of the roads don’t exist anymore, but it’d still be fun.

I don’t know though - I drove almost across the country, and it sucked at the time. It’s fun to look back at everything I saw, but it was a really mind-numbing experience. I listened to every tape I owned like 10 times and had to stop in Minnesota or Montana or somewhere at this sad, prefabricated shopping mall in the middle of rural nowhere to buy some more tapes. I was so bored of even the same TYPES of music that I was listening to that I bought Billy Joel, Green Day, and big band tapes, just to keep me awake. And, as Chris Rock observed, malls in the most backward places of the country are the same as the ones everywhere else: Radio Shack, Sunglasses Hut, Chick-Filet, Orange Julius, and Payless Shoes. Anyway, aside from the boredom, I drove across the country on I-90, which is a fairly major road from East to West. Most of OTR took place on tiny, two-strip roads with lots of stoplights and small towns to pass through. This was before all of the highway bills of the 50s. If you’re a Seattle native, try driving on 99 from downtown Seattle to downtown Tacoma - that’s pretty much what Sal Paradise’s life was like for most of his travels.

Leaving for LA

Wed, 16 Apr 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’m just about ready to leave for LA - I’m totally packed except for last second additions, and I’m waiting for Karena to get ready. I still have some errands to run before we go to the airport, and we will probably go to lunch before we leave. My stomach is really tore out right now though, I don’t know how much lunch I could eat. Hopefully it will settle down soon.

Not much else is up - we watched that Nick Cage movie Valley Girl last night. Interesting… It wasn’t until halfway through the film that I realized that the main girl’s dad was the guy that played Chef in Apocalypse Now.

Time to get out of here. I’ll be writing more on the 20th, when I get back. Until then, it will be the trusty laptop - a 120 page Mead spiral notebook…

A week in Hollywood (or Anaheim, anyway)

Tue, 22 Apr 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’m back. The trip was a lot of fun and an interesting change of scenery, but it was also a lot of work. I’m pretty beat from all of the marathon days of walking miles in the heat and standing in lines. On most days, the fun of the attactions made up for all of that, but on the days of flying, there was no fun, and the crying kids, illogical airports and LA freeways took their toll. But overall it was fun.

It would be hard for me to write a detailed list of what I did over the last week, so I’ll summarize. On Tuesday, we flew from Seattle to John Wayne airport in Orange County, got a car, and drove to Anaheim to check in at the hotel. The LA highways massively suck, and it took me 2 hours to make the 40-some mile trip, mostly because I ended up driving in the wrong direction and there was absolutely no way for me to determine this because none of the highways tell you where you are going, they just tell you nice names of dead Spanish people, which might help you if you are writing a term paper on the Mexican revolution or something but doesn’t help at all when you’re trying to figure out where the fuck you are.

On Wednesday, we went to the park from like 9 to 7, and rode every single ride there except for the really dumb kids rides in ToonTown. The Star Tours ride was cute, Space Mountain was sort of a bummer for me, Pirates was great, and we rode Thunder Mountain about 4 or 5 times that day. Thunder Mountain is not an incredible rollercoaster, but it is scary enough to keep infants and screaming kids off of it, and it is unpopular enough that it did not have huge lines like Indiana Jones or Space Mountain. We did ride Indiana Jones, and it was okay, but not worth a 6 hour wait. We also ate in the New Orleans quarter, and it was surprisingly cheap - less than $10 each for lunch. That night, we got in the car and drove south, hoping to find a Boston Market or IHOP or something that was not within walking distance of the park. I found an all-talk radio station and Ricky Rachtman was on with a call-in show. It was surprisingly good, considering the grudge I hold against the guy for his years as the host of Headbangers’ Ball on MTV. We didn’t find anything, and came back to Anaheim and walked to a Denny’s. Once again, prices were low - I got my usual of a grilled cheese and a bowl of soup, and we both ate for like 11 bucks. I wondered if the rumored inflation in California was just a matter of perspective, and things would cost about the same as Seattle. And except for tourist traps, I was mostly correct.

Thursday was early admission day, and we got to the park at like 7:30. We couldn’t get on any good rides like the bobsleds or Thunder Mountain, and everyone was jacking up the lines on the stuff like Space Mountain, so we rode the dumb kiddie rides before the dumb kiddies woke up. I camcordered stuff like the flying Dumbo and the Teacups. We rode a bunch of stuff over again, and checked out smaller stuff like the Disney Gallery, which had some cool models they used to build the park. We left the park to rest a bit and eat some lunch, and went to a McDonald’s which, once again, was only pennies more than the one here in Seattle.

Speaking of lunch, I need to go eat some now. So, more in a bit…

Karena’s staying at my house today while I’m at work - it was nice to come home and eat lunch with her there. But I was in the middle of a story, so I should finish my trip summary here.

Okay, Thursday we stayed until the park closed, and then ate somewhere close to the hotel. I remember we ate at IHOP twice and Denny’s once, but I don’t remember which nights. There was a row of restaurants in Anaheim, and the selection wasn’t too terrible, but the places were packed whenever we got there, which generally made service below par. Both Dennys and IHOP were open late enough so we could get in there when nobody else was around, though, and the servers were pretty nice.

Friday, we decided to change plans a bit and take a day at Six Flags. The drive north through LA was not too bad, and we even got to listen to a bit of Howard Stern on the way up. The park was crowded, but I managed to get to 8 coasters and a sit-down lunch of pizza in 6 hours. We rode on some Colorado water raft ride, and I thought we wouldn’t get too wet - I practically got immersed in the water and my clothes were wet from head to toe for the rest of the day. I almost got in a fight with some people who were cutting in line, which really pissed me off - later I realized it could’ve got me shot, and I calmed down. We left a little early, ate at Wendy’s and headed back. After some rest, we went to Disney and caught the night show. It was interesting - they did a bunch of lights and characters and music and crap, but they also had water projection screens and some explosives, so it wasn’t too bad.

Saturday, we went to Universal, again in LA. We took the tram tour, which showed us old scenery from films like Spartacus, Back to the Future, Three Amigos, Psycho, and a million more. The rides at Universal were for the most part lame and had million mile long lines. But we did go on the special effects tour, and I got to do sound effects for a Harry and the Hendersons clip. We also saw the movie Chasing Amy while we were there. That night, we went back to Disney again to check things out and ride a few rides for the last time.

Sunday was a horrorfest. We couldn’t find where to drop off the rental car at LAX, and then we couldn’t check in our baggage because we were too early. We couldn’t find any lockers, then had to go to another building to eat lunch, while dragging all of our luggage. We finally checked in, and waited another 4 hours for our flight. It was full, and full of screaming babies, so it took forever to load. We got back and I just broke down, from a total lack of sleep, food, patience, and ability to go on. Luckily, I was able to sleep it off, and here I am.

And here I am leaving - it is 5:15 and I am still at work. Maybe I will write more later tonight.

I need a Bunker Era

Wed, 23 Apr 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’m listening to Motorhead’s fine album Ace of Spades right now - Dojo has re-released all of the old Motorhead albums, remastered with lots of bonus tracks and new liner notes - all at a cheaper price point of about $12 a CD. I’m going to try to buy up all of them that I can, a week at a time.

Last night was pretty relaxing. Karena and I went to eat at Marie Callender’s (Collander’s? Collenaderes? whatever). She had to leave, which was a bummer, but I didn’t want her to get caught in some windstorm at 11 at night in the middle of nowhere or something. I read the rest of On the Road and then started reading this book about Burroughs and the Bunker era - when he lived in NYC from 1974-1981. It was a decent evening because I was able to just read, and the TV set didn’t come on all night. I need to do that more often, if I want to get back up to speed with writing.

That’s my next big plan - I’ve been thinking I need to get off my ass and start writing again. I haven’t even been reading at all this year, and I haven’t really been seriously writing for a year. I have been editing, dicking around, cutting up, experimenting, and writing journals. But I haven’t really been filling empty pages since last April, when I finished the first draft of Rumored to Exist.

So I need to read first. And I need to think more about what I’m going to write. Not just the subject matter, but what I’m really trying to accomplish with the writing. When I read On the Road this time, I tried to ignore the urge to think of it as just an autobiography and really start to look at what Kerouac did with the book - the voice he used and how he had an agenda beyond just telling the story of a generation or a period of time in his life or a friend. There’s an underlying force that pulls you through the book, because if you really look at the plotline, it isn’t like your typical movie that has the whole rise-fall rollercoaster of plot. There’s a more subtle force pulling you from page 1 to 254, and I need to figure out what it is. It was also the reason I read all of Infinite Jest without giving up. Sure, I wanted to find out what happened to the characters, but the hooks were different than those pulling you through a Sylvester Stallone movie or something.

In thinking about all of it, I want to rewrite my book Summer Rain over the next few months, but I want to throw out everything I’ve written sofar. I want to start with the story in my head, take some notes, write a really heavy-duty outline, and start completely over. I have a lot of new ideas, and I think it’s time to throw away the old approach and start filling in the blank pages again. I’m going to start reading books that I think are similar to what I want to do, and start taking a lot of notes.

—

Ray interviewed Jello Biafra last night, over the phone. I’ve listened to his double- and triple- albums full of politics and humor and anger and punkness so much over the last 10 years, that it would freak me out to talk to him in person. It would be like going to a Pizza Hut with James Earl Jones or walking in a mall with Cheech Marin and hearing him say “gimme a dollar Jon, I want to go buy an Orange Julius” or something. Jello has such a trademark voice that you’d expect him to say a line off of one of his albums, not something that had to do with you. I guess when he talked to Ray, he was really nice and told this story about one time when he visited Goshen, Indiana on a whim - Goshen is right next to Elkhart, where Ray currently lives, and Ray’s girlfriend lives in Goshen. Anyway, it was also freaky to think of Jello in a town where I once spent a summer working in a factory dropping plastic pipes into boxes.

I got the address of one of the main characters fictionalized in my book Summer Rain. We sort of dated about 5 years ago, became just friends, and then she moved away like a year later. I don’t know what she’s been up to, and I have been always wanting to contact her, but couldn’t. Now that I have her address in my hands, I don’t know what to write her or tell her. It’s strange that the most significant females in my life are the ones I can’t find anymore. I guess the lukewarm relationships always end on good terms - the most passionate ones end with somebody moving across the country without a forwarding address.

I accidentally ate some avacado, and now want to go eat a pound of cream cheese to get the taste out of my mouth. I don’t think the taste of it is that horrible, it is just that it looks exactly like guacomole.

Changing of the leather jacket guard

Thu, 24 Apr 1997 00:00:00 GMT

It’s another Motorhead day - I picked up a copy of Overkill last night and I’ve already listened to it 3 times today. I also bought an Enigma CD, which must’ve looked weird to the guy at the counter.

So in listening to Lemmy and reading about Burroughs, I wonder why my life is so boring and what I can do to fuck it up more. Most people feel the same feeling, but it’s from a Green Day record or something, so they go out and dye their hair or pierce something or tear up a pair of jeans, but those aren’t acceptable “nonconformist” things for me to do for the sake of adventure or deviance. I think about stuff like writing a completely fucked up story, one where even my friend Ray just spits Pepsi out of his nose while reading it and says “that IS fucked up”.

Like I said, I have been reading a lot about Burroughs in this book - I forget who wrote it - about his years in New York in “The Bunker”, which was a fucking huge 3 room flat in the Bowery that had no windows and used to be a YMCA’s locker room. The book is a series of interviews, of Burroughs talking to artists and musicians and writers in the NY scene where art was getting decadent, music was becoming punk, and writing was just freaking out.

Simms called me last night at about 1am - I left him a message about my Disney trip, because we saw those audiotronic bears at Disney and they were singing “Riders on the Storm”, which is a Simms standard and made me think of all of the Simms standards so much that I had to break out a tape of the Surfing Richards the other day just to listen to some of it. Anyway, he told me about 20 times to go see Lost Highway, so I will have to check it out. Unfortunately, it is just a midnight movie on the weekend, so I don’t know when the fuck I’ll get in there. But it sounds abnormal enough to make me think about what I’m doing with the writing.

I also told Simms about the Small World ride, where they played the song like 2000 times and you couldn’t get it out of your head for days. After we rode Small World, I could sing the first note of the song and Karena would get all freaked out and have flashbacks, as would just about everybody else who rode the damn thing, including the ones who didn’t even speak English. So I was singing other songs all day, and then I would change the words. Like, I’d start singing the Motorhead song “(We Are) the Roadcrew”except when I’d get to the chorus, I’d sing “We are the Small World”. I did that with about every song I could remember the words to, and sometimes I wish/I’m glad I don’t have a portable DAT.

—

Two unrelated but related items:

First, today is my ex-girlfriend’s birthday. I don’t remember how old she will be, 23 or 22 or something. 23. I didn’t write her, because I don’t know where she is. I just remembered her birthday.

Second, I retired my leather jacket, and bought an identical one. Well, almost identical - it is from the same store, same model, but it has different stuff in the shell, feels lighter, cheaper. The leather doesn’t look as black and the belt buckle is crappier. But the smell - it reminds me of the day I bought the first jacket.

I bought that first jacket in November, 1993, with my student loan check. I bought it because she left me - because I felt like I needed some other icon, some other protective force that defined what I was. It was like a bulletproof vest. It wore on me more perfectly than any other piece of clothing I had ever owned, borrowed, or rented. It became a trademark - the Konrath jacket. Along with the Konrath walkman, it went with me everywhere. It went to Canada twice, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, California, across the country, on every roadtrip, to work, classes, bars, parties, concerts, everywhere.

Anyway, it feels weird to have a new old jacket. The cut is about the same, and at first glance it feels identical. But it isn’t the same old jacket, which makes me sad and wish it was 1993 again. But it SMELLS like the same old jacket did in 1993 - that new leather smell. It’s a brief time travel to the day when it all started. Almost…

Heavy metal \647

Fri, 25 Apr 1997 00:00:00 GMT

More Motorhead today. I wish I could put the little umlaut above the o - there’s got to be some way to do it, but it will end up being a \647 in most people’s browsers or something. Motorhead, new leather jacket, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing at work. I should go out and steal a Harley.

I had a very intense dream where I was playing with a cigarette lighter for a long time and I couldn’t get it to spark or light. I messed with it for a long time, got it to strike, and started lighting stuff on this kitchen table, sort of as a joke. There was a piece of wood, or a box, or something, and it was burning with an immense but slowly wisping flame, like a scene from Backdraft. I tried to stomp it out, and freaked out because no amount of suffocation would stop the fire - it spread and hovered with a lazy precision over the surface of the whole table, and later the floor. I was screaming and trying to beat out the flames when I pulled myself from the ether and back to the real world. But when I woke up, I could only see in black and white, almost a posterized image. I looked at my window and miniblinds for several minutes, and couldn’t see any hues at all. I got my glasses, and started looking at other things in the room, and my color vision was fine.

I’ve begun reading these 20 year old encyclopedias (encyclpediii?) of mine, as leisure reading. It’s interesting to grab one and randomly browse through the pages, reading about countries you’ve never heard of. Most reference materials contain a certain political bias, but they also have so much useless demographical or technical data, that they’re better for me. I mean, you can’t find out about the Bahamas from travel agents or web sites or the media, because you’ll get this totally sterilized, promotionalized version of the story, wereas an encyclopedia will tell you the number of acres and average rainfall and chief economy and other items with relational values. Grated, they are all fucked up because this book came out in like 1973 or something, but ancient history doesn’t change too much. I mean, in recent years people might say that Abraham Lincoln fucked slaves or was a homo or smoked dope, but at least I can look up when he was born and died, and that hasn’t changed too much.

---

On a logistical note, I started the first step of shifting everything around and getting it ready for html. I will eventually have a batch program that converts these text files to html. I don’t know entirely how I will do it - something with replacing blank lines and tabs, and slapping on a predefined head and tail, like I do with the index. We’ll see.

I subscribed and then unsubscribed from the Diary-L mailing list. It seemed like a bunch of chattiness and no real talk about the mechanics of journals. Just the “what time of day do you write?” sort of stuff. Who cares.

Steamshoveling into a basement

Sat, 26 Apr 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I can’t wait to get all of my journals into HTML, so I can change the font so they all look like Motorhead album covers.

Last night, I taped about an hour of my rambling about Summer Rain. I set up the camera and taped it on the VCR using a VHS tape running on the slow speed. I don’t care about the picture too much, I just needed the audio. So this way, I can put 6 hours of discussion on each tape. And after an hour, I realized it will take a lot of fucking discussion to get this thing rolling. I am hoping that by the end of May, I will have enough notes to start an outline and a completely new draft of the book.

I brought Bill home last night and hung out at his place a bit, caught up with Jen and saw Liam. He was running all over, and talking about steamshovels. I guess he read this book, which I sort of remember from my childhood, about this steamshovel that digs this basement for a building and gets stuck at the bottom, so he becomes a furnace. Oddly enough, I had a dream last night where Liam kept saying “Boba Fett” over and over.

I started re-reading this Rupert Thomas book, to get an idea of what I want to do with SR. There are a lot of fine details about his writing that make it memorable. I think it’s because he never directly builds up his characters - they are built through strong incidentals. Instead of saying his characters’ age or height or looks, he’ll talk about the cigarette they smoke or their mannerisms in such a way that you build up the character based on your expectations of a person that would drink that kind of drink or whatever. And the characters really build in your head, come back to haunt you long after you set down the book. I like that.

I’m hoping to re-read about 5-10 books that contain pieces of SR that I like, and take a lot of notes on them. I also hope to collect together a bunch of music that will help me to write. I want to make tapes containing songs that I listened to in those periods, or songs that remind me of then. That’ll help me write a bit more. It’s too easy to listen to music that distracts me, or puts me to sleep.

From Longview

Sun, 27 Apr 1997 00:00:00 GMT

This is my first journal from Longview - I drove down last night. The trip isn’t too bad, but getting out of Seattle was a real bitch. I spent an hour going about 20 miles and then the next two hours going about 100. It’s nice that the trip is all in the daylight now. I really hate the drive south of Olympia when it’s raining and pitch black. It gets so dark out there in the middle of nowhere that you can’t even tell what direction is up - it’s like you’re in a tunnel or something. That’s the area where I had a blowout last month. It was PITCH black, pouring rain, and a narrow, two-lane section of I-5 where everybody is going 80. It took me a few hours to get that little baby spare onto the car, because I’d have to time it with the traffic. I’d wait for a break, run out, loosen one lug nut, and then dive behind the car as a herd of semis drove by, creating hurricane-like winds that would rock my poor little car, almost off the toy jack that comes in the back of Ford Escorts.

So that was all cool. I saw the show Sliders last night, and had the chance to see where they filmed it last week (okay, I just saw it from the outside). I always thought they filmed that whole show on location somewhere, but if you watch it, you can sort of tell that 90% of it is filmed in a sound stage. We also rented the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High since I saw the commercials for it and realized I haven’t seen the non-tv version in quite a while. I had a carbon copy of Mr. Hand for US History when I was in high school, although we had no Pat Benetar lookalikes. Many of the girls in my high school did look alike, or at least had the same hairstyle, but I don’t know what they were trying to copy.

I should get out of here. This keyboard won’t let me use the backspace key as a delete - it keeps opening up the emacs online help.

Pot pies for independence

Tue, 29 Apr 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I was going to write last night, but by the time I remembered, it was today. The trip back felt like a daydream, the darkness around me. I drove from Longview to Seattle in about an hour 45, pretty good for the slight drizzle that dewed the hills of asphalt under me.

It was a daydream because it was so hypnotizing. The music and the solitude removed the thoughts from my head, let me relax. I got into a rhythm with the spinning tires, the squeaking wipers, and the passing reflectors marking the road I ventured.

When I got to Seattle, the tranquility was broken as I checked my mail and removed a pile of bills. My financial situation is so fucked right now - I spent the rest of the night restless, thinking of the things I’d have to give up to keep afloat for the next few months. I figured a schedule that would involve some heavy payments in the next couple of paychecks, and would involve me eating soup and cooking at home pretty much all of the time. I guess it isn’t too horrible - I spent a lot of time last spring doing the same thing while paying off my Visa card. I think I can pay off my debts by the end of the year, and start figuring out what I really want to do with my money and my future.

---

Every night I eat 99 cent pot pies for dinner, I am dollars closer to financial independence. Maybe.

I’m listening to Rush - Counterparts. It reminds me of a strange time - my entrance into exile. Every song tells a story, but “Cold Fire” tells the strongest. It’s juvenile of me to spend an evening listening to songs that remind me of people from the past, but it’s either that or spend the evening thinking about money.

I should get back to reading…

It rains in Seattle

Wed, 30 Apr 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Rain. Despair. Bleakness. Running through the twilight.

Sorry, just trying to sound all gothic. It really is raining though. It’s almost May and Seattle thinks it’s only February.

Things are somewhat confusing here, but not things I’d talk about in a journal. It’s hard for me to censor myself about things, since I’m so used to writing everything in my paper journals. But my paper journals are not readable by 50 million people, so I limit myself. Sorry.

I finished reading that Rupert Thomson book last night. It felt great to finish it with the windows open, the dark horizon of west seattle glowing through the rain. The book itself felt like it took place in the same atmosphere, the same bleakness. I wish the guy had more similar books, but I think he got into historical fiction or something…

Anyway, I should end the lunch and start the work. Cheers.

Cell phones, drug wars

Thu, 01 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

More rain, and I’m really tired. Not tired, but compressed and dehydrated from too much caffeine at a late hour. I’ve been drinking 7-UP in an effort to recover. I’m still pretty jumpy.

I signed up for a cellular phone, mostly as a precaution to my next inevitable automotive disaster. It’s through some freaky corporate plan, so it might be an invitation to something awful happening later. But there was no activation or monthly charge, so my only investment is $60 for a phone, plus .36 a minute if I use it. I’ll just throw it in the glove compartment and never use it until I need to.

The ACLU annual meeting was last night, and I worked at it, helping people with nametags and setting up food for the reception. The topic was the drug war, which is a pretty ambivalent topic for me. I don’t support civil rights violations, but I’m not a stoner, either, and I don’t really agree with people who waste their lives abusing substances. And I know that people claim to be casual drug users, but in my experience, the worst alcoholics I knew all claimed to be casual drinkers. So who knows. Someday I’ll sort out my political differences, but I don’t think it will be on a usenet newsgroup or with the help of a glossy book from a newsstand.

It suddenly got really dark outside, it looks like something out of a Danzig video. Maybe the AM and PM are reversed on my watch.

On writing an email-based porno server

Sat, 03 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I can’t remember the name of my contact lens. It is a special kind for astigmatism, but I can’t rememner the fucking word. I hate it what this happens.

Anyway, the sun is out and it actually feels like a May day. Oh - I guess yesterday was May Day. And the day when the dude in the U-2 was shot down (or crashed, or ditched, or tried to defect). It’s supposed to rain all weekend, though. Oh well.

The other night I had a rush of memories from like 4 years ago, things I forgot all about. One time I consulted for somebody and wrote a mail server for a porno site in Illinois. You’d mail this account and say ‘send LesbianNurses3’ and it would email back the story. It was all cool, it used compression on the archive and supported a bunch of commands for listing, submitting stuff, and passwords. Anyway, the dickhead never paid me - I charged him like $300, and he promised a check in the mail about 10 times. Either he didn’t have the money, or he showed the thing to someone else because it was embarassingly easy to do - it was all a shell script, less than 50 lines.

I also remember when me and Andrew lived in colonial crest, and one time the whole gang of CS geeks came over to drink and watch some movie - one of the police academy movies or something. This guy Dave was with us, who just got dumped by his wife. He was drinking schnapps like water and had some low-grade porno book that he must’ve bought at the liquor store or something. He kept reading from it, and we were all laughing. I think Andrew went upstairs and passed out during the film, and missed all of the antics.

I have realized that if I move, I need to get a couch so a bunch of people can sit on it and watch TV. I wish I had my old couch. Lots of memories about that damn thing - I used to spend a lot of time on it, watching Beavis and Butthead, sleeping, talking on the phone, whatever. Need a couch.

I remembered I need to get new license plates in August, so I will have that plus moving costs if I do move. So maybe I will have to put off moving a little bit longer. Maybe I will just sign a 6 month lease and keep saving my pennies.

Blah blah blah blah.

Not much

Sun, 04 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Not much here - watching movies, sitting around. Austin Powers was a good flick. SNL is on now…

Teach Yourself ________

Tue, 06 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I did a mini-inventory and found I have “teach yourself ____” cassette and book sets for Spanish, German, Swedish, and Italian, yet I speak none of these languages. I have a problem with learning languages. I knew a woman that knew like 6 languages, and learned Japanese in like a weekend or something. It made me vomit.

I’m listening to Lawnmower Deth - one of their older albums, when they were still okay. I remember them playing a Lawnmower Deth video on MTV like 5 years ago. It seems so alien that they’d just play videos that weren’t somehow part of a game show or something.

I stayed up way too late last night making a videotape from all of the stuff I taped at Disney. I got through all of the footage, but didn’t have time to run off any VHS copies. It was good, but made me think of what I’d do differently the next time I brought the camcorder on vacation.

It’s hard to cohesively think about anything today. I don’t really feel manic, but not entirely stable. I’d like a nap, or a few hours with a good book. Maybe later.

Analog First Third

Wed, 07 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’m taking lunch about an hour late because I got into a rhythm with some balloon help stuff and spaced out the time or something.

I’ve been thinking more about writing, and what I should do next. I’d like to try another scifi story, some sort of cyberpunk thing that has some weird morality plot or twist of fate, like an old Twilight Zone. I’m not too into SciFi for the sake of creating some giant, complicated world. I’d rather have peripheral details of the future and make it more like the present, and then work on an incredible plot. I’m more of a Star Wars than a Star Trek person, if that explains it.

I picked up a copy of Analog last night, just to size up the competition, so to speak. Some of it is very cool, but not as much near-future-future stuff - mostly the stuff in the far future, giant starships in faraway worlds, that sort of thing. I’m not 100% into that, but it’s still good. But there’s so much going on in the SciFi world, all of these conventions and new authors and zines and everything. I’m not sure I can just dive into it. We’ll see what happens.

I also started reading Neal Cassidy’s The First Third. I’m just through the prologue, which was this huge family history. I’m looking forward to actually starting the book.

I’m supposed to meet up with Daniel tonight for some food. I’ll have to see if I have some rough cut of the video stuff for him to watch.

Blah blah blah.

Super Mario music torture

Thu, 08 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I left my car at the dealership to get the oil changed, so I walked a few blocks thismorning on my way to work. It reminded me of when I was in Indiana and didn’t own a car at all, when I had to walk everywhere. It sucked, but there were times when it was so relaxing. And you notice all of the details around you, the buildings and people and cars. When I lived on 6th St in Bloomington, my car broke down and I had to walk to and from the car parts store a few times. I usually sped by the neighborhood street at 40 or 50, never looking anywhere but ahead. But on the walk, I saw all of the weird houses, the kids playing, someone taking piano lessons, another person refinishing a porch. A different view.

I hung out with Daniel last night. He found a Nintendo for free, and had been playing Mario 3 for days. The music burned into my head - I was at my cousin’s once and he played it for about 10 hours straight, programming that song into my brain. It would be fun to do a dance remix of it, or use it for a soundtrack of a movie.

I got a cellular phone today. It’s charging right now - I have not used it, but I called it to see if it would ring. It’s working, so that’s cool. It will be just an emergency thing, but I’ve said that so many times I am expecting some sort of binge where I run up a $300 bill.

Lunch is over, time to go…

Chicago, old cow pastures

Fri, 09 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve noticed this weird pattern between my online and paper journals. I write about stuff that happened the night before in my online stuff, and stuff that happened that day in my paper one.

Not much is going on here. I didn’t know it, but Indianapolis is bigger than Seattle. So is Columbus, OH and San Jose, CA. Seattle seems so much bigger than Columbus - I’ve only been there once, but it was like every other midwest city. It had a completely revitalized downtown area with brick streets, artwork, and brand new buildings, and then if you walked 5 blocks it would be all of these abandoned warehouses and bombed out neigborhoods. And then if you drove for another mile, you would be in a cornfield. When you drive on I-405 in LA or Seattle, there are buildings on both sides of you as you circle the city. When you’re on I-465, looping around Indianapolis, there is nothing but fields around you. Now there are a few yuppie suburbs and strip malls, but the transition from city to nothing is very abrupt. Compare that to Chicago - if you got on 72 - Higgins Road, somewhere around O-Hare, you could probably drive 50 miles and see nothing but wall to wall strip malls and subdivisions. The city of Chicago is huge, but the tentacles of the suburbs run forever.

I haven’t spent much time in Chicago, but I can almost navigate the highways to get around it and through it. Last summer, I flew into O’Hare late at night, rented a car, and drove to Elkhart. Driving through downtown on the express lanes at 100 in a brand new Corolla reminded me of every trip I’d ever taken there. I’d been there a billion times with my folks, visiting my grandparents and family, but that’s nothing like getting in your own car, cranking some music and taking the trip yourself. I wonder how many times I have taken the trip? Can I catalog it?

89 - w/ Larry to see Metallica 89 - w/ Steph 90 - w/ Becky - car broke down 90 - to drop off Becky at airport 90 - to pick up Becky, with Tom 90 - with Tom 91 - with Jo 92 - with Ray, merch incident 93 - with Ray, at least 3 or 4 times 94 - with Simms and A, from Bloomington 95 - return from Chicago, Angie’s graduation 96 - from O’Hare, mom’s wedding

So, I averaged about a trip a year, except for 1990, when I had nothing better to do. If you count layovers where I was stuck in O’Hare, there are at least 4 or 5 in the last 2 years.

---

Monkey see, monkey do, monkey will destroy you. Sorry, listening to Rollins again. I’ve been thinking about writing a bunch of fake letters to people and mailing them (in the real mail) not to be malicious, but to make people wonder what is going on. A sort of art, I guess.

I’ve been thinking about how much money I’d need to buy some land in the middle of nowhere and build a house. It’s a common recurring daydream for me, ever since I had to watch dozens of hours of Bob Vila videos during architecture class in high school. I’m convinced I could do most of the work on a house except for the foundation and the plumbing. I’m not sure I could do it by myself though, or right the first time, or while working a full time job. But every time I go to home depot, I start having fantasies in the plumbing section, looking at those giant fiberglass tubs and wishing I could start stocking up on 2x4s now while I save up for the land.

I guess land is a big weird thing here. I could probably buy up a piece of an old cow pasture in the middle of nowhere for under a grand an acre, but there would be no water, power, etc. It goes from $6000 lots on up to $2,000,000 parcels up on the plateau or whatever. But ideally, I think it would be possible to get a good 10 acre, ready to build lot for under $50K. But I don’t know. I’m full of shit when I say I know anything about buying land.

And when I bought it, I would be out of money and have to save more. It would be cool to buy a fucked up trailer, wheel it onto the lot, and then dump all of my money into the building. I don’t know. My mom is building a giant extension onto their house now. She found a builder who was going bankrupt and payed him up front, and then got the materials herself. And since she works in a giant interior decorating company, she got a lot of shit at cost or below cost. Stuff like cabinets, windows, she got for probably 40% their price from a builder. So maybe it wouldn’t cost $100,000 to build a house, especially if I wired, painted, decorated, and landscaped the damn thing myself.

Gotta go - must see teevee is on soon.

Winning a dollar on a late-night walk with a children's book author in 1994

Sat, 10 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I remember one time, three years ago in the summer, I was writing a short story in Lindley Hall late at night, and I met this woman who wrote children’s books. We went to the Runcible Spoon and got coffee (well, I got a Coke), and then went on this long walk in the dark, through south Bloomington, past Simms’ apartment and past the old Red Chair bakery and through the student ghetto. But it’s weird because I don’t remember her name, or what she looked like. I think she looked like a 22 year old version of the child psychologist on ER, but I can’t remember anything else about you. I totally forgot about the whole thing, but then remembered this bizarre, solitary walk in dark streets, talking about literature and life in a deeply theoretical way to a person I didn’t know. And then I stopped to get a Coke out of a machine about 5 blocks from Simms’ old place, and I won a dollar from the machine. Otherwise, a surreal but uneventful moment.

I wish I could find a web page about buying an abandoned missile silo in Idaho or North Dakota or something. It would be like a bunch of little SoHo lofts, one on top of another, crossed with an army surplus store. All of the toilets would have little metal plaques, olive drab, spraypainted with serial numbers and part numbers in bright yellow. I’d like to get it with some of the equipment there. There wouldn’t be missiles, or top secret launch computers, but maybe there would be gas masks and survival rations and other cool junk. I love army stores - especially the kind that have more than just bomber jackets and cigarette lighters. The best ones have pieces of radio electronics, rusted jerrycans from WW2, and pieces of nylon webbing that you can’t figure out what they are for, and they say something like “M-1023921 NYLON PLACEMENT TIEDOWN” or something on the label. I’m always hoping to dig around there and find something cool, like a 1952 manual on surviving a nuclear blast that tells you to put on sunglasses and wipe mud on your face or something. I’d like to start an art movement called Military Art Deco - it would be a bunch of 1950’s military stuff. Instead of Brady Bunch looking kitchen furniture, it would be Gi Joe looking portable kitchen stuff. Buy up stuff from the surplus store before my trend catches on.

Fifth element

Sun, 11 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

We saw The Fifth Element last night - it is an incredible film. It has a level of depth beyond anything aside from maybe Blade Runner. Truly incredible. I will write more about it later - now we have to leave.

Windows open

Tue, 13 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I had to sleep with all of the windows open last night - spring is here. With the fresh air, 6 hours of sleep felt more like 10. I just have this fear of the temp dropping 60 degrees while I am asleep, so I wake up with pneumonia or something.

It’s the time of year that reminds me so much of summers in Indiana - 90 degrees in the day, but a cooler nighttime. My drive back from Longview last night was a flashback to so many summer nights from years ago.

I should probably explain this strange system of memory that I have. It basically has two parts. First, I always consider my life in the present tense to be very boring. I think that in the life of Jon Konrath in May of 1997, nothing is going on. I never think “wow, I am at the place to be”, regardless of what is going on. The second part is that I reminisce heavily about some point in time, usually 2 or 3 years ago. For example, in 1995, when I was working on my first book, I wished it was 1992 again. I missed all of the people from that time, and thought about how great it was, and noticed how much things had changed. Now, in 1992, I had a lot of fun but I also was stone-poor, depressed, and unsure about what direction life was going.

Anyway, it basically comes down to having a lot of memories of a lot of eras of my short life. Sometimes, the weather or a cologne, or a lost notebook, or a song or just a sudden realization will make me think about the past. It’s just odd sometimes.

---

I just got back from seeing Fifth Element again with Bill and Marc. It isn’t as incredible the second time - the annoying radio DJ gets more annoying. but the minor details were even better. Some of the edit cuts were also more obvious, good stuff.

I’m going to try to make a video now. More later.

Writing in HTML

Wed, 14 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

This is weird… this is my first entry in html. I have further screwed with the code a bit to let me enter stuff in html. It takes me more work now, so I need to automate things a bit…

I spent a lot of today screwing with a sparc5 at work, trying to get it to talk to the network. It was fun playing with solaris, but a pain in the ass to get it to work. Made the day go by faster anyway.

I heard from my friend Zara today, someone who I lost touch with about 6 months ago. Someone also told me my old roommate cut his hair and moved to Boston or something. I wonder what’s up with that.

It is pretty distracting to write in html. It’s much nicer to just plow across a blank page. This makes it feel more like editing, not writing. Oh well - I fucked things up enough that I can’t roll back.

I am running an edit of this movie I am making, which has been a pain in the ass. I am sad because I put so much into creating like 2 hours of footage and it looks like it will edit down to about 15 minutes. Bummer…

I should get back to this thing though…

Dual-tanker trucks are not a suitable or accurate alarm clock

Fri, 16 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I totally spaced writing yesterday, and forgot to write in my paper journal the day before that. It’s been a weird week, a lot of work, something going on every night, and I have not been sleeping at all. It is hot enough out that I have to open the patio all the way to cool the place down. This leads to a lot of noise, and I wake up 3 or 4 times in the night when there’s an ambulance or some weird traffic on the highway. Those dual-tank trucks with the long bar between the trailers get going really fast down James Street and then have to stop, and the rear trailers bounce and jerk around and when I’m asleep, it pretty much sounds like a car being thrown around by an out of control tanker truck or something. So I wake half-up and wonder if there will be an explosion, and there never is. The product of this is that I don’t get enough REM sleep, so I start having dreams all the time, weird dreams. Last night I woke up and looked at the sky and because it was like 4:30 it was all grey. Somehow, I instantly had a dream right before this where I was dying from some sort of nuclear holocoust death-gas attack or something, and thinking “well, this is it. I can’t run away because I’m too tired and I need to go to work in 5 hours so it looks like I’m going to die in bed, which is probably better than being in my car.” Then I realized I was just loopy and went back to bed for a few more hours. I guess I did think about going in to work at like 5am and leaving after lunch, but I’d be dead from exhaustion.

Last night, I had to bring Bill to the airport, so we hung out and he bought me dinner at Black Angus. The place was fairly cool, because I got ribs and he got steak, but we also got this sampler, plus we got soups and bread, and we ended up with a giant, long wooden table covered with food. Of course we had long, disjointed conversations about life and money and who is working where, all of that stuff.

I just made a ninja throwing star with a CD and a pair of scissors. I cut these points out of the CD, so it looks like a sawblade or something. It is truly unreal. I wish I had a shittier CD player because I would try to play it.

Rockets

Tue, 20 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Another day. Not much has been going on, hence the lack of journals. I’ve been really lax about writing in journals, reading, etc. I don’t know if it is writer’s block or apathy or just a wandering of the mind. I’m not worrying about it too much - either it will come back, or it won’t.

I’ve been messing with rockets more. On Thursday, I bought a starter set with an Alpha III rocket and the whole pad and launcher. On Saturday, we went out to a Soccer field in Longview, and I launched 6 times. Unfortunately, I lost on the 6th launch, which was a bummer. I have 3 other rockets though, so my fleet will soon be underway once I build them. I just hope I have enough space by then - there aren’t many big fields in Seattle.

Not much else is going on…

Spraypaint fumes, not a muse

Fri, 23 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I haven’t been writing at all lately - I think it is from spraypaint fumes, but I’m not sure. I just haven’t been overly ambitious with journals or writing or anything. One day this week, I wrote like 5 pages in my paper journal (I usually just write 1 a day), but then I also skipped days. It’s just been one of those spells.

I have been building model rockets though. I don’t remember if I said it, but I got a starter set and launched the Alpha III rocket 6 times and then lost it. I built 3 more rockets and bought one of those Estes blast-off kits with 24 engines. So maybe I will go launch some more this weekend.

Building rockets has been very hypnotic. I sit on the bed, with a large drafting board turned workbench, and build away while a CD or maybe CNN drones in the background. When I was building 3 kits at once, an entire night flew by before I realized it. It’s very tranquil. My only two regrets were lack of more models and lack of space. It would be nice to have an entire room to build rockets, but now I have to juggle stuff around in my studio apartment. Spraypainting is a bitch - the first rocket, I tried it on my patio. Instantly, about a pount of Seattle airborne soot and pollution stuck to the paint, giving it a really fucked up appearance. I painted the next two in my kitchen, inside of a microwave oven box, with newspapers everywhere. It worked OK once I got the hang of it, but after I cleaned up, I did find a few spots of paint on the tile. I was able to clean it with nail polish remover. But as I get more organized, I am finding more ways to make the building easier. And I will keep buying more new kits…

More rockets, less writing

Wed, 28 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

It’s pouring rain in Seattle again - a good reason to stay inside, do nothing. The weather’s supposed to stay gross for the next few days, so maybe I can crack out a book and get some reading done or something.

Memorial day weekend was pretty lax - we mostly stayed at home and watched movies, and I did get to launch rockets on Sunday. But it wasn’t very outdoorsy, mostly clouds. The sun broke through here and there, but it stayed pretty dreary.

I wish I had some money right now, to buy some more rockets, and maybe get some other modeling supplies. I am really getting into it now, I like to kill time while building. I want to get some more kits and maybe start some sort of custom job. We’ll see.

I’m getting more and more freaked out about my lack of writing. I am sounding like a broken record about all of this, but I have completely panned out any creative writing at this point, and don’t know how it will restart. It’s just a strange feeling, like I am an athlete who isn’t exercising anymore, just thinking about mowing the lawn and stuff. I’d like to get back into it, but I have no motivation. I guess as long as I am doing other things, it will work out. We’ll see.

Nothing

Thu, 29 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I almost forgot to write anything today. Hate when that happens.

Life’s been more of this really low-level thinking, planning, trying to figure out why I feel so weird and why I’m not accomplishing anything. I don’t feel like I could just sit down and write a novel or anything, and I get really restless that I’m not in front of the typer all night, or driving across the country or planning something big or whatever. I realize I talk about this every day, but it feels like such a rut. I haven’t been underway on a book-sized piece of writing in over a year now, and I don’t think that dinking around with minor (or even major) edits on my first two books would satisfy the urge.

Maybe I just need to read more. Usually when I read a bio about somebody who starved and wrote a masterpiece on the back of used index cards, I get enough energy to think of a new project and get things going. At least it gives me the energy to think again. I did see this special on D.B. Cooper last night and thought it would be cool to do some piece of fiction about him. It’s a cool story.

South of no writing

Fri, 30 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I guess I forgot to write stuff for today - it’s like 11:37 at night and I’m getting ready to fuck around with some other writing before I go to bed. I’m also trying to put too-old cheese onto triscuit crackers with marginal success. It could, however, show more results than the writing.

I guess I feel somewhat better about my writing right now. I have been reading Bukowski again; I got through almost all of _South of No North_ last night and today. It’s good to think about him - how he wrote in college and then didn’t write for another 25 years. He spent all of that time chasing women, drinking, living in roominghouses, and pawning off his typewriters. If I don’t write now, I’ll write later.

Speaking of writing now, I better get to it.

Buk, junk

Sat, 31 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Hangin’ out, eatin’ junk food, readin’ Bukowski. I better get back to it.

Alone in Seattle with empty calories

Sun, 01 Jun 1997 00:00:00 GMT

It’s been an odd day. Karena is gone, so I am here in Seattle alone. I slept until 2, bummed around, at 2 dinners’ worth of food at Denny’s, and then lost my Big Bertha model rocket. I need to stop putting so much time into rockets I lose.

I’m reading more Bukowski, getting ready to write, and eating Doritos.

Finding style

Tue, 03 Jun 1997 00:00:00 GMT

It’s just another day. I spent the weekend staying up all night and sleeping all day. Now I just about totalled myself getting in here, and my eyes are welded shut with sleep. My stomach is churning from no food and too much caffeine. I could use a nap. I could use ten naps.

I shouldn’t bitch - I got a lot of writing done. I cracked open the Summer Rain text, and started at page one. I hope to read through it, making revisions and getting up to speed with the text again. I used to be able to think of a paragraph or conversation and just turn right to that page without thinking. Now I forget how the fucking story goes in some places.

Last summer, I cut the book into three pieces - three books, to make it more logical, to fit together better. It’s sort of three phases of the character’s summer, and follows his thinking about what he should do with his life. It also makes the text easier to work with - the chapters are shorter, and I can just work with each third of the book, and not worry about this giant volume of writing all at once.

My plan this time is to read through the whole thing, correct the choppiness, and fix any holes. I do have a larger idea to break the story apart by alternating the chapters of reality with some other chapters - maybe flashbacks, email messages, or something. That’s a bit ambitious right now, though. I just want to focus on making the main body of text readable. I know nobody will want to buy this book, or even read it. But I want to make it readable to me, and I want to finish it. I’d feel better with a fully-functional book sitting under my bed and collecting dust than a bunch of disjointed text that makes up 90% of a book.

Also, I think my drive to finish this book is different than before. When I wrote the first draft, I wanted to publish this book and make money and do interviews and be on Charlie Rose and become famous. I realize now that the book market in this country is fucked, and the only way you can get a book deal is to be a murderer or one of the lawyers at their trial. Americans don’t buy books anymore unless they’ve got the endorsement by some pop-rock idiot, or they were ghost written for a rock star or something. I can’t sell this book. I can’t give it away. And I don’t think anybody would read it, because it really drags, and tells a story that has a lot of vague hidden meaning that isn’t there for most people. It’s boring to most people. But it means a lot to me. And also, I have been afraid about talking about me. I didn’t want to discuss everything that happened with people because I was afraid they’d sue me. There was a lot of self-censorship involved, and I’ve decided to just cut the shit, hit the throttles, and write this fucking book. Nobody’s going to see it except me. So it’s time to belt this thing out.

I cut through two chapters last night, and made some minor changes. I am not happy with my writing style in the manuscript, and my first big changes will be cleaning this up. The beginning of the book’s been edited about 38 times, and past the first few chapters hasn’t really been touched from the original manuscript I started back at IU. So the first third of the book is really lofty, with me adding adjectives and adverbs all over the place to make it more descriptive. It reads like a dumb-ass trying to be smart. And then later in the book, I was typing faster than fuck while on a caffeine buzz, and some parts of the book just skip all over the place. There are whole sentences without verbs, lots of edit marks, stuff unfinished. So it all needs to be brought to the same level, the same style.

I’ve thought about what style to mimic for this book. Obviously, I want my own style and I need to find it. But I need to find it by writing SOMETHING and then slowly finding myself and changing. I guess what I want is a combination of Bukowski and Rupert Thomson. I want to be easy to read, easy to tackle, something that flows well, but has a depth behind it. I don’t want to spend half a page describing an environment - I’d rather briefly set it up, have the character and their actions describe it, and then continue. I guess Kerouac was into that, especially in On The Road. Anyway, the stuff is hard to read in places, and it needs to be simplified, but it still needs to capture the feeling.

Window washers are outside my office right now, dangling from ropes with buckets of soap and squeegees. It was pretty weird - I heard a knocking around, then saw these ropes drop and guys in harnesses fling down like SWAT team guys rapelling down to get the terrorists or something.

My stomach is feeling a little better, but I still need a nap…

Walking dead

Wed, 04 Jun 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I am the walking dead today. I slept about 2 hours right after work, and I slept almost 10 last night. It was pouring rain outside, which meant I was hypnotized into a deep sleep, and I had abnormal dreams all night long. Anyway, I rolled into work today and could barely open my eyes. I’m still trying to get the caffeine going so I’ll be able to function a bit more.

I’m still writing, working on Summer Rain, but it’s getting tougher. I didn’t realize I left significant blank spots in the manuscript that were to be filled in later. I thought I’d just be doing some light editing, but now I’ll have to write complete chapters to insert into this thing. I guess it will be nice to do some writing from scratch, but I need to get the whole story in my head before I start messing with it more.

I do like digging through old writing and finding things that I think are ingenious, things I didn’t realize I wrote. I was digging through my hard drive the other night, trying to get things into some kind of order, and I found this long monologue I wrote about this woman who sold me a microwave at Target. I’d forgotten the piece and forgotten the women, and laughed my ass off when I read the story. I always love finding stuff like that. I think I’m a boring and redundant writer, then I find a story I scribbled on the back of some physics homework in 1992.

Writing with headphones on

Thu, 05 Jun 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’m reaching some weird point with the manuscript, the point where I usually bail and forget about it. But I need to stick with it, and I think I’ve identified the problem as a problem with the voice of the whole book. I’m trying to be too serious, too wordy, and it makes the whole thing drag and doesn’t make it too interesting. That sounds too simple to just say that, the hard part is going to be fixing it. I have some ideas, but nothing I’d like to mention yet.

I finished reading Bukowski’s _Post Office_ last night. I love that book. I almost went back to page 1 and started reading it again. Maybe I will. I think I will read _Women_ first, it is the logical continuation.

At least today I feel okay sleepwise. Karena was over last night, and she had to leave at like 6am to get to work. I stayed up with the headphones on, trying to write, while she slept. When she took off, I slept for another 4 hours. I guess I woke up and started saying a bunch of funny shit, but I don’t remember. I was pretty out of it - the sleep felt good. I’m looking forward to a good 3 or 4 hour dive through the writing tonight.

Walking to work

Tue, 10 Jun 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I walked to work today. It was sort of surreal, listening to Biohazard and twisting through all the skyscrapers and highway overpasses and crap to get here. It took about 45 minutes. I made it but my walkman didn’t - it is a real piece of shit, and maybe the batteries are dead or the tape is all tensioned weird and running slow, but it is fucked. Anyway, it was a decent walk and very strange, because I used to walk so much when I was in school and didn’t have a car. I walked an hour and 15 minutes each way to work on Sunday night, and almost every day walked an hour from campus to my apartment, sometimes each way. I spent a lot of fucking time walking, listening to a walkman, watching the terrain move at one or two miles an hour, wishing it was a hundred. But I walked so damn much that I could eat anything and never gain weight. At the time, I thought I was a little heavy, and lifted weights, ate salad, did sit ups, walked more on my days off, all of that stuff. I think I was about 25 lbs lighter than I am now, which is about right. In high school and my first year of college, I probably weighed about 50 lbs less than I do now. I hated it back then, because I was a major geek and wanted to put on 40 lbs of muscle or something. I was a walking fucking skeleton, and I ate Chips Ahoy by the bagful. I think I had a tapeworm. Anyway, all of this lithium and prozac and everything else has fucked my metabolism, plus I never exercise. I drive everywhere. I am nowhere near being the size of the average Jerry Springer audience member, but I wish I had the metabolism I used to have.

And I usually don’t work out. But sometimes I get on a kick. There’s a gym in my apartment building, and I convince myself - “All I have to do is get on the treadmill, at 3 in the morning when I have the place to myself, and run while I listen to the first Black Sabbath album, and do that 3 times a week and I’m set.” I go up there, and run for 40 minutes or an hour or whatever and come back and drink a gallon of water and take a shower and think “fuck! That was great. All I need to do is keep this up and eat better and I’ll be able to wear all of my clothes from high school.”

Of course, three days later, I will be in bed watching some assinine documentary about Nazi hot air balloons from World War II and eating Doritos. I can’t stick to a regimen like that, because it’s useless. It’s useless to sit on a piece of machinery and run for an hour and waste an hour of my time, just so the little readout tells me that I almost burned off the calories from one of the 16 Cokes I drank today. If I had to run for an hour to win some cash prize, or if I was at the Miss Nude Everything World adult theme park and I had to walk 16 miles over the course of the day to see all of the exhibits, I would do it. If my car broke down and I had the choice between the Metro and walking to work, I’d walk. If the walking is mixed with doing something, seeing something more than a rubber belt spinning around two rollers, than I would do it. But right now, I don’t have anything like that in my life. I don’t walk to classes, or to work, or to whatever. I sit in a chair and write. So maybe if I had something creative to do, I might be in better shape.

And before anyone says anything about hiking, climbing, rollerblading, distance cycling, or any of the other hip and trendy thirtysomething hobbies of the Pacific Northwest: NO. I am not going to participate in any sport where step one is buying five grand in equipment. Also, in all of these sports, there are people who would make me look like a complete idiot. I know fifty year old men that could kick my ass in mountain climbing. I couldn’t climb the rope in gym class in 9th grade. That was about 50 pounds ago, I know I couldn’t now. The reason I write and work with computers is because that is my gift and I was given that gift in lieu of any physical ability. It’s no secret that I’m no good at sports. Shawn Kemp can’t write WinHelp. Michael Jordan can’t program in C. I can’t run a single lap around a gym without getting shin splints. It’s something I’ve learned to accept.

Marcia Clark's hair

Wed, 11 Jun 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I think I’ve left Rumored to Exist alone for long enough to ferment properly (that didn’t make sense). Anyway, I read the May 15 draft (I think it was all of the corrections I did while I was in California, with no new material) and I laughed my ass off again. I think if my 3 or 4 months of editing after that point didn’t totally fuck it up, I might just do some light touch-ups and finish the damn thing.

I hated some of the randomness in the first and second draft, even though the book was about randomness. I also thought that it was too personal and I’d “out” some people in some way. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Howard Stern, it’s that you can’t out people who have fucked you over. So I’ll change the names, but everything stays. I think if I keep the dropped bits and put in the added ones, it could be 300 pages of pure bullshit. I like that.

But then I worry about really finishing a book. I mean, it’s like if you were thinking about killing someone and then you WENT OUT AND DID IT and you had blood on you and this dead fucking body and you didn’t know what to do next. I don’t know what to do next. Publishers? Agents? Editors? What? I haven’t played the ass-eating game of going to the dinners and the readings and talking to the people at the signings. When I go to book signings, I am always convinced that the authors think I am a CRAZED HOMICIDAL ON PAINT THINNER. When I met Kay Redfield Jamison, I really wanted to tell her that her writing about the manic depressive illness helped me out, but I think she thought I was some kind of JOHN WAYNE GACY ready to jump over the table and fuck her with my arm before vomiting in her eyes or something. I just have that aura about me, especially when I walk 20 blocks to the book store where everyone reads, and I’m smelling like someone who ran an iron man competition in a vinyl bondage suit.

Fuck, where was I?

Oh yeah. So I don’t know any publishers. And I have no friends in high places. And the book market, to quote Joe Pesci, FUCKS YOU. Unless you were somehow related to the OJ trial or you got your DICK cut off recently, you can’t get a book deal. 450 million manuscripts are written a year, and the 150 that are published have to do with Marcia Clark’s hair. I could print on a vanity press, which I have considered. I thought about printing like 500 books, selling a few through zines and the internet, and just giving the rest away. I’d lose money, but it would be fun to have a book and to show it to people. WHo knows.

Finger indp0100@copper.ucs.indiana.edu if you are at indiana. It’s funny.

Car accident

Fri, 13 Jun 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I hit someone’s car today. It was stupid, more of a low-speed tapping that messed up the little trim piece on their door. I think it might be like $200 of damage, so it probably won’t fuck up my insurance or anything. But it was a pain in the ass, very nervewracking, and I spent 20 minutes on my cellular phone in this parking lot, shouting above the traffic to my insurance agent. What a fucking nightmare.

I wasn’t at work yesterday - bad insomnia problems and the start of what felt like a cold made me stay home and sleep all day. I did get some editing done on the book though - all of the drafts are now in one draft. Now I can print it out and start with the red pen.

I’ve been reading a lot lately. I finished the Howard Stern book, read Microserfs, and started re-reading Mark Leyner’s Et Tu, Babe. I love Leyner’s work, but it’s very addictive…

Sleeping pills

Sat, 14 Jun 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I took some sleeping pills last night to avoid another up-all-night event like Tuesday. They really knocked me out, and I woke up very late for work today. I could barely function, nothing made sense and I’m surprised I managed to take a shower and drive to work. Then I got violently ill at lunch, and then stuck in traffic for an hour. So it’s been a memorable Friday the 13th so far. I’m thinking about hiding under my desk for the next 10 hours until it is over.

My mind’s been wandering, and it’s hard to think of some other topic to write about. Not much is going on that I want to talk about. I keep ending my sentences with the word about. I used the word ‘was’ 589 times in the latest rumored to exist draft. I use ‘really’ 38 times. I use fuck 205 times. Actually, that includes fucked, fucking, fucker, etc.

$506

Tue, 17 Jun 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I forgot to mention that the damage to that woman’s car last week was $506, which means my insurance will go up. I got that news on Friday, and it sucked. Oh well, with any luck, I will be able to dump my current car and get something cheaper.

This morning, I ate breakfast. It was a rare thing - I made oatmeal. I wasn’t starving for lunch by 11:30, which was a nice change. I went grocery shopping last night and have cabinets full of food now. I’m looking forward to going home tonight and eating a real dinner.

I read Howard Stern - _Private Parts_ this weekend. Good book, but I could only find a softcover copy. It’s 10,000 pages thick, so by the time I was done, it was all twisted and mutated and no longer book-like and flat. Oh well. I have been obsessively reading this book about the history of plastic. It’s well-written and simple to figure out but still contains good historical information and a little more than the basic science behind the formation and discovery of plastic, bakelite, celluloid, and so forth.

Magic Dragon sick

Wed, 18 Jun 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I didn’t mention this, but I got really sick on Sunday after we ate at Magic Dragon. I got some sort of chicken stuff and didn’t even eat all of it - I barely ate 20% of it. A few minutes later, I was almost doubled over in pain. I don’t know if it was food poisoning, or just a recurring trend in my eating habits. I have been developing more stomach problems after eating a lot of food or certain types of food, and I have to eat Tums or Rolaids or whatever. So I carry those with me, and then every time I have the medication with me, I get sick. I think it might be psychosomatic, but maybe it’s a lack of exercise and more stress. I had this problem about 5 years ago, and started spending a lot of money on over-the-counter medications. So maybe it’s the same thing. That was when I weighed a lot more, and spent all of my time on my ass, either in front of a computer or a TV. I moved back to school and started walking everywhere, lost a lot of weight, and I guess the problem went away. So maybe it will now that I’m getting a little more into shape.

I bought a bunch of different foods at Safeway the other night, in hopes of avoiding fast food. In the last few weeks, I’ve been eating at Wendy’s and McDonalds like every night, and sometimes for lunch, too. I’d like to find enough easy to prepare, not frozen foods to eat that I could just buy those and each cheaply and safely. I hate frozen foods because they all taste the same, that weird preservative taste, and they are just as expensive as eating at a fast food place. A TV dinner that has enough food in it to actually feed someone costs like $3.00, the same price as a burger and fries.

I don’t know why I am bitching about all of this - my eating habits are cyclical. I will get on a kick and figure out a diet or regimen of healthy foods, and stay on it for about a week. Then I’m back to fast food. My best diets are when I am broke and I’m forced to eat what food I have left for a week or two.

Did you know the DuPont chemist who invented polyester killed himself when he was like 46 or something? He went nuts and drank a bunch of cyanide. Maybe this 70s flashback crap with all-polyester clothes is a bad thing.

Carlin, Per-whatever, Smith

Thu, 19 Jun 1997 00:00:00 GMT

It’s another day of shitty weather. I didn’t really get a lot done last night, except for watching an almost-perfect lineup on Conan OBrien - George Carlin, Paula Per-whatserface, the supermodel, and Kevin Smith. Kevin didn’t have much time in there, but was hilarious. Also, I left almost all of my clothes in the washer, so I had nothing to wear. I came in with some dress slacks and a button-up shirt, two things I never wear unless someone has died recently (and seldom then, either).

I was at Barnes and Noble last night, which is one my favorite places to kill a few hours when I don’t want to write. There’s a test prep section that contains all of these books on how to learn calculus in 4 weeks or anatomy or physics. I think it’d be cool to buy a bunch of those books and memorize them, so I’d be able to cite medical knowledge or the postal worker’s exam in any of my fiction. But I know I’d buy them and never read them. I have about 16 learn-a-foreign-language courses in my apartment. I have used zero. I think once I learned enough German to confuse me when I commuted about 20 minutes to work - I’d listen to the tapes in my borrowed vehicle (my mom’s Celebrity stationwagon), but I’d almost always take out the tape and revert to some death metal band, since it was better to have Danzig stuck in your head instead of some dork reciting the German alphabet.

Around that time (summer if 1993), I started some detailed writing about my exploits. I planned to write a book about that summer, and write it while the summer was happening. Ray and I used to take frequent trips to Chicago to see bands, and every Monday or Tuesday, I’d have these long stories to type into my computer. I gave up on the idea at some point, and I lost everything I had on the computer when it crapped out after my stepdad powered it down and completely trashed the hard drive.

My high school went online. It’s pretty weird - most of the teachers I knew are either gone or have gone grey. After looking at the pages, I’ve decided to never go back and visit or go to the reunions. Things have changed too much in the last decade - it’s too weird. It’s like when I go back to the Monkey Ward store where I worked all through high school - a couple of people remember me, but the entire department where I worked is gone.

Why did Chick Corea start a second Elektric Band with all new people except for him and Eric Marienthal in 1993? I thought the first band was excellent, and the _Beneath The Mask_ album was the best damn thing they’d done. It was perfection. Did everyone decide to leave and make solo albums? They all sucked except Weckyl’s was tolerable. Oh well.

Dream melody

Fri, 20 Jun 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I never feel like I have enough time in the day now. By the time I eat dinner and deal with whatever bullshit I have to deal with every day, I am too lazy to edit anything. When I get up to speed on the editing, I just get rolling when it’s time to go to bed. I wish there were 30 hours, or I had more of the existing 24 or something.

I was reading a Chick Corea interview and he mentioned that the recurring melody on the _Eye of the Beholder_ album was something that occurred in a dream. It freaked me out - I’ve heard that album thousands of times, and every time I listen to it, I want to hear it again. It has a strange, dreamlike quality - but I never knew he really did write it in his sleep.

Self-publishing

Sat, 21 Jun 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been thinking more about this whole self-publishing thing. Printing copies of Rumored and selling them wouldn’t be much of a paradigm shift over when I printed copies of Xenocide and sold them from my apartment. It would cost about a jillion times more - actually, it wouldn’t cost that much more, since Xenocide 5 had a color cover and was photocopied 50 issues at a time, it cost about $2 per copy. To print 1000 books with a softcover and a square binding would cost somewhere around $2-$5 depending on pages, shipping, etc etc etc. So it’s more money initially, but not more money per capita.

The main thing about selling books vs. selling the death metal zine was that there was a whole underground network to sell the zine. There are a lot of dedicated fans of extreme metal music, and they are all pen pals and write each other and send everyone’s fliers for zines, demos, CDS, shirts, etc to each other. And there are many zines who will trade ad space for nothing or sell you a back cover ad for only a few bucks. With Xenocide, I just printed the zines, printed a bunch of fliers, and pretty much waited for the checks to come rolling in. I wish there was such a fanatic group of book buyers out there. With this project, I’ll really have to scrape to find small bookshops that are willing to pick up books on consignment. That’s the real pain in the ass. My only relief is that if I do sell Rumored and just sell copy by copy in all of these mom and pop stores, I will have a good database compiled by the time I try to do the second book.

The editing of Rumored is going okay. I broke down a task list of what I want to accomplish over the next month or two. The first task, which is underway, is just a line-by-line read of the whole thing, to fix the obvious and remove the idiotic. As of last night, I am 1/3 through that. Then it goes to a harder edit, where I completely scrutinize each little piece and spend a lot of time finely molding each word. Then I make a pass where I arrange things (the current order is arbitrary) and cut things that I don’t like. Through these three steps, I might add more stuff as I’m going. If I feel like 100% new writing, I will do that.

And now that I’m thinking of the followup to Rumored, I wonder if this book should be all of the freak-out stuff, with more of the personal stuff in another book. I thought about writing a book that’s just 10 or 20 long, personal narratives - each like a 10,000 word short story or something. It would still have some experimental aspect of it - sort of like that Hubert Selby Jr. book where it was a bunch of short stories and each guy had the same name but otherwise they were radically different. I love that kind of thing. But I am thinking about the next book and how it will happen. Mostly, I just want to produce another great vehicle that people will love and that I can finish fast. I don’t want to do this Summer Rain meets War and Peace 12000 page monologue with nothing grabbing in it, just for the sake of remembering my past. I’d love to do that stuff someday, but I guess it’s something you belt out later in your career. I mean, Kiss spent a few years belting out these kick-ass stadium-destroying power albums before they started doing the weird experimental shit and the solo albums. You can’t hit off right away with a novel that’s about a bath towel or something. I want to start out with a roar and then work my way to a gentle glow. But who knows, I change my mind every 10 seconds with this shit…

Earthquake

Tue, 24 Jun 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Almost forgot today. I was busy editing Rumored with my little clipboard and my little red pen.

There was an earthquake today, just after noon. It was a 4.9, out in the Puget Sound close to Bremerton. It freaked me out, being on the top floor of a 10 story building that’s all glass and electronics. This thing is built like a tank, but it still shook and waved around like part of some Disney ride or something. No damage, maybe some people’s pictures fell off the walls. Still, it was a little weird. This is earthquake 2 since I moved here, 3 really but I missed one because I was in San Francisco. It’s really like number 200-some since I moved here, but you need a seismograph to catch all of the other ones.

I’m thinking more about writing and future projects and stuff. Nothing I can talk about, but I do want to keep going in the same direction as I am with Rumored. I’m hoping to do a lot of writing over the summer, after I finish the edits. We’ll see.

It’s been a year since I started my current job. Nothing too eventful about that. I don’t like talking about my job too much in these journals. Just know that I have a job, and I work it, and I’ve been there a year.

All of a sudden, the sun is out like gangbusters. Maybe it’s time to go home and play.

Rumored line edit

Thu, 26 Jun 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I finished my first line edit of Rumored last night - it took about 13 days, not all of them productive. The next step will be to enter all of my changes into the computer - I edit on paper with red pen and then integrate everything into the original in emacs. It takes longer, but I like working in bed with a clipboard. More intimate… plus I’m lazy and like to lay down and write.

The next step will be to go through and rewrite each and every paragraph. Maybe 10% or 20% will stay, but the rest will be chopped up and redone from scratch. That’s a bit extreme, but there will be changes. Too much of the book talks about me - I need to obfuscate it. It’ll be a lot of work, but fun.

Another earthquake

Sat, 28 Jun 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I guess there was another earthquake last night, or rather thismorning, at about 3:50. I was still awake, fighting with sleep. It’s hard to tell if it was an earthquake or not in my apartment, because all of the traffic on I-5 frequently jostles around my building. This was a 3.something and didn’t do much. There have been like 3 or 4 minor but noticeable quakes in the last week. I heard a theory that all of these tiny slides might prevent a big earthquake.

Questioning future value of current drudgery

Tue, 01 Jul 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Sometimes I wonder what parts of the present will be things that I cherish in the future. That doesn’t make sense, but when I think about the past, I enjoy the memory of certain things, people, places, or times. But I can also remember that I didn’t neccesarily enjoy these things in the past.

Example: in the 1994/1995 school year, pretty much everybody moved away or graduated, except me and Larry. I spent a lot of time with Larry and a lot of time alone. I wanted to be elsewhere, and I wrote every day about how I wanted to escape, sell all of my stuff, get on a greyhound and go to LA or Arizona or Seattle or Mexico or whatever. When I was there, I hated that life. But I enjoy many of the memories of that year. I think about when I’d spend Saturday mornings in bed writing until 2pm, and then wander the streets of Bloomington. And on weeknights, I’d take a nap until 8 or 9, and then go to a computer lab and write until past midnight. It’s a pleasant memory now, as long as I don’t remember everything alienating and alone about that point in time.

But the point is, I didn’t think I’d ever look back at that point in time and cherish it. And now I think about my life and wonder what parts of it are going to stick out in my head 5 or 10 years from now. It’s strange to think about.

Two years ago was my last night in Bloomington, and my last day of work for UCS. I sold my blown-up Mustang, worked my shift, cashed my paycheck, and packed the last of my stuff into boxes. It feels like it was so damn long ago. After I left, I always thought I could go back and it would be the same, like all of the times I went home for a summer or a weekend or a Christmas. But when I did go back over last Xmas, I realized too much has changed. All of my old hangouts are gone, all of the people I knew have left, and I see everything in a different way somehow. Bloomington was always beautiful compared to Elkhart, but when I go back to the campus, I just see another Indiana town with all of the typical Indiana problems. And the sad part is that I don’t have the same magical feeling I had in Bloomington in my new home town. Seattle is okay, but that campus held such an incredible, perfect feeling to me for all of those years.

It all sounds sappy, so I’ll stop babbling…

Write, work, play NFL football

Fri, 04 Jul 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’m trying to write as much as possible on the book and I just don’t have enough fucking time. I need to trim more from my life - I wouldn’t say trim more from my life really. It’s not that I write and work and play NFL football and I need to drop one of the three. It’s that I lead a very lazy lifestyle and it’s a choice between being comfortable and living a busier lifestyle and writing more. I mean, I sleep 8 or 9 hours a night, every night, unless I have time to sleep 12. Should I sleep 4? Maybe that will burn me out so much that I can’t write. I need to read and fuck around and play on the computer to get ideas for writing, so it’s almost like those things are essential. I could seriously drop everything and have a 6 or 8 hour of space available every night, as opposed to my 2 or 3 hours. But would I be able to write if I did that? There’s the delicate balance of the whole thing.

I like how the writing is going - i am simultaneously worried that I am not getting weird enough and that I’m getting too weird. I am worried that if I put in a billion weird scientific references like I want to, I will become a Mark Leyner clone. But I like to be thought of as a thinking man’s (or person’s) writer, and I like having fucked up references that only apply to computer programmers, biologists, and illicit drug users. Building a cult audience is my first priority. Fuck accessibility.

NT 4.0 self-surgery

Tue, 08 Jul 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’m installing NT 4.0 on one of my computers right now. It’s about as involved as a heart valve replacement self-surgery, and twice as dangerous.

I haven’t written in here for a while - it takes more effort and I’d rather spend my time working on other stuff, but I’ll still try to nail stuff in here as much as possible. It was just the 4-day weekend and I spent a lot of time doing anything but working on the computer. I did a little work, and I’m happy with the changes that are starting to happen in this draft of Rumored, but it is taking forever. Oh well.

I better get back to this installer before it completely destroys all of my work.

Lots of work and little sleep

Fri, 11 Jul 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I know I haven’t written anything in a while. Life’s been an odd combination of lots of work and little sleep, but not in the traditional sense. I don’t know how to explain it - I am not sleeping less because I am working so much. I am sleeping less because I keep getting sick to my stomach whenever I eat anything substantial. I ate at McDonald’s for lunch yesterday and could barely eat one hamburger before I got an intense stomach pain like food poisoning. You’re probably thinking “no shit Jon, McDonalds food will kill you”. But typically, I can eat 9 hamburgers there with no problem, and I’ve eaten there a LOT over the last 26 years. And it isn’t just McD’s, it is ANY food more than say a bagel. So I barely ate, wasted $3.50, and got back to work with this mixture of hunger and sickness where I wanted to eat but I didn’t want to ever eat again.

So when I try to work at night, it is hard because I am hungry and all low-energy, but scared to eat anything other than rice. And this introduces this whole weird cycle of weakness and naps and caffeine and staying up too late and no concentration and blah blah blah.

But I am slowly working on things. I have more writing than time right now, which is a rare thing for me. I’m usually stuck on what I will be doing, and I bang my head into the wall over what I will be working on. Speaking of which, I should be working on some other stuff now…

Mental screen savers

Thu, 24 Jul 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I always play these weird games in my head to keep me busy and eat away the free time in elevators, showers, and meetings when typical people probably either shut down their brains or think about God or something. One of my puzzles is to think about the Camaro I had back in high school and what I would do if I wanted to restore it and had an unlimited budget. That one’s boring - the big gun is thinking about a quarter of a billion dollar inheritance. It sounds shallow, and many people would just think “I’d buy a car. Then I’d go to Nordstrom’s”. I think about a life-sized game of Risk: starting corporations, large scale retribution, and political destruction. I guess it beats doodling on my arm with a magic marker.

Anyway, my newest mental screen saver has been this: imagine going back in time only five years, confronting yourself, and hanging out with a week. Now, this is more advanced than the typical ‘see yourself as a kid’ thing. I haven’t changed that much in five years. Hell, I still have the same glasses I had five years ago. But, it was a whole different era for me - I was back in Indiana, living on dog food, mostly unemployed, and going through women like I go through Coke now. I could mostly unnoticed in 1992 - I could probably show up at work and work for 8 hours if it weren’t for the fact that I probably weigh like 20 lbs more and I wouldn’t be able to remember anybody’s name.

I thought about it more and wrote some of the science behind the thing. I would be fully functional (not like a Quantum Leap hologram), and I would be able to change anything. I would have a preprogrammed jump-back point of like a week. When I returned, everything in the past would revert to its previous value. Nobody would remember me, and all of the things I diverted or messed up would go back to the values that had already happened. Basically, a week-long divot of the past would be cloned and held in escrow while I fucked around, and then when I returned, a union of the past I changed and the piece that was removed would be grafted back in place. I thought of such a complex system so multiple machines could knock people back to the same timeframe of the same world without wiping out future people when grafts were reimplemented. A simpler system would be to take a week-long sample of the past and then feed it into something like the Star Trek holodeck, but it wouldn’t be entirely true. Here’s why - lets say the 1997 me decides to meet up with the 1992 girlfriend and I tell the 1992 me to get lost so we can talk for a bit. Okay, if I was in the holodeck, the only rendering information it would have would be my views of the 1992 girlfriend, and not her actual reactions to new situations. Well, I guess it would if it greatly sampled the entire week-long piece of the past from the actual past and not from my brain. The problem is this - I don’t know everything about people from my past - I only know the events I saw. I can guess, but it’s not 100% accurate unless it is really the living, breathing person in front of me. I think.

The weird thing of all of this - when I travel back to 1997, everything else reverts, but my memory doesn’t. I can carry back thoughts that change my future, because it hasn’t happened yet. I just can’t change the past.

The grand total of all of this is that I end up with this odd playground where I get to see and talk to people that I will never see again. And I get to do stuff like visit IU the way I remember it. I can drive my VW to Garcia’s and log into my old computer accounts and sit around with the 1992 me and lay some heavy shit on him/me about what’s going to happen in the past/future. I guess the whole thing is sad and abnormal, and I wouldn’t be doing anything worthy or changing things or anything. It would be like a photo album except with all senses, and it would probably just be depressing.

Other things I was thinking about in this - would I need to take my medicine? I would have to somehow bring it, as I took different medicine then. How would I hide myself to other people? I could say I was an older brother or something. I think about how I would identify myself to myself - I guess that would be easy - I know a lot of things that I have never told anybody, and if I laid out a bunch of those to the 1992 me, I/he would figure it out. Everything in my wallet would be wrong - the only thing in there that I would’ve had in 1992 would be my Social Security card. All of my money would be unspendable - I have $4 in my pocket, 3 are 1996, one is 1993. None of my credit cards would work. But I could probably use my 1992 photo ID without any problems, as long as I kept my story straight when I got pulled over or whatever. The people I saw everyday would be confused about me because my hair is probably different, I weigh a little more, etc. but the people I only run into every few months wouldn’t know. I don’t know, it’s a very strange thing to think about. I mean, I could sit and tell myself who would die, who I would date, but it would only be for my own morbid fascination. I guess I want to drive my VW again, too.

I want to write a long thing about FM radio. I don’t know what the focus would be though. The coolest places for FM radio are probably LA and San Fran. I remember driving into San Fran from Jose and the seek button would stop about every tenth of a number on the dial. 98.1 98.2 98.3 98.4 etc. Within 6 or 7 hits, I found a station playing Obituary. And although I’m not into these disco dancing stations, there are dance stations that must play commercials like all day, because they spin records for hours at a time without stopping for a commercial break. Any music that’s fast and doesn’t stop every 2 minutes for a car dealership ad is pretty cool to me. My biggest peeve is the station that has such a rigid format that you could set your watch according to the next Snapple commercial. When I drive south every other Friday to Karena’s, I listen to KOMO AM for the traffic reports. Bill Gallant is on and he’s a fairly cool guy, but they actually take like 15 seconds of callers per hour. It is commercial / traffic / commercial / intro / commercial / traffic / commercial / intro / two seconds of talk / commercial / traffic etc. Why can’t they just play commercials for like 4 minutes of the hour and shut the fuck up so they can get some entertainment going? I mean, I hate Rush Limbaugh, but I bet he talks for more than 3 minutes of his 7 hour shift in the morning. What makes it even worse is on the music stations when they do the same commercial rotation and then they play the same 6 songs all day. I hate listening to 107.7 now because they play all the commercials and then they play the same 311, No Doubt, and Porno for Pyros songs over and over and over. They play that Pets song by Porno for Pyros like it’s a new hit - IT’S BEEN OUT FOR FIVE GODDAMN YEARS! So I try to listen to 99.9 and they are moderately okay, but they have this thing “we play 9 in a row all day long”. Well, they don’t. They play 3 or 4 blocks of 9 with a lot of commercials in between. Like, if they finish 9, they don’t do 4 commercials and a station ID and then go into another 9. They dick around for a while, work around the lunch break or whatever, and an hour later they start another 9. And during the blocks of 9, they break between the songs for station promos, which I think is a ripoff. But, they play some older ozzy, and some other good metal stuff, which is better than listening to Bryan Adams or Air Supply.

I still think Seattle is better than Indiana though, because I NEVER listened to the radio there. Your choices were elevator music, or adult contemp. pop music. I guess now they have some “alternative” stations, but still. There are usually 4 stations that your FM radio will pick up in Indiana, even in the major cities. People are happy listening to the Chicago 17 album or whatever.

Synthetic gin

Sat, 26 Jul 1997 00:00:00 GMT

In Orwell’s 1984, he talks about filling his tin cup with a ration of a synthetic gin that’s greasy, difficult going down, and the only drink available. That sounded like the coolest thing in college. I think the only reason I ever drank rum was because of the stories of sailors and wooden barrels of the stuff - yo ho ho and a bottle of, and the Disney caricature of the same scene that was recently revisited a bit. (It’s not too much different - there was a scene of guys chasing after women, and now the guys are stealing food and the women are chasing after them. If you think it’s some PC brainwashing, go fuck yourself - Disney can do what they want. It’s not like it is a historical monument or something). Anyway, I was saddened to later find that all gin tastes like furniture polish and it wasn’t as cool of a drink as I had previously thought.

I don’t know much about liquor as I don’t drink at all anymore, and when I did imbibe, I stuck to what I knew - rum and a few beers. I tried tequila before - tasted too much of rotting vegetables or something. I liked rum because it was a more artificial taste, like Coke is more artificial than iced tea. Schnapps has a good fake taste, but too many of them are flavored to hell. Once on a whim, I bought a fifth of peppermint schnapps, and it tasted like eating candy canes right after brushing your teeth. It was the perfect beverage for little 19 year old girls in a dorm trying to get drunk without tasting alcohol - a small step beyond drinking Scope. For some reason, I never tried vodka. I did have a roommate who was a rotgut whisky connoisseuer, and got me to do a few shots of Jack and Wild Turkey here and there. I can’t drink that stuff for pleasure, but if I ever end up a divorced Vietnam Vet on welfare who hates the world, I’ll buy that shit by the case. It’s the most pissed off of any drink, in my opinion.

While I’m on a roll, let’s talk about beer and wine. I don’t like wine, and it probably dates back to when I was a Catholic kid and I didn’t want to drink the wine at my first communion, and my mom put a gun to my head and told me God would fuck my ass if I didn’t drink that wine. Okay, she worded it different, but you know how moms get about that shit. Like a Jonestown Massacre victim, I drank the wine and it was the most vile tasting shit - okay, there are probably many more vile things in the world, but this is the worst that was given to me by an alleged son of god in a church. I’m sure many Catholic altarboys have worse stories, but I won’t get into that. I think that shut me off of wine forever. It’s sad because so many of the artsy-fartsy poet types are always drinking wine because they think it’s more sophisticated than a case of Schlitz. Maybe, maybe not. I think I’ve drank wine about 3 or 4 times in my adult life, and unless it was immediately followed by food, it wasn’t that memorable.

But beer, shit - I think it’s humorous how so many people hate the taste of beer, and so did I, but it’s like Spanish - you can learn it in a semester or two if you work at it every day and incorporate it into your life. Except for the first communion incident, I didn’t drink a friggin drop of alcohol until the night of my 21st birthday. My mom’s a recovered alcoholic, and her whole side of the family is filled with substance abusers, recovered, dead, or still at it today. I also had a good friend from junior high and high school who later got into drugs and alcohol, and ended up in juvenile homes, rehab, AA, NA, halfway houses, and jail. I drove him to AA meetings during high school and learned enough to keep me petrified about alcohol for years. I was certain my first drink would snap me right into full blown alcoholism. Also, when I was in school, I didn’t know how to hide teen drinking from my mom. If I came home as a 17 or 18 year old and drunk off my ass, I would probably get the ‘first strike, you’re out’ treatment. And not only did I fear getting caught, I just felt bad about the whole thing. I didn’t want my mom to work hard at staying clean for all of those years and then have a son who was a drunk. So I didn’t drink.

Then I turned 21. I was at school, and I started thinking that maybe it would be cool to try it out once. It’s just like voting - I am totally against the political system, but if it’s legal to go in there and write Jimi Hendrix on the ballot and run out again, then fuck - I’ll try it. Plus, I figured that if I went out on my 21st birthday, I’d get a bunch of free drinks. So I started drinking fruity shit like Pina Colatas and I got into wine coolers because I didn’t like wine, I didn’t think I’d like beer, and coolers were all that they sold at the grocery store. Those were fun because if you drank like 4 of them real fast, you’d be set. Anyway, I started drinking beer because it is the lowest common denominator - it is at every party and every store and every bar, and it is the most accessible. It is the ZZ Top of alcohol - it goes with anything, and everyone who is cool can tolerate it.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, except maybe as a laundry list of the beers I liked and didn’t like. I don’t get into Guiness or all of the ultra heavy beers. If I wanted to drink something as thick as syrup, I’d stick to Robitussen. It tastes better and is cheaper by the ounce. I like cheap beer - if I am just drinking to drink and be merry, it’s going to be Budweiser. If I have the extra two dollars, I might get Molson. If someone else is buying, I might get something like Rolling Rock or even Sapporro. I am banning Coors beer, and I don’t like to pay double or triple for some brewpub small-brewery private label bullshit. I don’t buy $8 beer for the same reason I don’t buy $75 jeans - the labels make no difference, they are there for the pretentious who need them. Trade secret - it doesn’t matter if the water is as pure as the woodland stream when you are brewing a beverage that essentially tastes like piss.

Like I said, I don’t drink anymore. I didn’t surrender to any 12 step bullshit, although I respect those who do. I just woke up one morning after drinking like a fifth of rum and blacking out, and decided it wasn’t worth the time anymore. I didn’t drink every day to start my day and keep me going until the next drink, but I did drink heavily when I was alone and felt a need to ‘self-medicate’. But I found that if I didn’t spend money on it, I didn’t drink at all. Although it feels good in the moment, it’s essentially boring. It can be awkward to not be a drinker and not have a reason, but I’ve stuck to my guns on it.

I’ve also decided to quit Baked Lays potato chips. I hate them, but I always buy them, sort of by accident. Like I’ll go to Subway, and grab the wrong thing. Anyway..

quick thoughts on music

Fri, 01 Aug 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Quick thoughts - I have been listening to more death metal, especially before work every morning. At first, it made me uneasy - I choose to listen to the speed and type of music based on my mood. Like if I am lying in bed at 2am and wanting to sleep soon, I might listen to Brian Eno, but not Motorhead. But it works in reverse - if I listen to Dismember before work, it keeps me from being slow and passive. I have this fear that I have become such a slow working person, both at work and at home, that I spend 20 hours a day being lazy and the other 4 doing an hour of work. Listening to unholy satanic death metal seems to artificially raise my metabolism a bit.

I don’t remember my other thought, but I’ve got a meeting now.

Finished paper journal

Sat, 02 Aug 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I finished a paper journal last night. It was one of those Mead 120 page, 3 subject deals. I started it on December 6? or 9 maybe, and finished last night. I’m not writing as much these days - I need to change that. I’ve been wandering so much from my intended “mission” as a writer, trying to find that something that’s missing in life. I always pick up these stupid hobbies, thinking that watercolor or a camcorder or model rockets or whatever else will somehow make me complete. Most of them just make me completely broke. Last night, I read my first paper journal and thought about how things have changed and not changed in the last three years. I wanted to get out of IU and find some place to settle down and write. I remember thinking about how I could work for a year and then wander the world in a beat up van, writing and living. I guess I don’t want to do that anymore, but I’m in the same position as I was back then, with a mound of bills and living paycheck to paycheck with a job that could vanish at any moment. I know I’ve done a lot of things to further my life in other ways, but when it comes down to the writing, I’m still doing the same thing…

I have done a lot of writing over the last few years, stuff like the zine, and the rough drafts of the books. I just want a bunch of complete writing - finished drafts, published issues of the zine. I want to put out as much cohesive stuff as possible.

I’m babbling. About my new journal - mead put out a black cover of my standard notebook, which is new. I’m used to red, blue, green. I won’t be able to write the dates on the cover with a black marker though. Maybe I can buy a silver marker.

WSB DOA

Tue, 05 Aug 1997 00:00:00 GMT

William S. Burroughs died on Saturday (8/2). I heard about it Sunday, but all of my friends are e-mailing me today to ask me if I’ve heard about it, or to get my reaction, or something. It’s not a big deal to me, but it is strange. I cared enough about him to read through _Literary Outlaw_, his bible-sized biography. I guess I am just not into the whole cult worship thing like some people. There are probably people who cried about this even though they never read a book of his, just because he did a record with Kurt Cobain or something.

WSB’s life was something that motivates me, and a few years ago, it made me want to leave and write and everything else. And the movie _Naked Lunch_ has a certain amount of meaning to me. But I have to admit I haven’t read any of his “core” books like Naked Lunch or Nova Express. I own them, but I’ve never been able toget into them. I should try again someday, but too many other things going on..

Argument of diet and food

Tue, 12 Aug 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’m once again in the middle of this argument of diet and food, but the stakes are somewhat raised. I went to my doctor today and he said the symptoms I described could be the beginning of gallbladder disease, and he wants me to see a GI specialist. Of course, the problem could just be stress and poor diet, but better safe than sorry. In the meantime, I am scared into straightening up my act. I have avoided some foods, like pizza and many fast foods, but it’s time to really figure out what I can and can’t eat from here on out.

There are a lot of problems with this whole scheme. If I could afford it and stomach it, it would be nice to just go to McDonald’s every night. No hot ovens in my already broiling summer apartment, no cooking, no extra portions to rot in my fridge, no work, no wasted time. But I realize that a Big Mac or two a day will kill me in short order. Although it is nice and convenient for me to go to Burger King, it’s a death wish. Plus, I can’t stomach the stuff anymore anyway. I spend $5 on a burger and I can only eat a third of it before my stomach hurts and I need to quit.

I’ve had better luck with some cafeterias or restaurants if I don’t get the fried foods. A careful Denny’s order or a dinner at some place like MCL usually doesn’t harm me. But then I might be paying $8 for a grilled cheese sandwich, and it takes so long to drive there, wait in line, wait for food, etc, that I might as well just cook my own grilled cheese.

So why don’t I cook? Feeding one person is harder than feeding four, and possibly more expensive. If you go out and buy some casserole or follow a recipe, you end up with 4-6 times more food than you want, and you probably spend more than you would with that $2.99 McValue meal. Then you either have to invite over friends (I have none) or store the food for later in the week (and I will be bored of that food, so I will never eat it and it will rot). Cooking is a lot of work, as is the planning and shopping for the meals. And when you come home ready to fall asleep, it’s easy to derail all of that planning.

Some foods are easy to cook and store, and I wish I knew more of them. I want to get some book without some hokey dieting agenda like eating 42 cauliflower a day or something. I save money when I cook, and I save even more when I can buy in bulk and store the stuff for later.

I guess there are other dietary concerns for me too. Questions like: should I eat meat? Should I drink coke? I need to work out the basics like eating 3 meals a day and getting in the right nutrition though.

I’m just worried that I will obsess over this like I do over everything, and I’ll spend 24 hours a day counting calories. I’m already obsessing too much, as I’ve filled this entire journal page with stupid bullshit about my eating habits. Oh well.

My girlfriend wants to join a suicide cult

Wed, 13 Aug 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’m trying to wean myself off of caffeine and it’s killing me. I had one can of Coke yesterday, and about a half glass thismorning. Some of this diet change is okay - it’s nice to eat a bowl of cereal in the morning, and I feel a lot better when I’m not eating processed foods. But the no-Coke thing is a crippler. I did sleep like a baby last night, but I had a horrendous headache in the morning.

I’ve been listening to Miles Davis all afternoon. There’s a role model for perfection. Well, except the heroin and insanity. He jammed with about everybody, put out all of these albums, improv-ed the most incredible stuff, and really WORKED. I wish I could write books like Miles recorded albums, that’s all I have to say.

The Church of Euthanasia was on Jerry Springer last night. It was pretty stupid - they titled it “my girlfriend wants to join a suicide cult” or something lame like that, and made it sound like the COE was kidnapping babies from airports or something. Then they had some group on that bombed abortion clinics and wanted to hijack nuclear weapons in order to get the government to kill all homosexuals. It was a little too far out there, and involved a lot of shouting. Pretty lame. Also, I was watching public access and I think I saw a show get shut down. They were showing some porno, and then the cameras turned and I saw a brief glimpse of a cop, and then it all went blank. I thought it might be fake, and they’d be back on again saying “ha ha, we’re in jail” or something, but they didn’t. It happened mid-show, too - maybe 10 minutes into a half hour slot. Weird.

Caffeine sickness

Fri, 15 Aug 1997 00:00:00 GMT

It has been 4 days without caffeine now. That’s not entirely true - I have been drinking a half glass of Coke in the morning to ward off the horrific headaches. Yesterday I didn’t get a headache, but today I did. I’m hoping that if I make it through the weekend, I’ll be fine. But I’ve been having strange hallucinations. Not the bugs and locusts kind of thing, but I see somebody and I think they are somebody else. Like I see a too-strong resembelance between someone in the grocery store and someone famous. I do that a lot when I am really sleepy, but now I do it all the time. I am hoping that after the withdrawl goes away and the energy from eating real food kicks in, I will balance out a bit.

I’ve been listening to this Shadowfax CD that reminds me a lot of the summer 4 years ago. I lived in Elkhart, but worked so much I didn’t really notice the city. When I have time to mess around in that city, like on a vacation, I really notice all of the things that are different or gone. But that summer, a lot of my surroundings just felt the same as when I was in high school. For a big part of the summer, I worked two full-time jobs and slept a couple of hours a week. Those five days, I’d be perpetually covered with grease, oil, dirt, metal filings, cardboard dust, or whatever. But on the weekends, I’d sleep in, take a long shower to get decent, and sit around listening either to metal or to new age or ambient stuff, while I ate real food that didn’t come off of a break truck and do a little writing.

I had two dreams at that point - one was to go back to Bloomington and move into a really nice apartment, and get some good furniture on the cheap, and have a real place to live. I spent two years living in a boardinghouse apartment about as big as a walk in closet, and wanted more. I wanted to be able to invite over 10 people, cook a dinner, and watch some movies with plenty of room. I spent my few odd moments that summer rounding up furniture: a new bed, a new couch, a new chair, a new computer table. Well, not all of it was new - but the new stuff was discounted through my mom’s job as a decorator or my job at Monkey Ward’s. So I collected the furniture in the basement and daydreamed of having some posh living quarters after I moved.

Incidentally, I have almost none of this furniture, except a nightstand and a small halogen lamp. I sold almost all of it when I moved to Seattle.

The second thing was not my girlfriend, although I did spend a lot of time daydreaming about her while she was in Tampa, Florida. I guess the second thing varied. One week, I would think about buying a car. The next, it would be a 20,000 CD collection. I did not have a major in college that summer, and I thought about what I would do. I wanted to somehow get involved at NASA, and thought that maybe there would be some kind of technical writing gig there. I also wanted to start another magazine for a while, or do some other writing for bands. It always changed, which means I can sort of map the different things to the different points in time over the summer.

I shot 5 or 10 rolls of film on this new camera I bought that summer, partially intending to send photos to my girlfriend, and partially because I wanted to learn how to use a camera for art and journalism purposes. I took a lot of photos of me and my house and my back yard, and some of friends like Ray and Tom. Not only was this project one of the only ones with a concrete result that I still have today, but the photos are all indelible references to the past.

New C64

Fri, 29 Aug 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Since I quit caffeine, I sleep right through the night and never wake up or sleep lightly, which means I also never remember any of my dreams. The other night I was reading John Fail’s weird dream journal, and then when I slept, I remembered an abnormal dream. I wrote it all down, but I don’t remember what it was now. Thismorning, I almost remembered part of a dream, but I couldn’t pull it all together.

Just as I thought the whole zine was going to be composed solely of writing by me and Larry, a bunch of other stuff fell in place. I’m still worried that the big pieces are there, but the small bits that really make a zine readable aren’t there. I also have very little writing in this next issue, and all of my stuff is recycled. It’s been hard to write anything new, even though I have a bunch of projects on my back and I probably could sit and just work on other responsibilities for a month straight.

I bought a Commodore 64 the other day. I don’t have it yet, it should show up on Monday or so. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the net, and trying to pull together some games and stuff. I have about 3 or 4 carts that I rescued from my mom’s house, and I probably have some other stuff lying around her basement. It’s fun to think about - I got my first C-64 for Christmas during the 8th grade, and spent ALL of my time with it. Before that, I had an Aquarius with 4K of RAM, no tape drive, no disk drive, no printer, a chicklet keyboard, a horrible BASIC, and NO place to buy any accessories or documentation for it. I pushed that thing to the limit, which wasn’t hard. It was pure joy going to the 64, with way more memory, good graphics, excellent sound, standard joystick ports, lots of magazines and software available, and lots of programmability. I never got the disk drive, which was my one big downfall - I did all of my work on a tape drive. But I had friends with 64’s and we’d copy games onto tape, and I’d spend forever writing stuff in BASIC. It’ll be nice to toy around with this new machine. I even got a disk drive, too. Maybe I’ll sit down and try to write that adventure game parser, now that I have a bunch of CS classes behind me.

July 4 ruminations

Sat, 30 Aug 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Chuck Stringer called me from Billings, Montana. He stole his neighbor’s plastic pink flamingo and has been driving across the country and taking pictures of it at national monuments and stuff. When I drove the same route, I didn’t sleep, and I blacked out but kept driving at some point past Spokane. It was the 4th of July and I was hoping to get to Seattle in time for the fireworks.

That was 1995. On July 4, 1993, I was driving my mom’s station wagon filled with the remainder of my belongings at the 414 South Mitchell apartment in Bloomington. I was headed to Elkhart, and somewhere around Kokomo, I saw a burst of fireworks, and thought of the year before.

It was so weird leaving that apartment. I spent 2 years in that closet of a roominghouse flat. After everything was in the car, I sat on my favorite wooden chair (that I forgot!) and looked at the dirty, wooden paneled bedroom. It looked just like the day I moved in in 1991, but so much had happened. My dating life did a full 180 at least 4 or 5 times, I listened to music, Ray slept on the floor, I froze, I sweated, and bees crawled through the ceiling and evaded three different exterminators.

My phone line was still hooked up that weekend, but I had to bring a phone with me. My girlfriend called me from Florida and woke me up on Saturday morning. I thought she was over in Willkie quad and I told her to come over before I realized she was 1200 miles away.

The year before, Yusef and I drove to Zionsville to sell glowsticks at the fireworks show. We sold almost all of them in about 5 minutes. We left right after the fireworks started and hauled ass to get to a carnival before it got too crowded. We didn’t sell them as fast at the carnival; rednecks populated this carnival, not the rich lawyers and doctors at the Zionsville fireworks show. We had to work people for every sale, and put up with the ridicule of drunken 17 year olds or drunken 37 year olds acting like 17 year olds.

I got dumped by someone at the beginning of summer, and spent two months failing miserably at dating and meeting new people. I watched all of the couples in love walking the concourses, playing the games where you win big teddy bears, buying elephant ears and eating them together. This was the part of Indiana where bringing your girlfriend to the county fair would get you laid every time. Not only was I alone, but I was working as a street vendor, one of the most demeaning jobs that didn’t involve shoveling shit or holding a “Will work for food” sign.

And I heard Metallica’s “black” album constantly that night. The people running the tilt-a-whirl or the gravitron or one of those rides kept playing it over and over. It was the anthem to the whole event.

It felt demeaning putting up with these peoples’ shit. Every time some redneck started with the power trip, I felt like telling them that I was halfway done with a computer science degree, had all of my teeth, and was holding $2500 in ones and fives in my pocket.

I took that money and one Saturday when I was depressed, this little freshman girl called me up and wanted me to buy her alcohol. I bought a fifth of Bacardi black rum and drank most of it myself in about an hour. Someone called and didn’t leave a message, so I called almost everyone I knew, trying to find out if it was them. I kept calling people after I blacked out, and a bunch of people called me the next Sunday to see if I was okay - people I didn’t remember calling.

While I was hung over, I bought the Ice-T “Cop Killer” album, a new pair of sunglasses, and did my laundry. I met up with Leslie Puccinelli while I was at the laundry on 3rd street, across from Jerry’s Liquor’s.

Yusef used to walk to Jerry’s Liquor, buy a 40, and drink it on the walk home. One time me, him, and Derik rented a VCR from Sun Coast, along with all of those Chucky movies. We hooked it up to a black and white 12” tv, and then realized we needed to get fucked up first. We got into my car and on the hill just before 3rd street, a tire blew out on my Rabbit.

The spring before, Patty and I were at my apartment, and we woke up at like 5 so she could get to her dorm, get ready, take a shower, and walk to her 8:00 music class. It was March and in the 60s that night, but when we went outside, there was a foot of snow on the ground. I offered to drive her home, but when we got to my car, the passenger door wouldn’t open - I had to pry it open. Then, it wouldn’t shut - the latch caught on about the 15th slam. When we were driving up the hill, the door flew open and a sea of moving white and ice and powder appeared and lit the car like a supernova. She grabbed the handle and held the door shut, but on the drive home, the door flew open and shut on every turn.

On the 4th of July weekend, 1991, I was with Jo in Chicago and the same Rabbit got hung up on a manhole cover that ripped off the entire exhaust. We cancelled the reservations, stayed with a friend of hers, and got a new Meineke exhaust for about $160.

I took the Rabbit to Meineke two more times - once when it needed a new flex pipe in the exhaust, which cost about $120, and once when it finally died. The brakes went out, and the frame was so rusted that they couldn’t lift the car on the rack.

Once I was at that laundry on 3rd street with Racquel’s car. I made her a deal that I would wash her car if I could use it to drive to the laundry and do some other shopping. I scraped the spoiler part on the underside of the car, but she never saw it, so I never told her. It’s the part that gets scraped up anyway from the parking lot dividers. I also listened to Cannibal Corpse’s _Tomb of the Mutilated_ while I was driving around town.

Later, I was in the same part of town with her and we went to some kind of company event where there was a generic 50’s band and some catered stuff. It might have been the kind of thing where you buy tickets for $20 and the proceeds to to some schmuck who needs a new kidney. We walked around before then and she gave me a toy puzzle that was made out of a few pieces of metal and a string and you had to move one piece over the other on the string or something.

Come to think about it, I guess some other stuff happened that night, but maybe I should check my diary.

In 1991, Becky gave me a leatherbound diary for Christmas. She destroyed my entire room after we broke up, including my diary. I wrote a bunch of stuff in it the first week, like how I wanted to break up with Jo and how it was good to be with Tom again, even though he lost a bunch of weight in China and now looked like some kind of Vietnam POW from a Rambo movie.

And then I wrote a parser for an adventure game in modula 2, on an IBM-PC with only one 5.25” floppy drive. And I bought a new keyboard, and I drove on the new US-20 bypass, and I thought about how things would change once I got back to school. They did.

An expensive piece of paper

Wed, 03 Sep 1997 00:00:00 GMT

My diploma showed up this weekend, in a mailer marked DO NOT BEND that was bent almost in half by my fuckhead mailman. After straigtening out the piece of paper, tacking it in a $12 frame from target, and hanging it in my bedroom, it’s a strange reminder that my days at IU are over.

I guess that’s a harsh way of looking at it. But the piece of paper is sort of the official word that on June 30, 1995, the part of my life called college ended. I didn’t see this piece of paper because I owned the bursar some cash, and I never did the cap and gown stuff because at a school as big as IU, it’s pretty worthless. They don’t have every one of the 10,000 people walk down the aisle when their name is called - they say “school of business - please stand - you are graduated - next - school of music - please stand - ”.

Packing and moving out here changed things, and I’ve been here for long enough to forget what it’s like to be a student. But the piece of paper is a strange reminder. It’s so official - like something that would be in a doctor’s office, telling the world that this person spent a lot of money doing this and it ain’t no truck driving certificate. I sat looking at the piece of parchment for a while last night, mesmerized.

It reminded me of when I got my first driver’s license. I spent a whole evening staring at it, reading all of the text: the different restriction codes, the organ donor section, my height, my weight, my crappy picture. I drew a handlebar mustache and long hair over the photo with a pencil, which made my age go from 16 to 34. But most of all, I just thought about how strange it was to see an Indiana driver’s license with my name and picture on it. It was also abnormal to be able to get in my beat up Camaro that had been sitting for almost two years, and without a parent or guardian in the passenger seat, pull out of the driveway, turn up the radio, and slam on the gas.

-----

I was watching Larry King Live and he asked some guy in Paris if he had ever seen a car as fucked up as Lady Di’s limo after it got crushed in that tunnel. If Larry King asked me that, I’d have to answer “you’ve never seen some of the shit I’ve done to cars, Larry”. That Mercedes was in much more saleable condition than my Turismo that blew up in the parking lot of a Martins grocery store.

Ultrasound

Tue, 09 Sep 1997 00:00:00 GMT

This morning, I had an abdominal ultrasound. It was a strange experience, although I’m sure I’ve had worse. It’s odd to look at a computer monitor and see your insides displayed like some pacific ocean trench on a national geographic special about robot submarines. It wasn’t as cool as I thought it would be - the internal organs didn’t show up like the inside of some plastic visible human model or something. In fact, I couldn’t tell what the fuck they were looking at. I felt somewhat ripped off. Shows like Mad About You preach some folklore about ultrasounds, like they’re a video camera with a special lens. Really, it’s a step more advanced than tapping on the side of a gas can to see how full it is.

Also, I thought that magic wand just waved over your stomach like a UPC bar code reader, or maybe the thing they use to de-energize the hidden magnet strip inside a library book. The radiologist was pushing the damn thing so hard into my gut, I thought she was going to ask me for my wallet or something. I also had to do all of these gymnatics: get on your side, go on your other side, breathe in deeply, don’t breathe, breathe in a little, breathe out, etc etc. It was fucking unbearable. Plus they’ve got some kind of electrically conductive sex jelly all over the place, which they never show you on TV.

I guess it wasn’t bad - 50 years ago, they would’ve cut me open and rooted around inside of me with their bare hands. And I didn’t pay for the damn thing.

I haven’t mentioned why I’m doing all of this shit. Maybe I have, I don’t remember. Anyway, my doctor thinks there’s something wrong with my liver, but nothing serious. He’s taken about 4 gallons of blood, did this ultrasound shit, made me wait in lines forever, and when it’s all over, he will probably just say “don’t eat at McDonald’s anymore”. I have been avoiding fast food for the last month, since this whole thing started, and it’s not bad. I lost a couple of pounds, I spend way less on food each week, and I feel somewhat better. At least the fucking doctor didn’t have to shove anything up my ass to find out that I wasn’t eating right.

Transcribing pains

Wed, 10 Sep 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I finished transcribing this Jello Biafra interview last night. It took me about 6 hours to transcribe 45 minutes of tape. Most death metal bands or whatever talk in a slow, stoned-out voice and it’s easy to keep up with the tape. But Jello talks faster than fuck, especially when he is on some political rant, and he doesn’t pause for anything. It’s interesting stuff to read and listen to, but I never thought I’d finish typing the damn thing.

With that done, the zine is a big step closer to completion. I need to edit and proof everything, and figure out what stays and what goes. I can’t wait to get the articles flawless and into FrameMaker, so I can see what they look like with some good fonts and weird art.

I should put in a plug for this zine if you are one of the three people actually reading this and you don’t know about it. It will be done at the end of this month and is $2 or a trade, but if you’re actually reading this, I’ll send it to you anyway. Just email me with your postal address and I’ll put you on the list.

I’ve given up on making a cable to connect my Commodore 64 to my PC. I have the schematics and everything, but I just can’t solder anymore. I can’t see the fine detail that close up, and I can’t hold the iron that still, either. It’s sort of fucked up. I’d like to buy a cable, but the people out there who are building them are screwing over people. I want to play some of those old games on my 64, but I never knew it would be this much of a hassle…

It’s lunchtime and I’m ready for bed…

Studying the liver in an obsolete text

Thu, 11 Sep 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I read far more about the liver than I’d ever need to know last night, and studied Gray’s Anatomy for about an hour, finding out what hooks up to what. The problem with Gray’s is that it was written about a million years ago, so it doesn’t talk about modern surgery - just old fashioned sawing and forking apart a cadaver. Things haven’t changed much there, but it would be nice for more detailed medical information. I have an encyclopedia from 1972, but that doesn’t exactly give me the latest in surgical techniques.

It doesn’t matter too much. I worked my worry into a frenzy last night, thinking my spleen would explode in my sleep, and when I got to the doctor today, he said I was fine. I’m glad I don’t have hepatitis or something, but I was hoping for some simple, treatable condition that would go away after a prescription or two, and allow me to go back to my previous diet of Cokes and Quarter Pounders. No such luck.

Why is everybody suddenly lactose intolerant? Why weren’t people on the Old West lactose intolerant? Did they start adding stuff to milk to make it worse? Have cows mutated over the last 5 years? Has there ever been a US Astronaut that was lactose intolerant? Did they drink something else in space, like maybe a soy milk? I wonder about that.

Hey, remember ten minutes ago?

Sat, 13 Sep 1997 00:00:00 GMT

It’s one of those days. The temperature has changed enough to make me think that it’s fall. And with every change of season, I feel like I’m transported to some other year, or era. When the fall leaves are rustling and it gets chilly enough to need a jacket, I think about sitting in my mom’s driveway in Indiana, listening to Metallica - Master of Puppets and replacing a heater coil in a ‘76 Camaro.

It doesn’t help that I watched about an hour of some MTV “Hey! Remember the 80’s?” show last night. It was the one about 80s metal bands. A lot of it was about the hair bands like Cinderella and Poison, and it was amusing to see all of them broke and destitute, hair cut and money gone. It was odd to see George Lynch. He was in Dokken, which although they were trying to do the whole fringe jacket and tight pants thing, were somewhat musically talented. Anyway, George Lynch is now an amateur bodybuilder in Arizona, and was probably the most well-spoken of the bunch. He looked totally different with short hair, a tan, and riding around on a mountain bike or lifting weights. It shows you how much you can change in 10 years.

I listened to a tape last night when I was running that I made 10 years ago. Me and this guy Jia used to make comedy tapes, sort of Cheech and Chong types of things, and I dug them out of the closet. I actually listened to a mix I made on the backside of one of our tapes of a lot of the bands I was into in high school. Some of it had classic stuff like Hendrix, Grand Funk, and Led Zeppelin, but it also had some Saxon, Anthrax, and Metallica on there.

I know I’ve changed a lot since high school, but one of the things I miss is that in high school and in a lot of college, I had a real thirst for music. I spent a lot of money on tapes - when I got my first non-food job in high school and started working in the mall, I would buy at least one tape a week, every week. Even then, there were so many other things in the tape racks that I wanted to buy but couldn’t because of money. Now, I can walk into a CD store with a roll of hundreds and not find anything I REALLY want to buy. Sure, I could buy that Black Sabbath back catalog, or the Iron Maiden CDs that I only have on vinyl. But there isn’t a kind of music I LIKE anymore. I don’t know what new stuff I would want to get into. Although there is some cool older stuff, I want something new - something recorded in the digital age, something with good production, a lot of energy, and a reverberance that makes me want to go out and buy all of the artist’s albums. I had this back when metal ruled the world, but now I don’t. There aren’t any metal bands, and I’m not sure I’d even want to listen to them if they were out now. I’m sure they would be some band like Winger with some samples and a drum machine to sound more like Chemical Brothers or something. Oh well - metal caught me unprepared when I first started listening to old Maiden and Motorhead - maybe the next cool thing will, too.

DeLorean

Tue, 16 Sep 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I no longer advocate Details magazine as a worthwhile publication. At one time I said it was a good read for its price, but all of the good parts have vanished in favor for their idiotic new look. Plus they have these 200 page advertizing layouts that are disguised as genuine articles that pad out most of the articles that are not there anymore. And what’s with this “Details guy” thing? They make it sound like every person who is anybody in my age demographic wears $4000 suits with $400 shoes, works out for 40 hours a week, climbs mountains or visits Europe on the weekend, does the “club scene” every weekend (also) and lives in New York City or in the Valley. It’s total bullshit. If that is my generation, I want to file for emancipation and go join the baby boomers with their mutual funds and quiet vacations to Lake Tahoe. Anything but this.

I saw the first Back to the Future movie last night, and now I want to own a DeLorean. I also want to own a bunch of useless/useful scientific gear. I watched a lot of movies yesterday, many of the same genre, but on accident. I saw Wargames, then some HBO movie about a Soviet sub with a reactor fire, then Independence Day, then I went home and saw Back to the Future. So all but one had some military theme to them, and three mentioned DEFCON.

In about two minutes of searches, I found several comprehensive DeLorean pages. They cost about $20,000 new, but sold for much more, and appreciated way more. I did see one of these at Universal Studios, but it might have been a fake. Oh, you can find a used one that needs some work for $12K-$14K, and a pristine one for around $20K-$30K.

I’ve always been interested in ham radio even though I don’t like CBs or walkie talkies. I can never hear what the people are understanding. My dad had a CB back when fucking everybody had one, and it seemed interesting, but I never got into it - I was only 6. He also had a set of walkie talkies which were fairly cool - the type with six foot antennae. We used to run around the neighborhood with those bastards, playing army or star wars or whatever. But they took about 600 batteries each, so there were only one or two times we had both radios going.

The packet radio thing sounds cool - the idea of having something like the internet but without all of the ball and chain connections to the computer industry sounds pretty cool. But I don’t know what I’d use it for, since I seldom use my modem and computer at home these days. It would also be cool to get some 2 meter antenna radio and talk to people on the Mir and in China and everything, but I guess I can do a lot of that on the computer, and I don’t.

Today’s been a geek day, because I’ve been trying to figure out JavaScript for the first time today. I have always considered it useless, but now I think it might be cool to write some kind of book catalog search or something with it. As long as it isn’t some annoying dialog box that comes up and says “My Site is K00L! Come on in!”.

I plan to blow 50 or 60 bucks at the grocery tonight. I’m hoping for a good evening.

Four different things

Wed, 17 Sep 1997 00:00:00 GMT

It’s amazing that there are things in the Rumored to Exist draft from two months ago that I’ve completely forgotten about. I was just editing down an excerpt for the next zine, and I found about 10 pages of really incredible stuff that I don’t remember writing. So that’s pretty cool.

I have about four different things going on at work and in my mind, and I can’t just focus on one. Over lunch and last night, I was trying to edit some stuff for the zine, today and yesterday I was trying to learn enough javascript to fix something at work, I started thinking thismorning about how I could rewrite my auto-index program for this journal so it would include table support, and on the back burner is this game I’m writing. Lots of things to think about…

---

I guess the tables thing works now. It really makes the list of journals look small though. And I’m not sure if there’s some weird year-2000-esque bug that will cause the whole thing to fail at the end of the year. It sorts the stuff in alphabetical order, not numeric. So 12/25/71 goes after 9/16/97. And if I start writing next year it will look like this in the list: 9/16/97, 9/16/98, 9/17/97,…

Turing machines

Thu, 18 Sep 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been thinking about Turing machines a lot, and doing some reading about them. The basic explanation, if I can remember it: there’s a machine that can read this paper tape (probably mylar if it was invented now). The tape looks sort of like a piece of movie film or something, and each square can hold a 1 or a 0. The machine can also move the tape left or right, to read another square. The machine has in internal state, which is basically like one memory location that holds a number. The machine is also constructed to follow a ruleset. The ruleset is a bunch of if-then statements that distate tape movement and the storage of new items on the tape. So, “if the tape says 0 and the current state is 20, change the current state to 27, write a 1 in this position, and move the tape left”

What the hell does all this mean? Turing designed this thing (on paper) in 1936 as the solution to a problem about designing a machine that could solve any mathematical problem without being physically rebuilt or modified. This seems pretty stupid if you’ve got a pentium on your desk, but back then, it was a big deal. And if you’ve ever worked with assembly language, you know the similarities between a Turing machine and a simple (i.e. non-Intel) processor. A Turing machine is sort of like a one-register RISC processor, except it addresses a bunch of paper tape instead of a bus.

Wander streets aimlessly

Fri, 19 Sep 1997 00:00:00 GMT

It’s one of those days where you wish you could wander the streets aimlessly, with no purpose or goal. It’s cold enough outside to make it prohibitive yet seductive. Not like a hot and sunny summer day, where you biologically feel a need to escape and have fun. It’s more like a day when you wish you were clutching your coat against you, a wind blowing fliers and dead leaves down the street, and you watch the city as it works during the time you’re a part of it and working. You wander into a mall and it’s some geriatric ward, with the worst of the worst at the counters and muzak blaring in at 11. The small stores are empty, too. It’s all about the weather, though. It’s telling you “summer’s over”, like waking up with a hangover the morning after a party, your house filled with stale bags of half-eaten potato chips and mostly empty beer cans. It all sucks, but there’s something about that complete silence that tells you it’s over, but you survived it.

I once read a Bukowski poem where he describes the same feeling, where he sits in an attic drinking a beer and thinking that there’s all of those construction workers building houses or whatever, while he just sits there. My feeling is some of that, but also based on having such a weird student schedule for 6 years. I’d catch a couple classes or a shift of work at IUSB and then drive to Scottsdale Mall to blow my paycheck. The feeling of only me and my tape deck in the car, mixed with a city so busy at commerce, felt almost haunting, like being on the crashed Titanic’s hull, except it’s all alive.

The other strange thing about Michawaka and South Bend and my year their was that driving in downtown South Bend felt like really being in a city. There were buildings taller than 3 stories high, you had to parallel park in places, there were 6 lane streets and one way streets and overpasses and highways. Once I learned how to really drive around that mess of cities, I felt like it was better than being in Bloomington in some odd way. There was more going on in Bloomington, but it’s a small town compared to South Bend - compared to Elkhart, even.

The flipside to this is having the weird student schedule and being awake at 4 or 5 in the morning, and seeing the same city asleep. This happened to me almost every day back in school, and still happens sometimes now. It’s strange, but I think Bloomington had more stuff open late than Seattle. There are clubs and bars open past midnight, but you’re stuck with Denny’s or IHOP otherwise.

I just looked up some population stuff from the census page. My dad lives in Millersburg, which had a 1994 population of about 900. The city, or rather village, where I spent my time from age 1 to the first grade (Edwardsburg, MI), has a population of 1141. My birthplace, Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota, is not listed, although the city of Grand Forks is around 50,000. My old hangout of Elkhart was 43,000. The city of Seattle itself is around 500,000. The greater metro area is about 3 million though. The strangest fact I’ve learned - there is a city named Starbuck, WA - population 170.

On a boat

Sat, 20 Sep 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I spent all afternoon on a boat. It was a work thing, they took the whole team out on a little chartered cruise with some food and beer and stuff. We were out for about 3 hours, and it was pretty decent. The weather’s been pretty shitty all week, so I wasn’t sure if we were going to get rained out or if it would be too cold, but it was decent - the sun was out, and even though it was a little chilly, you could get around without a jacket.

The boat had a cabin with a kitchen and 4 booths that sat 4 each, with lots of wood, and a carpeted “living room”. The main deck went all the way around the boat, so you could go up to the front and hang out there. On top of the cabin was a second deck, and the cabin where they ran the ship (the cockpit?). There was also a third crow’s-nest deck above that. I don’t know how long or big the boat was, but it seemed pretty decent. The people who ran it were from Alaska, but they had a summer base up there and spent winters down in Seattle. They also had two little dogs, chiwawas or something, that sort of sat around the cockpit while we were out.

So when it was time to leave, we just crossed the street and went to the marina, and there was our boat, waiting in lake union. The cruise went all over, first back near the locks by Ballard , and then under I-5 and to lake Washington, and then back. The first part brought us through a lot of the more industrial parts of the water, where there were drydocks, old rusty ships, and lots of fishing boats. Lake union has some houseboats and stuff, too. And there are a lot of freaky business office buildings in Fremont that sit right on the water.

The western part of Lake Washington was cool, because we saw the 520 bridge up close, and also saw some of the rowing crew people practicing. A lot of UW is right on the water, too, and we saw stuff like the staduim up close. Then we crossed to the eastern side of the lake. If you’re on the east side of the lake, just south of 520, the first thing you see is the giant mansion that Bill Gates had built. First reactions, of course, have to do with how he can screw so many and build so big of a house. But when you continue north on the lake, you see that he is just trying to keep up with the Jonses, and I emphasize trying. I never knew there were so many billionairs around here! There were houses with yachts in the back yard, a house with a seaplane in the back yard, a lot of golf course green yards, giant verandas, decks, intricate architecture, marble staircases, long stretches of glass, and about everything else. It was like taking some kind of floating tour of the homes of the rich and famous or something. I liked seeing all of the neat architecture, but it was sort of a wakeup call that I would never become some kind of executive that could afford to spend 100 grand a year on their groundskeeping.

Oh well. It was a cool tour, and I liked seeing the houses and the boats…

Space exploration and Commodore 64

Tue, 23 Sep 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been reading about the Artemis Project, which is this effort to launch people to the moon in the next 10 years or so. (You can read about it here) It’s a pretty cool plan, really, and involves a lot of commercialism and a lot of volunteers. I guess if you are a rocket scientist sitting around doing not much of anything and an opportunity comes to design a giant booster or something comes up, you probably would decide to work on it.

I’ve been on this SciFi bent lately, and I don’t know if it is because of all the Mars stuff, or the Commodore 64 is bringing back repressed memories, or all of the talk of old SciFi zines sounds cool, or what. When I was in high school and took many study halls in order to avoid becoming an overachiever, I read about every book in the library to stay awake. This meant a lot of SciFi - old school stuff like Asimov, and Bradbury, and Clarke. Now, it’s hard to get into some of the junk science-based SciFi, but some of it has enough spirit in it to be readable. I’m reading the book Red Mars now, which talks about settling on mars, and terraforming, and all that, but it’s well done. I think I want to check out the whole trilogy.

I’ve always been into the whole space exploration thing, too. In grade school, I memorized all of the books about the manned space missions. Even in college, I followed all of the shuttle missions on the internet, and kept up with the construction of the Endeavour. It’s a fun bug, but you can’t exactly finish college with a 2.1 GPA and go work for NASA. Oh well..

I’m having a real non-day, and I’m feeling a bit sick. Maybe I’ll skip out for the rest of today.

Sick, Mars

Wed, 24 Sep 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I went home sick yesterday, with something stomach-related that felt like the flu or something. I don’t know. I’m here today, and I feel a little better. I spent the afternoon in bed, reading Red Mars and/or taking a nap. It’s a very cool book, and it covers a lot of details about Mars colonization that people wouldn’t think about, like money, religion, different countries competing against each other, and that thing.

Things I’m wondering about include what kind of power outlets they use, if the TVs are PAL or NTSC, if the women take birth control or something else is used during these frequent plot-building extramarital affairs, and so on. It also seems odd that they’ve been there about 20 years (at page 360-some) and they can build about anything. Assembly lines can build complete rover cars and biosphere domes, but there are only 10,000 people on the planet. I guess it’s the robots they have, and maybe it’s just easier to build stuff with less gravity. Who knows.

I’m eating toast for lunch. It was in the fridge all morning, so it’s pretty awful.

This morning, I started thinking about what would’ve happened if back in 1989, I would’ve hit myself in the head with a brick, started studying 40 hours a week, and changed to CompSci right away. I don’t know why I torture myself like this, because I’m sure when I turn 40, I’ll be wishing I would’ve had a moment of clarity in 1997 and started saving every damn penny I make.

So I’m thinking about this, and then I start thinking about computers and artificial intelligence. Would a computer know its limits? In a sense, even the most basic computers know their limits - if you divide by 0 or enter a number too big, it will stop and give you an error. Why can’t humans know their limits like this? Is it because our greater ability to think stops us? I mean, even our bodies know our limits. If you drink 20 shots of rum back to back, your body will make you puke. But your mind didn’t make you stop after shot 2 or 12 or whatever. It might just be a bad analogy - with a computer, it is a simple matter of checking a circuit, whereas with a human, it is a more complex and fuzzy process of making value judgements.

I need to read more about AI before I go off on these weird tangents… And I need to go finish my applesauce…

Red Mars, dumb metal

Thu, 25 Sep 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I finished reading Red Mars last night. Things get pretty weird and intense at the end of the book, and I really liked how it went. It made me think a lot more about capitalism and historic themes. Mars was a neutral place like Antartica, and then when big companies found out they could mine the fuck out of it, they broke treaties and lured human slaves to the strip mines with promises of money and good work that never happened. I read somewhere that any colonization happens not because of a lack of natural resources, but because of a lack of freely available natural resources. It took less firepower to steal land from the Indians than the French or British.

I bought Blue Mars and Green Mars, so I can keep going with the trilogy. I also saw Mark Leyner’s new book and Vonnegut’s new book, but I didn’t have the cash to buy them both in hardcover - maybe on payday. I think I’ll be busy reading for a while.

There’s a Jello Biafra interview on The Onion, and it’s amazing how much he repeats himself, sometimes in the same interview. I’d be afraid to interview him again in person and find that 50% of what he said is stuff I’ve already printed in the zine. But he has a lot of good things to say. He’s very anti-punk, in the sense that most punk rock these days is as brain-dead as the disco scene was in the 70s, and that scene was why punk was formed in the first place. Most rap is more punk than punk these days.

It makes me think about heavy metal - there was a long period where I thought heavy metal was a thinking man’s music, because my only exposure to it was reading Iron Maiden liner notes in the basement of my mom’s house. There was no metal scene in Indiana, and everyone else was listening to Warrant or whatever, so I bought my Slayer and Megadeth and Anthrax albums in the equivalent of a Musicland, and thought that with all of this anti-war stuff, that metal had sort of a moderate-left political position. Then when I started doing the zine, I found that most metalheads were mostly drunken rednecks and far to the left by default, and they listened to anti-war lyrics and thought they were pro-war and the coolest thing in the world. And it’s a strange hypocrisy - there are all these Swedish bands who bitch about the high taxes, but live off of welfare illegally while they tour America.

I’m not a hippy or anything - I guess I’m angry about such non-cerebral people taking a fake political stance and thinking they’re infallible. Most punks who hate corporate america and subscribe to that whole prefab belief are probably more conservative than your average NRA member. And most gun-slinging gangsta rappers are probably more to the left with Clinton - they all have this giant communal posse, and spread the wealth when they become famous. The first thing a rapper does when he gets signed is build a house for his mom. The second thing he does is buys a mercedes or bmw for each of his friends. It’s almost like socialism, redistribution of wealth. It’s rare I agree with rap artists, but if I had more money than I could spend, I wouldn’t just sit on it, either.

Speaking of which, how about that Ted Turner deal? That’s the first thing he’s ever done that I’ve agreed with. He loses a billion but I bet he gains it back on his stock prices. Despite the arguments from the black helicopter crowd, I think it’s a good cause. It’d be nice if the UN had the cash and the balls to figure out some thing and to get some damn money and aid to some of these poverty stricken country. It’s amazing how some countries have life expectancies that are half or even a third of ours. And despite what Sally Struthers’ fat ass tells you in a commercial, a dollar a week or whatever won’t fix those peoples’ problems. That dollar never makes it to the adopt-a-kid, because there’s some fascist puppet regime opening all the mail and eating fat on the proceeds. People gave millions of dollars of food to Ethiopia 10 years ago, and none of it got there. They should’ve starved out the fat cats and gave them a taste of their own medicine. If the US wants to do something worthwhile with their trillion dollar aircraft carriers, they should liberate some of the starving countries in the southern hemisphere - you know, the ones without oil.

Enough of the political bullshit - that Biafra interview got to my head…

99% pristine

Fri, 26 Sep 1997 00:00:00 GMT

My zine is at this crucial stage where 99% of the text is pristine, and I am now just screwing around with graphics and margins and fonts and all of that stuff. It’s easy at this point to rush it to press and throw everything together fast, and then get it back from the printer and find a bunch of stupid mistakes. (or even worse, shove them all in the mail and 2 weeks later get a bunch of letters about your stupid mistakes). It’s also easy to spend another 4 months nit-picking with stuff, looking at issues of Newsweek and Playboy and Details for more layout inspiration, while the articles rot and date themselves. And it’s also easy to completely fuck everything up, and delete one text frame that forces 25,000 words of text to all be imprinted on top of each other on the cover page. So it’s a matter of balance, and I’m still shooting for that Tuesday deadline.

I just had the sudden urge for rolls, potatoes, and turkey gravy. Potatoes and gravy are one of the only guilty pleasures I can enjoy these days. After eating a week’s worth of lunchmeat and salads, I want to sink into a steak or a pizza with a lot of stuff on it, or some Denny’s fare, but I can’t anymore. Potatoes have enough starch and texture for me, though, and it’s amazing how infrequently I eat hot food these days. Enough of my weight watchers stories…

I wish life had a search engine like AltaVista. Whenever I want to find out about some obscure band or spaceship or country or whatever, I enter it into a search engine and see what comes up. Some things, like music, work great for this - even the most obscure garage bands are usually listed somewhere. But sometimes you get a bunch of ads instead of information, which is somewhat annoying. I don’t always trust the info I find on the web - I seldom do. But it makes for good reading.

I can’t stay awake. It’s been a long week, but I’ve been pulling long days, so it’s sort of a twilight zone thing. I can’t believe it’s already Thursday, but it also seems like 7 weeks since the last weekend. I don’t know - time passes fast now, and will continue to speed up for the rest of my life. Now that I have no concept of seasons anymore, it all blends together. A second ago, it was April, and a second from now, it will be October. Kinda pathetic…

Futures and Coke bottles

Tue, 30 Sep 1997 00:00:00 GMT

If someone would’ve explained the futures market to me when I was 18 years old, I’d be a fucking billionaire by now. If I had the money to do it, I mean. I’ve been trying to figure out my money situation lately, especially since my average daily balance in savings in 1996 was 4 cents, and someday I’ll get sick or laid off or will want to buy a new pair of shoes and I’ll be fucked. I’ve been thinking about a mutual fund or something like that, where I can put in a few dollars a week and when I decided to buy a house or whatever, I’ll have the cash.

Anyway, I found out how futures work and it’s all highly skeptical and everything, but sounds incredible. It’s about like betting on the world money market - horseracing but slightly more legitimate. I’d probably do bad, since every prediction I’ve made about the business world has gone under. But it’s the thought that counts.

It’s been one of those days where I am so miserable that I wonder what I’m doing and why I’m not doing something better. Yesterday, I spent the whole day on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and I couldn’t even blame it on anything. Maybe it was diet or this stomach sickness or food or lack thereof or something, but I had complete and literal tunnel vision, and couldn’t do anything as simple as open my car and get something off of the dash without formulating a complete battle plan and executing it at a movement per five minutes, like some kind of lunar probe being controlled from a million miles away. And when I can’t even watch TV, I can’t do things like write, think, etc. So it’s been frustrating and tiring. Sleep hasn’t helped a lot. I think my glasses are going, or I need a new prescription, or I scratched mine up too much.

Shit, I didn’t know USWEST really had their yellow pages online. I thought the commercials were some kind of stupid joke, and when you went to the URL, it would say “Use the yellow pages!” and then have a phone number where you could call to get a paper copy of them (if anyone ever answered the phone).

Okay, so I now have an appointment to get new glasses, which is somewhat of a scary thing. First, I have had glasses since I was in first grade. And not some little token, about-as-distorting-as-plate-glass glasses, but big, thick, coke-bottle glasses. So from a young age, I’ve always thought of having to buy new glasses as something like having to replace the engine in your car - an expensive and time consuming process that 99% of the people out there probably don’t have to deal with. I know a lot of people that get all kinds of Brooks Brothers, Anthony Edwards-looking glasses to correct their 20/29.5 vision, and they love new glasses like they love a new pair of $300 shoes. That isn’t me. First, nobody can fill my prescription right. One time I went to a place in the mall where their ad said “we will fill any prescription in an hour!”. It took them 9 days to grind me a pair of glasses, and when I got them, they were not perfect. So I’ve always had problems with getting new glasses. Plus now, it adds the fun element of dealing with my cryptic and impossible to decipher insurance coverage. I think this will be a fairly cheap thing, but we’ll see. If it does work out, it will be nice to finally have a new pair of glasses…

Zine post-partum depression

Wed, 01 Oct 1997 00:00:00 GMT

My zine is done. I did my traditional thing for zine good luck, kiting a check, and printed everything last night. I thought it would only take a few minutes, and I went before eating supper. I wanted to wait there until they were done, and I spent over an hour in Office Depot, looking at the computer stuff over and over. They have some nice furniture that would never fit in my apartment there, and I found some crappy computer books, but otherwise it was a long wait.

By the time I got dinner, talked to some people, etc. it was about 10:30 and the folding and stapling operation only yielded about 50 zines before I couldn’t see straight. I’m hoping to finish tonight.

Today’s disaster was trying to find a post office - they are well-hid in Seattle, and the USPS web site lists addresses of buildings that were tore down in the 1900’s or postal jeep repair facilities. I spent all of my lunch hour trying to find one, no luck. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get there. It’s not as if I need a couple of dollars worth of 32 cent stamps - I need some pretty esoteric stuff - 23 cent coils, panes of 55 cent stamps, priority mail envelopes, etc.

After the dust settled last night, I sat in bed with the first issue I assembled, and read through it. I like the stuff, and it’s satisfying to see it in a booklet format. Maybe in a few months, after I’ve forgotten everything about it, the thing will look better. I’ve read through the whole thing 27 times in the last week, so it’s still pretty burned into my head.

Now I’m suffering from some strange post-partum-ish depression with this zine release. I like the zine, but I don’t know of that many people who will read it. I liked it back in the death metal days when I knew I could sell as many zines as I printed, and I had plenty of other people to trade ads, tapes, zines, and readers with. I’m not sure this zine will live another issue, partly because of this, and partly because of money. It would cost me almost $1000 a year to just give away a quarterly zine like this, and I could be doing cooler things with $1000. Hence, the feelings of unease.

I was reading some of the diary criticism stuff on the web - I can’t believe people take themselves that seriously. I write this online diary as a small side project, a way to tell my news to the people who follow it and a way to later go back and search for things or use the electronic records for nostalgia or whatever. There are people who must spend all of their time writing these great academic philisophical tracts about everything, and doing intricate html with imagemaps, high graphics, and everything else. Here’s some insight into what it takes for me to create this page: I hit Control-X Control-J, and then if it is a new page, I hit Control-C Control-T. Then I type the text, save it with a Control-X Control-S, and log out. It is indexed automatically. If I “had” to do anymore, I wouldn’t keep this journal - I’d stick to paper. Oh well, different strokes for different folks.

Rain

Thu, 02 Oct 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Rain. It’s one of those days.

I’ll spend the afternoon watching drops fall on the pavement six stories below my office, watching the funky clouds drift over the condominiums across the street from the Puget Sound and over to Lake Union. I never turn on the lights in my office because I have two windows, so on days like today, I work in almost total darkness, just the glow of two monitors on my face.

The rain pretty much symbolizes my feelings right now. I’ve finished the zine and mailed all of the issues today, and now I can get my life back on track. I haven’t slept in a while, my back is shot from bending over a stapler all night, I feel like I have carpal tunnel syndrome from folding, and I have some kind of toner-blacklung thing going on. But now it’s done, and I get to sleep, rest, and get back to reading trashy scifi and scribbiling in my notebooks.

One summer in Bloomington, five years ago, it rained for what seemed like two weeks straight. Everything was flooded to hell, and the worms were on the pavement because their holes got all fucked up or something. I almost went insane, because I had to walk to classes, drive to work, etc, and it just stayed gray outside for so long. It was like the Twilight Zone where the Earth went too close to the sun and it stayed really hot outside, and everyone was going nuts trying to get out of the cities.

That’s sort of like what winter is like in Seattle. It’s 40, raining like hell, and stays that way for a long time. Maybe I should drop $500 to get one of those all-out sunlamps that you’re supposed to use to avoid depression from lack of sunlight. I’m afraid the DEA will do an infrared scan on my apartment and bust me for growing dope. I’ll come home and find exactly 101 plants in my closet, and I’ll get some mandatory sentence even though I’ve never used pot in my life.

I’m listening to Type O Negative, the perfect music for rainy weather…

Sick day

Fri, 03 Oct 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I was sick today, and spent the day at home. That’s why I’m writing this late at night, which feels a little weird to me. Anyway, my stomach was bothering me again, and I almost got ready for work and out the door before it really nailed me, so I got back in bed.

My apartment has been getting colder, which is a welcome change, but I don’t want to start running the heat until I have to, because I have one of those expensive and inefficient baseboard heaters. Also, since it’s been sitting for 6 months, it will most certainly release noxious fumes when all of the dust in the filaments burns off. Sleeping in a cold apartment is heaven, especially after all of the 90 degree weather of the last few months. I love getting under my blankets with a book and keeping warm while reading. It’s great at night, but even better during the day. I’d often sit in bed on Saturday mornings and read until well past lunch, which is one of the most relaxing things I can do.

So that’s how I started the day. I kept reading my Mars book, and listened to the traffic outside my window, and felt the cool radiance from the weather. When I woke up thismorning, it was dark, cloudy, rainy and cold. I kept the blinds closed and kept with the book. After a while, I got up and put in a christmas CD, one of those Windham Hill Solstice CDs. Being in a cold apartment reminded me of when I spent holidays freezing my ass off in the Mitchell apartment, or in other places in Bloomington. Cold reminded me of winter.

I fell in and out of sleep as I was reading, and then really started thinking about the xmas CD. The music reminded me too much of people and places from 3, 4, or 5 years ago. It’s not that I have traumatic memories of college, but sometimes my memories are too good. Nostalgia is a powerful emotion for me, and all of that hit me at once. I thought of this ex that I was dating around one holiday break, which is ironic because it was xmas music and she was jewish. But it felt heavy to me.

Before I started reading old e-mail or dragging out pictures, I opened up the blinds and was greeted by some warm sunlight. The bed and floor heated faster than my wimpy baseboard unit could accomplish, so I got out of bed to find something else to do. I spent the rest of the day weaving in and out of cleaning the apartment and reading more of the Mars book. It seems like I spend so little time here sometimes, or the time I spend here is in decompression or sleeping, not in living. Alone and with the day to myself, I was able to clean things I hadn’t touched in over a year, and think about simplification.

Since the whole liver thing started a few months ago, simplification has been a bigger issue in my life. At first, I wanted to find ways to simplify my diet, so I could make eating fast and healthy, not fast or healthy. This meant knowing what to eat, what to buy, and turned me into a cheaper shopper. Once I had a couple of extra bucks here and there (well, more than a couple after I stopped eating fast food every day), I started thinking more about money. Some things save me money or time, like stocking up on stuff at the store. It’s also a nice psychological thing, making me feel like I have more here. If you spend $20 on a surplus of canned food, cup-a-soup, and kool-aid, you won’t feel like the cupboards are bare and you won’t feel poor. All of this is slowly blossoming into other issues with me and simplification - I got more shelves for my books; I do my laundry more often and reorganized where it goes; I can see my desk now - lots of little things, making life easier to manage.

Anyway, I take back the low grocery bill thing, because I went to the store and spent like $60, without buying many appreciable food items. I finally bought a lot of cleaning stuff I’ve been out of forever, and just stocked my cache of nonperishables.

I didn’t eat almost anything all day except for toast and cup-a-soup, but Karena came over and I managed to eat a salad and a bananna. We watched all of the new shows, and she was amazed that I did the dishes finally. Well, the mold did most of the dishes, then I cleaned off the mold.

I have to finish this journal so I can finish the print one. I wish they were one in the same - maybe if Apple keeps the Newton going and in a few generations comes up with something way better. Who knows. Anyway, hope I’m not sick again tomorrow…

Memories fading

Sat, 04 Oct 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I need to start working on a book again. This morning in the shower, I decided I need to pick up the Rumored to Exist draft and start working on it full time, until the end of the year. Last night, I thought about Summer Rain more, but I decided I’m not in the right mood to work on that book anymore. Maybe in a while, but I think those memories are fading and the events are becoming more insignificant to my life (although they were the most significant events I’ve had - nothing has replaced them, but they’ve faded with time).

I still don’t know my direction with selling this book or printing it myself or whatever. I’m mostly concerned with writing the damn thing. I want to make my next cut of the manuscript much longer, maybe twice as long, and I want each piece to blend into the next one somehow. Plus I’m hoping the new stuff will be as strange as the last third of the current draft - all of the stuff I wrote in late 96 and this year. It’ll take some work, but I need a new project.

I’m not as sick today, but I’m still having problems. It feels like fall out today - clouds and cold, but breaks of real sun flirting through the occasional rain. It feels alone - reminds of me being in Bloomington about four years ago, walking alone on a sunday and feeling the wind tear through my leather jacket. I don’t know how I could miss walking in the rain every day, but sometimes I do…

Dreams, gameworks, Apple CDs

Tue, 07 Oct 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Ever have one of those days where you have some free time, some cash in your pocket, more in the bank, and you just want to go out and do something by yourself like buy a whole stack of books or look at CDs for 6 hours or try on new leather coats or something like that? I’m still feeling sick, or else I would.

Dream from last night: I sold my Escort and bought a Ferarri convertible. I was nervous about calling my insurance company because I was sure they’d drop my policy. I went to a high school reunion and saw a girl I used to like named Christi. She was with some guy, and she asked me what I’d been doing. I told her I just bought a new Ferarri and she got all pissed, because she had a beat up Honda and it just broke down that week.

Food: mix two cup-a-soup packets in a mug: one cream of chicken, one chicken broth with noodles. Add a cup of hot water and mix. I’m still sick, still not eating solids. I tried to eat at Subway yesterday and it almost fucking killed me.

I went to Gameworks last night with Bill. Because of all the hype surrounding the opening, and because it is right by a Planet Hollywood, I thought it would be a trendy place full of assholes, overpriced, etc. It wasn’t too bad - sunday night has a special where you can play everything from 9-11pm for $10. They had the 360 degree jet game I played at Disney, and I got another run on that. Most of the games were newer, and there were only a handful of old 80s games, all of them Atari units like Missile Command and Centipede. I was hoping for Smash TV or Star Wars - oh well. There was a driving game that I liked a lot, and a networked tank game that kicked ass. One shoot-em-up game had a big Rambo-like machine gun that you had to hold with two hands that shook as you blasted the hell out of everything in your path. I loved not having to worry about money - they gave you a smart card with an infinite balance, which was nice for those $1.75 games.

I somehow got signed up to the Apple Developer List, and someone just dropped off a stack of CDs for me. I think I’m going to go install a bunch of junk on my Mac…

Lack of food and jazz

Wed, 08 Oct 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I haven’t eaten “real” food in a few days now, and although I feel a little tired, there’s a strange clear-headedness about it. I can’t remember things as well, but I thought it would be a lot worse. I’m feeling somewhat better, and maybe this round of stomach problems is over, but I don’t want to go from a diet of cup-a-soup right into a gyro sandwich from the mall or something.

I’ve probably said this before, but I wish writing were a more collaborative effort, like music. I’ve been listening to some jazz lately: Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Chick Corea, John Coltrane, and I’ve been reading up on these guys. It’s incredible how the jazz scene in New York and really all over the place was so strong back in the 50s, when bop was spreading like a plague everywhere. It links to the whole Kerouac-Burroughs-Ginsberg thing. I guess if I ever get any writing done and then die, everyone will think that me, Ray and Larry were an inseperable group in the same way.

Anyway - jazz - it’s music I like. It’s the kind of music that makes me wish I played an instrument or had an old secondhand sax in my apartment so I could teach myself. Before the day of the guitar hero, these guys were king. I’m listening to Coltrane now, and wishing I had a hundred more CDs in my collection. I’ve been looking to find some genre of music to replace the now-defunct death metal collection. It’s good laid-back music, but I’m not sure it can do everything. It does support a community though, in the sense that there’s so much history and folklore and audience. So maybe I’ll spend more time in the jazz section of the record store. I don’t think I’ll be spending any cash on a sax, though.

The art of being a pompous asshole

Thu, 09 Oct 1997 00:00:00 GMT

More doctor-like stuff today, that I don’t want to talk about. Nothing disastrous, just not publically consumable.

In the waiting room, I spent a while reading the John Gardner book, The Art of Fiction. What a pompous asshole. He goes on about Shakespeare all the time, like everybody’s read the complete works and memorized them. I’m sure some of you bastards out there have read more of the Bard’s stuff than me - that isn’t the point. Getting through the plots is one thing; comparing every frigging metaphor in your life to parts of his work is just plain annoying. Of course, Gardner’s book does have some good points and it does have some kick-ass exercises in the back. I’ve done some of them before, but I’m thinking its time to repeat them.

I got my new glasses, and it’s time to go pick them up. Another short day of writing on here… I hope my paper journal does better.

New glasses, old books

Fri, 10 Oct 1997 00:00:00 GMT

New glasses are strange. I always worry if they’re crooked or not, since the lackeys at the optical store adjust the frames like I adjust an aluminum can before I chuck it in the trash. I mean recycling bin - if recycling is such a big hit around here, why isn’t aluminum any cheaper? Why don’t they reprogram some of those GM welding robots to pull cans and paper out of garbage so we don’t have to separate things? Instead of throwing all that stuff in landfills, they should get some joint venture going between the scrap dealers and the landfills. When the trucks show up, they dump everything in a waiting area. Then the salvagers can pick through it for free, and send the rest down the line.

I always wanted to open a salvage shop, one of the kinds that goes through buildings before they are destroyed, and takes the sinks and toilets and rare tile and whatnot, and then resells them. It’d cost some money up front, but you could make a killing. A character in a book did that, but I forget what book. They went after the big stuff, like boilers and furnaces, and sold them at el cheapo rates to scummy apartment buildings. I wish I could remember the name of that book…

There are a few books that haunt me, the details show up in my everyday life without warning. Deja vu is worst when you feel like something in a story or a movie instead of your own life. The Five Gates of Hell by Rupert Thomson is a book with plenty of scenery that reappears in my life periodically. And anytime I’m on the ocean, I still see the setting for this book I read as a kid, maybe 20 years ago, called The Haunted Cove. When I was on the Oregon coast, I thought I was IN that book. Even though I hadn’t touched it in decades, I could see the little cottages, sand-swept roads, and breaks in the water along the shoreline. I dug my copy of the book, a book club hardcover now faded by a quarter century in my mom’s basement, and it turns out it was written by a woman, Elizabeth Baldwin Hazelton, who lived on the Oregon coast also. Pretty freaky stuff.

Back when riding a 20" BMX bike was not ironic

Sat, 11 Oct 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I remember riding my bike in my subdivision as a kid, maybe 11 or 12 years old, the age before you start to worry about girls and money and looks, but around the time you realize your parents are idiots and there’s more to life than sitting in front of a TV playing with legos. I won this BMX bike from Honeycomb cereal, one of the best injections of luck in my life, since before that I had a stupid bananna seat bike that I probably would’ve had until I got my first car.

We rode the subdivision roads - me and Manges and Wonko and Tom. There were also undeveloped pieces of land with dirt trails and forests and abandoned runways and empty fields. Summertimes were spent exploring these wastelands, looking for hidden roads, old junk, or lost Hustler magazines.

One spring day, I rode into this huge undeveloped piece of land by Wonko’s house. It had a higher piece of land that sat on the same level and behind a road of houses in the subdivision. A piece of land about as big as a baseball field cut down one side by a dirt road, it dropped down a steep hill into some thick trees and later into a lower and larger area near the Elkhart river. I pedaled the red Huffy over the crest of the hill, and started leaning into the downhill pull when I saw something that made me lay down the bike and gaze in horror. The Elkhart river, flooded with melting snow from the long winter, turned the entire back half into a lake. Where a larger-than-football sized field sat with bike trails, hidden forts, trees, and abandoned junk was now a giant sea, almost to the horizon. And I almost biked right into it.

I don’t know why I thought about this, except that I’ve been trying to think of a time in my life when I wasn’t depressed or upset, and when I had a solid network of friends without condition or distance. I think my closest experiences were when I was a kid, in the 6th or 7th grade, maybe going into 8th. My first thought on this is that I wasn’t as concerned about my place in life during those years, and kids aren’t as competetive or cliqueish in those years (at least at my school - I’m sure that little John-Benet Ramseys get their first boob job at the age of 10 now). But after reading more about it, I’ve realized that my depression probably started around then. At the very beginning of 9th grade, I had a huge growth spurt which probably did something to my brain. It sounds far-fetched, but I’ve read in a bunch of psychology books that manic-depression usually hits like that.

The different pieces of my life don’t come into question until I start thinking of book ideas and plots. I’d love to knock some story out of my childhood or teenage years and come up with a book about it. Writers like Hemmingway, Orwell, Henry Miller, and Bukowski seemed to be masters at that. But my life has been pretty boring. Case in point - my first book, Summer Rain. I put a lot of time into it, and loved the idea as I was writing it. But after a year or writing, I held a largely boring and rambling story about my life one summer. With enough bullshit, the basic plot almost made sense, but it never grabbed you. And then I took it to a writing conference and talked to some GenX hipster/shyster that told me I had to change 1000 different things about the plot. His ideas were like taking The Grapes of Wrath and turning it into Microserfs, a plot change at a time. It’s been eating at my ever since, whether or not I should rewrite that book. It was based on a short story originally, and a lot of people liked it, including me. Maybe at some time, I’ll chop at the existing manuscript and make it into a series of short stories, and then clean up each one as I go along. Who knows.

Colitis, bipolar

Tue, 21 Oct 1997 00:00:00 GMT

It’s been a while. Two basic things have stopped me from writing, both with twisted, deep roots. Let me explain.

First, I’ve been having medical problems. My doctor now thinks I have colitis, which is no death sentence, but means I’ll have to radically change my already radically changed diet, and possibly go on some medication with some drastic side effects. All of this worries me - I want to change as a person, but I don’t want the limitations and stigma attached with a disease.

Example: In 1990, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder - manic depression. This was after a year of a corny therapist in high school, and another year of Prozac and therapy during my freshman year of college. Prior to the diagnosis, I always thought my depression, my imbalance, would be something I could hide until it was all over. I ended therapy in high school, a few weeks before graduation, and thought it was just a chapter behind me, like when the inner ear infection goes away and you finish the bottle of antibiotics and you’re on your way.

In the first year of college, when the depression returned, I hid the therapy well. Prozac was not a household word, and I didn’t tell anyone about it. In 1989, everyone and their brother hadn’t been on an antidepressant - knowledge opf drugs for mental health was limited to memories of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest or something. I kept it inside, and seldom told anyone. No problem.

So I was diagnosed with manic depression, put on lithium, and got used to blood tests. I had more side effects and limitations, and I gained some weight. But I only let my inner circle of friends know about the medication, the doctors. I never “came out”, because I never felt a need to. I can understand how gays would want to come out and avoid telling lies about something as basic as their sexuality. But to me, the lithium and the therapy was something very personal, something I didn’t tell to the world. I didn’t want special attention or treatment - I wanted to define my own personality, and avoid mixing the diagnosis and the label with that.

I kept with this plan, and kept in the closet, so to speak. There were small limitations that bothered me - I would never be able to fly a plane. I would never be able to work for the CIA. Oh well, I would never get drafted, something that comforted me during Desert Storm. Prozac became a household name, and I saw many attention-hungry people who told every person in the world about their “problem” and how they were on Prozac. Lightweights.

[2020 update: I’m not bipolar as of a dozen or so years ago. I was misdiagnosed. Someone tell my mom this, because any time she hears the word ‘bipolar’ she has to call me and tell me about it.]

Anyway, I’ve kept in the closet for the most part, although I’ve told a few people. (and I guess this post tells a few more, although I’m lucky if 3 people read this thing). And now I’m faced with another sickness that might not be as closetable as the depression. I could have to take a steroid to calm down my large intestine, which could mean weight gain, insomnia, osteoperosis, etc etc. So I spent all weekend worrying about that. I guess my solution is just to take what comes to me and to keep on fighting for my health. I’m feeling somewhat better on the diet - it’s been almost 3 months, and I’ve lost 15 pounds. I don’t even remember what a quarter pounder tastes like. It’ll give me more inspiration to write more, and hopefully I will.

The other reason I haven’t been writing is the usual mix-up about why am I even writing a journal, and is all of this stereotypical and boring, and am I wasting my time, etc. I can’t answer that right now, but I felt compelled to write, and had a lot to talk about, so I’ll write today. Who knows about tomorrow, but we’ll see what happens.

I met the writer Kevin Canty on Saturday and saw him read at Elliott Bay Books. I loved his short story collection and wanted to check out his new book. It was a quiet reading, but he said a few things that I liked. I read all of his new book last night and loved it…

All out of steam now - time to think about work…

Revisiting old lit

Wed, 22 Oct 1997 00:00:00 GMT

“I wanna feel destruction I wanna feel extinction”

Sorry, listening to Henry Rollins.

I’ve been trying to write a biography of my life for a while. It’s not like a memoirs or anything, just a few dozen pages that tell what happened to me from birth to present. Right now, I’m up to the beginning of 1992, and each year is taking progressively longer to write. It’s essentially a worthless exercise, but it’s keeping me busy. I’d rather be writing on something nobody will see than watching TV.

I read a book called Haunted, a kid’s book from maybe the 4th or 5th grade. It only took me an hour to read the whole thing. I found it at my mom’s house last Xmas, buried with a bunch of my old junk in the basement. I tried to snag all the books I could, including a 1972 encyclopedia I shipped back to Seattle via UPS, because I knew everything would end up at a garage sale or in the trash when my mom tried to sell the place. Anyway, this book was about two boys who had to housesit in the middle of nowhere, at a place where some old German guy shot his wife, the cat, and then himself. Anyway, it turned out that they were Nazis, and the house was in the wife’s name, and willed to some american nazi party, but it turns out she was really adopted and found out her real mom died in the camps, so she wanted to change the will, and Adolf plugged her. I remembered a few of the details in my mind, and wanted to see if I could pick up on anything I was clueless about as a 10 year old. It wasn’t as memorable a book as The Haunted Cove, another book I loved when I was a kid, but it was still fun to read. Maybe someday I’ll write a “young adult” title. Who knows.

Game Boy

Thu, 23 Oct 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I got a Game Boy last night - it was an early xmas present from Karena, so I’ll have something to do on the plane flight back to Indiana, other than planning the ritual murder of half the people on the plane. I got Tetris Plus and Star Wars, too. I like Tetris a lot, but the Star Wars is hard for me - I am not used to the Mario-type games where you have to jump around on a bunch of floating platforms to get through a maze. I prefer shoot-em-up games, or strategies of some sort. I want to go to this used record store in the U-district and pick up some more games.

I’ve been searching the web for other Game Boy stuff and there’s a lot of it. People are hacking game boys, copying ROMs, writing code, making new hardware, all kinds of stuff. It makes sense - a Game Boy has a 6502 in it - only 8K RAM though. And no keyboard. I guess people are working on that though.

It’s almost down to the line on this trip. I need to start thinking about what I’ll bring. I usually pack a shitload of stuff, and I need to bring less this time. But I also need to bring enough to be self-sufficient, since I won’t be staying in hotels where I can lift stuff from the room. I also want enough extra room in case I find any books or things at my mom’s that I want to bring back. I’m expecting most of my old stuff to be sold off at various garage sales in the past. Maybe there are a few books or Commodore games lying around I can save.

Colitis is not a flower

Fri, 24 Oct 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I went to the doctor yesterday. He said I have colitis, but I don’t need to take any medicine. If I stick to a high fiber, low fat diet, it will all balance out. So disregard my panic attack a few days ago about all that.

I’m pretty devoid of all thought today - it’s just one of those days. I wish I could be home, half asleep and reading a book. I’m starting to think more about the trip to Indiana. Some of it is excitement, some worry. All of the things like catching the plane, leaving my car in long-term parking, etc. bother me. I’m worried about what I’ll eat when I’m gone, too. I guess I can find something, but I’m worried that everyone will want to eat fast food or in restaurants for the whole trip. I’ll work that out I guess.

I am looking forward to seeing Bloomington, and seeing everything and everyone. I’m worried about where I’ll park if I want to visit campus, and I’m worried about getting kicked out of computer labs because I’m not a student. Elkhart is just Elkhart - I get a strange satisfaction out of driving around there and seeing that things have changed, mostly for the worse. It’s eerie to see places from high school that are now vacant lots or Mexican groceries or Wal Marts. I guess even though I hated high school and the year I was at IUSB, I got comfortable with all of the stores and places and restaurants, and now many of them are gone or changed. The town in general is pretty beat, too. It’s 99% factories and 1% stupid public park projects that will never do any good, and that won’t change. But it looks more well-worn every time I visit. The roads are shittier, and busier. Crime is up, there are more cops, and the cops are even more belligerent. A “will work for food” sign on every corner. It’s weird stuff, but it’s interesting.

I have a vivid memory of driving across the Golden Gate bridge and thinking “I’m supposed to me at work right now”. I did the same thing in Las Vegas, during a plane change. Anyway…

My old room

Sat, 25 Oct 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I talked to my mom the other day, and she said she’s keeping the old house, but she’s renting it out now. Some background: the 5 of us moved there in 1978. My parents divorced in 1984, and my mom bought my dad’s share of the house. I moved out in 1989, back in 1990, out in 1991, and back for the summer of 1993. My mom moved in with her new husband in early 1996, and my sisters both left this year.

It’s strange for me to think about that place. I always expect to see my Camaro in the driveway, leaking oil, and my life’s possessions stuffed in my wood-paneled room in the basement, the room I helped build. Now I usually visit in a brand new rental car, and last xmas, my room was a storage space for sewing machines and stuff from my grandpa’s estate. No more iron maiden posters, no more model airplanes, no more netting from the ceiling hiding the joists and air conditining ducts.

The room was 11 by 11, more or less. I built two walls in an L-shape in the corner of the basement, which meant I had two walls of fake paneling, one of poured cement, and one that was half-cement and half-the backside of the livingroom’s walls. There was no ceiling. The carpet varied, because I was always getting leftovers from my mom’s frequent redecorating projects in the rest of the house. I didn’t get a door for about a year. I didn’t even have paneling for a summer - I had to build the place, or share a room with my stepbrother. Easy choice.

During high school, I decorated with stuff I stole from the performing arts center. I had part of a tree from Brigadoon - chickenwire, plywood, and plaster - covering the back of the livingroom wall. Shelves covered two walls, lined with old model airplanes. Iron Maiden’s Aces High poster covered the cement wall. The netting on the ceiling. I rearranged everything when I got a real stereo in my senior year. On one of the walls, I taped up every award, scholarship, and college acceptance during my senior year.

I recently found a videotape that was shot by my old friend Joe Gellert, with me and Derik Rinehart acting like idiots in my house. My room still had the Iron Maiden poster. My Camaro was in the garage. I weighed about 100 pounds. The whole thing freaked me out, like a time machine except I couldn’t grab the camera from Joe and pan around and see all of the little things I wanted to see.

When I left for college, I left behind all of the furniture. Good thing - I was back a year later, with a bunch of new CDs, and a woman who was living with me. The room overflowed with two people’s stuff until she found her own apartment. For a year, it felt like high school again, except I had more porno and Ray Miller’s fender stack was in the middle of my room for a while.

I moved back to IU, took the porno, and left the furniture. (my car broke down on the way there, too). The room stayed in the same condition for my occasional visits back.

The last girlfriend to visit my mom’s house was Johanna, for Thanksgiving 1991. My first four girlfriends all visited my house. One pretty much lived there for six months. I discontinued the visit policy after Johanna.

The xmas of 1991 was my last major holiday stay at the house. I think I was there for almost two weeks, and it drove me fucking insane. I brought with me the earliest permutation of my IBM XT clone, which was just a bunch of parts thrown in a metal case. I spent the whole break writing an adventure game in modula 2 and trying to seduce my backup plan from Johanna. Neither projects were completed.

I moved all of my stuff back in the basement in 1993, in two or three trips. I started buying furniture like mad to fill up my future apartment with Andrew in Colonial Crest. I also ran my zine from the room. I had a giant L-shaped computer desk, 6 floor lamps, about 500 CDs, and two months of unanswered main in that tiny room. I was working two jobs and wishing Tanya was back. And I didn’t have a car. Thank Satan for Ray Miller, my errand-boy of the summer.

I loaded that U-haul full of a lot of stuff when I left, only leaving behind my bed (I bought a new one). Right before I went to pick up the truck, I went to visit my dad, uncle, and grandma. It was the last time I saw my grandma - she had a heart attack a few months later. When I came home for the funeral, my room only had a bed, and a stack of xmas cards I opened 2 years before.

The room stayed in minimalist state until 1995, when I moved to Seattle. I showed up with the one way uhaul, and filled it with a bunch of stuff, including the bed, when I left. I came back that xmas and slept in the guest bedroom - same in 1996. The shower felt horrible, and the basement looked alien. Each visit, I’ve picked around, trying to find little things to bring back that I know will get destroyed otherwise. I found my Star Wars figures, some C-64 games, ad a couple of books. But now, it will all be gone.

The house will still be there, which is strange. I don’t know if it will be rented out, or if I’ll be able to pick through the rubble. I’m hoping the latter, just to get a good look at it. I never thought the damn thing would give me such a sense of nostalgia - I worked so long to escape it. Oh well.

Getting a cold

Wed, 29 Oct 1997 00:00:00 GMT

The rest of today, tomorrow, and then I leave for Indiana. I’m starting to get a cold, and I’m trying every remedy possible - vitamins, vaporizer, medicines, and soup. I’m not doing too bad, so hopefully the flight won’t be a disaster. I got some special earplugs you wear for flying - they have a weird valve in them which protects your inner ear from the pressure change. Maybe they’ll do the trick.

I think I destroyed a Solaris machine here at work, trying to upgrade it. I needed to install a patch from Sun, and the patch completely flattened the computer. I think I’ll have to install the OS all over again. At least that gives me a nice, mellow task to eat up my afternoon.

Because of the cold, I haven’t been doing much more than resting and packing. I’ve been trying to get past level 20 of tetris plus on the gameboy, but it’s a real ball-breaker. Maybe I will make it on that 4 hour plane ride…

To the airport early

Thu, 30 Oct 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’m just about ready to go home, dry some clothes, and then finish my packing for the trip. It’s always nice when the last details fall into place and everything starts rolling. My favorite time is when I get to the airport early, my bags are checked, my backpack is at my feet, and I can write in my journal and watch the planes fly away as I wait for my boarding time.

I’m not feeling too sick today - I took some sutafed-type medicine and spent most of the morning buzzing all over the place. Without caffeine as a base reference, it really felt potent. Cool.

I spent a lot of last night playing tetris plus and trying to finish the game. There are 4 cities with 20 levels each. I’ve cleared two cities, and I’m on level 20 of the third city. I hope I can finish the damn thing on the plane.

Anyway, time to split. I probably won’t be able to write until I’m in Indiana. Until then…

From the IMU

Sun, 02 Nov 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Today’s journal is coming to you from the bowels of the Indiana Memorial Union. Although I’ve written paper journals in weird places (at 30,000 feet, in the middle of the golden gate bridge, at disneyland, at MIT, etc), I think this is the first online journal entry I’ve written outside of Washintgon.

Of course, I have much to write, and little energy. I’ve slept far too little, and done a year’s worth of walking in a day. I’m staying with my former roommate Simms, in my old house, on my old couch. He threw a massive Halloween party last night - more people than I’ve ever seen in that house before. He, Bennett, and Jason played his score to the classic silent vampire film, Nosferatu. The band was in the kitchen, and 3 TVs in various places in the house showed the laserdisc part of the show. Incredible stuff! I also saw many of my old cronies, and many people who knew of me that I didn’t know - Simms tells his Konrath stories to everyone he knows, and he knows many people. My costum- I went as Poison Ivy from the new Batman film. Don’t ask.

I managed to give away a shitload of zines last night - I set a stack of them on a table, and within an hour, a bunch of people were reading them or taking them. Cool.

Yesterday, I saw a lot of the town and realized how small it really is. I took the walk from the IMU to y old place in Mitchell Street. A lot of it looked the same, but it didn’t ring a bell anymore - it seemed distant. Most of my visit sofar has been like that. Things from my past are still here, but it doesn’t feel like it did before. Maybe my brain is telling me I should move on.

Speaking of moving on, I’ve got a shitload to do. Maybe I’ll try another entry while I’m still in Indiana…

In Elkhart time warp

Thu, 06 Nov 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’m now in Elkhart, Indiana, at my friend Ray’s house. I’m staying here for the week, and visiting everyone in the old home town. Actually, ‘everyone’ consists of my mom, sister, nephew, dad, and Ray. Pretty much everyone else I knew from this pit was smart enough to leave, or so ashamed that they are hiding.

The Bloomington leg of the trip was interesting, but not entirely fulfilling. I had a lot of fun - spent a lot of time with Simms and the gang, including a kick-ass halloween party, met up with other friends like Andrea, Joe, Danielle, and more, and saw some of the campus. But with the rain, I didn’t really get to roam the campus as much. I tried, but the cold and everything made it hard to just stroll around and think. It’s also much more distant there - I don’t feel like I live there anymore. Majorly weird.

On Monday, I headed up to Indianapolis on my way to Elkhart, and saw my old pal Tom Sample. He’s the same old Tom, although he has a new apartment and a new cat. We hung out and then went to the abbey for some drinks and talk. I really miss hanging out with him… I will see him again on Saturday though; I am crashing there so I can make my flight out of Indy on Monday.

Today (yesterday - it is 3am) , I went to my old house. It’s still empty, but my mom is renting it out starting in December. I shot some camcorder of the place and searched for old stuff. It was like in Event Horizon when they opened the old ship and dug around. There’s some furniture, but some rooms are empty.. Once again, a lot of weird nostalgia. I also found a bunch of writing from about the 4th grade on up. I figured I should snag it before my mom shows it to someone.

We also went through a bunch of slides and transferred them to video today. Most of my baby pictures were on slides, and it was weird to see my relatives all young, thin, and with retro hairstyles. Also, my mom and sister say that my nephew Phillip looks like I did when I was a baby, and after looking at slides, I agree.

Nothing else here. Just stuck in a weird time warp…

Lost in Indianapolis

Mon, 10 Nov 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’m back, and what a day. It started by me getting lost in Indianapolis - I have an uncanny ability for not knowing which was is north in that city. Then I left a tape in the car, and it is probably gone forever. Then my car bill came to like $450. Then all of my pens simultaneously ran out and I had to buy the shittiest bic pen for a dollar at the airport. Then I lost my checkbook in the plane, and didn’t find out until a few hours after I got home. (United found it - I have to go pick it up later this week).

Glad to be back. The trip didn’t go as planned, and I didn’t see as many people as I had wanted. Then again, many people and places are gone. Plus, I can no longer eat at my favorite old restaurants. It gets more depressing every visit, and I’m not sure I will go back in the near future.

Some of it was nice, of course. Seeing everyone - spending time alone, driving on old familiar roads, not working for a week. But I need to get back in gear.

Speaking of which - I have too much stuff to do right now. Maybe tomorrow I can write more about the trip.

One year

Tue, 11 Nov 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Today is my one year anniversary with my girlfriend. It doesn’t seem like that long, but I guess that’s my stock response to about any passage of time these days. I got her a present, but I won’t talk about it in case she reads this before I get over there.

The time difference was on my side today. I ‘slept in’ and still got to work eariler than usual. I got a lot of shit done here, but I feel like I’m massively behind. I figure with a week of kicking ass, I will be okay.

Speaking of work, it is 5:14 and I am still here. It’s dark as hell out right now, which should make my drive an adventure. It’s strange to be here this late. Reminds me of my Spry days, sort of.

As for the trip, I guess I haven’t talked as much about it. I have some strong feelings for Summer Rain and rewriting it, but that always happens when I visit Indiana. The whole trip made me feel like I need to do more with my life. Most of the people I know back in Indiana are just clogging their arteries and complaining about the weather. There are exceptions, but it makes me think that I need to do more - write books, save money, get in shape, etc.

For what it’s worth, everyone was shocked at how much weight I lost since last Xmas. They were even more shocked when I told them I lost it all in the last 3 months. Add more shock every time we went to some restaurant serving giant slabs of half-cooked meat where I only ate salad.

I should leave now if I’m ever going to get across the lake and see Karena…

28.8

Wed, 12 Nov 1997 00:00:00 GMT

My new 28.8 modem works now, so downloads from home might be a bit more painless. I still need to mess with the dialup script a bit, because it isn’t perfect. I also have a 14.4 internal modem in /dev/modem and the 28.8 external in /dev/mouse. If I had two phone lines, I could run with both. I think I’m just going to wait until I get a house, and then I’m going to get a minidish with internet service on it.

Today I started writing a new outline for my first book, Summer Rain. It’s a frequently recurring project, but maybe something with come of it. I’m designing the book to be a series of short stories that are glued together by chapters that wouldn’t make sense out of place. So it will start with writing a short story, then another, then… In a worst case scenario, I will have a handful of bad short stories. Well, in a worst case scenario, I will have nothing done.

That book has been haunting me, and I’m stalled on Rumored to Exist, so I’ll toy with it a while. Some of it was being in Bloomington, and some of it is the need to write a solid novel of that size. I don’t know what I’ll do with it, but I just need to work out a cohesive piece of work that weaves together all of the feelings and surroundings from that part of my life. I don’t think my first pass did justice to that summer, and I need something with more depth to it. We’ll see.

I had lunch with Bill, Marc, Todd, and Chris Wilson - we went to Chang’s and I actually made Mongolian food with almost no meat in it. Todd and I got in a giant discussion about PC upgrades and what I should get for my ailing Linux box. I’ll eventually install a new monitor, video card, sound card, and CD-ROM. I need a power supply in there, too. All of this will be a slow process, though. I can’t afford to dump a grand into this thing just so I can play cool games or whatever.

It’s pitch black outside, which is my clue to leave…

Anton

Thu, 13 Nov 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Did I mention that Anton LaVey died? I guess he actually died on the 29th, but his birth certificate says the 31st, which is the major Satanic holiday, aside from your own birthday. His family didn’t report it to the public until this week. Pretty weird.

(For those of you who don’t know - Anton LaVey was the founder of the Church of Satan, and the author of the Satanic Bible, among other books. No, I am not a Satanist - I consider myself more of a Humanist, which in itself is not much more than a label saying I think man is responsible for his own problems. I’ve read The Satanic Bible, and I own a copy, and it has its moments. It isn’t based on killing cats and wearing little red horns, but then it isn’t for everyone, either.)

I’ve been working on an outline for the new and improved Summer Rain. There are many changes in the new version, mostly structural. It has a new ending, and I’m trying to change the pacing of the whole thing a bit more. I don’t know if I will ever write or rewrite anything based on this work - I usually quit after a bit of the outline and continue on some other project. But I’d like to get a decent-enough outline based on all of my old notes - an infallible outline - so that even if I quit, I will have details for later.

I should work on that outline now…

Mental roadblocks, celery MRIs

Fri, 14 Nov 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’m already hitting various mental roadblocks during this new rewrite of my first book, Summer Rain. My new outline is not much more then a mental recollection of how the book is supposed to work. The problem is - sometimes I forget. And when I go back and try to reference the old draft, it corrupts things and I go from creating this new, more functional structure to just rehashing all of the old shit that’s in the book.

I read pieces of a year-old draft, and the amount of work ahead of me is overwhelming. Writing shifts from bad to poor, the story drags with no real ‘hook’ to it, and everything is sloppy. It goes from describing everything too much to having no descriptions at all. I like bits and pieces of it, but some of it is pretty corny. I’ve tried editing it, but I think it would be easier to just start over.

I got my stupid checkbook from Seatac airport. It cost me $2 to park there for 20 seconds and get the thing. But I was able to balance everything and pay another round of bills last night.

Does a cross-section of celery look sort of like an MRI, or is it just me?

I got a kick-ass Camaro catalog in the mail - I must’ve put my name on a list a few months ago. It’s mostly stuff for 67-69, and mostly original with some repro stuff. So it is all expensive, for people who want to pay $175 a tire to get the original Firestone red-wall tires for their totally restored 69 Z-28. Anyway, it’s got me thinking more about buying another Camaro after I unload this piece of shit Escort. I’d need garage space, though. We’ll see…

I had a weird dream about my ex-girlfriend Tanya. I was at some unknown house watching Apocalypse Now with Simms, Andrea, and this guy who lived down the street from my parents. He was on the phone with someone, and then hung up. I asked who it was, and he said it was Tanya and that they were going out. I told him that I dated her a while ago, and he started telling these stories about how they slept together on their first date and how she was really wild in bed, and I was getting insanely jealous about the whole thing. It was like being a Giants fan back when they totally sucked, and you give up on them, and then they get incredibly good. I woke up and thought it all was real, and I was still all jealous about it. I don’t think jealous is the word for it - I didn’t want her back or anything. It was more like a betrayal. I don’t know - maybe it was because I ate right before I went to bed, who knows.

Brushing teeth as muse

Sat, 15 Nov 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’m at the point where I’m thinking more about the novel than other trivial things when I’m in the shower, eating, driving, etc. Today, I brushed my teeth, and then rushed to the spiral notebook for a pageful of ideas. Now I need to do the same with my amount of writing.

I used to tell people I would write for three hours a night: from 9 to midnight, and maybe more. It’s a romantic gesture stolen from Charles Bukowski’s fiction novels, and one I tried to live by. It never worked - I would eat dinner late, get in a phone conversation, go to Denny’s, shopping and Barnes and Noble, whatever, and not get started by 9. And I’d screw around on the computer, get distracted by CDs, and otherwise avoid the writing sometimes. But some nights, I’d burn away and write until dawn. I tried to write 2000 words a night back then, and I’d usually make it. My mistake was that I never wrote 2000 good words. I read so many books that said ‘get your first draft finished, no matter how bad, and then you can edit it). It doesn’t work like that - I can’t edit for shit, especially the jumbled mess I wrote two years ago.

Now, I’m lucky to get an hour of writing done during lunch, and maybe an hour later at night. I’m working on improving that, but it takes work…

I really liked last night’s episode of ER - I’ve always felt that the gutsy surgical bullshit got in the way of the human emotion behind the characters, and not the other way around. I guess I like the medical stuff to an extent - it’s better than exploding rocket launchers and stuff. ER is an addicting show, and aside from the dramatics, the writing really hooks me. It’s also how a show like Seinfeld can drag me in every time. For a show about nothing, it sure is loaded with a bunch of really catchy plots full of self-referential material.

I found out that if you put four whole apples and a whole lemon in a juiceman, it makes a kick-ass lemonade. The apples sweeten it, but the lemon’s taste overpowers it. It’s sort of slushy, like a smoothie. I think I might get some strawberries and try adding them, too.

It’s Friday. Time to finish up the work day, and get out of here for the weekend…

High Fidelity - Nick Hornby

Tue, 18 Nov 1997 00:00:00 GMT

BOOK REVIEW High Fidelity - Nick Hornby

I read this book about a year ago and thought “oh fuck! this guy has taken about every theme from my first piece-of-shit book Summer Rain and incorporated them into a novel that’s actually interesting, funny, and touching.” My first read made me both jealous and overjoyed. I kept the book around with a group of other novels that reminded me of what I needed to do during the eventual rewrite of Summer Rain. (other said books include John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, Rupert Thomson’s The Five Gates of Hell, some key points in On the Road, Shampoo Planet minus all of the generation X crap, and an ever-changing list of Bukowski fiction).

I’m rewriting Summer Rain now, for a lot of different personal reasons. Hornby’s book fell into my hands again, because I was too cheap to buy new reading material, but mostly because I wanted to keep thinking about Summer Rain, instead of buying some book about futuristic bug aliens that read minds and colonized the planet Mars or something. Reading his book kept me on track, and made me think much more about the new edits to my book. But, his story made me think of some other themes, and this is one that haunted me:

You can look back, or you can look forward.

Here’s the deal: this book is about a guy named Rob who is in his mid thirties and lives in the UK. He runs a beat-up record store out of the way in some dark alley, and works with two other characters who are total music bigots. I mean they have 40,000 records in their house, they listen to walkmen constantly, they are making top 5 or top 10 lists all the time (top 5 blind performers, top 5 side one, track one openers, worst 5 bands, etc). Anyway, the book starts with Rob talking about his top 5 breakups. Why? He just got dumped. And now he’s 35, pissing away at some tiny shop, wondering what’s next.

Hornby’s got all bases covered here. He’s hitting you with the hilarious and screwed up antics of this small record store, sort of like a UK version of the movie Clerks or something, and you’re also getting the quite real and touching story of this guy trying to figure out what it all means. He messes around with an American folk singer woman, and tries to look up all of the women he’s dated in some self-masochistic ritual of trying to find out what went wrong.

Like I said, this all reminds me of what went on in Summer Rain - the main character got dumped, and he spent the better part of a summer trying to find out what path to follow in life. But what hit me more was how Hornby had detailed a lot of the strange emotional conditions that had led to my writing of Summer Rain. I became a writer because I got dumped by somebody, and needed to find something to do besides sending her emails about every 20 seconds and asking what was so wrong with me or what did I do or would therapy help or is this something that happened to me as a child. And Summer Rain became a vehicle for me - instead of looking up my old girlfriends and asking them what was wrong with me, I could animate them, and watch them interact with the other characters in my book, and find out what went wrong during the course of the novel. I don’t know if it exorcised any demons, but it kept me writing.

Anyway, it is a good book, and worth reading. End of book report.

I went to see the band Dream Theater on Saturday night. It was a totally last-second plan; I heard about it on the radio that afternoon, and it was only $20, and right down the hill from me, so what the hell. The club is called the Fenix, and it’s massively small for this kind of deal. As a dance club, it’s pretty huge, but get a couple of big-dick drum sets and about 28 tons of amps in there, and it gets small fast. They sold out of tickets (lucky I got down there around lunch to buy one before then), so it was wall-to-wall leather jacket in there. I went by myself, and didn’t really talk to anyone, but I got there just as the opening back started, so I missed any awkwardness there.

The opening band pretty much sucked - some amalgam of the most annoying and marketable parts of U2, Pearl Jam, and Blind Melon, or something. They weren’t horrible, but I didn’t find them too noteworthy, and if you listened to 5 seconds of both bands, you could tell that this was the doing of some record exec. I was standing by some fratboys that were really into this band, which sort of proves my point. Anyway, it wasn’t as bad as seeing the Cult open for Metallica, but it wasn’t like seeing Primus open for Rush, either.

[Editor’s note: the band I mentioned above was actually Creed.]

I’m really into Dream Theater’s first two albums and their EP. I got an advance copy of their first album long before it was out, and played the damn thing thin. I wasn’t into their second-to-newest album, Awake, and I didn’t know they had a new one. So there’s my problem - they played a lot of new stuff, and I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. Granted, it all sounded cool, but it was unfamiliar to me. After a LONG time, they did some stuff from the EP, then the first two albums, and I was into that.

The band’s pretty tight and all of the musicians are more than talented. It was weird to see them on such a small stage, but reassuring that so many people showed up. They did a lot of weird improv-melody type stuff. Long drum solo. Chapman stick. Lots of guitar. A keyboard player. Instrumental stuff. High-end operatic vocals. It was all there.

If you’re wondering why I don’t paint a broader picture, it’s because I am weird about concerts. It’s so anti-climactic in a sense, and although I recognize music perfectly, I can never remember the damn names to songs, let alone lyrics. So I’m not the kind of person that can memorize a set list and post it up here and talk about all of the exact technical stuff that went on. Either it was good, or it sucked. This concert was good. Not as good as the G3 tour, but pretty good.

I’ve decided I need to buy more CDs. And I need to get a new stereo someday. Hornby’s book reminded me that I was obsessed with the Beatles 5 years ago. Now, I don’t have any of their stuff on disc (I do have Revolver on tape). The White Album is this haunting return to this time when I lived in my tiny Mitchell Street apartment, hit on every woman that moved, and tried to program in C with every chance I could get. But, like Hornby taught me, you can look back or you can look forward…

Remastering a two-track master

Wed, 19 Nov 1997 00:00:00 GMT

How do you remaster a two track master? I could see running it through some kind of filter, or digitizing it and using some weird electronics or computer programs to “clean” it. Maybe there’s something I don’t know about mastering and remastering CDs.

I’m babbling because I went CD shopping last night, and one of my picks was the new version of Hendrix - Electric Ladyland. No complaints about the mastering at all - and its cool that it all fits on one CD without any problems. The new artwork is cool, especially the hand-written letters inside. I like it because I had this album on vinyl, an old copy from the sixties that had warps and skips and problems, but I listened to it anyway. I still have a tape that I practically memorized, along with the skips and problems. Today was the first time I heard Little Miss Strange without a giant gap in the guitar solo, where my needle would always go airborne and jump past a good 20 seconds of the album.

This is the kind of album I like. It’s got lots of different types of music, and it is LONG. You can put it in and sit back or work on a book or some cleaning or whatever, and it plays out for a while. One of my biggest pet peeves about the death metal scene was that all of the albums were like 28 minutes long. By the time you put it in the player and sit down in your chair, its halfway over. Ladyland is an awesome album to put in on a rainy day when you don’t want to get out of bed. Actually, the song Rainy Day, Dream Away is the perfect Seattle song to play when you’re pissed off about the weather. It lets you chill out, and then from that, you go right into 1983… and everything is cool.

My other purchase was The Beatles (aka the white album). As a long two-disc, this is similar to the above. But the white album reminds me of a different period of time - I think I talked about this before - but about five years ago, I knew nothing about the Beatles, and just decided I had to own all of their albums. So I started buying stuff and reading books, and worshipping the Beatles. Because of this, all of my friendships and memories and problems and stories from 1992 are somehow set to a Beatles soundtrack. All of my Beatles stuff went when I sold most of my CD collection in 1995 (which was stupid). Listening to the CDs now is like some kind of time machine, which is both good and bad.

I’ve been thinking about only buying CDs that are older than me for the rest of the year. Of course, that isn’t too long - 3 paychecks, I think. I’d like to start collecting James Brown stuff, but that’s a lot of stuff…

I wanted to write today, but I spent my time doing, well not much. I should try to belt out a few words before lunch is over…

old journals

Thu, 20 Nov 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Last night, in a fit of research for Summer Rain, I found some old attempts at journals dating back to about 5 years ago. I put them on here [long gone now, sorry] for people to check out, even though they’re weird and don’t make a lot of sense to anyone but me.

The oldest journal talks mostly about the tail end of my relationship with Cheryl. After scanning some old email last night, I found that I first met Cheryl five years ago to the day yesterday. It’s strange to think it was that long ago, but even more strange to think about how much I’ve changed. I feel like I was able to work with people much better back then - I worked in the computer labs, had more friends, and was more “socially honed”. If I were single today and someone like Cheryl crossed my path, I wouldn’t be able to say word one to her. I know I was depressed back then, and upset that I couldn’t find a steady girlfriend. But hell, I was pulling em in like Jerry Seinfeld on a good episode. Why the hell was I depressed?

(Don’t answer that.)

After wasting most of the evening, I started some heavy work on Summer Rain, and I feel like I’m making progress on the first book. I’ve identified that most of it sucks, and there are some really bad dynamics problems that need to be fixed. The first book is about as long as the second and third books put together. There’s a short detour in the first book where I go home for a weekend and it turns into 11 CHAPTERS. Out of FIFTEEN. A third of the damn summer is that weekend. There’s lots of work to be done.

Am I the only person who saw that most of the Jedi religion was based on Catholicism? “May the Force be with you”/“And also with you”

It is, of course, raining like hell and dark outside. It is winter! I am not a believer of this El Nino bullshit, so I won’t take any excuses about a late winter this year. I think El Nino is an excuse made up by some corporate fuckheads to give a more PC explanation for global warming. Not that I care either way, really. If the icecaps melt, I will gladly sell my winter clothes and move to the Idaho-Pacific coast.

junk

Fri, 21 Nov 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Thanksgiving is a week from today, which is pretty weird. To me, it’s still the beginning of November for some reason. That lost time in Indiana threw off my internal clock.

I got no work done on Summer Rain last night, but I’ve been doing my scheming for the next issue of Air in the Paragraph Line. I’m trying to line up interviews with people - I have some good ideas, but I don’t know if any of them will work. I’m also thinking about other stories, writing, and ideas that might come together by the end of the year for the next issue.

The Beatles are still in the player, although I’ve wavered a bit and listened to everything from Saxon to ZZ Top over the last couple of days. I counted last night and I have 250 CDs at home. That might be the most I’ve ever had, but it doesn’t seem like that much to me. I’d like to have an even 500. I’m trying to buy up all of the CD versions of tapes that I have from high school on up, before they all disintigrate. Unfortunately, some of this stuff is impossible to find, but I’m having some good luck in finding old stuff like Saxon and Gary Moore on (expensive) import reissues. I just need the money…

I’ve been amazed at the number of dreams I logged in 1996 and how I’ve only remembered a few in recent months. I thought maybe it was because I quit caffeine and it was somehow supressing REM sleep or something. Last night, I left a pad of paper right under my glasses on the nightstand, and managed to write down two dreams that I don’t even remember right now, but I know they’re on paper. I’m hoping to get all of these down into a web page.

Day of the Clumsy Jackyl

Sat, 22 Nov 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I’m getting all of this mail from people I knew a long time ago, which is both cool and weird. I’ve been writing a story based on it, in an odd way. Some of it is my fault - I have a habit of sifting through my old mail and finding people that vanished off the face of the earth. It’s an interesting way to spend a Friday afternoon, anyway.

Last night was like Day of the Clumsy Jackyl at my apartment. I knocked a glass of sprite on the floor and the only thing that saved my paper journal was that my bed comforter was half on the floor and somehow absorbed the whole glass without letting a drop hit the floor. Hail satan. I then had to wash all of my stuff, and this all happened at like 11 at night. I got to bed by one, amazingly enough. Also happening that night - I spilled my garbage, spilled a bag of aluminum cans, spilled some sprite on the counter, and went to answer the phone and somehow grabbed the receiver but not the cord, saying hello several times before I realized I had to untangle the handset cord from that fucked up mess where the cord gets twisted around itself a million times. That happened twice.

Nothing else is going on here…

The doctor that invented flouride

Tue, 25 Nov 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Sometimes, I get into a fit about finding information about something, and I spend forever doing web searches and reading through endless pages of material for no reason. Right now, I’m in the middle of searching for the name of the doctor that invented flouride. He died on 11/27/96, but I don’t know his name.

I’ve been on and off sick all weekend, and I’ve been buying more CDs. I finally found a copy of the Queensryche “Sign of the Times” single, which I wanted for the Japanese-only track, which it turns out, sucks. I did get the new Ozzy CD, which is noteworthy for its 1970 rehearsal tape versions of 4 old Black Sabbath songs, including a verion of War Pigs that has different words. It also has some multimedia stuff on one of the discs, and I tried that out yesterday. I think this is my only enhanced CD.

Okay, I’ve given up on the fluoride search and I’m just listening to the White Album, eating applesauce, and doing what I do every time the sun is out and I’m sitting in my office - thinking. It’s cold and shitty outside, and there’s some pretty thick and high clouds; when I got out of bed thismorning, it was like some weird lighting effect - the sky dark, but sun poking through my blinds and illuminating the bed in thin strips.

I’m thinking about what to do beyond work today. I wandered into a music store yesterday and looked at all of the basses and drums and guitars and minidisc 4 tracks and keyboards and wished I played SOMETHING. I’ve learned my lesson about buying musical instruments and trying to learn - I don’t have the discipline. But I want to be in a band and write music and record stuff, and I’ve felt like this for a long time. That’s why I bought and sold a drumset, a guitar, several bass guitars, and a cheap synth in the last 10 or 15 years.

And when I think about this, I think maybe writing is my substitute for that. I know Mark Leyner talks about that a lot, and I’m sure other writers feel that. I can’t keep a beat, but I can fill up 500 pages without too many problems. So if I say “okay, I’m a writer. Instead of another Electric Ladyland, I’ll produce another On the Road” or whatever. Well, this begs another question: what am I doing with myself right now?

Writing takes as much skill and dedication as playing guitar in a band. You spend hours a day practicing or writing or rehearsing or whatever. And right now, I’m spending a few seconds a day writing. I should be writing 3, 4 hours a night, but it’s always some excuse. Granted, being sick all of the time is a convenient excuse, but even if I’m sick, I can at least sit in front of the computer, put in a CD, and press the B key for 45 minutes, just so I’m used to being in front of the computer. I keep thinking about musicians like the Beatles, who produced about 79,000 albums in only 10 years, or people like Zappa who produced 2 or 3 albums a year, toured a few hundred dates, produced other albums, wrote soundtracks, etc etc etc. I need to be working like that, and I’m not.

Why do I think about this when the sun is out but it’s cloudy? That part was a lie - I think about it a lot, regardless of the weather. This weather makes me think of Indiana winters, to some extent. I should take back what I said - the sun doesn’t appear to be out anymore.

An aside - I just found out that as of last Saturday, I have been journaling on paper on a mostly daily basis for 4 years. Maybe when I get home tonight, I’ll pull out my old spiral notebooks and take a look back through them. It’s weird, because on a related note, I’m trying to fill a notebook before the end of the year, and I don’t think I’ll make it. I usually fill two notebooks a year (120 page, writing on both sides), but this year has been slow, mostly because I seldom write when I’m at Karena’s for the weekend, and on my weekends alone, I’ll write more on those days then I do during the whole week. So I’m trying to double up my writing volume. I’m a few pages shy of the 2/3 mark. I might make it if I break out into a short story one night or something…

Differently worded War Pigs

Wed, 26 Nov 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Nothing beats listening to Black Sabbath - the song Black Sabbath, the title cut to their first album, when the weather is shitty and you’re half awake and not running at full steam. It’s that righteous depression that Henry Rollins is always talking about - not the kind that makes you think “I’m so sad, she left me” or whatever, but the kind that makes you think you ARE Iron Man, and your heavy boots of lead are pulling you down, which explains why you overslept by two hours and couldn’t get out of the shower in under a half hour. What really rules about the CD I’m listening to - this new Ozzy Osbourne compilation - is that this particular version of Black Sabbath is one that was recorded live at a rehearsal, before their first album came out. It’s heavier than fuck, like the album version, but the sound is really raw and the vocals are not as refined as the album. There’s also a version of War Pigs on here that has different words to it.

Last night, I thought I almost blew the whole night away - right after work, I hit the phone and made four calls that lasted about four hours, plus dinner in there, the tail half of Frazier (which was just background noise as I cooked), and Seinfeld. By 11:30, I felt shitty and knew I wouldn’t get any writing done. I sat down and took about four or five pages of notes about the first couple of chapters in Summer Rain. I’m on a weird rewriting program where the first few chapters will collapse down into one or maybe two chapters, because I piss away almost the first third of the book talking about one weekend that doesn’t have much to do with the story. After the notes, it was almost 1, but I sat down and started chopping at the first first chapter. I’m learning how sloppy my writing is, and it’s letting me seriously change things, but it’s slower than hell. I’ve always considered the first part of the book to be the best writing, since it’s what I edit most. I start with grandiose ideas to edit the whole book and I quit by chapter 3. So chapter 1 has been rewritten like 200 times, but when you get about 40 chapters out, that stuff hasn’t even been read since it was laid on the page in 1995.

This version of War Pigs with different words is just fucking eerie. I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times, plus the cover versions by Faith No More and whoever else covers this song. I seem to remember being on church with Jim Manges and his parents (maybe this was a hallucination, or something we talked about) and turning to him during the service and saying “Satan laughing spreads his wings” in the most Ozzy-like voice I could perform in a half-whisper. Jim originally got me going on Sabbath, on Paranoid and on old Ozzy stuff like Bark at the Moon.

I just did a search, and there’s a Black Sabbath web ring…

Old CDs, older stories

Thu, 27 Nov 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I spent last night putting my CD collection online. I’m at 273 CDs as of last night. My goal is to get at least 500. If I wouldn’t have sold or traded so many during college, I’d have at least a thousand, I think.

I also went CD shopping last night. The bounties: The Beatles - Past Masters Vol Two, ELP - Trilogy (gold disc), and Queensryche - Queensryche EP. I’m listening to Past Masters right now - it’s a great collection of the late sixties stuff, which is my favorite era of Beatles stuff. Observations about the Beatles that I made last night:

It’s annoying that so many commercials use their songs and ruin them for me
It’s amazing how many bits of children’s songs are mixed in there
The song Paperback Writer must’ve been like Motorhead when it first came out and knocked the shit out of all the American Bandstand, Monkees-looking idiots that were into the “fab four” before then.
The track “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” is pretty fucking weird.
I need to buy all of the Beatles CDs.

As for the ELP CD, it is probably the best sounding disc in my collection. That album was one of the first CDs I bought way back when I got my first player (in 1987). The original AAD pressing sounds way better than most remasters on the market these days. The gold disc sounds even more incredible than that. It even sounds good on the total piece of shit Koss computer speakers in my office. Of course, when I listened to it all the way through at home, it revealed a lot of the deficiencies in my current sound system. I really wish I could just rush out and drop the cash on a pair of Magnepan speakers and a good amp, but I guess I have to wait on that, probably until after I move.

As for the third CD - I’ve had that Queensryche EP probably since the summer of 1987, before the CD player, but on tape. The CD has one extra song on it, the Prophecy, which was also on the soundtrack for Decline of Western Civilization 2 - The Metal years. That addition means I now have the complete Queensryche discography, barring singles and imports, which will cost more than a fucking house to find.

Sorry if today’s post sounds like record collector’s anonymous or something, but I have another bitch, and that’s mass-produced “collectible” stuff. Here’s an example that I told Ray about and he completely agrees to the point of suicide: A lot of the Motorhead albums were remastered this year. Every single one of them had about 3 or 4 rare tracks also included, like B-sides or live stuff, and they all had the original artwork plus some more liner notes. That’s cool if you’re like me who doesn’t have any of their stuff on CD yet, but it is a mixed bag for someone like Ray who owns all of their stuff, and now has to buy all of it again to get the singles tracks, which he won’t really *own*, so he still needs to keep his eyes out for that stuff. Okay, so now Castle decides to put out this 4 or 5 CD boxed set of Motorhead stuff. Now, my question is: should I spend $50 to get this, which doesn’t include all of the albums, just to get the few odd extra tracks, and then should I, in addition, buy all of the reissues too, so I can have the whole albums? The purpose of a boxed set was probably originally so you could say “I don’t have any of their albums, now I can get all of them in one fell swoop, and maybe save a couple of bucks”. There’s a Beatles boxed set that contains all of their recordings, plus the singles, and nothing extra except this cool roll-top wooden box, but you probably save yourself some cash doing it. (I haven’t done the math yet, and I already own enough stuff to make it prohibitive to have doubles). Anyway, what’s a collector like Ray to do about a boxed set like the Motorhead one? He probably has all of the stuff in the set, albeit not remastered and in that order, and not with the package or booklet. But if he says fuck it to buying it, he doesn’t have the complete collection.

All of this makes me think about my collection, and how “complete” you can get. Like the Beatles thing - you can go to any big record store, buy the couple dozen studio albums, the two past masters albums, and you’re essentially “complete”. But you could spend the rest of your fucking life buying singles, 45s, reel to reels, bootlegs, live performances, solo albums, collector’s albums, UK pressings, German pressings, fan club records etc etc etc.

Another artist I’m closing in on with regard to completion is Peter Gabriel. I have all of his studio albums (solo - don’t fuck with me about his stuff with Genesis), but I’m missing the live albums, the compilations, and the singles. (actually, between paragraphs above, I got on line with cdconnection.com and ordered 3 Peter Gabriel singles, and the German version of Security). Anyway, this will probably be unfulfilled for a while, because both of the live albums, although pretty good, cost more. And singles - the only singles stores ever carry are Mariah Carey or whatever. I don’t even know what singles Peter Gabriel released in his pre-Sledgehammer career, let alone where I can buy them. Oh, and he has a CD-ROM out too. Maybe he has two?

Nothing else is going on today - it’s slow, everyone is gone or leaving early. I imagine traffic will be pretty gnarly leaving work today. It’s actually nice out, though - the sky is blue and the sun is shining. Maybe I should leave early, too.

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(I’m bored as hell, and there’s nothing to do, so it’s time for another weird game of thought association. Since I’ve been babbling all day about CDs, I’ll start there)

I bought my first CD player in the summer of 1987, with my first paycheck from my new “real” job at Taco Bell. Two weeks of stirring giant tubs of cold reconstituted bean paste bought me a Toshiba player that was somewhere between a portable and a full-sized model. It ran on AC power only, and was a top-loader with a tiny LCD display and the basic buttons for operation. I think it had some memory function, and you could see elapsed vs. remaining time. With a metal case and not that much plastic in its construction, it felt much sturdier than most el cheapo models on the market right now. At K-Mart, I paid maybe $99.99 for it, and then went over to Super Sounds in Concord Mall to spend the absolute last of my cash on a single CD. This was when they were half vinyl, half tape, and had maybe two bins with CDs in them. My first choice: Iron Maiden - Somewhere in Time. I rushed home on my bike, plugged into my Soundesign rig, and listened away. The beginning of an addiction.

A few months later, I was at World Records in Pierre Moran mall, right after school on a Tuesday. I picked up a copy of Metallica’s new EP, Garage Days Re-Revisited, and a RYKOdisc sampler called Steal This Disc. I bought it because it was only $8 or something, and every CD helped back then. I piled back into the Camaro, probably turned on Master of Puppets, and left for work. Now I drove, and I had a new job - I was a dishwasher at this Italian restaurant called Columbo’s. My friend Matt Wanke convinced me to bust suds over there, because he worked on the pizza line and it’d be cool to work together. I gave notice at Taco Bell, and they didn’t schedule me for my last two weeks.

The only thing noteworthy to come out of Columbo’s was that I met a guy named John that was even more insane than me, and I kept running into him for the next few years. While we were slamming through dishes from the dinner rush, he’d just stand up from his sink and say “I wonder what would happen if we put angel dust in the mozarella shakers” or “I’m going to go tell customers to leave their tip under the food on the dirty dishes, so we get a shot at the money”.

I also had to close the restaurant one school night a week. I learned how desolate Elkhart can be after 10PM. Sometimes I’d drive all the way to Goshen to get some food at the late night drive through Burger King.

Fuck - my mom called and threw off my whole train of thought. At least she didn’t mention the $450 rental car tab I put on her credit card

I walked out of Columbo’s on a Saturday night, without another job lined up or any money saved. (aside from CDs, I blew a bunch of cash putting a new exhaust on the Camaro). I got a job at Ward’s a few days later, and started a long tenure that took me through high school and beyond.

My first couple of Wards checks (which were my first non-$3.35 checks of my life) went to a new heater core in the Camaro. By that point in time (September? October?) the Indiana fall made driving to school in the morning pretty unbearable. My old heater core was full of holes, so I took the ‘in’ and ‘out’ hoses and connected it together with one hose. I didn’t lose any more of the precious green fluid on the driveway, but I also saw my breath when I drove anywhere in the AM.

The weekend of the heater core replacement also included some other repairs - I think I also installed a manual choke control (aside from freezing my ass off in the morning, the carb also had its problems) and a manual oil pressure gauge. That was actually on Halloween weekend, and I planned on going out with my friend Jia that night. It’s impossible to see the oil pressure sender on that engine (it’s sort of hidden back by the HEI distributor) and I didn’t tighten something enough. I started the engine with the hood open, and it shot oil all over the damn place for a dozen seconds, until I killed the engine. So we had to take Jia’s car.

I think our plan back then was similar to most - we’d drive around in downtown Elkhart or downtown Goshen and hope that some incredibly beautiful and loose women would be walking around and then they’d somehow end up in the car, and the magic would happen, so to speak. This, of course, NEVER HAPPENED. (Regardless, my friend Ray thinks this is 100% feasible and still wants to do this all the time.) The odds of this happening would probably be higher if we were in a crappy Camaro than in his car, a green, four door, Dodge Dart. We went out in his car anyway, listened to Master of Puppets on a crappy jambox, and went to some fairly hidden and now probably completely destroyed video game place, that had a shitload of games and a little cafeteria where you could get a hamburger or some nachos or something. Lots of people hung out there, and none of them were from our school. We played a bunch of Tron Deadly Disks or Spy Hunter or whatever I was into at that moment, and had some heavy discussions about how much stuff sucked in relation to our 16 year old worlds, which seemed infinitely wise at the time, and were infinitely stupid in retrospect.

On the way home (this was Halloween), we got egged and the Dart had no windshield washer solution, so we put on the wipers and drove for an hour, hoping they might scrape enough at the molecular level to remove the egg without any solvent. Then, while driving, swearing, and listening to Metallica, a black cat ran in front of the car, and Jia almost hit it. We both shit our pants and prayed to the reaper, knowing that we’d probably be killed in the next ten seconds.

We weren’t.

On the 4th of July in 1989, my parents found out that I had several thousand dollars in credit card debt hidden from them, and wanted to kill me, throw me out, and bitch for hours about how horrible I was. I decided to help them out by leaving and going to Jia’s to cool off, so I left the house without telling them where I was going. I found Jia at a tennis court at the high school (I didn’t really know he played tennis), and we hung out at his house that night. I called my parents back and they were crying and all upset over it. My mom expected them to find me dead and penniless under a bridge in Minnesota a few months later, and instead I was looking at porno and listening to Led Zeppelin in Jia’s bedroom a mile away. It was then that I learned I could win almost any campaign against my parents, and I was largely right.

I’m having a hard time remembering when I first started hanging out with Jia - we met in 7th grade algebra, along with Roger Eppich and Larry Falli and the rest of the braniacs. I guess it was at the end of the 9th grade school year. We were riding around on bikes, and to get to his house, we had to go into Ox-Bow park, and then scale some fence to cross the street. (you could’ve just not gone through the park, but it saved like maybe 4 seconds of time or something). Anyway, we went to his house, and he lost a joint that was hidden inside a ball-point pen, somewhere in his comic book pen. He had a cornoary while tearing through all of these old issues of Silver Surfer or whatever, and then found it. Aside from Health Studies class pictures, it was the first time I saw pot, ever. During the whole bike ride, Jia kept talking about all of these girls he was taking to the movies and then later messing around with. We were in a gym class before that and he’d come in with these insane and obviously false reports about his exploits, and always offered to get me a cut of the action. I figured it might be possible, because at this point in time, Jia and I looked almost like identical twins. In fact, Mr. Post, my junior high algebra teacher, signed my yearbook “To Jia..”.

About that gym class - it was made of 49% future pro atheletes - and not just the stupid ones who could run a mile in 10 seconds or shoot a million freethrows in a row - I’m talking about the ones that go to Stanford to be on their rowing team plus study corporate law. 49% of the class were the future license plate makers of America. And the other 5 of us - me, Jia, Jerome, Nathan, and maybe one or two others, were all like Silicon Valley hopefuls. The only reason we didn’t get the shit kicked out of us on a regular basis was because the other two groups were beating the fuck out of each other in basketball games. Most of the year was basketball - the coach was also the basketball coach, and this was when Shawn Kemp was shopping for a shoe contract or something, so he was always doing press conferences with ESPN and we were always playing the always-no-supervision basketball games. By the end of the year I got pretty good at it - all of us Apple II programmers played a 3 on 3 game, and would occasionally have to take in a loser, like this guy Ernie Friend, to round out the teams.

Other memorable gym class moments - we had to do some super-olympic event thing that involved running, jumping, gymnastics, climbing the rope, etc etc and you had to do all of this shit and beat certain goals and you’d get the A. Anyway, I didn’t pass ANY of the hundred-some events. Because I actually tried all of them, though, I still got a C.

About Jia, like a week later he was going to come over and spend the night, hang out, see my place, all of that. (this was at the age when it was still cool to go to someone’s house to see how many cool computer games they had, or whatever). My mom had to go pick up Jia, and when we got there, he was completely stoned. I guess my mom didn’t figure this out, but I knew he couldn’t stay in the house all night, because he was really fucked up, speaking in tongues, etc. So we went outside, and wandered around my subdivision and the once-vacant land to the east of the division. He spent a while laughing and making stupid observations, and then got really serious and started talking about a lot of the same issues that we shared, things that plagued both of us. Both of us were smart, poor, geeky, creative, and somewhat outside the loop within our rich and trendy high school. Jia’s outer shell was more defined than mine, and he had more confidence in many social situations. I never understood how he dealt with it, and it wasn’t until then that I realized that he didn’t deal with it, sort of like me.

Anyway, I got Jia back to my place many hours later. He ate a whole bunch of fairly rancid pizza like it was the best thing on earth, and I found, via note, that I was grounded for leaving the house for so long. After that, we were friends. And I found a secret that he hid from a lot of people - he collected Transformers. Once at his house, I had a strange “two worlds collide” experience when a fellow Transformers collector showed up to hang out for a while. He was Ray - known to me as the guy from my electronics class, but now known as one of my best friends.

Talking about high school is boring me, so I should get out of here…

Stories of Japan and India and Morocco and Amsterdam

Tue, 02 Dec 1997 00:00:00 GMT

It’s sad when you spend a half an hour reading your own web page. I guess these things happen. Actually, I’ve been tearing things apart a bit. I just changed all of the colors (again), and I’m trying to find a scheme to put next/previous links at the bottom of each page. Don’t hold your breath - it’s going to be a weird hack to get it to happen for the new additions, and I have no idea how I’ll fix all of the old pages, except by hand, I guess.

I’m back from Thanksgiving, and it was okay - no major complaints, no real excitement. I’ve been sick since Friday afternoon or so, and as I type, I’m working on my first real meal since maybe Saturday. I’m pretty low on sleep right now - I went to visit my friend Bijan, who is moving to SanFran today, to start a new job.

Bijan went on this massive trip, basically around the world, recording sounds on his MiniDisc, taking lots of photos, and meeting up with weird and cool people all over the place. He was supposed to be packing his stuff last night, but spent most of the time showing me fliers and CDs and photos and playing me stuff on his MD (which, by the way, kicks ass). He showed me a japanese reissue of Miles Davis - In a Silent Way on MiniDisc that was probably the coolest piece of music media I’ve ever seen in my life.

All of his stories of Japan and India and Morocco and Amsterdam made me wish I would’ve packed up after UCS and spent a few months on the road like that. There were always excuses - mostly money, but also language barriers, time, etc, that stopped me. Now it’s things like responsibilities, money (again), and the idea of traveling Europe with colitis isn’t a pleasant one. But a summer over there would probably generate a thousand short story ideas

It’s December! Shit, I didn’t even notice that until a second ago. This weekend, I did all of my Xmas shopping except Karena’s stuff. My sisters and nephew are just getting gift certificates, which was easy and should save on shipping stuff back to Indiana. I should avoid posting a message about what I got my respective parents, on the extreme off-chance that they somehow get an AOL account and a computer in the next 24 days. Less probable things have happened.

The CD of today is Black Sabbath - Heaven and Hell. I had no Black Sabbath on CD, just a motley collection of compilations on tape that I bought at gas stations when I was driving too much through central Indiana and got bored of every tape I owned, causing the purchase of many $3.99 cassettes at Marathon stations. Anyway, I got this Black Sabbath 4-pack of CDs at Costco (and miraculously, the CDs weren’t reissues, cutouts, or mangled in any other way). Anyway, three of the discs were Ozzy-era (Black Sabbath, Paranoid, and Sabotage), but Heaven and Hell is also included. It’s an odd-man-out because Ronnie James Dio sings on it. Plus, it doesn’t sound at all like a Black Sabbath album. It sounds more like a more refined version of early Krokus or something. It’s a decent album, and ahead of its time (it came out in 1980). I never liked Ronnie James Dio that much, but he’s tolerable here. During his solo career, I thought everyone in his band was pretty good except him. They should’ve fired him and becoem an instrumental band called “The Ronnie James Dio Experience”.

Speaking of Indiana, I am eating with a plastic spoon from Kroger. Of the things I miss about Indiana, Kroger is strangely on the top ten list. It’s probably because my mom shopped there when we lived in Michigan. She actually drove from Michigan to Indiana to get groceries at Kroger. Of course, if you live in Edwardsburg, MI, you drive to Indiana to put gas in your car, blow your nose, get a haircut, and about everything else. This was a town - sorry, this was a village - that had the village hall in a strip mall, next to a laundromat and a bait shop (and both of them were larger).

I think I’ve decided not to move from my apartment. To sort of offset this decision, I’ve decided to go through the whole damn place and throw out everything that’s not getting any use, and then buy some new shelves or an entertainment center, or some of those closet shelf organizer things, or something, so I can free up more spare room. If I get caught up on sleep, I might try to do that tonight…

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I have put previous/next links on all of the pages except for this one. This one has a comment in it that will be replaced by the update program with a correct and automated line of html that will add its own prev/next links without my intervention. That piece of code hasn’t been written yet, but it won’t be difficult.

I weighed myself last night and I was down to about 185. Four months ago, when this whole dietary thing started, I was probably pushing 215. I’m probably close to the range considered healthy, although I’m still a little flabby around the midsection. I think I am also within a couple pounds of my weight 3 or 4 years ago, before I got a car and money to actually buy food. I’m still 20 or 30 lbs above my weight in high school. I always hated being that thin - I looked like a ghoul. Of course, if I was in high school now, with all of these Seattle bands and waif commercials and calvin klein, i’d be about perfect.

I think I’m leaving early. Nobody’s here, and I’m about to fall asleep. Later…

Ugliest C ever

Wed, 03 Dec 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I just spent most of my lunch hour trying to add the stuff to my index program so the next/previous tags will automatically be updated on my pages. It is the UGLIEST piece of C code I’ve ever written - if you can even call it C. It constructs a couple of sed scripts that it systems out, and also runs a perl script to do all of the replacements. It is slow, of course, but not that bad. It’s only hacking at two files at a time. It looks like its working though, so I’m happy. I’m nervous that it will hit some kind of weird case where it will erase a bunch of files or something stupid like that, but it tested fine, and I think I’ll be able to just forget about it now and let it do its own work.

It’s another tiring day. I was up late last night reading my old journals from way back when. It’s pretty trippy - my first journal is very hands-offish and doesn’t really tell any details about what was going on in my life. I talked about paxil, and depression, but I never talked much about the women, or buying a new CD player, or working for UCS, or meeting Simms for the first time. A lot of weird stuff happened in that first few months of journaling, but it didn’t capture much. I had two journals going at once for part of that year, and the summer of 1994 (I kept one with me in a backpack, one at home). That journal was never finished, but the gossip and the dirt on a lot of the summer’s actifvities is all there - shit I forgot about. There were some strange gaps though. I talked about sex when I wasn’t having any, but on the rare opportunities that I did lure someone back to the apartment, I never filled the pages the morning after.

Some of my best paper journals are from the 94-95 school year. During this period, I wrote about 3 times more in my notebooks than I do now. And the stuff is classic - it was a period when I was reading a lot of stuff - my first Bukowski, WS Burroughs, Henry Miller, some Rollins - and I wrote for pages and pages every night about how much I hated Bloomington, and how I wanted to save my pennies and drive to San Diego or Mexico or Texas or Seattle and live in my car and write books about my fucked-up experiences. The stories about my wild ideas of escape would make a pretty good book in themselves. I guess I wrote a lot about my problems with Simms when we were living together, but most of it was some intense writing about that situation. I also had (shitty) ideas for a new novel about every other day. And the depression stuff was at its strongest then - a lot of rejection, all-out dating problems, almost no friends except for Larry, and I spent most of my time wondering when I would be fired from UCS for something I didn’t do. It’s pretty intense reading.

I thought about it a little, and it’s strange that my journals don’t talk about depression too much. I guess it has been pre-empted by long entries talking about dietary problems and gastroenterological problems. But ALL I used to write about was depression. It wasn’t that boring of stuff, either - a cross of parapoia and philosophy. I guess it’s hard to write about it when you’re doing OK.

I want to make sure this index works OK. Maybe I will write more, maybe not.

At war with Columbia House records

Thu, 04 Dec 1997 00:00:00 GMT

It doesn’t look like my new update program is working that well now - it mysteriously got confused and started creating 0 length files out of some journal pages. I think I fixed it, but I’m not sure. I’ll have to modify it a bit more so it makes a backup of stuff before it starts destroying things.

I spent a lot of last night either trying to fix the above program, or trying to get to the end of Tetris Plus. I think I’m about 4 levels away from finishing. But the last time I said that was when I was on vacation and thought I’d cleared the four worlds on the map. Then, Atlantis and another 20 levels magically appeared, and each level has been tremendously difficult. I’ve probably burned through 6 sets of batteries on my Game Boy trying to beat this thing. While waiting in O’Hare, I went through one set of batteries on one level, playing it over and over. An addiction - it isn’t heroin, but it will probably burn out my eyes over time.

I’m at war with Columbia House records. About two months ago, they sent me a “we want you back” offer saying I could get 15 CDs for free, WITH NO SHIPPING, and then I’d have to buy 4 more and quit. I get this kind of thing all the time, but not with free shipping - that’s like $40. So I signed up (but not with the little stamps they gave me - I dug out my A-Z catalog and ordered a bunch of jazz stuff that never appears in their fliers) and I waited. And waited. That was on 10/7. With 6-8 weeks of postal malady, they’d be here by now, right? This Saturday, I got my first “return this or we’ll send you the new Madonna album or something else horrible”. OK, it had a membership number and everything, so that meant that either the stuff got crossed, since they send CDs 4th class and mailings second class, or someone took all of my CDs from the rental office and sold them for methadone. More waiting. Last night I got like 6 hangups on my answering machine while I was playing GameBoy (if your name doesn’t show up in caller ID, you talk to the little black box). I answered on the 7th, thinking maybe I’d won some German lottery, or my girlfriend was at a payphone with her kidney missing or something. It was… Columbia House. Some poor kid was reading off a notecard and asking me if I wanted to come back to Columbia House. After his canned speech, I told him I THOUGHT I WAS A MEMBER. He gave me an 800 number to call from 8am-10pm Indiana time (of course it was 7:01PM, aka 10:01 Indiana time). I called thismorning, and they didn’t know where the CDs were, although they sent them out on 10/22. But, they were nice enough to re-send all of the CDs to me and I didn’t even have to threaten them with bodily harm. (They run this club out of Bloomington - I could probably fly to Indiana, buy a flamethrower and an AK-47, and get my 15 CDs the hard way). Anyway, maybe my stuff will show up in another 2 months. Maybe I’ll get both shipments and I can sell one set of CDs.

My sister Monica bought a 98 Saturn, so I no longer have the newest car in the family. Maybe after I get rid of my Escort, I could buy the oldest car in the family. Come to think of it, that wouldn’t work - my mom’s husband has a bunch of 55 57 chevys.

Rancid sandwiches, alternate realities

Fri, 05 Dec 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I guess I’ve officially re-started the edits on Rumored to Exist. I spent some of last night hacking at the text, trying to turn some of the “one-hit” stories into longer pieces. There are all of these parts with a single plot element, and they somewhat fall flat. It’s cool to work through these in edits and get some more length and depth in there. I think after (if) I finish an edit like that, and add the 55 fragments that are missing, the manuscript will be about 100,000 words long.

I just had to buy another lunch because the sandwich I made was rancid. I hate packing my lunch, but I hate buying lunch downstairs or down the street. Spending $3 on a tiny pasta salad or a half of a sandwich isn’t worth it. I’m almost used to eating the same stuff every day when I bring my lunch. Sort of like how David Lynch ate lunch at the same place for 17 years in a row or whatever.

I’m reading a Phillip K Dick book (I don’t remember the title) that takes place in 1960 in an alternate universe where the Japanese and Germans won World War two and divided up America between themselves. It’s not perfect prose - I’ve liked PKD for his ideas and stories, but never for his flowing use of the English language. Anyway, it’s an eerie and strange idea, and it reminds me a lot of an American version of 1984 in a way. Everyone thinks 1984 was such a high-tech story (the people who don’t read it), but it was really about the low tech situation. I should re-read 1984 right after this, it’s been a while. I bought a new copy at a garage sale about a year ago - it looks like it was originally from a school library. My old version was falling apart - I bought it 5 years ago for a class, and got a few reads out of it.

Orwell’s awesome, even outside of 1984 and Animal Farm. I’ve read Down and Out… many times in recent years. It’s a great book to read when you’re poor and out of money - one of my favorite college reads.

It looks like none of the CDs I ordered from cdconnection will make it - they’re all out of stock. I went CD shopping last night, and bought 2 Tori Amos singles and 2 albums by Tony MacAlpine, this mid-80s guitar hero type. I thought he dropped off the face of the earth, but here he is…

Drew Carey book

Sat, 06 Dec 1997 00:00:00 GMT

I read the whole Drew Carey book last night. It’s actually pretty good. He does a section that’s just jokes, a section that’s stories about the TV show, his life, etc, and then a section of short stories he wrote that are vaguely based on some events in his life, but fiction. I liked all of the other stuff, but the stories really kicked ass. They almost reminded me of some of the stuff in those Kevin Canty books - they really stuck with you after you put the book down. He should write more stories during hiatus week or something.

I am going to seriously try to edit Rumored to Exist this weekend. I know something will stop me, but I’m going to try. If I still drank Coke, I’d buy four two liters on my way home and pledge to finish them all by lunch on Sunday. Instead, it will be Sprite, and there’s no real reason to drink it that fast. I did more editing last night, although not a lot, and ideas are starting to come to me in the shower or on the drive over.

I’ve been listening to AC/DC in the car. My order from cdconnection didn’t get filled - all of the CDs were out of stock, so I got my money back. Maybe I’ll spend that money on some AC/DC CDs or that new boxed set. Of course, I am so whipped on this Silver Platters coupon system that I only buy CDs on Wednesday so I can get double points. I also found out if you buy 15 CDs on Wednesday, you practically quadruple points. If I could afford to blow a few hundred bucks a week, I could get a serious cache of points going.

(Do you remember the episode of the Brady Bunch where the kids needed the money to engrave their parents’ anniversary present, so they formed a band and went on TV to win the cash? The band name was Silver Platters. Coincidence?)

(I guess that only made sense if you lived in Seattle and knew I bought all of my CDs at a place called Silver Platters).

Everything I touch breaks

Fri, 05 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Sometimes, it seems like everything I touch breaks. Almost three years ago, when I first moved to Seattle, I went through a period where I never wanted to leave my apartment, because I was certain I would accidentally do something that would cost me money. My salary looked decent on paper, back in Indiana<, but once I got a car, an apartment, and got hit by all of the nickel-and-dime real world expenses, I had way less in my pocket at the end of the week than I did at my poverty-level hourly job back in Bloomington. And then every time I moved, I got hit with another asinine fee or bill - it felt like these people expected me to have a few grand in the bank for idiot expenses. So on Saturdays, when I was alone and had nothing to do all day because I was so broke, I feared going downstairs to the mailbox, because I knew I’d find some new bill awaiting me. And I feared leaving the house, because I was certain I’d either get in a car accident or in a breakdown that would cost me tens of thousands of dollars.

I’m beginning to feel like this again. Today, my VW started making engine noises that sound expensive. It actually started on Tuesday, but today was the first time I opened the hood with the engine running and gave it a good listen. I talked to a friend of mine who says it might be something like the water pump or timing belt, and that makes more sense - it will also be a hell of a lot cheaper than a complete engine rebuild to fix a knocking rod or something. Either way, I don’t have time time or money to deal with it right now, so I will switch back to driving my Escort full-time.

I spent part of last night watching old Twilight Zone episodes. The day of the last Seinfeld episode, I got on a major anti-TV rant, tore my cable out of the wall, and cut it so I wouldn’t be able to watch any TV again. I’ve since found that I can barely get a decent picture of channel 5, the local NBC affiliate, but it’s so fuzzy and screwed up that I can’t focus on a TV show. Life without TV has been more lonely than exhilirating. I’ve realized that it opened me up to a whole different world of people and experiences. Granted, most of them made me feel like shit - everyone on TV is thin and in shape and beautiful and together, and after watching for 3 or for hours a night every night of the month, you wonder if you’ll ever be able to find a woman as beautiful as Monica or Phoebe or any of Jerry’s girlfriends, and you’ve become programmed. You can’t buy the cars or the clothese they advertise, so you revert to buying the beers and pizzas, and soon you’ve gained 50 more pounds and you’re less together and less beautiful than when you started. It’s all a trap.

Background info: I grew up on TV, like the rest of you. We only had 5 channels (NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, and a neo-nazi religious channel) until we got cable around 83 or 84 (my parents were late adopters on most things - we didn’t get a VCR until about 1988. We did have a microwave oven around 1980 though.) I got out of TV when I was in high school - by the time I had a car, a job, and friends who were interested in anything but TV on a Friday, I stopped watching. And when I went to college, I didn’t have a TV to bring with me. In my first year of college, I watched maybe 4 hours of TV. But in my second year of school, I lived at home. I worked, but there was usually a night a week where I watched every show - the first semester it was when LA Law was on. And I watched a slew of stuff on Sunday night - it was part of the routine, to go to the grocery with my girlfriend, and then watch America’s Funniest Home Videos. Somewhere in there, I realized that I didn’t do anything outside of work anymore - I didn’t write, or play bass, or get into music that much, or go to movies, or anything. I also gained 30 pounds from sitting in front of the tube with a bag of chips or some candy or a pizza. So I went off of TV again, for almost six years. I didn’t own a set, and when my roommates did, I seldom watched. I did watch movies on VHS, but I think that’s a different experience. Movies aren’t written to draw you in and herd you toward a sponsor. The only TV show I watched in that timeframe was Beavis and Butthead - I taped a bunch of those when I was home one summer. My TV celibacy continued until the end of 1996, when I bought a TV and a VCR to watch movies. At the start of 1997, I bought a cable to hook up and watch the free cable in our apartment. Then I got hooked again. I got locked into must see tv, saturday night live, syndicated seinfeld, abc’s wednesday lineup, and late night talk shows. Any time I didn’t feel like writing or doing anything creative or productive, I would channel-surf. And about two weeks ago, I stopped. It was weird at first, like I had a lot of extra time on my hands. I used to watch TV and eat, and eating in silence or with a CD going seemed weird. I usually start writing at 9, and that used to mean I’d eat, finish my shows and go to the computer. Now I sometimes have hours between eating and writing, and I don’t know what to do. Anyway, it’s weird. I wanted to give you the background so you don’t think I’m an anti-tv nazi or a devout couch potato. I’ve lived both roles.

Anyway, I was watching Twilight Zone last night. I have a bunch of them on tape, and sometimes I watch tapes or movies to get over the eerie silence of the evening, or when I have writer’s block. When I was a kid, we watched these every night at 10 on WGN. After a few summers of this, I thought I saw all of the episodes. Maybe I’ve forgotten some, or maybe there are ones that weren’t in syndication before, but many of these seem new to me. I wish I could’ve written some episodes for Serling, because I bet I could bang out a bunch of weird ideas that would’ve been great. Other odd things I noticed - have you ever noticed how many Twilight Zone episodes had a wild west background? I bet they used the Universal Studios wild west lot to shoot all of them. Also, ever notice how many times Robbie the Robot from Lost in Space appears in Twilight Zone episodes? They must’ve had some kind of loaner program.

I don’t remember what the hell I was going to say about the Twilight Zone. I’ve been watching in an effort to pick up weird ideas for the now-almost-stalled work on Rumored to Exist. I’m in a weird sort of funk and I can’t write anything new or unique. I’ve been pushing around old ideas, and cleaning things up, but there’s no energy behind it. I’ve also been having a series of weird dreams, 2 or 3 a night, that all have to do with women. They are completely different dreams, but usually involve falling in love with somebody or chasing after someone, and the women are all composites of various ex-girlfriends or other women I knew in Bloomington. The dreams are vivid and lifelike, and I wake up wishing they really happened.

This is the first journal entry I’ve done for a while. Now I need to get the archive of old stuff and get this site going again. Maybe I will journal for a few more days first…

A return to posting

Sat, 06 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

After about 5 hours of hacking, this thing is up and running again. Sure feels weird to have all of the old entries on the server, and only one new one. I had to redo all of my interface here, and rewrite the C program that indexes everything, but it seems to be working. There are many bugs and rough-around-the edges things that need work, but it’s letting me enter in stuff, and it’s putting it on the web site, so that’s all that matters for now.

I have my Escort back. It feels weird to drive it after the Rabbit - almost like it’s a big car or something. It smells new, and the seats are more comfortable. I like the feel of it, and the interior, but it’s very sluggish. Going up hills, I kept grabbing for the gearshift to downshift. It also feels odd without a clutch under my left foot. Although I’ve cursed that car the last 34 months I’ve had it, I will miss it when it’s gone. It’s about as stable and well-adjusted as American cars get. Although my trips to Longview last year got to be a pain after a while, I will miss driving down I-5 on a nice, sunny day in that car. I’ve owned it longer than any other car, so it’ll always symbolize the beginning of my Seattle experience. And in 2 months, it will be back at the Ford motor credit office, on its way to another sucker.

I feel a need to update anyone who may have read my last journal and then got to the new one (or people who maybe read all of the old entries and then wondered what happened in the 6 month gap). So I guess I should run through the list.

I guess the biggest thing is that I’m single now. I split things off with Karena about 3 months ago. It’s hard to describe diplomatically in a public forum, but I guess I’ve been in the middle of some kind of weird identity crisis, and I wanted to get more serious about my writing. There weren’t any major dramatics, fights, etc. It’s hard to go into it any more than that, but I can describe what’s been going on with me, and maybe that will explain it more.

First, I’ve been writing a lot this year. I screwed around for a month or so, got a bunch of new computer gear with my tax money in January, and then decided to get back on the horse with my first novel, Summer Rain. In the middle of editing this book, I got to the point where I wanted to write full-time on it, and it became hard to do anything else. I thought about it so much, I *dreamed* about being in the book. And in all of this wanting to be a writer, and having a crisis about my purpose in life, I didn’t think I could live this bipolar life of working and being in a serious relationship, and writing. So, I got more into Summer Rain after the split, and then got into my second book again, Rumored to Exist. Right now, I’m supposed to be editing Rumored, but I’ve been blocked for a few weeks. So who knows what is next.

I bought a second car, another VW Rabbit like the one I had back in 1992. I was fixated on it after working on Summer Rain, since the car in that book is practically a main character. My old one was a 1980 diesel, 4 door, sunroof, 4 speed, silver. This is a 1978 gas, 2 door, sunroof, 5 speed, silver. It ran good for a while, and now this water pump shit started up. After I get that fixed, and a few other little things, it will be an okay car.

Since the beginning of last December, I’ve also bought a new stereo for the VW, a MiniDisc recorder, a bunch of computer crap, a bunch of books, and about 250 CDs. I’ve still managed to do okay with the bills - most of that was from a windfall of money at the start of the year, taxes and bonuses. I’ve been somewhat broke lately, and I am worried because the Escort has some paint scratches and I’m almost certain they will charge me $1000 for them when I return it. So I’m eating a lot of ramen and lunchmeat sandwiches these days.

I signed another lease on my apartment. Not much to say there, except that I’m too lazy to move, and I’m afraid if I move elsewhere, I won’t get any writing done.

My friend Bill Perry moved back to Indiana at the end of January, because his mom had cancer. She passed away the day before Memorial day, which really sucks. It’s weird without him here, since he moved me out here and he was kindof my default Seattle friend. He still works in Seattle (remotely) and shows up every once in a while.

Life has otherwise been very boring and routine, and maybe that’s part of the problem. I’ve been suffering fits of depression about what to do next. It’s not that I’m planning on quitting my job and backpacking across Tibet. It feels like the only interval after entering the corporate world is retiring, and that’s why people get married and buy houses volvo stationwagons and take package vacations and have kids and go to church. I don’t feel like I could do any of those things, but I almost feel like it’s expected of me. When I was in school, I always had goals - getting money for a semester, getting past midterms, getting through the semester, finishing requirements, meeting the right woman, etc. But it seems like life is a giant open frontier. I guess that’s good and bad.

It’s getting daylight out - I should probably sleep. More about this later.

06/06/98 12:23

I imagine I’ll be doing 9 entries a day for the first week, but the reading level will taper off with time. Bear with me.

As you can tell, I don’t sleep much on weekends. It’s very eerie to be sitting in bed, listening to a CD, and catching up on the paper journal as the sky turns from black to blue to broad daylight. The days are getting longer, which puts a cramp on a person who claims they can only write during darkness.

Although I am broke and tired, I promised myself I would leave the house and do something of interest today, and going to the mall doesn’t count.

A random trip to see the collapsing bridge

Sun, 07 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I loaded up the Escort with my cameras, MiniDisc, and an atlas and headed out yesterday, with the goal of taking a short to moderate roadtrip to somewhere I’ve never been before. So I got on I-5 south with a vague plan in mind, and pressed onward.

I do miss the Escort for some of these medium-length drives. I always complained about its road noise and vibrations, but compared to the Rabbit, it is whisper-quiet. The whole car feels so different now - newer, wider, and somewhat clunkier. Even though it has power steering, it drives less responsively than the VW - which isn’t all that bad. Also, it has air conditioning, which helped yesterday - it felt like it was above 80 for my trip. The MiniDisc was great for the road, too. That’s not a car-specific thing - mine is a Sony MZ-R50, a portable recorder about the size of a cassette tape box. I plug it into my tape player with a faux-cassette adapter, and it sounds fine. I listened to the new Pat Metheny album on the highway south. The perfect sound, small size, and nice little wired remote of the Minidisc made it a good companion for trips like this.

No, I didn’t drive to Longview, although I thought it would be a nice little drive, and it would be a real freakout to see that place again - it was bad enough when I zipped past there with Ryan Grant when we went to see Joe Satriani in Portland last March. Instead, I went down to Tacoma, and got on 16, which cuts to the west and up, into the peninsula on the other side of Puget Sound. After a bit of a haul, I got to the Tacoma Narrows bridge, another Pacific Northwest engineering tragedy story. Back in the 50s? the original Narrows bridge got destroyed in a windstorm. It was a gradual thing - the bridge gyrated all over for a day, and a bunch of people shot film and pictures of the thing before it broke apart and keeled into the water (I think some footage of it was recently in some Sony or Pioneer car stereo ad). The bridge seemed solid to me, but I still unloaded the rest of the b/w film in my still camera while driving across.

After the bridge, I saw a cemetery and decided to stop and look around. When I got out of the car and the AC, I realized it was pretty damn hot, and I was wearing a black t-shirt. Oh well. I have a morbid fascination with cemetaries - I’m not some kind of gothic zombie type, but I think cemetaries are a strange sociological phenomenon. We treat people like shit during their lifetimes, and ignore them until they die. Then we spend thousands of dollars to commemorate them with a piece of land and a chunk of stone. It’s the epitome of cookie-cutter ceremonies. Nobody is born the same way - there are so many stories of rushed trips to the hospital, prolonged labor, C-sections, kids born in the elevator, natural childbirth in swimming pools, and the whole deal. But (almost) everyone who dies gets the same ceremony, the same square of limestone.

This cemetary was a dud, in my opinion - all flat markers, and no real artwork or interesting history. It was a nice looking place though - there was a little newsletter I should’ve stolen, talking about how the staff was there to serve you and to stop by the office for cookies and icewater. It was a nice location, too - you could see a tributary of the sound, with some sailboats and homes built on the hills. There were no interesting graves, although I accidentally found a WWI vet that shared my birthday, so I loaded some color film and got a shot of that.

I continued north on 16, running out the Metheny MD and switching to some Henry Rollins spoken word. You might or might not know the story about how I claim Rollins turned my life around, but maybe I should recap since I’ve been feeling pretty depressed lately:

The story starts in October 1993. I’d been in a relationship since March, and I thought it was pretty perfect. Things had settled down from the hyper-romantic “in love” period, to a more cosmopolitan “day-to-day love”, but I still thought it was the greatest relationship I was in. Famous last words - in October, she found out she had an ovarian cyst, and had to go in for surgery in December for it - really serious shit. She had doubts about the relationship, and she felt she couldn’t deal with both the relationship and the medical stuff, and she couldn’t get rid of the medical stuff, so she dumped me.

Of course this completely flattened me. But there’s more background. At that point in time, I was on this academic rollercoaster where I was barely hanging on. At IU, you go on probation for pulling your cumulative GPA below a 2, or doing something asinine in one semester, like getting all F’s. I’d spent more semesters on probation than off; my recent transcript was like: on probation, off probation, on probation, on probation, dismissal, reinstatement, off probation, on probation, and now I would’ve bet money against myself that I’d fuck up the rest of the semester and face another dismissal. I’d also given up on my original dream of finishing a computer science degree, since there were too many hurdles (calculus, foreign language) that I couldn’t finish.

My academic goal at that point was to get a degree in general studies - a loophole provided by the school of continuing studies. I could finish a non-specific bachelor’s degree if I had 120 credit hours - no foreign language, and I got to pick and choose my classes a bit, although I had to have a certain number of social and behavioral, science, and humanities classes, and I had to take a speech class. No problem. I figured I’d never get a job as a hot-shit unix programmer, but maybe I’d get a job answering phones somewhere. I worked with computers then as a support consultant,had been for three years, and knew a fair amount. I knew people with English degrees and History degrees with no experience snagging good-paying computer jobs, and I was properly positioned at the very start of the whole WWW explosion, so maybe there was hope. But I still felt like I was drifting, like all of my mooring lines were being severed one by one. I was taking stupid, passionless classes in public management and business computing, and counting away my time until the real world kidnapped me, without really getting ready for it.

Ten days after the girlfriend left, my paternal grandmother died, and I rushed home for the funeral (I didn’t have a car - my sister drove down from Ball State, and then back up to Elkhart). We briefly lived with Grandma Konrath when my mom, dad, and I showed up in Edwardsburg, MI after he got done with the Air Force in North Dakota. We went to her house almost every weekend from age zero until I was 16, 17 and started running with my own car and friends. Even then, I’d get out there at least every month or so. My maternal grandparents lived in Chicago, and I only saw them on holidays; my paternal grandfather died when my dad was only 2 or 3, so I never met him. So my Grandma Konrath was probably my closest grandparent. I last saw her the day I picked up my truck from U-Haul to move to Bloomington for the fall, and didn’t think of it as a last goodbye, but I guess it works better that way sometimes. I don’t have problems with funerals - I don’t believe in heaven and hell, and that’s problematic when you’re surrrounded by crying people who are talking about that. I feel grief, but it usually doesn’t happen until weeks or months later. Call me weird. Anyway, the strangest part was seeing my dad - he mostly had it together, but there was this almost scared look on his face when we were at the graveyard. He’s the youngest kid in this huge family, and I suddenly realized both of his parents were gone, and it made my father, the person that I see as more of an icon or a figurehead, seem a lot more like me.

So where does Rollins fit into all of this? When I got back to school, I bought The Boxed Life, which is a hilarious spoken word album. Hank talks about travel, depression, the road, people, aggression, humility, strength, and much more. I lived about two miles away from campus, and although I had a bus pass, I’d rather walk home than wait two hours for a BT bus. So I’d strap on my trusty Aiwa walkman, put in one of the Rollins tapes (it was a 2-tape set, and I later bought up the back-catalog too) and hiked it home. His monologues made me think a lot more about my life, the depression, and reinventing myself. Pretty soon, I started hauling around a spiral notebook and writing down my observations and feelings during the lull between classes and work. I dug out my old 110 lb weight set at my mom’s house and brought it back to Bloomington, trying to get back into shape. I stole a bunch of paperback books from my mom’s - stuff like Catch-22 and Fear of Flying, and made a habit of reading an hour or two a night. Later, I started dropping more cash every payday at Morgenstern’s on stuff like Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski, and I devoured their stories of loneliness, romance, life, and living. I still thought about my ex every day, but I knew I’d need to reinvent myself if I wanted to live. And I guess the distraction of the writing, reading and the lifting got in my way, and kept me from jumping into a temporary, fucked up relationship, like the chain of them behind me. And within a few months, I was a writer. I filled the void title in my life by hacking out short stories, poems, and trying at a first novel. And here I am: Jon Konrath, writer.

About 80 pages ago, I was talking about my trip. I was headed up 16, which is a nice road, with a lot of evergreen trees on either side and some small hills in the distance. There are few stops, just the occasional Texaco station. It reminded me a lot of my time in upstate New York with my dad, the summer before my senior year of high school. The drive felt good, even though I didn’t know my destination.

I got to Bremerton, which is an old Navy shipyard town. I flew over the shipworks in a tiny Cessna plane with a coworker once - there’s a lot of old iron down there. When I pulled into town, I could see the old gray battleships right off the water - a bunch of them were pushed together, hull-to-hull,like they were in storage. I saw a sign for a naval museum, and I hoped there would be a place I could drop a 10-spot and walk onto a decommissioned destroyer. But it looked like the ships were in some fenced-off, official-looking facility, and I couldn’t even get to the water’s edge for a picture. Bummer.

I motored around Bremerton, which is a small town with a heavy naval influence to it. I can’t describe it much better than that, but maybe the smell of saltwater and presence of marinas remind me of being on the Oregon coast, or my walks around lake Union and Elliot bay. Small towns are weird, because they are always beat - worn out signs on little local stores, high school kids with nothing to do, lots of senior citizens. It’s always fucked up, but it’s fucked up out of ignorance more than corruption. In the big city, the problems are that everyone wants to make a buck - everything is a high rise or a parking lot or a no parking zone. Everything is covered with soot and neon signs and billboards for beer or Guess jeans. But in the small town, it’s all about atrophy. And the people like it - and, I guess from a lifetime of living in small towns, it’s nice for me to get a small dose of it here and there.

I got back on 16 and banged north again. I thought about going to 3 and crossing the Kitsap bridge, and headeing west, on the north side of the Olympic State park, until I either got to the ocean or a nice outlook on the Juan de Fuca Strait. Realistically, I didn’t have time for this, and you can’t go all the way to the ocean because the prime real estate right on the tip there is an Indian reservation. So I stopped in Silverdale, with the intent of picking up some cash, hitting a restroom, and maybe getting a bite to eat. I found a Seafirst - while in line, a guy started talking to me about my Joe Satriani shirt. I guess he was up from the Bay Area for the weekend. He looked Navy, but I couldn’t tell. I stopped at the Target by the Kitsap mall - the whole place reminded me of a mall I saw during a stay in Corning, NY. I decided against Burger King, and got back on 16, heading south.

I got back into Bremerton and circled around again, looking for that museum. I saw what looked like Hyatt Regency or Days Inn towers in the distance, but there were a bunch of them - sort of modern-adobe looking, pinkish-sandstone colored, with bright terraces and modern-looking roofs. Why the fuck would they need so many hotels? I got a little lost, and ended up at the gate of the Navy base, so I turned and drove the length of the base, looking in the fence. Then I realized that those buildings weren’t hotels - they were barracks! I thought all barracks were required by law to be 50’s-looking quonset huts, but these were modern, high-rise apartments. I also saw a Subway on base, which looked a little out of place. Just outside of the base were a bunch of run-down bars that looked like they’d never served a drink to a person since the Korean War.

I couldn’t find the museum (I’m sure it’s a snap to find) and I was bored of driving, so I decided to drop $8 and take the ferry back to Seattle. I got there halfway through the lineup, and only had to wait 15 minutes. I grabbed all of my gear, and spent the ride taking still and video pictures of the birds, boats, and water. You can get excellent panning shots when you’re moving through the water - if the water is moving toward your angle, and you zoom in, it looks like you’re flying over the water. Also, the birds had a horrible headwind, and were trying to fly with the boat, so it looked like they were hovering right over us. I shot about 15 minutes of film, and got some great footage (but horrible audio - the wind!) of the approach to Seattle. I got back to the car early, and spooled out the rest of my tape on the approaching kingdome (Sony Hi8 tape is actually 122 minutes long, I found out). It felt good to sit in the Escort after the sound and the headwinds. That car still smells new - it’s amazing.

I got home tired, and sort of depressed. It was 7:30 on a Saturday night, and I was broke and with nothing to do. No messages, no calls, no email - I felt like I should’ve kept driving. Instead, I fell asleep, woke about 3 hours later and ate a TV dinner while watching the tape that was in the camcorder. It had the tail-end of my vacation last October to Indiana (which shows you how much I use the camcorder). My mom had a bunch of old slides from when I was a baby, so we rented a projector, aimed it at the wall, set up the camcorder, and I had her talk about each slide while I taped it. The picture quality is poor, but the commentary is great. I also faux-interviewed my friend Tom Sample in his apartment in Indy and got him to recall some great stories about our time together. After the tape, I spent part of the night, screwing with the new glossary system, and reading the Cliff Stoll book about the German hacker, The Cuckoo’s Egg.

Now I’ve spent forever typing all of that and yet I don’t feel like I’m really talking about what’s going on. I want to get out of the house though, and this will probably be more pedestrian, like a trip to safeway. More later.

06/07/98 21:48

I just re-read and edited what was above. I can ramble when I have nothing better to do with my time. My apologies to low-baud users.

I spent the day wandering in the Escort, wandering Northgate mall, wandering Mountlake Terrace, wandering University Village. It felt good to get out of the house, even though I didn’t have money to blow shopping. Malls have a certain cathartic appearance, and they’re a prime location for peoplewatching. It drives my friends nuts that I will spent so much time at malls without even going in stores, but hey - it’s exercise.

I was reading a book at a bookstore (Waldenbooks? It was someplace I don’t buy books) and it said that you can give your dendrons in your brain a workout by doing things you aren’t used to doing. So maybe I wouldn’t feel as atrophied if I started studying Sweedish or Russian or something. I think that’s true to an extent, because when I was suffering with physics or Spenser and Chaucer, I felt a lot more alert than when I was watching TV 19 hours a day.

I’ve declared Rumored to Exist officially stalled. I need to change gears again, and I have an idea for a third book that might work out well right now. Mum’s the word until I can get an outline hammered out.

Did you know Indiana University had a president with the first name of Elvis? Did you also know that Indiana University, defined by law on January 20, 1820, shares a birthday with me (1971), Bill Perry (1971), physicist Andre Ampere (1775), second man on the moon Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin (1930), Deforest Kelley - Star Trek’s “Dr. Bones” (1920), mathematician and physicist Daniel Bernoulli (1700), creator of Little Orphan Annie creator Harold Gray (1894), Lorenzo Lamas (1958), Kiss guitarrist Paul Stanley (1949), novelist Johannes Jensen (1873), and Skeet Ulrich (1968)? That’s quite a lineup - I’m thinking a secret society is in the works.

I need to figure out dinner and then start outlining this book.

Hello from the office

Mon, 08 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Hello from my office. One of the reasons I started this again was so I could spend my lunch breaks writing and eating a brownbag lunch, instead of spending $7 and half of my break in pursuit of 600 grams of fat and some bread. I’m hoping the word count for this project will go up as my weight goes down.

I feel like I’m going to jinx it if I say it, but I started working on my third book last night. I got a good 5000 words down last night, and a rudimentary outline, and I would’ve wrote another 5000 except it was 3 in the morning and I had to be at work today. I have a good feeling about this one, and I’m not sure where it’s going, but I think it’s a cool project. I feel stupid talking about it in such vague terms, so I’ll stop for a bit.

I do have this weird feeling about starting a book like this. Both of my other books were conceived in 1995, which seems like forever ago. Summer Rain was born in an era where I was killing myself over getting a book started, and I had a great short story that begged to be turned into a full-length novel. Rumored to Exist began as a writer’s block exercise while in Boston on a trade show visit, using Bill Perry’s semi-stolen Dell laptop. I don’t remember the moment I decided to take that short story about the summer of 1992 and turn it into a book - in fact, I didn’t even write it down in my daily journal. I remember starting Rumored - I was in a hotel bar, and some drunken woman from Minnesota was hitting on me with the line “hey, is that a computer?” Starting a new book is like starting a new relationship - there’s so much charged energy, you can’t stop thinking about it, and the future goes from being indeterminate to holding so much promise.

Although this is my third book, it’s also maybe my 10th attempt at a book. So maybe by Friday, all of this will collapse and I’ll be trying to figure out what to do next. Buyer beware.

A shout out to The Meyhem Project, now posting daily again.

Col. Kurtz, old journals

Tue, 09 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I stayed up late (a subjective term these days) last night and watched Apocalypse Now. It’s been a while, and I felt a need to go up the river with Col. Kurtz myself. You know it’s a weird night when you’re thinking more about the mission and the river than the helicopters and explosions. The movie really hit the spot.

I read a bunch of old journals from the end of 1995, trying to find out when I named my second book, Rumored to Exist. It’s always odd to read old stuff, but it’s even stranger to find thick, deep, intellectual writing in a time when I thought I was just dicking around and spending too much money. 1995 now feels like a different era to me, and all of my old struggles and exclamations made it an interesting read.

I swore against it, but I feel another trip to Indiana coming on. I think it might be the same deal as last year, but it depends on money. I feel a need to shoot a lot more video of Bloomington this time. It’ll be nice to travel with a MiniDisc, too. A MiniDisc, a GameBoy, a camcorder, a cellphone - I think RoboCop hauled around less gear.

I’m going to go eat pizza in a second, and then go to the movies with my team at work, so I better split.

06/09/98 19:47

We went to see The Truman Show today. It was okay. It’s hard to say it’s a great movie, because then it puts you right in the demographic of the pathetic people they satirize. I don’t know if that’s a hidden joke, or a way of business. It wasn’t the kind of movie I’d pay to see, but it wasn’t as unbearable as being forces to paying to see a Julia Roberts movie with one of your friend’s recent ex-girlfriends, or watching Threesome with your mom. (both happened - don’t ask).

Actually, the whole premise of the movie was too similar to the excellent and overlooked Dark City, which did the whole city-you-can’t-escape thing, except with this whole scifi/noir thing which was the best cinematography I’ve seen in a while. It flaked out toward the end, though.

Someone should make a self-balancing washer. The basket would have water chambers around the perimeter and in the hub, and it would fill the ones opposite the imbalance. Maybe there’s an easier way - IU didn’t have an engineering program. I wish they did - I would’ve tried to get in some classes, maybe learn how to blow up bridges or do cool things with liquid hydrogen.

It’s time to work on the book.

As creative as a Reagan-era tax document

Wed, 10 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I didn’t get much sleep last night, so I feel as creative as a Reagan-era tax document. I managed to get some writing done last night, and it’s a really weird experience. Right now, I’m re-editing an old draft of my first book, and making edit marks with the intention of having others read them later. It’s truly weird, but the word count of this book is growing incredibly fast, because I’m slinging around parts of another book and importing them. This book was 100,000 words long before I even started.

I drank a bunch of this lethal iced tea I made on Sunday. I think I used way too much tea, like on the level that Indians used to mix with peyote during their tribal rituals. Side effects of this tea include nausea, vomiting, confusion, rapid breathing, body temperature fluctuation (+/- 12C), sleeplessness for the next week, and peripheral hallucinations. It also has strong diuretic properties, and tastes kindof like if they made a tobacco-flavored Kool Aid, and you mixed up two quarts of it with 17 cups of sugar. I made this stuff because I was too lazy to go to the store and get another 2-liter of something else. I learned my lesson - yet I’m still trying to finish off the pitcher.

Although I haven’t done anything about it, I’ve been thinking a lot lately on how I could redo my apartment to fit a bunch more junk in it, yet make it ultra-streamlined. I’m thinking along the lines of the apartment in The Fifth Element, where every square inch of the place would hide something. For example, I’m convinced I could cram twice as much stuff in my kitchen if I had some kind of all-out storage system. I don’t have a real, full-sized kitchen in the first place. It’s more like a kitchenette, like something you’d find in a dorm or a good hotel room. It has appliances that are mostly full-sized and everything, but it has like 9 square feet of counter space. I want all kinds of fold out storage racks inside and underneath everything. Shelves everywhere. Giant black anodized metal racks custom made to hold all of my CDs, tapes, VHS tapes, Hi8 tapes, floppies, QIC-80 backup cardriges, vinyl, MiniDiscs, and any other format I might stumble on in the near future. But it would all be hidden, or designed to look sleek. My apartment would like like a normal, toned down hotel room, but at the snap of my fingers, I could make a kick-ass stereo, a big TV, a minibar, and a thousand-book library appear out of nowhere.

I have an overwhelming urge to date a woman who works at Medieval Times. Confession of the day. I’m outa hare.

06/10/98 19:34

I’m eating breakfast for dinner. I was trying to figure out what to make, when it dawned on me that I had the perfect stuff for a kick-ass breakfast: scrambled egg beaters, toast, frozen french fries, and fresh-juiced grapefruit ala the juiceman. Good stuff.

More good stuff - I got Coltrane’s complete 1961 village vanguard recordings on a 4-CD set in the mail today. I’m still on disc one, but it’s some heavy duty shit. Original tapes, between-track talking and audience sound, 20-bit mastering, and some pretty slick packaging make this worth every penny. Now I need to get some blank MD to record this thing.

I can’t wait until they come out with some sort of recording device that hooks into your spine and lets you take a color capture of the image in your mind. I think a weird but cool think would be taking a picture of your mental image of someone from the computer before you met them, and then when you meet them, you could go “whoa - here’s what I thought you looked like” and show them the photo, and you could have a good laugh about it.

I thought about this because fellow writer Michael Stutz told me he had a weird dream about me the other night, moving to California because my house in Seattle was infested with cockroaches (or something - sorry if i paraphrazed too much there, Michael.) Anyway, this scenario comes up frequently for me with the whole computer deal - I’ve known so many people I’ve never met, and you pick up a mental image of people like that from the weirdest cues. I’m bad about picking up an image based on name - if a person has a name similar to a movie star or someone else I know, I’ll always associate the two. If I met a woman on the computer named Demi, I would think she looked like Demi Moore, even if she told me a thousand times that she was 5’-0, 240 lbs, with long, blonde hair and no breasts. I’d still think of G.I. Jane. Anyway, I’ve been pretty close in my predictions sometimes, and sometimes I’ve been WAY off, both in the good and the bad way. Either way, it’s fun.

Coltrane, Camaro

Thu, 11 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I’m still listening to Coltrane and loving the hell out of it.

I’m once again obsessed with the idea of restoring an old Camaro. I could probably pull together the money for the car and some of the tools after tax time. I’d need to find a good two-car garage, cheap - maybe in Tacoma. I’ve memorized every single nut and bolt you need to remove to turn a ‘71 Z-28 RS back into air, earth, fire and water. I’ve memorized many Chevy part numbers I’ll need to know once I’ve stripped down the 350 cid engine. This sequence is played and replayed in my head: remove trim; remove front sheet metal; strip interior; pull engine and transmission; seperate engine and transmission; strip engine down to the bare block; remove tires; raise body; remove subframe; strip front suspension; strip rear suspension; strip body; buy a bunch of parts and go backward from here. I would document everything - film each step with my camcorder, and write down everything. Then I’d pay $1200 a year to store it, and I’d drive it 100 miles a year. It sounds nuts, but it’s more practical than a room full of beanie babies.

I keep having these life-changing, revelational ephiphanies, and then forgetting all about them a few hours later. Ever since I chucked the TV, I’ve been doing this more often. I guess I used to feel like part of the big NBC family, and I never tried to quantify things beyond that. Now… don’t get freaked out when I dig out all of the Zen books and start babbling about koans or ideal society models or whatever.

I drank the last of my high-octane, paint-stripping tea last night. Actually I didn’t drink the last half-glass because it looked like it housed an entire ecosystem of various debris and rubble. I’m hoping my body will now return to normal, or maybe it’ll take a few days of DTs and heavy withdrawl first.

If I keep listening to this Coltrane box set, I’m going to want to buy a tenor sax, and I’ll try to learn how to play for three weeks, tops. I wish I had a job where I had to sleep in my clothes and run down the tarmac at the sound of an alarm to get the bombers in the air within the 10 minutes it takes the Russian ICBMs to reach the base. I wish everyone had to take standardized achievement tests every 3 years, so people would brag about what they know about now, instead of what they knew about a long time ago. I wish the UN passed a standardized toilet treaty, so I could go anywhere in the world and find a good toilet. I wonder if a hang-glider would work from a 7-story apartment building. I wish I liked the taste of wine as much as I liked the cool looking bottles. I think about Jack Kerouac buying a jug of port and dragging it to Allen Ginsberg’s reading of Howl, or Bukowski drinking back some red in his shithole apartment while banging out the poems on his typer. Plastic two-liter bottles of Sprite don’t have the same aesthetic appeal.

Do chambermaids listen to chamber music?

06/11/98 22:32

I fell asleep after work - the thick, compressed sleep where it feels like you went through a weeks’ worth of REM sleep in an hour, and it takes a while to regain consciousness. Virginia Lore called, and we got into a long and 100% right-on discussion about relationships and, more specifically, my situation and my past. I’ve come to value the fact that my conversations with Virginia always fire on all 8 cylinders at high speed, and I can tell her a lot of weird stuff without freaking her out. I wish I could give you an example, but by definition, I can’t. Anyway, interesting talk, and now it’s going on 11 and I’m eating Burger King.

Was Burger Chef a Midwest-only thing, or did they have them nationwide? I remember really liking their hamburgers as a kid, and they had some kick-ass happy meals. If I remember correctly, they must’ve went under around 1980.

I’ve decided to put a bunch of useless facts [Long dead, sorry] about myself on my web page. I think I’m going to work on those more.

La Jetee

Fri, 12 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Todd Duffin taped two DVDs full of film shorts or me, because there was this Henry Rollins thing on there. I haven’t had time to watch everything yet, so last night I zipped through the tape a bit. To my surprise and delight the film La Jetee was on there. La Jetee is a French film that was the basis for Twelve Monkeys. It’s a a black and white montage film from the early sixties, and it has no moving images - just shots of photos, with narration (which was replaced with English narration here) and a haunting score. It’s about a post WWIII world where everyone is underground living like rats, and the government is experimenting with sending prisoners back in time to get food and energy. It turns out that at the end of the film, the guy realizes that when he was a little kid, he saw himself get killed. So the whole film is really this strange loop.

Weird films like this really get to me, in the good way. I was thinking about this for hours last night, about how their time travel rules and mechanisms worked. I love time travel - I don’t know if it’s because I look back at periods in the semi-near past with extreme nostalgia, or if it’s just the scifi geek in me. Most people would travel into the far future or the far past. Most people are only interested in gold arbitrage, or going back to “the good old days”. If I was seriously given the chance to go to any time, I’d probably only go back 5 or 10 years.

I shouldn’t talk about it because it is a work in progress, and it’s also seriously fucked up at this point, but my second book talks about time travel extensively, which means I’ve spent a lot of time lately “researching” it. (i.e. watching the Back to the Future movies) Any time travel book or movie needs to have a weird twist, like La Jetee’s weird book-ending. There are at least five different versions of me in this book, all talking in first person. It’s not as confusing as it sounds, but it’s confusing enough to make you think.

Why do I lose weight faster when I don’t exercise?

Someday, this war’s gonna end.

06/12/98 21:37

I miss VMS process names. I’m listening to Corrosion of Conformity right now - 5 years ago, I would’ve done a SET PROC/NAME=“VoteWithABullet” and waited for a reply.

The new Details magazine is here, with Ben Affleck on the cover. I didn’t know he was dating Gwenyth Paltrow. Weird. This month’s issue is better than usual; articles grabbing my attention were about demolition derbies and CMC records. I’d like to try the former sometime, and I was suprised to see how mildly positive they were about a record putting out mostly 80’s heavy metal bands, especially considering they are constantly pushing $5,000 watches in their style pages. I think my subscription runs out soon, and when it does, I probably won’t be renewing. They put so many ads in the damn thing, they should be paying me to subscribe.

The journal police

Sun, 14 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I haven’t started writing yet tonight, if that tells you anything about how fucked up my schedule is this weekend.

I spent part of the day at Andrea Milor’s, getting a bunch of photos scanned. It was cool to hang out there - I’ve never spent any time in Redmond before, and it’s good to know I can almost find my way around the east side sometime.

I also paid the ailing VW a visit while picking up some videos at Karena’s. It’s definitely the water pump - I can move the pulley back and forth with my hand, it is wet around the spindle, and the radiator is low. I am going to attempt the repair myself next weekend. I did move the new amp and adjust the gain, and it sounds a lot better than before. I didn’t test it with a MiniDisc, but with a tape, it doesn’t distort as much. It’s hard to really know until you’re driving down the road with the music running.

I thought I was broke all weekend, but it turns out I got paid. So I went to the CD store and picked up some stuff - a CD of Captain Janks prank phone calls, a Jawbreaker album that I really dig, and a KMFDM CD. I don’t know much about them, but the whole German industrial artist thing is pretty cool. It makes me wish I was creating some art instead of sitting on my ass. It also makes me think about painting my whole apartment black, and then tig-welding a bunch of dead machinery, old car parts, and other hunks of metal all over the walls and ceiling until the place looks like the set to a Tool video.

I’ve been doing tiny amount of incremental organizing and rearranging around the apartment, and I’m trying to figure out how to build new bookshelves to replace some of the old ones, in an order to squeeze in a few more books. It’s a real horrorshow when a cleaning operation involves buying hundreds of dollars of Craftsman power tools and raw lumber. I will, of course, paint the new shelves black.

I guess I screwed up and didn’t really write anything on Saturday, since it’s technically Sunday. I’m sure the journal police will find me and beat the living shit out of me later.

Drum set in the office

Mon, 15 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Monday. Raining. Dark. Cold. Pass the Robitussen.

I have an overwhelming urge to buy a drum set. If you’ve ever seen my apartment, you’d see the humor in this statement. I’d have better luck putting it in my office.

One of the editors at Mad magazine has a drum set in his office.

I’ve been listening to the same Jawbreaker CD all weekend.

I almost got in a car wreck last night. The guy in front of me stopped on the bridge on I-5, and I had to lock the brakes at 65, in the rain. I was 100% certain I was going to hit. I stopped so close, I don’t think you could’ve put a sheet of paper between the bumpers.

I think it stopped raining, but it still looks ugly.

Kroger golf

Tue, 16 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I woke up at 7:30, almost full rested, after some weird dreams about playing golf inside a Kroger store and taking a shower in a 2’x2’ stall in the back of a 7-11 while on vacation in New York. I ate a bunch of nachos and salsa right before bed, so blame them.

Nothing else is going on. I’m going to work on my book now.

06/16/98 21:55

The desire to buy a drum set for my office fades as I get into the book. I managed to get a few lines down during lunch, and I’m thinking about it more. I need to let this take over, like a virus, until I can’t talk about anything but time travel and multiple storylines and the whole deal. I hope this happens soon. To help it along, I’m rereading Naked Lunch, getting into Burroughs. His writing seems to get stuck in my head. The last time I read NL was on a plane on the way to Boston. When I got there, I hooked up with some people and went on a massive pubcrawl in Harvard Square. It was the Saturday before Halloween, and people in costumes were roaming the streets. After a few drinks, it all became Interzone to me.

Speaking of, some of Kerouac’s journals from 1948-1950 are in the newest issue of New Yorker. It was $4 and there are only a few pages’ worth, but I really dug it. This was on the tail end of The Town and the City, his first book, but it was the period that was chronicled in On the Road. It’s great, but it makes me wish I had a couple of writing friends here in Seattle, a tight-(or not so tight) knit group of writers and weirdos that end up in all of my stories. My friend Michael Stutz is looking for the same thing, but he’s out in Ohio. Maybe with a few more enlightened souls, we’ll create some kind of online beat generation possee that swaps manuscripts on the web, and takes the occassional roadtrip to meet the others. It’s a thought.

I’m listening to Burroughs’ Spare Ass Annie. More specifically, “The Junky’s Christmas.” I’m probably not going to be home this year, and I’m not going to be with Karena, either. So I guess Christmas will be a few phone calls, a junk food binge, some sleeping in, a few xmas albums, and this track. Sure beats spending 12 hours in an airport, I guess.

Time to get working…

Reading Naked Lunch

Wed, 17 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

More vivid dreams last night, but nothing directly related to the book. When I fall asleep and see my characters, then I’ll know I’m fully immersed in this thing. I’m getting more done each day, but it’s still slow.

The reading of Naked Lunch has been smooth, my best attempt yet. Although I’m into all of this beat generation posturing, I’ve never read Naked Lunch all the way through. I love the movie, and I’ve read other WSB stuff. And I love On the Road - I manage to re-read it every year. But I always seem to get stuck partway through NL. It’s a hard book to read - you need to take it slow, and really pay attention. It’s not 100% linear, so you have to be prepared when it throws you by talking about a character that hasn’t been introduced yet. But it’s making more sense now, and giving me ideas.

Nothing else.

06/17/98 22:11

Sometimes, when I pull into my parking spot just as the song on tape is ending, I wonder if this is all choreographed. But, you can drive yourself nuts trying to figure that one out. You’ll end up putting your hand into a radial arm saw and shouting “I bet that wasn’t planned!”

The original soundtrack/score from the movie Naked Lunch is one of my most prized CDs. And I didn’t even buy it - Ray Miller gave it to me when he was in Seattle in 1995. Howard Shore in front of the London Phil, with a lot of horn work from Ornette Coleman. It’s simply incredible, laid-back, eerie stuff. It has this eerie jazz/bop feel, like you’re wandering the dark streets of New York circa 1948, but other tracks have the slightly Tangiers feel of Interzone. A lot of people slag the movie for its variance from the book (not me - I love it) but this music is unmistakably incredible. I was reading the book last night, and I put in the CD - it really hit the spot.

Every once in a while, Michael Stutz sends me something in the mail that makes me think we should find a third writer and start our own beat generation. He could be Al Ginsberg (he’s met him like a million times) and I could get a little more weirded out and be Bill Burroughs. Now all we need is a Kerouac, and maybe a Cassady for kicks. Anyway, Micheal wrote a highly indugent, first-person novel called Sunclipse, that reminds me a lot of Summer Rain. Even more than that, I think we both went through a similar process in writing - the need to get the feelings down, to capture the past, and the inability to turn anyone else on to such a plottless journey. Today he sent me a story he wrote after finishing Sunclipse, that talked about why he wrote it, and reminded me a lot of the writing I did on the third book, about why I wanted to work on Summer Rain. It makes me realize I’m not alone in the work I did on SR, even though I feel alone in that few people have read it or understood what was going on.

I ate at Jack in the Box for the first time tonight. I know, it’s a death sentence, “we cook the shit out of our burgers”, etc. It’s a weird little place because they offer so much on their menu - weird stuff like fish and chips, tacos, breakfast, pita bowls, and more - it’s not just burgers, burgers, and one fish sandwich. I was going to get an antenna ball for my office or something, but I didn’t for some reason. The food’s okay, but I really shouldn’t be eating hamburgers.

I was listening to the track “Welcome to Annexia”, and someone outside honked their horn in almost perfect time with one part, so it sounded like it belonged on CD. As Bill would say, nothing is true; everything is permitted.

I got the fear!

Thu, 18 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been obsessed with the image of someone eating a bunch of nutmeg, screaming “I got the fear!” and then jumping out of my window.

Dream last night - I was at my ex-step-grandparents’ house. (i.e. the parents of my mom’s second and now ex-husband) It was a tense situation, and they offered me a drink. Like Bukowski, I asked for a vodka-7. I’ve never had one in real life, so when I knocked it back, I was amazed at what it tasted like.

Still working on Naked Lunch. I think I’m at the halfway point now. It’s nice when I hit a little piece that’s on one of his CDs because I can hear his voice reading it to me. I guess there’s a NL book on tape - maybe I should find a copy.

I feel like I’m getting back into Rumored to Exist mode, even though the wordcount isn’t climbing at this time. I’ve been moving a few things around, and it’s starting to make more sense to me now. I still wish I was writing 2000 words a night - it seems like I’m averaging 200.

Speaking of which - supposed to meet vlore tonight and rent a movie, so I should be writing a bit now…

Twilight

Sat, 20 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

It’s already twilight out, and I can’t sleep. I’m feeling sort of nauseous - I think I drank too much caffeine. On top of that, my monitor just made a sharp cracking sound, went completely blank, then came back on and is now working fine. Maybe it’s going to blow up. I just bought the damn thing in January. Maybe the 6-month warranty timer just went off.

I finished reading Naked Lunch, and what can you say - pretty awesome stuff. I read the reviews on amazon.com, and everyone gave it either a 10 or a 1. The 1 reviews are hilarious. I have to admit, I wasn’t 100% fond of the book because of the randomness, but now I’m a convert. I think I’ll start reading some of his other more challenging stuff, like the cutup trilogy. I’ve read all of his more basic stuff, like Queer, Junkie, and Interzone. Time for a trip to the bookstore.

I got a fair amount of writing done on Rumored tonight. I’m way behind schedule - like 10,000 words behind. But, I cut a bunch of dead wood I knew was going to be dropped, and my schedule didn’t account for that. Although by wordcount, it appears that I lost about 4,000 words tonight, I lost about 7,000 and gained 3,000. And since I ideally write 2,000 a night, that’s a good haul. Most of all, I’m happy that a lot of new stuff is appearing in the time travel part of the book, and the order is all falling into place. I have a lot to do in this half of the book - it’s maybe 50% done at this point, not even that. The other half of the book is about 60% done.

I’m sure these numbers bore you. It’s 5 in the morning. I’ve got to get to bed before it’s completely daylight out, and the room temperature goes from 55 to 273.

06/20/98 12:26

I played GameBoy until like 6:30am, and couldn’t dissolve the caffeine fast enough. Now I feel like the living dead, and I’m preparing for the great water pump surgery, and eating some applesauce for lunch.

On my way to sleep last night, I thought of a long ramble of something I wanted to talk about in here, but now it’s gone. Story of my life.

To quote Dennis Hopper, “let’s hit the fuckin’ road.”

06/20/98 17:51

I knew it would be a mess. It always is.

I had a few things I could’ve done first - drain the coolant, remove the water pump pulley, loosen the alternator - and none of them were going to happen. I couldn’t hold the water pump pulley still to break the bolts (I also found that one the three bolts was MISSING!) I couldn’t move the alternator because I’d forgotten that a shitload of VW stuff isn’t held on by standard bolts, but by allen-head bolts, and I have no wrenches for those. I bought a siphon and did manage to get some of the coolant out of the radiator. I’m suprised the damn thing even ran - it looked like Love Canal sludge, more black and muddy than antifreeze green.

Okay, there’s a Sears about 10 miles from Karena’s (did I mention that I had to do this repair at her apartment complex, where I’m storing the Volks? She’s out of town, so I was there by myself.) so I went to get some 3/8” drive allen wrenches. I guesstimated it as a 6mm, and found that my mailbox key almost snugly fit inside there. I drive there - some kind of weird radio station on location deal is going on, with a guy dressed as a clam, a bunch of freaks wearing dayglow yellow painter’s overalls and dancing like one of those stupid Intel commercials, and a bunch of people honking their car horns. Inside, the Sears hardware department was a zoo - Father’s day is tomorrow. A set of 6 or 8 metric allen wrenches was like $28, so I guessed and got a 6mm and 7mm for $12. The sales clerk kept trying to guess how to pronounce my last name based on my Visa card, and I thought I was going to have to wheel her over to a display radial arm saw and cut her head off. I wanted to wander the mall, but I already had antifreeze and grease all over me, I’d just spend money, and I promised I’d work until 5 and then fuck around for the rest of the evening. The round trip took almost an hour.

I had a weird system of draining the car, involving a 2 quart tupperware bowl, the plastic tray from a one-gallon vaporizer (that would probably now kill everyone in the room if I plugged it in), and a 2 or 3 gallon dishtray-type thing. I had a couple of fuckups, and spilled some antifreeze, but most of it stayed in the plastic pans. I pulled the bottom radiator hose and got a few quarts to dump loose there, and after I fucked with the pulley a bit, the water pump leaked a steady drip. But I only got maybe 3/4 of a gallon out of the thing, and it supposedly held 2. The radiator had been half empty already, so maybe there wasn’t a lot of water in there.

I broke loose the alternator, no problem (it was a 6mm hex). Then I found that one of the two bolts on the pulley wasn’t much more than finger tight. I spent forever fucking with that last bolt - I couldn’t turn it when the pulley itself was turning. Finally, I jammed a screwdriver in the way so it wouldn’t spin, and got the last nut out. The water pump was now in the open and ready to be pulled.

A lot of cars have a one piece pump that bolts right on the engine, but this particular VW uses a hollow housing that bolts to the engine and has the three hose mounts, and then the water pump bolts on the side of that. Imagine an open-mouthed canister, with a bunch of hoses on the closed end, and a hole in the side that goes to a pipe. The lid to the canister has a fan blade on the inside, so when you put the lid on, it churns around and moves water from the hoses to the hole in the side. The canister is the water pump housing, and the lid is the water pump itself. And what I was trying to do was loosen the 8 or so bolts so I could pry off the lid, throw it in the dumpster, and put on a new one.

What’s the catch? I kept breaking the fucking bolts. There are like 8 bolts holding the two pieces together, and they were snapping off like plastic when I got a socket in there. Plan b - I tore off the alternator, and pulled out the entire housing and pump at the same time. It was only 4 bolts and 3 hose connections, and I got the whole damn thing out without much difficulty. It also drained another 2 quarts of coolant from the system.

So I sat on the sidewalk, with this piece of shit part, trying to see if I could remove any of the bolts without snapping the heads off. A semi-attractive woman that lived at the complex walked by as I sat there, drenched in grease and antifreeze, fucking with this cumbersome piece of cast iron that looks like something off of a 19th century steam engine. Right as she said “Having fun?” I snapped another bolt in two. After the damage was done, I snapped maybe 5 of 8 bolts, and couldn’t pry the two pieces apart. My only hope is to find a shop that will drill out the bolts, pry off the old pump, slap on the new one, and install some new bolts, hopefully for less than $10,000. Hopefully some VW shop will be a pal and do it on the cheap for me. Plus, then they will be the ones installing the gasket between the pieces and torquing it all down, not me. And once I have the housing-pump-pulley assembly, it’ll be easy to put back together - 4 bolts, 3 hoses, plus the alternator.

I’m guessing that at least one reader will look at that giant monologue, say “what the fuck is this guy’s deal?” and never come back to this journal. Right on.

I’m going to wash my hands for the 900th time, and either take a nap, or go to the mall and maybe the movies.

1992 flashbacks

Sun, 21 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Having incredible flashbacks of 1992 today. I was lying in bed, and the heat and smell of the air and desolation almost transported me there. I started thinking about details I’d forgotten, little things - the voice of a long-gone summer fling, the constant spin of the box fan in my room, the lazy emptiness of sitting around, not having a job the next day. It made me think I could put on some shorts and a shirt and go to Kirkwood and catch a WQAX streetdance on my way to CD exchange or something.

I guess going nuts over the past is permissibile, considering that I’m writing a book about it right now. I put down a few words last night about the same deal, about never really being able to touch your past again. Sometimes you can get so close - you can find that note from an ex-girlfriend and read it and get transported back, and touch the paper and know that she touched the same paper 5 or 10 or 50 years ago. It’s like when that dude from Quantum Leap went back to his own family when he was a kid, and he couldn’t tell them that his brother was going to die in Vietnam, and even when he did, it didn’t change anything. Even though my book uses the most lax, taboo, and destructive time travel methodology, it’s still impossible to go back to your own past and get what you want. All but the most devious are limited to being only observers.

Had a weird dream that I was hanging out with a few different women in Wright quad back at IU - no real prospects, just friends. Maybe I was living there? Anyway, Jenny McCarthy was going to college there, and was friends with one of the girls. One morning, I was sleeping on the floor there, and she came in completely naked, wanting to borrow something. It was very awkward, and I wanted to tell her “I loved your CD-ROM” or something else to piss her off. Later (or maybe earlier) she called the room and I answered, and she said “This is McCarthy” and I said “Joseph McCarthy?” Also in the dream, I got into a huge ethical discussion with her and the roommates about whether or not it was safe to go to a college class if it’s three weeks into the semester and you haven’t attended once. When I woke up, I was still thinking about cover stories that might work for this (clinical depression, father was sick, allergy attacks…)

I think I’m going to go see the X-Files movie after a hit of lunch…

06/21/98 22:01

I don’t want to slag the X-Files film on the off-chance that Gillian Anderson is stalking me, reads this, and then decides not to suprise me. I’ll say this much: Scully=good, Mulder=good, all of the other characters=what the fuck? Everyone else was a caricature of a caricature. And wasn’t this black oil alien already discussed at length in the series? Why didn’t Mulder know about it, if he was infected with it in that Russian gulag? Am I hallucinating? I don’t know. It was nice watching the X-Files without commercials, even if it seemed like a padded out 1-hour epsisode. They didn’t cut it off in the middle or end with a To Be Continued. And it looked and sounded great. I dunno - maybe if they would’ve divided the movie into 4 continuous episodes, like the Twilight Zone film, and gave each episode to a different director. Then you’d get a little of humor, a little high-tech angle, some more about the other people, etc. Oh well. Worth $4 and the bullshit involved with so many people and having to sit in the second row.

Beautiful day today. I got home, opened the window, and sat in bed, with a nice breeze coming over me. So nice, that I fell asleep and awoke to darkness.

You know it's going too far when you're walking in a mall, trying to make yourself invisible.

Mon, 22 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I just got back from the VW mechanic, and I dropped off my screwed up parts and new parts, and he said he should get it all done in a couple of days for around $50. That’s not a great deal, but most mechanics would’ve laughed me out of their garage if I would’ve come in with the same problem.

I’m feeling sick to my stomach, and very tired today. The tired part has worn off now, but my stomach has been killing me. I tried going to bed early last night - I even opted to skip writing so I could be in bed by midnight. But I ended up tossing and turning for hours. Temperature is always a problem in my apartment. Heat rises, and I’m on the top floor, so it’s always too hot, but it’s easy to get the fans running and drop the temp so low that I instantly get a head cold. Finding a balance is a full-time job.

The bread in this sandwich is absolutely appaling. I think it has pieces of sawdust in it. I keep biting into pieces of what look like drill shavings, or what particleboard looks like when it’s just particles. I hate the bread department in the store. Why can’t they make bread like they use when you buy a sandwich at a deli or a restaurant? Like Denny’s bread, or McDonald’s buns. Instead you have white bread, horrible generic wheat bread, and a bunch of esoteric, worthless 17-million grain breads that all taste like white bread soaked in a carinogen. I need to find some better bread.

I spent part of yesterday recording myself on the MiniDisc. It sounds pretty good, and gave me an opportunity to talk to myself for an hour 15 minutes. It probably sounds like the tapes the army recorded of Col Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (“I saw a snail, walking on the edge of a razor…”) Maybe I will trade the tapes with other people into similar stuff. Audio journals. I like it.

Reading more about Burroughs in The Job. You know it’s going too far when you’re walking in a mall, trying to make yourself invisible.

06/22/98 21:26

It’s amazing that I remember all of the words to Megadeth albums I haven’t heard in 10 years, but I don’t remember anything from a college physics course that required 10 hours a day of slaving at the scientific calculator. And it’s even more amazing that I can now casually say “ten years ago…” and refer to a part of my memory that’s vaguely considered adulthood. In high school, ten years ago meant kindergarten.

I’m a salsa convert. I was never into the stuff before, but now I’m eating it on a regular basis. I forget what the deal was in the Seinfeld episode with salsa, but maybe that subliminally had something to do with it.

I read a bunch of online journals after work today, but I couldn’t find any that I really liked. The last thing I found that I liked was The Cyprian Virago, since Heidi seems about as stable as I am. I read a lot of other journals that didn’t do it for me, and I’m thinking of making up my page next April 1 so it redirects to a GeoCities site covered with animated GIFs, an HTML-calender, and a giant diatribe about how you shouldn’t read this site if you know me in real life. And then I’ll password protect it.

I thought I had a stream of thought, but I lost it reading a travel page. I wish I could hit the road forever, but I guess I’m stuck here for now. Seattle, a TV dinner, and an evening of not much else. I guess that’s OK, for now.

Running monologues

Tue, 23 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been obsessed with reading this journal, about endless cool travels on the road. I wish I knew how this guy pays for all of it, so I could get into a similar situation.

Nothing else is happening. I had incredibly vivid dreams about a woman similar to someone I dated toward the end of 1992. It really freaked me out, the level of authenticity, the emotion involved. It made me wish I knew where the hell she went after school.

Connection’s slowing down, on the way to death. I’ll write more tonight.

06/23/98 21:44

It’s almost July and I’m running the heater. Welcome to Seattle.

I don’t know when I fell asleep, and I didn’t know where I was when I awoke. I was freezing, and I rolled on my other side, thinking “go back to that cool dream I had thismorning.” It didn’t work, although I felt like either sleeping for another day, or injecting a cardiac medication directly into my heart with a vetirenarian needle, I knew I had to get out of bed, get a cold drink of something, and force myself to eat a TV dinner, even though I felt nauseous. Said TV dinner (beef tips, carrots, potatoes, a cherry cobbler) has been reconstituted, I’m on my second glass of Sprite, Type O Negative’s latest is in the album, and I feel ready to describe… what was I going to describe tonight?

I keep a running monologue at almost all times, unless I’m 100% buried in interesting work, which hasn’t happened in a while. I don’t know if I would call it a monologue, or more of a daydream. I find a certain topic, a puzzle, scenario, or fantasy, and use it like a screensaver. When something isn’t burning cycles on my brain, I slip into this interactive daydream. In its simplest invocation, I’m figuring out a problem or maybe doing some shopping in my head. For example, maybe I’ve stumbled across a grand from a tax return, and I want to update my computer. When I’m stuck on I-5, I’ll be thinking about this monitor and that motherboard, and getting x amount of memory and video card y. I’ll hash and rehash the combinations and think about installing it, tearing apart the old PC, buying the pieces, and so forth. It’s a simple game that lets me have some fun, and avoid thinking about the ozone layer or the fact that my insurance company is raping me, or whatever.

That’s the simple case. A more expansive and fictitious case would be a few weeks ago, when I was thinking about buying an old Camaro and restoring it. I don’t think I’ll be doing this now, especially in the wake of my latest car repair disasters, but it’s an interesting way to burn up free cycles. Another similar future-planning-for-something-I-won’t-do game is thinking about graduate school - taking classes to get in, what program I’ll try to finish, etc. A flag is usually thrown by the time I think about how I’ll pay for and find time for grad school, versus my inability to get in a program, versus the lack of practical value of a master’s degree given my current situation. Then the whole thing is blown, and i need to find a new mind game, like planning a trip to Amsterdam.

These are the the simple, practical hallucinations to which I subscribe. Here’s a good one that is embarassing to admit, but has pulled me from the depths of heavy depression; a psychiatrist taught it to me about 6 years ago, although it’s fairly obvious: imagine that through some kind of weird inheritance, someone has dropped an incredible amount of cash in your lap. Then extrapolate what you’d do, and how you’d blow $661 million tax-free dollars. It’s like a vial of the purest heroin for your central nervous system - I can roll in this for days, weeks - I’ve been using it on and off since 1992 to keep me in line. It’s totally self indulgent, it’s childish - sort of like the people that play PowerBall every week, and it might put you further off-course than the original depression. But if you’re pointing a loaded gun to your head every day, it can knock you off track long enough for the biological low to pass and for life you resume course somewhat.

Now I have all-out fantasy programming that I can’t even describe here, weird stuff that’s probably dangerous for me to think about for long periods of time. Joining up with old ex-girlfriends, hanging out with famous people, going on book tours for books I haven’t written yet, that sort of thing. Sometimes I wonder if I’m operating beyond the bounds of sensibility, and if I’m hurting myself more than helping with these mind games. There are days I spend more time shopping for Italian sports cars in my head than I spend thinking about the things in front of me, yet I don’t feel detatched or removed. I’m not driving around my neighborhood in a motorcycle thinking I’m in Vietnam like Stacy Keach in Up in Smoke. Yet I’m not one of those super-applied people with three degrees and a shitload of stock options before their 25th birthday. So I don’t know. You tell me.

Like I said, I am listening to Type O Negative’s October Rust, which I think is a beautiful, powerful, and impressive album. When I go shopping for new speakers (winter? fall? spring?) this is the only test album I’m bringing. Aside from the sound, it’s an incredibly emotional album. I first got it when it came out, in September? of 1996. I’m going to go into a tirade here, so let me go back to where it all begins here.

September or so, 1991. Ray is visiting me in Bloomington from South Bend for a long weekend. This is when I am dating the girl Ray refers to as “The Za Chick”, for reasons I’ll have to get into later. He HATES her, and when the three of us our together, it’s like sodium and water, so the time spent only with Ray was the best of the weekend, of course. I left Ray alone with my roommate Yusef so I could go do my thing with the Za Chick one night, and they took off on ten-speeds at 3 in the morning looking for parties, which sounded infinitely cooler than what I endured. Anyway, Ray was there, and this was when I was back in the fold with Metal Curse - because of strict martial law and psychological warfare at home during the summer of 91, I ditched one issue of writing for Ray’s zine, something I put high on my all-time regrets list. But I was back, and when me and Ray were driving around Bloomington in his Escort, eating a Pizza Express pie in the parking lot of the library, he laid this new tape on me, by a band called Type O Negative. The album is called Slow, Deep, and Hard.

“It’s all the guys from Carnivore, but a new name,” he said. Cool, I remember hearing some Carnivore songs like Jesus Hitler a few years before, and thinking they were cool. “These songs are a lot longer, and slower. And totally fucked up,” he said. The tape started with a twelve minute song called “uncuccessfully coping with the natural beauty of infidelity”, which really hit the spot, since I was 100% certain that the Za Chick was fucking everyone else in the galacy, and I was completely oblivious to it. Then, over a fast metal-meets-hardcore beginning, singer Pete Steele said “Do you believe in forever? I don’t even believe in tomorrow.” The album was coated with a self-hatred so thick, it would make Sister Angelica slit her wrists and piss in the severed veins. The music went from a fast but relatively clear metal sound (this was when Death Metal and unintelligable vocals were on the way in, and ultrafast grindcore with little cohesive guitar work was on the way out) and lots of feedback-laden guitar work. Then it would downshift with fifth to first with totally doomy, almost gothic low end stuff, and blood-curdling screams. Although it attacked every part of your brain with extreme toxicity, it had a somewhat accessible tone to it - you could hear the lyrics, which were incredibly depressing, satirical, and offensive.

I really got into this album that fall semester - Ray had picked a winner for me. It was both depressing and funny, and I listened to the violence of “xero tolerance”, the eerieness of “glass walls of limbo” and the extreme, mind-numbing self-hatred of “gravitational constant…” I asked Sid and Matt, a couple of my punk rock friends, about the album, and they were totally into it to - it transcended the barriers between punk and metal, at least for freaks like these guys. And my long and depressing walks at 4 in the morning became Slow, Deep, and Hard walks with the tape in my walkman. It burned into my experience so deep, if I had to pick one album to summarize that few months, that would be it.

Fast forward to the summer of 1992. I was pretty much right about the Za Chick, so Pete Steele is smarter than I thought. I’m now DJing at WQAX thanks to the punk friend Sid, who is the acting GM for the summer and tells me to come in and play whatever the fuck I want. The first thing I spy in the racks is - a prerelease of a new Type O Negative live EP called Origin of the Feces It’s got 7 tracks - two are new, one is an intro called “Are You Afraid” that’s pretty cool, and a cover of “Hey Joe” that’s pretty over the top, sandwiched between the two halves of “Kill You Tonight” (aka Xero Tolerance). I play the SHIT out of the EP - I play the whole thing at least once a week, and play select cuts constantly. Turns out Sid’s doing the same thing. At the end of one week, the Hey Joe cover turns out to be not only the #1 metal song on the station’s charts, but the #1 song played, period!

I get on the case and start letter-bombing Ken Kriete, their manager, and Sophie, the PR rep at their label. Within a week or two, I get a nice letter from Ken and gang saying “don’t you have anything better to play at the station?” and “give us a call if you’d like to set up an interview on the air”.

I don’t know if you can imagine this, but going from worshipping a band’s album to having them say “give us a call, and we’ll talk” is a complete mindfuck. I was nervous as hell - this is an interview Ray didn’t get in the zine, because radio stations usually get the good stuff first. We were both sure that Steele would fuck with me, and I had no idea what questions to ask. The night of the interview, they were late in calling, so I thought they bagged out on me or something, and I went to doing something else on the air. Then I got the call from both Pete (vocals, bass) and Josh (keyboards) and off we went. The whole thing is printed in Xenocide 5, wherever it is on my server these days, but it went from weird to strange to disastrous to hilarious. I think they thought I was pissed off, but I was really just straining to hear over the piece of shit phone link at the studio. Either way, I taped the interview, it was live, and I ran it in my zine later. They wrote back and sent me a Type O Negative pin (a black circle with a green minus inside of an o) and I proudly wore it on my jacket until it fell apart about a year ago.

Their next album was highly anticipated and highly delayed. I re-ran the interview in the spring of 93 with an addendum, since I heard the album was coming out that summer. Perfect timing - I got the promo for Bloody Kisses the weekend I was with Ray at the Metalfest (~June 31, 1993). This album was more produced, less metal, more gothic, and just as powerful as the last. I played the shit out of my copy while awaiting my return to Bloomington from my temporary exile in northern Indiana for the summer. This album completely blew me away - it was incredibly catchy, but still had the weird invade-your-soul propertyu that tore you apart with depression and angst, yet made you feel good about it. There was still a lot of humor, but no chainsaws and “kill you tonight” type stuff like the last album. I was depressed about my girlfriend at the time being in Tampa while I was stuck in Shithole, IN, and songs like Blood and Fire and Can’t Lose You permeated while thinking about her. I loved this album - it had its weak points, but I thought it was incredible.

I guess some other people thought so, too, because within a few months, a lot of goth people really got into the album, and it went a lot further than its original metal roots. So when I wore my jacket, a few non-metal people would see the pin and say “hey, Type O Negative!” and I could lay the story on them. Then, one night I was reading the liner notes, and - I saw that John Conner from WQAX was thanked. Hey, that’s me! They totally misspelled it, but it was there. By the time I found this, the album had already gone gold, so it was an even bigger deal.

So I kept listening, especially since I walked everywhere in the 93/94 school year and I had my walkman on for at least 20 hours a week. Bloody Kisses was the perfect album to listen to when it’s 2 in the morning and you have to walk 3 miles to get back home. It’s even better when you’re completely devastated by the loss of a girlfriend and you need something to enrich your depressive lows. It became the soundtrack for my long-ass walks back from campus that fall and spring, and permeated most of my memories in that area.

Fast-forward to September of 1996. I’m in Seattle, at the Bellevue Silver Platters, and I grab the new album, along with $100 of other stuff. The clerk looks at it and says “hey, I heard about this…” and I lay into the ego trip. (Once I was at Tower and a clerk saw the button and said “cool button”. My reply: “Pete Steele gave it to me”. Him: “You heard Bloody Kisses?” My reply: “I was thanked in the liner notes.” His reply: “Check this out…” and he rolled up his shirt and showed me that he had one of the gargoyles from the digipak artwork tattooed on his back. End of ego war.) I got the album home, and started the memorization…

October Rust is a much more produced and consistent album than the others, and it seems like they went totally all out with the gothic thing, but still poked fun at it, which is good. It has more songs about relationships than the others, and it’s more of sadness and nostalgia than depression and rage. Songs like “Love you to death”, “Die with me”, “Haunted”, and “Burnt flowers fallen” knocked me over like a full-speed metro bus full of lead. I was already in an extreme depression at the time, and listening to stuff like this filled it out nicely. It’s not like Pink Floyd or something that pushes you over the edge - it just provides a nice soundtrack for what you’ve got. And the lyrics are simple, but try on stuff like this when you’re depressed about someone that dumped you:

now like a bird she flew away to chase her dreams of books and praise still i miss her yeah i miss her since she’s gone

girl i want to die with you in each other’s arms we’ll drown in flame

I’ve rambled for long enough. Now the apartment’s too hot. I appreciate it if you made it this far.

Sven carpetbombing

Wed, 24 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Sven is carpetbombing me with stuff on his mailing list right now. I think I enjoy reading 1 in 3 things he sends me. I guess that’s better odds than flipping through the channels on a TV, and there aren’t any commercials.

The other day when I was talking, recording, and driving at the same time, I got on a major rant on commercialism, society, and what hasn’t changed since the fifties. I wish I could transcribe it, add more, and get it into it. A summary - all of these Newt Gingrich types want us to go back to he wholesome fifties, a time of family values, blah blah. People have forgotten that the fifties were full of racism, intolerance, the start of the cold war, and the beginning of mass consumerization and the homoginization of America. The sixties happened because the fifties happened. That’s all I’ll explain for now.

I considered starting On the Road last night, after all of this thought of tracing his roadtrips across America in a rental car, taking Hi8 and 35mm images of everything along the way. I’ve managed to read On the Road every year for the last four or five years, and it’s about time for another reading. But I didn’t have the energy for something new, so I read a few chapters from Burroughs’ The Soft Machine. It’s always interesting to fall asleep with stuff like this in your head.

I’m going to look at some more journals.

06/24/98 21:58

A mental circle:

I’m listening to Sigue Sigue Sputnik, a strange throwback to about 1988 for me, when I found the tape in a record store in Stratford, Ontario, and I remembered my friend Roger Eppich’s advice that I should seek out this album at all costs. (At the time, all of the Canadian tapes I found had black shells instead of clear or white. Is this normal? A unique fad to that point in time? Is anyone on Open Pages even old enough to know what a cassette tape is?)

I bought the tape, listened to it on the bus trip home (it was all at night, and they parked the busses for an hour at a rest stop at 3 in the morning when they discovered that the itinerary didn’t account for the difference in time zines) and then the next morning, I went to Roger’s to tell him about the tape and to show him a copy of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, my first copy on CD - I’d already spent years memorizing a version Tom Sample dubbed on tape for me from the vinyl. Roger had pierced his ear since I’d left for Canada, and he said he did it himself. I asked him to pierce mine, and two seconds and no numbing later, he did.

Hell, that circle didn’t work like I planned it. There are a lot of interlocking references, but none circular. I wanted to do an A -> B -> C -> D -> A, but it fell apart. There are some other weird references I could mention from the above - I heard the song “Mother” on the radio today, and I still know all of the words; Roger Eppich lived with Tom Sample briefly in 1987 before Roger went completely insane; something else involving roadtrip with either of these bastards. I’ve spent forever talking about roadtrips with Tom, but one time me and Roger loaded up his piece of shit Citation after a Friday night of work at Monkey Wards and drove to his girlfriend’s place in Middleoffuckingnowheere, MI. Roger could drive like a maniac - we must’ve been airborne at least a few times - and we listened to a soundtrack of what was the coolest industrial mix tape you could hope to find in 1988. We get there, and this weird Bladerunner-esque trip dumps us into the most run-down Pizza Hut in the world, where we ate cheesy bread and waited for this girl to finish work. I can proudly? say I’ve eaten at small, redneck Pizza Huts from New York to Washington, and they’re all the same - families bringing in an army of kids for the weekly “restaurant” food, some idiot feeding quarters into the jukebox and picking the same Winger song 20000 times (once, at the Goshen Pizza Hut, we (me, Tom Sample, maybe Matt Wanke) got there just as a huge line of religious motherfuckers walked in. I went to the juke, fed in a fiver, and picked all of the AC/DC songs on the list, mostly the songs “Hell’s Bells”. (On another side note, my independant testing labs have confirmed that Back in Black is the best all-time CD to have in the player at a pub when you’re getting shit-faced drunk with a couple of buddies. There was a bar called Bear’s Place that was stumbling distance from my house, and once when I was there with my old roommate Yusef on $2.50 pitcher night, I heard the tolling bells and realized they were going to play the whole thing through. We tipped back about 5 pitchers between the two of us during the next 10 tracks, and it really hit the spot))

I don’t even remember if Roger even brought the girl back to Elkhart, or if we just went to say hi for an hour and eat free shit at Pizza Hut, or what. I know that on the way he gave me the “she’s got friends” speech, and when we got there, she gave me the “boy, I wish I could think of a friend for you” speech. Not that I would’ve known what to do back then - even with millions of years of genetic predispositioning, I would’ve been lost. At least Roger was cool enough to occasionally try to steer me in the right direction - give him five bonus points for optimism.

I’m now listening to Billy Idol - it’s some kind of nostalgia night. Believe it or not, but for a brief period of time, I had short, spiked, platinum hair similar to Mr. Idol’s. I don’t have any good pictures of it, though.

I don’t want to spend all night writing pages of obscure stuff that will throw 98% of my readers (what is 98% of 4?). I’ve got a book to write, so I better get to it.

It’s after midnight…

Hilbilly ISPs

Thu, 25 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I got a late start, but managed to pull in a few hours of writing last night. I’m trying to keep going on Rumored to Exist, but I keep hitting slow spots. I finally edged over 60,000 words last night. Every time I get close, I delete a bunch of dead stuff, and slip back a ways. I’m almost out of old stuff to delete, so there shouldn’t be much more slippage. I’m still hoping to finish this piece of shit by the end of August or so.

Since I’m still reading WSB’s The Soft Machine, and it requires extreme attention, I don’t have any current lack-of-attention reading. So, I started reading random snippets of Ted Morgan’s Literary Outlaw, a damn fine biography on Burroughs’ life. Although I have no intention of ending up in a common-law marriage with a benzedrine addict and then shooting her in the head, there are other areas of his life that I wish I could live. I wish I could pack up and go to Vienna for medical school, or spend a few years hiding in Mexico City. It takes money to live free.

I called my friend Larry last night. He’s the one in law school in Chicago, living in his grandpa’s basement. He found some kind of clerk job with a medical firm, where he looks up stuff on a computer all day. He actually gets paid for this internship, unlike 99% of the ones out there for law students. He laid some plan on me about moving to California next year, because he’d be eligible to take the bar without finishing his degree. I think Larry should move to Mexico and become a lawyer, because their brand of justice is more his style. Nothing against Lar, it’s just he would fit in better in a place where bribery is required and everything is rough and tumble, as opposed to the polished yet under the table crap in the US court system. I don’t know, maybe I’ve seen too many Mexican westerns.

My friend Ray switched ISPs for the 27th time in the last 3 years. He keeps subscribing to these piece of shit, hilbilly ISPs that are like $10/month and then he wonders why they don’t work.

I’m still asleep, so I should stop writing.

06/25/98 22:57

I planned on an early start to the writing, but I fell asleep. Now it’s 11pm, and I’m just now starting my dinner. I also had a pretty uneventful day, so I’m going to call it a wash, get to my turkey pot pie, and write more tomorrow.

Empire time machine

Fri, 26 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

After 5:00 on a Friday. I should be tearing down a road at 80 miles an hour, a bottle of liquor in one hand, the other flipping off a state trooper, a woman in the car, some loud music, all that jazz. Instead, I’m waiting for the traffic to die, so I can drive home in under an hour.

I had a glass of champagne a little while ago, and that’s probably what’s bothering me. I’ve been in a bad mood all week, but right now it feels the worst. Fridays should be a cause for celebration, but I feel like my weekend is already shot. Either I’ll spend the whole weekend writing on this book, or I’ll fail. That’s what it’s come down to. All week, I blow off a day and say I’ll make it up in some 18 hour Saturday writing session. And I wish the weekend could consist of wandering, shopping, exploring, meeting new people and doing new things, but with $13 in my wallet and not much more in the bank, I’ll probably be watching old videos I’ve seen a hundred times, and trying to get on that novel.

I started to read On the Road agains last night. Like I possibly mentioned once before, I’ve read it every year for the last few years. Oddly enough, I originally bought my copy, this 25th anniv. issue paperback, in 1992. There was this huge used bookstore right around the corner from my place - some crazy old Russian lady ran it, mostly old, moldy books and nothing of value, but sometimes I’d scour the place and shake down something good. I think I picked up my copy of ‘Road for less than a dollar. I read the first dozen pages, but got disinterested. At the time, I was already living my own beat paradise and I didn’t know it yet. So now I’m back on it again - I figure some good vicarious adventures will help me while I’m starving away with all of my own troubles here in Seattle. Maybe I will take some better notes this time on all of the journeys, cities, roads, and highways. Then when I have a few bucks, I can hit the road and follow Dean’s footsteps.

I’m listening to Queensryche - Empire, which is like a time machine to me. I listened to this album every day, twice a day, for months, almost a semester. That was 1990, when I drove my gray 5-speed Turismo from Elkhart to South Bend and back every day. I’d blaze down US 20 into Osceola and Mishawaka listening to all of these songs while eating my breakfast, either bagels or pop-tarts, and watching the morning Michiana roll by me. It all seemed so hip at the time, getting out of the house, living in the computer labs, learning pascal and writing computer games, eating lunch with Ray every day in the cafeteria. This album reeks of trips to the Miami street comic shop, the quarter pounder value meal, no pickels, from the McKinley st. McDonalds, trips down Logan to the Scottsdale mall, before it got semi-cool, and runs to the Hooks drug store or 7-11 for junk food. I think I’ve described this before (I know I have, I just don’t remember if it was here). It’s now July, almost 8 years later, but it’s cold enough to feel like an October day in Indiana.

What the hell am I doing here? I better go home, at least.

dead vw

Sat, 27 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I’m running emacs from eve on my local machine through the magic of X, and it’s pretty weird. It’s also a little slow on opening new windows, text selection, and redrawing, so I need to take it easy.

I’ve spent the last few hours reading old mail and cutting out snippets and ideas that I can later use in the second book. It’s recycling, but it’s also stuff that hasn’t been published, and it’s mine, so what the hell? Whenever I’ve done this in the past, I’ve contorted the old stuff so much, that it’s barely distinguisable for the original, so I don’t think anyone will notice. In fact, Rumored to Exist already contains stuff pulled from dream journals and heavily modified. It’s weird to think that ideas from the book originated in dreams, but it happens. It’s even more weird that I read in an interview with Chick Corea that the theme from Eye of the Beholder came to him in a dream. I’ve listened to that album thousands of times, and that song is so haunting - you remember it out of nowhere weeks later.

[There was a long thing here about Chick Corea’s belief system, which I won’t even mention by name for fear of getting sued.]

06/27/98 18:10

My digestive system has gone south, so I’m wondering what to do about dinner tonight. I’m sure something will happen. I have enough money to go to Denny’s, but the food would kill me, and I need to ration my cash like Germans rationed gas during World War II. (That’s a completely arbitrary comment - I’m assuming they rationed gas, because we bombed the shit out of their oil refineries. I didn’t. Somebody that lived in the US did. They, not we. Nevermind.)

The VW is still dead. I bolted on the refurbished water pump and housing, hooked it all up, and… it didn’t start. The battery died from the 3 weeks or so of sitting around. I checked it for any visible problems, and saw that it was a 50 month warranty battery that was installed in April of 93. Do the math and you’ll see why I found that humorous/not very fucking funny. I got a jumpstart (the wonder of two cars) and cranked it over, and… it leaked like a sieve. New antifreeze, all over the place. It didn’t leak too fast at first, and I thought that maybe the engine would get hot and the parts would expand and sort of weld together, sort of like how the SR-71 leaks fuel all over the place while on the ground, but once it gets going mach 3, all of the titanium expands and it’s tighter than a drum.

So I got in the car, went for a spin, and within 2 minutes, realized just how stupid I can be at times. The engine temperature light swept from C to H like the second hand on a watch, and I pulled into the parking lot of a medical center. The thing was REALLY losing coolant, and I watched it drain onto the ground while the engine ticked away. I’ve been told that driving an overheated VW is one of the worst things you can do, because it has an aluminum head, and it’s very, very easy to fuck things up on a colossal scale. So I was smart enough to stop before the needle got buried in the red on the temp gauge. I let it cool down, found that I don’t know how to operate the heater in my car, and then I left (the VW heater controls have a bunch of international symbols - instead of saying “vent”, “heat”, etc. there is a triangle, a box, a grid, and some wavy lines. I don’t know what the hell this means. Also, the heater core might be dead - I’m not sure. I wanted to run the heater because it’s the best thing to do when the car overheats. It’s uncomfortable, but it works like a secondary radiator, and can sometimes save your ass. I had to do this daily in my diesel Rabbit.) I got maybe a half mile back, and the temp redlined, so I pulled into a hospital or a medical building of some sort, and waited a bit more. The engine cooled, so I put in the key, and… nothing. No battery. No cranking. Not even a pathetic “tic tic tic”.

I called Karena on my cell phone, and she showed up and jumpstarted the car. On the remaining mile of the trip, I stopped again briefly. It was cool because I stopped on a little cul-de-sac with a slight downhill grade, and when the engine cooled and we took off, I just pushed in the clutch, shifted to third, let gravity pull me to a gentle clip, and jockeyed the clutch a bit - pow, the engine started. No jumpstart needed.

Anyway, I got the car back, and it doesn’t seem to leak a whole lot when its at a standstill. I think that it’s the housing’s connection to the engine, and that it’s not sitting well. I asked around on usenet, and I think if I pull everything apart again, put a Pamela Anderson-sized amount of silicone sealer all over the part, and torque the shit out of everything, it will stop leaking. But that means draining and refilling the radiator again. As for the battery, I can pick out of those up maybe next weekend.

I’m tired, my stomach hurts, and I’m still dirty from all of this work. I think a nap is in order.

junk

Sun, 28 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

It’s been a quiet day. I slept and/or sat in bed until almost 3, and then headed out to the bookstore, where I read books on day trips in Washington State, and thought about going into the mountains to write, ala Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. But would I be able to strip my routine down to the bare minimum to spend time in a fire lookout station? You can rent them for cheap - $20,$30 a night, but no electricity, running water, etc. Maybe I could make a weekend of it, I’ll have to do more research.

Other than that, I’ve been reading On the Road. I zipped through maybe a hundred pages, magically transporting me to New Orleans, New York, Bakersville, San Fran, and every point in between. It also makes me think of back in 92 when I started the book, 95 when I read it during my beat lit class, 96 on a long weekend trip back to Indiana, and 97, on my way to LA. I should get a new copy someday - mine is falling apart, yellowed pages, but maybe it’s betterthat way.

I don’t feel like I can write on the book now. Maybe I’ll get back to reading.

Kerouac, damage deposits

Mon, 29 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I finished reading On the Road last night, after ditching any attempt at writing and plowing through the pages like Dean’s Hudson across the country. Each time I read the book, there are parts that hold my interest more than other times, and other attributes or pieces that I skim over with little interest. This time, I was most interested in the routes of the roads - I followed along with my atlas, and tried to find the paths taken. I was also into the Burroughs stories, since I’d just read a snippet of a Burroughs bio last week, and it happened to be the same piece that was described in OTR. This time, I wasn’t into the music descriptions - Kerouac goes into these long, drawn out monologues about the bop joints and clubs full of musicians and everything, and it’s cool and all, but I didn’t feel like it this time around. Maybe I should re-read it this week and see if my interests transform into something else. Actually, I think the next read will be Desolation Angels, although I got stalled on that when I read it 2 or 3 years ago.

Three years ago today, my Mustang’s engine blew up, and I was in a mad dash to sell it’s smouldering carcass, sell all of my furniture, and get enough cash together to rent a U-Haul and leave Indiana in 2 days. I made it too - on July 1, 1995, I locked the door of the ten-foot moving truck and headed toward Elkhart, where I’d spend the night, loot my mom’s house for anything I’d need to set up shop in Seattle, and beg a few bucks off of my parents. On the way up, the trusty Konrath Sound System (tm), a pair of battery-powered speakers I bought in 1991 when my Rabbit was sans stereo, finally died. I stopped at the Kokomo mall, and got a new pair of Koss speakers at Target. Those speakers are on my desk here at work, as I speak. When I got to Elkhart, I pitched the old speakers into a trash at the Concord Mall Montgomery Wards, with great sadness. When me and Ray piled into his Buick - FM radio only - and drove to Chicago to see a show, the Konrath Sound System always saved the day. With that, a walkman, and maybe even a discman, we had demos, new music, and death metal, instead of the boring and static-bombed radio stations of northern Indiana.

I talked to a window washer today, one of the guys that rappels down the side of big glass buildings with a bucket and a squeegee. I always wondered how one got started on a job like that, and he said he worked with an older guy, a sort of apprenticeship. I didn’t know if they went to a trade school, started washing cars first, spent a lot of time mountain climbing, or what. So there’s your useful/useless factoid of the day.

06/29/98 20:50

Just woke up from a short nap with the windows open and a nice breeze whipping through the apartment. I love it in the summer, when a post-work nap doesn’t mean waking up in the dark.

I spent all afternoon moving and reconfiguring a SparcStation and a JavaStation, so they’d work in the conference room in the other building. (We have the original building at 1500 Dexter, and the new building at 1100 dexter. This was moving from old to new, but just ‘til tuesday.) It took a lot longer than expected to get the Sparc acclimated to its new gateway and IP number, and a lot longer to get all of the associated baggage involved with the JavaStation to work. The JavaStation boots from the Sparc - it has no disc drive, so it pulls an OS and its associated Java applets from the Sparc to boot, a neat but messy approach. It was fun in an odd sort of way - it presented a bunch of problems and involved a lot of thinking and logical analysis. About three hours into it, both mchines worked fine, and we got the product running on both of them, more than I’d ever seen before. By the time I thought about looking at my watch, it was already 5. I had an absolutely beautiful walk back to the other building, and tried to get as much work-work done as possible before I split.

The second shoe will hit the floor a week from Wednesday at Evergreen Ford in Issaquah. That’s when I go there with the Escort for the estimate on damages and soforth. I thought about telling them I’m thinking about leasing a brand new car as they are writing out my estimate, and then when I return the car and pay their written estimate, I’d say I decided to buy a new Beetle or something.

I started reading Desolation Angels tonight, and I can see why it threw me last time. It’s nowhere near as accessible as On the Road. I’ll have to dig in to keep on this one. Among the many books I want to get but can’t afford right now is the book of Kerouac letters. I wish I knew the whole story behind the Ann Charters vs. Gerald Nicosia vs. Jan Kerouac or whatever. I read the Nicosia biography and found it to be the best. Charters seems to presumptuous, and when I leafed through her bio, it seemed watered down - like if you bought a Sylvester Stallone biography and it had no mention whatsoever of his years in Sweden making porn films. Why would you read a history book with no history. Interested viewers are encouraged to mail me with text files or URLs providing more details about the whole argument.

I have an overwhelming urge to go to Barnes and Noble, but it’s time to work on the book.

Bio

Tue, 30 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

When all of my writing projects are dead or blocked, I have a fallback project that I use to keep the typing going. I don’t remember when I started this, but a few months back I started writing a biography. I started at January 20, 1971, and moved forward, trying to keep a steady pace with all of the essentials, and without getting stuck on some tangent. Late last year and earlier this year, when I was really blocked and unable to work on either book, I belted out a serious amount of writing, and stayed up all night many times taking the story from childhood to gradeschool to high school.

I’m back on the bio. Everything else seems dead, and I’m sick of my own writing style, so it’s time to pound out the facts for a while. I don’t care how glossy or artistic my prose is (kindof like this journal), I just want to get everything down. I’m now up to the fall of 1992, and there are 43,000 words behind me (maybe 100 pages). Each year gets more difficult. 1971 through 1975 are only a couple of paragraphs; 1992 is already close to 10,000 words. I want to keep writing fast, until I get to 1998 (or 1999, or whenever I finish) and then start at the beginning, making a second pass and adding more detail. I keep forgetting things, or start talking about a person without introducing them in the right place, and I’ll have to fix that. I don’t know if anybody will ever read this, or if I will neaten it up for human consumption, but it’s a fun chore. Maybe the next time I date someone, I will just print and bind the whole damn thing, hand it over, and then have no disclaimers. I’m usually pretty honest when I date people, but it would be relaxing to be able to avoid all of the long stories and make them do the work. But, I guess I like the long stories, so maybe it’s a stupid idea.

I started reading Desolation Angels, and I was certain it was going to throw me, but I read 135 pages last night and would’ve kept reading if it weren’t for that sleep thing. It’s sort of like a darker, more serious version of The Dharma Bums, that’s a little less accessible but also much deeper. It’s got a lot more detail about his time as a lookout, and a lot of Washington details, which is a weird clash of two worlds. It’s cool to read about Kerouac on the UW campus, and wandering the Pioneer Square area. I’m looking forward to some more reading tonight.

It’s been a month and a half since I pulled the plug on the TV. I can barely remember when I sat down and watched hours and hours of shows. I don’t have enough time to do anything now, and I’m not getting a lot of writing done, so I don’t know how I could fit in TV too. TV’s like alcohol - you have to enjoy it in moderation. Unless you’re depressed - then it’s nice to drown in it.

My typing is messed up - not sure if it’s the keyboard, the hands, or the slow connection, but I keep dropping letters. I better quit while I’m ahead.

06/30/98 23:48

Listening to the white album, thinking about the fall of 1992 in order to keep moving on this weird, masturbatory biography. It’s interesting.

I fell asleep for about 4 hours after work, nothing else happened today, and I’m not into whipping up some introspective essay about the past, so I’m going to quit while I’m ahead and get back to writing.

junk

Wed, 01 Jul 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I’m listening to Rush - Power Windows, which is sort of embarassing to admit. This was the tape in my walkman when I mowed lawns to buy model airplane kits. Was it in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle where there was a kid who only built model airplanes and jerked off? Anyway, for a moment that seems generations old to me, this album still sounds pretty fresh to me.

I need to take a rest for a bit. I’ll write more later.

Col. Kurtz works at Ford Motor Credit

Thu, 02 Jul 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I fell asleep after work until after 11pm, so I didn’t really feel like writing in here, or writing at all, really. I did work on my biography a bit, and that kept me up far too late. So today I am the walking dead again, but there’s relief in that I have tomorrow off.

It’s been weird writing about 1993 for this bio project. It feels like that stuff just happened, but it’s already been five years. Five years since I first ran Linux! I’m in the middle of writing about that summer, when Tanya was still a new item, yet she was in Tampa for the break, and I was working at Voyager on the punch press, and going to shows with Ray almost every weekend in Chicago. Ray lived at home then, and was at the height of his anti-female stage, which made it difficult for me. But we had a lot of good times together - we rented every concievable zombie film on the face of the earth that summer.

I talked to Micheal Stutz for the first time on the phone last night. It’s always weird at first to talk to someone from the computer, but we had a lot to talk about. We’re both stuck in the same place writing-wise, and wish there was some sort of “movement” going on, sort of like the Kerouac-Ginsberg-Burroughs alliance. I need to write about this more when I am awake and have some amount of energy. And I need to keep writing on my own, because even if I had a group of people to trade manuscripts with, it doesn’t work if I don’t have manuscripts.

Blah, I’m going to screw around for the rest of lunch, start looking around on the web. Hopefully, I’ll be able to write more tonight.

07/02/98 22:03

I just woke up, put some french fries in the oven, made some Kool-aid, and nuked some kind of demented aloha chicken meal. If it says 99% fat-free and works in the micro, I’ll try it at least once.

So it’s not a “school night”, and I’m excited about staying up all night, doing some cleaning, writing a bunch, and doing my grocery shopping at 3 in the morning, when there’s no chance at all of Screaming Kid Syndrome. Tomorrow, my pal Jennefer Wagner will be here from Eugene, OR. She’s only in town for a night, and she’s crashing with another friend of hers, but I’ll hopefully get to hang out with her for a bit during the day.

Ford Credit keeps sending me more and more bizarre letters. I think Col. Kurtz works there. The car thing is starting to worry me more and more, especially since the VW doesn’t run. I’m hoping to get that taken care of this weekend.

I found a good web site to waste a lot of time.

Out of it. Nothing to report. More later.

Rabbit plumbing

Sun, 05 Jul 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Very tired. The Rabbit’s plumbing might be fixed, but the battery had no juice and I couldn’t turn it over to tell. I finally made a discovery that would’ve helped my car repair experiences long ago - latex surgical gloves. I slipped some on before monkeying in the deep antifreeze and grease of the engine, and it felt great to just snap them off when done.

Both of my parents called today (separately - not a joint thing. Sort of a flashback of my last ten years of being parented.) I only hear from them every month or two, and I usually have enough experiences queued up to get me through a phone conversation, but today I didn’t. I know that when they talk to me and all I have to say is “I haven’t done anything lately. I’ve been working a lot.” that they interpret it as “I’m getting ready to go off the deep end.” And it seems kindof stupid that if they called and I said “oh, I just went shopping for new cars” or “I’m going to Boston next week” or something idiotic like that, they’d be content.

I need to get off of here and do some work on the book…

junk

Mon, 06 Jul 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Why must I live my whole life feeling like I just stayed up all night? I decided to knock my sleep schedule back into the daytime mode with some sleeping pills last night. Instead, I got a truly surreal experience of alternating periods of undead catatonia and extreme awake, paranoid rushes where my senses were supertuned to the rumbling of traffic 7 stories below me. I spent all day in an odd mood, like I’d accidentally breathed a short whiff of nerve gas and was waiting to see if it would cause my insides to boil. I just tried to take a nap as the tail-end of rush hour traffic zipped by on I-5, and I can honestly say I’d feel better if I would’ve forced myself to stay awake.

I have some food burining in the oven…

junk

Tue, 07 Jul 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Late start today, so this will be short. Not much is going on, except that I haven’t slept much lately. I remember looking at my watch during every hour from 2 to 9am, which made it seem like I was up all night, but then I remembered a snippet of a dream and I knew I must have fallen asleep somewhere in there. I’m now prepared for a day of aphasia, peripheral hallucinations, and extreme typing mistakes. Maybe I should drink a Coke or ten first.

I think I’ve decided I’m going to buy a new car in like a year, after I move to a new apartment and go through another tax season. Although I haven’t ditched the Escort yet, I think I’m already sick of problems with this Rabbit. I wish it would stabilize a bit, like my other one did. My old Rabbit had problems, but I drove it for months and months with almost no further investment. I’m whining, so I’ll stop.

I’m re-reading Leyner’s The Tetherballs of Bougainville and enjoying it. The only thing I hate about his writing is that it gives me so many good ideas, and I can’t just rip them off.

Okay, lunch is over…

Cars, Beppo

Fri, 10 Jul 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I haven’t felt like writing lately. Not much has been going on with life, and that makes the journal pages seem stupid (“I got up. I took a shower. I checked my voice mail. I dried my hair.” etc.) I don’t want my journal to become that predictable, especially since I’m stuck in a 9 to 5 life, and I’m not climbing the Himalayas or walking across Africa or something else profound. And I can’t spend time with giant fictional discourses, because I don’t have the time or energy to do that with my “real” writing, aka my book.

Some people wonder (hey, maybe they don’t) why I don’t do cool graphics and site design and intricate HTML in my pages. It’s because I’m not an HTML designer or a graphic artist, and I don’t want to be. Some people enjoy tweaking their HTML by hand to get every page just right, to add next and previous links and screw with jumps and colors and sidebars and counters. I have no desire to do that. This isn’t my main project in life. That’s why I don’t spend all night writing intricate, sharp, and witty articles. It shows. Why cares? I am not “creating content” right now. I’m writing. I’m keeping a journal. I don’t have to write my paper journal in perfect cursive, and I don’t need to lint all of my pages and worry about fonts and sizes.

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t care, and if I kept any attitude other than that, I’d quit this project again. I might, I don’t know. Maybe I’m in a slump, maybe this is a bad idea. I don’t know.

That said, let me dump two days of news on the table.

I took a day off Wednesday to figure stuff out with the two cars. The Rabbit is all good news - no more leaks, and I installed a new battery. It cranks over find, and all seems well. I need to run it around the block for a half hour this weekend and make sure it works when it’s up to temp and on the road. I’m also slightly scared that there’s some electrical problem (like my stereo wiring) that caused the battery death, even though the battery was out of warranty and it’s death was justifiable. But, I’m scared there’s a short and the new battery will be dead too. So maybe Saturday I’ll hit the road with it.

The Escort went to the Ford dealer for an estimate on my end-of-lease charges. They were fairly cool, but the body damage quote wasn’t entirely pleasant. I will have to pay $620 cash, and I don’t get the deposit back. That’s not horrible though, and I can swing it. I’m driving the Escort until 7/31, and then it goes back to Evergreen Ford in Issaquah for the last time. Sure will be weird without that thing. End of an era.

Tonight, Bill Perry called me at 5 and told me of a 20-person party at Julian’s, a restaurant/bar/pool hall/gameroom just a few blocks down from work. I hiked down there at 6 to meet up with him, Marc, and a bunch of their fellow workers at Aventail. Bill lives in Indiana now, and I hadn’t seen him in ages. He works in Seattle remotely from Vincennes, but managed to get back here now and again for a week of on-site work. Marc VanHeinengen, fellow ex-Spry, ex-IU computer geek was there with us. I shot a game of pool and sucked, and we all talked and hung out. I met some new people there, and everyone was cool. Then we got on the air hockey tables, and Bill kicked everyone’s ass. The computer games were pricy, and we were hungry, so we split.

Across the street is a semi-new place called Beppo, a family-style dining Italian place. There were 5 of us total, and since there was a wait, we hit the bar. My new drink is a Vodka-7, from Bukowski and Elmore Leonard, of course. It’s pretty good and I like it a lot better than Rum and Coke - maybe because I drink a half dozen 7up’s a day. We ate on the patio - a wild, thin-crust pizza with mashed potatoes instead of sauce, and ravioli with feta cheese inside. They brought out big-ass dishes of food, and we all shared. It was a fun time - lots of joking, talk, catching up, and the usual computer geek discussions.

After food, we split, and me, Bill, and Marc went to Aventail’s new location and played with remote control cars a bit. We also checked out Marc’s kick-ass Micron laptop, and their new setup.

Now I’m home. It always feels satisfying to spend a lot of time with a bunch of cool people, the kind of time where it’s 6 and then you look at your watch a second later and it’s 9:45. The people, the cool night on the patio, the drinks, the good food - it all made me wish I did this more often. Maybe I should.

No writing tonight. The weekend’s almost here though. I need to cover serious ground on Rumored to Exist this weekend…

Waterproof sunscreen blinding kids

Sat, 11 Jul 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Eating nachos, getting ready to launch into it on the book. There is heavy construction going on just outside my apartment - they are replacing bridge decks on I-5 south. The current work is about 200 yards from my apartment, and I think it’s a 24 hour job - lots of hardcore banging and welding and scraping with tank-like vehicles and about 100 cops blocking off the road.

There’s an urban legend going around in email about waterproof sunscreen blinding kids. It’s idiotic, and the “anything for the children” types have been pummeling it out there. I got multiple copies at work, and a huge flamewar per copy. I get a lot of this - people who forward on jokes, etc. It’s an odd internet phenomenon - I bet you could get a Master’s thesis out of it without much work.

I’m not entirely sure why, but I’m listening to Mariah Carey’s self-titled album right now. The only reason I don’t have sick and/or unrealistic fantasies about her is that if I did manage to luck into something with her, I’d have a Puff Daddy number of 2 (like the Kevin Bacon numbers, get it?)

I’ve given up on finding cool journals on the web, and I’ve given up on reading about 98% of the journals I once thought were cool. It seems like in my darkest hours, I’d openly embrace the whole journal community, but I still think the idea of telling people how their personal sites should be run is stupid. It’s the reason I’ve given up on the zine community - it’s all people saying “be 100% DIY and do your own thing - just follow these steps so your stupid punk zine will look like every other one and conform to the highly regimented rules of content and appearance.”

I don’t put counters on my pages, and although I could check server logs, I never have. I think there’s a sort of beauty to that. It’s art for the sake of art, and I’ve never worried how many people read this. (I think it’s somewhere between 2 and 3, but it could be less) I guess lately I’ve been preoccupied in telling people my ideals on this, and it’s wasting my time - I feel like Lenny Bruce, spending hours talking about trials instead of telling jokes. Maybe I should shut up about it.

07/11/98 14:12

Sleeping is out of the question. They jackhammered I-5 straight through the night. At around 6, it went from one jackhammer to a dozen. I managed to sleep about 7 or 8 hours, but it was in 90 minute spurts.

I have begun trimming back my web site - I pulled a bunch of stuff today, and I’ll continue cutting, abbreviating, and moving things. Why? Because I’m sick of selling myself on the web. I’m tired of the fact that when someone gets my URL, they instantly know a bunch of things about me - maybe the wrong things. I don’t think I’m extroverted enough to tell the world all about me. I’ve always wanted to have this cool website that archived everything I’ve written - the zines, stories, books, web posting, whatever, and anyone could jump there for free and print the stuff out, or read it online. I now realize that I don’t like putting my work on the web, because my old stuff really sucks, and I’m nervous about the new stuff - it’s not the kind of writing that you want your boss or your uncle in New Jersey finding on the web. So, it’s slowly being pruned. And I’m inches away from killing this journal again. I might just remove the archives, but I’m not sure. I’ll need to think about it.

It’s 2:17pm and I’m still sitting around here - no shower, no food, incredibly depressed about nothing. I have $21 to blow this weekend in the “miscellaneous” account, and I’m trying to decide whether or not I should cut off all my hair, or just go see a matinee and walk around the mall, looking at things I want and can’t have. I’d hash out the depression issues here, but it’s essentially the same old shit, a few new players. About that shower…

a diesel ghost

Sun, 12 Jul 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I saw a ghost today. To me, a ghost isn’t a dead person dressed like a Klansman, making weird noises and scaring people. It’s when one or more of my senses receive input that matches some other point in my history enough to make me think I’m there again. It can be a perfume, a song, a place, a car, a picture, or anything else that strikes a chord and really tears into me. Smell is my strongest sense, but a combination can really freak me out. An example - I used to drive a silver 1980 VW Rabbit diesel, back in 90-91. The smell of diesel fumes, like when a bus goes by, reminds me of my old Rabbit. Now I drive a silver 1978 Rabbit with a gas engine, which sometimes reminds me of my old Rabbit, but there are enough differences and I’m used to it, that it’s a different car to me. But, one time I was driving and I stopped at a light behind a big construction truck, and the diesel exhaust huffed away that familiar smell. And I saw a ghost. For a few seconds, it totally made me think it was the summer of 1991 again, like I was working at NIBCO and dating Johanna down in Bloomington.

Maybe I shouldn’t call it a ghost - maybe it’s more like a wormhole, a way for me to peer back into the past that’s triggered by external events. Like deja vu, but that’s more of an unexpected thing, like you’ve been at the current event before, not like the current event is a weird shadow or afterimage of a past event you know you lived. I guess this happens to a lot of people, and it’s simply called nostalgia. But I think it’s more for me, because I have such a strong memory for the past. Sometimes, when I’m hanging out with friends and talking about old times, I’ll rattle off a story from 5, 10 years ago with such precision, and everyone else says “I totally didn’t remember that until now.” Other people forget the past, and think it’s a curse. I think remembering the past is the real curse. I can’t put ex-girlfriends out of my mind, or forget my stupid mistakes. I wish it all faded away, but I think some people and places will chase me to my grave.

Today’s ghost was nothing tremendous. I walked to work and back, to time the distance (~40 min each way) and the clouds, the smell of the wind, the temperature, and the Rollins Band MD all made it feel like the fall of 1993 again. It wasn’t a total sensation - I was walking in downtown Seattle, not from Wrubel to Colonial Crest, the Rollins album in question came out in 94, and I didn’t have either the black leather jacket or the Aiwa walkman that were Konrath trademarks at the time. But it felt like time skipped for a second, and it lurched back five years.

That’s all I did today. I slept in, went for the walk, and by the time I got home, it was like 5:30. Then after I drank 2 gallons of ice water, passed out, and dealt with an incredible headache focused in the center of my left eye, I got my dinner, and here I am. I wish I had more stories for you about street festivals and shopping and contra dances and mountain climbing and running in the park with puppy dogs, but I don’t.

I should be working on the book…

Portable hot tubs and jackhammers

Mon, 13 Jul 1998 00:00:00 GMT

The jackhammers continued until about 5 in the morning, when the construction crews started running something that sounded like a tablesaw running in my kitchen, even though it was 200 yards away, slicing through the bridge decks of I-5. I hope to fuck that this roadwork finishes on time (allegedly tomorrow) so I can get some sleep.

07/13/98 12:46

The Damark catalog had a “portable” hot tub for like $1000 or $2000, and I kept thinking about how cool it would be to rent a two-bedroom apartment and set that bitch up - or a one-bedroom, and I wouldn’t put any other furniture in the living room. I don’t OWN any other furniture. Instead of buying a couch and a loveseat and a bunch of tables, I could just buy the hottub, and hang out in there when I rent movies. I just have to remember not to put any Japanese tourists in my Karl Fargman dresser.

Have I mentioned how slow the book is going yet today. Slow. Monumentally slow. Motherfucking slow. So slow, I shaved my dog’s ass and taught him to proofread backward. Wait, that doesn’t make any sense. Here’s an example - imagine you have to put yourself on a “tight schedule” to write a mere 300 words a day. Then imagine you break that schedule like 5 out of 7 days a week, and on the other two days, you don’t make up for it. This is why I’m thinking about a rewarding hobby in paint-by-number clown pictures, maybe working up to some dogs playing poker.

I was just looking at a web page and I couldn’t figure out why I would reload it and it would jump right to the end of the page. I thought maybe they used some kind of special anchor or something… until I realized I was holding down the space bar. It’s one of those days.

Wedding invitation from an ex

Tue, 14 Jul 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I got paid a day early and didn’t know it. It’s raining. I think the I-5 construction is done. I gave a panhandler 75 cents. My apartment smells like something died in the pile of unwashed dishes. I’m drying some jeans for the 4th time and I hope I remember to take them out and fold them.

I got a wedding invitation from an ex-girlfriend. Not really an ex, we went out a couple of times and it disintegrated before the labels were established. But I liked her a lot in early 1993. I had a dream about her the other night. I’m not mad or upset that she’s getting married, but it’s another reminder that I’m drifting. And I wish I had a better alibi for being single and childless. I wish I was Marilyn Manson, so when people would ask me why I’m not married, I could say “Where the hell have you been? Turn on your fucking TV.”

At least I got an invitation. I’d like to make a list here of all of the people who are/were allegedly close to me who didn’t invite me to their weddings.

I think I’m taking a long weekend in Vancouver BC in the near future. I don’t even know what I would do there, but I just want to go. I don’t know anyone there, except for maybe thirdhand connections or vague stuff like that. Now I know a couple of people in LA, but I can’t easily drive there, so the investment is higher.

I really need to do my dishes and find out of something did die in the sink, before it drives me nuts.

Cable TV relapse

Fri, 17 Jul 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I gave up. I fell off the wagon. I relapsed. I once again have cable TV. And I’m watching way too much of it.

I decided one night that I wanted to watch the Conan O’Brien show again. He’s really funny, and I like his guests and his jokes with Andy and Max, and it used to give my life a certain amount of regularity. So did the Seinfeld reruns at 7:30, but they always preempt those with the fucking Mariners games. So the other night, I got out the wire strippers and fixed my TV cable, and there it was.

Conan was funny, and I watched some other pseudo-educational things, like a show on the Berlin Airlift, and this giant Noam Chomsky thing on PBS. But I find myself wandering the stations, which is bad. Oh well, I need some new ideas for the book, and I can’t think of any while hermetically sealed in my apartment.

It’s Friday, but it feels like Tuesday. I hope this will be a breakthrough weekend for the writing - I have been hovering right below 40,000 words on this project, and I’d really like to break through and officially be in the 40s. Yesterday, it got so nice out that there was an emergency beer and ice cream meeting on the patio. It was HOT out there - it felt good to be drinking cold Corona while standing around on the concrete and looking at Lake Union. Days like that make me wish I had a boat moored across the street, so I could hop in and hit the water.

I’m in the final stretch of this money ordeal, before the car is gone. It looks like I’m going to make it with a few bucks to spare, but I’m waiting for Ford to pull the old switcheroo somehow, and ask me for more cash. So that means I’m mostly broke for the next two weeks, but then I’ll be back to dropping bills in the CD store and buying many books I’ll probably never read.

I’m bored now. Time to do a bunch of stupid web searches.

junk

Thu, 23 Jul 1998 00:00:00 GMT

If you still can’t figure out yesterday’s entry, it’s from the Conan O’Brien show.

There are several reasons why I haven’t been writing. First is the heat - at night it gets up to about 170 degrees in my apartment, and I want to do nothing but watch TV. I’ve begun tipping back a beer or two before bed, because there’s no other way I can fall asleep with this heat. I have a ceiling fan and a box fan - maybe I need more fans.

Also, my connection at work has been messed up. It slows down and times out way too much. It’s become too much a pain in the ass to write during lunch, so I stopped.

So that means no writing on the book. A few people are reviewing the first nundred pieces from Rumored to Exist, and I’m getting back some helpful feedback. It makes me want to write more, but the heat… the heat…

I’m getting a lot of conflicting information about what to do with my dating life. It was so much easier when I could just ask a girl in my Spanish class for help with my homework, buy a pizza, make up some stories, and bam. Now I have to explain a huge manifesto about what I want to do with my life when I meet someone new. Maybe I should stay single for a while longer.

I talked to Tom G. today, an old friend from my neighborhood. I guess he wasn’t a friend for a while - in 1989, my then-girlfriend took off with him, and they eventually got married, had two kids, then divorced. But I guess the statute of limitations on that stuff has run out, and it was good to talk to him again. It wasn’t much of an “old times” type of discussion, but more of a “what’s been going on” thing. It’s weird how much can change in 8 or 9 years.

I’ve gotta split - I actually have plans that don’t involve TV or writing!

CD test list

Sat, 25 Jul 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I’m thinking of sinking an insane amount of money into some new stereo hardware. I really want a pair of Magnepan speakers, and I really want a Crown amp. I don’t think panel speakers will sound too good with Entombed, but they’d sound great with this new Pat Metheny CD, or some Shadowfax or something. So I’m coming up with a list of all-purpose test CDs I could use while auditioning new gear. They all have to be familiar, but exhibit some weird quality I’d need to test. I think the list is something like this:

Motorhead - 1916
Chick Corea Electric Band - Under the Mask
Pat Metheny Group - Imaginary Day
Peter Gabriel - Us
Mariah Carey - Mariah Carey
Death is Just the Beginning II comp.
Dismember - Indecent and Obscene
Brahms - Piano Concertos (complete) (Philips)
Frank Zappa - Civilization Phaze Three
Frank Zappa - The Yellow Shark
Frank Zappa - One Size Fits All (Au20)
Joe Satriani - Crystal Planet
Shadowfax - Folksongs for a Nuclear Village
the digital domain test disc
the Holophonics test disc

I think with those CDs, I could find new speakers that didn’t suck, or at least piss off the sales clerks.

It’s a beautiful day out, I’ve got a twenty in my pocket - what the fuck am I doing writing on here?

The 30-day Diarrea Diet Plan

Mon, 27 Jul 1998 00:00:00 GMT

It’s motherfucking hot in Seattle. Maybe I’m just whining, but you should try hanging out in my apartment for a few hours. Even with all of the fans on full blast and the windows open, it must be 90 in there, and the mercury doesn’t drop much at night. I know there are some of you that think “I’m a tough guy - 100 degree heat doesn’t bother ME.” That’s because you’re brain damaged. I can’t do anything but sit in bed when it’s this hot out, and with the jet-engine roar of my fans, I can barely hear the sound of the stereo or TV. There’s no use in trying to read any new books or write anything. I’m glad I discovered that if I drink a beer right before bed, I fall asleep a lot faster. I’m not glad that I’m down to my last beer, and I’m pretty much broke until Friday.

Yes, I’m counting the days until Friday, when the Escort goes away. I have $400 of the $620 I need to pay Ford, and payday plus bonus-day is Friday, so I should be home free. I am down to my last $11, which I’ll probably spend on Sprite, Gatorade, and stuff for lunch this week. I should make it. And after that, I’ll have cash every month - enough to save for weird trips around thw world and still have enough to go to the CD store and buy everything in sight.

I keep thinking about where I’ll travel next. I think another default trip back to Indiana is in order, except this time I’ll try to hook up with Michael in Cleveland and take some better pictures of Bloomington. I also want to take a trip to NYC, and one to LA. This huge Amsterdam trek is still on the drawing board, but I’m not sure when that will happen or how I will pay for it. I’m thinking of keeping very detailed journals on my next couple of trips, and then writing a book about them. It would be about the tree or four places I visited, which would all be completely different, but it would be more about me and the time I spent on the road. It wouldn’t be like On the Road - more like Kurt Brecht’s book The 30-day Diarrea Diet Plan, which is a cool book about his voyage into Mexico on no money.

Nothing else. It’s nice in my office though. Maybe I should move in here.

beer before bedtime

Wed, 29 Jul 1998 00:00:00 GMT

The last few days have been a blur of record temperatures and incredible heat in my apartment. I got home from work last night and fell asleep with my jeans and shoes on. When I woke, I felt really sick, like I was going to pass out. This was with the windows open, and all of the fans running at full blast, so lound that I couldn’t hear. The apartment still felt like standing next to a kiln. I don’t remember it being this bad when I worked in a copper refinery in the worst of the Indiana summers.

My beer-before-bedtime solution to sleep is still working, but I think I’ve completely pumped up my alcohol tolerance, and I might have to start drinking more if this heat wave continues. Last night, I spent my last $8 on a 6-pack of Molson and a Chicken McNugget meal.

The great car exchange takes place Friday. I dropped off the Escort and took the Rabbit last night because the Escort’s brakes are starting to squeal, and I don’t want to make it worse. I hope that I can get that one past Ford without paying extra. I’ve got a bonus coming on Friday, and it should be decent, so it doesn’t matter either way. But if I just pay them the $620 or so in body damage and then get cut loose, that means a lot of screwing-around funds for the next few weeks.

It’s weird to be back driving the Rabbit again. I hate not having AC, but the sunroof is very awesome for weather like this. I’m not used to driving a stick, and the hills are a problem. Also, I have trouble determining distances and blind spots and all of that, but I’m guessing that after a weekend of blasting around Seattle, that stuff will pass.

I read somewhere that over 3 million copies of Dr.DOS have been sold in the last 18 months. Isn’t that weird?

I may have a visitor from NYC in the future. I may be going to Indiana again for Halloween. Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.

Seattle is back

Thu, 30 Jul 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Seattle is back. It’s 68, cloudy, and I managed to sleep without drinking alcohol last night. I even had to turn off the ceiling fan and close a window, it got so cold last night. I’m very happy - I feel like a changed man. Maybe I’ll get some writing done tonight.

My New York visitor is going to be here over Labor Day weekend, and I’m excited about that. Time to throw out the beer bottles, stock the bar, and do some serious cleaning…

The other night, I thought of the perfect plot for an action-adventure movie. I don’t know why, it just appeared in my head while drinking a beer and waiting for sleep. I’m thinking I subliminally ripped it off from some Van Damme movie or something, but I’m not sure - maybe it’s an amalgm of a bunch of movies. If I had any time whatsoever, I’d write a treatment, or even a screenplay, and then send it to a bunch of people. But I guess I have better things to do with my time.

I’ve been listening to the new Garbage album for some reason - I usually don’t listen to pop albums, but I got a copy from a friend of mine, and I actually like it in some weird way. I could imagine listening to it while doing 90 in a cnnvertible with the top down - it has a lot of energy to it, and sounds fresh. Maybe I should dump this to an MD and listen to it more.

I’m really not that nervous about the car now, but brief explosions of anxiety hit me when I really sit and think about it. I’ll miss that car, but not the dealership. My loyal zine readers keep asking me if I will still put “No thanks to Evergreen Ford in Issaquah” in the back of every issue of Air in the Paragraph Line, like I did with 1-9, or if I’ll find a new cause to berate. That’s a good question, and I guess you’ll have to buy a copy of #10 to find the answer.

I’m bored. I now have a NY subway map and a bartender’s guide, which should keep be busy for months.

Ford Escort nostalgia

Thu, 06 Aug 1998 00:00:00 GMT

It’s been a while - sorry about that. Lots of things going on here, and the heat’s been back for a bit.

I mentioned my mystery visitor from NYC, and I guess I can give the next piece of the puzzle. It’s a she, and I’m afraid that if I give it all away, I’ll jinx thing and then I’ll drown in the mistake forever, sort of like New Coke or the IBM PC Jr. So all I can tell you until labor day is that 1) It’s a female, 2) I think she’s cool 3) I’ve been spending a lot of my time communicating with her by sending back and forth huge pieces of writing - parts of short stories and large manifestos. So it’s been a worthwhile use of my time.

Oh yeah, the Escort is gone. I got out of it for only $620, even though the brakes were shot and making noise when I drove it on the lot. My insurance bill went down dramatically, and I had a few bucks left, since I saved about a grand for the whole ordeal. I’m back to the VW full time now, and it’s a bit of work driving a stickshift today, especially one with such strange and quirky habits as this little car, but I’m doing fine. And getting better gas mileage.

I had my first flash of Escort nostalgia today - I was driving alongside a City of Seattle Escort, which is just like my old one except for the big logo on the door. I didn’t think about leaving behind the Escort until I saw another one. I guess the little thing had a good run, and all of my memories of Seattle are tied to that one little car. Man - what the fuck’s going to happen when I move to a new place? I’ll really miss this studio.

Nothing else. A bunch of new CDs. Metal Curse #11 is out. Motorhead rules. Catch you later.

Jack in the Box is great

Sat, 08 Aug 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Listening to Rotting Christ, which started as a really underground band that Ray and I used as the example of the most extreme end of the sickness spectrum. Now they’re on Century Media and have the most incredible sound of a death metal band ever. A lot of variety, a lot of depth, excellent production, just great stuff. I thought the metal scene was dead and rotting, but I just got Ray’s latest issue of Metal Curse, and it comes with a sampler CD from Century Media, which is totally filled with mind-blowing new metal from Tiamat, Sentenced, Moonspell, Rotting Christ, Lacuna Coil and more. It’s so great - I thought all black/death bands were stuck in this eviler-than-though pissing contest, stagnating away, but this stuff sounds so new, great, and incredible - it’s like when it was 1992 and I was DJing and listening to all of this new and incredible music. It’s time for me to start spending on new discs.

I went to a journal gathering today to meet a few locals and see Scott, who is down from Vancouver. I’d like to list everyone and link them to their pages, but I’m in the middle of eating dinner, and my bookmarks are at work. But trust me - I met some people, and I’m sure Anita’s page has photos and links and all that jazz - she’s much more self-documented than I am, at least on the web.

Speaking of self-documented, I was working on my biography all night last night. I’m up to the fall of 93, and it’s like 57K words long. I was cleaning it a bit so I could email it off to Marie in NYC. Oh yeah, Marie is the person visiting me next month. I have been thinking about that a lot, and I’m really excited, to put it mildly. I should probably be cleaning and organizing and planning and everthing else. I’d mention more, but I need to play my cards close until she’s here, when I’ll know what’s up with the whole situation.

Jack in the Box is great. I wish I could rent a tape with all of their commercials. That would rule. It’s too bad the food killed a bunch of people. Maybe that’s why I like it so much.

Okay, speaking of clean… I have dishes left over from the Truman administration in my sink. More later.

Pizza discussion

Tue, 11 Aug 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I just made some pizza out of the box, and it’s not bad. It’s a pain in the ass to make, with the dough and all that shit, but some AC/DC in the player helped that. (_High Voltage_, required listening for everyone, especially my neighbors.) I am not supposed to eat pizza, but when I make my own, I know it won’t have that much fat or grease, and it doesn’t bother my stomach. Most other pizza really kills me, except feta cheese pizzas, and when we get that at work, it usually has mushrooms and other toppings I don’t like. Under controlled circumstances, I love pizza.

I got into a huge pizza discussion with Marie about pizza tonight. She’s from NYC and every pizza place there is “real” pizza and incredible. She’s never even been to a Pizza Hut. I guess that’s kindof cool, but I’d hate to go from NY to a place like Goshen, IN where Pizza Hut is a delicacy. I’d rather do the other way around like me; even the shittiest fast food seafood at Ivar’s in Seattle is probably better than the top of the line stuff in Indiana. All pizza discussions boil down to this: I miss Garcia’s in Bloomington. I still have a Garcia’s plastic cup on my computer table, holding my pens and pencils and telling me about the Monster Slice. (“Great 1/2 Pound Slices Under 2 Bucks!”) Although Garcia’s had good pizza with a unique taste, I really miss the atmosphere. I loved it on the Fridays when I had only a morning class, when I’d skip over there for a slice and drink, sit around with a friend, play their Tetris machine (which had a high score of like 19 trillion) and just hang out. They were the absolute closest place to campus that served beer (I went to an allegedly dry campus. As dry as a fucking brewery.) and that meant some great drinking experiences there. I know everyone reading this will think I’m insane for fawning over eating a greasy, undercooked, overpriced piece of pizza and tipping back a $2.50 bottle of Bud Lite, but man, those were the fucking days.

I don’t know if I should talk about it in public, but I’ve decided to go back to Summer Rain. I’ve started reading the drafts - I need to get the story in my head before I can start writing. I figure the second book - chapters 16-30, will require about 35,000 words worth of new material and lots of editing. I probably can’t finish that before Marie gets here (9/3) but maybe before her next visit.

Oh yeah, Marie bought tickets to visit for the first week of October. I’m not taking off of work though - she’ll be spending the day hanging out here, reading some of my non-internet writing and working on her own stuff. And I’m going to buy tickets Friday to go there for the first week of November. Does all of this sound crazy? If you think I’m sane, you must be a new reader.

Listening to Santana, greatest hits. It gathers dust most of the time, but I guess I’m in a Santana mood. Stop me before I break out the Cheech and Chong. Actually, Santana is a great Hendrix gateway drug, so maybe I’ll have Band of Gypsies blaring away by this time tomorrow (if not later tonight.)

I’m reading a book about the Zodiac killer. (It’s the Grayspoon? Graystein? book, the most popular one.) I hope this doesn’t lead me down the true crime road again, because I have a ton of books I bought but didn’t read back when I thought me and Larry would write a book about the Unabomber. I have a brand new, unopened copy of Helter Skelter. I read it back in high school, but it would be fun to read it again now that I have a vague knowledge of west coast geography.

Shit, it’s 11:30 and I’m just finishing supper. Time to get some real work done.

junk

Wed, 12 Aug 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I guess I didn’t mention this yesterday, but Ford tried to fuck me out of $83 - tax on a bill that was already taxed. I called them this morning, and I think I got out of it, but they got the last laugh - I was on the phone forever, forced to listen to Celine Deon. It really pisses me off that I thought this whole chapter in my life was over when I shelled out all of that money and handed over the keys. And I’m not a betting man, but I’d put down my pink slip for the VW on then sending me some vague invoice in 6 months for a few hundred bucks, based on their clerical error. Sometimes I just know the Unabomber was right.

I didn’t get any writing done last night, but I started reading this book, I think called The Invisible Circus, and I don’t remember the author’s name, but I think the last name was Egan. [Jennifer Egan] Anyway, it’s an interesting book about this girl who is coming to terms with her father’s death. Also, she had a sister that was a few years older who was perfect and the center of attention, and she went to Europe and either died or committed suicide, and nobody really knows (she fell/jumped from a building). It’s an okay book, but the main character reminds me too much of Abby McBeal, and I really fucking hate that show. I won’t get into that now, but the book is moderately entertaining. I like the prose - you don’t notice it, and yet, you see the details around you. I wish I could write like that.

I’m bored. Go read this page.

TRS-80 internet connection

Thu, 13 Aug 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Trying to get back in the swing of things with Summer Rain. I wrote last night, knocking little pieces of a few chapters around, but it’s not like it was last spring. I couldn’t stop writing every day, and I had dreams about the characters in the book. I’ll get back up to speed.

I called Ray last night, and he finally found a 5.25” floppy drive. He’s trying to publish the first four issues of Metal Curse in some kind of weird half-legal-size digest, which would be cool. (I guess I’m supposed to write an intro, so I better work on that.) While copying source files to 3.5” floppy, he found a bunch of old poetry, stories and letters. Some of the stuff was about the tail-end of his last relationships, all of the fights and double standards and problems and frustration. He also told me that he wasn’t sure if he wrote all of that stuff 10 years ago or yesterday. I hope he can find an escape this this one, because I’ve tried to talk him down many times, and it’s too messy of a situation.

And since I tell Ray everything, I had to tell him all about my current situation. I didn’t want to tell him how optimistic I felt about this whole Marie thing when he was depressed, but when he met his girlfriend, I was on an all-Pink Floyd diet, writing ultra-dark stories about being the last person on the earth. It’s weird how we’re sometimes on the opposite ends of our cycle - you’d think after more than a decade, we’d be in sync.

I need to go before my TRS-80 speed connection dies.

Feels like fall

Tue, 18 Aug 1998 00:00:00 GMT

It feels like fall today. It’s almost chilly out, and the clouds are making it look less like August and more like October, which I think is cool. I like the fall, the time when it isn’t hot out anymore, but before the weather goes to hell. It’s very lazy and subdued. I don’t want to sound like a goth wannabe, talking about the leaves and running through the forest in sorrow, or whatever. I guess I just have positive memories of the fall semester, of returning to campus after a summer of laziness to meet the new bumper crop of freshman women. I used to love taking new classes, meeting new people, spending my time in new buildings. I guess most of my relationships started in the spring, but many more attempts happened in the fall. I think my best semesters academically were in the fall, and I know many of my best memories were then.

The slippage of time has taken on a new meaning now that I don’t know how to handle. The division of time into semesters and breaks and vacations made things a little slower - I was always working toward finishing that one semester, like a long-distance runner trying to get in that one last mile before exhaustion. Now time free-wheels and I have no reference point. Someone asked me if I was depressed that summer was almost over and I hadn’t realized that it had started. Remember back when summer was that three-month sabbatical where you rode your BMX bike hundreds of miles a week, playing army and going to the mall to play video games and stealing candy from the corner store and building forts out of old packing crate lumber?

I never stole candy from the corner store. I stole change from my stepdad’s spare change box, and used it to buy candy. And I mowed lawns.

About fall - this time around, I’m thinking about 1991, which is the only fall when I had my old VW. I didn’t have it at the beginning of the school year - the rings went out and I had to limp it back to Goshen at like 40mph (a 250 mile trip, do the math) so this old German guy could fix it since nobody in Bloomington knows what the fuck they’re doing with water-cooled VW’s. But I had it later, and it reminds me of working at Lindley hall, spending late nights in the C335 lab (I had to stop working at 9am and drive my car home so it wouldn’t get ticketed), and everything else that happened in late ‘91. It was my first semester back on campus, and I went from working in labs with armies of Leading Edge Model D computers (the Yugo of PCs), Panasonic 24-pin printers that jammed every 3 sheets, a PRIME computer, and almost no networking, to a campus filled with ethernet, laserprinters, nice Macs, SparcStations, a whole fleet of DEC miniframes, and lots of other people into computers. I hung out in the “orchard”, a student cluster of Sparc IPC machines. The machines weren’t bad, but I spent my time there because of the cool people. Whenever I got stuck on a new hack, I could ask someone else about it, and we were always playing pranks, joking around, going out to eat or get a drink, or playing games. It was a really tight, communal environment - probably one of the best I’ve ever seen.

Marie will be here in 16 days. It seems like an eternity, but then again, my place is a real hellhole and I’ll be lucky to get it in shape by then.

I forgot to mention that I ran into Anita at the new/old Safeway on John st. on Sunday, buying light bulbs and trash bags. I just wanted to mention that so you non-Seattle readers will think there’s some kind of Seattle journal mafia where we run into each other on a constant basis. Jealous?

Rotting Christ

Wed, 19 Aug 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I’m listening to the new Rotting Christ album, and I’m simply floored that death metal (“extreme metal”, whatever) has taken on such a clean, thick, produced sound while still retaining a good edge. I think this is what bands like Paradise Lost were trying to do a few years back, although they failed. I like this CD a lot, and I’m only on track 4. Too bad the bonus CD is the same one that came in Metal Curse - it’s a great CD, but it would’ve been cool to get another sampler or something. Or a CD with some live tracks or unreleased material. I can’t complain too much, it was a completely free CD at the $16 price point.

In unrelated CD news, I’ve completely given up on Tower Records. All of their CDs are like $18 except for those perpetually on sale that I have no interest in. I guess if I was a top 40 zombie, it would be nice to get the new Smashing Pumpkins CD for “only” $16, but I don’t see that happening soon. Seattle really needs a Best Buy to come in and start up a CD price war.

A busy day today, and I was sleepy for most of it. It turns out that my team at work will be going on a boat cruise as part of our 1.0 release celebration, and it’s the same day Marie will be coming into town. The party is from 12-3, and her flight arrives at 6:30, so there should be no problems. We had another one of these parties, and it was very cool - it’s relaxing to cruise around Lake Washington, watch the shore, and get into long, involved conversations with coworkers that don’t involve Java. I will be a nervous wreck that day - my few hours before I meet Marie, but maybe the distraction will be nice. Better than sitting in front of my computer, anyway.

What kind of soda is Green River, other than green? I can’t seem to describe the flavor. It’s not a lemon-lime, it’s - green. I bought a 6-pack of it the other night, but I can’t drink much more than that. It’s too intense of a flavor to drink on a daily basis.

I should get some work done now.

Ramones and nachos

Thu, 20 Aug 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Listening to the Ramones, eating a Nachos Belgrande, hoping the next 14 days fly past. I can’t control my fingers, I can’t control my toes.

I’ve given up on about all of the web sites and journals I regularly read during lunch, except for CNN, which I read obsessively. Now that I watch CNN on TV and read it on the web, I can see how much news falls flat without the visuals. It’s all a bunch of shit anyway. They have a ton of crap about the Clinton scandal, and not a word about anything else. It sounds like things are getting wonky in Quebec again, there were these embassy bombings, and let’s not forget the dumb bitch who had her baby at the prom and killed it. While I commend her for ending the kid’s life instead of bringing yet another person with fucked up parents into the world, I cannot support her going to the DJ afterward and requesting a Metallica song. (So, you think her date got lucky? That’s the great thing about bringing a pregnant chick to the prom - you know she’s not waiting until she gets married.)

Marie has been forcing me to remember very obscure stories and facts from my childhood. Not forcing - she mentions some ancient toy or a story about her brother and I’ve instantly found some snippet of long ago to counter with. It’s been a blur of weird stuff from the Six Million Dollar Man toy with the bionic chips in his arm to that horrible meatloaf everyone’s mom makes with the crunchy onions inside and the red sauce on top. (I’m of the opinion that no human being should pay money for meatloaf - it’s a dish typically forced upon you, either by your mom or a dorm menu. I know you can buy it at Boston Market, which reinforces my theory that 97% of humanity is idiotic.) I led an odd childhood since I had a stay-at-home mom that wanted me reading Tolstoy before I went to kidergarten, and I lived in the middle of nowhere with almost no other kids around. Also my family didn’t have a lot of cash, so I didn’t have the latest of everything. I did have some legos and a lot of books, and some other toys like Micronauts and a GI Joe, but I didn’t get into the big fads like KISS toys and bell bottom pants and Peter Frampton records and all of the shit that’s now being re-sold to the Microsoft generation at primo prices. I didn’t even see Star Wars until its second theatrical run. So I guess I grew up fast on one hand, and didn’t grow up much at all on the other hand. It’s weird and I guess it’ll become a book someday.

I haven’t mentioned it for a few paragraphs now, but the Ramones really do kick ass.

I watched about 10 minutes of Friends tonight, and I’ve realized it’s completely unbearable. I guess I used to watch it as a way to kill time between the syndicated Seinfeld and the new Seinfeld. But it’s horrible now, like going back to your old elementary school and realizing you were stupid when you were 9. Now the TV diet is old-school: Conan and Seinfeld reruns, with an occasional piece of something interesting like Weekday Wings if they have cool planes on (I hate when they have episodes about cargo planes or some obscure RAF helicopter. Why do they paint targets on the side of their planes? Their aero industry is about as formidable as their music industry, except for maybe the Tornado. The good Harriers, the ones Ahnold flew in True Lies, are built stateside, you know.)

I should probably try to write. It’s suddenly very hot, but maybe it’s this horrible food eating at my insides. Have a better one.

Gabba gabba hey! Gabba gabba hey!

Rupert Thomson's Soft!

Mon, 24 Aug 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Rupert Thomson’s new book, Soft!, is here. I’m only a few pages into it, but it’s pretty decent. And only about $20 in hardcover, which was a relief.

I fell asleep a bit before 9, and now I’m groggy and mistyping. I don’t have anything else substantial to say, so I’m going to start working on the book.

Weird depresso days

Wed, 26 Aug 1998 00:00:00 GMT

It’s one of those weird, depresso days. I’m worried about my car. Paranoid might be a better word - it has a small coolant leak that’s probably just a hose or a hose clamp, but even that’s a pain in the ass to fix. I know if I bought 3 replacement hoses and 6 replacement clamps and drained all of the antifreeze and swapped the hoses, it would probably still leak, 6 hours and $30 later. I want to bring it to a shop, but then you’re talking lots of cash. I hope this thing can hold together until January, and then maybe I will buy a semi-new Toyota or Honda or something.

I’m still counting the days (8) until Marie shows up. That means more cleaning, preparing, and waiting. The apartment is pretty clean right now, but there are a bunch of things I need to do right before she gets here, like buy some food, do some laundry, etc. I’m trying to keep busy with the book, but it’s hard to keep focused. I’m still picking away at some stuff, like dialogue, but it’s been a real pain in the ass. On my last read through the material, I marked about 250 things in 15 chapters that needed to be changed. And some of those changes are giant - I have a lot of holes to plug. But I hope to get some of this done in the next couple of months.

Tomorrow, I’m going flying with a guy that I work with. I guess he needs to log hours with passengers or something. I went with him a couple of years ago and it was great - he rented one of those small Cessna planes, basically a VW with wings, and we circled around Seattle at 4,000 feet. It was an incredible view - high enough to get an incredible view but low enough that you could make out the buildings and streets. This time we are going to Friday Harbor in the San Juans and back, and I’ll have a camcorder with me.

It’ll be nice to have many distractions between now and a week from tomorrow. I have the flying, and the boat trip the day Marie arrives. Plus with all of the shopping and dusting and cleaning and mopping, I have some stuff to keep me busy.

Environmental death metal band

Sun, 30 Aug 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I’m listening to U2 - Achtung Baby right now, but I’m not entirely sure why. I guess it seemed like good music to have in the player while this beautiful, sunny day poured through the open windows and I stood in front of the stove, only wearing a pair of levis and too lazy to put on a shirt, making grilled cheese sandwiches. U2, and this album specifically, remind me heavily of my ex-girlfriend Tanya. I was very anti-U2 during the relationship, and even more when we split. But two years later, after I moved to Seattle, I gave the album a try and discovered that it was like a time capsule of memories about her. Even though I never listened to the songs with her, the words made me look back and re-examine a lot of our time together and find a lot of missing pieces and hidden messages. Maybe I’m insane, but it reminded me so much of her. It also reminds me of the summer of 1992, the year before we dated. That’s partially because that’s when all of the singles and videos were getting spit from the Island Records marketing machine to saturate the airwaves. But it’s also because my friend Meg kept setting her process name to “Achtung Baby” and because the sounds just seem to work for that period of time. If I ever made a Hollywood movie out of Summer Rain, the song “Acrobat” would be on the soundtrack. And no Puff Daddy remixes.

Last night, I saw this environmental death metal band called R.I.P. on the public access channel. It was pretty cool - they were sort of a thrashier version of something like Rotting Christ, but not as well-honed yet, and they all wore corpsepaint or other King Diamond-like makeup, with costumes and stage props and everything. The show was sort of like an infomercial, where they talked to the band, then showed live footage and these videos. They sang about the destruction of the Earth (I believe their album was called “Save Mother Earth or Die With It”) and mixed live footage with video of polluted factories, clear-cutting, Cheronobyl, polluted waters, etc. It was all very rough and not totally professional, but it was very entertaining and unique. At the end of the stage show, the lead singer took out a prop knife and slit the throats of all of the members, and then himself, and they all fell over and were bleeding all over the place. I’d like to find out more, but searching for R.I.P. on the web would generate a billion hits.

I’ve been sort of sick for the last few days. It’s not horrible, just the start of a cold and I’ve been doing every remedy possible to get it to subside before Thursday. I’m eating vitamin A, ecinacea, zinc, goldenseal and other vitamins by the pound, and drinking gallons of water. I’m not getting worse, but it’s still there. I stayed home on Friday to sleep and take it easy, and that helped. I didn’t do much yesterday, and today looks like it will be more of the same.

My new way to eat up my time and keep my brain busy until Marie arrives this Thursday has been Halberstam’s most excellent book on the 50s. I read this book when I took Murray Sperber’s class on youth culture in the 50s and 60s in the spring of 95 (by far the best class I took in college) and now I’m crawling through it again. It’s 800 pages, and I figure if I mentally race myself into trying to finish it by the time she’s here, I will relieve some of the nervousness and get totally involved in the Korean War, the birth of fast food, Harley Earl’s giant-finned cars, and everything else. But don’t let Newt Gingrich fool you - the fifties were terrible. They were full of labor disputed, inequality, brainwashing, racism, conformity, and governmental atrocity. That’s why the Republicans want them back.

I guess I haven’t written in here for a bit, and I forgot to mention my flying trip on Thursday. This guy at work is a private pilot and is trying to get his hours up, so he invited me and another guy for a short day-trip in a small Cessna. I’ve been up with him once before, in a big loop around Seattle where I got to look around and see everything. This time, we went to Friday Harbor, which is in the San Juan Islands.

The trip started at Boeing Field, which is a huge airport, but it’s mostly for big cargo jets (UPS, Fedex, etc), corporate learjets, Boeing test planes, and private planes. You can’t catch a United flight to Chicago from here, just like you can’t land your Piper Cub at SeaTac (well, I guess you could, but it would cost a lot.) Me and Chris stood on the tarmac while Jon checked out the plane. I saw a Virgin airways jet take off about 100 yards away from me, which was an awesome sight - I thought it was going to rip all of the bones right of my body as it left. It’s cool to see all of the planes there - some rental businesses have rows and rows of identaical Cessnas tied down like soldiers in formation, and the next lot over, you’d see all of a TV station’s news choppers. On the other side, a big DC-10 getting loaded up would sit there, and a Boeing test 747 would be across the way, maybe getting worked on to try out some new electrical fix or something. It’s a very odd and disparate situation.

The plane checked out, and we had to pull it to the taxiway, which is sort of funny. The plane weighs about the same as my Rabbit, and even with 40 gallons of fuel and 3 adults, it probably weighs less than the average bone-dry and empty sedan. The interior of the plane is about the same size as the Rabbit, but it has much better seats which make it a bit roomier. For the flight up, I took the back seat and gave Chris shotgun, and we agreed to switch on the way home. I had my camcorder with me, and wanted to get some good shots of the Seattle approach.

We all piled in, and Jon went through the last of the checklists before firing up the engine. I learned on my last trip that I’d never be able to fly a plane - there’s so much to remember and do. There’s the checklists, and the gauges, and the air traffic control stuff - I’d forget something and crash into a schoolyard full of kids or something. But Jon seems to be pretty good at it, and talked to the tower and got us all ready to go. While we waited, I saw a biplane land - it was red and looked exactly like the Red Baron’s plane, with open cockpits and everything.

Then it was our turn. We hurtled down the runway into the air very fast - it’s nothing like being in a 737 where they have to shuttle down thousands of feet of runway before they slowly rise. The Cessna bobbed right into the air, and reminded you of the tradeoff of such a small plane - it really shimmeys all over the place on takeoff. Maybe it was because I was in the back and had more of a fishtail effect, though. I had the camcorder out (you can use electronic devices during takeoff in this plane) and got the whole thing on tape, the skidmarked concrete falling away from us, and the surrounding Seattle turning into a model train diorama. I only wished I could’ve captured the headset audio onto tape - we all wore headsets with microphones so we could hear each other talk over the prop noise, and this also piped in the air traffic controllers and other planes. I haven’t watched my tape yet, but I imagine it’s just got prop noise in the background.

It’s weird and cool to see Seattle at 3000 feet. Our northbound course took is right through downtown and over Elliott bay, and I got a good view of my apartment on the way up. It’s the kind of height that’s damn high, but low enough that you can really see everything below you. I followed the landmarks on the way up - the UW, I-5, Northgate Mall, Fred Meyer in Lynnwood. Pretty soon, I ran out of familiar sights, and we were on our way to Everett. The plane cruised at about 100mph, so it only took a few minutes to get up there. We heard a lot of air traffic chatter, telling people to move to different headings and altitudes, because a group of 4 Navy jets were doing a ceremonial flyby somewhere in the area. I didn’t see them, though.

Pretty soon, we were over the islands and heading west. I had a map and followed along, but didn’t know any of the features on the ground, since I’d never been up there. It was beautiful though - some mist, but it only added to the incredible views of the Cascades and Mt. Baker - it made them more mysterious. I looked below - Chris said he thought he saw a whale, but all I could see were the ferries and the occasional boat. I didn’t film much of this, because I knew it would just look small and unmajestic on tape. But I did enjoy the show.

Before I knew it, we were making our approach in to Friday Harbor. Jon had to circle the plane around in some weird manuvers, and I got the whole thing on tape. There were many boats and ferries below, and we circled in to the airport. The touchdown happened fast, and we taxiied into the transient parking area. This airport was not much more than a single strip and some parking - there was no tower and no other dramatics. We pushed the plane into a spot, and hiked toward town.

The town was one of those very laid-back, touristy places - it reminded me a lot of Seaside, in Oregon, but much smaller and with less traffic. There wasn’t a lot there, but everything had to do with tourists - gift shops, restaurants, bed and breakfast places. And everything was CLEAN, like a Disney attraction. But it was cool, and I hope at some point Marie and I can catch a boat there and spend a weekend in a nice hotel or something. It looks like a good way to forget what’s going on, and it’s only like 100 miles away. We ate at the slowest fish and chips place in the world, but the food was okay and it was nice to just sit by the window and watch the beople go by. After eating, we took the grand tour of the city (i.e. walked around the block) and then headed back to the plane.

I had shotgun for the way back, and got the whole takeoff on film, which was cool. I also got to see some weird islands on the way back, with lots of very eclectic houses sitting on giant plots of land. This one house was built on maybe 25 acres of nothing, and sat on a giant artificial bluff that overlooked a huge manmade kidney-shaped lake. There were lots of light-aqua swimming pools shimmering in the sunlight, too. It made me wish I could’ve bought 50 acres there back in the seventies, so I could now sell half of it and use the money to build a mansion.

The ride back was also pretty quick, and I got more shots of Seattle on the way in. Landing was a little hairier, or at least there was a lot more chatter on the radio. The airport gets busy in the afternoon, and there are wake advisories after those big FedEx 757’s start hurtling in for the afternoon pickup. But we got back, touched down, and I made it back in time to go to work for a little bit. Overall, a very cool trip.

I guess I’ve been babbling for a while - it’s time to either get some cleaning done or leave the house for a bit…

Chinese food, Gary Moore

Wed, 02 Sep 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Eating Chinese food, listening to Gary Moore, and taking a break from laundry and other miscellaneous cleaning. It’s a beautiful evening out, but I can’t really feel the cool breeze from inside my apartment. My stereo just freaked out - it makes this weird popping noise about once a week and then there’s no volume until you power-cycle it, then all’s fine. This time it popped and jumped to max volume, which freaked the shit out of me. Looks like it’s about time to pick up a new receiver. I don’t want to retire this one, because I love it - but it’s been 9 years, and I guess that’s a lot to expect out of a piece of electronics these days.

Marie will be here tomorrow. I have to go to work, but I’ll be on this boat trip all day, so it’s pretty much like Friday for me today. I guess this is the last time I will write in here before the big meeting, and I feel like saying something profound, but all I can think of is what I need to get done before tomorrow. I’m not nervous about meeting her, but I’m very anxious. I don’t even think I need to do all of this cleaning, because I’m sure she won’t really care about the state of my kitchen linoleum or whatever. I think I’m pretty safe with this one. But it feels weird, like I’m on the eve of something big, like when I was sitting in my mom’s kitchen in 1995 with a U-Haul of my shit in the driveway, knowing I’d be rambling across the country in a few hours. It’s an odd sensation. But not bad.

This food sucks. I got over my cold, for the most part, but I think the overdose of vitamin C has turned my tongue into mooncraters or something. I guess that’ll heal up fast enough. I’ve got a lot to do, so I better get to it. Don’t expect any updates until after the holiday weekend. Until then…

visit

Wed, 09 Sep 1998 00:00:00 GMT

What a weekend. It’s hard for me to talk about things, not because they went bad, but because there’s a lot to cover and no matter how much I typed, I wouldn’t do the weekend justice. I also don’t want to seem all sappy and stereotypical about it.

Marie visited. She was even better than I expected. We are in love. I now have an incredible girlfriend. And the only problem is that for now, she lives in New York (but that will soon change). I really think she’s the one, and I’m not worried about the distance. I’ve never met a person who matched me this much, and I love everything about her - waiting a few months for her to relocate won’t be a problem. So that’s the synopsis.

We didn’t do a lot this weekend - at least in terms of the touristy, Labor day weekend stuff you’re “supposed” to do. We spent a lot of time in the apartment, and went to a few places around Seattle, mostly to eat and do some very minor sightseeing. It was still very cool though, spending time with her in person, just watching TV or whatever.

A couple of stupid bad things: I hit someone in the VW. It didn’t do anything to their car, but it bent up my bumper and has me paranoid that my front suspension is going to fall apart or something. The next day, my gas pedal broke while we were in Snoqualmie. I managed to Macgyver it with a piece of shoelace, but it was still a fucked up little adventure. Luckily, these events were minor enough and didn’t offset the otherwise cool time we had together.

I’m trying to get my diet back in order. I just went shopping and bought mostly fresh fruits and vegetables and stuff. I’m trying to quit red meat, fast food, and high-fat items, eat breakfast every day, and stop drinking anything but water and the occasional apple juice at work. The lack of sugar from all of the 7-Up I drink really took a toll on me today - I almost passed out during a meeting I was so tired. But I’m sure it will all balance out eventually.

Speaking of food, I need to finish dinner - I got a late start today. More later.

Godzilla parody

Thu, 10 Sep 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I ate breakfast today. It was a pretty weird experience, even though it was just cereal and grapefruit juice. And for lunch, it’s salad and a bunch of fresh fruit. Maybe if I keep this up, I might shed a couple of pounds. I’m trying to give up red meat, fast food, and most processed sugar. (famous last words).

I am writing a Godzilla parody. I’m thinking of writing a bunch of skit ideas and sending them blind to Conan O’Brien. I’m reading a book about “black” planes and browsing another book about military hardware. (Marie left both here for me - I told you she was the perfect woman for me.) I haven’t gotten back into Summer Rain yet, but maybe I will soon. And figuring out what I should and shouldn’t eat is taking up a lot of my time, but I guess that will cool off after I get used to it. Oh, and I’m messing with the C-64 a lot, but mostly just reading about it - it’s still in the closet, but maybe I’ll drag it out soon.

Nothing else. I am obsessed with Coke Slurpees. I have two obsessions in my life, and that’s one of them. It’s probably temporary - the other’s more permanent, and doesn’t contain caffiene (except when she’s drinking coffee, I guess.) I need to finish my lunch now.

Tracking down a VCS

Thu, 17 Sep 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Still alive. On an agressive schedule with the edits to Summer Rain - I am trying to wrap up the 15 chapters that make up book 2 before Marie shows up on 10/2. It’s a mess, but it’s slowly falling in place - I’ve written about 60,000 words - the first fifteen chapters were like 84,000 words. So I might make it, especially if I don’t sleep this weekend.

I’m listening to Shadowfax - their fourth album, The Dreams of Children. I just bought it tonight, and I think that completes my collection. It’s a shame that Chuck Greenberg, the group’s nucleus, passed away a couple years ago. I really like their stuff, and if there’s one band I listen to the most while writing this book, it’s them. (Chick Corea is second; Pat Metheny might be in third.) Their compilation What Goes Around is pretty much the soundtrack to Summer Rain, partially because it’s something I listened to back in 1992, and every song is imprinted heavily with those memories.

Not a lot is going on otherwise. I’m counting down the days until Marie shows up again (15) but having this self-imposed deadline to beat is really making the time fly. I also have a lot going down at work, so it’s been busy all around, with nothing interesting to talk about. I guess I have been spending some time on www.ebay.com, trying to track down Atari 2600 crap. I just bought a VCS and a bunch of games and I can’t wait until they get here. It was pretty cheap, and I just want to have an old-school, self-contained unit to play with. Games are cheap - usually about a buck each. The video quality is bad, but they don’t make games like they used to - it’s not just a rehash of mortal kombat or mario, there are some real playable titles out there. Plus, with a fifth of vodka and a friend, it can be a really hilarious evening. So if you have a bunch of Atari shit in your closet, let me know and maybe I can give you a few bucks for some of it.

Like I said, nothing else. I better keep writing before Conan. Later.

Atari, Taco Bell

Tue, 29 Sep 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Thought I was dead? I feel the same way sometimes.

I haven’t been writing for a few reasons, mostly apathy. I’ve also been trying to get the next 15 chapters of Summer Rain done before the end of the month, and I work on them during lunch. It doesn’t look like I’ll make it, but I have a lot done now.

Marie is visiting on Friday, for a week. It’s going to be cool and I can’t wait to see her again. All’s well there except for the fact that she doesn’t live in Seattle yet.

I’m very tired. I bought an Atari 2600. I want to go to Taco Bell, except I know it will make me sick. My throat’s a little sore, but I’m taking a bunch of vitamins and gargling salt water at night to keep from getting sicker. I need to clean my apartment, but maybe I won’t because I don’t think there’s anything I could do to scare Marie. I haven’t drank any soda all day.

That’s it for now. Maybe I’ll write more when I’m feeling creative.

indexing hell

Mon, 07 Dec 1998 00:00:00 GMT

This is a quick test to see how things have survived the move. Not everything is hooked up yet. It looks like the time is screwed up - I am entering this in PST and the server’s in EST, so it looks like my entries will perpetually be 3 hours off. Bummer. I’ll be back to write something meaningful after I beat the indexing program over the head a few times and make sure everything works.

12/06/98 23:46

That wasn’t fun. My little indexing program written in C was not that portable - it contained a bunch of hard-coded pathnames for speakeasy, and I had to break out gdb to find out why it wasn’t running after I recompiled it (a missing slash.) This system isn’t as convenient as the old one, but I think I’ll eventually get it running okay.

It sure is weird being at bat again. I have many truly paranoid fears about my audience and people running across my writing, especially since I seem to be leading a dual life right now. But, I’m sure about 3 people are reading this, and it doesn’t even look like my site appears on any of the search engines yet, so I guess I don’t have that much to worry about.

All of a sudden, a million projects have fallen out of the sky. I’ve been spending my odd time getting 34.216.9.77/ up and running, and I wish I could work on it full-time. It looks so threadbare right now, simple HTML everywhere and almost no color or pictures. But it has some good content started, and I hope to whip up some stylesheets and more universal design and navigation for the whole thing when I get motivated.

Summer Rain still continues. I’ve been working on it almost every night, trying to finish the final third. There are some real problems with the dynamics of the last 15 chapters, but I’m slowly chiseling it out. I never did finish the middle third - I got about 85% done. I wanted to move on to something fresh, so I’ll have to go back and get to that later. The book is now over 200,000 words, and it’s going to need at least another 50K words before it’s close to done. I don’t think that will happen in 1998, but it might by next spring. I love working on this book, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s unsaleable. It has been fun and I think my friends will enjoy reading it, but it’s probably going on the shelf after its completion. I needed to get all of the autobigraphical bullshit and first-novel gaffs out of my system, and at least I’m learning a lot from it.

Rumored to Exist still sits on blocks, as does the unnamed time travel book. I probably worked on Rumored since I last wrote in here - actually, I’m sure I did; I had a pretty good run with it before I went to NYC in October/November, and got it “halfway done”. I’m anxious to finish it and unleash it on the (il)literate world, but I’m not motivated to work on it right now. It takes a special sort of highly focused, almost manic work ethic to drill away on that thing, and I’ve been too wiped out lately to do anything with it.

Other stuff - some potential writing and HTML jockeying for Rock Out Censorship; The next Dear Death column and assorted reviews for Metal Curse. Something else, but I forget what. I have a lot of ideas for various web projects, but no muscle to put behind them. And I’m journaling more than ever on paper - pages and pages a day. I got behind this year, and I’m trying to catch up before the end of the year. It’s stupid to push it when I have nothing to write about, but I’m trying to fill my notebook by December 31.

Life has been somewhat miserable lately, which is slowing my productivity. It’s the part of the year where it’s always fucking dark outside, and we’re getting the Noah’s Ark treatment with the rain out there. My car is about ready to fall apart, and has a substandard heating system in it. Driving a 200 pound VW in the 100 mile per hour windstorms isn’t leisurely. Since I think every car trip will be my last, it means I don’t get out much these days. The cabin fever and lack of any daylight reference means I become completely nocturnal on the weekends, and then during the week I am plagued by horrendous insomnia. This destroys me - last week I was going to bed and then waking up at 1 or 2, unable to fall back asleep. That makes the days a zombie death march, and destroys any work I need to do after my day job. I’ve been trying to get on some vitamins and supplements and adjust my schedule a bit, but it’s hard. I wish I had 30 or 40 hours a day to write, but I don’t. I’m learning the gentle art of scheduling, although I wish I could just write when I want.

And Marie isn’t here, and I’m not there. She will be here on Xmas, for a few days, and I will be there, maybe sometime in Feb, athough it isn’t cleared yet. I was in New York for the first week of November, and we had a lot of fun. I finally saw Conan O’Brien’s show live, and also caught a Daily Show taping, among other things. I miss her and I miss her cats. I can’t wait until we are on the same side of the country together. Plans are afoot, but until they are solid, they are top secret.

New computer. Well, mostly - I tore out the motherboard and put in a AMD K6-2-266 with 64MB RAM; I also swapped up to a 6.4GB drive. I went up to the latest version of Slackware as my main boot, and broke down and put in a second boot with NT 3.5.1, just so I could run Office in extreme emergencies. After some minor snafus, it’s all running fine.

Lots of other stuff, but I feel like I’ve been at the computer all day (I have!) and I think I’m going to Safeway or something, just to get out of here. I hope I can update more, but no promises…

Piano, insomnia

Tue, 08 Dec 1998 00:00:00 GMT

When I was in high school, I finished all of my requirements except for one English class halfway through my senior year. Since I decided not to go down the Engineering road, this meant that I was in the middle of a bunch of very difficult and essentially useless classes. I somehow managed to con a guidance counselor to let me drop almost all of my classes and exchange them for a lot of fluff. This was a dream come true for me, since I had a serious case of senioritis. I hated my home situation, I hated my home town, and I was under the impression that when I got the hell out of there and went to college, women would be falling from the sky and I’d be recognized as some kind of cult genius for my advanced abilities.

This meant that my schedule consisted of a pre-calc class and a writing class. I had some kind of computer III course, but the teacher gave me all of the assignments in the first week, and I handed them back complete the next day. That hour of the day was spent writing a sport scheduling program, and trying to beat whatever was the hot new chess program for the Apple II back in 1989. My mechanical drawing III class was also humorous, because I was the only student. All of the advanced drafting classes met at the same time, and it was a big rumble of gossip, goofing off, and inside jokes. We did some CAD work, but we did a lot more goading and screwing around. I also got two study halls; I spent one reading every fucking book in the library from A to Z, and the other one working in the school theatre, painting scenery and hanging lights.

But the cool addition to my schedule was piano class. The school just started teaching this, and I was lucky to sneak in, since there were only about a dozen seats. I always wanted to learn to play a musical instrument, and this class started at the beginning. Everyone sat at their own digital keyboard with headphones and learned how to read music, play chords, and poke away at various five-finger melodies in C. It was a small class, so the teacher worked with us a lot and we got to practive every day. I even dumped a hundred dollars on a cheap Casio for home so I could practice more.

I got up to speed pretty fast, and once we got to the point where both of our hands were doing different things, we got to pick music out of a few beginner’s fake books and work on different stuff of our own. One of my big projects was hammering out a watered down rendition of Beethoven’s 9th, rewritten for the beginner who has never left C. I’d never heard the real thing - the closest I got to classical music back then was Cliff Burton’s bass solo on the first Metallica album. But I spent a lot of time at it, and got it to a recognizable state. Ten years later, I think I could at least play the first few notes of it if I was in a piano store and wanted to piss off the salesman.

The anticlimax to this whole story is that I was listening to Ludwig Von and his ninth this morning. It wasn’t anything special, just a German knock-off that came in a super-duper-every-classical-recording-ever boxed set. But it was all-digital, and sounded tight. And within the symphony performance were the same notes I’d hammered out on that Casio all those years before. And it made me think of that final semester, probably my best of those 13 years of school, where I had fun and got ready to leave for the first time. It’s corny, but these are the kind of weird tricks my mind plays.

I slept last night. It’s more of an art than a skill to me. I could sleep all day, every day, especially if it’s cold like today. It’s only about 50 outside, but with the gloom and the clouds and the darkness, it’s nice to envelop myself in the covers and stay there, thinking and waiting for sleep. I can tell when I’m about to fall asleep, because my internal monologue becomes irrational and disjointed. I start thinking about multiplication tariffs and drag-and-drop garden plants and secret, transdimensional tunnels and classes I need to study for even though I graduated from college almost four years ago. It’s a nice feeling of confusion, though, and it’s why this insomnia bothers me so much. The self-conversation doesn’t slow - it becomes more of a manic frenzy as I keep looking at the clock. I try to put myself elsewhere and imagine that I’m sleeping somewhere else, like the bridge of the International Space Station, or at Marie’s, with her next to me, Henrey sleeping on my feet, and Mungo sitting on my head or trying to stand on my chest. Eventually I get to sleep, but it’s satisfying when it takes no effort, and the dreams are decent.

I’ve had a lot of weird dreams lately, probably related to the insomnia. The other day, my sister was barbequeing with David Letterman, and instead of his usual schtick, he was talking very solemly and offering her all of this advice and inspiration. They both graduated from Ball State - maybe that was it. I also had a dream that I somehow convinced a bunch of people that I held the patent for fluorescent lights, but when I tried to use it as a physics project, I got busted. Last night I was with my friend Virginia in a national forest that had been turned into a large, refrigerated greenhouse. Elevators and tram cars snaked through miles of tulips and carnations. We were talking about filming some kind of video where various trucks filled with colored chalk would dump the powder on a giant salt flat, weaving and manuvering in some choreographed fashion while a camera truck drove in front of them, and Joe Satriani played guitar. The thing is that these dreams are far more detailed than I can now remember, and I wish I could write all of this stuff down when I woke up.

Lunch is almost over, and I need to find a bunch of art for my January 20 page. I better split.

don't have a theme

Wed, 09 Dec 1998 00:00:00 GMT

It’s one of those days when I don’t have a theme to start with. I’m sitting in my office, eating red bean and rice soup, which is welcome on a Seattle winter day. I’m sure that ten years from now, eating hot soup on a cold day will remind me of moments like right now, just like it currently takes me back to a snow-covered Bloomington, where the streets were rivers of slush and it was just cold enough to keep the snow on the ground. I don’t like the weather we have here, but I don’t miss the snow.

I’m listening to Slayer. More specifically, the soundtrack to River’s Edge. I finally found a copy after years of searching - I think it went out of print about 15 minutes after it was released. I found a copy during my freshman year of college, but stupidly sold or traded it at some point. The disc is an odd combination, with a bunch of old Slayer songs, along with Fates Warning, Agent Orange, and Hallows Eve. I only vaguely remember a Slayer song or two in the movie, but I think I must’ve had the soundtrack on tape back in high school, when the film came out. Either way, it’s great to hear the songs again.

Last night was my first insomnia-free weeknight in a while. I hope I’ve broken myself of the problem. I’m trying to go cold-turkey on caffeine, which should help. I’ve been having weird headaches and some real highs and lows, and I need to even that out.

Today’s not a great journal day, so I think I’ll split.

dream journals, old connections

Thu, 10 Dec 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Sunday night, as I was falling asleep, I wrote an entire journal entry in my head, but I didn’t mention any of it in Monday’s entry, because I got sidetracked. (Writing things just before bed isn’t that unusual for me, but the same practice happens more frequently when I am asleep, and most of all when I am in the shower. I come up with all of my good ideas in the shower, which is a reason I’ve been afraid to move to another apartment for 4 years.) Let me see if I can recap the idea.

On Sunday, I called one of my friends in Indiana (who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent, but it’s obvious to those who know me) and in the course of our long and interesting discussion, a name came up that I hadn’t heard in a while. It was a girl that I’d hung out with five years ago, who now worked with my friend. That’s not too strange, considering how incestuous a social community Bloomington really is. There were many social circles, but they all collided in so many strange ways that talking about any person from our old gang was usually like talking about how virtually any rock musician is somehow related to one of Frank Zappa’s touring or recording bands. And in the usual fashion of our long and winding (yet very interesting) conversations, I started to tell my friend the story about how I knew this girl way back when.

It’s probably a boring story if I just dumped out the facts - girl x emailed me way back in the beginning of 1994, I spent a few months chasing her even though she wasn’t interested in me, she spent a brief period of time enamored in me, even though I had bigger fish to fry. She was cute, and fun to be with, but had some major issues. And hey - so did I; this was only a few months after Tanya dumped me. The spring of 1994 was a confusing time, and telling this story made me think about all of the other things going on back then.

The basic mood of the day could best be summarized by going to your local record store and shoplifting a copy of the Rollins Band CD Weight. It was the CD of the week for about three months back then, and it’s still not a bad little opus. If you put the last three songs on repeat, that would give you a feel for my life back then. The first song would be this eerie, quiet, art-rock-esque number with Rollins quietly talking about despair. Then it explodes into the second song, which is a speedier, pissed-off-Rollins thing, and the last spng is a more laid back song that talks about how you only get one chance so you better not fuck it up/make the most of yourself kindof rap. If you go get that album, listen to it 400 times, and then listen to the rest of the story, it will help, but I’m not going to force you or anything.

So I liked this girl, and we had a connection going, although it was more playful and childlike than anything else. We shared lots of inside jokes and emailed a lot and spent tons of time on the VAX phone talking. But I could never make the transition to real life. And then summer happened, and when she got back, I found out she got married to some dork she just met so she could get financial aid. End of story.

This is another chapter in the seven volume set entitled “Konrath’s lost and missed opportunities”, which, as many of you know, is also the basis of many of my best short stories. In fact, my last two good stories are about missed opportunities from the same timeframe, the beginning of 1994. At the time, I just wanted to get past it. And now, although I’m not saying I would trade my current situation for anything, I often think about those days. But who couldn’t? My writing career was only months old and beginning to grow, I lived in a pretty kick-ass apartment, I was in good shape, and even though I was busy 14 hours a day, I had a certain freedom that you don’t find in a 9 to 5. I’m 100% sure that in a few years, I’ll be looking back to 1996 as my prime, even though I spent half of the year wanting to drink a gallon of Drano and get it over with. I don’t think time heals all wonds - it distorts them.

Nothing else to report except that I actually slept 8 hours last night with no interruptions. I didn’t have as many odd dreams, but I did find my first car, the Camaro, in Edwardsburg, Michigan. I bought it back from the current owner. Then I met at a Long John Silver in Bloomington with my first girlfriend and the guy who split us up (they later married and then split, so I don’t know why they were together again.) I also had a dream where someone mentioned planting an autographed picture of Nixon and a bag of hash on somebody, but I don’t remember the context.

That’s all…

Skipping school

Fri, 11 Dec 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I only skipped school twice in high school. (I think I only went to class twice in college.)

The first: I think this was in the fall of my senior year, but I’m not sure. I was driving in to school, and a bunch of fire trucks and emergency vehicles were blocking off everything. Firemen were telling us to turn around and go home because there was a bomb threat. What they meant is that we should come back in a few minutes and go about the regular school day. What that meant to me is to get the fuck out of there and do some kind of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off routine. I drove to South Bend, which was our closest mecca away from Elkhart. I went to University Park Mall, which wasn’t open yet, and slept in my car for a few hours. I bought the then-new Joe Satriani EP, walked around downtown South Bend, and then came back to school because I had to work at the theatre that night. Not much rebellion.

The second: I got a speeding ticket one night for going something like 87 in a 35. This meant a mandatory court date, and the kind officer summoned me to appear before a judge on a Friday morning. I should probably mention that the attendance office was run by someone who graduated magna cum laude from the Nazi school of administration. Every parent was called when a kind was gone. Attendance was taken every hour. The FBI crime lab was used to compare handwriting samples from sick notes. I could think of ways to break out of prison, but cutting class was another story. But going to court was a legit excuse. And I figured I would be in a waiting room all day until I got my turn. So I told the attendance office that I’d be gone all day, and they bought it.

I drove to court in South Bend, and within minutes, I was sitting there with the public defender guy and the judge in an insane plea-bargain arrangement, where I must’ve said the word “sir” 900 times in 3 minutes. I thought I was going to lose my license, and the judge made me aware that I could. Then he reduced the charge to 9MPH over the limit, and told me to pay my fine and get the fuck out of there. I budgeted and saved several hundred dollars for a reckless driving fine, but 7 minutes and $70 later, I was free. It was 10:11am, I had an excuse saying I was in court all day, and I had a bunch of money to blow.

I spent most of the day driving around South Bend, which, as I mentioned, was our mecca back in high school. I’m not saying it’s an incredible city (there are subway stations in New York that are bigger than South Bend) but it wasn’t Elkhart, and there were some unique stores and places to eat. There was also Notre Dame, and I was convinced as a high school student that there were dorms full of half-naked nymphomaniacs just waiting for an inexperienced male with a high ACT score. I guess I never thought that one through - Notre Dame is a religious school. Anyway, I spent the whole day gone and I got away with it.

Now, you ask, why the hell am I thinking about this? A new Rush live album has come out, and the last one came out around the time that the second hooky incident took place. This was just after my 18th birthday (1/20/89), a time when I knew I was going to IU, and I was just starting to step out of my shell for the first time. I was having my first disastrous experiments with dating, I didn’t have a curfew anymore, and the end of my high school career was in sight. Not only that, but I wasn’t taking any real classes, so I just had to coast for a few more months. It was one of the first times in my life I had a shred of self-confidence. The whole thing, even though I was getting ready to fuck up in so many ways before I even got out of the gate, is a very memorable era.

As for this new Rush album, I have mixed opinions. It’s not bad musically. I hate the packaging - it’s in one of those cardboard slip-case things that inevitably get worn and torn. I like that they included a third CD with a 20-year old show from the Hammersmith Odeon, and it includes a very eclectic playlist with a lot of songs they don’t play live anymore, at least not in full. (I disclaim that by saying I didn;t see them in 97 when they played two full sets, so maybe they do now.) Anyway, it’s both odd and great to have songs like Xanadu, Cygnus X-1, and Cinderella Man on a live disc.

I’ve been typing and not eating, and now my food’s cold. I better get my lunch finished.

New CD club bounty

Sat, 12 Dec 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been listening to the G3 live album all day, and I’ve realized that I really need to see Steve Vai live again. His albums are incredible, but his live guitar is mind-boggling. Everything is twice as complex and four times as fast. And it’s all incredibly exact. He only has three tracks on the CD, but the stuff he did at G3 really blew me away. I went on November 8, 1996 at sat in about the 10th row. I think his sound is perfectly engineered for people in the first few rows who are wearing earplugs. The low end bass sounded completely alien - it was totally undistorted, but felt like it was ripping through my chest and rumbling my bones. And he was all over the place, holding his guitar to the side, high, low, above his head, not even looking at it and playing things inhumanly fast yet hitting every note perfectly. The way he bent notes, wrapped them up and down and used the whammy at the same time, it felt like he was talking to me telepathically, through his guitar. His face would like like he was in a conversation, but the sound wasn’t coming from his mouth. Sure, Satriani was good both times I saw him, but Vai - it must’ve felt like this when people saw Hendrix for the first time 30 years ago. I wish he’d come out with a 3-CD live album for his last tour. He’s allegedly working on some huge 8-CD boxed set, so maybe it will have some cool stuff.

I got a bunch of CDs yesterday. Well, 7 - new CD club. I’m trying to clear out their AC/DC and Ozzy back-catalog. I’m about 18 CDs short of 500, which was my goal for the year. My next goal is to find a place to put all of them, since they are currently stacked on top of every piece of A/V gear I own.

I’m not in the journaling mood today. I’m going to go eat my sandwich.

12/11/98 20:45

I guess it’s a day to talk about what’s in the CD player. Now it’s Rush again, and I’m listening to all of these old Rush songs that remind me of spending an entire summer on a ten-speed bike, or in the basement putting together model airplanes. It’s really amazing how much scope my career with Rush really covers. One summer, I’m listening to the brand-spanking-new Grace Under Pressure and mowing lawns to save up for a drum set, and only a couple albums later, I’m listening to Presto in my walkman as I trod around the Indiana University campus. It’s pretty eerie when you think about it.

For the longest time, I thought that the last line of Rush’s song “The Trees” was “And the trees were all kept equal by magic acts and song.” It’s really “hatchet, axe, and saw.” And there’s still this Dokken song where I swear the guy is saying “your cufflinks are gold” but I know it has to be something else. Speaking of Dokken, I watched almost all of one of those greatest hits of the 80’s infomercials and almost ordered all 125 dollars’ worth of CDs. Several observations: First, the girl doing the commercial is the model who was in the Cherry Pie video. She is allegedly two years older than me, which is about right. So, while I was mixing paint at Monkey Wards for $3.50 an hour, she was only two years older and probably driving a pink Ferrari or something. Also, have you noticed the large number of vaguely metal-based songs that were popular back then? I don’t even remember that much of a bias, even from the middle of Indiana, but I guess it was true. About every third time I talk to Ray, we have a huge disussion about this. Right now, part of the country’s default musical taste is R&B-type stuff, and the rest is “alternative”, meaning almost nobody listens to metal anymore. Ray wouldn’t listen to Poison if they were the equivalent of, say, Green Day, but it would mean a lot of people would be willing to make the transition from Poison to Motley Crue to Metallica to Motorhead to Rotting Christ. Somebody listening to the Backstreet Boys isn’t going to follow the same path.

I don’t care too much, since I don’t listen to the radio much, and selling metal CDs is not my livelihood. But I’ve noticed that I don’t have a default preference for music anymore. I liked it back in high school when I was into bands like Anthrax and Megadeth, and there were tons of other similar bands. I’d buy a tape or two every week, and when I got to the store, the people there would point me to new stuff or cool bands. I didn’t make much money back then and couldn’t afford CD binges like now, so my biggest problem was that there were hundreds of new things I wanted, and I could only buy a few a month. Now I seem to drift, and I buy a lot of old stuff. I feel somewhat cheated when buying something old - it’s like watching an old Seinfeld rerun vs. going to see a new, really good movie. The Seinfeld rerun is great, but there’s a certain something in seeing something new. Sometimes I wish I was into rap or techno or jazz or punk or industrial just so I could go to the store and say “I’m into this scene” and have the guy behind the counter hand me some new stuff that I’d like. But now I pick through the racks and come up with some really disjointed selections.

I have almost 500 CDs, but sometimes spend 15 minutes trying to find something to listen to. Is that pathetic?

rain, no caffeine

Tue, 15 Dec 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I’m tired today. And I’m trying to stay off caffeine, which is a bad combination. Last night, when I was falling asleep, I came up with an entirely new idea for a book, and even outlined most of it in my head. I barely remember it - it’s like a strange dream sequence, with events spinning and changing in my head for no reason. I’d like to write a whole book like that, progressing like a dream instead of a linear story. I’ll add it to my list of stuff I want to do when I get the time.

It rained continually this weekend, like I was in some kind of southeast asian monsoon or something. Even worse, it was cold, and the rain was heavy. This whole description sounds very cliche, but the whole thing was demoralizing. Today, the sun is almost out and it looks okay, but it will be darker than midnight by four o’clock, and it will probably start raining before I drive home. Driving is the worst - it took me an hour to make the ten minute drive home from the mall on Saturday. When it rains, the roads fill with people and then slow to a crawl. I-5 becomes a parking lot of people, and there are never any good, alternate routes. Staying inside all weekend is the only option.

Despite the fact that I only left the house three times all weekend, I didn’t get a lot done writing-wise. I did put in more than a few hours of work, but I’m starting to get bored of Summer Rain. I don’t want to keep plodding through chapters like I do now, but I don’t have the focus or attention span to start working on Rumored again. I figure if I continue at my current rate, I will be more or less done with this draft by the end of January.

I got the new Dream Theater live album. It’s 2 CDs and both of them are completely full of stuff, which is cool. I’m sick of buying a 2 CD set and the second one has like 20 minutes of stuff on it. I saw Dream Theater on this tour, although I didn’t have their newest album with I saw them, so I didn’t know what to expect of the new stuff. I’ve since bought Falling Into Infinity and I love it, so hearing the stuff live is incredible. I’ve been a Dream Theater fan since before their first album - a guy at a record store in Elkhart gave me the advance tape, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

I’ve got a sandwich to eat, so I better split.

9 CDs away from 500

Wed, 16 Dec 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been listening to this new live Dream Theater CD so much, I want to go out and buy a guitar or a drum set or something. But I know I’ll end up spending $400 on a guitar and within a week I’ll realize I don’t have the persistence to learn how to play the damn thing, and then I’ll sell it for $200. So I’d rather just cut to the chase and spend the $200 on CDs tonight.

(BTW, after two orders show up on my doorstep, I will only be 9 CDs away from 500. And I have enough silver certificates to get a free one tonight. And if I shop around, that could be a free double album. So I might sneak in by my self-imposed 12/31 deadline.)

I should mention that there is a new Andrew Dice Clay website at www.dicemanrules.com. Not much there yet, but you can order his latest 2-CD set and get a bonus CD. I think it is a mail-order only thing - he probably lost his record deal when American went under and got bought out by Sony. Clay was on Politically Incorrect the other night, and made me realize two things: he is a genius and Kennedy is an idiot.

Yesterday was a wash for any productive work. I tried to stay awake long enough to get some writing done, but I fell asleep for a couple of hours and awoke to find that my heater had been on full blast the whole time, and the apartment felt like a pottery kiln. I had to open all the windows to get it back to a reasonable temperature, and I spent the rest of the evening babbling in a half-daze.

I did do some reading - I’m trying to get through this Thomas Pynchon book of short stories. He’s very critical of his early work, and that helps me - it’s cool to see the mistakes that a good writer did early in their career. I’m on this big kick about trying to reinvent my writing style. I know that’a big cop-out, but I have some ideas floating around and once I get my shit together, I’ll start with some smaller practice stories or something.

I have to go eat now.

hit the 500 CD mark

Thu, 17 Dec 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Last night I unofficially hit the 500 CD mark. I say unofficially because I have two pending orders on the way (now 3) and they will put me over the mark. Last night was a huge shopping night, and I got some great stuff. I finished my collection of easily-attainable Dream Theater albums, meaning I have to start hitting the bootleggers and/or track down all of their various import singles.

Side note: Dream Theater’s drummer collects bootlegs - of his own band. And when you’re talking about a progrock band so exact with their sound, and a listening demographic of a bunch of people with cool toys like portable DAT players, that means a lot of bootlegs.

I need to cut this short today, because I have a meeting right after lunch, and I need to get about a million other things done first.

The smell of a VW

Tue, 22 Dec 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I wish I could describe the way a VW Rabbit smells. I was thinking about this last night, while writing the book. One time I was watching an episode of Wings (the airplane show, not the sitcom) or some other Discover channel documentary on the B-52 and one of the pilots mentioned that all of the planes had a distinct smell, of old wiring, new electronics, jet fuel, spilled Cokes, and everything else. You’d think any military hardware would be sterile inside, but it’s usually much worse than an old car. My old VW is about the same vintage as a MiG-25, and similar in many ways - the silver color, the boxy construction, the minimalist instruments and controls, and the mix of comfort and discomfort that makes it a unique piece of machinery. You can reach every piece of the engine on a VW and easily strip the whole thing apart with five wrenches, but there’s no good place to rest your left foot when it’s off the clutch. The MiG-25 can fly over Mach 3 and high enough so you can see the curve of the earth, but it uses only vacuum tubes in its circuitry, and it’s far too easy to push an engine to failure.

The smell - I think of this because I spent so much time in my car this weekend, stuck in traffic. It snowed about 4 microns on Saturday, which meant every fucking soccer mom and Microsoft yuppie with a 4x4 SUV ended up in a ditch or shutting down a floating bridge because they thought they paid $60,000 so they could drive and brake at highway speeds on glare ice. Anyway, this meant the car got nice and toasty inside, and while I was strapped into my minimalist little seat in my aluminum-silver cockpit, the odor of a 20 year old VW made me think of my history with these little cars.

First, the West Germans made great little cars that were fun to drive and still got 30 or 40 MPG, but they had horrible wiring systems. My current VW has about 10 wiring problems, ranging from an intermittent rear defogger to no horn or reverse gear lights. For a while, my front turn signals wouldn’t blink when the headlights were on, and then they miraculously healed. Same with the dome light, although it comes and goes. On my last VW, all of the dash warning lights would turn on when it was raining, and on the one before, a buzzer would sound if it got too wet out. The substandard wiring gave the car one of its smells - a mix of old rubber insulation and ozone that increased when the temp went up. This mixed with the paper and cardboard used under the dash, which gives off the aroma of old books - not the paper and dust mite smell, but the thin cardboard cover of a 1960’s owner’s manual. All of this mixes with the smell of a rich gas engine, or the unique odor of the thin, black dust given off by a tiny diesel powerplant. Add the slight smell of oil and an aging plastic dashboard, and you start to get the idea.

It’s odd how unique the VW aroma is, yet how standard it is among the make. A couple of years ago, I was in Snoqualmie at a company picnic and saw two Rabbits that had been tricked out for some kind of racing - they had no doors, one seat, some NASCAR-esque netting, and so forth. I looked at the cars for a while, feeling some nostalgia for my old VW. When I climbed in, it smelled just like the interior of my old VW. And it’s not like what my old Camaro smelled like, the rich smell of 8 cylinders rumbling, with Armor-All, carpet cleaner and Turtle Wax all over the interior.

Maybe I’m nuts - I have a sensitive nose, but I can’t describe smell that good. It reminds me of different times, eras. When I spray Lysol, it reminds me of the summer of 1992, when I used to spray the shit constantly in my tiny roominghouse apartment on Mitchell Street. Every cologne I own is a time machine going back to when I first started using it - same with every shampoo, cleaning product, and candle. If I knew anything at all about differentiating this stuff verbally, I could probably get a job designing perfumes or something. Maybe not…

Speaking of time machines, I am vageuly starting to study them a bit more, so maybe I will go from Summer Rain tight into working on the third book again. I haven’t written in here all weekend, but I spent a lot of time reorganizing and moving around stuff in Summer Rain’s third book so it fell into a logical order. I think I had about 7 or 8 weekends in August, and that didn’t work out. The shuffle went without a major hitch, but now I’m almost out of energy to continue with it. I think I’ll plow away until Marie gets here in 4 days, and then start something else after she leaves - maybe Rumored, maybe the yet-unnamed time travel book.

I better go. It’s snowing again and I’m worried about making it home. The Rabbit drives excellent on the ice - it’s such a light car, and front wheel drive. The Rabbit’s weight is distributed just right so when your wheels don’t let you turn anymore, you can swing the weight of the car around and aim it almost perfectly. But the fucking idiots out there are probably causing 200 car pileups on the freeway, and if my 3000 pound Rabbit got hit by a 9000 pound Suburban that didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, well, you could guess who wouldn’t be updating his journal for a while.

Nintendo 64

Thu, 24 Dec 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Last night, I bought a Nintendo-64, a second controller, Diddy Kong Racing, and the South Park game. It’s a present for Marie, sort of like when Homer got Marge a bowling ball. No, really, she used to have one, and I thought it would be fun. I already told her about it, so I’m not outing myself by posting this. Of course, I set all of the stuff up last night, and stayed up way too late playing it.

First impressions: I’ve spent almost zero time with the Playstation or N64, so I was going into this as a complete novice. First, I like the way the console looks - it reminds me of a piece of Sun hardware, or maybe an SGI. It’s also very simple, with few switches, buttons, or jacks. I’m fortunate in that my video/audio setup at home is very generous in facilitating the video/audio setups. People with older TVs would probably have much more trouble dealing with the composite video out and stereo audio out. The controllers are a bit weird, and I still get screwed up on how to hold them and use the 90,000 assorted buttons. They are pretty comfortable after a while, though.

I first started with the South Park game. I expected more realism than other 8 and 16 bit games, but this totally blew me away. It has the whole introduction to the show, and the graphics look almost exactly like the TV show. Although you can tell the shapes are computer generated, it is not blocky or pixelated at all - it is very smooth and shadowed correctly, and looks truly amazing for something on a TV. The sound is even better - it’s stereo, and I ran it through my receiver, which added even more to the effect.

The South Park game is fun - you play one of the four kids, and then you meet up with the other 3 and do various things in the town, trying to finish each level. I haven’t played games that much, and I usually play very specific ones, so I was getting my ass kicked over and over. It is funny to hear Cartman die - all of the characters talk, and even swear (it is beeped out, mostly). But I wanted to see the whole game. So, I got on dejanews, did a search, and found a page of cheat codes. The codenames are funny, and let you enable different characters and other stuff. I think ASSMAN gives you invulterability. If you have the game and are trying to find the codes, email me and I will send them to you. I found a code that turned on everything, and started kicking ass. There’s one weapon which is a terrance and phillip doll, which is like a grenade of flatulence. You can throw a whole bunch of them and leave a path of deadly landmines which produce giant mushroom clouds of green gas. I also had a lot of fun with the cow launcher, and the chicken sniper weapon. At the start of each round, there is a little cartoon that tells you your mission, usually with Chef talking to the kids. It’s very cool - I need to get in there and start going through all of the levels.

I played Diddy Kong Racing a few times, although I spent so much time on South Park that I couldn’t do much more than run a few races. It’s very cool, the graphics look like a Disney cartoon and the sounds are very cute. If I had a kid, I would get them a N-64 just because so many of the games are like this. I couldn’t figure out the controls, but I will mess with it a bit more. Marie likes the game a lot, so we will play it more when she gets here.

Writing, of course, is at a dead stop. Maybe tonight I’ll get a few lines done, but now I need to clean the house and shop for Marie’s visit. I think my sleep schedule is about up to date now, so that’s cool. I also go to the dentist in a couple of hours, and find out how much heavy construction they’ll be doing over the next few months.

I found an odd page on the technology of Star Wars at http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~saxton/starwars/

xmas

Sun, 27 Dec 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I hope you survived this year’s day of Christian celebration without too much hair-pulling.

It wasn’t too bad of a day for me. I woke up “early” (8am) and drove to SeaTac airport to pick up Marie. The snow and ice turned into rain and fog by xmas morning, but the roads were completely empty, making it the easiest drive to the airport I’ve ever encountered, even easier than a 3am on Sunday night drive I had to do once. Parking was really bad, though, and I heard that a water main broke on the rental car level, creating a small lake down there. I got there an hour early, which turned into an hour and a half early because of delays. I forgot my gameboy, and didn’t have anything else to do, so I sat down in a crappy airport chair and fell asleep sitting up for almost an hour. I wish I could do that all the time.

So Marie got here, and it’s good to have her here again. We exchanged gifts and I got the Beat Generation CD set and the Burroughs set from Giorno poetry systems, and a ton of cool books. We spent the rest of the dark and rainy day around the house, playing with the new Nintendo and eventually getting to the IHOP for dinner.

We’re getting ready to leave and do some post-xmas shopping for Nintendo games, so I’ve got to find my teargas and rubber bullets for the uzi to make the trip to the mall a little more pleasant. Later.

not awake today

Wed, 30 Dec 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I’m really not awake today. I had to drop off Marie at the airport for a 7:20 flight, which involved waking up at 5:30, which is about 5 hours earlier than my typical schedule. She also had to deal with a bunch of shit from Continental, which has this problem with forgetting about e-ticket bookings. I just spent too much of my time writing them a pissy email, and now I need to stop thinking about it.

It was nice to have Marie here, although it wasn’t nearly enough time, and it was hellish here during her whole stay. Now she knows I’m not kidding about the permanently gray skies, pissing rain, and high winds that pummel the building. Seattle is a very beautiful city, for about 15 minutes a year. Anyway, we didn’t do much of interest or get out too much, based on the traffic and weather. I wanted to go to a movie, but there’s such a poor crop of films out there this holiday. If I had free passes to go to a movie, I don’t think I could pick one. We rented a few movies though, and I got to see Fear and Loathing again. I might watch it again - I have the tapes until Friday. It’s a great film, and usually gets me going about writing and living. In a world where all of the inspirational films are about sports and overcoming odds and whatever, it’s nice to see something new.

Now that the holidays are over, I need to get back to writing as much as possible. I’m still trying to figure out which book to work on, and I don’t think I’ll know, even when I’ve got pieces and chapters on the screen in front of me. I might end up going back and forth a bit. I think that the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron game for the Nintendo might slow down my writing output, at least until I finish all of the levels.

Lunch is over. More later.

Welcome to the new year

Sat, 02 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the new year. I need to write something here, and then go back and see if it breaks my indexing program. I’ll write more in a bit.

01/01/99 05:31

That took major brain surgery, but my war-torn indexing program now works for more than two years, and might even be a step closer to being Y2K compliant. I have no respect for people who meticulously hand-code pretty calenders for their journal pages. If you think you’re hot shit, try automating everything with a nice, messy C program. Machine-generated HTML is where it’s at, and I’m not talking FrontPage.

I wanted to write a bunch on Rumored tonight, but ended up playing the Star Wars game on the Nintendo. I found cheat codes that let you fly a TIE interceptor, or the Millenium Falcon. The TIE kicks ass - you can really weave around, and it’s great to be able to follow other TIE fighters through tight manuvers. There are many times in this one level where I am 3:1 against TIEs in an A-wing and during a quick approach, I’m lucky to randomly pick off one. In the TIE, I can stay on them like stink on shit and quickly destroy all three without thinking. The only bad thing is that the TIE has no shields, and no missiles. It’s a poor weapon for attack runs on ground equipment. The Falcon, on the other hand, kicks complete ass. It manuvers tight, turning on its side in corners. It has some heavy shields, and can take some serious fire. And, it’s weapons systems aren’t aimed with the craft - the guns swivel on turrets, and there are proton torpedos that home in automatically - you just get the target in your sights for a second, and a targeting circle will follow the ship while you move off in a different direction. I’ve been stuck on a level all week, and with the Falcon, I was able to completely pummel everything and finish. Unfortunately, you can’t use it on all of the levels - I’m now stuck on a level where you have to use the snowspeeder. The snowspeeder is really odd to fly - the weapons suck, and you can’t loop or dive too much, because it hovers. You can slam on either brake and turn on a dime, which is cool, but it usually runs me into a building. On this level, you are in these shitty little hovercraft, trying to down TIE bombers, which is like fighting an M1 abrams tank with a Schwinn bike and a ball-peen hammer. And at the end of the level, you have to do the little harpoon-cable-on-the-AT-AT’s-legs trick, which I’ve found impossible with the Nintendo controller. Oh well, maybe I’ll find another cheat.

So yeah, no writing. A little, but not much. I flipped through the channels a bit at 12, and luckily haven’t heard that fucking Prince song. Leno was pre-empted, which meant Conan was either late or gone, since Leno was in his spot.

Not much else. I should get back to work.

new driver's license

Mon, 04 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

The midwest is buried under 16 feet of snow, and the sun was out here today. Vindication.

I got a new driver’s license today. I tried to look as scary as possible for the photo, but it’s not great. I didn’t shave for a week, and wore a Cianide shirt. Unlike Indiana, they let me keep the old license (after they punched a hole in it.)

My friend Suzanne was here today. She’s been in Olympia since xmas, but her and her guy-friend Matt came up here tonight. We went to Denny’s, did a bunch of driving around, and stopped by my work for the tour. I’ve known Suzanne since 1994. She’s a manager at the Borders in Bloomington and I usually see her when I’m in town, and hassle her about stuff in the store or whatever. The first time I visited Bton after my departure, she went with me to White Castle. I went to the counter and told the girl “I came all the way from Seattle to eat here.” She said “I’m sorry.”

I wanted to write more, but I’m so tired. I read through all of Rumored to Exist tonight, and made some comments. I also read through all of my notes, and got all ready to start writing new stuff. But I’m not awake enough to do any work. (I am listening to the Dream Theater album entitled Awake, though.) My mom called me at 9:30 this morning, and I was dumb enough to pick up. And no naps, either. Maybe I will write more tomorrow.

lunch, year

Tue, 05 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I actually brought my lunch today. I’ve been going to the deli downstairs every day, but that costs money and I’m gaining weight because of it. Plus, I’m moving offices at the end of the week, and the new place doesn’t have a deli downstairs. So, I need to get used to lunchmeat and snak-paks again.

I’ve been having a minor freakout about the year. It isn’t because Prince sang about it in that stupid song, but because 1989 was ten years ago. So many key things happened in that year, from college to women to psychiatry to everything else. It was when I left for school, learned to play piano, bought my first bass, got my first real credit card, and started taking Prozac. And the fact that I can now say “Ten years ago, I…” is making my usual nostalgia trips even more chaotic.

On a similar topic, I was flipping through channels last night, and saw a “Hey, remember the 90’s?” CD for sale. I almost called the 800 number to yell “Hey, IT IS THE FUCKING NINETIES!!!!” at somebody. Remember you read it here first - this is going to collapse on itself so much, that by 2015, you will see ads for “Hey, remember 2:45 this afternoon?” CDs.

I have a lunch to finish. Catch you later.

it happened ten years ago

Wed, 06 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been obsessively eating those little, red, cinnamon candies, and watching a special about nuclear submarines that sank. So it’s been a productive evening. I also got a bunch of CDs in the mail, but I fell asleep after Marie called, and I didn’t get a chance to listen to anything. Now, in a fit of “it happened ten years ago” nostalgia, I’m listening to a Lizzy Borden album. It’s Master of Disguise, probably the best one. It’s somewhat of a concept album, and really reminds me of my first semester in college. I recently found another copy, and it’s one of those albums that can really transport me back to a very specific time and era. I love music like that, even if it is somewhat dated.

I should get back to writing. Rumored to Exist is going slow, but I have a pile of edited stuff to reconcile that I’ve been putting off. And Letterman is on.

01/05/99 15:05

The government is burning tons of napalm that has been sitting around since the end of the Vietnam war. Why can’t they have some kind of lottery for it? Or sell it by the barrel at the army-navy store? I don’t know about you, but I could really use a 55 gallon drum of napalm.

It’s a slow day - I want to write more, but I can’t. Maybe later.

01/05/99 15:42

I need to do some research and find all of the nuclear subs that are still on the ocean floor. I think there are at least 4 or 5 of them. After I make my first billion dollars, I’m going to rent that Hughes explorer ship and try to find one of those subs. That Hughes boat has this gigantic hole in the middle of it, where they can lift an entire submarine with a giant claw-like thing, close the doors behind it, and dismantle it with Navy frogmen in nuclear protection gear. I guess when they salvaged that Soviet sub in ‘74, it was completely hot from the nuclear missiles. They also found 9 bodies, and gave them a traditional Russian burial at sea, while they rolled a few movie cameras. They showed part of the burial on the Discorvery channel special last night - it was very bizarre, James Bond sort of stuff.

I still hear what sounds like sea otters across the street. I’ve been listening to White Zombie all morning. I’ve started cleaning my office in anticipation of my move to the other building. I only have one or two boxes of stuff - some of the people I work with have a dozen boxes of stuff. I wish I had a camera I could mount anywhere and transmit the video signal several miles away. I’d use it for lots of things, like proving that my fucking landlord is only in his office an hour a day.

It was a dark and cloudy afternoon

Thu, 07 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

It was a dark and cloudy afternoon. Foggy, really - it looks like the mist at the outer boundaries of a Nintendo-64 screen has enveloped all of Seattle. I knew the few days of sunshine were too good to be true - now we go back to six months of shittiness.

I watched too much TV last night, and didn’t get any work done. There was a show on about the Air Force One, another one of those Discovery Channel “Inside Story” things. I actually went on the first jet-powered Air Force One, a Boeing 707, tail number 26000. It’s at the Boeing museum in Seattle - you can walk through it and see various replica seats and desks and fake radio gear behind plexiglass. Actually, I don’t remember if the museum had plane 26000 or 27000, or if it was all fake. But one one of the two was where they swore in LBJ while JFK’s corpse was stowed away in the passenger compartment. Another weird thing on that show - Air Force One is the FAA callsign for the plane only when the president was on board. When Nixon resigned, he was president when he left DC on his way home, but Ford was signed in at noon, when he was midway to California. So the plane had to change callsigns to 27000 while in midair.

The Museum of Flight has so many cool planes there, each with a weird story. Their B-17 was in the film Memphis Belle; their FG-1D Corsair spent 33 years at the bottom of Lake Washington before being restored; they have an A-4F that used to be a Blue Angels plane. I already mentioned Air Force One; their SR-71 Blackbird and D-21 drone is also a one-of-a-kind. Their F-4 Phantom really scored 3 MiG kills in 1967; their P-12 biplane once flew from LA to San Diego, inverted. One of their biggest planes is the prototype 747; one of the smallest is the Aerocar III, a fiat-sized car that can bolt on a pair of wings and a prop for air travel. The Aerocar is pretty kick-ass; you can convert it in only ten minutes. Although it can go about 100 miles an hour in the air, it can only drive at about 65.

I’m bored, and I have a meeting in a bit, so I better cut this short.

persona

Fri, 08 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I’m at the point in my writing cycle where I’m overanalyzing how writing works. I often need to break apart stories and books and try to find what makes them readable, desirable, and functional. Although I feel that Rumored to Exist is a good book in many places, I don’t know how it will stand as a complete book, and I don’t know how I will come up with the ideas to finish it. Because it is so loose and free-form, there’s no cohesive story to follow, which puts me in the danger of never finishing. I’ve been hacking at Rumored for a little over two years, and I’m barely halfway done. Another round of edits could put me well below the halfway bar, if I start chopping the pieces I absolutely hate.

This means I start thinking about the theory of plot and structure of story. It also means I think about my interests and try to find new topics to research, combine, and twist into new ideas. It’s a nervous prospect, since I have absolutely no attention span right now, and I can never apply myself to projects like this. It’s the reason I could never learn a foreign language, or pull a decent GPA in largely scantron courses like psychology or sociology. So I might be off this kick before too long.

The perfect starting point and example is, of course, William S. Burroughs. He lived a life of ecclectic and bizarre connections: heroin, South America, homosexuality, classical literature, psychology, technology, and travel. He worked jobs just to find out what it was like, as a private detetective or exterminator, and took a strange path, studying at Harvard, going to Vienna for medical school, living in the middle of nowhere in Texas, and then going across the globe: Mexico, South America, Tangiers, Paris, Austria, New York, Kansas. His life provided the raw material to produce his books. He often went on about different topics, such as the Mayans, time travel, scientology, the corruption of a Christian society, drug dealers, and more. But he didn’t write straightforward narratives about his experiences, like Charles Bukowski or Henry Miller or something. It was more veiled in complicated structures; cutups, fragments, dreams and chaos used to frame the pieces of his stories.

If I wanted to rip off Burroughs entirely, the two basic pieces to investigate could then be defined as the content and the method. This sounds pretty arbitrary, but it’s an important distinction, because I think in most of your writing 101 classes, the division of story would be something like plot and character. I don’t think plot is required, because it’s really a part of method. The method of a story, especially something nonlinear, doesn’t have to include plot. It could use any mechanism that would pull the reader through the story. A book like Naked Lunch is not plot-driven. (The well-versed Burroughs scholar could argue that it is, but the first-time reader would disagree, so let’s stick with that.) And character is somewhat of a division of content. Although characters are important in WSB’s work, he doesn’t rely on a top-down cast like a Hollywood movie. And it isn’t a typical first-person narrative like so many literary works.

I don’t know where to start, and I don’t think I can investigate both of these today, but the easiest way for me to begin would be with content. I always try to find new, cool things to discuss in Rumored, be it designer drugs, high-tech weaponry, pop-culture icons, or obscure history references. I’m not always 100% happy with some of these things, and many have been cut or toned down as the editing of Rumored continues. I need to think of new topics, but I need to think about how they are discussed or applied, and that’s where it gets even more complicated.

Back to Burroughs - a lot of his work has a mystical, investigative approach. He talks about the Mayans and Ah Pook the Destroyer and all of that, with a spiritual approach. I don’t mean that he is a religious writer; it’s that the characters and reference - the content - relies on a religious framework to interact through his books. When he talks about heroin, it isn’t a Trainspotting sort of Calvin Klein ad for junk; he talks about it in a spiritual sense. He has created a culture which has its own minor morality plays based on the unique aspects of drug use and addiction. It’s not like a Hollywood movie where the use of drugs pushes one of the characters in the stereotypical inventory of characters through the stock five plot movements, i.e. I’m a high school cheerleader and I have a football player boyfriend; Someone offers me drugs and I try them so I can be pretty/popular/better; antics ensue; I weigh 500 pounds and smoke a pound of hash a day; I learn to love god. moral: don’t do drugs, kids! Burroughs seems to walk far outside of this, because he isn’t pushing a plot like they are. He might have some plot elements to keep the pages turning, but it’s not all designed to be a 2 hour movie of the week.

Although I haven’t read his stuff in years, I was thinking of Asimov as another example. He wrote all of these books about robots, but the books aren’t really about big aluminum men running around killing people or whatever. He took the angle of social commentary and engineered it around the limitations and issues of robotics. Asimov wasn’t a religious guy (If I remember correctly, he’s a Humanist, which is probably my closest fit, religion-wise) and his books aren’t knit together with a spiritual overtone. He takes his unique topics and works together the content with the political or sociological consequenses. Other writers would have a plot-driven theme about robots, but he uses a light plot to drive home the unique circumstanses of man creating artificial “life.”

So my homework for tonight is to come up with a laundry list of topics I could further explore and research for the universe created within Rumored to Exist. There are tons of things there, but many of them are free-floating. Someone might be injecting some cloning serum in his arm, but the purpose and placement of clones in the book is somewhat secondary. I think if I picked apart some of the topics I’ve discussed and brainstormed further mutations of them, there would be more coross-pollination of weird stuff and more ideas for new pieces.

And maybe tomorrow I can talk about method. Or maybe I’ll still be babbling about this.

persona, content

Sat, 09 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been thinking more about content, which I babbled on about yesterday. There are a few conflicts involved in all of this, so bear with me.

Yesterday, I talked about content and method versus character and setting and plot. It might be helpful if you read yesterday’s entry, but for now, I’m going to ignore everything but content. A typical, writing 101 short story or Hollywood screenplay contains content - a protagonist, an antagonist, a dark and stormy night, a football player and the cheerleadr who loves him, and so on. The distinction that I would make between a typical story and something experimental or literary is that the purpose of the content is different, so the content is different. For example, the purpose of Dr. Benway in a William S. Burroughs book is different than the purpose of Dr. Niles Crane on the TV show Frazier. The former can develop in different ways because he’s not supporting this typical entourage of characters in the typical plot A/plot B sitcom script. More focus can be put on the characters (or the settings or objects) because they aren’t simple plug-ins to a prefab storyline. I think that’s the big distinction in literary fiction, and it’s what differentiates something like The Subterraneans and Weekend at Bernie’s.

So where do these heightened characters and places and objects come from? Writers write what they know, for the most part. This has been the major stumbling block for me and my writing career. I’ve read books by Bukowski, about his years of drinking, meeting different women, betting on the horses, living with almost no money and writing for an underground newspaper, living in roominghouses. I’ve read Burroughs, the trips into the jungle to find Yage, the travel all over the world, the Beat Hotel and Tangiers. And I’ve even been jealous of Henry Rollins, sleeping in the back of a U-Haul, a different city every day on the road with Black Flag. All of these people lived adventurous lives, while I haven’t. The closest I’ve been to being on the edge was maybe in college, but that’s nothing like On the Road. So part of my muse has been telling me that I need to go out and live to collect this content - to do like Hemmingway and fight in wars and fight bulls and drink 20 shots of whiskey for breakfast and everything else. And granted, if I could play the guitar or I found some gig that got me out of the house and all around the country, maybe I’d try it. But I’ve thought that the collection of content was a major deterrant in my writing career. I wrote one book called Summer Rain based on a summer in Bloomington, and it was fun to write (well, it’s still not done yet…) but I realized that there would never be a second book after this one, because if I stuck to this genre of autobiographical fiction, every book I wrote would be another Summer Rain.

But you don’t need to live it to write it, do you? Several of my favorite writers, most notably Mark Leyner, write stuff that never really happened. It’s all based on a mix of research, pop culture, current events, and sheer insanity. Someone like Leyner is pulling his content from the air, and it’s commendable work. When I mess with this, I find that the fictional content you create is only as good as the random junk floating in your head. I took a few weird college courses on music theory, cancer, third world politics, and astronomy, and I have a weird laundry list of interest and topics I like to read about, too. But when I do my best work on Rumored to Exist is when I do my best homework. I pick things up from other people, from newsgroups, from websites, from odd shows on the Discovery channel. And when everything works good, and when I’m saturated with this useless knowledge, the content flows. But other times, it doesn’t. And that’s what I’m trying to improve.

I just got interrupted, so I lost my train of thought. But what I think I was going to say is that I feel a need to research and challenge myself to look at new things and ideas, specifically for Rumored to Exist. I find that I need to look for a starting point for new and weird topics, and once that happens, everything snowballs and I’m doing plenty of good writing. My friend and fellow writer Michael Stutz recommended Robert Anton Wilson’s book Everything is Under Control, so I ran and got a copy of last night. He was 100% right - it’s this encyclopedia of weird conspiracy theories and secret societies that’s somewhat tongue in cheek and probably not even 10% correct, but it’s an excellent read. And now I’m thinking about Freemasons, Men in Black (not Will Smith), word virus theories, germ warfare, and a ton of other cool stuff. I have enough research material to keep me busy for a while.

The application of this material is the second part of what I talked about yesterday, the method. I don’t think I am going to be able to crack out a good explanation of this, since I haven’t even begun to think about it. But that’s a good discussion for later.

As always, I’m really looking for comments about this babble, especially since this self-discussion is becoming somewhat important to me. So please email me if you have any thoughts on the subject.

Biological anomaly

Sun, 10 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I want to talk more about writing, but today’s been weird. Not today, or the events of today, but some biological anomaly. Maybe I’m depressed, or maybe it’s poor diet. It’s one of those weird in-between states where I’m talking to someone about something and it reminds me of a movie, and it takes me 7 years and 3 Leaonard Maltin books to remember that I was thinking of The Godfather. Or whatever. Not the time to start discussing weird literary theory.

I finally found the expansion pak for the Nintendo 64, and also picked up a Rumble Pack. I’m still trying hard to finish level 4 of Star Wars: Rogue Squardon. Last night, I managed to get a tow cable around an AT-AT three times, and the fucking thing stumbled to its well-deserved death. Then I found out that you have to kill two of them and do some other jerking around before you clear the level. I read some FAQs and found that I’m not alone here - it’s one of the hardest levels of the game.

I don’t know who reads this, but I’ll say this in case some people deeply embedded in the journal scene do read this: I am really looking for journals similar to mine, or similar to what I want this journal to be. I have been falling into this rut of “I went to the mall. I bought some new socks. I ate a grape. I looked at the inside of my fridge” sort of journal entries. I wish I knew others who were writing about writing, instead of writing about their lives as writing. If you know of any, let me know.

Writing Rumored has been hard lately. I wrote two pieces last night, both marginal in quality, and finished working in some edits Marie did on the first half back when I was in NY. And it’s hard to procrastinate. I feel so guilty watching TV, and I’m so sick of the shit they have on there. I spent 40 minutes out of the hour watching commercials, and think about Asimov writing a book every 14 minutes during his career. I know that eventually I will get motivated and a long string of writing will suddenly hit the page. Until then, I’m poking away. I am at part #133 of the book, and it would be nice to be at #150 by the end of the month. I really hope to get this fucking thing done by the end of March. That doesn’t mean a final draft, but just something that has parts 0-255 and doesn’t require me to go back and junk 40 or 50 of them because I wrote them all in a night.

I have a dinner getting cold here, and I should probably try to get in the right frame of mind to work. More later.

dreams and writing

Wed, 13 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

(Sickness update: I’m back at work, but I’m not eating yet. I don’t know how long I can survive on applesauce; I really wish I could go to Burger King and order a bacon double cheeseburger, but I don’t think that would help things.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about dreams lately, in the context of writing. I think the ultimate nonlinear novel would flow like a dream, and I’m not talking cliches here. I mean the entire story would unfold in the same random, surreal fashion. It would be an easier project with film, because you wouldn’t have to explain all of the visual anomalies. One of my favorite films is, of course, Naked Lunch, and it uses many of the Burroughsian structure elements and changes which could also be attributed to dreams. The movie has little to do with the book, but it was the only way they could pull it off.

So what are the elements of dreams that would have to be captured? I could write about all of the stereotypical dreams, like falling from a height, being naked in public, finding out on the last day of the semester that you were registered for a class you didn’t know about, etc. I think if I did that, the story would resemble one of those “we’re making fun of horror movies even though we’re a horror movie” movies, like Scream, Urban Legend, or whatever.

The first thing about dreams is that they are incredibly nonlinear. It’s normal for me to wake up after a dream, remember two pieces of it, but not remember which one was first in the dream. Then, other pieces filter in, some fitting in the order of the story, and others confusing it further. But how the hell do you do this on paper? One solution would be to NOT do this on paper, and work on some hypertext project. My personal bias about this is that it’s not possible to achieve suspension of disbelief while sitting in front of a CRT. Plus hypertext is more of a choose-your-own-adventure experience, which isn’t non-linear, it’s sort of multi-linear. Maybe someone will do further research on this and make a hypertext novel that captures the nonlinear feel of dreams.

I don’t know how this would work with just regular HTML though. I think dreams may be a phenomenon other than natural thought, like something with a more chemical basis or using parts of the brain we don’t use when reading a book or shopping for groceries. When you remember three or four parts of a dream but don’t remember the order, or each part makes you remember more parts, it’s like when you try to remember something that happened ten years ago - the parts are all in your mind, but with varying quality, and they don’t “come back” in order. When you read a book, you start at page 1 and read until the end (unless you skip around) and the story is placed in your brain in a linear fashion, even if it is nonlinear. If you think of the book later, and the various pieces of the book are not as clear in your mind, the plot might appear to be more dreamlike. I re-read The Grapes of Wrath about five years ago, and I don’t remember many of the specifics with great detail, but I remember the part where the grandmother died and they pretended she was really sick so they could get past the border guards. It’s almost like a dream, but it’s not that Steinbeck wrote it that way - it’s a function of my memory. The question is, how can you write a book that imitates that function when the reader has to read it from start to finish?

It’s time for my daily plug for Raymond Federman. His books are so nonlinear, they can be unreadable in places. They’re all great, and funny. He has a lot of different stuff going on in his experimental works, but one thing he uses to obfuscate the linear plot is repetition and derivation. In books like Double or Nothing, he’ll tell a piece of a story, then later change the story, tell an earlier segment, and so forth. It’s not as easy as just reading the story from A to B, but it plants little subliminal facts in your memory, so when you hear a derivative of the story later, you wonder if you’ve already heard it, or if it was new. Irregardless of Federman’s technique (which is beyond the scope of this one time journal entry) it shows that it’s possible to work with non-linear dream structures on the linear page.

I want to talk about this more, but maybe I should wait until tomorrow to start a new topic about dreams. As always, let me know your thoughts and help me keep thinking about this.

Dream theories

Thu, 14 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

(my non-writing update: I’m alive and my stomach is letting me eat what I want. I still feel a little weird from my total lack of nutrient, but I’m getting there.)

Yesterday, I was talking about dreams and writing, which is a great topic right now. I think I have some kind of sleep disorder, because I sleep 10 hours and it feels like 6, and I always have dreams which are taunting me, saying “just try to write this shit down when you wake up.” My dreams right now are incredibly nonlinear, overlapping, redundant, confusing, and realistic. Because they aren’t a simple story, I can’t just write them down. (It’s also a pain in the ass because when I wake up at 4 in the morning, I don’t want to spend 20 minutes transcribing dreams, and then end up wide awake.) I find that by thinking about how I want to write the dreams down, they happen more vividly, and I remember more when I wake. I wish there was some kind of machine or hypnosis tape I could use to get closer to this goal, but most of the stuff you find on the internet is either new-age hippie crap, or a get-rich-quick scheme.

I think people have similar, cliche dreams. I mentioned this yesterday: falling, naked in front of people, forgot they were registered for a class, and so on. I find that my dreams sometimes fall into templates, but they are much stranger. Let me see if I can assemble a top five list (not in any order):

This really isn’t a dream, there is a nuclear holocaust, and I’m experiencing the last five seconds of my life.
A lucid dream where I’m able to take control.
I’m back in Elkhart, Indiana, and going through the same problems I did ten years ago
“The amalgam dream” - I’m walking in San Francisco, I turn a corner and it’s Bloomington, 1992, crossed with the cabash scenes from Naked Lunch. I run into a person I used to work with, who is drinking coffee with Jesse Ventura. Etc.
The lucid dream that takes place in my apartment and I’m not sure that I’m asleep or awake. Happens when I’m about to fall asleep, or on those bad nights of insomnia where I wake up and look at the clock every hour and later deduce that I’ve been up all night.

I take ideas from my dreams. For the last three years, I’ve been on and off successful with writing down things. I read about how Phillip K. Dick dreamed all of his stories, and then woke up and simply transcribed them to paper. I thought that was so cool, I started doing it with Rumored to Exist. A lot of key ideas in that book were lifted straight from dreams. I’ve never been able to fully capture the whole dream-state onto paper, but I never would’ve been able to figure out some of the stuff I use in Rumored.

Or maybe I would. I have a lot of theories about dreams, that they are simply extensions of what you feel and think consciously, mixed with a little biochemical work from what you ate before bed or how stressed you are. I wish there was a way to control that mirror from one side to the other, and maybe there will be within my lifetime…

I got a late start today, so I better split. More about this later.

BL Sandwiches, taxes

Fri, 15 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I’m getting a very late start today - I had a meeting that ran late, and now I’m eating a BL, since the sandwich shop was out of tomatoes. It’s pouring rain outside, but I borrowed one of the huge golf umbrellas from the receptionist’s desk. It was a good plan until the wind picked up to about 90 miles an hour and it started raining sideways.

I remember reading about some famous poet in jail or a mental institution who wrote his epic poem a line a day, because he had no paper and he memorized a line each day. When I’m at my current level of output, I’m grateful I’m not that guy. I’m averaging about 30 lines a day, since I figured out that for Rumored to Exist to be about 100,000 words when it’s done, each section from 0-255 would have to be about 30 lines long. I need to increase my pace, but it’s hard. Once I hit that perfect frame of mind, I’ll write a few thousand words a night of really hilarious shit. But for now, I trudge along, hoping that my future editing passes will add some life to the mediocre prose I’m putting on the page.

I did my taxes this morning. This is the earliest I’ve ever filed. I use the tele tax phone thing, and I will be getting a ton of money back. Because I do not have the ability to save a few bucks a week, I have the government take an extra fifty out each check, and then when I get it back, I blow it on computer equipment or whatever. I should have this wad of cash back by the time I go to New York (Feb. 10).

I’ve got another meeting in a few, and I need to eat. Maybe I’ll write something better tomorrow.

Snap Judgment

Mon, 18 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

Thank you to Ray for my early birthday present, which I got in the mail today. It’s the best three demos from the Chicago hardcore/Death band Snap Judgment, all compiled together on a CD-R. Ray put the whole thing together for his own evil intentions, but he also made me a copy, with a nice laserprinted package that has scans of the original three covers and very comprehensive, anal-retentive track info that a fellow audiophile would love. The first demo, Tomorrow Will Be Worse reminds me most of a trip to Chicago I took with Ray during spring break of 1992. There’s a funny and tragic story that goes along with this which I need to tell at some point, but these six tracks remind me more of other imagery from March 92, like my VW, my old girlfriend Patty, the spring break trip home I took with Ken Rawlings along for the ride, the new Realistic cassette-only deck in the dash of my car, and Eternity cologne. The second demo, Hey! Soul Classics reminds me of Jan/Feb 1993, when I was dating both Kim and Danielle, and walking everywhere because I didn’t have a car. I only heard the third demo, 1993 once or twice, and never got a copy. Around that time, I was going to Chicago a lot with Ray, almost every weekend, and I must’ve met their lead singer John Tekiela a few times, but I don’t remember for sure. I never saw them play, but I heard many times the fable of when Ray saw them on his birthday. They threw together an impromptu cover of the Motorhead song “We Are the Road Crew” for him, and when John didn’t know the words, he gave the mike to Ray and let him sing.

Memories like that make me wish the music scene hadn’t gotten so stupid in the last five years. At least I’m finding more old, cool stuff on CD so I can listen to it until the next wave of decent stuff comes out.

I hate to cut this short, but I just got home and ate dinner, and I have a new Nintendo game waiting for me. Maybe I’ll write more later.

unproductive weekend

Tue, 19 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

This weekend wasn’t very productive for me. I had tons of stupid stuff to do - laundry, bills, cleaning, groceries, shopping, etc etc etc and I spent the whole weekend getting caught up on errands. I never got in the mindset to do any writing all weekend, except for a few occasional scraps. I do my best writing when my apartment’s clean, no pending errands are nagging me, and everything is in a state of calm. I don’t write as well when my todo list is full and I feel like I shouldn’t be on the computer. And I don’t get much done when other tasks run into my scheduled writing time.

All of this is sort of a precursor for the big discussion about writer’s block. I don’t know how much I can just jump into this, since every writer and aspiring writer has their own opinion on it. My basic theory is that I tend to freeze up when I don’t have enough structure and I have too much writing ahead of me. When I was blocked on Summer Rain last year, it was usually when I didn’t have a good outline of the chapters I was trying to start. I’d have lots of ideas and thoughts about what needed to be included, but I didn’t know how it would happen, so I couldn’t write. I’ve known writers who don’t have this problem, and a few who don’t even use outlines. But for me, planning is the key. That’s why Rumored to Exist has been such a hard book to write. Because it’s non-linear, it basically has no outline, and I write the ideas that come to me each day, or things I have in notes. I have some pacing, an idea of how much to write each day. But it has been hard to keep up. I used to write more words per day, but a lot of the writing was shit and required major revisions or simply got junked. I guess I’ve been going slower to prevent that.

I was looking through my current paper journal - I use those 120 page, 3-subject spiral notebooks. It’s interesting, because I’m in the final stretch of this one, but I started it at the end of July. I went to the front of the notebook and read some of the entries last night. So much has happened in the last six months, with my relationship with Marie, the summer of extreme heat, getting rid of the Escort. It’s weird that those entries and my current ones are still in the same book. I guess I need to start writing faster. Historically, I go through two of the 120 page notebooks a year, but the last few times, It’s taken me about 7 months to fill one of them up. I think my pace has quickened in the last couple of months, though. I should probably mention that what goes on in my paper journals never crosses over to here. I know some people form their electronic pages by forming a “best of” from their paper stuff, but I’ve found it easier to avoid that.

Still listening to Snap Judgment. I think I’m going to go buy some books online.

late, NYC, dreams

Wed, 20 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I’m starting late - actually, I’ve been writing for 45 minutes and decided (for the second time) to kill a giant rant about how unhappy I am with other journals out there. I will shut up and keep looking for other similar journals by writers that aren’t just taking up space.

I bought (on Amazon) a book that contains walking tours of various beat landmarks in NYC. Michael had this book when I met up with him last November, and it looked like a cool way to blow an afternoon or ten, not to mention a few rolls of film. I’m going to NYC on 2/10 so maybe I’ll find some of this stuff. I also ordered a long out-of-print book on the early history of Indiana University, in the hopes that their old book service will eventually turn up a copy for under $4000. I don’t know how rare the book is, but it was published in 1970. I heard a lot about it from this pictorial history book of IU I bought last year. It was cited frequently, and sounds like it has all of the details I’d like to hear about when the campus was over by the Kroger a little southwest of the current campus.

I had very vivid and bizarre dreams last night. I was at a very small and shitt theatre reminiscent of the dollar theatre in Bloomington, and they were showing three different trailers to the new Star Wars movie in a continuous loop. I was dressed as Luke Skywalker, in the white robe get-up from the first movie. I think you had to pay once to get in, but people were staying to see the trailers over and over. During a break in the loop, they had a large video projector, and Sean Penn as Jeff Spiccolli was there, playing Rogue Squadron for the Nintendo on the huge screen. (“Whoa dude, these TIE interceptors are most bogus.”) I remember studying the credits to the trailers later, and many of the people’s names were purposely obfuscated for some reason, maybe to prevent people from figuring out the plot or how many special effects were used. Maybe James Cameron was the guest executive producer and they didn’t want people to know. It was a weird dream.

My writing is slowing down a little, although I think there’s a direct correlation between my diet and my muse. I made shake and bake chicken last night and ate until I was about reado to drop. Then, it wasn’t hard to start working on the book. I think I need to keep the fridge stocked to finish this book on time.

Well, I’ve screwed up - I’m out of time, and spending 45 minuted on my previous aborted entry means this is it for now.

28

Thu, 21 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

Today is my 28th birthday. It feels like any other day in some ways - I’m here at work, I don’t have any plans tonight, and I’m eating my usual sack lunch. It’s a weird year; Bill Perry has the same birthday as me, and we usually do something together. This year, he’s in Bloomington and I’m in Seattle, so that won’t happen. He will be here this weekend, though, so there will be some late celebration. Marie isn’t here either, and I wish I was in New York today, just to hang out and get out of the greyness and miserable weather here.

28 is a weird number. I didn’t like 27 because it’s an odd number, an in-between. I’m no numerologist, but it reminds me of when I was 17, which seems like the first non-landmark birthday. You get a license at 16, and you can do all kinds of stuff at 18, but when you’re 17, there’s nothing. I think you can get into R movies. 28 is also odd because it’s 10 years after 18, and so much stuff happened then. It really opens me up for more “ten years ago…” moments.

And ten years ago… my 18th was on a Friday. I went out with my friend Julia Zehr. We got into her Renault Alliance and drove to University Park Mall, which is vaguely near the Notre Dame campus in South Bend. We were going to eat someplace first and then go to the movies, but we got a late start, and ended up going to the Chick-Fil-A in the mall and eating while we waited in line. We didn’t have time to eat, and smuggled chicken dinners into the theatre. We watched Naked Gun - it was my second time and her first. The thing I remember the most were the long and strange conversations we had while driving in the darkness of the middle of nowhere. Julia is a great person to talk to and it was a great way to spend my 18th birthday.

I have a lot of birthday memories, and a lot of weird stuff has happened on January 20. I made a web page (long since deleted, sorry.that talks about other people who share my birthday and events that have happened today. The page needs some work, but it’s a good start.

I thought today would make me write scads of nostalgic and introspective stuff, but I don’t feel like doing anything. Oh well. Send you credit card numbers, I am thinking of buying a sit-down Star Wars arcade game for my birthday.

birthday, AC/DC day

Fri, 22 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

Today is unoffically AC/DC day in office 375. I got the Bonfire boxed set last night, and I’ve got two of the five CDs with me today. I think I now own about six different recordings of “Whole Lotta Rosie.” Time to go out and buy one of those leather caps and a Jack Daniels t-shirt.

My birthday is over. It was pretty low-key, and to anybody but myself, would have appeared depressing. After fielding phone calls last night, I went to Denny’s, ordered a porterhouse, and wrote in my journal while eating. Then I went on what was probably my biggest CD shopping spree ever. I got two boxed sets, an Ultradisc II CD, and another double album. The total: $145.96. I think I’ve had other binges close to that, but it’s always nice to set a record. I was inches away from buying the Pink Floyd uber-boxed set, but then I thought it out and realized I have all of the CDs I like from that set, many of them in their new remasters, as opposed to the 1992 remasters. So I stuck with AC/DC.

I’m thinking, since almost nobody reads this, that I might parody another online journal for a while. I don’t know if it would be a specific one or a stereotype, and I’m not sure if it would live here or on another server. I could always get a geocities account. I guess I’ve screwed it up by mentioning it already, but what the hell. I loved Stale when it and Slate first came out. Is Slate even around anymore? What a stupid fucking idea.

Slow day. I’m going to screw around for a while.

Saxon

Sat, 23 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I think I have some kind of seasonal disorder. This rain isn’t very fun anymore. It’s 45 and slightly drizzling, but it’s been raining for so long that the sky is always grey and the ground is like a full sponge. Don’t move to Seattle - If you do, show up in April and leave by October.

The CD(s) spending most of the time in my player(s) lately is the latest Saxon album, The Eagle Has Landed. It’s a live album from 1995, and I love it. I used to listen to Saxon back hin high school - I bought a copy of Crusader because Vyvvyan on The Young Ones was wearing a Saxon shirt. I loved their sound, this NWOBHM two-guitar attack with lyrics about British motorcycles and castles and military history and touring the world. Their sound wa kindof cheesy - almost Spinal Tap-esque, but I didn’t care. I grew up on their albums from the early and mid 80s, but when the 90s came around and the albums started looking slightly stupid, I gave up on the new stuff, and stuck to the classics.

Fast forward to 1998, when I felt a need to replace every cassette in my collection with a CD or MD. I had a lot of trouble finding any of the Saxon stuff, although I did find a Dutch pressing of Crusader. Then, this week I decided to pick up this live album, because it had some of my favorite old songs. I guess these guys kept touring and playing all of this time, because they sound really tight. They sound like if Bruce Dickinson was singing for the new Helloween. It’s a great 2-CD set, and it will probably be in my player all weekend.

Aah, the weekend. I haven’t done shit all week, so it’ll be nice to get caught up on Rumored. I’m sure it will be pouring all weekend, so I’ll be at home, on the computer.

I can’t seem to spell today, and I want to finish my reuben. Maybe I’ll get to write some more entries this weekend.

Ramones

Sun, 24 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I watched the Ramones video for their last concert (or one of the ten last concerts, rather) and it’s really fucking depressing. Okay, there’s a lot of funny stuff, like when they were on Sha Na Na, and tons of rare and/or old footage, but the whole video is like watching a divorce. Everyone they interview is like “The Ramones are the best band in the world and gave it 20 years of their all, but too bad they never got a big break or huge record sales like any of their flash-in-the-pan imitators.” And everyone in the band was like “we’ve run our course and don’t want to be doing this when we’re 50, but we have no idea what to do outside the band.” The performances were great, but the big finale was Eddie Vedder? Jesus christ. It is a very well put-together video though, and it has tons of stuff I’d never see otherwise. And Lemmy plays on a song, so it’s a must-have.

Last night while writing, I couldn’t think of the word “smoothie” while writing something about Orange Juliuses. I spent an hour trying to figure it out, and then started calling people. “It’s like a fruit drink… it’s like, fucking… it’s got ice. Made in a blender… freezie - slushie - slurpie - icee —” The whole piece wasn’t even that important, but I get locked into this missing-word freakout because I’m convinced that years of antidepressants have completely destroyed my mind.

I’m on day three of the AC/DC marathon. I wish they made a 600 minute MD, so I could record all of my AC/DC stuff into one giant mix MiniDisc, and antagonize everyone in my general vicinity. I think there are few people that could listen to six live versions of “The Jack” back to back without some form of restraint. I was going to post a bunch of AC/DC lyrics in my journal, but lyrics.ch is down.

I haven’t left the house all day (except for a quick trip to the post office and bank) and I haven’t eaten either, so I better shove off and go out into the grey shittiness and find a relatively kid-free McDonald’s or something. Later.

01/23/99 20:30

Guns N’ Roses is allegedly in the studio recording their next album, according to a rumor I heard. The only original members are Axl Rose and their touring keyboard player - everyone else is new. Their assorder resumes sounded reasonable, but there were no big names (i.e. Tommy Lee won’t be playing drums or anything, not that it was a rumor.) I don’t remember the producer, except it wasn’t Mike Clink and it wasn’t Moby. (Moby was really a possibility, I heard from a friend who knows him. It was just a scheduling problem.) Anyway, I expect that in a few months or a year or whatever, everyone will be listening to a new Guns N’ Roses album, and they’ll be headlining Lollapalooza, and the songs will be all over radios and MTV and millions of people will be saying “I’ve been a fan all along.” I hate this shit. I have been a closet Guns N’ Roses fan for about ten years now. Over the last five years when everyone was talking about how Axl Rose was an idiot and would never put out anything else, I still listened to the albums. I don’t know if that’s something to be proud about or not, but it bugged the fuck out of me when 100 million people jumped on the Metallica bandwagon, the same ones who gave me so much shit for listening to them back in high school. The whole music industry is idiotic.

I still haven’t done anything today, except for going to McDonald’s. It’s cold and I 100% know the traffic is bad on I-5. I did get a book from Amazon today that’s a walking tour of many beat generation landmarks in New York. Michael had a copy when I saw him there, and I intend to take some walks and pictures when I’m in town next. And it’s cool reading in the meantime.

I think it’s Nintendo time.

crown, zine, etc

Tue, 26 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

In less than two hours, my dentist will be grinding down one of my molars to fit it with a crown. It sounds excruciating, but the tooth already got a root canal last year, so I shouldn’t be too bad.

I’m itching to work on another zine. I’m not sure it will be Air in the Paragraph Line, just because of the outlay of cash involved. If I had FrameMaker at home, and printing was free, I might put together another issue. But I still have reams of pages from the last issue that I haven’t folded or collated yet, which tells you the level of enthusiasm for the project.

It’s not that I don’t like AITPL - I like it very much, especially when it’s done. When I was creating that zine, I was aiming toward something similar to Frank Zappa’s work ethic - a lot of talent, no attitude, and none of the typical bullshit. You don’t need to review some punk band’s 7” records to have a zine. I didn’t get the exposure I could have, but I got some very positive reviews and no complaints, and you can’t beat that.

Now I feel a need to work on a zine that’s so warped, that’s it’s hilarious. Something like Orgazmo meets Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Something that 90% of the population will be incredibly offended by, and the remaining 10% will worhip as a work of genius. I don’t know if this will be a paper zine or an ezine or an urban legend spread as chain mail or what.

The weird thing is this - I was talking to Michael about a zine he wrote for years ago, and one I read because I talked to one of the editors a lot. We both wished the zine was around like it used to be, and murmurred about ressurecting it from the dead for a project similar to the one I mentioned. But the editor I mentioned had dropped off the face of the earth about six months ago, so we figured the whole thing was a lost cause.

Then, last night, I had a weird dream that I was the editor for this zine. I was at a college campus, reading submissions and doing the layout for a small book-type binding. It was vivid, and I remembered the whole dream, even on the way to work. And once I got to work, the aforementioned editor that I hadn’t heard from in months wrote me some email, and we got caught up. Very strange.

I have a lot to do before the dentist, so that’s it for now. Bill Perry is in town, too, so we have some belated birthday celebrations to take care of…

the rubber block

Wed, 27 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I’m home today. I won’t go into too much detail about the dental procedure, except to say that I feel pretty odd today. They had to use a rubber block to prop open my mouth, so my jaw feels like I took a shot in a fight or something. My gums were also very torn up and wouldn’t stop bleeding, but it looks like tons of orange juice and a good night of sleep calmed that down.

The best part of the dentist was the nitrous. If I had that whole setup in my apartment, I’d write ten books a year. When I was first going under, I started thinking of this Ginsberg-esque poetry, stuff about apocalyptic priests of terror. Then I started thinking about Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, and I wanted to laugh so bad, but I had this block in my mouth. After all of my fun, they gave me pure oxygen, which sobered me up almost immediately. I wish my last dentist would’ve given me this stuff.

So today’s a day of those chocolate diet shakes, and maybe some applesauce. I think I can eat solids okay, I just can’t chew. And since it’s been about 24 hours since I ate anything, I feel a little weird. I’m sick of lying in bed though, so I want to try and get some writing done, or at least some shuffling.

I’ve been listening to Chick Corea’s Expressions CD, which is him playing solo piano of assorted standards. He does his own version of the Gershwin “Someone to Watch Over Me” that’s currently on repeat in the player. It really reminds of some era in my past, maybe the spring of 92, maybe the spring of 90. It’s a very eerie, familiar sound, but so is most of Chick’s piano. Anyway, it’s nice sitting home in the rain, recovering from a bad dental procedure kind of music.

It’s either time to write or get some applesauce.

working on rumored

Sat, 30 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I don’t know why I haven’t been writing, except that things are odd and busy and it once again seems like the days are only eight hours long. I am (falsely) hoping for a good weekend. I got my bonus from work, and I plan on putting it all in the bank, but I’m sure within 24 hours, I’ll be shopping for something stupid, like an underwater CD player.

I’ve been working on Rumored, and it’s slowly progressing. I used to be amazed when I could write for three hours a night, every night. Now I’m amazed that I meet my writing quota in 12 minutes and then start watching TV or something. I promised myself that I would finish the first 150 parts of the 256 in the book by the end of the month. It is the 29th, and I am on #148. I should be fine. Now, I want to finish all 256 by the end of March, which might be impossible. Maybe I’ll sell my TV.

The new Kevin Canty book has made me think about a lot of Summer Rain, and how I need to eventually finish that bastard. I think I’m going to go back and rewrite a lot of the sex scenes, or rather insert some. There’s one implied in chapter 3, and one in first person in like chapter 41 or something, but neither really tell what needs to be told. Overall, the protagonist isn’t supposed to get laid, except for the girl who dumps him right before the book starts, and the girl at the end of the book. (And no, it doesn’t have a stupid happily ever after ending - it’s more of a ‘once you get what you’re chasing, you realize it’s not what you want’ sort of thing.) I guess I’m still worried that someone out there will sue me because they think that the fictional characters in my book are based on them. They are, but at least I changed the names.

I don’t think I have anything to talk about today. Just wondering how many feet it will rain over the weekend. I’m glad I live on the fifth floor.

My days in Seattle are numbered

Mon, 01 Feb 1999 00:00:00 GMT

Watching reheated Chinese food cool to an edible temperature, listening to Shadowfax. Track ten of their CD The Odd Get Even is on repeat. “One Heart” is the name of the song. It’s soft - ethereal guitar, dischorded piano, and eerie reeds, the kind of thing you listen to when it’s four in the morning and it’s been raining for a month straight. It reminds me of 1993, when I was all alone in my mom’s basement, everything I owned temporarily stacked against the walls of an 11 by 11 cement cell. My girlfriend was temporarily in Tampa; my social life was temporarily in Bloomington; my zine was temporarily on hiatus; my posh computer job was temporarily on sabbatical while I ran a punch press third shift and unloaded trucks first shift. It was one of those situations that needed definition: a song, a smell, an anthem, a t-shirt, a car that would always pull my life back to it. This is one of the songs, albums that does it. Maybe in five years, it will also remind me of this moment. Who knows.

It’s time to go public with a fairly big secret. I think I know all of the people who read this journal (and if I don’t, you should drop me a line) so this isn’t a surprise to any of you, but here goes. My days in Seattle are numbered. On March 31, I will get in a car and take a two-week voyage across the country which will end with me in New York City, which I will call my new home.

First, I should explain the plan. I’ve quit my job, but I will continue working until the second week of March. Oh, I will be in New York for about a week next month, visiting Marie and maybe laying some groundwork for the move. I’m moving in with Marie, in Washington Heights. I’ll be shipping books, records, electronics ahead of time. Basically everything but my clothes, my computer, my music, and the stuff I’d take on a two-week trip will be going through UPS. My third-hand furniture will be chopped into bits or abandoned at Goodwill. My car will be sold for scrap. Some other stuff will also be given away or sold. And I’ve been dumping a lot of shit I accumulated over the last four years. I’m hoping this move will be a little cleaner than the last, although that wasn’t too bad.

And where will I work? From my computer desk, creating fiction. The pay’s not much, but it’s what I need to be doing. I have some money in the bank, and I will probably pick up some freelance work here and there, but from here on out, my full-time job will be novelist. I need to get Rumored to Exist off the ground, and start other stuff. I can’t do this weird dual-lifestyle thing anymore. I’ve known this for a while, and I thought my only way out was to work a day job and save money to retire at 50 instead of 65 and then write, or maybe go back to school. Marie has been very gracious about this, and I think the time and the change in environment will mean an incredible Rumored to Exist and an even better next book.

I’m anxious to be with Marie more. And Mungo and Henrey - I really like cats, and having two of them to hang around with will be great. I’m anxious to be in New York, the city where everything’s there - every big record store and every famous street and corner and building and every bookstore, and every publisher, and everything. Seattle is very second-tier - it’s thirtysomething, people going to little league games and competing with the Joneses and Working Hard / Playing Hard (tm) and driving SUVs. There’s some counterculture here, but even that needs more counterculture. Seattle is a stereotype, where New York is everything. Maybe I’m just guessing this stuff, but I feel like I need the change. I can’t stay here forever, I’ve decided that.

I feel like I could write about this forever - what I see ahead, what I don’t like about today. It’s not that I hate Seattle - it sure beats Indiana. But there are many things that make it impassable for me. I hate the traffic. I hate the rain. I hate the parking. As of right now, I feel very alone in this city, probably more alone than I did at the absolute low in Bloomington, which was the period between when Larry left (5/95) and when I left (7/95). I have no friends in Seattle - no regular friends. I have a half-dozen friends that I see once or twice a year. One calls the other out of the blue, “it’s been forever, let’s do something,” and then a dinner or a movie happens. There’s nobody that I could just call out of the blue here and say “let’s go to the mall.” I don’t want to short-change the couple of people that I do see a few times a year - I love to hang out with them. But I have no default friends, like Ray or Larry, and I would never expect to meet one here.

I don’t expect NYC to be filled with people interested in meeting me or anything. But I need the change. I think being out of college has killed my drive to talk to others. I used to meet new people every semester, and now the only people I see are my coworkers. I’m sure I could go to somebody’s kids’ soccer game, but I need people like me. I think being on the loose as a writer, going to readings and workshops and stuff, might help me. Who knows.

This has gone from an announcement to a bunch of whining drivel, so I should wrap this up. I’m sure a lot more stuff will be discussed about this move, and I’m glad it’s out in the open so I can mention it. I’d like to avoid making this into some sort of countdown to the move (“day 7 - I bought some boxes.”) but I’m sure it will come up again. Drop a line if you have any questions, as always…

Brown-orange sky

Tue, 02 Feb 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I woke this morning (well, it was about 11:45) to a strange condition of light outside that I can’t describe. The same thing happened yesterday; it’s like the almost brown-orange color between when it’s very sunny and when a storm suddenly dumps hail out of the sky, an eerie rust-colored available light that’s still full sunlight, but maybe when it’s obscured by a giant storm that hits and vanishes like the Viet Cong. But thismorning it wasn’t just this light - in the half-awake state between the last cycle of sleep and the first moment of being awake in bed, my mind was fully convinced that it was 1988, even though I was a 28 year old adult (?) living in Seattle, and not a kid in high school back in Elkhart, Indiana. I completely thought Ray Miller drove a grey Citation and Larry Falli had a cow’s skull on the hood of his Cordoba and I worked at Montgomery Ward as a master paint specialist for $3.65 an hour. This wormhole lasted for about two seconds, like when you have a dream that you knocked your teeth out and you wake and think for a split-second that you have no teeth. When this temporary portal slipped past, I felt an intense burst of depression that it really wasn’t true, or maybe that I couldn’t go back to sleep and exploit it further. After a half a minute of that, I realized how stupid the whole thing was, and started looking for the remote controls to the TV, stereo, and VCR.

Here’s another dumb thought that happened today. It takes forever to set up, and maybe I just want to ramble about the past more, so bear with me. It also has to do with Pearl Jam, so don’t freak out on me.

I wasn’t a big Pearl Jam fan from the beginning. I wasn’t really a fan of anybody from the whole Seattle movement, because I was too busy with my Motorhead collection and whatnot. When I met Tanya back in the spring of 1993, she initially started emailing me because my process name on the VMS mainframes was always “Doctor X.” (Process names: on VMS computers, you can set a 16 character label that will appear next to your userid when someone looks at some or all of the users on the system. Many people set them to everything from “NoBlood4Oil” to “BoKnowsUnix” to “Sid Lives” to whatever other music-related or depraved things you could think of on a college campus.) Doctor X was a Queensryche reference, and we had that in common. She was also very into Pearl Jam, and I was reluctant, but I heard Alive or Jeremy or something on the radio once, and it wasn’t too bad - it was more metal-based than Nirvana and I thought that maybe I could be into them. One Friday night, we were sitting in her loft in Willkie Quad after a typical dinner/movie date, and she played the whole album for me. Although I wouldn’t call myself a Pearl Jam fan, all of the songs deeply cemented that evening into my head. The relationship started so sweet, innocent - walking across campus, holding hands, being in love and beautiful April days, and the eleven tracks on that album were and still are a direct condiut back to those days of spring 1993.

So she went away for the summer, so did I. We both came back, things went on, but were different, and it ended at the end of October. If you need more details than that, you can read any of the 400 journal entries or short stories I’ve written on the subject. Needless to say, when Pearl Jam’s second album came out, I was pretty anti-Eddie Vedder. And the breakup wasn’t exactly smooth. She tried to politely and distantly be friends, and immediately got into another relationship. I wallowed in episodes of psychotic bullshit that were entirely my fault, and created a huge rift between us. It was the kind of situation where I didn’t feel I could win. I couldn’t have her back, but I couldn’t pretend it never happened. But I couldn’t have her back.

There were drunken, suicidal phone calls, new medications, rambling emails, and other mind games. Then the process names started to change. Even when you aren’t talking to someone anymore, the process name wars will always happen - I found that out with the astrology chick. These were not of the “JKONRATH=dick” sort, but much more subtle - obscure musical references that 1 in 10,000 people would catch. During that time, when we weren’t speaking, one of her process names was “rearviewmirror.” I knew it was a Pearl Jam song, from the new album, but I dismissed it and went on to my chaotic, singular path to destruction.

Fast-forward to July 1, 1995. Everything I own is in a U-Haul truck. I said goodbye to A and Liggett after they helped me load the last of my stuff, and then said goodbye to the city of Bloomington. I’d drive up to Elkhart, say my parental goodbyes, and then head west to Seattle. On the way, I stopped in the Karma records in Kokomo, about halfway through the 250 mile trip. I had a fat wad of money in my pocket, and I figured I’d buy every used tape they had that I could endure. I found the entire Anthrax discography, and a copy of the second Pearl Jam tape for $3. What the hell, I was mostly over her, I thought. I’d had sex with two other people since her, so that qualified as over in my book. I got the tapes, and during the 40-some hour, no-sleep drive to Seattle, I must’ve listened to it a couple of times, but I didn’t pay attention. It seemed marginal, and not as good to me as the first one, so I went back to Henry Rollins or whatever I was listening to on that trip.

I got to Bill’s house, slept for 8 hours, took my first shower in about three days, and got ancy. His wife and kid were in Indiana, visiting relatives, and he was at work, which left me in Mountlake Terrace with no car, a U-Haul full of shit, and in a strange house. I needed food, a walk, and some exploration. I grabbed the walkman and the Pearl Jam tape, rewound to the song rearview mirror, and went walking to the Dairy Queen about a half-mile from the apartment.

So, two thoughts were going on in my mind. One was the knife turning in me over her process name, and how it had to directly do with how much of a dick I was after we split. But the other, less predictable response had to do with my own interpretations of the song, the first song (in theory) that I listened to whhile in Seattle. The relationship aspects hurt, but it made me think about how Indiana was in my rearview mirror. Since my breakup with her, things went downhill for me in Bloomington. It wasn’t her fault - it was that everyone was graduating and moving away, and it made the whole scene more alien for me. Seattle was my start over, and the song was oddly appropriate.

Today, I was about a half hour into the 4 minute trip from my house to the Taco Bell, and for some odd reason, I put in my copy of Vs. and rewound to the song. It won’t be long until Seattle is in my rearview mirror, and the ramifications of this were like a sharp blow to the sternum with a huge weight. I’m not scared of leaving, but it doesn’t seem like too long ago when I was walking to that Dairy Queen and listening to this song on my walkman. My memory has been fucking with me so much, snapping me into brief but chaotic periods of confusion, nostalgia, and depression. I’ve been in Seattle for my whole life, but two minutes ago, I was talking to A about Leonard Maltin in Simms’ old apartment while he was making Indian food and getting ready to tape Duckman. It’s all very confusing sometimes.

That’s enough shit to stew over for now. Hey, when I move, my dates and times won’t be 3 hours off anymore. How’s that for a solution to my stupid problem?

Dental malady, trinity

Wed, 03 Feb 1999 00:00:00 GMT

Part two of the dental malady will take place in a few hours. I get a real crown and a new filling, plus a bunch of shots in my gumline, a lecture about why I need to floss more, a sore jaw from the rubber block they jam in my mouth to keep it open wide, and hopefully some more nitrous. I will probably start having Frances Farmer flashbacks while I’m in the chair and put a dental explorer through an assistant’s thigh. Think gentle thoughts…

One of the best bits of luck has hit me with regard to my trip across the country. As I may or may not have mentioned, when I leave for New York, I will be spending two weeks in a rental car, exploring the country. My original plan was to go from Seattle to Salt Lake, then Vegas, then LA, then follow Route 66 to St. Louis, skip over to Indiana, see all of my friends, go to see Micheal in Ohio, and then head to the city. This was the plan, with me leaving on the 31st of March. But, get this:

The Trinity Site is opento the public on April 3! What does that mean? This is the place where it all started - July 16, 1945, the first atomic explosion ever. It’s only open two days a year, and I will be in the general vicinity for one of them. This means the whole trips is changing. I will stay in Vegas for one night, then immediately drive east, stay the night in Albequerque, and drive down in the morning to check this out. I’ll also have time to go to Roswell and see all of the fake alien UFO museums.

For a good site on Trinity, check this out. There isn’t much there - it’s not like the NTS tour, where there are huge craters from plowshare explosions and fake cities which were nuked to study structural integrity. But there will be some cool government spook signs, I’m sure - telling people not to pick up radioactive stuff or they will be shot on site or whatever. It will be a very cool photo op.

I just called NTS - they have monthly tours, but they are on March 22 and April 23, or something like that. You can’t take cameras there, either. I also found out from the above site that you can now scuba dive at the Bikini atoll, although the tours are very small and expensive, and you need to be an advanced diver. It almost makes me want to learn how to swim just to check it out. The aircraft carrier USS Saratoga is sitting at the bottom there, and you can swim all over it. Also, the Nagota is there, which is the ship from which the attack on Pearl Harbor was conducted. They hauled all of those old ships out there to see what an H-bomb would do to them.

I’ve gotta check out this guy’s web site. More later…

Seven Days, time travel

Fri, 05 Feb 1999 00:00:00 GMT

More rain. I’m listening to Lizzy Borden - Master of Disguise, which is a very good album to have in the player on a dark and dreary day like today. It also reminds me a lot of my first semester of college for some reason, probably because I listened to it so much back then. The fall of 89 is on the very short list of semesters when the most change happened.

Before I get into this, I need to launch into an aside: Have you seen the show on UPN called Seven Days? The basic plot: the government has a time machine that can send a single person back seven days (called “backstepping”). So let’s say Sadaam gets a nuclear bomb and U-Hauls it to the superbowl and kills a few million people (which really isn’t a bad plan). So this secret division of the NSA would stap this guy in a giant machine, shoot him back a week, and now he has to go find Sadaam and distract him with some Asian hookers while he dismantles the nuke with a Bic pen and a book of matches, ala MacGyver. The special effects are on the moderate to shitty side of the scale, and sometimes the writing is a little too oversimplified for the scifi crowd - dumbed down for the action/adventure types. But it’s an interesting idea - sort of like Quantum Leap but grounded in reality a bit more. I’m not saying the technology is real, but they make this more like the government sending in the ATF or the Navy Seals, as opposed to a guy leaping all over the place and becoming different people. (But I liked that show, too.)

I have been studying a lot of scifi shows and movies about time travel, because I’m writing a book about it. So, I have some observations about the plot. I doubt anybody who reads this has seen the show, but maybe someone looking for Seven Days sites who is a big fan can answer my questions about the technical aspects or “time model” used by the show. I just did a search on UPN.com and found that the 7 is not spelled out in the title, and the main dude’s name is Frank Parker. It looks like it will be impossible to do web searches on “7 days” though because I will get hits on every calendar-type page on the way. On to my observations…

Okay, the first thing I can’t figure out: when Frank Parker goes back seven days, are there two Frank Parkers, or does he replace the old one? It appears from the one show I saw that they can also travel distance a bit with their machine. So, let’s say I am Frank, and I go back 7 days to the top of the Sears tower, but seven days ago, I was at a strip club. Does the me at the strip club vanish, or coexist? Doesn’t mean there are n+1 Frank Parkers, where n=the number of times he’s backstepped? If he replaces the old version of him, that would be a very interesting time model. It also eliminates gaffs like going back in time, robbing banks, fucking shit up, etc. because he is basically him. If I went back to 1947, I would not be me - the police wouldn’t be able to look me up and find me anywhere. If I go back to last Thursday, I’m still Jon Konrath - same fingerprints, same vehicle registration, same apartment, etc. If I knew I was backstepping in an hour, I could do a bunch of stuff that maybe wouldn’t happen, but I’m not sure - see next observation.

It appears that 7 days follows a destiny-based model, because (at least last night) some events happened exactly the same in both timelines. For example, the chief-type guy accidentally broke a tooth, which became a key plot point. Now, if it was a pure chaos-theory model, a butterfly in Nebraska could’ve completely thrown things off and the second time, his tooth wouldn’t break. But, if things always happen, how can a meddling time traveller do anything to throw off the process? In a 100% destiny model, no matter what he did, he wouldn’t be able to stop anything from happening. In fact, he might even cause them to happen. Imagine him backstepping to prevent the assassination of the president, and when he shows up, he tries to shoot the gunman, but instead accidentally shoots the president! So there’s some mix of destiny and freewill - maybe events are fixed by destiny, but an entity that goes through time has the ability to stop or supplement destiny and do their own thing.

When Frank Parker backsteps and then shows up at his office, everyone knows it’s him and that he has moved back to do some important work. They immediately listen to him and fall in line. Now they know that they put him back seven days, and they know all about his missions and whatever. This is a pretty smart way to do it. In most Terminator-type movies, they spend the first hour fucking with “oh my god! you can’t be from the future! you need to prove it!” crap. Of course, we’re not taking about 60 or 260 years of travel - they know the dude, and they paid to zap him back a week.

Also, their time machine is a huge basketball-arena sized thing with nuclear reactors and a few dozen operators, not a pocket-sized device that lets you zap all over. That means that time travel is pretty regulated to real missions, and you don’t have Biff going back in time to give himself a sports almanac or whatever. It’s not as cool looking as a DeLorean, though.

If I had time, I would start talking about all of the different, evil things I would do with a time machine. But I’ve gotta split - you’ll have to wait for the book.

The length of a cubit

Sat, 06 Feb 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I’m building an arc. Math majors and/or biblical scholars, please tell me how long a cubit is. I will not be bringing any animals, except for Marie’s two cats. They are both males and fixed, so it’s not part of a plan to populate the world with cats. That would, however be a good scifi movie - Planet of the Cats. Charlton Heston yelling “get your paws off of me you damn furry kittens!” It would sell to the SciFi crowd and folks who think cats are really cute.

It’s still raining, which makes the days go by faster. When I can’t leave the house and I spend all of my time eating, sleeping, or watching TV, it only takes about 6 or 7 hours for a day to pass. I’m not writing right now - I have completely run out of steam on Rumored to Exist. I think I will go back to Summer Rain this weekend, and maybe get the last third close to done by the time I leave for NY for good in March. The difference between the rain in that book and the rain here is that in Indiana, it would pour rain, and then instantly become sunny. I’m pretty sick of the rain now, but if the sun came out in a split-second, I would run around on the wet pavement and smell the earthworms and thunderstorm ozone, and enjoy it more than this 40 days/40 nights shit.

Although I get more positive comments about Rumored, working on Summer Rain is ultimately more satisfying. I can write more per night on SR, especially when I get caught up in dialogue that works well. I can take things slow, and carve out scenes with a lot more visual impact. I also like to build up the characters more. Rumored is fun, but it’s very hit or miss, like writing copy for a newspaper instead of actual prose. But, more people enjoy reading it, and I enjoy reading it, and it will probably manage to sell someday, while Summer Rain will never really be finished. The only distribution methods I see are printing a hundred copies and giving them to my friends, or someone finding the ms long after I’m dead, and publishing it posthumously. Oh well, it’s fun anyway.

I thought about describing this company meeting I attended yesterday, but then I realized there there wasn’t much going on there. It was at the Moore Theatre, where me and Bill Perry saw Henry Rollins perform spoken word on his birthday, 2-13-96. Rollins spoke for so fucking long - it was great, but my bladder was exploding during the third hour. I ran to the bathroom, and it was the worst torture of North American plumbing - the trough. Luckily, this time there was no trough - they removed it and installed a bunch of stalls. After the meeting, there was a bunch of beer and food, and the line for food was very long while the line for beer was negligible. So, I started drinking right away on an empty stomach - hey, it’s free. I didn’t do anything stupid, except not cash in on the free food, and after they bussed us back to the office, I had to sit around for a few hours playing on the web and sobering up.

I’m more into this reuben sandwich than writing, so I better split.

Denny's hot soup

Mon, 08 Feb 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I feel a need for an update, but I’m sick today. It hit all of a sudden, and it’s more fatigue than the scratchy throat/raspiness thing. Some hot soup at Denny’s helped some; a four hour nap was even better. I wanted to get so much shit done today, but now the day’s pretty much over. I hope that massive doses of vitamins and rest will get me back to semi-normal status by Wednesday, so my trip to New York will be uneventful. (I mean btw of problems. It should be a very cool trip, although short. Marie said that next week, we are going to a party in the apartment (it’s now a condo) where Burroughs lived when Lucien Carr showed up to tell him he killed David Kammerer. That’s kindof cool.)

I bought a bunch of boxes, and I’ve been trying to pack. It’s a slow process, and incredibly nostalgic, which makes it go even slower. Every single thing I pull off the shelves to put in a box reminds me of a ton of stories and other mental baggage. It’s always great to live in the past for a moment and explore the stream of memories, but it makes me take hours to pack each box. I bought ten boxes today, and when those are packed and on a UPS truck for New York, my apartment will look threadbare. I’m also hoping to get as much of the breakables and invaluable items to New York on my trip. I’m packing as little as possible for the three days, and filling the rest of my luggage allowance with journals, photos, video masters, my whole Nintendo setup, and as much as I can get into the 3 bags/70 lbs each limit.

You’d be suprised how much broccoli seems to help a cold. Most be the vitamin A. Anyway, I can barely think, so I better quit for today.

GPS

Tue, 09 Feb 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I’m still sick today. I spent all of yesterday sleeping, and bought about $40 of various cold remedies and vitamins. I feel somewhat better today, but I hope for more improvement before Wednesday. There’s nothing worse than flying with a head cold.

I got my GPS today. It’s a Garmin GPS-12, and I haven’t had much of a chance to play with it yet. It’s very small, almost as small as my cell phone, and has a very cool-looking display. On my way to work, I got it to lock onto 4 GPS satellites, which gave me my location and altitude. It also read my speed as I drove into town, which was cool. I need to read the instructions and start making a bunch of waypoints, for the hell of it.

I have a dozen other things to do, plus I’m sick, so I better scoot.

packing

Thu, 11 Feb 1999 00:00:00 GMT

A quick update… I stayed home from work today (Tues) and slept, to try and beat this cold or whatever it is. I feel pretty decent now, but still disoriented. I also threw out my back a bit, although after lying on the floor for a few hours, it feels much better. Bad things always happen in threes right before trips, so I’m expecting my car to get firebombed tonight.

I’m almost entirely packed for this trip. I’ll be in New York until Sunday night, so there won’t be any more updates. This will be my last trip to New York as a visitor, so it’s pretty weird. I still remember the same type of trip in Bloomington. It was the summer of 1991, when I was dating the astrology chick and visiting every couple of weeks. I drove down about two weeks before my final move-in, with a carload of stuff and a bunch of appointments at the bursar, registrar, psychiatrist, landlord, etc etc. This move was a return to Bloomington after spending a year living with my parents in Elkhart and going to IUSB. Usually when you transfer back to a regional campus, you never make it back to Bloomington. You fall into a rut of a class a semester and an all-encompassing day job, until you stop taking classes. Everybody told me I’d never make it back. And then, on that August day, I was walking through the arboretum, on my way to the shrink, looking at the sky and the trees and the people and thinking that I was back - after two more weeks of work, I’d have Bloomington as my playground again. I guess I feel the same way about New York. Once I return, I think I have four weeks of work, two weeks of time to myself in Seattle to pack and say goodbyes, and then my two week roadtrip. Then New York is my playground.

Okay, time to finish packing and maybe watch Conan. It’s a 1pm flight, but I’ve been sleeping all day for the last few days.

The Burroughs house

Wed, 17 Feb 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I am back. I am sick. I could barely talk today, and felt like crawling under my desk and dying all day. But I have a deadline this Friday, and I had 248 mail messages waiting for me at work, so I had to get there. Plus I woke up at 6am when the Nyquil wore off, and I had nothing better to do. Actually, I had a lot of better things to do, but I chose to go to work instead of calling in. Maybe tomorrow.

New York was cool, although I was too sick to do much. It was good to see Marie for a couple of days, and hang out with my two feline friends Mungo and Henrey. We did go out a few times, to a Ukranian deli, to the village to look at CDs, and to Tower. I bought two new prerecorded MiniDiscs (Ozzy and Pink Floyd) and I saw the lab which was used as an exterior in Seinfeld when they went to get the frozen yogurt tested for fat content. So that was my big brush with fame for the trip.

Actually, on Saturday, we went to a big party at this giant three-story house. It turns out that the place used to be divvied up into tiny apartments, and in 1943 and 1944, William S. Burroughs lived there. Kerouac and Ginsberg visited there a lot, and it’s the place where Lucien Carr visited the morning after killing David Kamerrer and showed Burroughs the pack of bloody cigarettes he lifted from the body. It’s a flat with some real history to it.

Of course, when we were there, all of that was gone. The building was converted into one giant house long ago. Burroughs’ old residence is now a kids’ bedroom, full of toy cars. On the top floor, there was a bathroom that was seriously as big as my entire fucking apartment, with a sauna, giant bathtub, fireplace, everything. And the whole house was wired for audio and TV, so you could listen to music all over or divide it up to certain rooms. Later, we were trying to guess how much the place would sell for - at least in the seven digit range.

So here I am, sick. I better stop my whining and get some rest and a few good belts of the Robitussen. Maybe tomorrow…

alt.hackers

Thu, 18 Feb 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I’m still sick, but I think I’m making progress. I slept almost all day yesterday, and thismorning it didn’t feel like my lungs were full of paste. I’m still not up to 100%, but I have hopes of being functional by the weekend.

I’ve started reading alt.hackers again, and it’s got me all messed up on this early-90s technology kick. It’s amazing how little things have changed in some ways. If you ignore all of the internet explosion bullshit and Bill Gates’ totalitarian wet dream, the old iron was still the same. Unix machines have become more powerful, and now anyone with a PC can have one, but the basic tenets are the same. Gcc, sed scripts, X11, sockets programming, it’s all there. But back then I was logged in via a 286 running Procomm and a Sytek 2400bps connection, instead of a Pentium and an ethernet connection. Even with all of the crap on the web, I really miss the days when usenet was a cool place to talk and find information, and there were a few cool internet BBSes to mess with.

Nothing else is going on, and I think I’m going to get back to being sick and stuff.

Strange Antibiotic Dreams

Sun, 21 Feb 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I am still sick. I managed to sneak out of work on Thursday afternoon and catch a doctor’s appointment at the Polyclinic. After reading a March 1998 issue of Forbes for about an hour, the doctor gave a quick listen to my cough and determined that it was bronchitis. He gave me antibiotics and told me about 9 times to drink lots of water with them, or I would explode and possibly kill other people nearby. He also said I should be better by Tuesday, which blows the whole idea of being better today. I do feel somewhat better today - not as much coughing or aching. Of course, my thirteen hour nap helped somewhat.

I wish Seattle would give me some nice weekend days before I left. I woke at about noon today, and the sun was peeking out a bit. Now it’s 3:30 and it looks like the sun is going to set in about 2 minutes. I don’t know what I would do if it was sunny, except maybe drive to the mall or bookstore or something. But dammit, I want one good Saturday with some sun and my sunroof before I junk the fucking car and go to riding the subway. I hate driving in traffic, I hate I-5, I hate parking, and I hate my car, but nothing beats a steady speed on some winding hills with the Rush song “Red Barchetta” in the player.

I had many weird dreams last night, which is strange because I’m trying to lay off the NyQuil after a 14-day stand. I wanted to learn to fly - a plane, I mean. In the dream, my uncle Jim used to have a pilot’s license, but it was decades expired and he couldn’t teach me. I was going to get LASIK surgery on my eyes to pass the flight physical, and I even went up on a test flight with anotheer pilot. Then I remembered I was going to New York, and I got all depressed because I thought it would be almost impossible to find a place to take flying lessons if I lived in Manhattan. My parents were mad at me for wanting to fly. I was in New York and my uncle died. When I went home, I had a neighbor I didn’t know who looked like Nancy Travis who was in a wheelchair. I was strangely attracted to her. I went to visit my dad at work, where he was raising bioengineered plants like the ones in Jurassic Park. I was trying to get him and mom to pay for a summer program at Rutgers. I started thinking about how I would set up my .forwards on the Rutgers email accounts, and then use gnus on 34.216.9.77/ to read all of my mail. When I woke up, I had a strange, intense feeling where I missed my old Escort, and how I should sell my VW and buy a Corolla or something similar with a really nice interior.

And right now I’m listening to the newest Pat Metheny album Imaginary Day, which does remind me of the Escort, and the trip I made up to Bremerton last summer with the MiniDisc, listening to Metheny. (Look in the 1998 entries in the beginning - it’s in there somewhere.) This shows that I can be nostalgic about something that happened less than a year ago, which shows that I’m completely insane.

The Karate Kid was just on. If I ever make a movie, no matter what it is, I’m going to cast Pat Morita as something.

I better go do something before the hundred mile an hour winds start.

TV-free

Tue, 02 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I am TV-free. For a month. I sold the piece of shit today, and now there’s a gaping hole in the stack of equipment and cables next to my computer. My “entertainment center” is a coffee table, on which the TV, a speaker, two VCRs, a tape deck, a receiver, a CD player, about a hundred CDs, and a dozen or so VHS tapes live. Now it’s minus the TV, since it would cost me about $50 to ship, and that’s all it’s worth. And I sold it for $75. I’m already going into withdrawl though - I got home from work, plopped down on the bed, stared at the blank spot on the way, and… yelled FUCK! I now need to do something creative with my evening, for a change. So this is how I used to write 4000 words a day…

I have yet another stupid nostalgia-trip story. I was at the mall Saturday, and went into the mall music store, which is usually a good place to look at a couple of bad guitars and then leave. But on consignment, they had a white Cort headless bass, with Steinberger tuners. About ten years ago, I bought my first bass, which was identical to this one, except my old one wasn’t wired - the knobs were missing, along with the jack, back panel, wiring harness, and foil shielding. I bought my old one for about $100 or $150 and rewired it, but it sounded like shit and had horrendous buzzing problems. I also painted it all up and put stickers on it. This one was in great shape - the fingerboard and frets were decent, the paint was original and new, and the electronics were pristine. I had to hear how it sounded stock, so I asked the guy to plug in, and a minute later I was going through a nice Hartke amp.

Some background on me and the bass: I started playing in the last semester of high school, towards the very end of the school year. I bought this Cort bass as a graduation present to myself, and took lessons all summer from Jamie Magera, a local guitar prodigy. In Bloomington, I took classes through school, met a lot of other musicians, and never got to the point of being really good, but I did play in a Calypso band in front of a sold-out IU Auditorium, so I did okay. After I got into computers, bass fell by the wayside. I tried to pick it up again in 96 with a Fender Precision fretless, but it felt alien, and I didn’t do too well. I’ve always since wished I could play something, but I never had the time. Every time I see a band live, I want to be the one on stage. I wish I could record a 4-track demo and trade it with people. And when I got that bass in my hands on Saturday, it felt natural again. Steinberger-based basses feel very strange - the body is small, the scale is short, there’s no tuning pegs or headstock on the end, and some people can’t stand them. But since it was my first bass, it felt RIGHT.

A minute later, I whipped out my Visa card and said, “I’ll take it.” I also picked up a 20 watt Hartke amp, which kicks some serious ass - ampmakers have really gotten their shit together in the last ten years. I hauled all of the gear home, unsure of how I’d even start playing or learning. At home, I ran through scales and the riffs that I knew, and things slowly got back to me. And on Sunday, I got a strap, tuner, and one of those “Metallica Riff-By-Riff” books. It might not be a good start, but I used to know more of their stuff, and it’s got my fingers moving again. I think this will be the perfect new hobby to pick up, especially after I move.

Michael Stutz was here all weekend, and we hung out on Thursday and Saturday. I’d write more, but I just ate some really greasy pizza, and I think I’m damaging this computer.

The cleaning/packing process

Fri, 05 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

Time for an update, I guess.

My typing has been poor all day, for the last couple of days really - I don’t know if it’s a slow net connection or some kind of mental problem on my end, but it’s annoying me. I’ve had a lot to do in the last few days, but all of it’s invisible - lots of emails, moving around files, tweaking websites - none of it real, visible projects. It feels once again like there are about 6 hours in a day. I think “I’m going to get started on my real work any second now” and then I realize it’s 2 in the morning.

Lots of stuff is going wrong. My car stereo went out, but then magically came back. My caller ID is broken, or maybe it’s just that nobody calls me anymore. I went to the dentist and got fillings, and now one tooth perpetually feels like its got popcorn husks stuck underneath it. And my fucking apartment rental company is fucking me over on my last months’ rent. I paid a last months’ rent, and now they are saying I have to pay a last month, and I will somehow magically get that money back when I get my deposit back. But I know and they know that in about 8 years, I will get a check for $47 and a receipt for a new washer and drier or something. The company is Equity Rentals. Never, ever trust them.

I’m trying to get as much of Summer Rain done as I can, given current circumstances. It’s slowly getting there - I have about 6 of the last 15 chapters done now. I’m hoping, as always, for a good weekend. Since I’m close to broke now, thanks to my apartment management, I’ll probably be spending the whole weekend inside, doing nothing but writing and playing bass. The bass is good, but I have a long way to go. Having a good amp helps. Falling asleep at like 7pm for 2 hours every night does not help.

The cleaning/packing process continues. I gave away or sold a handful of items here at work today, which is good - I had no idea what I’d do with a 12” monochrome monitor. I’m also frantically throwing out everything I can, in an effort to at least make the place look a little more vacant. Because of this apartment bullshit, I won’t be sending out any boxes for a bit, but hopefully I can get a bunch of them packed this weekend.

I think it’s time to go home now.

War on my apartment building

Wed, 10 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I have been copying Type O Negative albums to MiniDisc all night long. Working on Summer Rain and writing email to Conan O’Brien. Once I get 1000 messages to him, I am putting them all out as a zine.

I have declared war on my apartment building. It is 2:45 here. In a minute, I am moving my 200 lb dresser in front of the door, turning my bass amp up to 11 and practicing scales to a metronome for about 4 hours. I guess I should go to work tomorrow, though. We had some sort of party today, and the most interesting part were those cans of Guiness beer with the nitrogen widget in the bottom. When you open them, the nitrogen releases and carbonates the beer. I have no idea how much it costs per can, but you can probably charge a lot from people who think it’s important. In my opinion, beer is beer. Sorry.

I should either go to bed or get back to work on the book.

Vomit bag storage

Thu, 11 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Written Picture

Fri, 12 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Last day at the job

Sat, 13 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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.

The temperature cycling has begun

Mon, 15 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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.

First day of freedom

Wed, 17 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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.

junk

Thu, 18 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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.

An effort to think more like a starving writer

Sat, 20 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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.

About to rain

Tue, 23 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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.

new home layout

Wed, 24 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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.]

working on Summer Rain

Thu, 25 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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.

The Bellevue Denny's run

Sun, 28 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

How long has it been since I’ve updated? Everything’s been a blur of either going to UPS or hauling crap down to the dupster. I have one last trip to UPS, and that’s to send off my stereo. Otherwise, everything’s going into the trash or my car, with the exception of a few things that others might snag. The place is starting to look very empty, but now the mad rush of cleaning, scrubbing, and vacuuming needs to start.

I have allegedly sold my car, for $100. I say allegedly because I have it until Sunday night, when the sale takes place, and there’s always a chance it will fall through. But it will be gone, and I guess I’m a little sad. It’s a piece of shit, and it’s starting to develop problems, but it reminds me so much of my old VW, the one from 91-92, and there’s so much nostalgia behind that old heap. I won’t miss driving in Seattle - don’t believe anything you hear, Seattle’s transportation situation sucks balls in a major way. And don’t believe that there’s a public transit system here, because there isn’t. I won’t go into that now, though. The car - I will miss it. I should take some pictures tomorrow. I would take it for a nice two hour drive, but that only gets me about 5 miles from my house.

Almost every Friday night, when nothing’s going on, I drive to the Denny’s right off of 520 in Bellevue for dinner. I eat alone, write a bunch, and then drive to the Barnes and Noble over by Bellvue Square Mall and shop for books. Sometimes I also hit the Tower Records there, and on the way back, I go to Safeway for junk food and various caffiene. Then I get home and write. This has been a tradition since I first got to Seattle. I didn’t know where any other B&N or Denny’s was, so I would go out there. And I’ve done this on and off for about four years.

So it hit me that today was my last Friday in Seattle, and I had no other plans, so I decided I needed to do this again. On the way over, driving across 520 in the dark and listening to the last Queensryche album, it really sunk in that it’s almost over here. I guess all week I’ve been so busy with packing and thinking “I’ve got another week,” and then it was suddenly Friday. I’ve got the weekend, then Monday and Tuesday are eaten up by cleaning activities, getting the rental car, and maybe saying bye to a couple of people. But then, I’m on the road. It was an almost scary thought, as I sat there in Denny’s eating one of those awful skillet things and scribbling in my notebook.

Everyone keeps asking me if I will miss Seattle. I thought about this today while driving around Northgate, listening to the aforementioned Queensryche album. That tape reminds me so much of the apex of my Seattle experience, which was probably when it came out - late spring of 97. It reminds me so much of driving around in my old 94 Escort, I can pretty much smell the new car smell and plastic interior, and feel the power steering and plush bucket seats. I drove so much then, down to Longview every other weekend, listening to that tape over and over. It was when I was pulling out of debt, and actually had a few bucks left over on the day before payday. It’s not that I miss the situations or the people as much as the general aura, the feel that I’ll always get when I listen to that album.

I guess I didn’t answer my question. But, it’s hard to explain. I miss all of the places I’ve lived, even the horrible ones, for different reasons. And I wouldn’t want to go back to them today, but the memories are great. And I guess that’s what will happen with Seattle.

I’ve gotta hit the hay. I’ve been trying to push back the sleep schedule so I can leave at 6am on Weds. I’m waking up at about 9 now, so I should be able to make it. We’ll see.

The clean air of Seattle

Mon, 29 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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.

VW gone

Tue, 30 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Last Seattle entry

Wed, 31 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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.

In KC

Tue, 06 Apr 1999 00:00:00 GMT

A quick entry from Kansas City to let you know I’m alive. Asleep, but alive.

I will have to put more detail up here when I’m safe in NY. But to let you know, I’ve made pretty much all of my objectives and then some. Stayed at Salt Lake City wth Roger, went to to Vegas, went to the Trinity nuclear test site, got some trinitrite (sp?) went to the Gnome test site, stayed in Texas, saw the Hoover dam, and now I’m here. 11 states, 3000+ miles.

I must sleep now. Maybe more later…

In NY

Fri, 16 Apr 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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…

Random fiber cuts in Pittsburgh

Sat, 17 Apr 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Diddy Kong

Tue, 20 Apr 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Walkman synchronicity

Wed, 21 Apr 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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…

working working

Wed, 28 Apr 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Finishing the road

Thu, 29 Apr 1999 00:00:00 GMT

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…

Fermenting Rain

Sun, 02 May 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I have completed a draft of the last third of Summer Rain. It took a lot of stalling for me to type that sentence, at least wouthout qualifying it somehow (“mostly completed”,“shitty draft”,etc.) I’m not happy with the writing in the third part of the book - it’s very repetitive, simple, and I don’t think it has as much significance. But the third part of the book has never been written entirely. While the first chapters have been written and rewritten a million times, there were holes in the ending that were left in a skeletal state ever since I started this disaster back in 1995. Maybe with time and further refinements, I will be more comfortable with book 3 and its problems. Maybe I will have to completely rewrite it, or at least add some new plot elements and scale back the stuff that seems to drag on forever.

I should mention that Summer Rain in its entirety is available for review and comment to discriminating readers. I say that because the whole thing is 237,000 words long and I can’t throw it on a public web site and let the world read it if I ever try to publish the thing. But if you want to read it and let me know what you think, drop me a line and I can give you a password to download everything.

Work is beginning to pile up. I have two freelance tech writing clients, and a couple of other leads. Summer Rain can sit and ferment for a bit, but I’ve still got this damned trip travelogue thing. I think it’s 4 or 5 days into the 14 total, but it’s still going slow. At least I got the pictures scanned, thanks to Marie, so I can plug those in once I get the thing on the web. Soon, soon.

I just read an excellent bio on Bukowski - I would tell you the author and title, but I already put it away and I don’t want to get up. It’s the new one that just came out in hardcover - I found it at Tower, so it shouldn’t be that obscure. It’s the best bio of him I’ve seen, considering all of the half-ass attempts made. It’s the first third-party Bukowski book I’ve seen that was longer than a pamphlet, and it’s very well written. The problem with Buk is that his stories and poems were about 90% accurate, and the other 10% has been very elusive. Everyone has speculated on details of his life like finances, and it’s good to see a realistic account of this stuff.

I just started a 12M download and typing is not an option anymore. I guess it’s time to go do some other work.

Two clients, two books, no waiting

Wed, 05 May 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, and my medium-term memory is completely gone, but I’ve taken on a second tech writing client. It’s a sort of whirlwind project, writing a manual in the next two weeks. I’m still getting started with the software and everything, but the framework of the thing is zipping along. The reason I mention this is that with two clients, I have virtually no time to think about other stuff. It’s good that Summer Rain is currently resting, as I will be very busy for the next few weeks.

I’m at a state where everything I touch breaks. This happens here and there, but it has been fairly constant since I arrived here. I’m still waiting for this to go away so I can… so I can something. so I can complete my sentences. This journal project is useless at this point. I can’t compose my thoughts when I have to pre-guess what I’m typing over a delay that ranges from five seconds to five minutes per character. I can’t compose my thoughts, period. My paper journal has gone completely south - I’m lucky to update it weekly, and then it is a maze of confusion, wondering if I’ve added some certain daily activities event in the story. And my writing on the trip piece of shit has been mostly “I was x” “I did y” “I drove more” kind of shit.

I honestly need to stop writing, period, until the desire to write comes back. I need to do nothing but sleep and play nintendo for weeks, months, years, until my journals and my other work become creative again. But I can’t do that. I have work that needs to be completed, and I know that if I stop writing, I will just beat myself up for not writing until I return. And if I stop, I will feel that I have absolutely no purpose in life, and I will spend the remainder of my savings on some idiotic hobby to give myself purpose. And I can’t do that.

So maybe I need to do some exercises. Write something different. Read some books about writing. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out eventually.

Rosy Crucifiction

Thu, 06 May 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve decided that if I ready Henry Miller’s Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, many of the short-term wrongs will be righted in my life. I’ve been looking for something to make me think about writing and somehow think about where I’m at right now. It’s hard to explain beyond that, but I’ve read the first 30 or 40 pages of Sexus today, and it makes a lot of sense to me. Miller starts as a person who has written but who doesn’t write, but is told that he should. It’s in the context of a torrid love affair, and it makes him analyze what writing is, and why he should or shouldn’t proceed. It’s a good dialogue for me to ponder at this point. Plus, reading someone else’s prose for a while usually helps mine. So we’ll see - I might give up by page 47.

I got the three books as a present for being in Bill Perry’s wedding. That was the summer of 1994, and I read them over the last half of that year. I got started on Miller with Tropic of Capricorn at the beginning of ‘94, around my birthday. It was when I was starting my transformation from whatever I was to writer. I guess it’s good to get back into his stuff, because I feel another major transformation will be required to get all of Seattle out of my sytem and really become a full-time writer.

I’ve been dealing with a strange depression, which partially has to do with me never leaving the house. I guess I had that when I was in Seattle, but I was so burrowed into my apartment, it felt good to stay in all day surrounded with my books. Part of the depression also probably has to do with not having a car. Because in Seattle, when I never left my house, I would make the 3am run to 7-Eleven for a Slurpee and then drive for 20 minutes or an hour, just for the sake of driving. Now that I am a pedestrian and deathfully afraid of getting lost or mugged or both when I do anything other than walk to the McDonald’s or Radio Shack down the street, it has begun burrowing away at me.

I have been busy - two clients, the book, the trip story, the journals, reading, and assorted cleaning/straightening/organizing which I never seem to get done. But it’s not like when you go to work for 8 hours, and then sit at home for x hours. I guess I’m just whining and babbling about all of this, but it is really starting to take a toll on me. I’ve been waiting for that magic transition period to end so everything is correct and I can do what I planned on doing before I left, which was write full-time and spend the rest of the remaining time enjoying myself. Right now, I’m not writing or enjoying myself, and that’s the problem.

I feel better today than I did yesterday, but I still feel like I was hit by a car. I’m hoping that 12 hours of sleep will knock more of this out of me. Until then, I’ve got a ton of mail to answer and I should do some more reading.

Raining, editing 'Rain

Thu, 20 May 1999 00:00:00 GMT

It’s raining today. I slept in, and now I’m having throuble getting my day started. I don’t really feel like doing anything, but I should get motivated and write. Some projects are slowly getting finished, leaving me with only a couple of major things left. I wrote my column for the next issue of Metal Curse, and finished a user guide for a company, plus that big trip essay is done, so now it’s just down to another freelance client, and Summer Rain.

I’ve begun a full edit of Summer Rain. I’m starting from chapter one, and moving forward at a crawl, to find all of the problems. The biggest problem is that the three books are stylistically very different, and I need to smooth that over. There are also some holes in book 2, and there are still structural problems in book 3. After some recent reviews of the last 15 chapters, I’ve realized that things need to be greatly restructured to make the story interesting and believable. And the dialogue in book 1 isn’t as great. So there’s lots of crap to be done. I’ve been pecking away at it, mostly reading and reviewing stuff, and there are parts of the book that I really like. I hope I can make the whole thing like those favorite parts.

I’ve temporarily given up on reading Henry Miller. I’ll probably get back to it, but his sometimes long-winded style is not what I need to be reading while I work on this. I’ve switched off to Hunter S. Thompson’s _The Rum Diary_, which is a long-lost novel he wrote back in 1959. It’s an autobigraphical fiction piece, which has the same first-novel feel as my book, or Michael’s Sunclipse novel. It’s helpful to see how he did a few things, like how he handled pacing and time problems. I just started, but I will probably finish the thing in a day or two.

Thinking about buying a laptop. If you have any tips or leads, please let me know. It won’t happen for a few weeks, but maybe I’ll go to the newsstand and get a Computer Shopper to salivate all over.

It’s almost 12:30 and I haven’t even showered yet today. I better get moving.

AfterStep, AfterSeattle

Fri, 21 May 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I have been editing Summer Rain. That means I am reading every chapter about a million times and trying to find the most minute of errors. I figure if I can do about a chapter a day, I will be okay. I also figure there’s no way I will keep up that pace for more than a week.

I went for a long walk today, about two miles round trip. I live vaguely near 181st and Broadway, so I headed south of there for about 20 blocks and then back. During the trip, I listened to the Henry Rollins album Come in and Burn in its entirety. Although this album never caught me that much when it came out about two years ago, it made more sense while actually walking the streets of New York City. The whole album is about the desolation and confusion of the big city, and I guess it never hit me while I was driving from Denny’s to Denny’s in Seattle.

Speaking of Seattle, I was watching the show Frazier tonight. I know it isn’t really filmed in Seattle, and in general TV writers don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about, but it felt strange to hear all of the vague references to Seattle geography and instantly know where all of them were. They didn’t throw any tough ones out - the U-District, Fremont, etc. but it reminded me that I’m not there anymore.

There are many times when I don’t really realize that I have left Seattle, or at least times when I think I’m still on some kind of extended vacation and my apartment will be waiting for me just the way I left it, even though everything from my apartment is here. Sometimes, there is the overwhelming feeling that I am in New York - it’s hard to be standing in Union Square or Penn Station and think anything else. But when I’m staring at a computer screen and listening to the same old CDs, it’s possible to enter this stateless feeling where I’m working hard and I think “after this chapter, I’m going to hop in the VW and go to Safeway.” It doesn’t happen so frequently that it is dehabilitating, but sometimes it freaks me out.

I’m still having trouble finding a writer’s group or any other writers around here. I realize that’s as stupid as saying “I’m having trouble finding any skyscrapers around here” but seriously, all of the things I’ve found on the web or in free catalogs are the 10-week beginner’s course thing. It’s the same deal everywhere - the teacher spends a couple of months telling you what to do and how to write an outline, blah blah blah. I want to meet with other writers and critique chapters and stuff. I guess if I look around enough, I’ll find something. Besides, I’m getting a lot done working on my own.

Ever mess with the AfterStep clock? It’s pretty neat, I like it. I’m too chicken to go with the whole AfterStep window manager, but the clock is neat.

Leyner panel

Wed, 26 May 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I went to a panel discussion at NYU tonight, mostly to see Mark Leyner. It was supposed to be about blasphemy, and what you can’t say in America anymore. However, it was moderated by this idiot law professor, and everyone on the board, except for Leyner and Todd Solondz, the director of Welcome to the Dollhouse, were completely stupid. The moderator kept asking these dumb theoretical questions about legal situations which had nothing to do with the greater ethical situation which we were led to believe was the topic. When they opened the floor for questions, one person had the balls to say that the whole thing was stupid and explained that they should have discussed the censorship methods really used to dumb down America “for the children”, like big corporations and unneeded legislation. He was immediately attacked by one of the idiots on the board for being an anarchist. After that, the whole thing fell apart, and the people asking questions were clearly outpatients from a schitzophrenia clinic who had lost their medication. It was very cool to finally see Leyner, but it would’ve been much cooler in different circumstances.

I was going to write more, but I have a splitting headache.

Phantom Menace

Wed, 02 Jun 1999 00:00:00 GMT

It has been hotter than hell here. And the top floors of old buildings aren’t conducive to rapid cooling or anything. I shouldn’t bitch, because it’s starting to cool off now, and I’m sure things will be peachy. Nothing like last summer in Seattle, where I had to get drunk every night just to get any sleep.

I saw Phantom Menace twice over the extended holiday weekend, and you’re probably expecting me to say that I loved it and I have been waiting since I was a kid, or that it was completely stupid and that George Lucas should shove Jar Jar Binks up his ass, along with his fucking ewok-esque charaters obviously added to the movie to market to 8 year old kids. Well, it’s a little of both, and it’s the biggest and most disproportionate list of pros and cons that I could even list for a movie. Let me try:

Pro

The joy of watching a new Star Wars film. the fact that i had all of the toys when i was a kid. the music. the sound. the design of some of the new cities. a lot of the lightsaber dueling. the characters that were in the other 3 movies that appear in this one. the way ewan macgregor sounds and moves very much like a young alec guiness. the silver SR-71-looking ship. a lot of the pod race. saying pulp fiction lines during samuel l jackson’s parts. the part where yoda makes a “mmmmmm” sound and it almost sounds like he’s going to imitate homer simpson. natalie portman, when she doesn’t have on all the makeup. there’s probably more, but i’ll stop here.

Con

The entire movie is marketed toward eight-year old boys. Jar Jar Binks. Anakin Skywalker. The killer droids. The pacing. The length. The somewhat cryptic governmental subplot. Anakin Skywalker flying in space and destroying the space station, allegedly by accident. Darth Maul’s total lack of personality. (Darth Vader was a prick, but at least he talked to you during the duel.) The utter predictability of certain plot points. Almost every animated creature. The lack of more personal combat, instead of huge combat scenarios. (A bunch of one CGI character against a bunch of another - who cares?) Natalie Portman with all of that shit on her face, acting like she just overdosed on quaaludes. Anakin Skywalker.

Okay, enough about that.

I am still writing, working on Summer Rain. I shouldn’t say that, because I didn’t do anything over the weekend. But I’m very close to finishing the first 15 chapters and putting them out there for review. If you’re interested and you can give me some feedback, let me know and I can set you up.

I finished HST’s Rum Diary, and it really hit the spot. I’m now reading Slaughterhouse Five, or at least I pulled it down from the shelves, and the next time I get a chance to read, that’s what I’ll pick up. I saw the movie on Bravo the other night, and it got me interested in it again. My third book, which I’ll work on when I finish Rumored to Exist (which I’ll work on when I finish Summer Rain) is about time travel, and involves part of a premise from SH5, although I didn’t realize it until later. Writing a time travel book is a bitch, because you need to come up with your own entire set of rules and stick to it. And everyone will tell you that your set of rules is wrong, because there’s no perfect set. But here’s a little trade secret: IT’S FICTION! If you don’t like my set of time travel rules (and most SciFi types won’t), then go fuck yourself. Write your own book, and make everyone at your Harlan Ellison fan club proud.

I’m buying a DVD player. I already have three movies: Pulp Fiction, Blade Runner, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I have the player picked out and everything, but I have a temporary financial logjam involving a couple of check deposits in transit. I could order it now, but I should do the right thing and let everything settle, just in case something stupid happens and I don’t really have the money. (Sounds dumb, but a few weeks ago I mailed a deposit, and forgot to put a stamp on it. Fucked everything by about two weeks.)

Tired. Hot. Got a chapter to fix before bedtime. Sweet dreams.

1992

Thu, 03 Jun 1999 00:00:00 GMT

It’s still hot here. It is amazing how many times I had to deal with much worse heat than this in my past: the factory jobs, the Indiana summers, my top-floor, no AC apartment in Seattle during the August crawl of 90 degree weather. I’m a complete wimp now. Either I’m getting old, or I have no sense of perception.

I “finished” book 1 of Summer Rain. I “say that” because there are still pieces I don’t like and I’m sure I’ve made some bonehead spelling errors in there. But I’ve messed with these 15 chapters so much, that I don’t want to touch them anymore. The next 15 chapters are watching their intestines spit out of a gaping hole in their abdomen while I’m giving the first 15 a pedicure. I need to go where the real work is needed. And I need to finish this book, and go on to the next.

(If you want to critique or read the book, email me. I can always use another opinion.)

I want to finish Summer Rain, but I want to spend the summer doing it. I enjoy working on this little opus (little - it’s 1200 pages) and it’s a very dear part of my history. Many others from that era need to read the book, to rememberthe times we had together and to see Bloomington in 1992 again. But I know it would never sell, and it’s a first book. So I need to get it done and go on to something which will wow the agents and the publishers and satisfy a greater cross-section of fans. I don’t mean selling out or anything. But Rumored to Exist, the second half-done book in the queue, has satistfied many more fans who think it is genius and funny. I think when it is done, and its sister book is halfway done, some publisher will think it’s the next big deal and get it out there for people to see. I’m not 100% confident, but it’s a decent view to hold when trying to figure out what to work on and how to ration my time.

If anybody ever asked (nobody has, as I’m never on Charlie Rose or NPR or whatever) what my favorite year was, I would say 1992. Everything went wrong that year. I lost a scholarship. I lost my car. I lost three girlfriends and two other women who were mind-numbingly incredible sexual partners, but not girlfriends. I lost a walkman that was like my only child. I lost my first CD player. Me and Ray Miller lost all of our money to a crack dealer in a bad part of Chicago. I lost my mind, many times. But it was my first real year of living. For all of the lows, the highs were incredible. Every one of those problems I mentioned had a flipside that was unsurpassable. I had a scholarship, a car, three girlfriends, two other women into mind-numbingly incredible sex, etc. And I wrote about this whole thing in Summer Rain, or at least the summer part of it. It’s hard to explain, but 1992 was sort of my default year.

And I’ve babbled about 1992 a lot in my writing, and in here. So I’ll stop. It’s still hot as hell. I was going to stay up and work on SR for a few more hours, but maybe sleep is a better option.

Final SR push

Tue, 15 Jun 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I guess it’s been a few weeks. A lot has happened, but I still find it difficult to regularly update my journal. I’ve been finding it hard to get anything done lately. I’m hoping to turn that around this week, but I can’t really predict or control my work output. At least it isn’t 100 degrees anymore - it’s actually a little cold and rainy today, which might make it easier for me to stay inside at the computer.

Summer Rain came to a halt about a week ago, but I’m slowly picking it up again. Book two has been impossible in places, mostly because of dialogue I can’t write. I tried to get back on Rumored to Exist for a bit, but now I’ve realized that I absolutely need to finish this thing this summer, or it will stagnate forever. So yesterday, I took a bunch of notes and tried to divide up the work as much as possible, so I’ll be able to clean up everything unrelated to this pain-in-the ass dialogue that’s giving me such a bad case of writer’s block.

(The dialogue has to do with a very brief relationship with a woman. I can’t write for her well, and it makes me think I should somehow change her or drop the whole thing. It’s very easy for me to write for some people, but with her, it’s almost impossible. It’ll happen, sooner or later.)

I bought a DVD player. I haven’t been playing with it non-stop, so it’s not the cause of my problems. It’s fun, though. I have about 13 movies and I’ve got about 10 more on the way. It’s pretty incredible, especially on the movies with a bunch of extra stuff, but I’m somewhat disappointed with the selection of movies currently available. I hope more cool stuff comes out eventually.

It seems like there’s much more to tell, but I really need to get back to work…

Death of DIVX

Sat, 19 Jun 1999 00:00:00 GMT

Summer Rain is almost done. I shouldn’t be saying stuff like that, but I now have one of the most complete drafts of the book I’ve ever seen. There are still many small problems, and I’m not really into a lot of the writing in the final third. But there are no major holes in the story, and you could read the entire thing from start to finish without hitting a major construction spot. Now I’m going to sit and read the thing from start to finish a few times and try to iron out any small mistakes I can find.

I’m thinking of publishing a few dozen copies of the book and either giving them away to the people who helped me, and/or selling a few of them in some sort of limited, numbered run. If you think that sounds cool, let me know and I’ll think about it more.

The big thing on the horizon is Rumored to Exist. I’m trying to figure out a way to attack it, become immersed in it, and get rolling with it. I looked at all of it the other day, and I’ve realized that I really, really like 20% of it and the rest of it isn’t that great. And the current draft is only half as long as it needs to be. So there will be major cuts, major revisions, and a lot of new material. I’m excited, and I think this will be my big mark on, well whatever I’m trying to leave a mark on.

DIVX is dead! Can you believe it? I am getting into this DVD thing, especially the director’s commentaries. I just ordered a few more, but I really wish I could get a copy of Slacker with commentary. Or Naked Lunch.

Okay, time to start my day.

Wasting time

Wed, 23 Jun 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been very tired. Sick, tired, a lot of small things bugging me which cumulatively make me feel like I’m a car on its last legs, ready for abandonment on the side of an Indiana highway. It’s nothing major, and sleep seems to help, so maybe I’ll spend the week in bed, like one of my cats.

Summer Rain is done, or at least as done as it will be for a while. I read through it enough that I can’t read another paragraph. I’ve zipped up everything, and it’s all sitting on my hard drive, awaiting to be discovered in 50 years.

I’m supposed to be working on Rumored to Exist, but I’ve hit a major wall. I can’t even put together a string of words into a sentence anymore. I am over-analyzing everything and wondering how pieces of writing become good or bad and wondering how thoughts become words and paragraphs and pages and books. It’s like when you pick a random word and say it 10000 times and then wonder why the fuck they picked that phonetic disaster to be the word for zipper or jello or whatever. But on a larger scale. Maybe I just need to sleep more, I don’t know.

I didn’t write all day today. I slept. And I called banks. And I watched DVDs, mostly From the Earth to the Moon. I should’ve read, but I didn’t.

I thought I had a lot more to say when I got on here, but I guess I don’t.

Rumor panic

Fri, 25 Jun 1999 00:00:00 GMT

My email is dead, but I can still update my stuff here. I think it’s some kind of networking problem, and it’s stupid that all of my email sits on a machine in Seattle when I live in New York, but you’re talking about a person who still has all of his money in a Seafirst checking account.

I think I am starting to calm down about the major panic attack I was having w/r/t Rumored to Exist. I’m slowly getting back into it, but I’m not writing any great amounts yet. I’ve set a schedule that takes me to the end of the book around Halloween or so, and I’m ahead of schedule, but then I built a certain amount of slack into it so I could get back up to speed.

I’m listening to a Century Media compliation disc that was included in the last issue of Metal Curse and a bunch of Century Media releases a year or two ago. It’s a fairly diverse sampler of new death metal, and a decent CD to listen to if you’re as out of touch with the metal community as I am. It’s strange, because this disc reminds me so much of a year or so ago, when I lived in Seattle. I didn’t think I would be that nostalgic about Seattle, and it seems stupid to reminisce about the summer of 97 or 98, but I guess I do sometimes.

I’ve often thought that my next big project would be a novel about Seattle, going from when I left Indiana to when I left for New York. On the drive out, I outlined the whole thing, making it work like Bukowski’s book Post Office. I don’t know if I could write it or not, but it’s an interesting composition, the way everything is lined up and everything. I’ve got too many other things to worry about now, and I’m not sure I could write another strictly autobiographical book, but it’s always a thought.

My email is back. One thing from a Guns N Roses mailing list, two pieces of junk mail.

Three dollar shake

Sat, 26 Jun 1999 00:00:00 GMT

There are days when nothing happens, nothing eventful, and I can’t say “I went to the mall” or “I went to the movies” or whatever. And oddly enough, those times seem to happen more frequently when I’m working on Rumored to Exist. I think it’s because when I work on Summer Rain, I actually write for 8 hours straight sometimes, interrupted only by breaks for food, drink, the restroom, or a CD change. So when I do that, there seems to be a greater sense of accomplishment. But when I work on Rumored, there’s a lot of dead space, a lot of looking at books and watching parts of movies and doing web searches and just fucking around in general. Because with Rumored, it could take me all day to pull together 30 lines of writing, 18 of which suck and need to be re-written. It’s satisfying to finally read something that has come together after a lot of work, but it’s also very frustrating to feel like I’m wasting away my time.

I haven’t been reading, and it’s a dangerous situation. I feel like I need to get buried in some books to guide me and reinforce that I’m supposed to be writing a book right now. But I feel like I’ll start ripping off somebody else’s stuff if I do start reading. I tore through some Leyner recently, and it got me started on how cool I could make things, but it also embedded a lot of references in my mind that I don’t want to rip off. None of his books really remind me of Rumored in their structure; the old stuff is much more experimental, and the newer stuff is more linear and plot-constructed. I thought about getting into some Burroughs, but it’s the same problem, and I don’t want to invest all of my creative energy into working through Nova Express or something. I need to start reading obscure technical manuals, almanacs, history texts, cancer handbooks, power tool instruction manuals, and other crap that will get my mind churned up enough to work on new ideas.

I started cataloging new ideas in a leatherbound journal that Marie got me a few months ago. It’s a little unlined book that’s perfect for me to brainstorm a few pages of idiotic ideas while I’m watching TV or whatever. I’m not doing a good job in general with the 87 different formats of journal I’m keeping, but I figure this will be an interesting experience.

IHOP has a $3 milkshake, which is a great shake, but I’m not sure if it’s worth $3. There’s an IHOP in the Bronx (take the 1 train to 231st) and it’s one of the few portals to my previous life. Everything in Manhattan is different, but every IHOP is almost exactly the same. This one is a little weird - no peaked churchlike ceiling - but it’s still a fucking IHOP. Four syrups, big pot of coffee, bizarre blue and wood color scheme - it’s all there. I think we’ve eaten there almost every week since my arrival. There’s no Denny’s, no 7-Eleven, no giant malls with parking lots and air-conditioned concourses. I guess I can get used to that (although I miss Slurpees) but it’s cool to go to the old, familiar International House of Pancakes and eat about 2000 calories of junk.

That’s all.

First Atlantic

Mon, 28 Jun 1999 00:00:00 GMT

If I knew how to play an instrument with any proficiency, I would start a Grand Funk Railroad tribute band. I don’t know why, other than the fact that there are too many Kiss tribute bands, and it seemed like a logical next step for me.

If you’ve ever suffered from heatstroke, please email me so I can figure out if I need medical attention or not. Actually, I’m not too bad today, but I’ve been pretty fucked up all weekend from the heat. I know that everywhere in the world it’s a cliche joke to mention how hot or cold it is, and then support the statement with a bunch of wild exaggerations about frying eggs on the sidewalk or whatever. I’ll spare this to be perfectly clear. Luckily I spent the whole day today on my ass, with a fan pointed right at me and drinking tons of water.

I spent all day Friday exploiting the MTA one-day unlimited ride pass, trying to find various bookstores and Beat landmarks like Chumley’s (MIA) and the White Horse (there, but somewhat yuppified.) There’s no story to tell except that I managed to leave the house and blow the whole day, most of it in air-conditioned subway cars. I brought a notebook and wrote, but this wasn’t a work day. It was a day of exploration and sort of a test to see how well I could find disparate points on a map of Manhattan and navigate between them with the subway. So, I did okay.

Marie’s birthday was Saturday, and we went out for dinner on Friday, to some place I don’t remember. I do remember we ate on a nice patio, and I ordered some pretty incredible bluefish. We also walked to Incommunicado Press a new publisher Michael mentioned that’s on the lower east side. If you’re into new and out there fiction, you should check out their site. We left with an armful of books.

I spent all day Saturday at Coney Island, my first time. It’s hard to describe without getting all stupid, but it was everything I expected: lots of people, lots of rides, lots of food. I liked everything, but suffered from some tremendous heat problems that completely fucked with my head on and off. Despite that, we rode the Cyclone, the log flume, a couple of the throw-you-around-in-a-little-car-until-you-puke rides, and the big car that crawls up a tower and gives you a panaromic view of the whole beach.

We also went on the boardwalk, and saw the ocean. It was actually the first time I’d seen the Atlantic, so we went up to the water and got our feet wet. It reminded me of the first time I really saw the Pacific a few years ago, in Oregon. Beaches in general remind me of Lake Michigan and the Michigan dunes, where my dad used to take us when we were kids. There were a lot of small lakes in Edwardsburg, but Lake Michigan was the first huge, nothing-on-the-horizon lake where we used to swim.

Dammit, I had this huge thought I needed to convey, and then I started reading something else for like an hour. You’re going to have to figure the rest of this out.

Hot nights in Washington Heights

Wed, 07 Jul 1999 00:00:00 GMT

Ignore all of my previous statements about how hot it is here - today it is relentlessly motherfucking hot. And it has been for days. Yesterday was a new record high, something like 103 and the humidity was at 99% all day. It didn’t let up much after the sun went down, either. I took 6 or 7 showers yesterday, and even with the air conditioner in our bedroom, it felt very uncomfortable indoors. The rest of the apartment felt like when you turn the oven on all the way for a few hours and it turns your kitchen into a kiln. Today isn’t supposed to be any better - I think on wednesday, the temps will drop to the low 80s, but they will go back up by the weekend. I’m thinking of stealing a car and driving as far north as possible, until I get to some Canadian glacier I can lay on for a while.

Really, I am planning a trip to DC in two weeks. My old friend Larry Falli is working an internship at the EPA (he is in law school, which is slightly ironic) and I’m trying to figure out the bus situation to get down there for a 4-day weekend. I’ve got the time and the money, so I figure I’ll greyhound down there, spend a day wandering around while he’s at work. There are still a ton of details to work out, but I’m excited to check out a new city and hang out with Larry again.

It’s way too hot to be here - I think I’m going to go to the movies or something.

The blackout

Tue, 13 Jul 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I haven’t updated for a while, because the shit hit the fan right after my last update on Tuesday the 6th. Where do I start?

Okay, on Tuesday, I left the house to eat in an air-conditioned restaurant, ride the AC-equipped subway downtown, and sit in a frigid movie theater, watching movie after movie until I ran out of money. I got all ready, hiked to the subway station, and found chaos. The escalators were broken, and I couldn’t get to a train. I live at 181st, which is the highest point of Manhattan, which means the trains are far underground instead of just a flight of stairs from the street. So I couldn’t just climb down a bunch of stairs and get to the track level. Oh well, I hoped I would be able to walk to the 1 train instead of the A and still make it down south without problems.

I went to the corner cafe, a dive I regularly frequent. The night before, Marie and I spent some time basking in their air conditioning. The place isn’t clean or a four-star restaurant, but it’s a good place to catch a quick meal. I got there, and the AC was dead. So was the soda fountain, but they luckily had some canned drinks. I ate a quick grilled cheese that could’ve cooked itself in the afternoon heat, and headed out.

There are two 181st street subway stops for the A, a couple of blocks apart, so I walked to the other one. No dice there either - the elevator was out, and some old-timer was saying it was a power outage. I figured that a capacitor or a transformer blew from the heat, and the station would be out for a few hours. A biggie, but not insurmountable. I walked to the 1 station, which is a few blocks away, also on 181st. This station just got closed for construction, and on that day it was all fucked up with moving trucks and reels of cable and jackhammers and the precursor to much more major repairs. Although it was supposed to be open, it wasn’t that day. It looked like the same damn problem - a power outage. Fuck it, I thought, I’ll just walk south until I get to an open station.

That wasn’t the wisest idea in the world. It was almost noon, and above 100 degrees, with a rapidly climbing humidity. With my medication, I dehydrate easily, and within a few blocks, I felt like I was 18 miles into a marathon. Luckily, I found a vending machine and bought a drink, and kept at it. I walked from 181st to 168th, descended into the hotter than hell station, and after a few minutes, got a crisp, new A train that just started its day with us. It was about 40 degrees cooler inside, and my body must’ve lost a quart of water weight in sweat almost instantly.

I went to 14th and switched to the L train, to go to Union Square. There, I got tickets to the new Adam Sandler film (it was either that or Star Wars again) and then wandered Circuit City and Virgin a bit. It felt excellent to sit through the movie, even if it was just a mediocre comedy with a predicable script and a few sort of-funny lines. The movie wasn’t worth $10, but the AC was.

I thought about staying to see The Red Violin, but it was about 4:00 and I knew I’d have to fight rush hour traffic home. So I got in a train, stood the whole way back, and got to the house.

It was hotter than FUCK at home. Our AC wasn’t doing much anymore, and even taking a shower didn’t help. Then, we had a serious brown-out that cut out and reset all of the appliances except my computer. I took that as a sign and powered down everything non-essential. Then I waited. Minutes ticked away like hours, and I counted them, hoping they would eventually lead us to January and sub-zero temps. I didn’t know how I’d ever sleep without our window AC pushing cold air into the room. So I waited, kept the TV off because of the brownouts, and hoped for the best. That didn’t happen.

At about 10:00, I was in the kitchen with the lights off, enjoying a very faint breeze that would come through the window every 10 minutes or so. It wasn’t enough to keep me cool, but it was better than nothing. As I looked out the window over Washington Heights, I saw the lights of the apartments, the projects, the streets and stores. And then I saw all of them go out in one fell swoop. The entire neighborhood screamed like something out of a jet crash. EVERYTHING went black - stores, hospitals, streetlights, everything as far as I could see. Actually, I saw a few things on the horizon, probably buildings way into the Bronx, but it looked like all of Manhattan had lost power at once.

We were fucked. We tried the tap water, and it was just spurting. We had maybe 3 liters of water in the fridge, and our fridge had also been on the blink. Marie found some candles, and got on her walkman to listen to the radio for any news. The apartment, now without any fans, quickly heated up well beyond the 100 degrees on the street six floors below, while we tried to figure out what the hell to do. We knew the power wasn’t going to click back on in ten minutes, and it would mean suffering through the night. Marie got a news broadcast that said ConEdison wouldn’t get things back online until the next evening.

We both sat in the living room, Marie on the floor and me on the couch, looking outside and trying not to move. We were both horribly scared for the cats - they were both terribly overheated, and even panting because of the temperature. Seeing a cat pant is a rare occurence, and looks terribly demonic. We hoped that the temp would drop a few degrees now that it was after nightfall, and that the four of us would make it until the morning.

I had a secret weapon of sorts: I didn’t take my medication all day. I forgot it in the morning, and I decided not to take it that night. I knew that I could go for 4 or 5 days without any serious problems, and the lack of lithium would help me survive the heat. And it did - I felt less of a desire to drink water, and the heat didn’t completely wipe me out. But it had me fucked - I was sweating buckets, and couldn’t do anything except struggle through it.

I watched outside for a while, looking at the bizarre landscape. There’s always noise in New York City, but then it was absolutely quiet. The only lights were the police riot wagons making slow, methodical sweeps of each block. Oh, and choppers were circling with their spotlights. It pissed me off that the police were more concerned about their anti-looting position than they were about actually helping people, handing out water and ice, or whatever. If anyone ever tells you that cops are there to serve and protect, they are leaving out part of the proverb - cops are there to serve and protect themselves.

I tried to sleep, but it was one of those nights where you look at your watch every hour. I sweated until I was covered in liquid, and I also had problems with the too-short futon couch. I guess I’ve had to sleep through worse, but this one was in the top ten. I think I sneaked in 3 or 4 hours, but I was up by seven or so when Marie got up. She was supposed to stay home to bitch at a refrigerator repair guy that was coming over, but with no power, that wasn’t going to happen. She went in to work, and I woke up and tried to think of a plan.

The power was down from 150th or so on up to the northern tip of Manhattan, which is 220th. The subways were running, but not in the blackout area. According to the news, MTA was running a bunch of shuttle busses to get people to their stops. So I decided to get the hell out again, and go to Jersey City for the day. The plumbing was back, so I got a cold shower, brushed my teeth, and felt somewhat better. I walked down to 168th street again, and it actually felt almost okay on the street. There was a little breeze, and the temp was closer to 90, so I made it without getting completely totalled. The bus shuttle situation was a mess, but I managed to get downtown and on a PATH train to Jersey without trouble.

The trip to Jersey City only takes a few minutes, but it felt like going through time to me. New York is all about big buildings and tiny stores and a totally different paradigm than what I got used to in the Midwest. But the Newport mall is more like what I’m used to: grassy strips along institutional boulevards, lots of parking, lots of standalone buildings in the middle of asphalt seas, and a few hundred stores in one giant building, with a food court and concourses and everything else that reminds me of Alderwood Mall in Lynnwood, Washington.

And I was three doses behind on my medicine. This wasn’t enough to throw me into a full-blown psychotic attack, but it meant any edge on my depression was gone, and I really felt like sitting around and listening to Pink Floyd. I’ve been taking this shit for almost ten years, and for the most part, I have no complaints. But this was the first time since 1990 that I’ve missed more than two doses, and I could feel the difference. I was dealing with a lack of sleep, lack of food (that grilled cheese was the last thing I ate in 24 hours) plus the lack of medicine, so it could’ve been that, too. But nostalgia hit me like a runaway train, and everything reminded me of some other period. The walk through the mall concourse reminded me of fall 88, summer 93, seattle 98, portland 97, and so on. The mall vaguely reminded me of this place in Portland that I used to visit with Karena, but all of the stores reminded me of Alderwood in Seattle, And the whole PATH station smelled like my mom’s old car that I drove in the summer of 93, some kind of powder-fresh air deodorizer. The whole thing freaked the fuck out of me, even more than those things usually do, and it simultaneously got me thinking of like a dozen people that I used to love and would never see again, enough to really make it difficult to go in a Spencer’s and make fun of all of the Wild Wild West bullshit.

So I went to Burger King, for an uneventful solo meal and more recurring thoughts about my life. I decided it would be good for me to see the South Park movie again, so I bought a ticket, went in early, and listened to my MiniDisc while the stupid commercials played before the show. They played, and played, and played… and played. For 45 minutes, me and about 10 other people waited for the fucking movie to start. Finally, someone showed up with a handful of vouchers and announced that the projectionist didn’t make it. Great. At least I got a free pass to another movie, and I could use it at any Loew’s or Sony.

I tried to find something else to do, but the depression trip was laying on strong, and I didn’t know what the hell to do about it. I made a lap through the concourse, and then headed back to New York, vowing to take the lithium the second I got there. I did, and I made a couple of phone calls, since that still worked. Right after 5:00PM, all of the lights and fans and everything else bounced into action, and the entire neighborhood cheered like Sammy Sosa got traded to the Yankees or something. Everything was normal.

Actually, it wasn’t - I was so far off base with medicine, food, and sleep that it took me days to get straight. I’m still a little off, but I am doing a lot better. Today’s the first day I wrote on Rumored in I don’t know how long, though, so there’s a lot of missed time in there. The fridge got fixed, the cats are back to normal, and it’s so cool out tonight that I think I’m going to have to dig out a blanket before I go to bed. So how’s that for a happy ending?

I’m going to DC on Thursday, BTW - I got my tickets and I’m ready to roll. It’s a 4-hour bus ride, and then I’ll be at Larry’s, going to 7-Eleven and driving around aimlessly. I still need to do some quick research and figure out what I’ll be doing, but I will be gone until the 20th. Maybe I’ll update from there, he has a computer. Who knows.

For now, I need to get some shit done and then get some sleep…

Digging through archives

Thu, 15 Jul 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I’m passively getting ready for my short trip, which begins tomorrow. I usually have these things more planned out than an Apollo space mission, but this time I’m probably going to end up throwing everything in a gym bag before I leave. I haven’t done any research on museums or anything else, so I’ll probably buy a map at the bus station and go from there.

It’s been very unproductive lately. I think I did about a line of writing for Rumored today, and that’s it. I spent the whole day digging through old mail messages, wishing I had more complete archives for the time I was in Bloomington. I kept mail messages from some people, but I also botched it up and accidentally deleted all of my mail from an ex-girlfriend, a very vital point in my history. I found out about the mistake when I was still in Bloomington, but it was far too late to get a backup from tape. I wish I had kept more outgoing mail, and more stuff from 1992 and 1993. But I didn’t. It’s too nostalgic to read the stuff I do have anyway.

The whole thing relates to this weird part of my disorder or makeup or whatever where I look back at the past a lot. It’s not like I used to play football and date cheerleaders and I want it to be the summer of 69 again. It’s a much more complicated nostalgia-related depression, where I think of myself in a different era. I wrote Summer Rain because of my feelings for myself in 1992, how much different I was and how I have so many vivid thoughts of those times. I can still see myself in the fall of 1992 like it was yesterday, like I’m really on some kind of vacation and I’ll return there again and pick up at some point on my old timeline. It’s like some kind of confusing time travel book, which is fitting because I’ve already started to write a confusing time travel book just so I can figure this stuff out.

So I dug through old mail. And it reminded me of 1993, 1995, different people and things I should have done and things that I miss. I don’t know if my thoughts are normal, somehow exaggerated, or psychotic. I’m guessing it isn’t too abnormal, as I’m pretty much able to function in society. I mean, I’m not blowing up computer companies because they will create machines that will someday destroy the world. Just reading a lot of old email.

I’ve got to record a few MiniDiscs and pack up some camera gear before bed. I probably won’t update this while I’m gone, so look for a full report when I return.

Hello from Virginia

Mon, 19 Jul 1999 00:00:00 GMT

Hello from Virginia. I’m at Larry’s, waiting for him to take a shower so we can go eat. It’s been a cool trip so far, and I’ll need to write up the whole thing at some later point.

On Friday, I spent all day at Air and Space, checking out the planes. They have the best collection in the world: The Wright Brothers’ first plane, Apollo 11, a lunar lander, the X1, the Spirit of St Louis, and tons others. A slew of space stuff too, like a Skylab backup that you can walk through, capsules from all of the three early programs, Russian stuff, space suits, moon rocks, and a lot more. I spent most of the day there, looking at all of this stuff in awe, and shooting lots of film. Later, I went to the American history part of the Smithsonian and saw more stuff, including Old Glory and the restoration of the Star Spangled Banner.

Saturday was a huge roadtrip in Larry’s van. I’d need to look at a map to describe it, but it involved driving to West Virginia, and then making a huge circle through Virginia and eventually going to Richmond to drink with the college students. We also went to VMI, Washington and Lee, and saw a barn that George Washington allegedly stayed in. A dude was dressed in Washington garb as part of some local publicity stunt or something, and I thought about giving him a bunch of shit (Do you grow pot? Are those teeth wood? Are you a freemason?) but I didn’t.

OK Larry is done and it’s time to eat. More later.

Seattle the distant dream

Sat, 07 Aug 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I realized today that after about four months, Seattle is nothing but a distant dream to me. I pulled a book off of the shelf today (Steve Katz - 43 Fictions) and a receipt fluttered out, an ATM slip from a Seafirst bank. The red 1 on the back and dot-matrix printing brought me back to 5/23/98. I guess maybe once a week I have a heavy thought back to various points in the whole Seattle experiment. I’m not saying I hate New York and want to be back there - I mean, sometimes I go on a heavy trip about being back in Elkhart again, but I would never do it again. It’s just I have a bad habit of thinking back a year, or two years, and trying to compare it to now, to see if I’ve improved at all. I guess I usually think that moments of my past are best, but then I’ve probably screwed myself by thinking more like a writer and less like - well, whatever everyone else thinks like.

And I got on a big nostalgia trip about last year because I got on this huge self-reinvention thing last spring and summer, trying to figure out what path to take and what to do next. After breaking up with Karena, I spent a lot of time oscillating between thoughts of doing things to meet more people and extreme hermitdom. The latter brought greater productivity to me, and let me do a great deal of work on Rumored to Exist and Summer Rain. And it made me feel more like a writer. It also freaked me out, and made me more depressed. But I got a lot done.

I guess the reason I’m babbling about this is one of the reasons I haven’t updated in a while, and that’s because I have been lost. I mean, I’m almost always in the apartment, so it’s not that kind of lost. But I don’t know what I should do next. I have so many options open to me, that it’s almost confusing to figure out what I want out of life. And in wandering between different internal dialogues about the whole thing, I haven’t solved many things. Maybe I should give examples.

Sometimes, I want a job. Sometimes, this recruiting firm gets me to put on some nice clothes and go to interviews with big companies who are looking for writers. As of now, none of those have resulted in a job. And I guess that’s a good thing. Maybe I’d like the money and the desk and the people, but it would be counterproductive to my writing. There are times I am so blocked that I think “fuck it, I will take any job, even if it involves 2 hours on the subways to mop floors at a laundromat, as long as I don’t have to face writing again.” I usually get over those phases. But as my bank account dwindles, I feel drawn closer to this option.

A recent kick was grad school. I thought that I wanted to go back and get an MFA in creative writing. I looked into it, and decided that I had too many strikes against me, and it would be better to take the $15,000 that I didn’t have anyway and use it to keep holed up in my apartment and keep writing. I don’t want to go into the pros and cons of the situation, because it is exhausting. But that’s another option.

You may wonder, “why isn’t he listing his writing as an option?” Well, I am and I’m not. I want to finish Rumored to Exist. I want to edit Summer Rain. I want to work on more stuff. But I don’t know what to do aside from the writing. I don’t know what to do to meet people, make connections, and get out of the house. I thought grad school would make instant contacts, but it’s too much bullshit with GREs and application forms and tuition residency and comprehensive exams and foreign language tests. And I thought a job might work, but it’s a step in the wrong direction. And most of the writer’s workshop options in New York seem to be “pay me $1000 and I will teach you how to write in 10 hours” and not useful to a quasi-professional.

Somewhere in the middle of this chaotic argument, I made one universal statement that became like the 0th law of robotics to my entire mission: I need to finish Rumored to Exist. I need to make it a good book, the best I can write. Everything I do, every dollar I spend, every minute of every day needs to be directly related to the completion of this book. There will be no other side projects or diversions until I get the galleys back from the publisher.

I am starting to think a few things that would be considered anti-social but would probably help this process much more. First, I am not going to try to workshop the book. I think if I spent my money on a workshop, all I would get is a bunch of Anne Rice wannabes who would shit their intestines if they read any of Rumored. I don’t need people who don’t know what they are talking about to criticize my work, and I don’t need to waste my time reading theirs. And I don’t need to get tied up in the world of book publishing name-dropping.

So, maybe I do need to be a hermit again. Maybe I need to ignore the world until this book is done, and stop worrying about defining myself with outside shit that’s just there for people who need definitions. Right?

Yesterday, my computer completely died and I lost one of my harddrives. Luckily, it was not the one that holds all of my writing and personal files. Un-luckily, I had to drop $200 on another drive, and after two days, I am only about 90% functional. It has been a nonstop hack-fest trying to get everything running again. For some reason, I can only boot from floppy now. It appears that no known computer hardware can actually work with a harddrive bigger than a few gigs, and everything that Microsoft and hardware manufacturers have led you to believe is wrong. The only way to get large drives to work is by sheer voodoo. This is because They want you to throw your old PC out the window and go buy a brand new one anytime anything goes wrong.

I don’t remember what else. A lot has gone on, but it’s mostly categorizable in the “if it’s not one thing, it’s another” file. All I want is one full day of writing without something asinine happening that consumes 12 hours of my time. I’m hoping by the end of the month, this will happen. In reality, I know it won’t.

[2020 update: I can’t believe I thought an MFA would cost only $15,000.]

Sartre never had to worry about what UART his modem needed

Thu, 12 Aug 1999 00:00:00 GMT

I think I’m starting to calm down after my week of everything gone wrong. I planned on getting a bunch of writing done, but spent the day doing laundry and leafing through a generic history of philosophy book, a sort of cliff notes-esque thing that wasn’t that detailed, but contained such a wide overview that I got pretty lost in it, in the good way. And I continue to work on a contract job that will probably be done by the 20th or so. But no real work on Rumored, just a few dozen words.

I guess I’m still lost; I thought about that a bit more today. A catalog for the New School came in the mail and I wondered if $400-something on a night class in fiction would be a waste of money or not. The timing is bad right now - a fall class would really butcher my time with Rumored, and this week has demonstrated that I’d really need to work to fit anything else in my schedule. Even though I spent most of my day doing nothing, that nothing provides me with the lack of structure I need for the bursts of work that eventually add up to great things. It’s something that’s impossible to fathom when you’ve spent years doing things according to tightly planned schedules. I can’t force myself to write x pages a day, especially if I want them to be creative and unique. All I can do is provide myself with a comfortable situation - plenty of food, plenty of sleep, something good in the CD player, and the words will eventually come.

I was reading about Sartre and his book Nausea today. The main character, during a bunch of research, withdraws and gains the ability to recognize that things and events in life are not categorizable, and contain no intrinsic meaning. What he discovers is that cultural and social efforts enforce or impose an order or meaning onto things. When those systems are ignored, the bare existence of things, or their facticity, is revealed. And once you see that, you realize that any meaning of events is supplied by your own free will, and you are what you choose to be.

It sounds simple, but Sartre also goes into the extreme difficulty of comprehending the extreme freedom and the extreme responsibility that comes with this realization. The freedom is in a sense a trap, because one you experience it, there’s no way you can go back the the straight-man, 9 to 5 world and expect to deal with it on any level. Also well-said by Bon Scott in the first line of Highway to Hell: “It ain’t easy living free.”

What the hell does this mean? I don’t know, I need to sit down and read Nausea when I have some time. But I do know the difficulty of dealing with this much freedom. A lot of options also means a lot of confusion. Sometimes I wish writing books was more like a 9 to 5 job at a corporation, where I went in and wrote fucked up stuff every day, and knew what was wanted from me. That’s not really true - I’ve already mentioned that I can’t write in those conditions, and I don’t think I would want to. But the problems with comprehending this whole thing that Sartre talked about is something that comes and goes for me. Sometimes, I’ll be walking down Broadway and I’ll think that none of this makes sense, the way people are controlled like slaves by religion and corporations. I don’t know why anyone would do something like run a fruit stand for their whole life when they could write or pick up a guitar or learn HTML or SOMETHING. It sounds elitist, but… I don’t know, maybe I’ll explain it all later someday.

With that, I should try to get some sleep…

Hello again

Mon, 17 Apr 2000 00:00:00 GMT

So I was walking through the rain today in Times Square, going to the American Express office at 47th and Avenue of the Americas to give them $1200 before they sent in the dogs on me, and I thought about everything that’s happened to me in the last eight months since I last did this journal. I got a job, I had a minor breakdown and started therapy again, I moved to Astoria, and just last weekend, I split up with Marie. Now I’m alone in a big city, buried in work, and trying to edit my first book for publication this summer. What better time than to start an online journal, right?

Where to start… okay, there’s the job. I’m working as a technical writer for a large ISP, one of the largest. I guess they’ll remain nameless, just to keep a solid line between work and play. It’s the same kind of stuff I did in Seattle, but I have a little more power, a little more money, and a lot more fun. I’m glad I have a job. It’s solved some of the problems from last summer, of not knowing what to do and having no interaction with anybody. Right now, this job’s one of the only reasons I’m still in New York. And stability can be a good thing.

The book - Summer Rain. It’s my big epic about the summer of 1992 in Bloomington, and it’s going to be published somewhere around the end of the summer. I’m in a frenzy of editing and corrections, which should probably finish by the end of May. It’s going to really be published, and I hope all of you go to Amazon or Borders or whatever and buy a copy. I don’t ask for many favors…

I moved to Astoria in December. I’ve got a cozy one-bedroom with a new TV, a new leather couch, a new DVD player, a new bed, my bookshelves filled with books, and a 384/128Kbps DSL connection to the outside world. I’m a half-hour on the N train from work and central Manhattan, and the neighborhood here isn’t too bad. I still miss my apartment in Seattle, but I’m starting to settle into this place.

I guess that’s it for now. I need to get back to work on the book…

Cold as hell for an April day

Tue, 18 Apr 2000 00:00:00 GMT

It’s cold as hell for an April day today, and I’ve got that Yes song “Leave It” stuck in my head. One down, one to go, another town and one more show…

I’m really pissed at my ISP today. They recently switched from sendmail to qmail without really telling anyone there would be any changes, sort of assuming that all of their customers are just idiots who read their mail in IE or something. After the change, all hell broke loose and pretty much everything mail-related in my account ceased to function. See, sendmail uses a spool directory, where your messages are concatenated one after another in one big file. Qmail uses a directory in your home directory, and it creates a file per message. It’s technically a better system, but after decades of the old system, damn near every program written for unix relies on the old way. That means that my mail program wouldn’t pull in new mail, I wasn’t getting notification messages when I got new mail, my account didn’t tell me if I had new mail when I logged in, I couldn’t quickly list the messages in my account, and so on. So last night, these fucking idiots converted all of my old saved mail folders to this new format, completely screwing me. The thing that pisses me off most is that these people profess to be unix-friendly and tech-saavy and all of this crap, and for the most part they have been, up until recently. Sigh.

Yes, I really am publishing Summer Rain. I don’t want to jinx it by posting all of the details, but I’m deep in the middle of editing it and trying to shake out all of the bugs. I hope to finish this by the end of May. Then, it goes off and in about 60 days, all of you will be cracking out your credit cards and going to amazon.com to check it out. I’m very excited about the process, and I’ve been writing more in the last few weeks than I have all year. I stumbled through some pretty pathetic writer’s block for the last few months, so it’s nice to cruise through edits and work on things. I thought Summer Rain was a dead project, completely unworkable. But it’s been fun to work on it lately, and I guess that’s all that ultimately matters.

Rumored to Exist is still alive, albeit still up on blocks and awaiting more of my attention. I can’t wait to finish Summer Rain and get back to work on it. It’s been hard to write new stuff for Rumored, but the stuff that is there will blow your mind. It’s completely 110% balls-out, pure gonzo insane. I wanted to finish it by the end of the year - I might, but it might take longer. We’ll see.

And I’m thinking that between the two, I might try to publish all of the archives from this journal, with some editing and maybe an odd short story or two thrown in there. Would anyone actually be interested in something like that?

Goodbye goodbye goodbye bad Hello Hello heaven.

Death metal and blind accordions

Wed, 19 Apr 2000 00:00:00 GMT

I can’t really write about what’s on my mind right now, except to say that I’m not feeling great today. I still don’t know who reads this or why, so I’m forced to tiptoe around assorted facts about my current mental well-being. While I agree that this is stupid, it’s probably best that I don’t drag other people’s lives into a public forum.

I can tell you that I’m listening to a lot of death metal these days. As I work on the book, it’s become essential to listen to the same stuff I had in the player back in 1992, so I’ve been burning CD-R’s of stuff as a sort of soundtrack. And it’s the only kind of music I like when I’m in this weird, mixed mood - half-depressed, half-pissed. Why would I want to listen to Tori Amos whine incessantly about how her boyfriend doesn’t love her anymore, further driving me to the edge, when I can put in the Satanic deathfuck of Blood Coven or something similar? It combines the power and hatred I wish I had with the nostalgia and memory of a distant time where I probably didn’t feel any better, but I was in much more comfortable surroundings. And it’s slightly less embarassing to getting caught with Yes - Big Generator in your walkman.

The album of the day is Dismember - Death Metal. I like a few things about these guys; one is that they’ve managed to put out new albums each year that are innovative yet still stick to the basic, thick, detuned Swedish death metal sound without drifting into pseudo-industrial, electronic, sampled bullshit like so many death metal bands that ruled in 1992 and are now working at a 7-Eleven. Their production is also phenomenal - the mastering, the way the whole CD comes out sounding ten times louder and heavier than the average CD. And their albums start off completely kicking ass, and push at this level of intensity all the way through. Although I’m not into Death Metal as much as I’m into their first or second album, it’s consistent.

On the train home last night, there was this blind guy with an accordion. I’ve seen him before, mostly causing a clusterfuck of congestion on the stairs at the train platform. Last night, he started playing on the ride home. It was a real disaster, only because the car was swaying back and forth and slowing and speeding up, and here’s this guy with a huge metal box strapped to his chest, both hands busy pressing the keys, and at every movement, I was certain he was going to plummet across the whole length of the car and take out four people with his needle-sharp blind cane. Luckily, nobody was hurt, and he got to play, and he even made a couple of bucks for his efforts.

I’m feeling less pissed now, but I have a bunch of work to do on the book before the end of lunch, so I better get to it.

Kava dreams and lucid nightmares

Thu, 20 Apr 2000 00:00:00 GMT

I take a lot of Kava to sleep. I’m back into the bad habit of coming home from work, falling asleep for two hours, and then staying up until 3 in the morning. It’s probably because I drink a 12-pack of Coke a day, but there are a lot of other factors. I used to take Nyquil, or Budweiser, or sominex to get to bed. I even got a script for Ativan recently, but all of that stuff makes my brain do weird things. I wake up hung over, and sleep in a blackened state of confusion. But Kava seems to work great, and slowly makes me more tired until I don’t realize it and slip into unconsciousness.

The flipside is that Kava gives me really fucked up dreams, the kind of dreams that you can’t even explain to people without laughing. They aren’t always funny, but they’re extremely nonsensical. Last night, I had a dream I was living in some underground bunker that looked like part of Quake II, with this family of other people. There was a huge pit, like a well, that had some kind of radioactive device in it. It would periodically leak or explode, letting loose this giant glow of energy. When this happened, you had to look away, and bury your face in the ground. Then, you would travel time. Once it happened to me, and I could feel the hair on my head falling out, my muscles atrophying. I sneaked a peek at the ground and saw dirt eroding at a rapid rate, like the movie The Time Machine. When it ended and I emerged, I looked like Tom Petty and I was a latin professor with twin baby boys that talked in Polish. The next thing I knew, I was in Canada, driving an RV with a boat on a trailer. I was visiting my friend Derik from grade school, and even though the RV was unwieldy, I whipped it through the streets of Vancouver or Toronto or whereever we were. You weren’t supposed to drive the trailer faster than 50MPH but I pushed it past 120, until the wheel bearings started smoking.

What does all of that mean?

My nephew looks exactly like me - I mean, when I was two. If I ever have kids (that can be pinned on me) I’m going to tell them that Ho Chi Mihn is a fictional character, like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Spiro Agnew. I think the worst part of having a child would be instilling a set of values in them, especially since everyone overlooks this step and turns to Jesus.

Okay, maybe I can try to sleep now.

back in Seattle

Fri, 21 Apr 2000 00:00:00 GMT

I feel like I’m back in Seattle - it’s been pouring rain, so much that the entire apartment’s humid and it feels like it will never dry. It’s also cold, and I ran out of hot water today. A nice hot shower is the only way to beat weather like this, and I didn’t get one today. I did, however, get the equivalent of a shower walking home from the subway, which is never fun.

My friend A is coming into town at any moment. I pulled her here to interview for a job at work, and she’s going to be around for the weekend to see some family. We get to hang out tonight, although I’m not sure I want to wander around the village or something when it is pissing rain like it is now. Her flight got pushed back because of rain and dreariness in Indianapolis, so that also sucks.

Work on Summer Rain has been slow and clunky lately. I’ve got so many changes to do in book three - one of the main characters has been totally rewritten. Or rather she is being rewritten - I am still doing major changes to the plotline as I am editing. The whole thing looks like a disaster right now, but it’s getting there. I just want it to be done and off to the press - Stutz is publishing a Linux book at the same press, except he’s just about ready to roll and send in his copy, while I’m like two months from that point. It will be very cool…

My favorite web site in the world today is www.ntsb.gov. Tens of thousands of plane crashes in excruciating detail - it is incredible!

single

Mon, 24 Apr 2000 00:00:00 GMT

My alarm goes off in 8 minutes. I went to bed about 4 hours ago, and woke up about 8 times. I took three different medications to sleep last night. Today will be a long day.

I’m at the point where work or the pretense of work won’t hide the fact that I’m now single, and I need to think about what’s going to happen next. I’ve realized I need to take a mental inventory of what’s wrong with me and try to think of a strategy to fix things, avoid things, and deal with everything in my life. It sounds easier than it is, especially considering how guilty I feel about getting out of a relationship, and how at fault everything makes me feel. It seems like every time I’m forced to look at what went wrong, I find another major character flaw in myself that requires attention. A week ago, I felt that I was on the right track for picking up the pieces and starting over again. Now, I feel like I have months or years of overhead and recovery before I can even get back to the shaky spot I was at two summers ago.

I started reading old paper journals last night, in some effort to piece together an explanation of how I felt over the last two years. I expected to see some great pattern, a reason for what I’ve done or what I’ve become. Instead, I found that I was really obsessed with how many words a day I wrote during Summer Rain. Well, I’m still in 1998, so maybe this changes. I feel like an NTSB investigator trying to put a plane back together after a wreck. Unfortunately, I was also the pilot that drove the plane into the ground.

I don’t feel like writing about this anymore because it ultimately doesn’t do any good. I guess it’s a good excuse for why I’m not doing anything more creative with this journal right now. I’ve got a book to edit, and all of this to deal with. Maybe I picked a wrong time to start doing this.

I think I’m going back to bed.

...

Tue, 25 Apr 2000 00:00:00 GMT

I’m still very tired. It’s hard to say whether or not I’m getting work done on Summer Rain. I am filling in a lot of the holes in book three, finishing a lot of small pieces to bridge the gaps and get closer to being done. But I’m also so sick of the third book that all of it looks like shit to me, and I don’t even see the point of the last 15 chapters. I wanted to be close to complete by the end of this month, so I could spent all of next month just editing on paper and going over things carefully. I’m like 8 chapters behind right now. I might be able to finish some of it this week and weekend, but there’s no way I can finish 8 chapters.

As far as my mental state is concerned, I’ve been far too busy to really think about it. I mean, I had a long talk with Ray last night about it, mostly because he’s going through a bunch of weird shit and indecision also, and that’s helpful, but there are so many things that I need to think about. I feel like I need to get a lot of small things done in my life and make a lot of major decisions about what to do, and I really don’t know what direction to go. I do feel better about doing this alone - I don’t feel that I need assistance, but I do wonder what choices I need to make.

I am not saying that I am deciding whether or not to move to Sweden or start podiatry school or shave my head or anything. It’s just that my standard, default action at this point would be to sink into my writing, and buy a lot of DVDs and sink into mediocrity. Then in six months, I would start saying “fuck, I’m really lonely, but I’ve been eating pizza every night for the last six months, and I’m a poor slob with no social skills” and I would go into dramatics about how I needed to retrain myself to interact with humans. Instead of that, I am trying to think of how I can get my life together or keep my life together, but also work on my writing and try to stabilize things enough that I can interact with others. I just need to think about these things a little bit at a time, so I’m not floored when they all hit me at once later.

For example, I need to clean my fucking apartment. I have picture frames I bought four months ago that I still haven’t hung up. And my kitchen is full of boxes. If I ever want friends or people from work or whatever to come over and hang out, I should take the pile of six months’ worth of junk mail and do something with it. And I should buy some silverware. And I need to find a convenience store that’s open past 10. That’s completely unrelated, but I always run out of stuff to drink at like 10:07.

final mile

Wed, 26 Apr 2000 00:00:00 GMT

Things are, at best, a blur. I think I’m getting a cold, which is a pisser because I’m in the final mile of editing Summer Rain, and I really want to blow through the last of the writing and get it over with. I’m down to five chapters with sizable holes that need to be plugged, and then it gets down to the monotony of spell-checks and passes through printouts with the red pen. I’m almost certain that two weeks into the month I’ve scheduled, I will say ‘fuck it’ and send the thing off to the printers.

I can’t think well at the start of a cold. It seems to cut into my creativity first. I think if I could sleep more, I would get past this. I got about 6 hours last night, which helped. Tonight, I will try for 8. I also want to think about what books to read next. I haven’t been able to read while I edit Summer Rain, and I want to get into stuff that will make me want to work on Rumored to Exist. Maybe some Raymond Federman. Or I could re-read Leyner.

I have an overwhelming urge to get a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator. I’ve decided to wait until the book is done and money settles down, and then I will waste my evenings on learning to fly a Cessna. And waste my paychecks on control yokes, pedals, and more memory.

Okay, back to the book.

CVS woes

Fri, 28 Apr 2000 00:00:00 GMT

I should mention that I finished a draft of Summer Rain today. Now it’s time to shake out all of the bugs, and get this piece of shit to the printer.

I’m sick - probably shouldn’t be awake but my sleep schedule’s off due to a day of heavy cold medicine and too many naps. I ate dinner at like 5:30 and now I’m starving, so I woke up in the middle of the night to eat pizza. Make sense? Probably not.

Ten seconds after I convinced Michael that CVS was the greatest thing in the world, it stopped letting me check in files. This is a metaphor for my life.

04/28/00 13:59

I fucking hate being sick. Even though I got a good night’s sleep last night, I absolutely couldn’t get out of bed thismorning. So I called in, hacked (lungs, not code) for 45 minutes, and got back to bed. Had a weird dream that I was at the weird Maryland top-secret camp where they’re holding Elian and his dad. I was hanging out with my old friend Chris Hagen, who was desperately trying to convince me that I should have children as soon as possible. Chris has always been a strange guy, so this wasn’t entirely out of character.

I just got lunch from the Mini Star, a diner a few blocks away. Very cheap, pretty good, and extremely fast. And they let me order anything, no matter how small, with no minimum order. I think I could call and ask for a napkin, and a guy would be here three minutes later. It’s like having a Denny’s on call. Today’s a soup day - hot chicken noodle, perfect for this cold. I also got a $3 cup of fresh-squeezed orange juice that could regenerate the dead, it has so much vitamin C in it.

Otherwise, it’s very much a non-day. I kept drifting back to sleep, half wanting to stay unconscious for three days until this was over, half wanting to get up, take a shower, and get on the computer or clean or go to the corner store or something. I feel so guilty for sitting around all day, but… I’m sick.

It still hasn’t registered that I finished a draft of Summer Rain. It probably won’t; this is common for me. When I think about it, there are probably so many problems - continuity, gaps, grammar, and it’s going to be a huge task to fix all of them. I wish I could print the whole thing, mistakes and all. But it’s somewhat rewarding to find a major fuckup and thing “I’m glad that didn’t make it to print…”

Back to my soup…

Canadian allergy drug lust

Sun, 30 Apr 2000 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been suffering from allergies all weekend, or a cold, or both. Why aren’t there any non-drowzy antihistimines available over the counter? I heard that in Canada, you can buy Claritin and that stuff without a prescription. Oh well, I’m going to the doctor tomorrow - maybe I can get set up. I also found that antihistimine eyedrops help me out quite a bit.

Sunday night - eating sushi, chipping away at the book. I am surprised by how great a lot of Summer Rain really is, once I read it all straight through instead of reading the problem areas over and over for months at a time. I’m hoping another week or two of careful reading will turn out a good draft that I can send to the printer and get this whole process moving.

I should get back to work…

Reading and work and nothing else

Tue, 02 May 2000 00:00:00 GMT

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about this thing.

I’ve been pretty off lately. For the first time since I was a kid, I’m getting allergies. I spent all weekend in bed, suffering and taking Benadryl. I went to the doc and got set up with Claritin, and I also got a HEPA air filter. Plus the bit of rain and temp change has calmed things down a bit. So I’m mostly feeling better, but I’m slightly off from all of the rollercoaster ride of Benadryl and Sudafed and everything else. Now that my brain is programmed to completely shut off at night with the Benadryl, I can’t sleep well without it. So, things are weird.

Since I finished the last Summer Rain draft, life has been much more unstructured. I really hate reading stuff for the 19th time, trying to fix “i before e” crap. I wish I could just hire someone to do this for me, but I’m too cheap, and I’m not sure it’s worth it. So I trod along, reading chapters with my red pen.

I’ve reached a point where editing Summer Rain is pretty much the only thing in my life outside of work. That’s okay, but I’ve realized that if I do anything else, it seems unnatural. Last night, I didn’t want to edit after about an hour of work, so I sat down and tried to watch some of The Matrix. It was cool and all - the DVD has so much extra shit - but I felt nervous, like I was trying to get away with something. I stopped, and tried to go to bed early, but I just paced the apartment like there was something wrong. I also feel weird because I’m not reading anything else these days. Reading Summer Rain is pretty much a full-time job, so I can’t sit back with Tolstoy or whatever when I’m not working. It would be counterproductive, and it would make my edits resemble whater I’m reading. So I will look forward to the point when I can stop reading this book and actually start something new.

Of course by then, I’ll be reading Rumored.

sleep

Wed, 03 May 2000 00:00:00 GMT

I feel sick.

I mean the kind of sick where you think you should go to the emergency room, but then you remember the last time you spent an hour on the subway to go to Columbia’s emergency room and the attending nurse just stared at you for twenty minutes without even asking your name or if you’ve been shot or were in the middle of a heart attack or anything. I feel like I’m crawling out of my skin, like I can’t focus on anything for more than three seconds. I think my body is having some adverse reaction to Claritin. I also feel like I have pneumonia. I want to sleep for a month. I think I slept about an hour last night.

Summer Rain is finished, more or less. I hate it. I’ve read the book so many times, it makes me physically ill to even open the files now. And it sucks. I would give it a 5 out of 10, and I think it would take a year of heavy edits to get it to a 6. I just need to get the thing out of here, and finish it. I want to get back to work on Rumored to Exist, which I think has much more potential. And so does everyone else, I guess, because nobody ever reads drafts of Summer Rain. I don’t blame them - it’s 500 pages of mediocrity.

I mean, you should still buy a copy when it comes out. Just don’t read it. Like that copy of Pale Fire you’ve never opened.

Summer Rain deja vu

Mon, 08 May 2000 00:00:00 GMT

It’s hot. That 90-degree kind of hot that tells you it’s summer and makes you wish for cold weather, like last week. I just spent money on a spring jacket, and I got to wear it about three times. Sigh. At least the apartment isn’t completely unbearable. I’ve got the windows open and I just bought a fan, so it’s functionally cool, but not entirely comfortable. I’ll survive.

Things have been strange and I haven’t been able to concentrate on much of anything lately. Still getting used to my new life, and I’ve been running into glitches. There are huge voids of time where I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with myself that bug the hell out of me. I know, I should be working on the bok, but sometimes I just need to relax, or talk, or socialize, and I’m still trying to find a social structure to relax in. It all sounds stupid and petty, but it’s also very depressing and it’s one of those situations that can consume your soul if left unchecked. And it’s very unchecked at this point.

I haven’t been doing much work on the book in the last few days, because of this sickness thing (I think it was bronchitis - mostly better now) and everything else. I did print out most of the draft and started carefully red-penning it for one last pass. I don’t want to drag this out forever, but it deserves one more chance before I start the publishing process.

I had a very strong Summer Rain deja vu the other night, Saturday night. I ate dinner at the Neptune and then came home around 10 or so with absolutely nothing to do, and an apartment that was too hot for me to just sit around for 3 or 4 hours. I got on moviephone and found out American Beauty was playing at the new 14-plex that’s about a mile and a half from my place, at 11:40. So I got all recombobulated and hiked through the night. The walk reminded me so much of the book, of 1992 in Bloomington. The streets in Astoria are like the nice houses just outside the student ghetto in Bton, houses all clustered together with no yards and old cars in the driveways. That, and Joe Satriani in the walkman was a temporary time machine - both to 1998, when I was working on the book so much, and 1992, when it actually took place. Very weird, very cool.

I didn’t like American Beauty. It had its moments, but the time structure of the film distracted me. It was so long and drawn out, two and a half hours for something that essentially had as much plot as a 22-minute episode of Three’s Company. Oh well, it was a nice walk.

I’m too hot to be slaving in front of this monitor. I’m going to go sit in front of the fan with my clipboard and red pen and read some of Summer Rain.

Allergy trance

Mon, 22 May 2000 00:00:00 GMT

It’s been a while since I’ve updated, I realize that. I guess a lot has been going on with me mentally, although very little is happening in real life. I feel like I say this in all of my entries these days, and it makes me wonder if I should even be doing this anymore. But I’m too lazy to remove it, knowing that I will probably restart it in three months anyway.

I’m in a trancelike state, from having allergies all weekend and not being able to breathe. I was up until three AM last night, trying to find a combination of fans and blankets to get everything at an ideal temperature without too much dust or pollen or fungus or whatever the hell is making me wheeze. So I took a bunch of stuff last night to knock me out - benadryl, ativan, kava - only it didn’t do much. Now I’m hung over, feeling confused and strange, drifting from monent to moment. If I was working on Rumored, this would be great. But, I’m not.

Work on Summer Rain continues. I had a very productive week, and I got changes made to books one and two, little grammar things and misspellings. The last part will take forever though, especially if I’m all loopy like this. I want to get the book done and move on to Rumored. I feel like I’m entering a state of mind where I can really get into Rumored a bit more, and I want to finish it. It will be an interesting summer.

There’s little to say about my personal life except that it’s depressing. I bought a mountain bike, but it has rained every day since I got it. This is my latest obsession. There’s a new Motorhead CD. That’s all.

Ignore everything 2

Tue, 23 May 2000 00:00:00 GMT

Ignore my previous interest in the www.everything2.com site. After messing with it more, I’ve found great shortcomings in using it as a reference tool. It does, however, make a great popularity contest if you miss the days of high school. Sigh.

I feel largely functional today, with almost all of the wheezing gone. The other night, the blinds in my bedroom fell down and I had no way to re-fasten them. I live on the first floor, so this was a problem. I ended up duct-taping a sheet across the window so I could go to sleep. I got that whole nightmare fixed last night. And I’m almost caught up on sleep, so maybe I’ll get something productive done in the next few days.

I’ve been in a strange situation as far as trying to figure out what to do next in life. I realize I always say this, but don’t explain it. I also realize that I make it sound like I’m going to quit my job tomorrow and go join the circus or the Marines or something. It’s nothing like that. It’s just that there’s a lot of slop in my life now, a lot of emptiness. I feel this inside of me, but it’s also in my schedule, my activities. I go to work, I come home, and there’s nothing but an answering machine with zero messages and a book that I couldn’t possibly work on for ten hours straight every night. I don’t want to watch TV, and I don’t have cable, and I don’t really feel like going anywhere. So what do I do? When I had a girlfriend, I had an excuse, a person to call or see or whatever. And I realize I was not the best boyfriend in the world and I didn’t entertain her with tons of neat, new activities on a constant basis. So what am I supposed to do? If I was religious, I’d go to church, but I’m not. And I’ve thought about volunteering but I have severe social anxiety problems related to this. I could start other projects, program computers, start a zine, something like that. But the bottom line is, I need to find a way to fill my time that will eventually help me feel better about things and give me room to grow.

I guess in the past, I would jump right into another relationship, and the fastest way to do that is to get into a dysfunctional relationship. I don’t want to do that, but I also don’t want to shun away from the opposite sex entirely for a mandated sentence until I get “better.” I wish I could just hang out with more people, experience things, do things. I don’t know, I’m babbling. But I feel a need to write, and to explain.

Everything2 really bothered me. It’s like IRC or any other BBS in that there’s a group of popular, trendy people, just like in high school. And if you’re not for them, you’re against them. People were voting down my stuff just because I wasn’t writing stupid new nodes that were chatty and useless. I can’t really deal with stuff like that. Everything2 is a good idea in theory, but it’s nothing more than a glorified chat server for a bunch of airheads.

I don’t know if I want to stay and work until the trains calm down, or go get a drink somewhere and edit the book, or just mess around for a while. I guess I’m going to go find out.

what to do with this

Thu, 01 Jun 2000 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with this thing for the past few days. I’m unhappy with the entries since I re-started this journal in April, and I have no energy or content to make this any better. I have no desire to write, and I have no desire to tell anyone what is going on with my life. Nothing is going on with my life, and I know nobody reads this.

I’ve been in a really bad place lately. All I really do is go to my job, and come home. Most people say that because they hate their job and it consumes their life. My job doesn’t, and I actually like it. The problem is that I live thousands of miles from anybody that I know, and aside from editing a book that nobody’s going to buy, I have nothing to do. It’s incredibly depressing, and I can’t write entries that say “I went to the village, and looked at all the happy people, but didn’t have the guts to talk to anyone.” But that’s essentially all that has happened to me in the last few months.

I blame all of this on myself because I left a relationship and hurt someone greatly, and this was all my fault, and now what comes around goes around. So I can’t expect any amount of pity, because I’m completely responsible for the situation I’m in. I guess that means I’m responsible for getting myself out of it, but I don’t really have the energy to do that. I’m not entirely sure where that leaves me.

At any rate, updating this journal any further would be an exercise in futility. I’m hopeful that at some point, I’ll get my shit together and come back and write something meaningful. But for now, I’m just focusing on my job, and trying to find out what to do with my life. If anyone has any wise ideas, you know where to find me.

Book done, Seattle nostalgia

Sun, 16 Jul 2000 00:00:00 GMT

Well, I think it’s time to start writing here again. Aside from the number of people that keep writing to see if I’ve jumped off a building yet based on my last entry, there’s been a lot of nothing going on in the writing world, and I don’t want to resort to other less savory methods of wasting my time after the 9 to 5, like watching prime-time TV. So here we are.

The biggest news is that my book is done. I sent off the masters on July 5, and now I’m just waiting for the designers to send me proofs to correct and approve. I’m also working on a site (located here) that all of you should check out and keep up with as I add more great new content and news on what’s up with the publishing process. I think I’m looking at a mid-September release, so start saving your pennies.

The lack of the book means my daily process has been screwed. With no deadline and no project, I’ve been drifting. Everyone keeps asking if finishing the book is exciting, and honestly, it isn’t. I think if I would have kept writing and rewriting for another ten years, I still wouldn’t feel done. So it feels like I submitted an incomplete work. Secondly, this wait is killing me. I want instant gratification, but at least this is much shorter than most publishing cycles. And most of all, it’s hard to not be immersed in a project. I know I should be working on Rumored, but I can’t force myself to get started, and it will take some time to get back on it. So until then, I will drift.

Today I bought a new stereo. Actually, it’s one of those home theatre in a box things - five surround sound speakers, a 100 wattx5 receiver with DTS, Dolby Digital, and many functions, inputs, and outputs I will never fully understand. It also came with a huge-ass 50 watt self-powered subwoofer. The receiver does a good job of powering its 5 matched speakers plus my old 12” 3-way Pioneer speakers when I’ve got a CD in the player. I’m listening to the Zappa Au20 gold disc for One Size Fits All and it sounds better than ever, especially with the sub to pull out all of the bass. And _Top Gu_n and The Matrix in AC-3 both made me glad I don’t have neighbors underneath me. I can’t use my remote for my CD player anymore (long story having to do with proprietary Kenwood system interconnect crap) and it’s sort of difficult to jockey the volume sometimes on Dolby Digital movies. When you lower things so the Terminator’s motorcycle isn’t waking the dead three houses down, you can’t even hear peoples’ dialogue. There is a special mode to correct this, but it also flattens out all of the ass-kicking sound that I just paid a bunch of money to have. I guess you can’t win there, unless you live in the middle of nowhere.

I still haven’t found any magical answers to life, although I’m getting a little better at dealing with things. I’ve had rough spots, but I’ve also been slowly figuring out what’s bugging me and why. I still basically have nothing to do in my life except my job, but sometimes doing nothing can be enjoyable. Nothing’s better than cooking some dinner, reading a book for a while, and making a few phone calls. It’s not the way to Carnegie Hall and it won’t earn me any Nobel Prizes, but I think this downtime is important. I seriously need to regroup, figure out a few things, and get a little more comfortable with my surroundings.

Case in point: like an idiot, I bought the DVD for Singles. Okay, Bridget Fonda is nice with the first-season-Agent-Scully haircut, and as long as you don’t think about the Kevin Bacon thing, Kyra Segwick ain’t bad, either. And I was at Virgin and there was some “buy 4, get 1 free” deal, and it was the first thing I saw. So I put it in the player tonight, and all of this imagery of Seattle hit me like a sniper’s bullet to the temple. It made me wish it was a Saturday night at 7th and James and I was climbing in the Aqua Ford Escort to drive around in the darkness and do a lot of nothing. All of those comfortable memories hit me - the places I used to hang out, the scenes I used to stroll through and the drives I used to take. After about three minutes of this, I tore the movie out of the player, and spent a long time thinking I needed to get the hell out of New York and go back to Seattle so it could be 1997 all over again.

Then I realized how stupid this was. It’s not 1997. And I can’t go back to Seattle, any more than I can go back to high school or the third grade or living at my mom’s house and working at the mall for my pizza and CD money. I have strong memories of the Seattle experience, and maybe there was something magical about the scenery or the people I knew, but I think a lot of it was how I perceived myself there. Because I wasn’t happy in Seattle - in fact, I was pretty depressed a lot of the time. There were many Saturday nights I went to the Barnes and Noble to sit around and read magazines because I didn’t have anything better to do, and at the time, I thought it was pretty pathetic. So why don’t I go to Borders or whatever in Manhattan and do the same thing? Good question. And that’s what it all comes down to - I have all of these convenient memories of my past, but they are of mundane activities in a glamorous setting, and the whole thing is blurred by time. So if I went out every Saturday and wandered through the streets and ate at 24-hour diners and went to bookstores and maybe even picked up a copy of the Voice and found something slightly more interesting to do, maybe I will create the same memories, the same experiences. I can’t expect to talk to people or make lifelong friends or meet the lover of my dreams, but I can expect to get out, and expect the occacional weird stuff to happen.

So I guess that’s the plan. Except it’s raining and shitty tonight, and I stayed in all day running wires all over high hell to get this surround sound stuff working. I am exhausted now, my arms hurt from hauling in a hundred pounds of wood and plastic, and I feel about ready to drop off to sleep. But before I do, I’m going to keep cleaning, rearranging electronics and cables, and wear myself down a bit so I’ll drop off like a baby.

I don’t know when I’ll update next, but if it’s not for a while, just assume I’m still trying to program all of these remotes. Why can’t they write decent documentation for this stuff? Wait, I should know the answer to that one.

exhaustion, heat, and lack of demarcating events

Mon, 17 Jul 2000 00:00:00 GMT

Life is like a daze right now, a combination of exhaustion, heat, and lack of demarcating events to mark the passage of days and weeks. I wish I could find the most ideal bed in the most ideal temperature and simply sleep for weeks, with machines feeding me and stimulating my muscles and whatnot. But I know after fifteen minutes, I’d go mad thinking that I needed to figure out how the interconnects on my CD player worked and how I had to balance my checkbook, take out the trash, wash dishes, etc etc etc.

I’m listening to the Pink Floyd album Momentary Lapse of Reason, an instant time machine to my senior year in high school. I was on such a big ‘Floyd kick back then, probably because most of the mood matched my own. I didn’t realize until I got to college that everyon thinks the same thing, and it’s a pretty played-out thing to do. I still like some of their stuff, mostly the albums nobody else likes. The Final Cut is probably my favorite, but it’s far too depressing for tonight. I just like the sound of Momentary Lapse… in the new system. Very crisp and exact. Too bad the army of fans whirring at top speed cut most of the quality out of the disc. But it’s either that or extreme heat in the apartment.

I have very little to report except that I’m slowly chipping away at the Summer Rain homepage. And I think I’m ready for bed, maybe after a long, cold shower. Maybe I’ll sleep in the shower…

wanting pierogies

Sat, 22 Jul 2000 00:00:00 GMT

It’s a beautiful day out, and I woke up early, and I have a wad of cash in my pocket I can spend on anything, but I’m sick. My stomach’s bothering me, and I really want to go eat something bad, a pile of fried pierogies with sour cream or a plate of greasy hash browns and some fried eggs, but I don’t think that will happen. I hate this stomach stuff, and it’s been happening pretty much constantly for the last few weeks. I’m hoping it’s just stress, but maybe it’s a warning sign that I should be paying attention to some of the other problems in my life.

I should be working on Rumored. Marie loaned me this book (and I don’t remember the author or title) and I started reading it last night, and it reminded me exactly of what I wanted to write like. I stopped reading after about three pages because I didn’t want to subliminally rip off this dude when I got back on my own writing. It got me motivated to at least think about Rumored for a while.

The problem is getting some momentum going, to sustain it. I need to figure out the process, how I can get back to writing every night and return to that sweet spot where I can produce golden prose for three hours a night. With Summer Rain, there was this entire process, pages of notes and outlines, the music, the food I ate, the smells I smelled, that pushed me into that creative zone where I could recreate the past with words. A glass of cold Coke, a compilation tape of my favorite songs from that era, and I would be able to work. The problem with Rumored is that I’ve sometimes found that zone, but it’s so difficult. I can get so distracted by music - it needs to motivate me, but it can’t pull me away. It’s difficult to describe, but the setting has to be just right. And I haven’t found that magic combination yet.

Maybe I need to buy a new desk. I don’t know.

I’m also not in the mood where Rumored is always in my head. I need to think of ideas all day long and then write them down. The Palm Pilot is nice for that, but it doesn’t happen enough. I spend my days daydreaming about stupid shit, not thinking about the book. The book needs to be my daydream. When I worked on Summer Rain, it was easy to drift back to 1992, to replay those memories and fantasies and get far too sentimental about old flames and distant days. Then when I checked in every night and sat down at the computer to pound out another chapter or whatever, it was easy to really get into it. I haven’t been doing that now, and I need to.

There was a period in 1998, between Karena and when I met Marie, where I was 100% gung-ho about Rumored. I think it was back when Fear and Loathing was in the theatres and I was watching it constantly and never sleeping and pushing myself with tons of Coke and low-grade speed and food from Denny’s and hanging in this freaked-out state where I was the book, where I ran through reality like a machine gun firing at everything 72 times a second. I wrote a lot of fucked-up stuff back then, stuff that still makes me laugh out loud. I didn’t give a fuck about my job, and I wasn’t a technical writer by trade - I was me, writing. It was a good time, but it didn’t last for long. No heavy reasons, I just couldn’t sustain it.

I have been sober for seven months today. The medicine I just took for my stomach is .5% alcohol, but I don’t think that counts. Besides, it didn’t make me want to run to the nearest bar and get loaded. I could barely keep the stuff down - it tasted like fucking turpentine.

Okay, at the very least, I need to go to the bagel shop on 30th Ave and get something for lunch. Go visit the book site if you haven’t already, dammit.

Early Sunday

Sun, 23 Jul 2000 00:00:00 GMT

I don’t think I’ve ever been awake this early on a Sunday morning, unless I was still trying to make it home from a Saturday night out. Even back when I was a kid and my mom used to drag me to church, there was an 11:15 mass. But I went to bed early, and I’ve vowed to get something done today, so here I am.

I started working on Rumored again last night. It’s tough - I have a lot of little ideas, fragments, but I can’t string them together so they flow well. I’m going to keep struggling with it, in hopes that it will fall into place better or maybe the stuff that I’m doing now is somehow editable at a later date. I’m trying not to throw out anything, because I’m eventually able to twist it around and come up with something more functional. It feels good to at least be thinking about this.

Not much to report here. Yesterday was a quiet day; went to the mall in Jersey City, which was probably a mistake. There are too many people and not enough good stores there, but it’s the only mall-type mall around here, unless you go to Staten Island. I wanted my Midwest fix, but didn’t really get it. The train rides were okay though - air conditioning is always a plus. I almost saw X-Men again, but decided I didn’t want to kill half the evening on it.

I think I’m going back to bed.

ISBN, Dolby

Wed, 26 Jul 2000 00:00:00 GMT

Okay, I’m calmed down now.

The good news is that my book has an ISBN number. Forevermore, Summer Rain by Jon Konrath will be known as 0-595-13494-7. And that is cool. I feel very legitimate now. I just wish I didn’t have another 2-3 month wait until the thing was in my hands.

It’s pouring rain. I’m listening to the Peter Gabriel - Secret World Live album, which makes the subwoofer sound incredible. I also went through the Dolby Digital test disk tonight, which has some cool trailers, but is way too damn short for $15. But it really shakes the rafters, especially the ‘City’ and ‘Rain’ demo trailers.

Okay, nothing else. I need to finish dinner and write a book.

Saturday afternoon, no plans

Sat, 29 Jul 2000 00:00:00 GMT

I feel a need to update, even though not a lot’s going on. Saturday afternoon - no plans, a few bucks, and so-so weather. I went out late last night to Kiev, to eat some food that I probably shouldn’t have. I have been passively drifting on some kind of diet thing, but it’s more like I’ve just been feeling more guilty about eating bad, and avoiding snacks. I tried to get on diet Dr. Pepper this week, but my allegiance to The Real Thing is too heavy, and I was back to six Cokes a day by Friday. I’ve also been trying to take more late-night walks through the ‘hood, but it’s been raining all week, and spending an hour and a half walking around is kinking the Rumored to Exist writing schedule.

I haven’t been doing much writing, but I read a lot of Rumored in the last few days, and I still really like it. I can’t wait until it’s 100% and I can start showing it to my friends and stuff, because it is very tripped out and the current draft is very tight. I still have some stuff to fix up, there’s some slop in the language and some of the references are too far out for anyone but me and maybe Ray Miller.

I registered allhailsatan.com this week. It points to my home machine. Not much located there, but maybe later I can use it for some weird project.

Okay, I need to get dressed, catch some lunch, do something cool. I’m thinking of the Strand, but spending money might not be the best idea at this point. We’ll see what goes down.

Extreme olfactory triggers and strange nostalgia

Sun, 30 Jul 2000 00:00:00 GMT

I’m in one of those strangely nostalgic moods that only happens when you combine an extreme olfactory trigger from the past with an old CD that strikes a nerve. I’m burning a candle that smells like 1993 to me, and the CD was Rush - Counterparts. It reminds me of someone from a long time ago that I probably shouldn’t even be thinking of anymore, but I still do.

I was talking to my shrink about this on Friday. I’ve been getting through the emotions and problems of my last couple of relationships, trying to figure out where I went wrong, or if “wrong” is even the right word to use, or whatever. It would be much easier for me to say “my ex is a bitch and it’s all her fault” when I break up with someone, but they usually aren’t at fault, it’s just my reaction to the situation, or I’m at fault, or… well, whatever. The problem is, my last couple of relationships have been very long and involved, and there were many factors involved. These were people that were my friends, lovers, partners, everything, and it’s hard to pick apart the issues about what’s going on when you have so much all wrapped into one package. I don’t know if things would have been different if I never moved to New York, or if my work situation was different, or if I owned a car still, or whatever. It gets confusing fast, and it’s hard to analyze, especially when you’re still in the middle of it.

But way back when, things were different. I had a relationship that only lasted from March to October, but it still haunts me. And it’s because it was so fantasy-like in so many ways, just in the time it happened, how it all went together, how we met. There was no real-world component - it was just pure infatuation, pure fairy-tale. And then we spent the summer apart. And then school started, things wavered a bit, and then it was over.

One of the reasons this is so important to me is that it’s almost mythological. I was depressed as hell, and this innocent little 18 year old wandered into my life like a puppy dog, and we were in love. It ran its course, it hit the ground, and it was over. It was like when they take a brand new car and smash it into a wall. There are no other factors to consider, like tire wear or a drunk driver - it’s just the car and the wall. And that’s what this is, because when it was over, I couldn’t reason with it in any logical matter, or place blame. I was forced to feel loss. And for a guy who has spent his whole life using logic to avoid feeling loss, that’s a major fucking beating.

So here I am, in New York City, 7 years later. I don’t even remember what her voice sounds like. I can barely remember what she looks like. The idea of being close to her - or anybody - seems so remote to me. I’ve been in two relationships that, combined, lasted five times longer than the time I spent with her. Yet it still bugs me. I don’t obsess about her every day - I’ve got enough shit in my life going on. But it seems like I’d be able to forget her and move on with life.

I think part of it is that I think I will somehow repeat what I had with her, but make it all happen right again. I’m convinced that I made a couple of dumb little mistakes, and if I meet her again, the 30-something version of her, and I don’t fuck up, I will have the perfect woman and I’ll do everything right. I think every relationship I’ve had since, every first date and failed encounter has started with some sick fantasy that this woman would be as perfect as her. Not that she was a supermodel or anything - I mean that everything would dovetail nicely; that we would be a nice match and the atomsphere would be incredible and everything else.

It’s silly for me to continue this discussion, because I’m not going to say that wanting something spectacular is a bad thing, and I’m not going to say it’s helping me out, either. I guess that’s the rub. Either I’ll figure this out someday, or I will be in the right place at the right time again.

Not much else. Time to go to bed.

Book post-partum depression

Tue, 18 Jun 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Sometimes when I look back at this much of my life in one place, it tends to freak me out.

For example, when I first got a designed, printed, final copy of Summer Rain and I saw and FELT how much the summer of 1992 weighed when it its final form, it made me realize how much could happen in three months. And to this day, I still can’t read the book, because a page or two into it, I start thinking about all of the events that I wasn’t able to capture in words, all of the laziness and intensity and all of the people whose paths I crossed who didn’t fit into that formulaic outline that I followed.

I recently finished my book Rumored to Exist and I’m now in this weird, post-partum funk, trying to figure out what’s next while also thinking that I have until September to figure out a way to sell this damned book when it hits the streets. After I zapped the final draft and other assorted submission form cruft to the publisher last week, I did some quick math and realized I’ve been writing this book for almost seven years. SEVEN YEARS! And this is the first time since before I left Indiana in 1995 that I don’t have a major open project. It’s like the kids have grown up and moved away. (Except I get the occasional $14 royalty check.)

I read a bunch of these old journal entries today, as I contemplated getting everything hooked up and operational again. I realized I really do like my old writing, aside from the strong nostalgia of Seattle it invokes. I really do miss Jet City, but I’m not sure if it’s that I miss the Pacific Northwest, or I miss the experiences of that time in my life. My leisure time and writing career are obviously structured much more differently now in New York, and I can’t say I feel it’s the most productive time of my life. But then, I used to say that back in 1996, and now I wish I could run things like that again.

I shouldn’t say I have no major projects - I actually have a few unfinished books and half-baked ideas. I started writing something for NaNoWriMo last year and got about 30,000 words into it. But I missed the first few days in Vegas, and then I got horribly sick when I got back. Somewhere during the trip to the ER, I decided I should fuck the contest and sleep as much as possible, and there it lay. It’s a bizarre sci-fi tale called The Device, about time-travel and a cross-country roadtrip, and it is partially similar to an older idea with the same name (but no roadtrip) that spawned from Rumored several years ago. So maybe that’s my next big thing.

Food’s here, Wyoming chicken burger from Rainbow Cafe. Hopefully, I’ll update this more, and shake out a few bugs in the site format at some point.

Rumored proofs

Wed, 19 Jun 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I got the first proofs of Rumored to Exist today. Unfortunately, the book block was paginated wrong, and I had to send it back. They put each “section” on a new page, always starting on the right, which meant tons and tons of blank space where it wasn’t supposed to be, and it made the thing read like a corny poetry book. So it’s back for a redesign, which will take a couple of weeks, and then the book will be out maybe six weeks after that. I’m nervous as hell that there will be problems, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

It does feel good to have an ISBN, though. Rumored will now be known as 0-595-23476-3. It’s also weird to see the whole thing in a book manuscript, with real fonts and layout and stuff. The cover also looks very official, with a bar code and everything. The price on this proof was $20.95, but that’s assuming a 384 page count, and this pagination fuck-up will bring it closer to the 300 mark, so maybe the price point will drop. I’d love to see it at or below 20 bucks.

I’m still going through this strange haze of not having the book anymore, and seeing it almost done freaks me out a bit. It’s hard to not have a steady project anymore, and I know I should be pushing The Device, but I haven’t been in the mood yet. I’ve got a lot of little shit to deal with first, so I don’t know when I’ll get moving with this thing.

Speaking of which, I have a couple of vacations coming up. At the end of this month, I will be flying to Las Vegas and then driving to my land in Colorado. The drill is this: a day at the Hacienda hotel just outside of Boulder City (I could not get a reservation on the strip if I arrived on a Saturday), then an all-day drive through the southwest, then four nights in Alamosa, then another hell-drive, then two nights at the Tropicana. The Vegas heat will be bad - I think it’s about 105 there right now. But the Colorado part will be decent, comfortable temperatures. And no, this isn’t the part of Colorado that’s on fire right now.

The second trip will be for my sister’s wedding in the beginning of August. It’s an in-on-Thursday, out-on-Tuesday thing. I haven’t been back to Indiana since I moved to New York, so this will be a first. I’ll be staying with Ray, and I have no idea what the itinerary will be, but it will most likely involve driving back and forth between all of the podunk towns in northern Indiana in which my family is scattered.

Not much else is going on. I have a dozen different books I want to be reading, but I’m currently going through a biography of Howard Hughes. It’s not bad sofar - I’m up to the point where his parents died - but I don’t know enough of his history to tell if it’s accurate or not. I am mesmerized by him though - something about his secretive and bizarre lifestyle makes me want to know more. Or maybe it’s because I like the Monty Burns character on The Simpsons so much.

Listening to the new Tony Levin solo album (Waters of Eden) which actually sounds a lot like a Shadowfax album, so It’s good for writing. I think I need to get out of the house though, go for a late night walk…

Jackhammer alarm clock

Thu, 20 Jun 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I woke to jackhammering this morning. Actually, I awoke to the sound of someone dropping a several-hundred pound jackhammer off of a truck, which to the half-asleep mind sounds a lot like a car being dropped from a skyscraper. Then, every car alarm on the block lit up, then the jackhammer. These idiots haver been building a three-unit for at least a year now, working odd hours with leftover material and half-assed labor. It’s pretty much the theme of my neighborhood. There’s a bar on 30th Ave. (right by my place) that has been under construction for a good two years now. And I mean their remodel job is taking that long. I could build a house out of trash and old printouts faster than that.

In good news, I got another set of proofs for Rumored to Exist today, and they look great. I approved them, and the book will now go to the next step of production. That means in about three weeks, you’ll be able to buy it from the publisher, and in about six weeks, Amazon and ilk will have it. It’s 268 pages, which puts it at $15.95. I’m pretty happy with that size and price point, and hopefully that means more of you bastards will buy it and maybe even actually read it.

Incredibly tired - I’ve fallen into the nap-after-work syndrome over the last few days, partially because I’ve had a borderline cold, and I didn’t get any sleep today. If I was smart, I’d go to bed at like ten and wake up early to avoid any potential jackhammer action. But, the Playstation 2 looks so inviting…

google, Florida

Fri, 21 Jun 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I spend a lot of my spare time putting people’s names into google and trying to find them. I never really know what to say to them if I do stumble across them in a new life of whatever they are doing now, which is always radically different than what they were doing ten years ago. I have an incredible problem with looking into the past and thinking it was a wonderful time, hence my first book and other web projects. So I always find it amazing when I do run across some piece of the past in the form of a person or some old news posting or whatever.

Lately, I’ve been having more people find me first, which is always great. It makes me think the permanent 34.216.9.77/ domain is starting to pay off. I just heard from an old friend Alana who I thought was forever lost. And a few weeks ago, I got a message from Brian Smith, who even had a very small bit part in Summer Rain, although I didn’t tell him at the time.

I’m thinking of having a contest for the book where if you send a picture of yourself in a strange place with the book (or just the book without you in the picture), I’ll send you a dollar or something. Then I will put all of the pictures on the web. I don’t know if this is the sort of thing reserved for stolen garden gnomes, but I think it would be fun. Too bad I don’t have any copies yet, or I’d take some of my own pictures in Vegas and Colorado later this month.

I can’t believe a year ago I was in Florida. I sure wish I was sitting in the pool down in Treasure Island right now. I’d love to have some kind of canoe or small boat down there, where I could go to a public launch and then just circle around all day, do nothing, take a lot of photos. It’s such a relaxing thought, especially considering that New York is pathetically hot right now, and I had one of those days where every single fucking person on the sidewalk was in the exact wrong place in front of me. There are times I think about buying some kind of aircraft landing strobe so people would get the fuck out of my way. My doctor keeps telling me I should go for walks more, but if I can’t walk ten feet without someone tripping me up, I don’t think it will help my cardiovascular situation. I sure miss being able to hop on my bike and ride across an empty cornfield for 20 miles.

Okay, I think the AC is getting fired up now…

Linux, Coney Island

Mon, 24 Jun 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Every time I need to do something on Linux, I run into a whirlwind of problems. Current issue: I turned on pretty much every firewall option when I installed Red Hat 7.2. Now I want to install a web server. Nope. The only method of reconfiguring this is to do everything short of pulling chips off the motherboard and crossing bare wires in the computer case. Is there any documentation on it? No. There’s a two year old HOTWO that does the “if your system has X Y Z do this..” crap, which means I would have to go on a major expedition to find out of Red Hat 7.2 has X Y Z, and of course it probably doesn’t, because Red Hat is legendary for installing stuff sideways and covering it with a bunch of unmaintainable crap.

Aside from that (which actually didn’t come up until today), I had a pretty relaxing weekend. It’s officially summer, and the city’s starting to smell like it. I think it’s going to be a long, hot, humid summer this year. New York summers are the worst, because the entire city is like a miles-long concrete solar collector, and then all of the big buildings dump heat out of their AC systems. But most of the buildings like restaurants, stores in my neighborhood, have substandard AC and aren’t built for the heat. And my building is like a big brick pizza oven. Luckily this year, I have a portable AC in my room, but it isn’t incredibly cool, and it uses a lot of power. I’m going to carefully orient the fans and maybe get another, more efficient one. Luckily, I will be out of town for about two weeks of the worst of it - next week, and the first week in August.

I went to Coney Island yesterday, just to take a long ride in the air conditioned subway and shoot a few photos. (I wanted to post the photos, hence the big Linux screwup.) I like the last part of the train ride through Brooklyn; the subway is outdoors, and passes all of these family houses with little backyards and stuff. Then you go through an immense train yard, with rows and rows of subway cars - some new, some old, some damaged or antique. The train stops, and you’re right at the corner of Surf and Seaside.

It’s very strange to be on the same train for so long, and then get out and see it right there by the beach. I had a similar feeling when I drove across the country for the first time in a small U-Haul truck. A few days into the trip, the truck looked so weird to me, because I had all of these mental images of it in Bloomington, at my mom’s in Elkhart, in the Badlands and at Devil’s Tower, the panhandle of Idaho after the plains and mountains of Montana. I could only imagine what it would be like to go to the moon and back, and then see your capsule sitting on the deck of an aircraft carrier with the interior filled with two weeks’ worth of tang bottles and moon rocks.

Despite the long trip, I didn’t do much at Coney Island. I shot some pictures, walked the boardwalk, got a hotdog at Nathan’s, and watched the people. Coney Island always has a strange feel to me, the way it’s laid out and the building surrounding the area. It’s a weird mix, because there are some high-rise projects or condos or something, and then there are hundred-year old businesses. There must be some strange zoning going on there, because I’d think it would be built up to the gills, like the rest of the city. Maybe it’s the practicality - I would love to have a view of the ocean, but the beach is always crowded, and how would you get to work every day? It’s a good hour and a half from Manhattan.

Anyway, not much else going on. I saw the new Ocean’s Eleven on Saturday, and Swingers last night. Trying to get in some Vegas movies before the trip. I’m not even sure I will gamble when I’m there, though.

OK, gotta finish eating…

The ghost of grocery store past

Thu, 27 Jun 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Okay, so this daily journal thing slips away from me sometimes. A lot’s been up in the last few days, and I’m getting ready to leave for vacation on Saturday. Actually, I haven’t been getting ready, and that’s a problem. I will probably throw a bunch of crap in a suitcase an hour before I leave for the airport, and then end up in the middle of the fucking desert without a single pair of shorts. But, that’s why they invented Mastercard.

The big news - the book is done, and available. Go here and check out the page. You can view the whole thing from the publisher, and I also installed a message board, so ask some questions about it. And of course, buy the damn thing! It’s only $16 this time, and it’s a fairly easy book to read. You don’t even need to read it in order - just open it to a random page.

I don’t have copies of the book yet, but they are allegedly on the way. They will probably show up next week while I’m out of town. I still haven’t sent out a huge email yet telling everyone about it. I might wait the 4-6 weeks until it shows up on Amazon, because that’s where most people buy it from.

I found an incredible grocery store near where I work. I grew up in the midwest, where there was a Kroger’s store every mile, and each store had a few million square feet of floor space with every food imaginable. But in New York City, the grocery situation sucks. I’m sure it’s the lack of space, plus the markups, high costs, and the fact that everything has to be trucked in from far away, and it’s all run by the mafia. So the Key Foods near my house is in horrible shape, the kind of sanitary conditions you’d expect out of a Russian prison shortly after World War II. There are no choices in foods, the refrigerators are tepid, the freezers are covered with ten years’ worth of frost, and the cashiers give you so much shit, it’s a crime that they also ask you for money for the food. And for some reason, after you get such shitty service, there is a fucking tip jar at the cashier for the bagboy. Most of the time, I end up bagging the stuff myself, and if they do bag it, it’s all wrong. Plus, there are almost no 24-hour grocery stores in NYC. Compare that to Safeway and QFC in Seattle, who had an incredible variety of foods, great cashiers who knew me by name, and they were always open!

Anyway, I went to Safeway when I was in Washington, DC a bit ago, and it depressed me so much that I decided that I was either going to leave New York, or move to Jersey or something, where they had real stores. And then after a few weeks, I thought I was just nuts. Then the other day, I went to this Morton Williams store on Bleecker and LaGuardia, and the place might as well have been a Safeway. Well lit, air conditioned, very modern looking, wide shelves with lots of choices, excellent produce, large freezer cases and open fridge areas that were actually cold, and clean. And the cashiers were nice! I bought a sandwich and some sliced watermelon while I was there, and it was incredible. I can’t begin to explain how such a hospitable oasis in a desert of pure corruption and filth made me feel.

Enough with my insane rant, I need some lunch.

Travel, broken toe

Fri, 28 Jun 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I’m packing it up and getting ready to head out. Tomorrow, I fly to Las Vegas, pick up a car, and drive to the Hacienda, which is out by the Hoover Dam. (Not to be confused with the old Hacienda, which was imploded a couple of years ago.) Then on Sunday, I drive to Alamosa, Colorado and hang out there for four days. I stay at a Best Western, and basically just see my land and check out things. Then it’s back to Vegas for two nights at the Tropicana. Should be a decent week.

I think I broke my toe last night, though. I’ve had a lot of misery with my feet over the last year - gout, pulled muscles, and flat feet - so this really sucks. I had my suitcase out, my hardshell samsonite, and I put it in the hallway to air out. I forgot, and when I went to get a drink of water in the middle of the night, BAM! I just thought I stubbed it, and it was OK all day, but when I got my shoes off tonight, it was pure murder. The middle toe is all purple right now, like a ring of purple. I am not going to a doctor, because aside from the fact that doctors can never fix anything, I know that there’s nothing you can do for a broken toe except tape it to the neighbor toe and load up on pain meds. So I got some tape, and I got my little “bootie” from when my gout was killing me, and I got some Tylenol, and it’s fine. I think it will be decent for walking if it is taped up; the middle toe isn’t that important. But when your big toe is messed up, you are fucked. I learned that the hard way last year.

Not a lot else, just packing. I hate that I never know what music format the rental car takes. Ideally, I would just pack MiniDiscs and a cassette adaptor, but now some cars have a CD in them. So I pack a mix of CDs and MDs, or I end up going to a Best Buy or WalMart and buying a bunch of CDs while I am there. Last trip, I ended up listening to the same BT album over and over and over, so I need to be more careful about what I pack this time.

I should get out of here. Not sure if I will update while I am gone, but I might be writing some kind of story or offline journal of the whole trip, depending on my mood. Anyway, see you in a week…

Rumored out

Mon, 15 Jul 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I’m back. I’ve been back for a week, I just haven’t been in the right state to get back into this. It was a long trip and everything went great, but it was also the kind of thing that made returning to New York difficult, and I’ve spent the last week not really able to work on anything.

The good news is that Rumored to Exist is out, and it’s at Barnes and Noble and I got my first six copies in the mail last week. It looks incredible, and having the book in my hands as a real book and not a bunch of laserprinter paper feels great. But I have no idea how to tell people about it, and I am not the salesperson type. So please check it out, and read it online, and tell other people or mention it on your site or whatever else you can do to help. I think people will really enjoy the book, it’s just a matter of getting it to them.

I am oscillating between two writing projects, and I’m not sure which one will take. The first is called The Device, and it is a time-travel story I wrote a while ago that I’ve been trying to get into a book for a few years now. The other is another book about Bloomington, something that takes place after Summer Rain and basically fixes a lot of things that were wrong in there. I’m not sure which one will happen, but I’m sortof gravitating toward the Bloomington thing, and I plan to visit there when I’m in Indiana in two weeks, so that might be the catalyst for the whole thing.

I’ve been reading a lot lately, mostly because it’s too damn hot to do anything but sit in one place. I’m working on this book by Joseph Heller that talks about his early life, his childhood. He grew up on Coney Island, a Russian Jew during the depression. His dad died when he was five, so everyone worked a million odd jobs to get by. But the way he describes the neighborhood, the boardwalk in its heyday, is the kind of writing I enjoy. I go to Coney Island maybe once a year, and it’s pretty much a shithole now. But there are these little glimpses of a more majestic past that intrigue me. I wonder what it would be like to live there, to have the ocean as your backyard and have all of Brooklyn and Manhattan in front of you. I’m only 50 pages into the book, but I’ve always been a big fan of Heller’s since I found a battered copy of Catch-22 in my parents’ books. (My parents were not literary by any means, but it must have been my mom that bought some of the grocerystore paperpacks that I eventually stole years later - stuff like Fear of Flying, The Terminal Man, and The Godfather.)

I saw the movie The Bourne Identity this Saturday, in a rare trip to the theatres. Since they closed the old Steinway theatre, so the “talk through the whole movie” crowd has moved to the multiplex where I usually go. That means I pretty much can’t go to movies like Men in Black and I either have to go to a really late show, or to a movie that I know no adolescent Queens boys would like. And that’s fine, but it means I go less. Anyway, Bourne was a good movie, and had one of those prototypical Robert Ludlum thrillride suspense plots. As much as you want to make fun of me, I think Matt Damon’s a capable actor, and handled the lead in this well. Good action took place with the beautiful background of Europe. I realize I’m saying nothing about the movie itself, but it was worth a watch, and I enjoyed getting out of the house for the evening.

Lots of movies lately, lots of books, and lots of heat. It will be nice to go to Indiana in the beginning of August only because I will have an air-conditioned car.

Gotta go finish my Big Mac…

Too hot

Thu, 18 Jul 2002 00:00:00 GMT

It is so hot here, I’m afraid the computer will start melting at any moment. I just filled the bathtub with cold water and sat in there for a while. That’s not bad; it would be better if my laptop worked in the water.

I’ve been piddling with a short story about when I worked as a computer consultant back in Indiana, in the student labs. A lot of weird shit happened on a daily basis, and I didn’t think much of it at the time, but it was really like being in the army or something, we had so many different people working on different things. And every night I worked in the library, it was like Saving Private Ryan, only I didn’t have a gun or anything. So I think there’s enough there to get a few thousand words on a page.

My friend Andrea is in town briefly, and we got together for lunch at John’s Pizza and later for dinner at one of the Indian places on curry row. She’s got a very atypical appreciation for the city that I can’t fully explain. Most people (myself included) who go to a different place try to explain it by comparing it to another point of basis. For example, I might (and did) say, “Alamosa’s about as big as Goshen. But they’ve got a Safeway like one from Seattle.” But A has seen enough cities in enough different eras to appreciate it from a different angle, so that’s cool. She keeps bumping in here during other trips to Montrel or Sweden or whatever, and it’s always cool to see her. I wish I could convince more friends from way back to pop through the city and hang out, too. I don’t really have a great motive to brainwash them into thinking New York is the greatest city in the world or whatever, but it’s always cool to see people, and New York draws more people than Elkhart or something.

Too damn hot. I’m going to watch a few more episodes of The Osbournes. Marie gave me a tape with all of them, and last night I saw my first couple. I love Ozzy and have for years - I saw him back in 96 at the Tacoma Dome, but have been playing the tapes for years before. It’s a cute little show, and usually I avoid shit that everyone and their uncle thinks is neato and trendy, but this is an exception. It’s pretty good stuff.

Maybe if I keep my feet in a bucket of water, I’ll feel cooler…

junk

Wed, 24 Jul 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I don’t really feel like writing in this, but I feel I should. Lots of other stuff up, not enough time to mess around.

I started writing down books I’m reading. A list of what I’ve read sofar this summer is here. At some point, I’d like to make a better page with reviews, buy links, dates, etc etc but I don’t have time right now. Reading the books is work enough.

I’ll be in Indiana in a week and a day. I’m getting a bit nervous for too many reasons to list. I’m also writing about Indiana again, but I’m not that nervous about it.

OK, back to work.

Gaming the related books field

Mon, 29 Jul 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I really wanted to go to the movies this weekend, but it’s amazing how much total and utter shit is playing at the high point of the movie season. I think the only reason the movie industry is making any money is because the theatres are air conditioned. I’m sick of this formulaic thing where they make a sequel of a movie and then expect us to pay for it. I thought the first Austin Powers was moderately funny, but I thought the joke wore too thin to see the second one. And there’s no way in hell the third one would keep my interest. I also didn’t think Men in Black 2 would be worth paying $10 to see. I saw K-29 already, and that’s about it. I think I almost seriously considered seeing that new Halloween movie, even though I don’t like that genre at all and this is like the 68th sequel, and it has Jamie Lee Curtis in it. But I didn’t.

I spent most of the weekend watching DVDs, although the lack of AC in my living room makes this a losing proposition. I got a 2-DVD set of all the Mr. Show episodes from the first two seasons. I think I saw one episode of this back in 1997, so I’m glad they got the DVDs out. They remind me of the old UCB show, but slightly earlier and it was on HBO, so there’s more general obscenity. It’s always weird to see something like this or the Chris Rock Show DVDs and expect the general network TV level of dialogue, but then get all of the fucks and shits and everything else thrown in on top of it. I like the general format of their show too, the jumps into randomness. It reminds me a little bit of what I was trying to do in Rumored to Exist, which is also like what they did in Kentucky Fried Movie.

I am hell-bent on changing the “related books” fields in Barnes and Noble by buying some really stupid books and then buying a copy of Rumored in the same basket. I’m slightly amused that a bunch of Oprah books ended up under Summer Rain for the same reason. So I just ordered some stuff to test my theory. I’m still waiting on Amazon, and I have no idea when the book will show up there. I also wish I had more copies with me to take back to Indiana, because I know I could get rid of them if I had more. I think I have 3 or 4 spare copies around the house.

And yes, I am going back to Indiana on Thursday, for my sister’s wedding. This will be a tightly booked trip, and I have no idea if I will have any time to do anything other than the wedding and other family stuff. I will go to Bloomington maybe for an afternoon, to have lunch and take some photos. It has been ten years since the stuff from Summer Rain happened, so I need to get some kind of story out of this, and it would help to have some pictures, too. I’d like to redo the Summer Rain site, but I also need to redo this journal site, and I’m not happy with the Rumored book site, either. And that’s on top of about ten million other things I need to do.

Oh well. Waiting for lunch. It’s too hot to go outside, something like 95 out, maybe over 100 with the heat index. I need to figure out a way to rig my air conditioner so the humidity tank doesn’t fill up and shut off the AC in the middle of the night. I’ve got a hose, I just need to do some Rube Goldberg thing to rig a secondary tank. But first, I need to find out what the hell is up with lunch.

Simms, Daly

Tue, 30 Jul 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I just got back from eating dinner with my old roommate Simms and two friends of his, who are in New York from Bloomington to see The Who tomorrow and Thursday. I dragged them around Times Square and we ate at Sardi’s, which was pricy but pretty decent. Since everyone there had to split at eight for theatre shows, we had the whole place to ourselves. I had steak for the second time this year; I wanted a black angus but they ran out, so instead I got the filet mignon. I’m not 100% on that cut, because you get a lot of meat in the middle and not as much on the outside, even if it is more tender. This was a pretty decent cut though; I had the same thing on my birthday in Vegas at the Circus Circus steakhouse (don’t laugh - it’s one of the best on the strip) and it wasn’t as good, but cost more.

(And before any of you PETA types send me a gallon of blood in the mail, I should disclaim that I am not a regular steak eater and I probably would’ve ordered a good salad, if they would’ve had it on the menu.)

While we wandered around Times Square, I ran into my old pal and Juno coworker Matt Daly, passing out fliers for a comedy club. He’s now a standup comedian, hustling people to his shows. I still haven’t had a chance to catch his act, but he is a funny dude and I hope to check him now that he’s got this thing in Times Square.

I’m still mentally off because of this heat. Last night the power went off and then back on twice, and each time there was a half-second when I thought I’d be truly fucked. Turns out a power station here in Astoria had a fire, and I was lucky enough to not lose power all night. But even with power, a fan, and a portable AC, it’s hotter than hell in here.

I got a new biography on Henry Rollins, so I’m going to read that for a minute before I pass out from heatstroke.

Back to Indiana

Wed, 07 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I’m back in New York, and a lot went on over the last week, so I’ll see if I can lay down the bare-bones version of it as I eat my lunch.

On Thursday, I woke up early and caught a limo to LaGuardia. This is a pretty quick trip from my apartment, so I got to the airport about 90 minutes before the plane left. It only took me a few seconds to get through security, and I managed to skip the whole line of people by using Delta’s kiosk checkin. So I had some time to kill, and I read almost all of this biography of Henry Rollins I’ve been working on.

The plane didn’t board until about five minutes before we left, but it was a small shuttle flight on Comair, so that didn’t mean much. The plane, the usual Canadair, was sitting away from the terminal, so when we went down the stairs to the tarmac, a big, square airport bus was waiting there. After the dozen or so people got on, we rode about 30 feet to the jet. I once again missed the perfect photo op, a shot looking down the tubular body of the tiny jet and into the engine from the door. Maybe next time.

Nothing much to say about the flight in, except it was short - about 90 minutes. When I got to the airport and sprinted to the rental car counter, I thought everything looked completely different from the last time I was there, maybe five years ago. Most of this was new stores, new artwork, new signs, and so on. When I descended to the luggage area, I saw the airport was almost identical to the many times I was there in the past, which triggered the strange nostalgia in my head.

So after a few minutes at the Thrifty car counter and a quick shuttle over to their lot, I was in possession of a Kia Optima SE which I’d never heard of before. The thing looked a little off in its shape, and the fake wood and chrome trim inside looked butt-ugly. But it had a CD and cassette, a power moonroof, and a decent engine, so I couldn’t complain.

After I got the car, I went to pick up Alana. I’ve known Alana since 1990 or 1991, I think, when we were both in Bloomington and both on the computers constantly. We’ve been in and out of touch over the years, but she recently found me again and we got caught up a bit. I thought it would be cool to meet face to face, drive around a bit, and see some of the landmarks from Summer Rain again, especially considering it’s been ten years since all of that stuff happened.

It’s always weird to be doing this kind of shit, and it really hit some buttons to be driving on SR-37 again, stopping at the Flying J truck stop just south of Indy again like I used to, and pulling into town again. Of course, it was also cool to talk to Alana, who is both a cool person to hang out with and a strange connection to this past I don’t forget. On the way into town, we drove past all of the big landmarks: my old place in Colonial Crest, the downtown, Kirkwood, what used to be Garcia’s, and Tom’s CD store. We ate at a Tibetan place on 4th, then drove past 414 South Mitchell, the College Mall, and checked out Lake Monroe. It’s all there and very strange to see. The quiet college campus I described in my first book still exists, even though a few stores have changed. It really made me wish I was back in town, even if I did have to starve to stay there.

After a few laps around, we headed back and listened to some Bill Hicks, which is pretty much the default music for many of my roadtrips, and I’m always happy to find a new convert to his work. We headed back north, and after I dropped off Alana, I headed up 465 for the ride to Elkhart.

I’ve made the 465 to 31 to 20 trip so many times back in the day, I knew every damn piss-stop and fuel depot and restaurant on the way. So after a few years of mental rust and constant change, I enjoyed the quick whip north. I found a Hardee’s restaurant, which was a strange thing for me. I ate there a bajillion times back in high school, so it was cool to stop there for a cheeseburger on the way up. I also saw that Grissom AFB is now gone, and they chopped it up into some kind of industrial park. Otherwise, the drive felt just like it did back when I used to make it every other weekend. Of course, the hermetically sealed and highly engineered Kia felt much different than my lawnmower-powered and somewhat shaky VW, but I still enjoyed the ride.

I made it to Elkhart in good time, and pulled in to Ray Miller’s place, where I’d be staying. We went to Meijer to get my nephew a present for his birthday, and I marveled at this cavernous, 24-hour store bigger than many neighborhoods in New York. On the way back, we cruised my old neighborhood and looked at my old house, which was a bit strange. At Ray’s, we watched some Mr. Show episodes, and I had a minor freakout because the jacket I just had pressed for the wedding was wadded up inside my suitcase, and I was almost certain I’d be fucked on getting it straightened out before Saturday.

Because of the paranoia on the jacket, I woke up at about seven and immediately got showered and out the door. I found a cleaner with three-hour service in downtown Elkhart, which was cool except it basically meant I would have to kill three hours in Elkhart. (I couldn’t go back to Ray’s because he sleeps about 20 hours a day and that kept me locked out.) So I drove around pretty much every major road in Elkhart, and did a lot of nothing.

I never had any strong feeling for Elkhart, and never thought I’d miss it after I left. And I don’t really miss it, especially now that half of the stores there have failed and left a big chunk of the city a hollow shell. But way back when I first got a car, I drove around Elkhart a lot, cruising the strip, cutting across the city to go to the malls of South Bend, or hunting down comic books at various stores that are now long gone. Crossing through downtown and other main strips of Elkhart reminded me of my time in high school, or the year I spent going to IUSB. Circling down all of these roads made me realize I could still drive them in my sleep, even if many of the surroundings had changed.

I went to the Concord Mall, which is now nothing more than a fragment of what it used to be. The Montgomery Ward store where I worked in high school is now boarded up and vacant, and the neighboring K-Mart has also vanished. The Osco drugs and Supersounds record store in the mall are gone, as well as many other small stores. But, I stopped in an Athlete’s Foot and found a bunch of plain, colored t-shirts that I could not find when I was in New York, and got 5 for $20. But other than that cool discovery, the mall was a very depressing site to see.

Cycling around, I went through my old subdivision a few more times, and saw that pretty much everybody I knew had moved away. Maybe some people had moved into newer parts of the area, with more updated subdivisions and fancier houses. Or maybe they just left the area. Most houses still looked the same as they used to; although a few had new paint or new trim, I could still cruise up the streets and remember the kids from my childhood that lived there. When I got bored of this, I drove over to Ox-Bow park, which is next to the subdivision and a place that I spent a lot of time as a kid, riding my bike, climbing the wooden tower, and digging around the woods and trails. The park looked pretty much the same, although it seemed smaller to me. And they replaced the old-fashioned green metal pumps on the artesian wells with generic electric-powered water fountains. That was a drag, because I always remember the fun of pumping the water pump and starting the water going, and then drinking this cool and pure water. It’s not as fun when you just flip a switch.

After a lot of driving, I ate at a Dairy Queen in Elkhart, and then got the jacket. It was only like $4.50 and when I tried to give the woman $7 including a tip, she absolutely wouldn’t take a tip. So that was both cool and strange. After I got the jacket, I called my sister and headed over to my mom’s place. She lives in Bristol, so the drive took a few minutes and I got a bit turned around on the way over. I got to her house before anyone else showed up, so I had a few minutes to kill, just standing around.

After a minute or two, my sister Angie showed up with my nephew Phillip. He’s going to turn five next week, and he’s in the stage of development where he’s fully mobile, cognitive, and aware of everything, yet he’s also young enough that the first feelers of real life haven’t reached him yet and his innocence and childhood are fully intact. I still remember that age well, and I’m envious of it, but it also makes it that much more fun to hang around him.

I gave Phillip his birthday presents, which consisted of a Spiderman puzzle, a Star Wars puzzle, and a Lego set that contained two pull-back type cars. I helped him build the Legos as my mom and her husband Jeff arrived. We hung out for a bit, but most of the time consisted of everyone else getting ready for the rehearsal dinner while I played with Phillip. After a bit, I suited up in my dress clothes for the dinner, and everyone split to go register at the hotel before then. I didn’t have a room, and I knew Ray would still be asleep, so I drove around for a while longer, and headed into South Bend.

I took the same way into South Bend that I took every day of the 1990-1991 school year. Once again, a few things were different, but I drove the stretch like I was on autopilot. I cruised through Mishawaka, into South Bend, and stopped at IUSB, mostly to use the restrooms but also just to see what was up there. The campus has changed pretty radically, with the old Coca-Cola bottler gone and a brand new building in its place. Also, the strip of pavement and parking that led up to the library as I knew it was now a grassy pedestrian mall. I stopped in the main administration building, which looked largely the same. I thought about walking around more, but the whole thing freaked me out enough that I had to get the hell out of there.

I don’t even remember where I went next, except that I had hours to kill and I was so damned bored, but I didn’t want to go to University Park Mall or the Notre Dame campus because, well I don’t know. I headed down 31 toward Plymouth and looked around for some place to kill some time, like a book store or something. No luck on that - the small Indiana main street didn’t have anything promising, so I went to a park and wrote in my paper journal for a bit. Then I cycled back to the place for the reception dinner and hung out for a bit. This was a small bed and breakfast where everyone looked at me like I was a drug dealer as I sat in the car for an hour playing games on my Palm Pilot.

Finally, everyone showed up, and we filed into the dining room of the place and sat down. I can’t say too much about the dinner, other than it was strange to see both my mom and my dad in the same room at once. Phillip was there and since he was in the wedding, he got a gift of a bunch of Star Wars Legos. I finally saw my sister Monica for the first time, and also finally met her fiancee Derek. I didn’t actually go to the rehearsal, so this dinner went by pretty quick.

After dinner, Monica needed a ride back to Walkerton, so we headed back there to her house. She bought a place a few years ago and I hadn’t seen it yet, so I wanted to check it out. When we got there, we met up with Angie and my cousin Cathy, Phillip, my sister’s friend and coworker Maggie, and Sheila, a friend of Monica’s from our old neighborhood that all of us have known forever. Her house is pretty decent, a hundred-year-old two bedroom with nice wood floors, high ceilings, and a very quiet neighborhood in a tiny Indiana town. I like it, but I also understand why she wants to eventually sell and get into a bigger place. Anyway, the bunch of us sat around and talked for a long time, mostly a bitch session about various families and relatives. Between the stories of past weddings, my grandfather’s thriftiness, and various people at Monica’s school, we were up for hours until everyone had to split. It was weird to be the last one there and tell my sister goodbye, knowing it was the last time she’d ever be a Konrath. But I got a good drive back with Henry Rollins in the player, and met up with Ray for a 7-Eleven run and some episodes of Mr. Show on DVD before I had to collapse.

I slept in, got dressed, and shot down to Plymouth again for a 3:00 call. They reserved a new convention hall at the Swan Lake PGA golf course, and by the time I got there, people already filled the place. I saw a lot of folks that I hadn’t seen in years; all five of my mom’s sisters were there, and a lot of my dad’s family was around, plus a bunch of Derek and Monica’s coworkers. My old Bloomington pal Julius Cooper, who previously worked with Derek, was there with his fiancee, so I sat with him and chatted in between rounds of hellos with other people. Once the food got started though, I sat between my dad and Phillip.

The wedding was one of the best I can remember. The hall looked great, my sister had a great dress and both her and Derek looked pretty happy about the whole thing. I expected a lot more tension with both of my parents there, but everyone on both sides got along well, and people from opposing families who hadn’t seen each other in decades talked to each other, which was great. Phillip, Derek’s son Ethan, and the handful of other kids were running all around but were pretty well-behaved and entertaining. And everything in general fell into place without incident.

I felt very strange during the wedding, for a few different reasons that are hard to explain. Going to a wedding alone can be an uncomfortable experience, especially when the dancing starts, and it made me wish I had more people to hang out with during the whole thing. My family members were there, but sometimes talking to that many distant family members at once is more like a press junket than anything else. I don’t mean that I don’t enjoy talking to people, I just mean that I wished I talked to them more often so I had better topics of conversation than “so what’s been up the last three years?”. And the strange thing was that I actually enjoyed seeing a lot of family members, but I felt uncomfortable knowing that I wouldn’t see them again for a long time, and I didn’t know what the next occasion would be. Part of me thinks I should see my family more, but it’s difficult to simply climb in a plane and meet up with a hundred people on a whim. And of course, I hate to admit the slightest amount of jealousy. I mean, I am very happy that my sister is happy, but of course as a single person with no real prospects on the horizon, at least part of me wished I had a person I was happy with. These aren’t things I can simply dismiss, so they tugged at me a bit as the reception went on.

A small pet peeve: if you know someone who was in or near any of the attacks in 9/11, don’t ask them about it as a conversational icebreaker. I got really fucking sick and tired of telling the story over and over. Maybe some people are into it, but I’d rather not talk about it. So if you go to a family reunion and meet someone from New York or DC, ask them about baseball or something. The Yankees are a much more socially acceptable disaster to discuss.

The whole thing was over quick, even though I was there four or five hours. I stayed while everyone rounded up the last of their stuff, and made the drive back to Elkhart, where I met up with Ray and his girlfriend Maria and we went to Perkins for some dinner.

Next morning, I drove to Edwardsburg to see my Uncle Jim, who was not feeling well and didn’t make it to the wedding. He recently had angioplasty and a pacemaker, and he’s still fatigued from it. My Uncle Jim was a career Navy man, who returned to live with my grandma and take care of her until she passed away a few years ago. He was everybody’s favorite uncle and spent a lot of time with all of us kids. I always realized this, but really saw it when some of us grew up and had kids and he also nurtured them the same way. The positive experience of my Uncle Jim has really motivated me to be the same kind of role model for my nephew Phillip, and it makes me happy to see Phillip enjoy his time with me.

I talked to Uncle Jim in the kitchen at my grandma’s old house, where we spent so many Sunday afternoons with my parents and many of my other relatives, reading the comics pages and playing with the box of toys my Grandma kept there. The house is a Konrath museum of photos and other keepsakes, and it was great to be back after so many years and to talk about everything with Uncle Jim.

After about an hour, I took some pictures, then headed back to Walkerton. I drove past my old old house on Redfield Road, where I spent my time from infancy to the end of the first grade. The tiny pine tree my dad planted in the front yard now stood twice as high as the old house, and everything else looked close to the same. I drove down state line road and took the old route to the University Park mall. The strange thing is that on a spot on Cleveland Road, a good friend of mine from childhood, Peter Elias, was killed in a car accident in 1991. And on SR 23 just south of the mall, my grandfather was killed, also in a car wreck, long before I was born, when my dad was a kid. That only adds to the strangeness of this trip, the roads I drove on so many times ten years ago.

Back in Walkerton, I headed to Monica’s to watch Mr. and Mrs. Owens open gifts. She told me to be there at one, but everyone checked out of the hotel early, and by the time I got there, everyone was gone except her, Derek, and Maggie. So the four of us piled into Maggie’s car and drove to the Scottsdale Mall for lunch at Hacienda. It’s really weird being in that mall, given that I used to go to that Target all the time when I worked at IUSB. Service at the Hacienda SUCKED, and they took about three times as long to get us through lunch, finally culminating in us tracking down the server for the check and leaving in disgust. After a quick run through Target for some last-second vacation stuff and Maggie’s wedding party gift (a croquet set), we got back to Walkerton and said our goodbyes.

By the time I got back to Elkhart, I was hungry again for dinner, so Ray, Maria and I piled into the car and drove to Great Wall for some Chinese food. The food was so-so, but I like that restaurant because the big sign has been the same ever since I was a kid, and has that old-school Oriental restaurant look to it. Back at Ray’s, we watched some wrestling, then I collapsed so I could wake up early the next day.

My dad just bought a new boat - it’s a Ranger 16-foot aluminum bass boat. He’s a huge fisherman, and it’s a great size and setup for him to plunk around on some of the local lakes, or head up to Traverse City every year for some more involved ventures. He just had the boat in the shop to replace some decals, and he offered to take me out on a quick run. I jumped at the chance, because I absolutely love boats (and wish I could buy one), but also because it would let me spend some time with him. So despite the 9:00 meeting time in Millersburg, I was excited to get down there.

I met him at his place, and we took his truck out to Ligoneer to get the boat. I have many fond memories of driving around in my dad’s various GMC trucks over the years, including the time all of us went to the Catskills in upstate New York for two weeks. So it felt good to be back in the pickem-up truck and on the road. We went to the boat dealership, and I saw many ways to blow many dollars, like all-fiberglass bass boats with 3.1L, 220-horse engines. My dad’s boat is a meager 40-horse, but it’s set up for fishing, with swivel seats, live wells, a trawling motor, and a steering wheel, electric trim, and throttle for the outboard motor.

We went down to Oliver Lake in LaGrange county, backed the boat down a ramp, and got in. The first channel has vegetation on all sides and looks like something out of Apocalypse Now, but quickly opens into a decent-sized lake with almost no traffic, and lots of big houses on one side. Dad took the boat out and got it up to speed, which brought us up to about 30mph without too much strain. The boat isn’t built to be a demon on the open water, but 30 in an open boat seems faster than 70 in a convertible, so it’s still fun. We then went to the next lake over through a narrow channel, and dropped the throttle to almost no-wake speed. The next lake had no houses on it, just DNR property. They stocked the lake every year, and there was no bank fishing allowed, so there were some great fish to be found. My dad has a great bass hanging up in his house that he caught in this area, and there were probably many more, but the heat kept them to the bottom.

It’s unbelievable to spend so much time in a big city, fighting traffic and fighting noise and everything else, and then find yourself on an open lake with nothing but pure green on every side of you, no noise whatsoever except the occasional trout jumping out of the water. It could have been 1902 or even 1802 on that lake, and even though we weren’t fishing (well, my dad threw out a line a few times to see what was biting) I really liked it. Now, I just wish I could do something like it more often.

It was also good to see my dad in this element, talking about something that he really enjoyed and knew a lot about. I previously encountered something similar in 1990 when I worked for a summer in his factory. I never doubted that my dad worked hard for his money and that the people there liked him, but spending a summer on the factory floor with him really made me realize how true this was. This wasn’t something I could see when I was younger, but it’s interesting for me to watch because I know I have many personality traits of my father, and watching him makes me realize a lot of things about myself. I don’t know if this sounds sappy or stupid, but it is an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon on a lake.

We went to the next lake through another big tunnel, then returned to the original lake and swapped places. I felt nervous getting behind the wheel, considering this was a boat so new, it was still on its first tank of gas. But I hit the throttle, and got the boat up to a decent clip. It’s a little weird steering a boat as opposed to a car - there’s a bit of drift or slop you need to take into consideration. But I figured it out in no time, and we circled around a bit more, looking at houses and parked boats. After a lap or so, we switched places, and took the boat back to the trailer. After some slight trouble getting back on the trailer with the semi-crooked ramp, we got back to Millersburg and hung out for a bit before I headed to Bristol to see my mom.

Oh, first I went to Goshen and ate at the Long John Silver’s, which I haven’t seen in many moons. I also circled back to SR15, which has a strange connotation because my first girlfriend lived down there, and 13 years ago, I used to make that drive often. I also used to work in Bristol at the Bristol Opera House, and took the same trip every night. I drove into Bristol and south to my mom’s place.

That afternoon, my mom had all four of her foster kids plus Phillip, and her husband Jeff was there. This meant I got to spend some time with Phillip and help him assemble his Star Wars Legos, but it also meant the other kids were nagging us the whole time. Angie showed up after a bit and took Phillip home, and I spent the rest of the time with my mom, as she herded around the kids. I don’t really want to get into the politics of the whole situation that much except to say that it’s a very rough load of work on my mom and it’s really a difficult battle. I hung out for a while until my mom was getting supper started for them, and then said my goodbyes and cruised back into Elkhart.

Back at Ray’s, Maria was cooking some chicken for us and Ray was preparing to watch wrestling. We ate (the food was great) and watched and made fun of the WWE Raw show. I’m not a wrestling fanatic, but I watch it enough to be able to keep up with Ray’s conversations and make fun of various wrestlers with inside jokes. After the show, I packed up my stuff and talked to Ray more while plotting the final leg of my trip back to New York. Since he would be going to bed about an hour before I’d be waking, we said our goodbyes, and I went to bed.

In the morning, I took a lightning-fast shower, chucked the luggage into the car, and hit the road by 7:15. Once again, this was a strange roadtrip that reminded me of many trips south, reminders mostly of the times I moved to Bloomington. I had to make it to Indy for a 11:55 flight though, so I kept my eyes on the clock more than anything else.

After a fast drive to Indy and the car rental place, I caught a shuttle back to the airport and got checked in with no problems whatsoever. I fell half-asleep waiting for the shuttle flight, then got aboard and drifted off during the 90-minute jump to Laguardia. When I woke up, I saw Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, and the now-misaligned New York skyline before we cycled back to the airport. After a $10 cab ride, I got back home, and unpacked to get ready for another day of work.

Last Stop sandwich

Sun, 11 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

It’s about 1 in the morning. I’m eating the remains of a sandwich I got from the Last Stop Cafe and listening to the new (to me) Chick Corea New Trio CD, which I discovered at Best Buy today and I have been enjoying. Corea, along with a lot of other Jazz greats, always seems to swap bands and record labels as time goes by. I’m a big fan of the GRP era, the Mariental/Weckl/Pattitucci/Gambale lineup, and the fact that all of those guys did their own solo albums on GRP that had guest appearances. Sort of like those solo Kiss albums, but these were a bit better in quality.

Oh yeah, Rumored is on Amazon. Go check its page on Amazon.com. If you order it there, do me a big favor and use the feature that lets you tell friends to buy it for 10% off. Of course, right now the book is cheaper at Barnes and Noble, and I am pretty agnostic about what store people use, as long as they check it out.

Nothing else mind-bending is really going on these days. It’s too hot for me to enjoy the apartment, but moderately okay outside. I haven’t been in the mood to do much, and I keep racking my brain trying to think of ways to pass time until the mood strikes me to start another book. I should be writing something, but I can’t get into it. So maybe I will take a class or try to find a workshop or something.

Of course I say this, and I have no free time. It seems like every day goes by in ten hours, and I’m left with a list of things I’ll get to tomorrow. Of course, I don’t know what’s on the list right now, except that I just got the new Simpsons box set and I want to watch some of the episodes. But now, it’s going on 2:00 and I need to turn on the AC and sit in bed and let this turkey sandwich churn through my system so I will have bizarre dreams. Not too bad of a plan, really.

From a Blue Planet

Mon, 12 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I’m happy today - I got the Chuck Greenberg album From a Blue Planet today. I’ve been searching for this for years, and finally found a used copy on Amazon’s marketplace. Chuck was the main man behind Shadowfax, a former Windham Hill new age/jazz band that I’ve been obsessed with since the late 1980s. I have all of the Shadowfax CDs and I really like listening to them when I’m writing or when I just want to relax. The only problem is that Chuck Greenberg died in 1995, so that was the end of the road for the band. Luckily, I found this 1991 solo album, and it sounds a lot like a lost Shadowfax work. It’s still got Chuck up front, playing winds and the wind-controlled Lyricon synth, but it has a stable of other musicians, including some of Shadowfax and some new players. Chuck wrote all of the songs, and they have the same great energy and feel as any of his other stuff. The stuff sounds great, and I know it will be in my player for decades to come.

Another musical find in recent news is that I picked up the new Fozzy album. This is a sort of project band formed by professional wrestler Chris Jericho and most of the former band Stuck Mojo. It’s old-school heavy metal, with a slightly more modern production and styling. I loved the self-titled Fozzy debut that came out two years ago, because Jericho is a big heavy metal fan like me, and covered a cool set of songs, like old Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Krokus, Twisted Sister, and more. This time, it’s half cover songs and half new stuff, and it’s not a gimmick or joke - Jericho can really sing, and the band sounds incredible. So it’s cool to see a band that isn’t just the same Slipknot/Korn/Limp Biskit sort of dreary grime, but is actually some good guitars and a guy singing lyrics.

Not much else going on. It is hotter than a motherfucker in here, so I might give up on any writing for the evening and retreat to the bathtub for a while.

All-ice asteroid plans

Wed, 14 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

The heat situation here is at a level where I spend large amounts of time wondering how global climates work and if there’s some way we could tow an all-ice asteroid into orbit and use it to cool cities and generate water without pumping more heat into the air. That’s the real rub there; you can put air conditioners on everything, but it’s like an air conditioner releases cold but also releases even more hot and uses up so much energy, that you reach a point of diminishing returns, and the best example of this is Manhattan. There are constant brownouts because all of the offices are mass-ACed to be 40 degrees cooler than the outdoors. Meanwhile, the majority of apartments in the city don’t have central air, and people are in misery. The moral of the story is I played way too much SimCity a ways back, and now I look at all of life as some derivitive of the same thing.

I went to Wendy’s today, even though I vowed to never go there again, mostly to try their new cheddar hamburger. It’s a mess, way too much to eat and the sort of burger that is taller than it is wide and the whole thing goes in your lap the first bite you take. It’s okay, but not great. All of the cheddar cheese makes it taste more like something from Arby’s. As a strange aside, I’ve dated two people who were managers at Arby’s restaurants in Fort Wayne, although these were separated by ten years, and neither of them knew each other, and one was in New York and the other in Bloomington. Still, weird.

Since I’ve been back, my TV has been messed up. It no longer displays the major network channels correctly; they ghost and have a sort of double-image to them. I know this is a bad ground or faulty cable somewhere, but since I don’t pay cable, I have no recourse but to live with it or not watch TV. I thought I’d do the latter, but I find that when I’m eating dinner, I always watch TV. I still get a few other channels, like TNN and UPN, but there’s not a lot on. I should just watch movies, but I can never make up my mind on what to watch.

I just subscribed to the techwr-l list, and it’s interesting to hear from other tech writers. I’m the only writer at my job, so there’s nobody else to talk to about the craft or business of techwriting. I’m not saying that like it’s heart surgery or something, but it is more involved than, say, being an administrative assistant. I never really pay attention to the career side of being a techwriter, because in most jobs there is no career to it - you are either a tech writer, or sometimes you are a senior tech writer, and that’s it. You don’t become the CTO or CEO by working up the ranks as being a writer, but then I’m not sure I would want to be an executive.

When I worked at Juno, all of the project managers were trying to work the ladder, kiss the right ass, make everything look good, so they could get closer to the top. It bothered me a lot, because tech writers should be immune to that kind of political stuff. We deal more with telling people the truth than doing the smoke and mirrors bit. And a lot of tech writers have actual work to do, while project managers just go to meetings, write memos about going to meetings, and draw project plans that say when there will be more meetings. They do report what work is being done, and most of the time they make it seem as if they were responsible. But most of the time, it’s tech writers, trainers, programmers, or other grunts that actually do the work. So basically, being a tech writer is a bad situation, because you’re doing a lot of work you won’t get recognition for, and even if you did, there’s nowhere for you to move in the company.

So why do I do it? It pays a lot more than anything else I could do. And sometimes, it isn’t bad. Even though Juno got fucked up in the end, I had a manager that upped my salary by a third because I worked hard. I had another let me hire someone with virtually no conditionality, as long as I thought they would well with me. And I had a boss give me a $10,000 bonus after I took pretty much no vacation in 2000. And my current job has almost no political situation. I get to hide out and write docs without any distraction.

Speaking of techwriting, I have a brand new copy of FrameMaker 7.0 sitting on my desk. So I need to break the seal, cut off the shrinkwrap, and see how this thing will make my life more complete.

Minority Report

Sat, 17 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

It’s day seven of over-90-degree weather in New York City, and my tolerance for this is beyond low. I feel like I’m trying to survive the desert or something. I do have a tiny AC in my room, but it only runs for a few hours before its humidity take fills, so I usually wake up in the middle of the night to an oven-like atmosphere. Also, its a bit disconcerting to sit in my room all weekend, without the TV or my desktop computer or anything else. I’d like to get out of the house, but even the trip from my house to the subway is murderous. So survival has been grueling, to say the least.

I got up early and ran a bunch of errands (bank, post office, laundry) and then went to Times Square, mostly because I wanted the air-conditioned subway ride. Turns out there was a huge street fair on 7th Ave, the main drag through Times Square, and thousands of people were there. I’m not sure I’ve seen this many people in Times Square at once; it wasn’t a crowd as big as New Year’s, but considering the heat, it was still phenomenal. Right off the train, I grabbed a corn dog from a cart, and briefly scanned the vendors. They didn’t have much I couldn’t buy at K-Mart for cheaper, but I have some strange fascination with those potted bamboo and bonzai trees they sell at street fairs, and someday I’ll get the nerve to buy one. (I say this as more than half of my window garden has died from neglect.)

Another alterior motive was to see if my friend Rob was at work (he is the manager at the Yankees store on 42nd street), but since he wasn’t, and since I was drenched in sweat from the 5 blocks of walking, I ducked into the AMC 25 and decided to pony up $10 for whatever was starting within a few minutes and wasn’t Austin Powers or Men in Black or some other movie with an integral fast-food marketing tie-in. So I got a ticket to see Minority Report, which was a coup because it was something I wanted to check out, and also I got two hours and twenty minutes of AC for my money. (As opposed to MIB2, which was about 23 minutes long, from what I hear.)

I don’t think Minority Report got a big pop; the commercials weren’t incredible, and it wasn’t that compelling for most people. Plus it seemed like most reviewers on the “dumb” review shows HATED it. Well, there’s a reason for that - it was an excellent movie! And it made people think, which is a big no-no in Hollywood. If you make people think they are thinking, they will love you. But making them actually think is bad. (I was happy to see that Roger Ebert’s Review was good, though.) Anyway, I don’t want to even give away any of the plot, but I will say a few things about the movie. First, the combination of CGI and excellent design makes the 50-years-from-now world of Washington DC incredibly realistic. It’s orders of magnitude better than movies like Fifth Element or even Blade Runner, but the movie isn’t about the technology. It’s more of a human element, and the action in this movie is very tight, and keeps you going through the entire two and a half hours. (It honestly felt like 90 minutes to me.) The ending is complicated, but it’s very much worth it. The other thing is that this is the first movie that I’ve seen based on a Philip K. Dick book that really SEEMS like his writing. Blade Runner took it in another direction, and Total Recall seemed a lot more like an Arnold vehicle, like Running Man 2. I don’t think people will flock to the home video of this, but I do think it will be a cult classic like Blade Runner.

I stayed up all night last night (well, almost all night) reading the new Cynthia True book about Bill Hicks. It’s incredible, and I want to write more about it, but I also want to take a shower, so I’ll save that for another day.

Womb of air conditioning

Sun, 18 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I managed to settle into my small womb of air-conditioning around midnight last night, after my third cold shower of the day. When the air conditioner shut off at 2:00 because the dehumidifier tank was already full, I felt really sick, even when standing right in front of the freon-cool air. I’d been drinking water all day long, and figured this was some kind of electrolyte fuck-up, so I pulled on some clothes and a pair of shoes and walked to the all-night bodega.

I’m not afraid of walking in my neighborhood at night, although I’m usually on “heightened alert” when it’s 2 AM on a Saturday night. There’s a somewhat shifty Irish bar halfway between me and King’s Deli, and at that hour, there’s usually drunken assholes on the sidewalk, talking loudly and moments away from either fighting or fucking. There’s also a small market in prostitutes on Steinway and 28th if you look carefully, but I wasn’t - I just wanted some Gatorade.

The walk wasn’t bad, actually. Because my apartment is essentially built like a pizza oven, the temperature outside felt about ten degrees cooler. I drank one of the two large bottles of Gatorade on the way home and ate a thing of roasted peanuts, and felt 100% better, but wide awake. So I sat in the living room and watched infomercials and other useless crap for an hour. Did you know that the local CBS affiliate reruns the old episodes of The Real World in the AM hours? That’s pretty weird, but I couldn’t stand that show the first time it was on, let alone ten years later.

Instead, I watched some show on The Food Network where they showcased these ultra-elaborate, high-design kitchens in rich peoples’ houses. The show both intrigued me and pissed me off simultaneously. I mean, these houses were absolutely beautiful, the kind of thing I wish I had, especially since I was sweltering in a giant broiler pan and wondering if I had heatstroke, while they showed stainless-steel refrigerators bigger than my bathroom. The aesthetic side of these kitchens, the way the islands were placed and how the wraparound windows overlooked a big deck with a strategically-placed fountain or whatever, made me think about breaking out a sketch pad and designing the kitchen for the house I want to build in Colorado.

On the other hand, these people PISSED ME OFF! This woman, whose husband was some high-up in the Nevada Gaming Commission, blabbed and blabbed about how they worked with one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s understudies to get the perfect FLW-inspired house. But, she made this big deal about “oh, but we had to fight with them because they wanted the garage and driveway narrower, but I drive a Suburban, and they told me ‘so don’t drive a Suburban,’ but I need a car that’s 27 feet long.” I HATE people who drive big cars like that because they need to look stylish driving to the fucking golf course or whatever, especially people so rich that you know they aren’t hauling around drywall or going deer hunting in the mountains or whatever. And then, after showing this kitchen - which not only had the standard triangle for cooking, but had a SECOND one for baking, along with two ovens and a smaller fridge for baking goods, and a THIRD one for her kids, along with their own fridge and dishwasher, and at least two MORE fridges for vegetables and shit, we find out that THIS WOMAN DOESN’T EVEN COOK! SHE SPENT A MILLION DOLLARS PUTTING SEVEN FRIDGES IN HER KITCHEN AND SHE CAN’T EVEN MAKE A FUCKING GRILLED CHEESE!

Okay, so that really chaps my ass.

During the walk last night, I saw that on Steinway north of 28th, they were having a ghetto street fair, so after I woke up, I got some more Gatorade and went to check out the bamboo plant situation. I’m fucking obsessed with these plants now. I have some demented dream about buying a bunch of bamboo and planting them on my property in Colorado until I have a ton of bamboo I can chop down and use to build a house. I don’t think they would live there unless I had a killer well setup, but it’s a more realistic dream than many of my others. But for some reason, the street fair trailers were still there, but only a handful were open and running. This was at 12:30, so I’d think they would be open 12-5 or something. Maybe if I went there right now, they’d be open, but fuck it. I don’t care now.

I walked around that neighborhood, and it’s a pretty strange area; mostly Egyptians and other Muslims live there, and there’s a Mosque shoved in between the small restaurants and hardware stores. I remember walking in that neighborhood on the day of 9/11 after I made it home (I needed to get some crap to clean my scanner, and some lunch, don’t know why I went there instead of 30th ave or something) but I remember it was just odd to walk around and see everyone in all of their robes and full gear, smoking hookah pipes in cafes. I think most of my fear would be that a Klan rally would show up and start firebombing the whole street. Heightened tension.

Oh, and on the way home, I found a Voice paperbox in front of an Egyptian restaurant in a neighborhood where if anybody reads at all, it’s probably not in English. I grabbed one, and the stack was full. I’m used to going to the machines in SoHo and finding them totally empty about 15 minutes after distribution. So now I have my own secret place to always get an issue.

Another odd thing is that I walked home and some dude across the street from me dumped this pile of maybe 300 books on the sidewalk and had a tiny sign that said “free books.” I thought it would be the usual pile of shit, but I dug through and found about a half-dozen cool titles that weren’t messed up in any way. He must have been moving or something. So, no bamboo, but a pile of reading material.

Today to beat the heat, I went to Astor Place, walked down St. Mark’s and ate at Kiev, then went to Barnes and Noble. I sat on the floor and read two car books from cover to cover, and enjoyed their frigid air conditioning. The two books, one was about building a hot rod frame, and the other was a pictorial history of the Camaro. So it was a lot of pictures and not as much reading, but it wasted some time.

Speaking of wasting time, I’ve been typing this while waiting to pick up my laundry from the cleaner’s, and they should be done. I should walk over there now and get all of that, and then fill the bathtub with ice and do some reading.

Trip report procrastination

Tue, 20 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been digging through notes and trying to type up a trip report about my last visit to Vegas in July, but it’s been a total bitch. I didn’t take many notes, and I have an outline, but it’s hard to get worked up about this and type anything that’s worthwhile. I’m tempted to just post the outline and say “you figure it out.” I think part of my total lack of enthusiasm is that I’m sick and nothing beats a hot summer night than a hot summer night with a fever. And one of my fans is crapping out, so it spins and then it stops and then it starts again, and it fucking freaks me out every time it does it and I think maybe it’s going to catch fire when I’m asleep, and/or maybe if I hit it hard enough or change its angle, it will cut the shit and start working again. Also, my kitchen light is burned out, and it’s this stupid circular fluorescent thing that you have to drive to the Westinghouse lab in New Jersey to find a replacement. And there are about 17 much more pressing things that are currently bugging the hell out of me, but I can’t really discuss them publically. When it rains, it pours.

I keep thinking of stuff I need to do to this journal to make it “better”. I haven’t touched the structure in five years, and now with all of this diaryland-livejournal-blogger garbage out there, my pages pale in comparison. The biggest pain is I want to break out the frameset and make it individial pages with the links in a table next to them, but I don’t have PHP or anything like that on my site, so I can’t do any of that. Also, it would be cool to do some other weird stuff in the sidebar, like have a poll or some static links. But without dynamic pages, it’s a huge pain in the ass. Another cool thing would be where you can leave comments, but that requires scripts. Sometime when I’m not sick, I might be able to come up with a better plan for doing this kind of shit. Of course, I don’t even know if anyone reads these pages, so maybe I shouldn’t waste my time.

Incidentally, I hate the term Blog. I also hate any notion that blogs are new, revolutionary, or otherwise creative. Why? Because back in 1992 and 1993 when I first started to mess around with the Web using the NCSA browser for X, I found that everyone’s homepage (then more commonly called a hyplan) was essentially a blog. Every page on the web was a page of links, except for the 23 or so pages with actual content. If you were a college grad student in some compsci department that let you create a hyplan, it would always be a list of links you found. I remember the main reason I started creating my now-defunct Coca-Cola page in 1994 was because I was so fucking sick and tired of nothing but pages of links. It’s like when you try to rent an apartment in New York, and every number you call in The Voice Classifieds isn’t a person who has an apartment, but is rather a realtor who knows a broker who knows a landlord that blah blah blah and THERE ARE NO APARTMENTS. That’s how I feel about blogs. One, they aren’t new. You aren’t trendy if you have one. Two, they suck because they are often just links to other blogs that are links to other blogs that are, at most, links to news articles that require registration and the URLs will be fucked up and rot in a day. And I’m not saying this journal isn’t high art. But I didn’t claim I invented journals yesterday.

Not much else. I’m going to finish this quart of orange juice and lie down with my half-broken fan.

haloscan

Thu, 22 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I think I have figured out a new commenting system for my journal. It was a bit of a stretch to find something that worked with plain-jane HTML, but haloscan.com seems to do the trick. The only problem is it will involve major drudgery to get it to work with past entries. Maybe I can get some kind of script to dredge through the old entries. I’m vaguely thinking of doing something more elaborate with the backend of the journal to allow more flexibility in how things are generated, but it will take some work. I’m almost thinking I need to pay the extra $100 a year to get the advanced-level account at my server company, so I can use SSI and PHP. Something to think about.

Another thing to think about is if I should publish a book of my old journal entries. I’m still amazed and mesmerized when I start reading some of the old entries about Seattle, and how I managed to write so much back then, even when I had Summer Rain and Rumored to Exist to worry about. I would love to see all of this stuff in a paper volume that I could put on the bookshelf next to the other books. There are a few issues involved with it, though. First, even though I want to run out and start editing this tomorrow, I think it would be wise to wait until Rumored has run its course. Maybe next year, or even six months from now might be a better timeframe. Second, I would need a title. And third, there would have to be some theme or packaging other than a bunch of random journal entries. I also thought I could try to pad this out with stuff from paper journals, but then I thought maybe it would be best to make this just stuff from Seattle, and not even use anything past 1999. Anyway, let me know what you think, and if you’d actually be interested in seeing this. And hey, you can use the new comment form.

I’m still sick today, but feeling slightly better. My kitchen light is still messed up; I replaced the bulb, but I think it’s the switch. For one, it looks like it was painted over in like 1947. Also, when you switch the light on and it doesn’t come on (sometimes it does, though), and then you pound on the wall near the switch, it comes on. So now my kitchen light has turned into Fonzie’s jukebox. And I think my landlord is in Italy, and we don’t have a super. You people in the Midwest who have a fusebox in your giant basement and a thousand 30-amp outlets throughout your house and a $277 mortgage, please don’t tell me how horrible your life is.

I’m going to see Fozzy tomorrow at The World. I wasn’t impressed with their life performance on WWE Raw this Monday, but I still love the CD and tickets were only $15 (plus another $10 in Ticketmaster payola) so I figure I should go. The show’s at 7:30, so I have to go straight from work. Hopefully after another two gallons of orange juice and about 10 hours of sleep tonight, I’ll be up for the show.

On that note, I’m going to go back to digging at this short story I’ve been messing with for a while…

Fozzy

Sun, 25 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

So the Fozzy show on Friday night went well. I got to Times Square at about 6:30 and grabbed a hot dog and a Coke before I got in line at the World. There were a fair number of people there, and I was further back than when me and Ray went to a Smackdown broadcast earlier this year, but luckily it wasn’t 34 degrees or whatever this time. The line went in fast, and I had some time to kill before the show, but there wasn’t a mad mob of people. The stage had about three or four people deep, but the rest of the floor was open, and the place has some weird ramps and balconies and stuff that allowed a lot of good vantage points.

I got a place just right of center, about four or five people back. The first band was Sick Speed an Atlanta band formed by Stuck Mojo guitarrist Rich Ward. Fozzy is essentially Stuck Mojo with Chris Jericho as the lead singer, so Ward pulled double-duty that night. I had no idea of any of this until I got to my web browser later that night, so all I knew was that the band’s name was Sick Speed and they were opening. I actully dug these guys a lot; they have a melodic feel like Creed, but with much more of a metal thickness and tone. Ward’s got an incredible stage presence, and really knew how to work the crowd and get things going. They also had incredible sound, excellent tone with everything well-mixed; that’s unusual for an opening band, especially in a small place like the World.

After Sick Shift, there was a big equipment shift, and I thought the roadies were getting some stuff ready for Fozzy. Turns out the “roadies” were actually the next band. They started their set without telling the crowd who they were, and plunked away a very low-energy set. These guys sounded like a bad garage band, like some dudes that listened to the Meat Puppets and maybe some Maiden and decided to get together and jam. The lead singer/guitar player was rumored to be Jericho’s brother, but nobody could confirm it. After the first two songs, people were yelling “WHO ARE YOU?” and I think the singer was going to start crying. I was surprised I was in a club full of wrestling fans who weren’t heckling him worse, so I started the Kurt Angle “YOU SUCK/YOU SUCK” chant, and three seconds later, everyone in the club was chanting “YOU SUCK.” They tried to dig themselves out of that hole by playing a Billy Idol song. To end their set, they played a slightly more metalized verion of “Are You Experienced,” and I have to admit that they did a good job musically with it, but it wasn’t the right thing for this crowd. They managed to escape with their lives, and then we went through another equipment shift while I talked to some other guys about the horror we just witnessed. I mentioned the story about how in 1997, I saw Dream Theater at the Fenix in Seattle, and a fresh-on-tour-and-unknown Creed opened for them, in what was the worst mismatch since Hendrix and The Monkees.

After several minutes of roadies and tests (but not as much as you’d think - turns out Sick Shift and Fozzy shared a lot of gear) the classical music intro from Happenstance started, and the band ran out and started their full-metal cover assault. I forgot that Fozzy has three guitar players now, and it’s amazing there were no collisions on the smallish stage. Jericho ran out - sorry, I think it’s Chris Irving, or whatever fake name he uses for Fozzy - and I was amazed to see him there in the not-larger-than-life size. When you see pro wrestlers on TV, you’re amazed and think they are nine feet tall. But when you see one and they are the same height as you, it’s a bit weird. I mean, he’s a big guy muscle-wise - he could kick my ass - but it’s always weird to see people as people instead of what TV distorts them into.

I don’t remember the entire setlist, but it wasn’t incredibly long, and it also was more covers than I thought. They did do “Crucify Yourself” and the single “To Kill a Stranger” was the encore. But they did a lot of great covers, like Krokus/“Eat the Rich,” Twisted Sister/“Stay Hungry,” Motley Crue/“Live Wire,” and Accept/“Balls to the Wall.” New covers not on either of their albums included AC/DC’s “TNT” (which turned into a big sing-along with all of us chanting “Oy! Oy! Oy!” and a dude getting pulled up on stage by Jericho to sing a verse), ‘Priest’s “Breaking the Law” (how could you not cover that one), and Iron Maiden’s “Wrathchild.” Also a minor contribution to my 15 minutes of fame: Jericho took a big hit from his bottled water and then spit it into the audience, and some of it hit me. So that should make you rasslin’ fans jealous.

The show ended by 11:00, so I caught another hot dog and got home. My knees were killing me from standing on a hardwood floor all night, but overall it was worth it. I also went to the Sick Speed site and PayPal’ed them ten bucks for their self-released CD, so I’m anxious to hear more from them.

Speaking of Fozzy, my review on Amazon for Happenstance is the featured review, which is always cool…

I had a decent day yesterday, too. I went to Times Square and this time found my friend Rob at his job (The Yankees Store). He was going to eat lunch in an hour, so we agreed to meet up and go to Applebee’s where they have this all-you-can-eat riblet special. I killed the hour at Virgin, looking for a bunch of old metal CDs that I suddenly wanted, after talking to people about old-school bands the night before. I picked up two Helloween CDs that I used to have on tape (Keeper of the Seven Keys part 2 and I Want Out) and the Sabbath album Mob Rules) before walking back in the pissing rain to meet up with Rob.

Lunch was cool, and it’s always good to hang out with Rob. He’s also an Indiana expatriate and we met a few years ago at one of the alumni association things. I laid a copy of Rumored on him, and he picked up the check, which was cool. We didn’t get the all-you-can-eat riblets, and I’m glad, because the cut was sort of fucked-up, like Rocky was practicing his boxing on these ribs and there were all of these little pieces bone in there. I predict that Applebee’s will have some kind of major choking lawsuit in their hands within the next year that will make that McDonald’s parking thing look minor. You heard it here first.

Because the conversation somehow got to comics, after I talked to Rob, I went to Midtown Comics. I used to be a big comic collector; more specifically, I loved Spiderman. For some reason, in my second year of college, I went Marvel-crazy and was on this huge quest to get every single comic that had an appearance of the web-slinger. I realize this is nuts, or at least I do now. But back then, I was spending an entire paycheck on a single Amazing Spiderman, and still wanting more. This was back in 1990, 1991, when the self-titled Spiderman was just out, and there was also Web of, Spectacular, Amazing, and all of the other stuff Spiderman appeared in. There was a Fantastic Four crossover going on then, and who knows what else. But I finally wised up, (I think it was when I realized I would be completely undatable if all of my time and money went to comics - this was before they became insanely popular again) and decided I wasn’t buying another comic ever again.

My friend Ray has been nutso about comics for forever - he’s got about 15,000 of them in his house, and he buys maybe $50 a week of stuff he regularly reads. So he’s always bugging me to get whatever neato title he is reading at the time. (Of course, he’s into all kinds of japanese-samurai stuff that I don’t really like, so it’s hard to get him to shut up about it.) Also, I keep seeing various movies that threaten to pull me back into buying comics. But the main reason I’m curious about it is that it’s a subculture that a lot of people subscribe to, and it’s interesting. I mean, most people these days plug into a larger common thing that I find repulsive, be it sports or boy bands or bad TV shows. And I am not currently into anything that is the other side of that. So there’s a strange draw to it for me, similar to the way zines appealed to me years ago, and how heavy metal used to be interesting.

Anyway, I was amazed by this store and the amount of stuff available. I wanted to get something, and I’d heard about a new version of Spiderman called Ultimate Spiderman, but browsing a collection of the comic didn’t really impress me. Something about the artwork was just too weird to me, so I decided to pass on that.

Not much else is up. I went through my CD collection last night, cleaned things up and got my online list in order. You can see a list of everything I own here. 761 CDs, more or less. I haven’t bought a lot in the last year, and I wish I knew what I liked a bit more, so I could start collecting, getting into it a bit more.

Okay, I’ve been typing forever, and I need to get out of the house and get some shit done today.

rain

Thu, 29 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

It’s pouring, pouring rain outside. All of the streets are turning into rivers, especially in Astoria where all of the guidos throw their trash right into the street, blocking the drainage vents for the storm sewers. I’ve also recently found out, thanks to a public service announcement ad that runs on the subways, that this is the reason there’s so much shit on the beach, like at Coney Island. You throw garbage on the street, it goes to the storm sewers, those lead to the sea, and the sea washes your crappy band fliers and empty cigarette packs up onto the sand. An ecosystem at work.

So about the rain, it’s pouring out there, and like a dumbass, I wore an old pair of shoes, thinking I didn’t want to ruin my new ones. Well, the old pair has a hole in them, so my foot was immersed several times, and my white sock turned a blackish-grey. So I’m sitting around barefoot, the lower half of my jeans completely soaked. I wore an army jacket with a hood and these weird rainshields on the end of each sleeve to cover your hands but still let you hold an M-16, and it kept the top have of my body bone-dry. But the jeans and my bag are fairly wet, and now I’m wondering what I’ll do for lunch. I think I’m putting back on the wet stuff and running to Wendy’s, unfortunately.

The page redesign continues. Please leave a comment or drop me a line if you see something broken or stupid, and let me know if you have any other ideas for me. I spent a long time last night reworking the index pages for the old entries, and I think it all works, but I’m not sure. It needs more attention, and I’ll get to it eventually. It turns out I won’t be going anywhere this weekend - I looked for a good fare, but couldn’t find anything decent. So I’ll try to fix the webpage, and do more crap to the rumored page, and do more crap to the glossary.

OK, I’m getting hungry. Maybe I’ll buy some socks downstairs, so my feet are dry.

Pollock

Fri, 30 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

It’s a cool Friday night, with a nice temperature that makes it feel like October. It’s even a three-day weekend, and even though I didn’t line up a trip out of town, I feel pretty good about staying here. This is the first time in a long time it’s felt like a Friday night of years ago, back when I lived in Seattle, when Fridays meant fast food, hacking away at the books and listening to music. I didn’t have a TV, and I had high hopes of someday seeing Summer Rain in print. The evenings had a strange feel to them, like the only possible outcome would be pushing an emacs buffer well past midnight, watching the story unfold.

I think I feel very nostalgic about Seattle because I’ve been spending some time editing my old journal entries. I’m going to put out a book of the Seattle entries soon, hopefully by the end of the year. I know it’s close to Rumored, but I don’t care. It’s not like if I wait a year, I’ll sell another 10,000 copies. I’d rather have another book up on the shelf and have nobody buy it. Anyway, I’ve been editing those old journals, reading about Seattle, and I really do miss the place. I’d like to go back at some point - I know I will visit soon, but I wouldn’t mind living there. If I had it to do over, I’d probably get a boat in Lake Union - just a little speedboat I could take out on the weekends - and I might live in Belltown, or Freemont. I’m not sure, but it can get all depressing to think about, so I’ll stick with editing the journals for now.

I watched part of the movie Pollock tonight, and I really loved what Ed Harris did in there. The movie is very inspirational to me, the way he paints and really turns out these genius pieces of work. It’s also a good story between him and Lee, his wife. I wish I could convince someone like her to enter my life despite my delusional tendancies. Maybe I need to get more stuff published.

I got tickets to see Joe Satriani and Dream Theater on the 14th of next month at Jones Beach. I have no idea how to get out there, though. Someone told me it’s a two-hour train, but I should get on the LIRR site and get that shit straight. I also have tickets to see this Zappa tribute band on the 18th, and I’m getting tickets to see Quiet Riot on the 12th, so it’s like live music month in September.

Not much else here. I’m a bit ancy to get back on this journal editing, so I’m going to load up some music in the player and get to it.

If you could bet on predicting when bad restaurants in Astoria closed, I'd be retired

Sat, 31 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been editing down this bunch of journals from 1997-1999 to make it into a book, and it’s harder than you’d think. The first thing is that it’s difficult to throw away pieces of it to get the size of the book down. I’m currently at about 140,000 words, and I want it below 100K. The other thing is that it’s so difficult to look back into time and relive that era. Nostalgia is a curse for me, and I always look back instead of forward, so doing a project that explicitly requires me to look back can be a bit pained.

The strangest part is reading about how, back then, I wasn’t interested in my life and I wanted to go back five years and live in Bloomington. Now, five years later, I wish I was in Seattle. And I bitched constantly about never writing, but I produced an incredible amount of stuff in that era. And I wished I archived more stuff, took more pictures in Indiana, so I’d have them for Summer Rain research. Now, I’m digging through photos from Seattle, and I realize I don’t have much useful stuff at all.

I do want to look forward. The more I think about it, the more I look outside of my life for validation on Rumored, the more I realize the next book should be twice as experimental, twice as dense, twice as violent, twice as detailed. I think Rumored was in 100% the right direction. And I don’t think it’s an inferior work. I think it’s a good first step. And I think there should be more.

A lot of stuff fell into place today. The landlord’s son came over and fixed my kitchen light. I have a new fixture and a new switch, and the new switch has a much “softer” feel to it, so it’s easier to flip on when you have both hands full and you jab at it with an elbow. For some reason, my cable TV mysteriously started working again, so I will be able to watch ER again. I got tickets for Quiet Riot, and I got the Pollock soundtrack. That CD is truly incredible, a very motivating 18 tracks of sound. It’s going to be up there with the Naked Lunch soundtrack as far as CDs to listen to while writing. I also got a Motorhead DVD-Audio. It’s interesting, but not entirely worth the $25 (except I will be able to lord it over Ray that I have a Motorhead thing that he doesn’t, and he’ll bitch endlessly.)

The shitty cafe around the corner from me closed. When they were getting ready to open that place, I gave it a year. If you could bet on this like this, I’d be so rich, I’d pay someone to write these entries for me.

three-day

Mon, 02 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

It’s been an odd little three-day weekend, although absolutely nothing noteworthy has happened. It rained, poured all weekend and I barely left the house. I was in a weird, low-level, melancholy depression that is almost enjoyable if you have no obligations or other social requirements. But the fact that holiday weekends are rare and I felt like I was on the spot to do something wonderful and exciting, I spent most of the time feeling weird.

Sometimes I think if I had absolutely nothing to do, if I had all the time in the world and no work or other obligations, this kind of depression would gradually mold itself into a creative passion. I think about the times when I’m away from work and people for long enough that I get into my own natural cycle, and don’t worry about the value of time. At the end of 2000, I took about three weeks off of work, and did absolutely, positively nothing. I was also sick during that period, and didn’t want to do anything except sleep and play Nintendo. But after a certain period of time, it all fell in place and I managed to stop thinking about what I should be doing and instead thought about what I was doing.

I guess in 2001, my time like that was in Florida, although when I was there, I felt a strong urge to be doing something touristy or whatever, and every day I would wake up and think about driving to Cape Canaveral, and every day I would chicken out. I didn’t get a lot of writing done down there, and I didn’t write a story about my trip, although sometimes I wish I would. The problem about writing travel journals, at least for me, is that after writing three or four of them, you realize that the travel changes but you don’t, and the journals are all the same. Despite where you go or what you do, you look for the same things, or look at things through the same lenses. Maybe I’m nuts in thinking this, but it’s why I’m not a travel writer.

Not much else here. Spent the day watching a so-so TV movie about the Unabomber starring Dean Stockwell as the postal inspector. I’ve been putting in a lot of time on editing the journals for the next book. And I went to the street fair on 30th Ave today for a minute, in the drizzling rain. No luck on the bamboo plants, and everything else looked pretty sub-par.

Back to editing…

picking at journal entries

Wed, 04 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Very little is going on here, just picking at these journal entries that will become a book, and trying to figure out at what point I should consider them done. They actually don’t have a lot of issues, it’s just a matter of space and size and whatnot. I also need to write some kind of introduction and figure all of that stuff out.

I’m vaguely planning what I will do in November for the next Nanowrimo contest. I am going to write a book, but I want to make sure it’s something that I will be able to iUniverse after some rudimentary cleanup. I have some thoughts on it, but it’s basically going to be like rumored but with a bit more structure and it will be much more violent, demented, obscene, and humorous in general.

Starting to plan the next Vegas trip in January - Bill wrote today to ask about it. Duffin and his chick just had a kid, so he’s probably out. If you’re interested in heading out to Vegas around January 17-22 next year, drop me a line - I’d like to get a few more people onboard.

Back to writing…

Cherry Coke

Fri, 06 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I’m trying to remember what year Coke introduced Cherry Coke. I could do a web search but that would be too easy. Coke was always available as Cherry Coke back in the day of soda fountains, but they didn’t start putting it in a can until about 1985 or so. There used to be a pretzel shop in the mall where I grew up, and they would make a Cherry Coke for you - they had a pump full of the cherry syrup, and they’d add it to the fountain Coke. I think that approximates the taste of the original soda fountain drink, and it’s very cherry-flavored. The stuff in a can is barely any different than regular Coke, and I remember first trying it at the Elkhart county fair, when I was there with Tom G. and his folks. I think his dad was the kind of guy that had a stockpile of 200,000 cases of “old” Coke when they switched to “new” Coke, and he didnt’ like the Cherry Coke. I didn’t really like it either, but it was one of those things where I was glad I tried it, just so I had a conversation item for future use.

I almost forgot why I started talking about Cherry Coke, and that’s because they changed the can, I guess to be more inline with the new Vanilla Coke, which I still haven’t tried, and probably won’t, because I hate the taste of vanilla. I liked the previous cans better, and it’s weird that I can’t even describe what they’re like. It’s always weird how Coke and Pepsi cans morph over time and you barely notice it. I have pictures from ten years ago and Coke cans look completely fucked up. And they were even more strange in older movies, like when they had the old-school pull-off poptops. Does anyone even remember those anymore? I was collecting them, because I wanted to make a suit of chain-mail armor out of them. I think I got like one line about a foot long. Oh well.

Five new copies of Rumored are on my desk. I’m not sure where they will go, but I need to send out more review copies or something.

Slow afternoon. I need to get back to it…

Bike ride

Sun, 08 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

It’s been a slow weekend, and I didn’t get out much. But today I got the bike out for a ride, and had a decent time with it. I have an e-bike - it is a retrofitted Heinzmann kit that I installed on a Mongoose mountain bike. There’s a motor built into the hub of the rear wheel, and then a self-contained battery/electronics kit rides in a modular pack that fits on a rear rack. Using a thumb-controlled throttle on the handlebars, I can get going from a dead stop up to 15 MPH or so. It also enables me to pedal normally, either alone or with the motor. The motor cuts out at 18 MPH, because that’s the limit for motor-assisted bikes as opposed to mopeds or scooters, which require a license. The battery, which weighs about 20 pounds, takes an hour or so to recharge, a bit more to get a good charge, and it lasts for about 10 miles of unassisted power on a flat surface.

So I got all charged up and headed east, trying to hit a bike lane on 34th Ave that cuts across Queens. The city has started painting these bike lanes on a few streets, and you can get maps of where to bike in local shops or online. But no drivers know what the hell a bike lane is, so you have to keep your eyes out. It’s always strange for me to ride away from my own neighborhood, into the areas that aren’t near subways or main roads. Queens rapidly becomes a car-centric area as you go east, so the landscape changes to more stores with parking lots, strip malls, and bigger areas that only cars would go.

I live on 36th Street and I watched the numbers go up slowly. The bike lane helped, but I could only hit a few lights and then I’d have to stop. Finally, I got into the hundreds, and reached the area by Shea Stadium and Flushing Meadows. I cut down 114th and ended up in the roughest neighborhood you could possibly imagine outside of a RoboCop film. The only cars I saw on the street were 100% stripped out and burned down, just the frames left. Luckily, I cut over a block and then down, and got to the park entrance.

Flushing Meadows is a strange little place. It’s a park where the old World’s Fair lived back in the 1960s. Now, all of the exhibits are gone, and there are neatly cut lanes that spoke outward, with trees and park benches. Some stuff is still there - I managed to get there on a big day for the US Open, and there were cops and limos and busses all over the place. I could hear the roar of the crowd in the tennis pavillion, probably watching the men’s singles matches. There’s also the hall of science, and those two big towers that were in that Men in Black movie.

So I rode around a bit, and went to the big fountain with the globe, which was empty. What was weird though is there were two blimps overhead, and there were these planes skywriting. But it wasn’t one plane, it looked like five planes in a line, so it worked like a dot-matrix printer. I think they may have been models of some sort, maybe flown from the blimp. But it was weird because they were skywriting these perfectly linear dot-matrix letters in a perfect circle around the fountain. I wish I would’ve brought my camera because it was a truly strange sight.

I also watched some kids with remote-control cars, in an area where they had an oval set up. These aren’t the cheap cars you get at Toys-R-Us and fill up with AA batteries. They had the variety that cost several hundred dollars, and had model airplane-type radios and chargable battery packs, with gearing that made them drive at scale speeds. It was cool watching it, because the tires must have been a “real” ply - every time they braked to go into a corner and then took off again, they would leave tread and smoke a bit. I saw a pretty incredible collision between two cars where one car lost traction and went sideways in a curve, then another t-boned him at full speed. It looked like a lot of fun, and I bet you could make tons of money sitting out there and renting out some cars and fresh batteries.

I rode around a bit, and headed back without too much incident. I hoped to save enough batteries to just coast back with the motor doing all of the work, but I lost a lot of juice and ended up only using the assist on start-up. I could get it up to about 18 with a bit of effort and then cruise through three or four lights before a red. The gearing really sucks on that bike, and there’s no high-end to really let me get going on flat spots. It’s also hard to get going from a dead stop because the battery and motor probably add 30 pounds to the 20 pound bike. It rides like a fully-loaded touring bike when I’m only hauling me, a bottle, and a small kit with a couple of tools.

So that was decent, except getting the bike in and out of the house. Other than that, I am fuming and fretting about this embryonic book, and in a strangely nostalgic mode. I could go on about this forever, but instead I want to get out of here and think about it for a while. So there.

Black Stickers

Mon, 09 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I think one of the biggest disappointments of my childhood was black stickers over cardboard packaging. Let me explain.

I had a lot of Star Wars stuff. Figures, playsets, the Death Star, the Millenium Falcon, the Slave One, and a bunch of other assorted crap, like a lizard with a trap door in his back so you could put figures on it. Also, when you moved his head, the tail would move in the opposite direction. So anyway, I got a lot of these figures. They came in a little blister pack, a figure on a card with a square plastic bubble that held the dude and his gun. On the back of each card were photos of other available toys. Well at one point a bit before Empire came out, the cards were printed with a special offer - if you clip enough proof of purchase seals, you can send in for a free figure for this dude from the next movie, named Boba Fett.

Of course, I immediately amassed as many of these damn coupons as I could find. I think I had enough seals for TWO figures, so I was in a frenzy over this. And this Boba Fett - nobody knew anything about him, but he looked like Darth Vader or a Stormtrooper, with an armor suit and so forth. But the coolest part was his rocket backpack. And the rocket looked like the same missile that equipped various Battlestar Galactica toys - a red rocket that SHOT WHEN YOU PUSHED A BUTTON!

There was no information about the rocket on the packages. My nine-year-old mind wondered why they didn’t advertise this in 72-point type, as it was obviously the biggest selling point of Mr. Fett. I mean, the big and somewhat dumb-looking Battlestar ships had two rockets, but that was on an entire ship. Boba Fett had a rocket on a single portable launcher, which meant a much higher per-capita killing capacity for him. Why didn’t they tell me more? Why weren’t there commercials every fifteen minutes during the Hanna-Barberra lineup every Saturday morning? I didn’t get it.

I heard rumors that some kid shot the Battlestar Galactica rocket down his throat and killed himself. Also, someone said Coke and pop-rocks may have been involved. And something about Rod Stewart getting his stomach pumped, but I didn’t entirely get the details. This was before the Internet, so I couldn’t just do a search on Bobo Fett or whatever the hell the guy was called. So I investigated the package further, and found a strange detail - the mail-away offer was printed on A STICKER that was glued onto each action figure package.

I also thought this was suspect. Were you suppsoed to peel off the sticker and put it on a card to mail in? Was I ripped off and did some cards have cooler stickers, like maybe a Death Star I could put on my lunchbox? The sticker didn’t peel off though, so I spent a few hours trying to carefully pry it loose. When I did, I saw a picture of Boba Fett’s backpack FIRING THE MISSILE! Why did they hide this? I don’t know, but I quickly begged my mom to send in all of the paperwork. I patiently waited the 16 weeks or whatever, and when the package showed up, NO MISSILE. The sticker was like a conspiracy theory to me, like a hidden level in a videogame that you know is there, but you can never find. I searched for stupid conspiracy theories like this in all of my toys. I took apart everything to search for hidden functionality. I played our Sears pong game for hours, thinking there might be a magic way to unlock a secret mission of some sort. The closest I ever got was a misprinted card in Trivial Pursuit.

And then when I got older and didn’t care about this anymore and my step-brother had a Nintendo and the game Contra, he told me about the up-down-up-down-left-right-left-right thing to unlock infinite lives, and I felt like my entire childhood had been betrayed. When I was a kid and my parents were spending their hard-earned money on my toys, there were no secrets. Now, everything is about extra features, bonus tracks, unreleased scenes, secret codes.

Oh well. I don’t know where I’m going with this, I was just thinking about that Boba Fett backpack.

Dream Theater and Joe Satriani

Sun, 15 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

It’s pouring rain, but it’s nice. I didn’t really want to leave the house today, but I felt an overwhelming guilt to go do something. But I didn’t want to spend any money, and I didn’t really know what to do, so I fell asleep and woke up to a heavy rain, which kept the nap going and fairly enjoyable.

Last night, I went to Jones Beach to see Dream Theater and Joe Satriani. It took me about two hours to get there via trains and bus, and then while I was there, it rained. (Did I mention it’s an outdoor venue?) It was good to see what it was like down there, but the whole thing sort of left a bad taste in my mouth. I’m also recovering, since it threw off my sleep/food/nutrition/hydration/etc situation so bad, I feel like I just flew around the world twice in a biplane.

I also went to see Quiet Riot on Thursday. I’m not going to write more about either of these because I’m currently making a page just for reviews of shows, as I’m going to a lot more of them. I’m also attempting to review old shows, at least as much as I can remember. I’ll put a URL out there when I have the site in a presentable state.

A bunch of other news - I am going to Vegas again at the end of October, staying at the Stardust again (but not in the rock-star suite like last January.) I am also going in January for my birthday, but hopefully with a few other people. I got tickets to see Rush the day before I go to Vegas, at MSG. $90! And I got tickets in November to see Dee Snider and a segment of his Twisted Sister band, at Lamour. So a lot of crap coming up. And I’m also extremely broke until 2003.

Very depressed otherwise, it’s just one of those days where you sit in front of the TV watching really bad movies on TBS with seven minutes of commercials every six minutes and wondering what the fuck you’re doing with your life. I think the Dream Theater concert threw me because half of the guys there were geeks that spend 20 hours a day practicing a musical instrument, and half of them were geeks who somehow managed to have a girlfriend, and then there was me. I don’t really know the importance of having a girlfriend or knowing how to play an instrument, but it really bugged the hell out of me for some reason.

OK, I should be trying to write a book now, but the air is as hot and humid as some kind of Cambodian shithole, so I think I will just play Playstation until I piss away the time until dinner.

Ozzy and Vegas

Tue, 17 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I can’t believe it - Ozzy is going to be in Las Vegas the day I get there. Unfortunately, tickets are going for $100 to $250, at the Palms casino. Either that is a really small place, or Sharon is really screwing people over, or both. For that price, he damn well better bite the head off of something. Paul McCartney is at the MGM Grand the next night, but it’s $150-$300. I guess I like the Beatles sort of, but not that much. I think you can get the entire Beatles discography on CD for that much.

Today seems to be one of those days. I tripped over everything in the house on the way out, and then found out my headphones are shorted out or something. So I need to go buy another pair after work. I also brought a bunch of coins so I could buy some Cokes today and it turns out that one of them is actually a French Franc. I don’t even think they use those anymore, so I guess it just becomes another coin-related keepsake to throw on the shelf with my obsolete Vegas tokens, Susan B’s, and gold dollars. (And I just got a shitload of gold dollars, because the LIRR ticket machine gave me back $10.50 in change, all in coins.)

I’ve been trying to write each night, but it’s hard, with no concrete direction for this book. I had a lot of thoughts about it this morning as I was half-asleep, so I need to think about it more, develop a plan. I spent most of last night dicking around with my Korg M1 and the MIDI hookup to my computer. I found a DOS program that shows a staff of music and reads in a MIDI file and displays it. Then it plays the song and shows you what keys to play on your keyboard; a tutor of sorts. But it wouldn’t recognize my workstation, so I gave up on it and tried to get Cakewalk reinstalled correctly. It worked, but the patches were all messed up by default, and I didn’t have a spare ten weeks to sit around and rename all of the shit to work right. So you would pick Xylophone on the program, and the workstation would change to the drum patch. Or whatever. I also downloaded the free version of PowerTools and completely crashed my machine three times before I gave up on it and put everything away. I didn’t really practice or anything either. I am thinking of getting one of those $60 piano tutor packages, but I’d probably only use it twice.

My Sick Speed CD finally showed up in the mail. I should be listening to some Zappa before I go to this Project/Object tribute show tomorrow, but I’m too lazy. I think I’m going to go review some more concerts.

Questions

Wed, 18 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Questions

When people talk about “hate literature”, how much of the hate literature out there is done via limerick? Is this a lost art form, at least in the genre of racist literature? I think the government should fund more hate limerics so they will have more of them to ban.
Can you go to school for arbitrage? Is that like a degree program, or just a certificate?
If this is such a violent country, why aren’t more people killed at sporting events? I would think arenas would encourange the occasional beating death to help stimulate TV ratings.
How many of those solar-powered calculators would it take to power my house?
Did I read this wrong, or is the woman that ate the apple in Genesis 3 a different person from the woman that Adam called his wife in Genesis 4? She isn’t called Eve until after they left the garden.
Dave Mustain of Megadeth broke up their band because he can’t play guitar. Metallica can’t play because their bass player quit. So why don’t they get the bass, drums, and other guitar from Megadeth and they could join Metallica? They would have 2 drums (like old Genesis), 3 guitars, and a bass. And they could call it Metallicadeth. Or Megatallica.
Would it be illegal to print all of the spam I recieve as a book? I would also include pornography so it is interesting.
If Jews atone their sins on the holy day of Yom Kippur from dawn to dusk, would a Jew travelling east in a plane be more atoned? Would a Jew who crossed the international date line be less atoned?
(Oh wait, I guess they aren’t supposed to fly planes then. Never mind.)
If we ever go to Mars, do you think the makers of Mars bars will have some special candy out? Or will it become the standard candy of Mars? I don’t really like Mars bars, but I would like to go to Mars, and don’t want to rock the boat or anything.
If a person with no hands used a Palm Pilot, what would it be called?

Okay, I’m bored of this.

Nothing, heat, Young Ones

Sun, 22 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Things have been slow. And once again, hot. It’s almost October, but I think I’m going to have to run the AC tonight.

I’ve been spending many of my free cycles trying to write a trip report for last July, when I went to Vegas and Colorado. I’m about 5/8ths of the way through it, and it’s about 8,000 words. So I might have to do some sort of design to split up the days or whatever, maybe put some photos into the body of the text to break it up a bit more. I really don’t like writing stuff like this after the fact, but even with the laptop, I’ve become so apathetic about keeping track of things during the trip. I think part of it is that I’ve been to Vegas enough times now that the novelty is not there, and I can’t do a story like the one I wrote for my 30th birthday, where everything is new and wonderful to the reader. It’s become repetitive, although I do find new things to do each time. But there’s a different between introducing the concept of the Vegas buffet and finding a buffet that is a dollar less or has a make-your-own taco station. I don’t dislike going to Vegas at all, it’s just the writing part, at least without a mission, has become tedious. But I feel that if I don’t write about it, ten years from now I will be working on some project and be furious that I didn’t. At least that’s the way I feel now about a lot of things that happened ten years ago.

I did absolutely nothing this weekend except spend money that I didn’t want to spend, and mess up my nutritional situation. I’ve been getting incredibly picky about what I eat, and the thought of pretty much any genre of food disgusts me. And without the Star Trek replicator in the kitchen, I’m limited as to what I can order. And of course I could buy a ton of crap and try to cook the food myself, but that takes planning, and this whole downward spiral of bad food planning is because I don’t think about this shit ahead of time, and it’s 9:30 at night and the only thing to eat in the house is a Lean Cuisine dinner that has been in the freezer since 1963. So things have been off, which puts me in a bad mood and prevents me from doing stuff like writing books or going out or whatever.

I did manage today to go to Best Buy to replace the battery on my piece of shit cordless phone, and I picked up the boxed set for The Young Ones, the old BBC comedy that was on MTV late Sunday nights back when MTV was almost cool. I used to love that show, and then it was impossible to find, and then some crappy VHS tapes came out. Now they are on DVD, and they are great. I watched the first six of them in one go this afternoon, and they are funnier than what I remember. I did not watch the one with Mot

GTA3 Procrastination

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto 3 too damn much. The problem is I don’t want to write, or can’t write, and that game is the most perfect way to waste time since the invention of SimCity. I don’t even play the missions or attempt to advance through the strategy part of the game; most of my time is spent stealing cop cars and then destroying them in extravagant stunts that usually involve total destruction of the vehicle. I’ve been trying to make some of the crazier jumps with more and more stupid vehicles. There’s a jump over an elevated train platform that’s in all of the commercials, and last night, I made it with a stolen ambulance. I didn’t make it with a flatbed truck - it got stuck on the platform and I had to abandon it. I also got a tank to jump over the water between two piers by rotating the cannon backwards and firing shells to increase my acceleration. It’s a very addicting game, very realistic in some ways, and yet the over-the-top satire in the general theme makes it hilarious to me.

I have way too many things to do, but all of them are drudge-work, fixing stupid design stuff on web pages and finishing this giant trip report from last July in Vegas. I also need to figure out what to do do for this October trip. I wish I knew some people that lived in Vegas that I could hang out with, but I haven’t had much luck googling around on it.

Okay, I should get back to writing this thing…

Up

Wed, 25 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

The new Peter Gabiel album, Up is pretty damn good. The music behind it has progressed greatly over the last ten years, although in a strange way, this is not as pop-accessible to me. It reminds me much more of one of his first three self-titled albums, but if they were recorded with incredibly advanced and modern digital equipment. There’s still the world music-oriented influences on there, although in a different direction than Us. But the thing above all of it is that his signature voice is still as pronounced as ever. It’s a very strange experience, and I think it will grow on me even more after I get it on a MiniDisc and listen to it with headphones on the train for a week straight.

I can’t believe it has been ten years since the last Peter Gabriel album. I don’t remember exactly when I bought Us, but I do remember spending a hell of a lot of time listening to it in the 1992-1993 school year. It’s one of those pieces of hyper-nostalgia that ties me into that timeframe. I really remember listening to it a lot when I was briefly dating this girl Kim in January of 1993, because the song “Secret World” really reminded me of her. I also remember a night where I listened to the whole tape three or four times, when I was dragging my laundry from my house on Mitchell Street in Bloomington to the laundromat in Eastgate Plaza. It made me remember the whole routine; I’d drag the clothes there and practically explode the tendons in my wrists from the laundry baskets. Everything went in, then I would walk down the plaza. This was, of course, on a Saturday night, because I had no life. I would go to Morgenstern’s and look at some books or the magazine rack, and pick up some obscure magazine that looked cool. Then I’d go to the cheap Chinese place - was it called Grasshopper? - and order some very Americanized sweet and sour pork, and read my magazine. I guess the Peter Gabriel fit this well; Us was such an introspective and dark album, following Gabriel’s divorce and really picking at various parts of the same problems I was facing. It was such a soundtrack to the strange ups and downs of my life at that point, unlike the steady stream of Death Metal that also shared the CD player around the same time. Death Metal marked the peaks, the energy and anger of being 21 and being in college and everything else, but after that all faded and I found myself sitting alone in an apartment as a 31-year old writer, the Peter Gabriel stood the test of time.

Speaking about thinking about the past too much, I’ve been getting some letters about the NecroKonicon, the glossary about my life. I guess I’m not the only one plugging their past into Google and hoping for an answer. I wish I could do more with this thing, either expand it more or do something fancy with the layout. I also wish I knew of a better way to send this out to more people, or somehow market it or put the right spin on it. I have a hard time even describing it to people. Most of its readership is from Google. If you have any bright ideas, let me know.

I had to move all of my logs off of 34.216.9.77/ today, so I did a quick report with analog to see how things stood. The directory currently getting the most hits is the Vegas directory, and I suspect that most of the hits are from people googling on stuff like “cheap vegas hotel.” And a ton of them are from google’s image search. I have very mixed feelings about this. For one, I’m running out of space posting photos, and I get no feedback whatsoever from them, they seem like such a waste of time to me sometimes. But, if I had nothing but text, my site would be incredibly boring. So, I don’t know.

Rabbit-proof

Thu, 26 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

It’s been good weather for this Peter Gabriel soundtrack to the movie Rabbit-Proof Fence. I have no idea what the movie is about, just that it is Australian and has to do with two aboriginal girls. But the soundtrack is very dark, detailed, and somewhat ambient. It’s the perfect thing to have in the player when I am writing, and since it has been cold and pouring rain outside, it fits that climate well. I almost hope the weather is like this all weekend so I can put this CD on repeat and keep the words flowing.

I’ve been keeping steady with this Vegas story, but it feels like the more I write on “documentary” stuff like this, the more I harm myself for writing anything like Rumored again. It’s very difficult to think of following this book, especially since opinion on it has been so strange and mixed. I know I can’t go back to writing first-person, coming-of-age kinda-biographical stuff like Summer Rain, even though I essentially have another book up on blocks right now that deals with that. Sometimes I feel like I’m back to 1994 again about what to do with my writing. It’s very depressing to think about it.

I still have a stack of copies of Rumored to Exist sitting on my bookcase, awaiting the post office but I don’t know who to send them to. If you’re reading this and you don’t have a copy and you think you could somehow con a couple of other people into buying one, mail me and I will send you one. I’m not going to send them to every idiot who writes me like they are a free sample of nutrasweet gum (remember those?) but I would like more people to check it out.

Did they ever have an Apocalypse Now video game? Do you think it would cost a lot to license that shit from Coppola? I just found out that Take Two, the company that did GTA3, has an office about two doors down from me. I could swing in there, talk that shit up, and just sit around sketching up crap on a whiteboard and then sending it off to Korea or whatever to get coded. Who wrote the engine for Medal of Honor Frontline? Shit, I should look some of this stuff up on google.

OK, I’ve got time to kill until the new ER, so I’m gonna play some games.

Boomtown

Mon, 30 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I watched about half of this new show Boomtown last night, which was mildly entertaining. There are far too many police dramas on TV right now, but its little gimmick is that it is nonlinear from multiple points of view. It makes people think they are smart, and it’s slightly easier to get caught up when you start watching late into the program.

Anyway, on the show, one of the cops had this list of things he wanted to do in his lifetime. I didn’t catch the setup to this, but it’s something that I see in many other journals. For some reason, on the subway ride to work today, I thought about how great it would be to make a list of 100 things like this, and then a year from now visit the list and see what had been done. Then I sat down at the computer and came up with like seven things. I guess I have a few more now, but my list is very testosterone-centric, and I’m not really into the whole Mountain Dew Xtreme Sport kind of thing, that’s all I could think of. There are a lot of places I want to visit, but there aren’t a lot of “humanitarian” sorts of things, or the typical ones like having a kid or getting married. I need to think about this list a lot more before I publically put it out there.

I also think I should put out a list of 100 things that I’ve already done that other people should put on their damn lists. I mean, I’ve stood at ground zero of the first atomic bomb explosion, flown in a biplane, petted a lion, gambled in Vegas, been to the top of the (then) tallest building in the world, wrote a book, shot an automatic weapon, and touched a moon rock. I don’t know what use this list would be, but it would be interesting to actually write this all down.

Nothing else is going on here; I’ve had a huge headache all night, and I’m stuck on this one battle in Final Fantasy X. The TV is all crap tonight, and I can’t really get into a book or some writing. I think I will see if there are some Star Trek reruns on now.

40 lbs of laundry

Wed, 02 Oct 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I’m so tired. I was out late last night, and I haven’t caught up yet. I also had to drag 40 lbs of laundry to the laundromat and back today. Every day, I want to start enforcing strict hours on when I write. And every day, I get home from work, do two or three things that have to be done, look at my watch, and it’s 12:38 and the alarm’s going off in another few hours.

I got a new Zappa book that’s pretty incredible, but also pretty huge. It’s hard to haul on the subway, but worth it. I’ll review it when I’m done.

Phone call…

Zappa and experiments in form

Fri, 04 Oct 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Not much is going on here. The Zappa book I am reading is Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa by Kevin Courrier. I’m about 200 pages into it, and I like it so far. I think in some sense it fails to be critical about Zappa’s shortcomings, but it does give a different perspective than Zappa’s first-person biography, which is the only other book I’ve read about him.

I’m not interested in reading about Zappa because I am the sort of person that has memorized every single song of his. Rather, I am interested in how he created this whole monster, the way he started making very confusing and confrontational music and brought it to a worldwide cult status of attention. I wish I could do the same, and it makes me jealous in a way because music and performance is such an easy to comprehend format for people. It has such a legitimate place in society, it is easy to distribute and easy to perform live, and it can be a very active performance or a more passive thing to enjoy. I feel the literature’s downfall is that in order to enjoy it, you have to sit there with a book in hand and get through 200 pages of it. The bar is so high for entrance to it, that it’s hard to get a large number of people interested. I wish I would’ve asked my parents for a guitar when I was ten, and then played it for hours every day. It makes me very confused and depressed about what I am doing, and what I should be doing, not to mention that I just put this book out and I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever done and the only legitimate feedback that I got was that I should go back to writing stupid first-person stories or that I should find a psychiatrist and make them read the book so they could “cure” me.

Of course, the only answer is that Rumored is the right direction for me, because I don’t think there’s any legitimate value in me writing another book like Summer Rain or some kind of Cometbus ripoff stories like Air in the Paragraph Line. I think there are a lot of popular writers out there that are selling lots of books writing coming-of-age, punk-rock, brat-pack stuff. And I think my only tangible skill is to take what they do and destroy it, satirize it, blasphemize it, and take their bold statements on society and laugh at them. I feel more people, or at least some people, should see this and enjoy it as the opposite of these books that are easy to hate. Rock and roll was created because people didn’t want to listen to “Who’s that Doggy in the Window.” I don’t want to read Wally Lamb. I’m sure others don’t want to, either.

I guess a lot of Rumored was the beginning of an experiment to find my own form and technique that isn’t just a story about a boy and a story about a girl or whatever. The way I structured the book was an attempt at changing that, and it didn’t work as well as I wanted, so the next book will pick up on the flaws in structure and story. But it won’t change with regard to tone and content. It will still be obscene, and dark, and violent, and funny. (It may not have any puke jokes, since that pretty much threw everyone.) I don’t want to go down the road that Burroughs did with cutups and stuff. I am finding less and less value in Burroughs as I continue. (I now find almost no value in Kerouac, and I’ve always disliked Ginsberg, both as a person and a writer.)

Anyway, I have an idea for a book, but I can’t talk about it. But I think it might work. I’m going to take notes on it all weekend. I think I might do NaNoWriMo again in November, and write a draft then, but I will continue working on it after them. I’ve come to realize that writing fast is not my forte, and it’s better that I take my time and nurture my thoughts a bit more, so I can come up with stronger writing.

I just ate Chinese food, and I’m ready for a nap.

trying to write

Mon, 07 Oct 2002 00:00:00 GMT

It’s been so damn hard to write; I don’t think I’ve ever had writer’s block this bad. I think during Rumored it was almost this bad, to the point where I got anxiety attacks just by sitting down at the computer and trying to start a writing session. It’s worse than that now; I get migranes before I even start typing. And I don’t have a half-written book in front of me that requires attention. Now, I just have the blank page, and any half-baked idea or outline I have for book three usually gets destroyed within moments. I’m not really sure how I will get through this, mostly because I’m not sure what kind of writer I am, and what kind of book is the next target. I know that sounds stupid, but it’s true.

I do have some almost-done projects that will keep me moving for a bit. I am starting to pay more attention to the glossary and I think I will eventually make a printed book out of it. Right now, I’ve just been doing dumb stuff to the layout, but I’m on the verge of editing stuff, and taking care of the pain in the ass stuff to get it published. I don’t think a god damned person will buy a copy of this, so I’m essentially paying a few hundred dollars to have my own printed and bound copy, and to give away a few copies to other people. I also have a book of journal entries from 1997 that I’ve been editing, and I think that will eventually make a good book.

Nothing else is going on. I’m nursing a cold, so I feel horrible. I should get back to dicking around with the glossary.

random stuff

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 00:00:00 GMT

A bunch of random stuff:

Wendy’s just shorted me a spicy chicken sandwich, and gave me a Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger instead. I hope you rot in hell, Dave Thomas!
I put on ad on fark.com to see if the $10 would make a difference or not toward book traffic. There’s more traffic, but no email or anything else. It’s going to run for 7 days, so we’ll see. If not, it’s only ten bucks.
I bought a Nokia phone on half.com with the hopes of putting the SIM card from my VisorPhone in it, but the damn thing is locked. I might be able to get T-Mobile to unlock it, if I can endure their customer support.
I am reading Small Town Punk from John Sheppard. It’s a great book and you should go buy a copy. And if you give me any of that “I’m too poor” shit, you can download a PDF of the whole thing online.
I renewed 34.216.9.77/ until 2005. That number looks really weird to me for some reason.
I upgraded 34.216.9.77/ to the next level of service from my provider (pair.com). I now have twice as much disk space and bandwidth. More importantly, I have the ability to do CGI scripts and PHP code. So when I get a spare ten seconds to think about this, I will start redesigning Rumored to have more interactive stuff on it.

Okay, now I need to go dig for some fucked-up CGI scripts to put on this site.

Leather Jacket exchange

Sun, 13 Oct 2002 00:00:00 GMT

It’s been raining, POURING, for two days straight. I spent all day and all night at work on Friday; came in just after nine AM and left just after midnight. I’ve got an early morning and a lot of work tomorrow, and then I’ve got jury duty on Tuesday, which also requires an actual 9:00 start, so that shit’s bugging me. But the two things that have permeated my dreams are heavy duty cut-and-paste on a 200-page sales document, and the next book, whatever that might be.

So it’s been raining, and I spent all day yesterday inside, doing nothing. I finally left the house a bit ago to go for a walk and a sandwich, and I came back with a new leather jacket. This is the third in line, of a now-old tradition. I like to wear those generic leather biker jackets that the Ramones and everyone else has that you can get at Wilson’s in the mall for a hundred bucks. I got my first one in 93, and an identical replacement in 97. Now, it’s time for another changing of the guard. These jackets are as tough as hell, and the shell could take anything shy of a nuclear blast with no problem. The real issue is the inside liner, which gets all ripped apart and starts to smell like ass after you walk home in too many rainstorms and sweat it out on the subway every day. These jackets are fairly disposable as far as the lining is concerned, and it would cost more to get a new one sewn in than to get a new jacket. On the way to Subway, I saw a leather shop that was closing down and having an “everything must go” sale, which pretty much every shitty store in New York is always doing. But I went in, found the jacket, and got out for only $99. It looks a bit cheaper than the last one, but I think the leather sort of firms up after you wear it a while. I did a side-by-side of the old and new to see if there were any other differences, but not much. The left inside pocket on the new one has a zipper, which the old one didn’t. And the new one is a bit bigger, but then so am I.

BTW the last time I did this exchange was on 4/23/97. It’s weird that I have a journal entry from then. I wonder if I will have one in five years when I need to buy another damn coat.

I watched a shitload of a lot of TV yesterday. I was so bored, I watched about half of the movie Over the Top. This movie was a total disaster, which makes it an excellent bit of comedy in my eyes. It has every bad 80s cliche you could possibly imagine, from the costumes to the acting to the Rocky-like plot curve. This movie really tries to cash it in like Rocky, the underdog-comes-back-and-kicks-ass angle. The problem? It’s about ARM WRESTLING. Rocky has all of this preparation for a serious fight, the drinking of eggs and running up the steps and punching the pieces of meat. And when he gets pushed back in the plot, he gets his ass kicked, and he’s all bloody and beaten. So they try to legitimize this sport where you essentially move your arm one way or the other, and in the final match, there is the infamous Stallone “preparing for battle” montage, but it’s just a bunch of fucking meatheads putting powder on their hand or strapping up their arm or yelling and posturing. It’s stupid, but I love it.

Pro Wrestler Terry Funk, the “living legend”, has a small role in the film as the bad guy’s bodyguard. I totally forgot about this, and when I saw him, I jumped off the couch and started yelling “Funk! Funk! Funk!” Unfortunately, it is a very small part, but it is funny to see him with his 80s hair. Also, the music in this was that really bad power-ballad inspirational rock shit you saw a lot of in this era. Frank Stallone gets a cut in there, along with Asia, Kenny Loggins, and Eddie Money. Sammy Hagar (pre-Van Hagar) has one of the main cuts, “Winner Takes it All”. The funniest part was when I saw the end, where they drive off into the sunset and the credits roll over this Larry Greene song “Take it Higher”. Before I knew the title and before the singing started, I thought “I bet they rhyme fire, desire, and higher. The actual lyrics: “something something desire, fight the fire, take it higher, over the top.” I about had a seizure when I heard that.

So last night I started reading Summer Rain again. I skipped around a bit and read about the last 20%. I always put down this book, especially compared with Rumored, but I really liked reading it, and I’m very happy with the prose in there. It’s been about two years since I’ve read any of it, and that’s enough distance for me to really look at it and enjoy it. I know it has some problems, mostly with small stuff though. If I had to do it all over, I would keep it the same size, the same pace and everything. It could have used another month of copyediting, but I really like the size and level of depth of the book. I can still get lost in it, read for an hour and forget I’m in New York and really enjoy the story. What was the true test for me was reading the final third of the book, the love story between John and Amy. The funny thing is, that is entirely fictitious. I made up the character of Amy because the previous Amy, based on a real person, wasn’t really working out. And now, I read the conversations and exchanges of emails, and I wonder where I got all of this shit, because it’s all fabricated, but it all looks real.

On that note… I woke up this morning from a nightmare, about not being able to write the third book (I shit you not.) And I thought about Summer Rain, and I thought about how I always say in interviews it was such a mistake to write a first-person book based on my life. And then I thought about how much I thoroughly enjoyed reading 200 pages of it last night as the rain fell on the sidewalk outside my window last night, and it really made me wish I could do it all over again, write Summer Rain from scratch to 660 pages available on Amazon. It was a lot of fun to write, it is a lot of fun to read, and it didn’t sell shit. But what’s really important?

So I’m back to this: I have five really good stories about Bloomington. Maybe I should write fifteen more, and have an arc of stories about Bloomington. I don’t know how it would work, but in the shower thismorning, I thought of at least four or five stories that would easily play through for 5,000 words. It wouldn’t be an entire novel like Summer Rain, but it would let me write some detailed stuff, some straightforward fiction, and it would let me get some stuff out of my system.

So that’s the plan, for now. And it isn’t raining, so my plan is also to go to the bookstore, and try out my new jacket.

Jury Duty escape

Tue, 15 Oct 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I got out of jury duty, at least for now. I actually woke up about two hours early, took a long walk and then two trains out to Kew Gardens, and then sat around for about an hour until they said that if you were traveling in the next two weeks, you could send in your itinerary and get a postponement. So then I spent another hour on the train, and I didn’t have a walkman or a palm pilot because the summons said NO ELECTRONIC DEVICES all over it, and I knew I’d have to go through ten metal detectors. I’m happy to get out of it for now, but I wish it would be over, and I also have the hassle of finding an itin and photocopying it and writing a damn letter and hunting down an envelope and some stamps. I wish I could just email someone a URL or something.

My big bit of work at the real job is over, and I got home by about 7:30 with no problem. Of course, my home is now freezing cold, but maybe I should have closed the damn windows. I sat down and managed to write about a thousand words of dialogue, nothing substantial. I can’t believe how out of shape I am, writing-wise. I couldn’t even imagine writing like I did in Summer Rain. I know I need to keep into it, but it’s going to take some work. Luckily, I don’t have any early mornings to throw me off, so if I can manage to turn off the TV for a bit, I’ll try to get some of these Bloomington stories started.

Other than the obvious, life has been a blur here. I’m ready for a weekend when I can sit around, but I just finished one and it was pretty unremarkable. I’m hoping that the writing will pick up and distract me as the weather gets cold. It’s a nice novelty to have weather like this, but it will get old in a few days.

Okay, gotta finish my Quarter Pounder and then look at a few stories for a minute.

Summer Rain useless trivia

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been busy working on something. Check this out, here are some facts and other worthless trivia about my first book, Summer Rain:

The book was started on April 1, 1995
The final draft was sent to the publisher on July 3, 2000
The last third of the book was completely rewritten in the second-to-last draft.
About 20,000 words were cut from the book’s length during the final draft.
Final wordcount: 220,866
First draft wordcount: 82,142
Original target wordcount: 40,000
A first draft was completed on 9/15/95, but contained just a fraction of the final product.
Based on a short story by the same name written in late 1994 for a writing class. Part of the story is in chapter 38. A slightly cleaned-up version of the standalone story is here
The interview with Type O Negative contained in Chapter 35 really did happen when Jon Konrath was a DJ at WQAX in 1992. Later, when their landmark album Bloody Kisses was released, they thanked John Conner from WQAX. This is where the name for the main character came from.
Early drafts contained lyrics from many Death Metal bands, but they were removed in the final draft to avoid permissions problems.
The band Nuclear Winter was a basement/joke band containing Jon Konrath, Larry Falli, Ray Miller, Derik Rinehart, and others. The song lyrics quoted are real.
The story’s timeline is carefully scripted to match Indiana University’s actual 1992 academic calendar.
Jon Konrath went back to the IU Bursar’s office and purchased a complete recapitulation of his Bursar’s account to reverse-engineer some of the dates and dollar amounts in the book.
The report cards and letters from the college with regard to grades were real.
In chapter 32, a letter from the Dean of Students is signed by Juan Schwartz. This is the pseudonym Trey Parker used in his film Cannibal: The Musical
In chapter 21, John falsely predicts that the World Wide Web will never catch on.
Almost all of the mails sent from John Conner were actual emails sent by Jon Konrath in 1992.
Several scenes and characters were cut completely from the book:
- A job interview for a computer support position at Bryan Hall.
- Going on a horrible blind double date to see Cool World with a female friend and her best friend.
- An interview with Death Metal band Unleashed
- Several sequences involving me tutoring a friend in computer science
- Another female interest late in the book that acted as a foil against Amy.

The original draft had an ending that took place years after the original summer. It told what happened to John Conner, and some of the other characters in the book. It ended with a paragraph that’s partially stolen from Charles Bukowski’s Post Office:

         Then I started reading, reading guys like Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski.  I saw their lives through their prose, and it started me scribbling in spiral notebooks, hoping to free myself by journaling.  The scribbling helped mold me, and as I felt better about my own little world, the pile of filled spiral notebooks began to grow.  Then, I decided I should just write a novel about all of it.  And I did.

In early drafts, Amy leaves John for another man at the end of the book.
In real life, WQAX closed its doors forever at the end of 1992.
Nick’s original name was Marco.
The first trip to Elkhart was much longer. It was cut in half during edits. One scene removed contained John’s father.
The entire book was written using emacs. It was stored in text files, a file per chapter.
A printout of a draft from 6/18/99 is in the Library of Congress. This was the second-to-last draft.
Amy’s apartment in chapter 37 (Colonial Crest, #144) was Jon Konrath’s actual apartment in the 1993-1994 school year.
The cover photo is Showalter Fountain. The photo was taken by Dave Gulbransen, but the publisher messed it up during design, so it looks horrible.
Amy’s personal name in her email says “The more things change, the more they stay the same” in French.

comments

Fri, 18 Oct 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Finally! I am done with the commenting code on The NecroKonicon. That was a bitch - I had to hand-wire all of them. I also changed the way images are displayed so they flow correctly, and I wrote a what/why/how page that’s on the main index. So if you haven’t looked at that thing recently, give it a spin.

My eyes hurt now. And it’s cold as hell in here, not very conducive to writing, but I do have a little heater sitting by my feet, so it isn’t horrible. Actually, the cool weather has been a neat change. Whenever it is fall, I get an urge to listen to Metallica - Master of Puppets. To me, that’s the theme to the first fall I had a driver’s license, to a time when I was messing around with my Camaro’s engine and working at Monkey Ward’s. I seem to have told this story a thousand times, but I still love to think about that time, that era whenever it gets cold enough to need a jacket. Combine that with the smell of a V8 that’s running too rich and burning a little oil, and it’s as close to time travel as you can get without Dr. Emmett Brown and his magic DeLorean.

I’m still entertaining the thought of a bunch of short stories about Bloomington, but I haven’t made much progress this week. I do have about 35,000 words of text, and if every story I started was complete, it would be closer to 50,000. But too much other shit is going on. I want to get the glossary into a book. Actually, I just like doing small, piecemeal work on it, because it takes no concentration. I’ve been adding a word or two here or there; it’s easy to do, and I don’t have to invest much time. But I will get to those short stories. Maybe when I go on vacation next week.

Yes, NEXT WEEK! I will see Rush at MSG on Thursday, and then on Friday, I get on a Delta plane at LGA and head off to the Silver State. There’s absolutely no plan; I just know I have a room at the Stardust, and I need to stop spending money so I can blow it all when I get there. Nobody is going with me - I think I invited three or four people, and would have even partially bankrolled one or two of them, but that’s the story of my life. I’ll have fun. And if I don’t, I’ll destroy the fucking hotel room.

Can someone good at math and on top of the TV industry please confirm that more than 80% of all TV shows on right now are police shows? Between the 19 Law and Order shows, all of the CSI shows, JAG, NYPD Blue, Fastlane, Boomtown, First Watch, and the actual show Cops, I wonder if people in Russia or whatever think that US TV is nothing but an ad for the police. Is it just me, or what?

I wish my landlord would turn on the fucking heat. That is all.

heat and taxes

Tue, 22 Oct 2002 00:00:00 GMT

The landlord finally turned on the heat, so I woke up this morning with a cold. The dry heat dried up my nose and throat, and now I’m in the beginning stages of a bug. I fly on Friday, so this sucks. I’m going into full cold prevention mode - tons of vitamins, tons of juice, soup, zinc nasal spray every two hours, the whole deal. I also need to sleep as much as possible, but I’ve got a lot of crap to get done before I leave.

The IRS finally sent me a check for my 2000 taxes. I refiled these recently, and after a lot of runaround, I shook about $300 dollars out of them. This is great, especially right before a trip, but considering they got me for about $1400 earlier, I won’t be singing the praises of the treasury department any time soon.

I spent most of the weekend picking at this book of short stories, which really needs a name. It’s at about 40,000 words, so I’m slowly making progress. It’s strange to be writing about 1994 like it was ancient history, but it’s nice because I kept a journal then and I can check a few of my facts. Unfortunately, I’m finding that my old journals are not that well-written. Instead of spending time writing about what was happening in the present, I went on a lot about how I wanted to get the hell out of Bloomington.

I think I’m too out of it to write. I just looked at a packet of crackers and could have sworn they said “online crackers”, when they actually said “saltine crackers”.

still sick

Thu, 24 Oct 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I’m still sick. It’s progressing, and it’s just a cold, but colds tend to completely level me out. And since I have about no immune system, stress makes them worse. Unfortunately, a million and one things all tend to go wrong when I have a cold, which is what I’m currently experiencing.

First, I have no heat and no hot water. I haven’t for three days. Calling the landlord does no good, because he’s - I don’t know where the fuck he is. Italy, I think. Or dead. I’m not sure. He has a son in New Jersey that still cashes the checks and comes over every few weeks, but that’s it. And there’s no super. Which is illegal. So is not having hot water any time of the year, or not having heat during heat season (starts this weekend) or when the temperature is below 50 or something (it was 36 this morning). I called the city today and started the long and drawn out process to get the landlord in trouble. This morning there was a sign on the front door that said “we are repairing the boiler, thank you for your patience.” I don’t know if that means it will be fixed today or it will be fixed in ten years. The other major sticking point is that I don’t have a new lease, and my current lease ends in December. Legally, anyone in a rent-controlled apartment automatically gets their lease renewed unless Bad Things happen, like you run a drug lab or something. But as this motherfucker has no concept of the law, I have extreme fear that I will be looking for a new apartment in December with no money for deposits (i.e. sleeping in a cardboard box.) So that kind of shit certainly adds to your stress level and lowers your ability to fight a cold.

So the last two days my mornings have consisted of putting every pot and pan on the stove, filling them with water, turning on the oven for some heat, and washing in the kitchen sink. The one thing that would really, really help my motherfucking cold would be a half-hour in a hot shower. But no.

Also, I have to fly tomorrow. It’s a little-known fact that taking someone up in a plane with a head cold was ruled a form of inhumane torture by the Geneva Convention in 1947. I did this once before, from Boston to Seattle, and if the doors on a 757 actually opened during flight, I probably would have jumped out DB Cooper-style without a parachute and plummeted to my death instead of facing that horror. As the plane pressurizes or depressurizes or whatever, every individual sinus explodes outward with an incredible force, like someone is driving white-hot steel stakes into your face. And that’s before all of the shit you go through with the ears. One of my ears didn’t actually uncompress until three days later at a doctor’s office, when he shoved some kind of evil death rod into the depths of my ear. It’s not pleasant. I’ll be there tomorrow for a 1PM flight. I plan to drink an entire bottle of nyquil before the flight, and then put in those earplanes ear plugs. Those actually help a lot, they balance the pressure between the inner ear and the cabin. Just don’t buy them at the airport, because they cost twice as much.

I also have tickets to go to this Rush concert tonight ($100) and I really don’t feel like going. But, I know if I don’t go, I will forever regret it. So I will load up on the DayQuil in a few hours and go to MSG and check that out.

I haven’t started packing at all for this trip. I did all of my laundry last night, which was a major bitch, but at least it’s done. I will be very happy in about 30 hours when I am sitting in a nice hotel room with working heat and a working shower and cable TV and nothing else. The main goal right now is to reduce the number of variables from here to there. I’ll feel much better when I’m sitting at the airport gate with my bottle of nyquil in hand, ready for the plane to board…

Ok, I may or may not update after this. If not, be back in a week.

Hello from Las Vegas

Tue, 29 Oct 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Hello from Las Vegas. I’m typing from the Internet cafe where I usually log in, at this sort of Korean-oriented strip mall. My laptop has taken a dive, or at least the battery power has, and I cannot get a dial-up connection. But it’s good to be ssh’ed to the computer sitting in my living room in Queens; at least I know it is not without power or under three feet of water.

And no, I did not have heat when I left on Friday, but there was a repair truck outside, and I’m hoping that means it will be fixed by the time I am back tomorrow night.

Many good things sofar. I met Penn and Teller after their show; I saw a Jackson Pollock painting at the Guggenheim (and a bunch of Picasso, Monet, Reubens, and other crap, but the Pollock was the best.); I saw the 250+ car collection at the Imperial Palace, including a TON of cool and famous cars; I hit four aces on a video poker machine on like my third deal, which cashed 60-1 (I quit gambling after that, doesn’t get better than that.); I walked nine miles on Saturday; I saw an IMAX 3-D movie; I saw the movie Jackass twice. (It is the funniest thing I have ever seen.); I ate at In-n-Out and Dennys; I did about 200 other things I can’t think of. I’ll write a story over the weekend.

Bad things: I am sick, although it is almost gone. I am cutting it close on money. Laptop is dead. My feet are pretty torqued out. It is extremely depressing here when you are not busy with something. I wish I could write more about that, but my head would explode. Also, I am getting charged to use this piece of shit, and it’s a BEAUTIFUL day out. So I better split. I’ll be back late tomorrow…

back from vegas

Thu, 31 Oct 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I’m back. I spent all day yesterday flying, but it wasn’t too terrible. In Vegas, I bought this giant Tom Clancy nonfiction book on the story of the general in charge of the Air Force during Desert Storm. It was a HUGE book, like 500-600 pages but the physical size of a college textbook, and that kept me busy for most of the day. My lunch was at about 10:00 at Denny’s before I left; my supper was at about 10:00 at night in the Cincinnati airport’s piece of shit Pizza Hut. I make it back to LaGuardia at about 12:30, and got a quick cab back to my place.

I now have hot water and heat. Too much heat, actually - the place was like a kiln when I came in last night. I think I need to buy a dehumidifier of some sort. I’m afraid the books will get damaged, but if it is 0% humidity and I jack it up to 30%, I don’t think any harm will be done. The place is a disaster right now: the kitchen is still set up as my imprompu bath room; the living room is filled with books I shuffled from the bedroom floor; two weeks of clean laundry are in a giant pile in the bedroom; and most of my stuff is unpacked (I didn’t bring a lot with me) but I have to get stuff off of the laptop and get the pictures online. So I already have a busy weekend ahead of me. And I am still trying to figure out if I will actually do the NaNoWriMo thing or not. I thought of a good plot yesterday, so maybe I will. But I have so much other shit going on, so I’m not sure if this will be a good time investment.

Okay, gotta eat lunch now…

Nano

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

After finding a plot, cleaning off the desk, uploading my photos, and getting everything ready for the NaNoWriMo contest last night, I decided I wasn’t going to do it. I really want to write another book, but I want to do it at my own pace, and worry about quality more than quotas. Also, I have a couple of small projects I need to juggle, like a trip report for Vegas, and I want to putz with some PHP stuff, and I don’t think I can do that if I’m constantly worrying about output. And there’s not anything in it for me even if I do finish. So, fuck it.

Speaking of photos and PHP, give https://www.rumored.com/vegas/oct-2002/photos/ a spin if you haven’t already. [Long ago broken, sorry.] I am still hacking the PHP code for this, but I got the captions working correctly, and fixed a couple of other errors. It’s my first stab at doing anything longer than a line in PHP, and it seems to work okay. If I can improve some of the features a bit, I will use this script in other places on 34.216.9.77/.

It’s nice to be home on a Friday night with the wind whipping away outside, and the radiators glowing with heat. I bought a dehumidifier on my way home from work for about $40. It has some kind of air filter, a cool mist function, and other assorted features I ignored that promise me better comfort from the air as I sleep. It also came with a mostly useless gauge that measures the humidity (a hydragometer? Hydrometer? Hygrometer?) except it doesn’t have any accurate numbers of markings, just a green band called “comfort zone” in the middle, with “humid” and “dry” in red on either side. It gauged my apartment as being below the “comfort zone”, but now that this little plastic beast is churning out humidity, it appears I am once again in the “comfort zone”. That’s comforting.

Just the other day someone pulled like $3.5M out of the New York horse betting computers through some kind of security breach. Dammit! Why can’t I figure this kind of stuff out?

Feels like winter in NYC

Sun, 03 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

It feels like winter in New York, in the good way. I’ve enjoyed a weekend of doing nothing but sitting in the heated apartment, and going out for groceries. I like the first time it gets cold here, when you can pass the restaurants and smell the food and enjoy the slight amount of quiet you get when more people are inside. The only thing better is when there’s a huge snow and the city shuts down, and you can walk around with this giant blanket of white absorbing all of the sound. Of course, in a day it all turns to black and grey sludge, and in a few weeks I will be bitching about the sheer cold outside, but it’s nice when it first starts.

I’m already in a weird Christmas mood, although I don’t really celebrate the holiday that much anymore. I mean, I still exchange gifts, but I don’t celebrate the birth of Christ, and I don’t believe in Santa. I don’t place any importance on the familial aspect of the holiday anymore, since I don’t usually go home for it; that’s sort of a sticking point for me. I grew up with the centralized holiday at the maternal grandparents’ place in Chicago, with tons and tons of people and excellent food, time to play with all of my cousins, and the whole tradition, the routine of piling up in the car and getting on the Indiana toll road and heading to the big city. That pretty much ended when my grandmother died, which was when I was in college, also complicating things. There are still various family get-togethers, but very decentralized and not as noteworthy. The people are still important, and I’m not slagging that, but there is no tradition. And if it’s not about the myth of Jesus or the myth of Santa or the myth of the dreidel (or whatever), then there has to be something to replace that.

I think the same feeling of Christmas happiness, or whatever you want to call it, is somehow encapsulated by being inside in the warm when it’s cold out, and having an overabundance of food in the fridge. That isn’t entirely a complete holiday for me, but yesterday I bought way too much food, and cooked dinner at home, and baked cookies, and kept my ass on the couch all day, and it was pretty decent.

One outing I made yesterday was to Game Stop to buy two new titles for the PS2: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Socom Navy SEALs. Here are first impressions on both.

I’ll start with the Navy SEALs game first. It was a real bitch to find this, and I think my used copy cost $55. The introduction is PHENOMENAL! A very cool movie showing frogmen swimming in water, attack helicopters, insertion teams, the whole nine yards. It was all meticulously rendered, with water effects better than any I’d ever seen. In general, this game is about a half-step ahead of Medal of Honor: Frontline, although MOH:FL probably has a higher volume of detailed items, while SOCOM has more night missions and stuff, which makes it easier for them. But in general, the game has some great looking graphics, and the sound is integrated well.

One of the very cool things about the game is that it comes with a Logitech headset that plugs into the USB port of your Playstation 2. Most adventure games have on-screen hints on what to do, i.e. “destroy the radio to escape” popping up in a little window or whatever. But in this, someone tells you these things via radio in the headset! It’s a weird effect, because stuff is blowing up around you or whatever, and you hear someone saying “Delta team, advance to their position - over” or whatever. Very cool! The other, even more fucked-up part is, the game has voice recognition! There is a push-to-talk button on the controller, and you can issue commands to you other SEAL team members just by saying them! A menu appears on screen to help you, and the comamnds are in person-verb-object format. So, for example, you can say “team deploy frag” and everyone will throw frag grenades at the target. The recognition works well, and there is no complicated training or anything. It’s incredible!

Overall, the game is great, but very complicated and difficult. It’s not a thing where you go in, shoot a bunch of dudes, and then you are at the next level. It involved a LOT of strategy, hiding in shadows, taking out people from behind, and so on. So I haven’t played it much, but it’s cool. It also supports online gaming, so I’m going to have to get the ethernet adapter and try it out.

The other game I got is Vice City, the followup to Grand Theft Auto 3. It’s sort of a prequel, happening in the 80s in a Miami Vice-like environment. The coolest part of this is that when you get in a car, you can change channels and listen to the radio, just like in GTA3. But now, there are a lot of 80s channels, and one of them is similar to the old K-ROCK, but called VROCK, and it has nothing but old 80s metal. So it’s pretty cool to be listening to Megadeth - Peace Sells… or Slayer - Reign in Blood while driving a stolen sports car and killing cops. There are way more cars, people, weapons, details, and everything else, too much to describe. I spent hours last night and thismorning driving around, stealing stuff, going on rampages. It’s absolutely great.

Not a lot else. I’ve been working on this short story about Bloomington, one of many I hope to get into a book. It’s going slow, but it’s going. I think I will be able to write more as winter progresses. It’s much easier to cocoon up to the computer when it’s too cold to wander around outside. Also the jerkoffs that sit in front of my building tend not to do that when it’s twenty outside, plus windchill.

Okay, I just poured a quart of sulfuric acid down my bathtub drain, and I think I need to either flush it out with some water, or get some kind of gas mask.

All traditional forms of fiction look broken

Fri, 08 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I’m at the point in writing where all traditional forms of fiction look broken, and all of the pieces of my life around me look strange and disjointed, and I doubt everything and wonder how things happened. I can’t easily explain this, but it’s the sort of thing where I sit and look at a Coke can for 20 minutes and think about HOW a Coke can got the way it did, and why wasn’t it a triangle or a tube that was a centimeter wide and three feet long, or how they formed the metal or whatever. And then I think about how Coke cans have remained unchanged in a sense for years and years, but sometimes I find a picture of a Coke can from like 1990 or even 1997 and every aspect of it looks so different, but I can’t entirely tell HOW. And I look at everything like this, but more than that I look at writing like this, and think way too much about stuff, and flip through some random book and think, “WHY does this work?” and you start to see all of these strange patterns, like that more words or more descripton doesn’t always build a bigger picture. Sometimes less or even no words burns an indelible image in your head. It’s like looking at a stick figure, or a dot-matrix image, and your brain fills in the blanks as to what isn’t there. I have images stuck in my head from books I read 20 years ago, and when I go back and re-read the same books, I think “how the hell did that move me so much?” It’s all a very confusing way to look at things, but I feel a need to get through it before I do anything else, because I feel my current writing is pretty lame.

I’m going to see Dee Snider tonight, which should be interesting. I think one of the first tapes I ever got was Twisted Sister - Stay Hungry. I don’t know what stuff he will play tonight, but it should be cool. Other than that, I just ate a bunch of Chinese food and now I feel like I am going to pass out from MSG poisoning. I think I need another Coke.

Dee Snider

Mon, 11 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Dee Snider wasn’t bad on Friday. The only problem was we had to sit through a lot of BAD bands before that, one of which looked like a U2 cover band that didn’t play U2 songs, another that consisted of a woman that looked like she took Chrissy Hynde far too seriously. (After the show, she went around with a book to get people to put down their email addresses for their list, so I put down Ray’s address.) The show was at L’Amour, which is a pretty big name in some circles for heavy metal. It was closed for years and now reopened, but has the same smell of piss and death. It’s also rumored that this was the same club where they shot Saturday Night Fever back in the disco days.

Finally, I thought we were ready to roll, since it was like 11:30 and we had sat through a half-dozen bands, including one that had a big fat guy singing and a skinny little guy playing bass and alternately singing, playing stuff with way too much bass like you’d expect some 17-year-olds to play in a jacked-out Honda Civic with a 74” subwoofer. So after them, instead of Dee, we got Dee’s son, who looked like a Calvin Klein underwear ad (which probably isn’t that bad, given A) his dad’s looks and B) the looks of the woman he had on his arm after the set.) He jerked around spastically (this was his first time on stage, ever, so maybe that was why) and one song made me laugh hysterically, because it contained a really stupid lyric like “if you hear me now, you won’t hear me later/if you don’t hear me now, you’ll hear me later” or something. When people booed him, I thought he was going to start crying. Hey, imagine what your dad went through when he used to go onstage in biker bars wearing Tammy Faye makeup and spandex.

After we sat through an unending setup period, which pissed me off to no end (it’s not like these guys are staging the chariot race out of Ben Hur, it’s just four amps and a fucking drum set) they finally came out and opened with “Stay Hungry.” In fact, they did almost every song from this album, which made me happy because Stay Hungry was one of the first tapes I ever bought back in junior high school, and I played it so many times I still have every note memorized. They did a couple of other songs that I didn’t know, and then they did a bunch of covers, some of them pretty odd. They did “Anarchy in the UK” by the Sex Pistols; “Hell Bent For Leather” by Judas Priest; “Search and Destroy” by Iggy Pop; a weird medley that ended up finishing with “Rock and Roll” by Led Zeppelin; and AC/DC’s “Whole Lotta Rosie”. Dee talked a lot between songs, and still had long hair although not as poofy as back in the day. A.J. Pero from back in the Twisted Sister days was on drums and played a solo; there were two guitar players, and the current bass player for Overkill was in the band. Overall it was a fun time, and they played until two.

Next show: Peter Gabriel at MSG, next Thursday. I was reluctant to buy the tickets because I love his music, but I wasn’t sure how it would work outside of the studio. Also, everyone I know who likes Peter Gabriel only likes “Sledgehammer” or whatever, and his “greatest hits” are the least favorite songs for me. But since he averages about ten years between albums, I felt that it was important that I check it out. So I got a $65 ticket way the hell up in section 305. It should be interesting, though.

I think I gave myself food poisoning yesterday with some taco salad I made. When I woke up this morning, it felt like someone threw a medicine ball right into my gut. I think I’ll finish on that note.

Earwax removal tool

Tue, 12 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

When I was in Vegas, I went to a Walgreen’s across the street from the Stardust on a pretty constant basis, since bottled water cost about $87 in the hotel. I always like big drugstores because they remind me of the ones in the Midwest, like the huge Osco in the Concord Mall that has recently vanished (along with everything else in the mall.) New York drug stores suck; they have almost no selection in the medical-oriented things, and no variety in the non-medical stuff. I bet you could buy a snowblower at a CVS or Hook’s back in Indiana, whereas you might have to go to seven different places to find a 4x4-inch bandage and some gauze in Manhattan. (And when you do, it will cost more than an emergency room visit.) It’s the same gripe about lack of real estate, cost of real estate, and the fact that we don’t have a Target in Manhattan and that would make my life much better, even though all of you in the Midwest are saying, “why would he want a Target? They suck ass.”

Anyway, I was in this Walgreen’s, and saw something I’d never seen before: an earwax removal tool. It looked like a little plastic plunger, except it had a ring on the end of it. The idea was that you shoved it in your ear and scraped out a thing of wax, and it wouldn’t push the wax further back because of the shape, or something. Since I have constant ear problems, I bought this thing, ran back to the hotel (okay, I didn’t RUN) and jammed it into my ear, carefully following the instructions to make sure that it didn’t puncture my eardrum. After all of this anticipation, it removed a piece of wax about as big as the amount of wax a crayon leaves on a piece of paper when writing a period or comma. I felt ripped off, expecting it to remove something about as big as a BB, or maybe a small kidney bean. No dice.

At first, I thought that this was just another ripoff from the health and beauty industry, like magnet-point shoe inserts, anything with the word “Igea” in it, or the ab-exercise belt. But later, I thought that maybe this was some kind of pea-under-seven-mattresses sort of perception problem. Maybe the “huge” amount of wax in my ear that bothered me was just microscopic. Maybe this was like some larger metaphor for my life, and all of the things bothering me - money, acceptance, dating, writing - were all microscopic bits of wax that weren’t that big of a deal.

Okay, this is getting stupid. I shouldn’t come up with journal ideas on the subway anymore.

Disturbing things

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Vague things I find disturbing:

First, I watched this entire TV show about Al Roker getting his stomach stapled shut. Since I am like 30 pounds overweight, I often think about this, but you need to be like 100 pounds overweight to get it done. Also, my problem is not eating large volumes of stuff; I actually don’t eat a lot in any given sitting, it’s just what I eat that got me here. It’s also amazing that he got this invasive surgery done to get down to my current weight. That doesn’t make me feel as bad.

Second, during this Dateline NBC or whatever it was, they had an ad for another Dateline show in which some parents were deemed unfit parents and had their kids taken away, then went out at gunpoint and stole them back from foster homes. The commercial depicted it as “the system has screwed us, and since we’re such strong people, we would do anything…” This is total bullshit. If a court takes away your kids, you’re given a list of stuff you have to do to get them back. The list is not unreasonable for a normal person: get a job, get off drugs, take a course on parenting, etc. The real story is probably that these folks couldn’t do any of this, but they could get a guy and go take their kids back. This is stupid, and this kind of thing will make tons of dumb parents who had their kids taken away that they could do the same thing. It’s amazing how American culture has propogated this belief that everyone is always right, and that anyone can do anything on their own terms. It’s probably Reader’s Digest’s fault for publishing all of those little amazing profiles of courage or whatever the hell they are called. People are wrong. People fuck up. Deal with it.

Third, I will probably watch the above show.

Fourth, if you download an entire first-run movie because you don’t see yourself giving the MPAA ten bucks, you are an idiot. I actually saw a LiveJournal where someone said they were going to see 8 Mile but didn’t because they didn’t want to give the MPAA the money. This is stupid. I mean, wanting to see 8 Mile is also stupid, but that’s not the point. I don’t feel that I need to justify this any further, but rather I will issue a decree making it true.

It seems like I had a fifth thing, but I can’t remember. I’m still sick and pretty much reduced to watching TV, and not much is on. I did finally sign another lease, which is always good.

Now, I must eat my soup.

IMU, cold

Fri, 15 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I just got a call from my friend Lisa from the parking lot of the IMU. She’s from up here (Stamford, actually) but visited to see the Lilly Library and needed directions to find it. It’s pretty weird to consider someone I think of as a “New York” person to be in the place where I lived ten years ago. It’s even more weird to give directions by phone, and mentally imagine what it would be like to be there. I was actually reading a few pages from Summer Rain last night, so I’m really in the mood to be back there. Maybe I can put some of this nostalgia into the stories I’m trying to finish.

I’ll still sick, although the cold has moved from the throat to the nose. I’m not fond of blowing my nose constantly, but it sure beats that back-of-throat post-nasal drip, or the throat-suddenly-dry, must-cough-violently thing I’ve had going for the last few days.

I finished rereading The Fuck Up by Arthur Nersessian, and it wasn’t bad. It reminds me of a modern-day Down and Out in Paris and London by Orwell, and I was able to mentally figure out more of the geography now that I work in the Village. It’s a slightly depressing book, and sometimes the writing is a bit jumpy or inaccurate, but it’s not bad. It makes me wish I could write a book similar to it, but I’m not as verbose in my prose as he is.

Okay, I need to go to Duane Reade and stock up on cold supplies (Dayquil, Nyquil, Kleenex, etc.)

a lot, nothing

Tue, 19 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

A lot has been up. Nothing has been up. My heat was out for a weekend, and I was sick, which meant pure misery and I was about a double-shot of vodka away from going to my landlord’s house and beating his power meter into a non-functional state until his heat went off. The heat is back on, and my mood has improved immensely. My cold is almost gone, no sniffles or aches, but the post-Nyquil dream and sleep cycle has gone completely fucking David Lynch on me. Also, although I have no sniffles, about every hour, my sinuses exude about a cubic liter of thick snot that immediately blows out of my nose in a very satisfactory manner, yet not as satisfactory as absolutely nothing. My appetite is also messed up, as I can now taste food, yet I realize that everything that a) I can cook or b) I can order for delivery tastes like total shit. My last two dinners and today’s lunch were horrid and I did not finish them. I am hoping to segue this into some kind of diet where something that is low-fat/low-calorie or whatever will suddenly taste better to me than horrible Greek food as cooked by Mexican workers in a Chinese restaurant in Queens. Or maybe not.

---

I am working on The NecroKonicon nonstop now. The goal is to have something to give the publisher by the end of the year. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE go read it, find mistakes, point out my horrrible speling errors and everything else, and give me ideas for new stuff so I can turn this fucker out. I am adding stuff every day, so please take a look.

---

I had a lot of other things to say, but mostly I need to get some work done. So I must go enjoy the heat and write some damn glossary entries.

Peter Gabriel at MSG

Fri, 22 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I saw Peter Gabriel last night at MSG, and it was… interesting. It was excellent in many ways but also really depressing in many other ways, and the whole thing really threw me by the time I got out of there. It’s strange to say that going to a show full of people and energy and music that I essentially enjoy would make me leave in a deep depression, but there were a few nerves to be pinched.

To first get this out of the way: I like Peter Gabriel’s music, but I don’t think I like people who like his music. I think it’s a very personal thing to me, and the songs of his that mean the most to me aren’t the ones that have supported his livelihood. So to go and have the guy sitting next to me yell “SHOCK THE MONKEY! SHOCK THE MONKEY!” after every other song really made me want to sell everything I own, put a unabomber-style shack on my property, and never talk to another human again.

The other thing that bothered me is that although I go to a lot of shows alone, I really don’t like doing it. And this is probably the first non-metal show I’ve ever attended. So not only was there no chance for me to talk to some other dude about the band, like I did when I went to see Rush or Fozzy or whatever else, but pretty much every guy there was with a woman, because this is the kind of show you bring your girlfriend to and hope they play “in your eyes” or whatever. And, not that I haven’t noticed this before, but I’m getting extremely depressed about being alone. Sometimes it doesn’t bother me, but then there are these breakthrough points where I suddenly realize that it’s been months and months since I’ve dated, and I’m currently sustaining no relationships, and I have nothing going on where I’d potentially meet people, and I have no energy to seek out people, and things won’t change themselves, and I have no energy to try to change things. And I can push this stuff away enough to get up every day, and go to my job every day, and maybe put in a little bit of writing on my books or whatever, but when I really think about it, it completely fucking demolishes me. And that happened.

So I’m sitting there for this whole show, essentially spending the whole thing not thinking “wow, I have all of his albums, he’s great,” but rather “I wish this show was over so I could go home and completely reinvent my horrible life.” And the thing is that a lot of Peter Gabriel songs mix happiness and depression in such a strange way that they totally pulled me further into this. When I’m alone, when I’m depressed, I listen to his music, and that helps me write and create. And that means I’m not a fan of “Sledgehammer,” but if you’re depressed and you listen to “Mercy Street” or “Red Rain,” it’s not going to snap you out of it. And my whole career of depression has bookmarks in it via his songs. Even the happy songs remind me of failed relationships, like when they played “Secret World” and it reminded me of the girl I dated back when that album was out, the girl that put “In Your Eyes” on a mix tape for me and now even the first two notes of that song practially exorcise her to me again.

The concert “ended” in a very strange way. They played the song “Signal to Noise” from the new album, and it’s very heavy and deep and dark and forbearing, but absolutely incredible. It’s primarily a more tribal drum sound and some symphonic synth. As the song approached the end, each instrument would finish playing their part and the person would just put down their stuff and walk off the stage, until finally it was just the drummer and a synth playing a sample on its own. Then he got to the end, and the lights went off, and that was it. It was such a heavy and strange ending, watching everyone just walk away, and it struck such a strong impression on me that it completely blew me away.

(Of course, they came out and played a couple of radio-friendly singles as an encore, which sort of ruined it for me, but still…)

So there it is. I have a lot of thoughts and a lot of plans, but mostly I just want to go home and sleep and sit in bed and read and just try to figure out what to do next. I have a hot idea for a new book and I’ve been letting it fester in my head. I think getting onto something real in the writing department would help, but it’s also one of those times where I know that writing isn’t the answer for me and I need to figure out what is.

On that note, I better go home.

star wars toys

Sun, 24 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I’m enjoying having a five year-old nephew. I mean, I’ve always thought he was a great guy; what I mean is that I enjoy buying Christmas presents for him. Between all of the Star Wars stuff and Lego technology available, it’s a good time to be a kid. I bought him this Jenga Fett doll action figure that has a removable helmet, working rocket pack, laser rifle, incredible details, and he talks, makes laser sounds, has battle-sensitive noise electronics, and I think he can also do taxes. When I was a couple of years older than Phillip, I got the same size Boba Fett action figure, and while he did have Six Million Dollar Man-esque eye lens that enabled you to look in the back of his head and see out his eyehole, it didn’t have any of the electronics. And my Millenium Falcon had two C-cell batteries in a side door with a button that you pressed to get a “BZZZZZT” sound that didn’t resemble the sound of lasers and thrusters, but rather the old-school doorbell on my Grandma Mamola’s house in St. Louis. NOW, the Millenium Falcon made from the same molds has incredible battle damaged paint, plus I think the sound chip plays every single second of Millenium Falcon footage in actual 5.1 THX Dolby Digital sound. (Oh well, that battery compartment made a handy storage space for Yoda and other small shit cargo.)

Okay, just had a phone call with my sister (not Phillip’s mom, the other one) and I don’t have much more to say other than the fact that my kitchen smells like something died in there, so I’m going to fill it with Lysol to a depth of about three feet and see if that helps.

No heat, no Danzig

Mon, 25 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

No heat. No hot water this morning, but I’ve got the bathing in the kitchen sink thing pretty down, and the water is back. Allegedly, the heat will be back tomorrow, and this will be the last round of repairs. But saying that ten times doesn’t have the same effect as a nice hot shower at six in the morning.

I have decided to do another issue of Air in the Paragraph Line, after reading the Cometbus Omnibus all weekend. I need a good solid project in my life, even if it involves collating and toner dust. I made PDFs of all of the old issues and you should really check them out - they are at 34.216.9.77/aitpl. Reading the old zines really surprised me at how good they were. They really bring back a lot of memories of my time from Seattle, and it’s also weird to see how they document the time I was writing both Rumored and Summer Rain. So I’m excited to begin working on issue 10.

Britta filters do not filter out all impurities. I mention this because a lot of people don’t realize this, and at some point, people are going to try to drink water with West Nile and Anthrax and think a pass through a $4 charcoal filter will make the shit into Evian. It won’t. Boil it.

I was going to write this huge diatribe about the Danzig album I am listening to, but I’m too tired and I really need to start positioning heaters and humidifiers, and I have to call in Ray and rub in the fact that Roddy Piper was signing books in New York and I didn’t go.

Log analysis

Wed, 27 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I am home. Half-day, holiday, not too bad of a deal. I went to two different wine stores and had a minor breakdown when faced with all of the choices. I bought a German Riesling and a California Merlot. I hope that works.

Larry asked in comments how many people read this journal. Out of curiousity, I will post a quick log analysis. From 9/25 to 11/26/02:

105,354 hits for 34.216.9.77/ (a hit being a single HTTP transaction or attempt.)
6015 hits on any journal page or the journal directory
965 unique domains hitting journal pages or the journal directory

If you’re wondering how I did that last one, I put the logs in a directory and did a grep journal * | cut -f2 -d':' | cut -f1 -d' ' | sort -u | wc

Note that people on the same proxy have the same IP; also people from AOL or other dialups potentially have a different IP each time they dial in. Also, search engine robots scanning for text are in there. That’s not a ton of people, but it’s higher than I would’ve guessed.

Not much else going on. Still no heat, but I saw that the department of housing was here earlier today and gave the landlord a citation, so he’s going to be charged something like $250 a day at a minimum of $1000 until the problem is fixed. There is a truck right outside my window, and I’d imagine they are working on it, but I also wouldn’t doubt it a damn bit if the workers are either asleep in the truck or at the Athens Cafe, getting drunk of their gourds. If the landlord hired them, I’m a bit suspicious of their work ethic. (Not that I should talk. But then shoddy tech writing is different than no heat when it is 30 out.)

I’m reading John Sheppard’s book Bad Men Driving right now, and it’s pretty cool. He has a giveaway going on where if you send him his address, he’ll send you one, and you probably should. I think I’m going to dig out the heating pad and spend an afternoon under my sleeping bag, and finish this book.

The ghost of Thanksgiving past

Thu, 28 Nov 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Happy Thanksgiving. I give thanks that my heat is now working, and I celebrated by staying up until four in the morning working on a short story. Now I’m eating breakfast/lunch before I go to my friend Julie’s house for a thanksgiving dinner later in the day.

This is the eighth year I didn’t spend Thanksgiving back in Indiana with my folks. In Bloomington, I managed to get back north every year, even though some years were a total bitch, especially when I didn’t have a car. And when I made it back, I spent most of the time watching TV and getting slow, not really talking to anyone except maybe my sisters and of course my friend Ray. On the way back each time, I felt ripped off that I put so much time, money, and effort on the line to make the trip, and there wasn’t anything for me.

Once I got to Seattle in 95, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t spend a thousand bucks and two full days on planes just to eat a turkey dinner and then watch TV on a couch for 48 hours. So I laid down the law, and said I wouldn’t come back anymore, which caused some hysterics on the parent front. But even the stock Thanksgiving dinners went away; my mom’s parents were both dead, so the classic trip to grandma’s in Chicago was now just a memory. And the backup, dinner with my stepdad’s family, was also nixed, because my mom divorced him. Even if I did come back, I don’t know what would have been there for me.

In 95, I had dinner with Bill Perry, his wife Jen, and the then-infant Liam. They were also stranded from family back in Indiana, so they cooked a great dinner and we ate in Mountlake Terrace. Nice, small, comfy, and not a bad transition from family to friends.

In 96, I just started dating Karena a month before, so that dinner in Southwest Washington was of the meet-the-parents variety. What she didn’t tell me was that her parents were moving the next day, and needed some manpower to help them dig a few decades of still-unpacked stuff into vans. This was the worst possible move imaginable; every appliance had to move, and her parents were collectors of everything imaginable, all of it still unboxed. It’s hard to pack and move someone else’s stuff, when you don’t know what’s trash and what’s treasure. And it’s even harder when the apartment is a second-floor walkup, and it’s 38 degrees outside. We made at least three or four trips with a caravan of trucks and cars, and the capper was that her dad drove the truck into some grass and broke a water main for the whole subdivision on a Thanksgiving weekend. But after that complete hell, her family had a good respect for me. We had 97 thanksgiving at their new place, and had another great dinner of home cooked food and joking around with her brothers.

By 98, I was dating Marie, and she flew in to Seattle the night of Thanksgiving. We couldn’t find any place to eat, and ended up at IHOP. I think that was her second visit to Seattle, and after I went to her place for Halloween. I was well on my way to moving to New York at that point, and I did in the spring. In 99, we went to her brother’s in DC for thanksgiving, and ate dinner at a fancy Indian restaurant. Turkey Vindaloo - it’s pretty awesome.

In 2000, there was no girlfriend, but me and my friend Rob Reynolds went to the Neptune for dinner. And in 2001, Michael and Marie came into town, and we also hit the Neptune. And now, it’s 2002. That’s the history of the post-family thanksgiving, and I’m surprised I can remember all of that.

Crap, I need to get a move on and haul out of here. Have a good holiday, and don’t eat too much.

National Buy Nothing Day

Mon, 02 Dec 2002 00:00:00 GMT

National Buy Nothing Day is stupid. There, I said it. If you don’t buy anything on one day, you still buy the stuff on another day. Unless you get everyone to buy nothing all the time, it won’t do anything. Maybe if you got everyone to buy nothing for a whole quarter, that might work, but everyone stocking up on stuff before and after would average out. And it’s also stupid because the day after Thanksgiving isn’t even the busiest day of the year. It’s usually one of the two Saturdays before the 25th. With the way the economy is, they should be having some kind of “buy everything” day, where you spend as much money as possible.

It’s too cold outside to deal with reality. I guess it’s 36 degrees, but with the wind and the gusts, it feels more like 20. I really want to get a Navy SEAL winter parka with all of the attachments and hoods and sleeves and stuff, but they are like $300. I also have an overwhelming urge to get a snowmobile, but there isn’t enough snow to support one. That’s probably because I watched about half of Die Hard 2 on TV yesterday, because I didn’t want to leave the house and I didn’t have any DVDs I wanted to watch.

Writing continues, although some parts have slowed, but I started a new chapter last night and wrote like 1500 words in 45 minutes. Work on the zine also continues, although I think I am going to change the name to “This Is Not a Fucking Music Zine” or something, because I’m sick of people from Portugal or whatever sending me their crappy tapes.

Baby in Holland, toys in Japan

Tue, 03 Dec 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I forgot to mention that my friend Danielle had her second baby girl the other day, on the 29th. Her name is Delphine Isabeau Mariel Mutsaers. 10 lbs 9 oz. 23 inches! Dani lives in the Netherlands now, so I have not seen her in a couple of years. I want to visit there at some point, although it is about third on my list of countries I want to visit, with #2 being Poland and #1 being Japan.

I had a long conversation with Ray last night about visiting Japan. I know the prices are insurmountable, but they are here, too. If I could get the airfare down, I think I could do it. I’m not interested in the super-high-end restaurants; I would be going to the Japanese McDonald’s and the Tokyo Denny’s, eating in those pork bowl restaurants and from vending machines. The killer would be that I’d want to buy an incredible number of CDs and gadgets. Ray really wants to somehow scam together a trip, and I really, really want to go somewhere significant next year. I think it would cost at least $3000 - a grand on airfare, another thousand on a hotel, and the last thousand on food and crap like taxis and subways. On top of that, I would need money to spend on gifts, gadgets, whores, whatever. I might be able to pull together $3000+ in the next year to blow, but I doubt Ray could. So who knows. It’s something to think about.

I also really want to get Ray out to Las Vegas, but once again, no money. He has a Costco card, or actually I think it’s a Sam’s Club card, from his Mom’s business and he uses it constantly to buy videos and shit when he can sneak them in. I devised this strategy that I think I will use in a story, that he could drive to Las Vegas and just stop at Sam’s Clubs across the country. He would be eating big boxes of pop tarts and nutragrain bars; he could buy one of those camping coolers that plugs in a cigarette lighter and keeps the big cases of Pepsi cool. At night he could pull over and camp out with a Honda Generator and a self-inflating bed. Once he got to Vegas, he could sell us a bunch of stuff for cash, like movies or video games or batteries, and then he would have money to gamble. That could make a good short story.

(The stupid Sam’s Club site won’t give me a national list of all of the locations. I’m paranoid about writing this story, and then it turns out there are no stores west of St. Louis or something.)

I’m serious about the Japan thing, by the way. If you have any stories or tips, let me know. I realize there are a lot of small things I’d have to deal with on such a trip, but I think the biggest would be paying a grand for tickets. And yes, there probably were cheaper tickets at some point, or I could do some crazy courier/supersaver/discount ticket thing, but I think I’d rather pay full price and hold an actual ticket. And tickets are damn expensive these days. I don’t know why, although the mandatory terrorist taxes and increased staffing probably doesn’t help things much.

I wish I was still in touch with my old friend Reece. He lived in Japan for years and always had info on that shit. Ray has a couple of friends there, so maybe I need to crack down and start writing people…

GROVER CLEVELAND WAS NOT TWO PEOPLE

Sun, 08 Dec 2002 00:00:00 GMT

So yesterday afternoon I was watching CSPAN-2, mostly because I couldn’t fathom leaving the house because of weather and lack of money, motivation, and purpose, and also because all of the other channels I get on my half-assed bootleg cable setup were either showing infomercials, college football, or hunting programs. Anyway, I was watching some kind of award dinner where some group was giving George Bush (the first one) some kind of American patriot award. Even though I hate GBI, I was watching because they were showing some historical retrospective slideshow of his life. And the narrator said “Only 42 other people have known what it is like to be president.” WHAT THE FUCK? GROVER CLEVELAND WAS NOT TWO PEOPLE! I knew about this in the third grade, and someone who makes twice as much money as me can’t look this shit up in an almanac?

Okay, I did look it up in an almanac just to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. Cleveland was the 22nd president in 1885-89 and the 24th in 1893-97. Other trivia about Cleveland:

He had oral cancer from cigars, and had a tumor removed secretly; an operating room was set up in a yacht in the Potomac, and he had the surgery while he was allegedly on his way to vacation.
He allegedly fathered an illegitimate child in 1874 with a woman named Maria Halpin. During the 1884 presidential campaign, he never disproved that the child was his, but he never admitted it either. He did, however, offer financial support to the mom and kid.
He drank a lot of beer. He also had gout, which is directly related.
He was the second-heaviest president, behind Taft.
There’s some conspiracy behind his 1908 death, and some modern doctors think he may have had Alzheimer’s. He had a rapidly deteriorating mental state, but some say it was probably too rapid for Alzheimer’s.

I found an excellent site here that has a lot of information on the health of presidents. After reading it, I think it’s pretty clear that every person who was President had pretty severe medical problems. Even JFK, who was supposed to be a young and healthy guy, was on more prescriptions than my grandma took when she was 72 and months from death. I think Carter is probably the healthiest president. Maybe Ford. And I didn’t know Clinton wore hearing aids. Guess I missed that one.

Anyway, nothing has been going on here. I haven’t left the house all weekend, although I think I might go to the book store in a little bit here. It’s just been one of those weekends where sitting around and playing SimCity for 7 hours straight is more interesting than getting out. I don’t know if it’s weather or depression or what, but all I want to do is sleep. And read the almanac. It’s the ultimate zero attention span book. I just wish I had a newer one - this one is the 1999 edition, which means it was really written in 1997 and the most important stuff was updated in 1998.

OK, I need to finish my canned peaches and find my shoes. Oh, I’m also pissed and a bit freaked that MTA might strike in a week, because there’s no way I can walk 4 miles to work in December, or pay $20 each way for a taxi. More on that later.

Stone-cold radiators and the threat of a transit strike

Wed, 11 Dec 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I’m in an all-day meeting today and we broke for lunch at 11:00, so here I am, updating early and eating Wendy’s.

I went to bed early last night and woke up at about 3AM, my room freezing. I got up and found all of the radiators stone-cold, and the hot water somewhat lukewarm. This immediately launched me into a severe panic attack, with visions of spending the next week bathing in my kitchen sink with hot water from the stove and running the spaceheater for a tiny amount of warmth. I don’t know how I managed to fall back asleep, especially since the last two nights were filled with insomnia and looking at the clock every hour and hoping I would get in a few minutes before the alarm went off. But I did fall asleep, and at 6:00, I heard the creaking of water in the pipes and when I felt the radiator, it was slowly getting warm again. So the hour from 6:00 to 7:00 was the most wonderful sleep in the world.

The threat of a transit strike still looms over the city. I won’t go into the details, because I’m sick of repeating them, but you can look them up anywhere. Basically, if the union and the MTA don’t agree to a new contract by Sunday, the trains won’t run on Monday. I talked to my boss, and have a contingency plan: I will burn a CD of all of my Framemaker files on Friday, and if there are no trains on Monday, I stay home until there are trains. It actually wouldn’t be that bad, not having to ride the train in the morning and battle the cold; I could sit at home and listen to music and eat peanut butter and jelly every day and get work done in retreat. It would add an extra two hours to my day. And I normally don’t have meetings anyway. So we’ll see what happens.

Still working on the book, slowly. It’s above 60,000 words and my goal is 70-75K. The writing needs a lot of editing, though. I feel like I’ve said this over and over again, so maybe I should stop saying it.

I watched the movie Dark City the other night, at least part of it, and it’s nowhere near as good as I remembered. The scenery didn’t look as stunning as I’d remembered, and the plot was so forced that it seemed silly. I’ve heard the movie is much better if you turn the sound off until the first appearance of Kiefer Sutherland, but I haven’t tried it.

OK, gotta finish eating.

Dio and Broken Arrows

Sat, 14 Dec 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I had tickets to see Ronnie James Dio at Roseland last night, but I was so tired and miserable by the end of the day Friday, that I just wanted to go home, order some food, and sleep. It was a long week, there’s this looming MTA strike, it gets dark at 4:30 now, and it’s rainy and 40 degrees pretty much all the time, so I didn’t feel like waiting in the rain for an hour to see four shitty opening bands all for Dio.

Instead, I got some Indian food and watched a DVD I forgot I hadn’t watched yet. I got this three-DVD set of documentaries about atomic weapons by Peter Kuran a while back. They’re pretty cool; one is called Trinity and Beyond and it’s your basic “about the atomic bomb” movie, but with a lot of new footage I’ve never seen. It also includes some 3D footage and the red and blue glasses, but it’s not a very good effect - maybe either my TV or my eyes are not calibrated correctly. There’s also Atomic Journeys, where they go to various places bombs were tested, including the test sites I visited in New Mexico in 1999.

The third movie, which I forgot about and just watched last night, is called Nukes in Space, and it’s all about various high-altitude nuclear tests by the US and USSR, plus a lot about the history of the ICBM and ABM. This is incredibly fucked up stuff and I never knew about a lot of it, but the US did tests where they tried to inject bursts of high radiation into the Van Allen belts to see what would happen. These top-secret tests, called Project Argus, were (at first) from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and they basically found out they could completely fuck up radio waves with the EMP that would be carried through the belts, which they thought could eventually develop some kind of all-out radio and radar fuck-up weapon against the Russians. A later test in the Pacific fucked up radio transmission across the ocean for three or four days and even knocked out the power grid as far away as Hawaii.

Lots of other weird footage on that DVD included LOTS of failed rocket takeoffs, which you can see in The Right Stuff, but they had a lot of alternate views and other launches. They showed two launch failures in the Pacific that WERE ACTUALLY CARRYING NUCLEAR WARHEADS! The warheads did not explode, but they did get consumed by the huge fireball of hot-as-the-sun propellant, which probably did something to the value of property within a 100 mile radius. Oh, also they showed the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, better known as America’s only (formerly) operation ABM base. It’s located very close to where I was born, and was in fact designed to protect my birthplace of Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota. (They did not build this to specifically guard the base because I was born there; although I’m sure some of you appreciate my contributions to American literature, I don’t think the military does.) The SRMSC is a really fucked-up looking place, and looks more like a Mayan burial ground or some kind of 70s sci-fi movie set, because of the strange buildings and antenna. It was built, but then when Congress was dealing with the 1972 ABM treaty and the fact that newer Russian missiles would probably get around the highly complicated and expensive system, they scrapped the program - exactly one day after it was fully operational. Now, it sits dormant and maybe someday if someone decided we need to spend another 40 billion on anti-missile programs, they will reopen it.

While digging around for info on the SRMSC, I found a cool site called Cold War Leftovers that has some excellent pictures of the Safeguard site, plus a bunch of other stuff like abandoned Nike Missile sites and planes stored in the desert. Pretty cool stuff.

Not much else is going on, other than the threat of an MTA strike. If it happens, I will stay at home and work. I have FrameMaker and Windows on another partition, and I have all of my work stuff on a CD-R. I really don’t know if they will strike or not, but everyone seems to be ready for the worst.

Anyway, I’m arguing whether I should go into the city and get something to eat and either brave a movie or pick up some DVDs, or stay here, order some food, and rewatch some old stuff. It’s raining on and off, so it’s a tough choice. We’ll see…

Platoon, Sim City

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Watching Platoon. It’s on TNN and is “uncut”, which means they can say “shit”, but they still bleep out “fuck”. I haven’t watched this movie in a long time, and I forgot how many now-famous people are in it. It’s quasi-realistic and okay looking, but it also suffers from the Vietnam Cliche Syndrome like most other movies of its genre. They all have the same soundtrack, the poor black guys that don’t want to fight, the obligatory drug scenes, the out-of-nowhere VC ambush, the My Lai analog, and so on. Still, it’s an interesting waste of a few hours, at least for free.

I haven’t been writing much lately, haven’t been doing much of anything. Last night, I played Sim City for like 6 hours. I tried to build an entire city supported by nothing but rail, but then I gave in and had to build some roads. I got up to about 60,000 people, and then the fucking program crashed, and didn’t save anything. I haven’t played it since, mostly because I have to reboot my computer to Windows, and that’s a huge pain in the ass because I can’t get the stupid GRUB bootloader for Linux to work, so I have to open the BIOS and set a different drive, and that’s about a step away from opening the case and soldering a jumper or something.

Nothing else. No transit strike, BTW. Now I just need to brave the cold every day to get to the damn train.

Ground zero

Sun, 22 Dec 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I had another weekend of doing almost nothing, and then I decided to go out today and spend a few bucks on DVDs. I went down to J&R’s, and for some insane reason, decided that I really needed to go see ground zero. I’d previously said that I would never go down there and be one of those stupid tourists looking at a hole in the ground like it was the largest ball of twine on display in the middle of South Dakota at a roadside marker or whatever. But I did decide go to once I was down at City Hall, so I walked over there.

I don’t think the site would be that impressive to someone who hadn’t been down there before, when the towers were standing. Aside from the banners and displays and signs hanging on a fence, the place doesn’t look much different than any other construction site. And I didn’t spend a lot of time down there before, but I did have a mental image in my head of the pre-9/11 layout. So when I started walking down Vesey and got my first clear shot of the area, it was like being hit in the chest with a lead plate. It was so dramatic, seeing that big piece of the landscape plucked clean and replaced by a giant pit of nothing. I really wasn’t even thinking that much about the people who died there or the greater symbolism. I just looked at the surrounding buildings, the things that were made famous by the videos and the news stories; the giant pit of the WTC 7 foundation, the fucked-up Verizon building, and all of the surrounding structures that are now pretty much back to normal. There are still a lot of fences and opened-up manholes and torn-apart sidewalks and stuff like that, and that’s the biggest indicator of the area to people walking by. You can’t really see into the bathtub from the street, and you can’t see the same shot that every aerial photo on the news shows. It doesn’t look that impressive or huge when you are standing in front of it - the whole area is only 17 acres. But it was there. And it was pretty weird.

That was the only noteworthy part of the weekend. Other than that, I sat around, edited this journal book, watched a lot of dumb movies, and that’s about it. I have to work this week, but only Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. No holiday plans, just editing and Grand Theft Auto, which isn’t too bad. Our Xmas weather is going to be in the 40s and raining. I can deal with that.

Celebrating the birth of Christ with various war movies

Wed, 25 Dec 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Christmas.

I don’t have any giant, special, holiday issue of the journal ready. I didn’t do much for the birth of the baby jesus or baby santa or whatever. I mostly slept, and had some macaroni and cheese for lunch, and then ordered some Indian food for dinner, and fielded a couple of phone calls, and talked to my nephew about nintendo, and that’s about it. It was a nice day off of work, and I couldn’t ask for anything more, really.

My sister and brother-in-law’s gift to me was the Band of Brothers DVD set, which includes 6 DVDs inside a cool metal box, for a total of about 863 hours of viewing. It’s a Spielberg-produced HBO miniseries about the 101st Airborne in World War II, akin to Saving Private Ryan, but a different story. I also got the special edition of Platoon the other day, and spent all of Christmas Eve watching that with the commentary.

It’s snowing out, one of those winter white christmas wonderland snows. It was just raining with cold temps, then it started hailing, then slush, and now it’s white enough for Bing Crosby to start singing about it. I went out earlier today to go to the drug store (and the god damned pharmacy was closed even though they said they would be open) and I had to battle through some impressive downfall to get there. The wind is the worst - it cuts through everything when it hits. 25 mph gusts. Not fun.

I’ve been editing and slowly working on the book of journal entries, and it’s getting there. I think I will try to get it to the printer by the end of the year, and then it will take them a couple of months to figure it out.

So that’s Christmas. Back to work tomorrow, then a three-day weekend. Hope your holiday worked out.

Sleeping 20 hours

Fri, 27 Dec 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I took my last vacation day for 2002 today, and I’m glad that I did, because I started to come down with a cold, or at least the horrific sore throat part of a cold that usually happens when you live in a dry heat environment and have to run around in the cold and then get on a crowded subway with a bunch of sick people. So I went to bed at about 8:00 last night (not on purpose) and essentially slept until 4:00 this afternoon. I did wake up in the middle of that to eat a can of Dinty Moore stew and watch another episode of Band of Brothers. And after a shower and about a gallon of juice, I finished the last disc, aside from the special features. Overall, I liked the series a lot, although it’s probably going to be like that Moon series that Hanks did for HBO in that I won’t crack the DVDs again for another year.

The book of journal entries is slowly progressing, but it’s at the point now where I really need to worry about the end-game issues, most of all how I’m going to sell the damn thing. Part of me wants to send it to the publisher and then not tell a god damned person about it. Nobody will buy it, but it will be out there. I still need to finish editing, and then get together the cover and marketing crap. Luckily, the editing is going fast, and I’m not finding a lot of corrections. Of course, if I were to rewrite it, there would be lots of work, but I’m just fixing major mistakes. I’m not even fixing the fact that I used to use em-dashes like a motherfucker five years ago.

Not much else. I feel pretty fucking tired for having slept almost 20 hours, though.

Working on book proofs on New Year's

Wed, 01 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Happy New Year. I think I’ve figured out all of the associated issues with knocking the journal over to 2003 without completely mangling access to the old archives. There are still broken bits and pieces, and the UI isn’t wonderful, but it looks like it’s at least mostly functional.

And what did I do to usher in the new year? I was mad at work trying to finish things for my next book. And now, I’m happy to report that Tell Me A Story About The Devil: Selected Journals, 1997-1999 is on its way to the publisher and will hopefully be available in a few months. It’s a collection of old journals from right here, edited and pulled together into a nice, bound copy. I’m very happy about making this a book, and I really do like all of this old writing. Of course you can get all of this stuff for free on this site, but it will be a different experience to be able to sit in bed or on the bus or whatever and read a copy on real paper.

The last few days have been a real bitch, pulling together the manuscript, dealing with the little bits like the back cover text, marketing summary, and all of that, and getting the cover ready. (It’s here if you want to look at it.) Ray did the cover again, and it took some work to find a photo that I liked. But I think it looks good, and I’m happy that after two black book covers, I will have a bright red book to put on the shelf next to it. Anyway, I haven’t slept much, and my food schedule is way off too, so I feel like shit. After finally submitting everything to the publisher at 10:30 this morning, I got a few hours of sleep and went out in the pissing rain to get some Subway for lunch at about 5:00. Now, only a few hours later, I really want to get supper, but I really don’t. And I don’t want to work tomorrow, but I have to go in. At least it will be a nice, short, two-day work week.

Not much else is up. I am not going to ramble on about resolutions or look back at the year in review or anything like that. I do too much of that stuff on a daily basis. Right now, I need to clean the disaster in my house from working at full-bore for the last week or so. I’ve got a bedroom full of photos everywhere, a living room covered in red-penned printouts, and a sink full of dishes. I doubt I will do too much damage to that tonight, but I would like to get things returned to normal so I can get started on the next book.

And yes, there is a next book! I have an idea, but I won’t jinx it. For now, I need to get thinking about the trip to Vegas in about two weeks. I just ordered a new battery for my laptop, and I hope that fixes the problem so I can get mobile and running. If it doesn’t, I think I’m going to buy a used PowerBook and go Mac. But I hope the battery fixes everything. It’s weird to think that I used this laptop for the last 40 or 50 hours almost constantly, scanning photos and plugging away at the manuscript, but it won’t work without a cord.

Okay, time to look at this dinner problem again…

Both compelling and stupid

Sun, 05 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I’m watching a TV movie about Enron that’s both compelling and stupid, and I’m not sure which of the two keeps me watching. It also has Shannon Elisabeth from the American Pie movies, but she looks somewhat terrible, and is playing the role of a whiny, two-dimensional Enron wife, which pretty much kills any sort of sexual attraction she would normally exude. Anyway, it’s the only thing on TV right now, so here I am.

I went out last night to see Bowling for Columbine and go eat in Times Square. The Times Square thing was unusually busy and very strange, given the ghosts I see of my two years or so of working there. But many of the stores are changing, and many new things are opening up. One new good thing is this huge Toys R Us store, which is where a cheap theater and a bunch of those annoying junk camera stores used to be. One bad thing is that the food court next to the AMC 25 on 42nd is now gone. That sucks, because it was one of the open, public, and no-hassle restrooms in the area. And speaking of ghosts, I once again ran into former coworker and standup comedian Matt Daly, handing out fliers to his comedy show at a club right off of Times Square. We didn’t have too much to say other than the usual catching up, but he’s always a cool person to talk to, and I really hope I manage to catch one of his shows.

After dinner at the Howard Johnson’s, which was pretty unmemorable, especially my $16 faux stir fry, I went to the AMC 25 for the movie. I resisted going to this movie for a long time. I am not always down with Michael Moore’s confrontational style. I did like Roger and Me a lot, but I saw The Big One in the theater, and found it to be uneven at best. There was good information in this one, but it didn’t really offer any kind of a thesis or solution. And while some people might consider it some sort of in-your-face vigilante justice to corner a company spokesperson in a lobby while waving a fake check in their face and telling them they laid off too many people, I ultimately don’t see how it does much of anything, especially when you consider that most company spokespeople and other talking heads are brainwashed and functionally useless.

Given all of this, I thought Bowling for Columbine was interesting and entertaining. I would have done a few things differently, but I dug it overall. I was going to write much more about this, but I have no energy to do so right now, so I’ll stop.

I bought the Ethernet card for my PlayStation 2, along with Tony Hawk 4. I can’t get the card to work with Socom Navy Seals, but I read online that it’s because Sony fucked up on their servers and they never let people log in because of load. They should get that shit figured out if they’re going to run commercials constantly. The Tony Hawk game is pretty cool, and it’s incredible to play it online. It doesn’t use that much bandwidth, and there you are skating along with other dudes in the same skatepark. It’s a very hypnotic game, the sort of thing where you can play forever, going back and forth on the same level, trying different tricks over and over. A very good time-waster.

Not much else. I need to get out of here and think about going to bed in a few hours. I was up till about four or five last night, so getting up at seven tomorrow will be a real trick.

Grandiose systems to replace all international monetary functionality

Tue, 07 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I just got a copy of my phone bill dated December 1, which is due on December 26. (Yes, last December 26.) I don’t know if this was a screwup with Verizon (very probable) or a screwup with my online bill payer situation, which recently was merged or bought or otherwise shifted over, resulting in massive disruptions in .05% of their customers, which means me. Hopefully I will get another bill shortly that is double, and I’ll pay it, and in the meantime, my phone won’t get disconnected. That’s my hope, anyway.

This is one of the kinds of situations that throws me for enough of a loop that I spend days wondering, “why does anyone ever pay their bills?” and I start wondering about grandiose systems to replace all international monetary functionality, and then I realize that the people I work with are just trying to upgrade a tiny, tiny, tiny facet of the banking world, and the amount of incredible bullshit involved with the infrastructure is tremendous. On one hand, I look at a bank (mostly when standing in line) and I think, “why can’t they replace all of this, and have it work for a fraction of the cost?” and on the other hand, I have no idea how trillions of dollars can flow through the system without catastrophe on a daily basis. It’s like when I’m washing dishes, and I think I’ve found a way to invent an entirely new dishwasher - no, an entirely new concept in dishes that is custom-engineered not only for comfort, but for maximized, automated washing and sterilization. Meanwhile, I can’t actually finish washing my own fucking dishes.

I’m still playing with this Ethernet adapter on the PlayStation 2. I still can’t get the Navy Seals game working. Tony Hawk 4 works great, although I can barely play it against others. I am slowly learning more about different tricks, but it’s complicated, and requires more manual dexterity than I can muster. But it’s an excellent game. I didn’t realize how good the PS/2 is until tonight, when I got Quake 3 going on my work machine. The graphics are very blocky and crappy-looking, compared to something like Medal of Honor. Maybe I don’t have them maximized fully, but they look very primitive to me. Quake is interesting, but playing games with a mouse and keyboard is very counter-intuitive to me, and ergonomically disastrous. Still, it’s fun to play networked with other people at work after hours.

Not much else. A lot of trouble sleeping, and I took Tylenol PM last night, so I was out of it all day today. I heard from my PSA at the book publisher, and I should have proofs in a few weeks. That could mean the proofs are done when I’m on vacation, but I told them to push back until I get back so I don’t have to try to download them over a modem or anything.

OK, gotta go play a bit more before bed…

Baby book

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT

My mom moved recently (for reasons I don’t really want to get into) and told my sisters to basically get any of their shit that was around her house a month or so ago. I’d already been through this in 1997 when my mom was preparing to rent out and ultimately sell the house where we grew up, and I’m pretty sure I even wrote about that experience here. Basically, at that point, I thought it was last call and I got what I thought were the last of my mementos, old books, and keepsakes from the piles of old stuff in the basement. Well, I was wrong, and my sister found amidst a bunch of garbage a rather interesting little item that she sent to me, and it arrived today.

The item in question is my baby book. I don’t know if this is a unique tradition to the Catholics or the people in the Midwest or particularly Better-Homes-and-Gardens-type parents, and I’m interested to hear if anyone else has one of these. Basically, it is a pre-printed scrapbook with various pages dedicated to clippings, photos, and tons of statistical information that new mothers love to gather on their baby, like when they first sat up, when they first held their bottle, when they first asked if Alan Greenspan is actually the head of a tribunal Masonic government that secretly runs the entire world via the monetary system, and so on. Mothers then write down all of these factoids and save birthday cards and kindergarden grades and locks of hair and so on. In a sense, it’s almost like a throwback to the entire blog concept, except it’s not on the web, and it’s not full of ads for vitamins.

So I guess my mom bought one of these books about 32 years ago, and I completely forgot about it. I do remember as a child that this book hid away in the buffet in the kitchen, along with commemorative candles from baptisms and bibles given to us at first communion and real silver silverware that never saw the light of day. My book was very late 60s looking, although I was born in 1971. I seem to remember Monica’s book being much more Gerald Ford-esque 1970s, and I don’t even remember Angie having a baby book. Angie was the Polaroid child; my parents had a crappy 126-camera that took slide film, which means there are about a dozen photos of me before the age of four. Monica was born when the 110 camera was the shit, and there are a fair number of shots of her in the family album. When Angie came around in 1976, my dad’s new toy was the Polaroid, and we have dozens and dozens of photos of Angie doing about everything. I think this novelty replaced the novelty of the baby book in the same way that email has replaced the novelty of writing a letter and sending it snail mail, so Angie’s childhood is in a sense much more documented, but it’s a much different experience. And now that everyone has a video camera the size of a book of matches, I doubt anyone but the most dedicated mother is still using the baby book concept. And I’m sure most of them have gone to the web.

Anyway, the book showed up today, and it smells like the inside of that buffet drawer, and like our old house in Michigan. The first thing I found that amazed me was… my own receipt! The bill from the hospital was in there; the Grand Forks Air Force hospital charged Sgt. and Mrs. Konrath a grand total of $10.50 for a seven-day stay, including food. Also included are my hospital tags that went around my foot (with a US military stamp on them); the slip that was on my hospital crib; the front page of the Grand Forks Herald from January 20, 1971; the newspaper announcement of my birth; some photos showing me and my mom and dad in the wood-grained trailer where they lived when my dad was in the service; and a chunk of my hair from my first haircut.

Aside from the initial birth stuff, there’s not a lot that would be interesting to anyone but me, unless you find the fact that I walked when I was nine and a half months old, and I used to call making the bed “changing the bed” when I was a kid. It’s still a very neat little discovery for someone who is as nostalgic about the past as I am. I’m glad my sister was able to liberate it for me.

Not much else is up, except that I’m busy as hell at work, and that makes the day go by faster, but it makes the time off seem much shorter. The Rite-Aid by my house can’t get a god damned thing done right, and every single prescription I bring there gets fucked up somehow and they either don’t have the stuff or they forget to fill it or the insurance company needs some super-secret approval and they don’t fucking call me and ask for it, even though they ask me every single time what my phone number is in case they have questions. The fact that I run into stuff like this in pretty much every avenue of my life makes me wonder how things ever happen at all. I wish this generation had a saying like “they can send a man to the moon, but they can’t _______.” But the thing is - they can’t send a man to the moon anymore. They can’t even install a public toilet in the largest city in the country, and I pay them $30,000 a year in taxes. You can buy a toilet at Home Depot for $100. Thiry grand times everyone else who has ever had to take a piss buys a lot of toilets.

Okay, gotta go see if Ray actually bought a region-free DVD player or not.

Apartment oasis, George Romero

Sun, 12 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT

The apartment is still a bit too hot, but it’s a nice oasis from the weather outside. With temperatures at about 30 degrees and winds in the 20-30 MPH range pulling that down a dozen or so notches, it’s not the kind of weather to lounge around in. I went out for a while today, and endured the biting cold for a few hours, and it felt good to get out and do some shopping, but it felt better to return to a nice warm apartment with an armful of stuff I just bought.

Yesterday, I went to a screening of Night of the Living Dead at AMMI with my friend Julie. It was extra-cool because George Romero himself was there, and did a Q/A session after the film. First, it was cool to see the film on a big screen, with a sold-out audience. People laughed at a lot of the corny lines, and clapped for some of the more over-the-top stuff. Romero came out, and he was pretty cool. He reminded me of Bukowski in some ways, the tone in his voice or his articulation. He talked about Tom Savini’s craziness, the possibility of a fourth zombie movie, the fact that he was a director on Resident Evil but was fired after ten months, and a lot of other stuff. A bunch of suck-up people asked obvious questions and complimented him on obscure films that nobody’s seen, and that’s always a pain in the ass. Overall, it was a very cool screening, and the only bad part was that when I took out my camera to get some pictures, the damn batteries were dead. Oh well.

I spent part of today trying to hunt down these camera batteries. They are a lithium battery the size of two AA batteries, and I can’t just pick them up at the corner bodega. I ended up going to three different stores before I snagged two sets of batteries at a Staples. I also went to a Barnes and Noble and picked up some new travel books, and this totally fucked up Air Force survival manual. It was like $12 and is about 600 pages of information on how to skin rabbits and build shelters and what plants are edible, and tons of other stuff. It’s a very interesting read, the kind of thing I can open to a random page a thousand times over and still not get enough. It’s also the kind of book that makes me think I should be in the deep woods somwehere, digging a hole in the ground and covering it with branches while my campfire roars.

Not much else. I am watching this TV movie about JFK Jr. with some sort of sick fascination. It’s interesting, although I never really followed what happened with John John and I don’t really have an accurate mental timeline on the whole thing. I do remember when he died, because I was in DC visiting Larry, and a lot of people there were all bent out of shape and leaving flowers at the Kennedy grave. It’s an okay show, but not incredible.

I can’t believe I will be in Vegas on Friday. I better start getting my crap together for the trip…

Sick, sleep, proofs

Tue, 14 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I stayed home from work today because I felt sick on Monday and couldn’t get out of bed this morning. I ended up sleeping from about 10:30 at night to about 5:30 this afternoon. I kept waking up every hour or so to drink some juice or water and try to think about a shower and some food, but then I would go back to bed. I feel a bit better now, and I will go to work tomorrow, but I have this horrible feeling in my throat, and I really don’t want to be sick at the end of the week when I travel. But I always seem to get sick right before I fly, which always sucks.

The proofs for the book came back this afternoon, and I looked through them tonight. Everything seems cool, and I approved them, so it will take a few more weeks and then people will be able to place orders. It’s great to have the proofs, but I haven’t been able to think about it too much because of the mental haze from the cold.

Not much else is up, except that I’ve had some truly bizarre dreams while I was asleep. I’m going to bed in a few minutes, so I look forward to more of that. Maybe I will be able to write some of them down, use them in a book, something like that.

trip prep

Thu, 16 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I’m watching ER, packing for the trip. I’ll leave for Vegas tomorrow afternoon, meet up with Lon and Bill, and check in to the Boardwalk for four nights. I’ve barely planned for this thing, but it should be fun. I still feel slightly sick, but much better than yesterday. I hope another gallon of juice and twelve hours of sleep will get me closer to better.

I bought my birthday present to myself at B&H photo, a new Sony camcorder. This will replace the old Hi-8 I got six years ago, the one that I recently broke. It is the TRV-240, and it records in Digital8. This is the same format as DV or Mini-DV, but it stores the digital data on a standard Hi-8 cassette. This means it is bigger than the palm-sized camcorders (it is almost exactly the size of my old one) but it also means it will play my old Hi-8 tapes. Camcorders have improved quite a bit in the last six years; this one has a cool flip-out LCD screen, and a night-vision feature, plus a million other bells and whistles I will probably never figure out. Most of all, it has a firewire port on it, so I will be able to easily hustle the movies in and out of my computer.

I’ve spent the last two nights watching a lot of old movies, and they really remind me of Seattle. It’s very strange, and it makes me wish I taped more stuff from New York and Bloomington. It’s so cool to have a solid record of a timeframe, to see a room the way it was, to hear the sounds and see the traffic and actually look at that period. I really need to take more video, and starting with this trip, I will.

Not much else here. I need to pack now, and get ready to roll. Wish me luck!

Too cold to think

Fri, 24 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT

It is too cold to think. To get to work today, I wore two pairs of pants, an army jacket, a leather jacket, a hat, a hood, and a pair of gloves. I was still so cold I couldn’t breathe. My apartment has been in spats of hot and cold; the heater runs but sometimes bangs like Godzilla is in the basement and trying to escape via the radiator, and that worries me that the whole thing will stop working and my landlord will be in Italy for months. If so, I will light the place on fire. Also, the wind blows so hard, it blows right through the windows, no matter how much foam tape and bunched up blankets I cram into the crevices. I am slightly sick, but not a lot - maybe some kind of infection in my throat, a lump that I can’t swallow. It is getting slowly better, so hopefully more juice and water will lodge things free.

I got back on Tuesday from a pretty decent trip to Vegas. There were four of us: Bill, Lon, me, and Lon’s pal Cliff, who is a pilot for a regional airline. It was cool to talk to Cliff about planes and flying and the inside world of the aviation industry. I envy being able to fly a plane, but I don’t envy the fact that a third-year pilot makes about $20K a year. Anyway, we did a lot of cool stuff, so here’s a short list off the top of my head:

Went to Blue Man Group and sat in the front row (the poncho section.)
Ate at Emeril’s fish restaurant; had the 6-course tasting meal, which was all incredible.
Shot a Madsen M50 9mm automatic rifle with a silencer.
Rented a pimped out Caddy with leather everything, power everything, onstar, rear radar, an incredible stereo, ass-heating seats, and all the other goodies.
Bill found out that the Caddy has a 120 MPH cutout. It felt and sounded like we were going 60, though.
Ate at In-n-Out and Jack In The Box
Went to the Grand Canyon; threw a copy of Rumored to Exist into the canyon.
Went to the Hoover Dam, took the tour, found a tour guide who didn’t know what The A Team was. I made the wild sarcastic guess that she was born in 1986; she was actually born in 1984. I officially feel old.
Ate at Denny’s twice.
Went to 7-Eleven. Got a Slurpee. Did not fuck sluts. (Sorry, Ray.)
Went shopping at Caesar’s Forums. Bought a new pair of Vans shoes.
Went to Best Buy and bought a ton of new CDs and a new camcorder battery.
Won $40 on blackjack at Imperial Palace.
Went to the car museum at Imperial Palace.
Threw paper airplanes out of the hotel windows.
Got the Caddy airborne on a speedbump.
Went downtown and saw the Fremont Experience light show.
Went to the worst pawnshop ever downtown.
Talked to some strippers on Fremont Street.
Watched the movie Jackass on pay-per-view.
Watched the movie Undercover Brother on Bill’s laptop.
Ate a good breakfast at the Luxor.
Drank way too much at Smith and Wollensky.

That’s all I can think of. But we got a lot of stuff done from Thursday to Tuesday, and we didn’t do that much Vegas strip stuff. So I’m pretty happy with the results, except for the part about puking up a $160 dinner.

My camcorder was great on the trip, and now I have a firewire card for my PC. I installed all of the stuff on my Windows partition, and it works pretty good for editing video and pulling in stuff through the DV connection. I need to now pull in old stuff from Hi8 and make some real movies with it. I still have a lot to learn, but it’s not like I’m going anywhere this weekend.

OK, I need to do some more DV editing research. I’ll try to get back on schedule with regular updates, but my semi-hibernation isn’t helping things much.

Need a warm vacation

Mon, 27 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Forget what I said earlier; today it is colder than fuck out. And I didn’t really bundle up, because I went out yesterday and it was in the 30s, fairly reasonable. It was the walk of death from the subway to my front door today. And while my apartment was like an oven all weekend, I’ve only got a lukewarm temp with a horrid breeze ripping through the closed windows.

I’m doing the dance of computer software and hardware upgrades, or at least trying to avoid it. I feel like I won’t get much out of this video setup unless I have a copy of Premiere running ($500), but that will require a copy of Windows XP ($200) and a big hard drive ($200). Or I could do nothing and spend $0. But then when I decide to spend nothing, I later get this nagging feeling that I should do something, maybe cut a corner and only buy one or two of the three. I don’t know.

And part of me thinks I should take the money and go on a vacation to somewhere warmer. Delta had a fare this weekend to Orlando for $220, including hotel. But I would have to leave at 7PM on Friday (not a major problem) and come back at 7AM on Sunday (a major problem). I don’t deal with early flights like that, and I don’t think it would be worth it to spend essentially one day in Florida. But shit, I would spend $200 to spend an hour in Florida if it would mean I could feel my toes again.

I’m not reading anything or writing anything. My new book is available for preorder on iuniverse, but I don’t feel like mentioning it with a link because they are so shitty about preorders, and I don’t think anyone will buy the book anyway. Oh, and I put Vegas pictures online: here. [Broken link, sorry…] They are not all captioned or turned the right way. I’ll get to it eventually.

I’ve installed anti-spam software, and I’m pretty happy with it. I have the Spastic set of procmail rules, and it’s only accidentally deleted one mail, from Evite, but otherwise it is running 100%. It doesn’t pick up all spam, but I’d say it gets more than 90% of it. Today I had about 70 pieces of spam, and all of them got quietly whisked away. I am not actually deleting them yet, but once I’m sure the filters are working, I will automatically nuke stuff marked as spam.

That’s it. Throat still hurts, but it is slowly getting better. OK, I think I am giving up on this so I can read or something.

Subway balance

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I spent way too much money on computer stuff today. I got a 120 Gig Western Digital drive ($200) and a copy of Adobe Premiere 6.5 ($550). I’ve snagged a copy of Windows 2000, so once all of this crap gets here, I should have a fairly decent video editing machine. I also found out last night that my camera supports frame-by-frame and time-lapse recording. I made a stop-motion test movie tonight (40 seconds of video shot in 30 minutes - I forgot how tedious this shit is) and I have a lot of ideas for time-lapse stuff. It would be pretty cool to sit out in Times Square with a camera and do a time-lapse, or maybe out of my window during a snowstorm. Lots of ideas, not a lot of time.

The new Hunter S. Thompson showed up in the mail today, and I’ve read 30 or 40 pages so far. It’s a good read, but I wouldn’t say it’s incredible. At least I finally have something to read - maybe after I get done, I’ll be ready to start writing again.

On the way home, I saw this woman sit down on the train, and she was holding like 3 or 4 pots and trays full of food, plus balancing a backpack and reading a book at the same time. This is on the subway - the New York subway, the one that goes from 0 to 40 in about .2 seconds, creating sideways forces of about 10 G’s, knocking loose everything that isn’t firmly seated or grabbing onto a rail. I stared in amazement as she balanced all of this food - hot food, you could even smell that some of it was chicken - in bulky, metal containers, while the train sloshed the rest of it around. People like that truly amaze me, the people with the John Kennedy gene that can step in from a hurricane perfectly dressed and without a single hair out of place. I remember a day last month when it was about 80 below zero, and I saw a guy in Times Square, walking around with nothing but a fucking t-shirt on. He wasn’t sprinting to a subway, or running back into a store after a smoke, or anything else. He was just reading a fucking Playbill and walking down the road, while I was freezing to death in my coat inside of a damned restaurant. Every day, I at least put in a marginal effort to groom myself and get dressed, and yet I know I look bloodied, beaten, and fucked to the casual observer, while many New Yorkers look like a god damned Calvin Klein ad. Did I miss an immunization as a kid, or is this the product of private education?

Okay, back to reading.

Exploding Shuttles

Sun, 02 Feb 2003 00:00:00 GMT

So I woke up yesterday around noon, and was messing with Internet Explorer on this new Windows 2000 installation, trying to get the google toolbar installed. In the course of that, I ended up going to the google news page, and the top story was something like “A history of the Shuttle program.” I thought, “That’s pretty bizarre for a top news story - google’s sort algorithm must’ve gone completely sideways.” Then I looked at the link and it mentioned the crash of the Columbia, and I thought, “shit, what a glaring error - it was just the anniversary of the Challenger crash, not the Columbia. The Columbia is still operational - it’s landing today…”

Then I realized that something was wrong, and I turned on the news and saw the Shuttle was in bite-sized pieces all over East Texas. Holy shit.

---

When I was a kid, they used to gather us all in the library of our elementary school, or wheel in one of those A/V carts with a big, clunky, 1970s institutional-looking TV, so we could watch every Shuttle takeoff and landing. This was heady stuff in the height of the cold war; the demonstration of American might and technology. I ate this stuff up, too. I’d read every single book in the library about Apollo, Gemini, Mercury, Skylab. I knew every mission, every failure. I knew about Apollo 13 before Apollo 13 was a household word, when it was a seldom-mentioned blemish on our space program. Like many other ten-year-old kids of the era, I thought that in the million years it would take me to graduate high school and college, they would be running Shuttles to the moon and mars like Delta runs flights to Cancun, and in the distant future of 1998, I’d only need to make a quick trip via personal jetpack to the nearest spaceport for a Star Wars-like trip to the beyond. After I got bored of dinosaurs and before I found out about computers, space travel was a Big Deal.

One day we’re all watching a landing attempt, and this is a mission where they had some high winds and couldn’t land in California, so after a very tense one-day delay, (“Wow! Will they have enough air and Tang to last an extra day?”) they glided in to some other air force base, I think in Arizona or Nevada or something. I’d look this up, but I’m sure every Shuttle site on line is disconnected due to overload today. So just trust me on this one.

Anyway, the teachers are white-knuckling it, hoping the pride of the space fleet doesn’t have problems, while most of us are bored and wondering if we get to play kickball on recess today. And this one kid named Rick - maybe I should explain him. He looked like he could’ve made the final casting call to the movie Gummo, the kind of career hyperactive juvenile delinquent that spent so much time in the principal’s office, he had his own desk and phone in there. He lived in the trailer park white trash part of the school district, a small minority among the more typical whitebread, take-care-of-the-lawn-and-keep-up-with-the-Jonses folks that populated most of the subdivisions in the area. Rick was a prototypical headbanger, and the first kid I ever knew who was on Ritalin (although he chose to sell most of his dosage to other kids so they could cop a high while he ran rampant and caused chaos.) Coincidentally or not, Rick was also an amateur BMX racing star, the champion of his division in the state or maybe the world. It’s no surprise, considering they could put him in the chute on a stripped-down moly bike and have him punch the pedals like a motherfucker for two minutes of hyperactive rage.

Anyway, while the teachers are fearing the worst from this Shuttle problem, Rick jumps up and starts yelling “I HOPE IT CRASHES! I HOPE THE FUCKER BLOWS UP!” while he runs around the room in a Tasmanian Devil-like rage. The teachers had a fit at this act of total sacrelige and dragged him into a back room to beat him within inches of his life. (This was long before every square foot of elementary schools were wired with security cameras, and when teachers could still keep a rugby bat drilled with blood holes on their desk as a disciplinary aid.)

Fast-forward a few years, and I’m a high school freshman, sitting in a study hall and counting the minutes to lunch. In comes this dude who was much like Rick, the motorhead-type dude that was majoring in shop class and already had a mustache and two kids by the 9th grade. He came in and told me, “Dude! The fuckin’ Space Shuttle blew up! I just saw it on TV in the library!” Although partially amazed that he actually used his library pass to go to the library and not to go behind the school and inhale some glue, it also floored me that it could’ve happened. I thought maybe he was just pulling my leg, a prank concocted in a haze of cheap pot and model cement, an outburst like the one that Rick pulled years earlier. But by the time lunch started, there was more and more verification, and I knew it was real.

---

I feel strange about the whole thing. In terms of human life lost, it’s seven people; on 9/11 I personally knew four people, and way more people obviously died that day. Any time an army chopper goes down in Afghanistan, it’s about as many people; many more than seven test pilots have lost their lives in the construction of these craft over the last few decades. It’s not going to stop air travel, and it’s not going to (directly) cause major economic issues. We won’t go to war with someone over this loss, and we don’t have to rebuild or mourn some large metropolitan area because of it.

But of course, the space program is fucked. The ISS is doomed, the Shuttles may never fly again, and forget any sort of funding for any of the various Shuttle replacements that are on the drawing board. It will be years until we send people back into space, and the Russians are far too broke to do anything more than get back the three guys that are stuck in the ISS right now. Any hopes you may have had in seeing a man on Mars within your lifetime are now lost. And that’s too bad. Like I said, twenty years ago, I read every single book I could find on the subject, fact or fiction, and I’ve spent the last two decades following everything, reading everything, and hoping that ISS would be the first step to bigger and better things. This really sucks.

Missed a day

Tue, 04 Feb 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I feel like I missed a day somewhere, like I forgot to sleep for 24 hours and I can’t catch up. I took a sleeping pill Sunday, so on Monday I felt drunk and underwater and drugged and could barely think straight. I tried to fight this with caffeine and sugar and sleeping with my eyes open, but all I could think of was going home, getting into bed, falling asleep for days. My friend Bill was in town for the day, so we came back to my place, hung out, watched DVDs, played Red Faction, ate Thai food, and that was cool. A few hours of hassling with Premiere, and by midnight, it was bedtime, and… I was wide awake. I spent forever falling asleep, only to awake to the feeling that I missed a day somewhere.

Sunday night, when I took the Tylenol PM, I had the most fucked up terror nightmares ever. Some mystical force was attacking me on the subway, in some mathematical fashion, and I was so scared of it, I was yelling numbers or something, and I am pretty sure I was really yelling because it was the sort of thing where you try to scream in a dream and you can barely form the words or work the vocal chords. It was a total your-life-is-ending, Mothman conspiracy type of thing. I was hiding at Marie’s house and sleeping on her floor, and she vanished, and both of her cats were walking circles around me and talking, like it was some kind of Satanic ritual. (She actually has three cats, but one is newer, so she was not included. You ever notice how stuff in dreams is never up to date? Like how your dreams always happen in your childhood house?) Anyway she vanished, and then her dad showed up and took all of us on a tour of Knott’s Berry Farm, and I felt really guilty for interrupting the whole seance terror thing. I don’t remember much of the dream after that. But the terror part was pretty fucked up, and it bothered me for hours into the morning. I’ve been having more and more defined dreams, and I really hope that is an indicator that I will get off my butt and start writing something soon. My dreams were the best during the writing of Rumored, and it was no coincidence or anything.

So anyway. My tax refund is done and on the way to the bank, but I am torn between buying a gigantic monitor, going on a vacation, or just putting the damn thing in the bank for retirement. I would love to sit in front of 1600x1200 on a flat screen, but I was talking to Bill yesterday about land, houses, and all of that stuff, and it makes me think about that, too.

Not much else. Still very windy. I had a nice bit of Deja Vu this morning walking to work, in a crisp air of about 40 degrees with the rain just about to explode from the clouds. For some reason, it really reminded me of the early spring rains of Bloomington about ten years ago, walking around town without a car and with too much open road in front of me. It’s strange to think that was ten years ago, but it was. Damn.

Gotta call Ray. His mom is in town, and it’s even money that he put six .44 slugs in her head for some random reason. The parental cross-country buffer zone is great, but it means you have to put up with a years’ worth of cached misery in a week of time.

Taking the iPod plunge

Fri, 07 Feb 2003 00:00:00 GMT

My MiniDisc player broke! AGAIN! I just bought the fucking thing last April or something. And it’s a Japanese model, so I can’t return it, I can only put it on the slow boat and pay more than it originally cost to get it back in a year or two.

So I decided to buy an iPod. It looks like the best solution, and it is more compact and easier to work with. The only problem is getting it to work with Linux, but it appears there are hacks out there. The other option is to burn all of my CDs on my Windows partition and then install iTunes or whatever the Windows version of the software is on there. I’ll figure that out after I get it. I ordered the standard 5Gb model - I figure that should work for now.

I also decided to blow even more money and get a new monitor and video card. I got a Matrox G550 Millenium card - I was tempted to get a Radeon with twice as much memory, but the Matrox has Linux support, and that means more than billions of polygons a second or whatever. I also got a ViewSonic 20.1” LCD monitor. It’s very cool looking, black, has built-in speakers and microphone, and does 1600x1200. So I should be very happy once that bitch is on my desk.

I almost forgot - the books got here yesterday. They look good, and I’m happy with them. If you’re reading this and you want a copy, send me an email with your address and I’ll send you one for free. I only have ten of them, but I’m sure less than ten people read this regularly, so there you go.

It snowed like a motherfucker last night, and everything’s white outside. I wish I could get out there with the camcorder before it turns to grey sludge, but I’m here at work.

Computer upgrade disasters

Tue, 11 Feb 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I think most of the computer upgrade disaster is over. I now have a new monitor, a new video card, and a new Linux installation. It took me about six hours to get everything installed with Linux and Windows 2000, most of that being Linux. I had to back up 9 gigs of personal info and work onto CD-R, then install RH8 three times, then I was stuck for an hour because networking didn’t work, and it turns out it was because I entered the wrong thing for the fucking gateway. Now, all is mostly well, except I have to undo all of the stupid Red Hat bells and whistles and get back to an actual functional operating environment. And as I say this, emacs looks deranged with all of these stupid banners and widgets and extra bullshit they have affixed to every side of my text window. They should put Richard Stallman on a hidden government installation hidden in the middle of the Nevada desert somewhere and do the world a load of good.

So now I have this monstrous screen - 21.1” actual viewable size, with a resolution of 1600x1200. It’s big enough that I can have a browser window opened to the maximum size and still have a fuckload of space. Text is very tiny, but I am too greedy to set it to a larger size. We’ll see how it works when I get some real writing underway.

Anyway, the monitor is cool. Also, the router fuckup let me figure out what was wrong with the Navy Seals game, and I got to play that online for a bit tonight. I totally got my ass kicked, but it’s pretty fun. And my iPod is on the way - it should be here tomorrow. It was back-ordered, so I slapped down another $200 to upgrade to the 20 Gig version, and it is in stock. So I’ll be all set there.

Very tired, and feeling a bit sick. Computer upgrades always stress me out, but at least it’s a short week next week…

iPod

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 00:00:00 GMT

The iPod is here. I got it on Wednesday, and I’ve been happily adding songs to it and toting it around to work and back, and I’m pretty impressed with it sofar. I’ve only used it with Windows so far; I bought the Windows model (which is formatted for Windows and not HFS+ for the Mac) and it came with a copy of MusicMatch that’s been modified for the iPod. So when I plug in the iPod with a firewire cord, MusicMatch opens and asks me if I want to sync up my music. I can also look at the iPod as if it was my E: drive, and even stash files there, in case I want to put them on another computer later. You can’t do anything with the files, although now the iPod has some rudimentary organizer capability if you put vcard or vcal files on it.

Overall, I have a lot of good things to say about the device. The UI is pretty slick, a very quality product that one would expect from Apple. The unit itself looks great, very futuristic yet refined, unlike the cheap plastic cases on most MP3 players. It’s also very small, only 7 ounces and smaller than I’d expect a 20 Gig drive plus player to be. The display is incredibly crisp and readable, with a great font. It sounds good, it holds a lot, and it’s very easy to update. Plus it has some long-range batteries that are automatically charged when you plug in the firewire cord.

There are a few minor issues, but nothing huge. First, the chrome back of the case looks great but instantly became a huge smudge and is impossible to clean. And I already scratched it. Also, the clip on the remote control is very tiny and a bit impractical. And the stock earbud headphones didn’t work for me, so I went for a pair of Sony vertical in-ear phones. And I wish it had more games on it - there is a breakout game, but nothing more. Other than that, very happy with everything on it.

Not much else is going on here, except that I am relatively brain dead from the temps outside and the minor cold I am nursing right now. I think I am going to the grocery store after work to buy a bunch of comfort-type food and then I’ll lock myself in the apartment and sleep through the weekend. There are three days, so hopefully I will get to mess with the computer all weekend, and watch the backlog of movies I have sitting around the house.

Oh yeah, it is valentine’s day. I would go on a small tirade about this day and the expectations of people and how I don’t like to deal with it when I am single and alone, but it’s not really worth the effort. My only consolation is that I will probably go to Rite-Aid tomorrow and buy a bunch of candy for 50% off.

iPod, CD binging

Sat, 15 Feb 2003 00:00:00 GMT

This iPod is incredible. It’s a great experience to have a big plurality of your music collection with you at all times, in a tiny little box as big as a deck of cards. And it’s great to listen to everything on shuffle, hearing old favorites next to new CDs next to things I cherished ten years ago but haven’t heard in ages because they were on a compilation CD buried somewhere in my apartment. I’ve been ripping CDs nonstop, and I’m barely filling up the 20 gigs of space. I’ve got about six gigs on there, and another gig or so of stuff I’ve ripped today.

I went to Best Buy today, the new one in Chelsea. It was a minor pain in the ass because there wasn’t an N/W train running to Manhattan, so I had to get on the 7. Then I got on an F, and it took me right to the door of this new place. The whole store is actually underground, and it’s big for a store in Chelsea, although it’s probably one of the smallest Best Buys I’ve been in. I went on a CD rampage, and here’s what I got:

CKY - Infiltrate, Destroy, Rebuild
CKY - Volume 1
Twisted Forever - A Tribute to the Legendary Twisted Sister
Iron Maiden - Powerslave
Iron Maiden - Piece of Mind
Iron Maiden - Somewhere in Time
Iron Maiden - Iron Maiden
Orgy - Vapor Transmission
NWA - Greatest Hits
Green Day - Kerplunk
Dead Kennedys - Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death

The Iron Maiden CDs are all the new “full cover” versions, with shitty bonus tracks available as multimedia only. I should’ve bought them all five years ago when they were in the cool Castle reissues with a bonus CD in a brilliant box, but I’m an idiot. I don’t have any of them on CD - all of my old Maiden stuff was on vinyl. The CKY is new to me, but I really like them a lot - I first heard them in the Jackass movie. The rest of the list were impulse purchases or stuff that was at a good price, so there you go.

I also picked up a copy of The Sims for PS/2, not really knowing much about it except that a lot of people like it. I played it for an hour or so this afternoon, and it is a total pain in the ass. You have to tell your dude what to do: eat, crap, bathe, watch TV, learn stuff, pick up the house, etc etc. If you don’t do stuff, your meters go down. For example, if you don’t talk to other family members, your social meter goes down. If you don’t watch TV or listen to the radio, your fun meter goes down. And you never, ever have time to do everything. So basically, it’s like real life. And I can’t manage to keep my own house clean or eat three square meals a day, so there’s not a chance I can do it on the computer. Despite this, it’s hard to put down. Go figure.

OK, gotta get out of here and get some stuff done.

hiding from snow

Tue, 18 Feb 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Yes, I survived the snow. I went shopping on Sunday, so I hid out indoors, watched TV, and did nothing else while it managed to pour down about two FEET of white stuff. I went out at about seven to get my laundry, but found the laundromat and everything else closed. So I got the camcorder and walked around for a while. Cars were entirely buried in drifts, and roads were mostly plowed to single-lane width, with some of the sidewalks partially shoveled, but most of them completely hidden under dunes of white. Absolutely nobody was outside, with no cars, people, or sounds for blocks. It felt like the whole city had vanished from a neutron bomb, aside from the occasional building super digging out their sidewalk.

I got to work okay today, although it took about twice as long as usual. The walk to the train took some patience, as only half of the sidewalks were clear, and each street crossing at a curb involved scaling a wall of snow left by the plows. Trains were slow, crowded, and infrequent, so that took a great deal of waiting. Only about half of our people made it here today, so it will be somewhat quiet in the office this afternoon.

Not much else to report, except that I’m getting frustrated over a lack of writing lately, and that’s compounded by a general feeling that I’m not sure what I should be writing next. I have a couple of ideas on projects, but I also have this overwhelming feeling that I’m barely treading water these days, and I need to find that “big” project to somehow advance myself. I guess for years I thought that Rumored would be that project, and now that it’s done and I’m still here at the same level, it makes me wonder what I need to do next. Does that make any sense?

New Best Buy

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Yes, I’m still here. I guess I’ve been hiding out, although I really don’t know what I’ve been doing for the last week or so. After the snow ended, everything started melting, flooding, raining, and the walk to work became these waist-high mountains of snow, with giant lakes on the other side. The weekend’s been nothing but rain, and yet I was vaguely productive in the sense of getting out of the house and not sitting in bed until 3PM and then eating one daily meal of delivery pizza in front of the TV.

I got out into the city yesterday, fought the rain and got some DVD shopping at the new Best Buy in Chelsea. There are a lot of new stores going in down there, and I’m not entirely sure why, because I’m not familiar with the area. Maybe everyone’s getting the fuck out; maybe Bloomberg gave some kind of tax cut to big chain stores who wanted to move in. Anyway, I saw an Outback Steakhouse going in there. I am not entirely in love with the place, but it’s at the head of the A list for Ray, for some reason. So at least when he’s here next, I can bring him there in addition to other New York places.

Today I went to Rite-Aid to get fucked over on a prescription again. I don’t think they’ve ever been able to get one right yet. Also went grocery shopping, which as I’ve mentioned before involves grabbing about $50 of stuff that doesn’t even constitute a meal. I guess I really should eat before I go to the store. At least the iPod makes it a bit more tolerable. The muzak at this particular store is usually horrific, electronic horn and synth versions of bad 80s pop tunes blasted out of tinny speakers in the ceiling. You’d think they do it to get people the fuck out of the store, instead of somehow finding music that made people want to buy more meat or something.

I’m barely picking at some short stories for a book, and that’s what I must go do now.

Linux upgrades, conspiracies, Danger

Thu, 27 Feb 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Okay, it just took me about an hour and a half of dicking around to get started, but here I am. It seems Red Hat Linux 8.0 has a brain tumor in the program that I use to resize images, and I had to go through a lengthy procedure to get the fucking thing all right. But it is, and here’s a treat for you: Photos of the Blizzard! This is mostly a series of shots when I was walking to work on the Tuesday after, and it features lots of buried cars. [These are long gone, sorry.]

Another project I am working on now - I am writing another glossary, but it is a conspiracy theory glossary now. It is here, but I have barely started working on it. It takes a lot longer to research each entry than the last glossary, but it is loads of fun. So give me a week or two, and I should have enough entries for it to be interesting.

In other news, I bought a Danger Hiptop yesterday. It is a combination cell phone, small computer, PDA, web browser, and pager, with a small keyboard, a neat flip-open screen, and very cool integration. You can view the web with it, use it to read mail, do PDA-type stuff, and play games on it. All of your data actually lives on servers, and their back-end strips down and re-renders web pages for speed and simplicity. And the cool part is that the data network is all-you-can use for one price, at least for the first year. I don’t actually have it yet - I ordered on the phone, so I am very ancy about getting the thing. But I’m hoping it will let me send mail and maybe put up some tiny web journal while on the road with it. We’ll see.

Not much else is going on here, just busy with other crap and reading about 22 different books on the JFK assassination at the same time for the glossary. When you read this much shit about it, you can pretty much make up any story about that day and have it make sense. Anyway…

Geiger counters on the subway

Sat, 01 Mar 2003 00:00:00 GMT

On Friday, while I was riding to work, the subway stopped at 57th and 7th like it usually does, and while the doors were open, I saw three NYPD cops with FUCKING GEIGER COUNTERS! WHAT THE FUCK!?!?

Not a lot is up here. I got a copy of Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA by Bob Woodward from an Amazon z-shop for only three bucks, in hardcover. I read about a fifth of it last night, and it’s not filled with ultra-crazy conspiracy shit, but the kind of thing that makes the CIA Director’s job look more like a conventional executive’s job, except way more competitive and full of political bullshit, and instead of ordering raincoats from China, you’re covertly sending weapons of mass destruction to central Asia. So that’s interesting, and I’m going to have to dig through sources of other books to find more stuff to buy used on Amazon.

I bought the Fear and Loathing Criterion edition this afternoon, but haven’t fully dug into the extras yet. I watched about half of the movie with HST’s commentary, and it’s both interesting and weird. It’s almost impossible to understand a word he’s saying, plus he’ll ramble on forever about something, and then when someone asks an intriguing question like, “did you like the way Benitio Del Toro played Oscar?” he will simply answer “Yep” and that’s it. I haven’t looked at the other stuff but there are like 58 sets of commentary and a bunch of other extra shit I will probably never have time to get to.

I was dicking around at the delta.com site today and found a hotel plus plane package to Hawaii for $700!! I’m going to have to look into that, because even a trip to New Orleans was like twice as expensive. Maybe there’s some kind of stupid catch, like you have to sleep on the beach or you have to fly in the cargo hold. My sister went to Hawaii and I would like to check it out some time, especially if I can do it without spending like five grand on it.

Where the hell is my food? I haven’t eaten all day, and I’m waiting for my sweet and sour pork from the local Chinese dump…

Stupid Facts

Sun, 02 Mar 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I like the new Coke can design. It’s cool.
I’m trying to figure out how the impending Broadway musicians’ strike will actually affect me, since I’ve never been to a Broadway show and never really intend to.
I almost bid on a 1976 Gremlin in Staten Island that was up to $300. I wanted to paint flames on it, with a roller and housepaint, and paint OFF THE PIGS on the back of it. And if I got pulled over by the cops, I would say I was a pork farmer.
There seems to be some kind of national shortage of Levoxyl, a synthetic thyroid replacement. So I’ve been out of the shit for a few days now.
Emil Goldfus (aka “Abel”), the NY-based Russian spy who was exchanged for Gary Powers, lived in the same apartment building as Norman Mailer when he was writing the spy novel Barbary Coast. They didn’t know each other, though.
I have a chance to go to Hawaii for four days for $700. I am debating checking it out in April or May.
It’s raining like a motherfucker out.
I thought those Catherine Zeta Jones/T-Mobile ads were annoying, but now for some reason I find her incredibly hot. Maybe it’s because I keep going to their site every three minutes to see what is up with my Sidekick.
The Cigar Corner, on the corner of 30th Ave and Steinway, sells Barely Legal magazine. No I did not buy it.
There is a cheat in Grand Theft Auto - Vice City that changes all of the pedestrians into the cast of the Michael Jackson Thriller video: zombies, and an occasional red-leather MJ wannabe.
After someone is killed in the gas chamber, their body has to be completely scrubbed with bleach before it can be handled.
Only three US Presidents have cried in public while in office: William McKinley, William Taft, and George W. Bush.
You can use vinyl dye (sold at car parts store for refinishing car interiors) to paint plastic parts like bezels of computer drives, keyboards, cases, etc.
Diesel engines get better city mileage than highway, because heat makes diesel combustion more efficient.
I have a beard again. I’ll try to take some pictures of it this time. [I’m glad I didn’t.]
The acronym TWAIN (a scanner interface) stands for Technology Without An Interesting Name.
The bible is the most shoplifted book in the USA. (Strange, considering how easy it is to get a free copy from the Gideons…)
The first flushing toilet in a movie was in Psycho.
I’m sick of writing these facts.

Sidekick

Mon, 03 Mar 2003 00:00:00 GMT

The Sidekick is here! I thought it would take another week or more, but it showed up during lunch, and I plugged it into the charger right away. My old SIM card from my VisorPhone fit right in, and when I fired it up, it asked me to set up an email account right away. I got the name jkonrath (at the host tmail.com - feel free to drop a line) and everything worked right away! So I am very happy about it.

Everything about the Sidekick is pretty cool. The display flips open in a very cool way, and the LCD is very crisp and easy to read. The whole thing is very compact, and small - like the size of one of those hard-wired pocket videogames or something. The keyboard isn’t too bad to type with, although it takes some getting used to using the edges of your fingers as opposed to a full-size keyboard. The whole design in general feels more like an appliance, a usable tool than something like a pager or Palm pilot. It’s some pretty Star Trek bullshit.

The OS and applications are the icing on the cake, though. There’s a good email program that operates about like Eurodra or Outlook, and it’s integrated into an address book that also feeds into the portable phone application. AOL IM is built-in, as well as a calendar, notes, todo list, and a handful of games. The Web browser is pretty cool - unlike WAP phones, this goes through a proxy that crunches down sites and graphics so they are easily viewed and so you don’t download as much. You still get graphics though, enough to make it much more rich than a WAP phone. And there’s a detachable camera, about as big as a small keychain, so you can snap a photo (color, but very small) and then mail it as an attachment or access it on the web aside all of your mail and other stuff in their secure portal site.

The coolest part - UNLIMITED DATA FOR ONE PRICE! You only get 200/1000 minutes for $39 a month, but you get all the data you can download. Pretty cool.

By the way, I have a small web log that I can update on the go that is located at http://hiptop.com/hiplog/read/4/292/. I don’t know if I will actually update it regularly, but it lets me send in pictures I take, so it’s pretty cool to mess with.

I booked a vacation to Hawaii today. I am going in the second week of May, to Oahu. I got the airfare and four nights in a hotel right on the beach for $900. Now I need to do some research and actually figure out what to do there.

Gotta go watch wrestling and play the games on the Sidekick…

Repressed memories about computer cases

Thu, 06 Mar 2003 00:00:00 GMT

A reply RE http://elemeta.com/retrocase/index.html

Oh man, you just brought back a horrible repressed memory with your case page…

When I was in college in 1991, I didn’t have the cash for a computer, and needed one bad. This guy sold me an XT clone motherboard for ten bucks, and I scoured the used junk shops looking for the rest of the pieces to get something together that would run Procomm and sit behind a 2400 baud modem so I didn’t have to leave the house to get my email.

So a local place that sold lamps and lighting equipment and had a side-line selling mail-order Commodore 64 parts also had a beaten up 5150 case, PS. and keyboard, and I talked the guy down to five bucks for all three. Great! I could just slap in that newer motherboard and get to work, right?

Um, no. Turns out, as you probably know, that not a damn thing lined up between the case and board. Every single mounting hole except one was off, and I had the whole thing supported by a suicidal mix of plastic standoffs and mix-and-match screws and bolts. My mobo had like 8 or 9 expansion slots, which didn’t jive with the 5-slot webbing on the back of the case. So I borrowed a friend’s dremel and went to work, tearing out all of the slots on the case until the whole thing looked like a Civil War field amputation done with a blunt butterknife. The worst of all was the keyboard connector. The damn thing did not line up at all, so at three in the morning one night, I got out a soldering iron, melted out the stupid thing, and reattached each wire with a few inches of lampcord or whatever I had laying around. I could then move the plug a few inches over.

The whole thing sortof worked for a semester. I fried that 55-watt power supply when I got one of those full-height, five Meg hard drives on usenet for about ten bucks. I went to a local place and got a 100-watt power supply for a few dollars, and managed to get the drive working, although when it spun up, I was afraid it would blow out every fuse in the house.

I had a lot of intermittent shorts and lockups, and I figured the case was flexing the board, or crossing some traces on the backside. So when I got my tax refund next spring, I went out and blew $100 on a really nice mini-tower that I ended up using for the next ten years. But the shorts continued. I would disassemble and reassemble the damn thing in rage every night, hitting the case, the PS, flexing the motherboard, doing everything to get it to come back on. Finally one night, I had the whole thing torn down to air, earth, fire, and water, and I found the problem - the damn CPU was replaced with a V20 before I got it, and it was seated in the socket crooked. When the system heated up, it would pull half of the pins from the socket. I re-seated it, and all was well until I got a real 486 a year later.

Anyway, your project made me nostalgic for the old days, and glad I have a nice case now.

-Jon

Spring

Sun, 16 Mar 2003 00:00:00 GMT

It was almost seventy degrees outside today. Since I am going to Hawaii in May and it seems like everything will be a two-mile walk, I have been trying to walk a bit more, so I put on the iPod and went out for a while today. I crossed through an area north of my house, north of the highway that consists of a lot of warehouses, small homes covered in barbed wire, and lots of half-disassembled and scavanged Crown Vic taxicabs on blocks. It’s all concrete, not much in the way of life, just a set of twisted railroad tracks on pylons and steel a few dozen feet in the air, snaking through the buildings a hundred years after they were put there, as an afterthought. I watched a trio of Conrail blue locomotives pushing steel across the horizon, and the random shuffle of the iPod (which I sometimes think is not that random, based on the songs it sometimes throws at me), and it hit me with a Peter Gabriel song - Secret World - from a ten-year-old album that made me think of ten years old. Back in 1993, when I used to take the same kind of walk once or twice a day, listening to the walkman, I’d walk underneath the trestles at 15th Street in Bloomington, and I’d sometimes look up at an engine assembling together boxcars into a freight train as I hustled toward class, toward work. And now here it was, ten years later, worlds away, watching trains as a killed an afternoon a step at a time.

It’s all stupid but symbolic that I think of my life ten years back, the relationship I was starting in 1993 and how great it feels to be in love in the spring, to start something new and know it’s mutual. And that carried through the summer and into the fall, and then it was over. I should have forgotten about all of this years ago. I’ve been through enough other, longer relationships to think this should have been bumped out of the cache long ago. But it’s funny how a nice round number can make things come up again. And for the rest of the walk, things felt so insignificant, in the sense that I felt like nothing had happened in the last ten years, that I was back to walking nowhere with a walkman on my hip instead of doing anything productive with my life. And that sounds stupid, given everything that has happened in the last decade. But it’s weird how things can go full-circle on you like that.

Explosion

Sat, 29 Mar 2003 00:00:00 GMT

About an hour ago, I was watching TV - I forget what, probably flipping through the channels, and contemplating going to Taco Bell for dinner. I noticed that my lights in the living room were flickering a bit, and I was sort of pissed that my fluorescent-LED replacement things that were supposed to last for ten million hours were crapping out after less than a year. All of a sudden, there was a fucking EXPLOSION! It was far louder than anything I’ve ever heard (and I’ve heard some impressive stuff) and it sounded like it was within a block of my place. I checked the phones and the ethernet to see if it was anything that would affect that, and then I went into that weird sort of adrenaline-fueled paranoia where you memorize the location of everything in the room in case the five stories above you collapse into the basement and you need to find a quick exit. I grabbed my coat and went outside, thinking it would be a fucking scud missile or car bomb, although it sounded far too “compressed” and not as omnidirectional as an exploding car.

By the time I went outside (I waited a second - read too many stories about IRA secondary bombing) and saw some fire trucks trying to put out a couple of cars that were basically twenty foot pyres of flame. There was also smouldering smoke coming out of every ConEd manhole within a block. I got enough half-truths from the pigs that were fencing off the neighborhood; I guess there was a fire and explosion of a switch or transformer underground, hence the flickering lights, and an exploding manhole set off the cars. So I went to Burger King, came back, and ate. A few minutes, there was a second explosion, but not as loud. And I think I heard a third, but it was much smaller, maybe a car gas tank or something. The lights are still flickering, and I’m worried that they will go out. (Shit - fourth explosion!) But the computer and ethernet are working fine. I hope they get the fire underway or the dropping temps help, and I hope ConEd has some redundant systems they can get online.

---

Nothing interesting is going on in life. I am really trying to think of another writing project, but I can’t find a spare moment or two a day to do any writing. And that’s not because of anything interesting going on. I basically go to work, come home, eat a couple of meals in there, and add some TV or the PlayStation, and that’s about it. I’ve been fighting a cold, which also makes it hard to get out of a slump. But I have managed some updates to the glossary in the last week or so. And I’m still planning for Hawaii, which is in five? weeks.

Speaking of just like yesterday, it’s been four years since I left Seattle. (Actually, the four-year mark is on Monday.) I’ve been thinking about Seattle a lot, even in my dreams, which is part of my depression lately. I have these dreams where I go back and somehow my apartment was still held for me, and a bunch of stuff of mine is in storage, stuff that I thought I lost years ago. The apartment is always different in the weird, surreal way that dreams distort reality, but it still has so many details that remind me so much of 600 7th Ave #520. This morning I had the dream, and when I woke up, a cool, clean breeze drifted through a window. For a moment, it felt like I was back, like my big window looking out over Harborview was cracked open, and I could wake up, run downstairs, and jump in the Escort for a quick run up I-5 and to the nearby Denny’s, or over the 520 to some record shopping in Bellvue. It’s always weird what I miss and what I look back on over time, but right now it’s really kicking me in the ass because I don’t feel like the present is offering that much. Of course, ten years from now, I could be anywhere in the world, wishing I was back in Astoria the night the manholes exploded.

Now I’m off to play some Playstation for a while.

books on the stove, I am Nostradamus

Wed, 02 Apr 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I had two books (or more) on the stove at the same time for five years. Then I had one really hard book on the front burner for another two years. And for the last year, I haven’t had anything going on, and it has been driving me apeshit. I’ve started lots of projects that fell flat, and I’ve felt overwhelmingly depressed, examining short stories and pieces of outlines letter-by-letter, wondering why things didn’t work and how they needed to happen.

Last night, I came up with an idea for a book. It’s actually one that I kicked around a while ago, but dismissed as too hard or too far off. Then I found a way to frame it, a way to put it together, and a way to get it to work. And now, it’s all in my head, and I’m very scared about planning it and laying down, but I think I can. And I think it will work. And I think it will be everything I wanted Summer Rain to be, but I get to start all over, from a blank slate. And I’m very excited to have a project, to have a mission, to have something that just might work.

Of course, I can’t tell you shit about it on here. And I might stop posting for a while as I get started with it. Just a warning.

I had a super fucking bizarre nightmare last night about someone who shall remain nameless (who has already been told about this, so nobody else needs to worry that it was you) and I can’t really explain it, but it was this thing where I was eternally in love with some girl, and then she left, and I went to see this friend and confide in her, and somehow she was less than corodial about the whole thing, and even in the dream the depression and angst were so heavy and piercing. I stopped going to work and drove around Portland with my car in first gear, trying to hit something but only going a mile an hour. Then I showed up at work and this guy Mike was installing a rack mount with a bunch of new gear. It looked cool, and he was all excited, and when he switched it on, it burst into flames.

I woke up from this dream totalled, thinking somehow I’d subliminally hurt this person in real life, or lost my friendship with her forever, or some other bullshit you’d think before you get out of the comfortable womb of your bed and into the shower. So I went to work and told the fire part of the dream to Mike, who really was installing a new rack to hold an IBM xSeries blade enclosure and something like eight new blades.

About an hour later, I went to see what Mike was working on in the NOC, and THE FUCKING BLADE ENCLOSURE WAS POURING OUT SMOKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SARS-mania

Fri, 04 Apr 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been having assorted sadistic daydreams that this SARS thing is going to be a global killer virus, something like in the movie 12 Monkeys and I, somehow genetically mutated through decades of psycological drug use and abuse, manage to survive. I had a similar dream when I was a child and suffering from a continual 104-degree fever; it’s one of my earliest memories. Except in this one, everyone was bursting into flame. At first it was isolated, but then it got to the point where you would be watching TV and an anchorman on CBS would suddenly immolate on camera. By the very end, the surface of the earth looked like the moon, and a giant voice laughed, like the end of a Vincent Price movie or something. Heavy shit for a 4-year-old, and with my newfound ability in precognitive dream prediction (see last entry), maybe it will all go down.

I’m going to see Twisted Sister tonight. I’m actually more excited at the thought of going to IHOP for dinner first, but it will be good to get out of the house, and a bit better now that there’s this no-smoking ban in New York. It’s gotten to the point that I have a second leather jacket I wear to clubs because the smoke is so bad. I do feel like going home and sleeping for a decade, but I’ll drink some Coke and jump around a little and try to get alive in the next two hours before I leave.

Not much else going on. It’s rainy and cold out here. I’ve been outlining the next book, picking at the timeline and the characters. I still don’t have a name for it, but you’ll be the first to hear.

It’s time to battle the subways and get home.

junk

Sun, 13 Apr 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I don’t feel like writing, but feel a need to update, so you get another bulleted list:

I chopped off all of my hair today. It’s down to about a #2 guard, so it looks like I just got done with basic training. Much easier to wash, much more comfortable.
I saw the movie Old School against advice, and it was actually really funny. Will Ferrell didn’t actually ruin it, and Vince Vaughn was hilarious playing a blue-veined dick (which he’s sorto f typecast into.)
I saw High Fidelity tonight, after reading the book last week. (re-re-re-reading…) I loved the movie except for the woman who played Laura, who was horrible. The scene where they were beating up Tim Robbins/Ian is hilarious.
Still writing this new book, although it is going slow.
I hate daylight savings time, at least the spring part. It would be nice if it always moved backward, so you’d get like an extra two hours a year.
PS2: I got Splinter Cell, which is damn hard but cool looking; Auto Modelista, which is really interesting looking but entirely vapid; and Tribes Aerial Assault, which is very hard to play but incredibly worth it.
I heard the Pink Floyd song “Wish You Were Here” in K-Mart today.
I can’t think of anything else.

Allergy season and forgetting your own age

Wed, 16 Apr 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Ah, allergy season. I was wondering why I suddenly couldn’t breathe and my eyes were on fire. I skipped work yesterday and started the Benadryl/Claritin rollercoaster, which by mid-afternoon today had me to the point where I could see through walls. I think it will rain tonight, so the weekend might be tolerable. It’s amazing and yet not that amazing that I had no allergies for years, and then when I moved to the city with the absolute worst air quality in the country, I’m back to wheezing and gasping.

Not a lot has been up. I’ve been working on this book, which is going okay. I’m above 10,000 words, so I guess that’s an offical hull-laying, or at least enough that I can really say I have started. No title yet, though. The book is similar to Summer Rain in many ways, but it takes place over the summer of 89, when the main character (and me - what a coincidence) graduate high school and get ready to leave for college. It’s supposedly going to be heavily themed in heavy metal, or at least that will be a big component of it, the metal culture or lack thereof in a shithole town in Indiana at the end of the 80s. There’s also a lot of angst over going to high school with a bunch of dumb football jocks that will be in there, the whole coming-of-age thing, etc. The fact/fiction ratio will be more fiction than Summer Rain, but still somewhat based on my reality. It won’t be a true prequel to Summer Rain, because I have to change a few things to get stuff to work. It will hopefully be shorter, and the writing a bit lighter, but it won’t be anything like Rumored. That’s about all I can tell you right now.

Someone sent me one of those dumb things where you take the year you were born, multiply by 9, add the number of times a week you eat out, etc etc and then divide by 23 or whatever and it says how old you are. I couldn’t get it to work, and it was just tonight that I realized I FORGOT HOW OLD I WAS.

Okay, gotta start writing…

stuck

Sun, 20 Apr 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Nothing is going on. I am at a bad stuck point with this book because it is ultimately very depressing to write about your life right after high school. I feel that every single thing I did in that era was hopelessly wrong. Not in a moralistic sense, but in a very awkward way. If I could redo it all, there are so many things I’d do: I’d run ten miles a day, work two jobs, save every penny, take every summer class I could, and definitely handle things different dating-wise. But it’s stupid to look back at that shit and think about changing it. And I’ve done it so much, that the topic is worn out for me. And I didn’t really think about any of this when I went into this book. I am very tired about writing about this, and it’s very frustrating. It feels like I wrote “I will not think about Indiana anymore” 500 times on a chalkboard and someone asked me to do it a 501st time.

I think part of the problem is that there is not a catalyst for this like there was with Summer Rain. With SR, there were two “true loves”, two different people that I was obsessed with way back in 1992, very different people with very different reasons behind them. And a lot of that was still left over, and that really kicked me in the ass and made me want to write that book. With this book, the love interest that I am kicking around is really my first love. And it’s someone that royally fucked me over a long time ago, so long ago that it isn’t even worth thinking about. I obsessed over her and I felt pain for about half of a semester. Then I moved on. And now, I don’t even remember what it was like to be with her, to fall in love with her. It was a hundred thousand years ago to me, and so many things have happened since. So it’s hard to scrape up the energy to keep moving with this, which is frustrating because I really need something to keep going with.

I’ve been in a sort of social black hole lately. A lot of other people are busy with a lot of other things and I come out of this project to look around and see that everyone else is gone. I’ve had a few strange weekends where I’ve had nothing to do, and the PlayStation takes too much energy, and you can only watch Full Metal Jacket so many times on repeat before you think someone else should be going on besides your ass and the couch. It’s strange to think that I think there is nothing to do in New York, but I realize that it’s just me, not the city. I could be anywhere and be bored. All I really want is another book. Actually, part of me wants another relationship, but I don’t think I’d be able to manage one, let alone find one. What I really want is another book, like Captain Willard wants another mission at the beginning of Apocalypse Now. And hopefully, I’ll get it soon.

I want another book like Rumored. I feel some strange pain inside, some kind of hatred toward everything, everyone. I feel like this pain has been created by everything around me. And I feel like I’ve conditioned myself to ignore all pain. I’m not talking about the kind of pain where you grab the stapler off of your desk and empty a whole clip of metal into your forearm. I mean the kind that you tune out to ignore everything, everyone around you, to get up at the same time every day, sit at a desk, take a train home, eat number 9 with fried rice and a Coke every day from the same shitty Chinese restaurant, and never really think about any of it. And I think that Rumored was a good first step in taking all of that and putting it into prefabricated pieces on a page, combining the rage with the humor of knowing that nothing is taboo and everything is a joke. And I guess the next step is to keep going, and to make this more real and more of a book and something that more people will pick up like a virus and either love or hate, but at least experience.

I think. Or maybe I’m full of shit.

I think I have another three weeks until vacation, so maybe I will think of a good idea before then. Not much else to report here.

Sleep, sickness, Van Halen

Sat, 26 Apr 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I slept almost all day today. It’s rainy and I did manage to drag 30 pounds of laundry to the ‘mat and get a couple of bagels and some juice, but otherwise I spent the day drifting in and out of sleep, flipping through the channels and watching nothing, and wishing I didn’t have a sore throat. Now I await my Indian food, listen to Van Halen’s Women and Children First (current track “Everybody Wants Some”, which reminds me of my 30th birthday when I rented a Corvette and drove around Vegas with the glass roof removed and this track on repeat, the Delco all-exclusive, all-top-end, better-than-Blaupunkt premium sound system at like 11.)

I actually spent a lot of last night and this afternoon reading Chuck Klosterman’s book Fargo Rock City, which Julie recommended when I said I was writing a book about 80s rock. I got a copy from the last Amazon dispatch, and sat on it because I thought I’d take it to Hawaii with me to help kill the 12-hour plane flight. But I cracked it open last night and started reading. I thought it would be a quasi-fictional book about some dudes in North Dakota hooked on Dokken records or something, but it’s more of a reviewer’s deconstruction and personal tales about heavy metal and what it means to him.

That’s a great premise, and I really do like a lot of his examination of the genre. That said, he’s a big fan of various glam metal that I really don’t like and consider to be more of a product of MTV and the LA scene than the kind of music I like. There are generally two types of metal: the kind that’s about the lifestyle, and the kind that’s about the power, the extreme-ness. He’s the kind of person that loves Poison and Motley Crue and completely dismisses guitar-metal and Death Metal, while I’m the complete opposite. But there are enough bands in the gray area and he’s an intelligent enough observer that I didn’t throw the book out of the window at page 6. (Which I assume people like Ray would.)

That said, he says some pretty stupid shit. He dismisses Rush as a Christian band; he says Slayer is a Death Metal band; he rails on bands with a more technical guitar player (i.e. the Steve Vais and Joe Satrianis) and he spends a lot of time at the beginning trying to define and dissect hard rock versus heavy metal, mostly getting it wrong. There were many points at which I thought this guy was full of shit, aside from the fact that he liked the most weak bands of the era.

That said, I stuck with it, and a lot of his observation was dead-on. One thing that really struck me was the fact that any rock music on the heavy end is written in such a way that you think you have a personal relationship with the person who created it. I mean, if you are a really huge Van Halen fan, and let’s say you relate most to Diamond Dave (as opposed to being a guitar fan and Eddie Van Halen virtuo-protege), you think to some extent that you have a conenction to Dave. He wrote the music (okay, the band did, but he sang it on the record) and you understand it, so you think he understands you, or you understand him. So there’s this strange premise of “wouldn’t it be cool to just hang out with David Lee Roth and life would be just like that video with the chicks with the boobs.” But in reality, that isn’t true, and that’s just part of the product. You won’t hang out with Dave or Eddie, and if you do, they aren’t going to be flying through the air on wire-mounted motorcycles like the “Panama.” They’re probably going to be hidden away in a trailer, bitching about their accountants. And that strange illusion is weird, because once you really realize it, the whole thing breaks. You can’t be an insane fan of a band if you know that it’s all fake. It’s like hooking up with a beautiful woman from a Victoria’s Secret catalog and becoming her boyfriend and girlfriend, and then getting to the point where you watch her take a shit, and that wall of illusion is gone. As a person who has never had a truly successful long-term relationship, I often wonder what that happy medium is, and if the secret to fifty years of marriage is that you really need to fall out of love and drink a lot of Pabst Blue Ribbon on a daily basis.

Okay, I went from book review to “too much information,” so I’ll stop there. I have absolutely nothing else to report - it’s been a very boring time around here. Maybe after my Indian food, I will have a greater burst of creativity and try to get to work on the book.

walking, iPod

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I went for a long walk today, because I figure I will take more than one when I’m in Hawaii and I could use a shakedown cruise or two. I found that my iPod doesn’t like being in a loose pocket when I walk somewhere between a fast walk and a jog; it tends to lock up and requires a hard reset, which isn’t good. Normally, I keep it in a small holster-type bag, but I didn’t this time. This will be my first trip with the iPod, so I’m trying to test out any use beyond its regular daily pattern, just so there won’t be any surprises.

The walk was good though. It was in the low 70s, and I got all the way to Queens Plaza before I chickened out of walking over Queensborough Bridge. I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around SoHo and record shopping at a few used places. I managed to score a copy of the out-of-print Henry Rollins The Boxed Life 2-CD for only $4.99. I had it on tape, but it’s good that I have it digitized and ready for my long trip. That album is pretty much the reason I became a writer. I used to listen to it during my long walks to Colonial Crest, and it made me start carrying a pen and paper so I could collect my thoughts and eventually develop them into writing. And that was almost ten years ago - ten this fall. Weird how time flies. I bought an album today that I hadn’t heard in TWENTY YEARS. That’s a bit weird to me.

I updated the music collection page [long since gone], although I think I may have missed some things, and now I really think I should develop some sort of database system that is fed via a barcode scanner. The collection is now above 800 CDs. That isn’t the shocking part; the shocking part is that I really don’t consider that to be a lot of CDs. I really want to get above 1000 in the near future. Maybe I need to start scamming CD clubs again.

Okay, almost bedtime.

no sleep before Hawaii

Fri, 09 May 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I can’t sleep. I guess I only have an hour or two until the alarms go off, but I think I will be fairly screwed today. In about five hours, I’ll be on a plane to Dallas, then to San Francisco, then eventually to Honolulu. That’s about 14 hours of airplanes and airports, and yet I still don’t manage to score an actual meal on any of my flights. My biggest worry is that my transfer at SFO is a scant thirty minutes. The two gates are right next to each other, but if the Dallas plane is at all late, I will miss the last flight to Hawaii. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed on that one.

I think I’m packed, except for the various electronics that are charging, and their respective chargers. I’ll only be gone four days, so I just have a bag of clothes, the laptop bag, and a small camera bag for the camcorder. I really feel like I’m forgetting something, but I think I’m ready to roll.

Okay, I really should try to at least lay in bed and rest for another two hours. It is currently 50 degrees and drizzling - it will be nice to get to 85 and some sun. Anyway, I’ll be back in a few days.

back

Fri, 16 May 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I’m back. I’ve been back since Wednesday morning, but there’s been a lot of jetlag and apathy toward writing on here, plus I’ve been working on the trip page and other general unpacking.

Not much else is going on. It’s very depressing to be back in New York. The temperature is a good 20 degrees cooler than it was on Oahu, and the little (and big) problems of living in New York seem magnified now that I’m back. I felt so wonderful when I was gone, and now I’m back to having a perpetual hack and sniffle that won’t go away. I wish I could move to Hawaii.

Anyway, eating a late dinner - I fell asleep after work, so I ordered some Chinese. I need to spellcheck that story before anybody reads it, so I better go do that…

Blitzkrieg

Sun, 25 May 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I can’t stop playing Blitzkrieg. It is the most addictive strategy game ever. It’s fairly accurate to World War II, but instead of being a first-person sort of thing like Medal of Honor, all you are doing is moving around your tanks and troops and stuff on an isometric map that vaguely resembles the old SimCity, except it has way more detail of the French landscape (or whereever you are in Europe.) When your troops run into the enemy, they automatically enter battle and try to do their duty, so you don’t worry about that. What you do worry about is the supply line, guarding the flank, getting overrun, enemy dive bombers (you can call up air support) and about a million other things. It’s not hard to figure out how to move around your dudes, but it takes forever to learn the actual art of war and how to keep your army alive.

Not much has been up here. It’s still winter outside, which sucks. We have a three-day weekend, but it’s in the high 50s and cloudy and generally shitty. I have barely left the house all weekend; it’s the kind of weather where sitting in front of the TV is optimal. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything on but NASCAR and other crap. I went to the drug store yesterday to pick up a $10 prescription and left $119 later, with a ton of stuff I vaguely needed: new britta filters, new cleaining supplies, new toothbrush, new printer cartridges. I spent part of yesterday cleaning this hellhole, and actually got the kitchen somewhat in order. Pretty exciting, huh?

I got about 35 new CDs from Ray. A friend of his is apparently going to prison, and he sent Ray his whole music collection so he could somehow sell it off and scrape together some of the fines he will also owe the government. So for $206, I got this giant box full of Death Metal, Black Metal, and some other old stuff. I stocked up on a lot of the old early-90s stuff that I had on tape a lifetime ago, and haven’t heard in ten years. I finally got a CD copy of the Cynic album Focus, which is pretty cool and weird. I also got the metal cased version of the Slayer double-live album, which is pretty neat.

Right now I am listening to the Saxon album The Power and the Glory; I finally got a version from Holland for like $19 on Amazon. I love all of those old Saxon albums, and had them on tape back in the 80s when they had a deal with Sony (I think.) Now EMI has some of the old stuff out in Europe, and it’s great to hear it again. It reminds me so much of driving down the road in the old Camaro, listening to all the old heavy metal we could find in the local Camelot Music’s bins. But digging around for this old metal on eBay or weird third-party web stores always makes me think that my musical knowledge is somehow stuck at 1989, and I’ll always be trying to find that old Indestroy demo or looking up what Dave Mustaine is doing these days, while all kinds of other music comes and goes. And I’ll admit, I’ve tried to objectively listen to this New Metal a bit to see if I’d like it, and I realize that it’s probably true: I’m getting old.

I was at a party and someone was talking about Metallica, and I said “yeah, I used to be a fan of theirs, but I’m not anymore,” and the chick I was talking to said “oh, you mean you’re not a fan now that Jayson left?” No, since Cliff left.

I want to redesign the front page of 34.216.9.77/, but I’m not sure I’ll do it this weekend. I almost saw the sun for a second, but now it’s gone. Looks like I’ll reboot to Windows and continue invading France.

Sleep dep zombie, future of war

Sat, 31 May 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Can’t sleep. It’s amazing when I can drag for 14 hours through a day feeling like a zombie, then when I make it to bed, I can’t sit still. And after all of my bitching about the weather, it’s almost vaguely warm tonight, and I don’t have my fan armada set up yet. So I just took two Tylenol-PMs, got a snack of microwave pretzels, and I’m listening to some jazz show on PBS that doesn’t sound half bad. I really wish I knew more about jazz sometimes, but I guess I’ve only got so many brain cells, and most of them are occupied with worthless trivia about the heavy metal genre.

I just finished reading a book about the Civil War - more specifically, a journal or diary by a surgeon from New York who spent three years in the army. I think it was cleaned up by some high school teacher and some of his students as part of a historical society project, so I couldn’t tell if it read well because of the man’s education, or the post-processing. I thought there would be more blood and guts, lockjaw and field amputations. That stuff was mentioned, but it was mostly a travelogue, about how the army put down tents and set up camp, then moved at a moment’s notice. But even with this travel, they still had visits from their wives, leave in Washington DC, and semi-regular mail. (But not regular pay!) I did enjoy the little notions of the bygone era, like how the guy said “I called on Dr. Hall this evening,” not meaning that he picked up a phone, but that he walked over to his tent and socialized. It’s interesting how technology and society has changed this sort of interaction. I mean, the book was written mostly from letters the guy wrote to his wife. Who actually sits down with pen and paper to write letters anymore?

(The show is Jazz at Lincoln Center, btw.)

I went impromptu CD shopping for a second today (someone at work went to Tower after lunch and I tagged along.) I didn’t sweep the whole A to Z looking for specifics, but I did pick up the first Anthrax album, and the first (or third, if you count demos) CD by Pacific Northwest Death/Gore Metallists Engorged. I bought their CD on a whim, but I REALLY like it. It reminds me a lot of Carcass, which is one of my all-time favorite grind/gore-type bands. While most of Carcass’s grumbled lyrics are medical terms straight out of Grey’s Anatomy, Engorged is almost a parody, a lot more humorous and referential to horror movies. It’s a pretty good accidental find.

Not much else. I am playing Blitzkrieg still, on a very regular and scheduled basis. I’m now in the desert, outside of Libya. It’s neat to see the terrain change from France’s grassy hills and villages to the African desert. And even my equipment changed color, to the desert fatigue paint jobs. Missions are getting a lot more complicated, but I’m gaining ground faster, so I must be learning something.

I am reading a new book on the future of war, which is turning out to actually be a larger lesson in economic interdependence of major ruling powers, and how war has evolved since the conquest for land position has diminished, but the tension of economic dispute stays the same. It used to be the case that in order to be a world power, you had to have a strong rule on the Atlantic trade route. But as of 1980, the economy of Pacific trade routes equaled that of Atlantic. So even if you were a country in the far end of Asia, you could rise to the point of being a major economic power. (See also: Japan, Korea, Singapore, et al.) And a major point is that many people say war is obsolete because more and more countries are linked together by trade. But the truth is, before World War I, most academics said the same thing, and that France and Germany would never go to war, because their hands were so deep in each others’ pockets. And you know how that one ended up.

The magic of the little blue pills cascades over my head. It’s time to go have a long series of bizarre dreams.

Hobby shop nostalgia

Sun, 01 Jun 2003 00:00:00 GMT

It rained all weekend. Poured. It’s always good to have the two days off, but I get a bit restless when I can’t go to a store or a movie or whatever without dressing in a scuba suit. While I was dodging to get some lunch on Saturday, I decided to duck into this hobby store that’s about a block away from me. Like a lot of other businesses in Astoria, it’s run more like a hobby than a regular place with regular hours, and pretty much every time I walk past it, the gate is down and lights are off. But I saw the doors open for business, so I decided to duck in there.

I’m no stranger to hobby shops. As a kid, my interests ran from trains to planes to cars to pretty much anything else you put together with plastic cement and little glass jars of paint. I built military airplanes, 1/48 scale plastic kits with way too much detail, at an age much later than I’d probably like to admit. When most kids were off trying to chase after girls for the first time or sneak into their parents liquor cabinet, I was in my parents’ basement, sitting at an old card table, listening to a Rush cassette and painting each individual dial on the instrument panel of a 1/32 scale F-15. My room had two walls of shelves filled with planes, and I had a workbench in the basement filled with half-built kits, tools, and supplies. I don’t entirely remember when I stopped or why, although I’m sure a lot of it had to do with a driver’s license and the desire to fit in. I don’t regret the time I spent doing this, although there is a certain shame factor, thinking about the geekiness of it. I mean, working on a computer - at least that could eventually lead to a job and money. But model airplanes don’t have any analog.

Walking into the old shop was like a flashback to me. It was a narrow, run-down little spot, but the walls were filled with shrink-wrapped cardboard boxes of many different areas and scales. Even the toy stores have the typical stuff, the half-dozen Testor’s kits that are made for kids with little patience. But when you get to a REAL hobby shop, they have the Pacta paints and the Tamiya kits and the sheets of custom metal foil detail pieces that cost more than some models. And this place had all of this - some older, almost vintage kits, and all of the heavy duty planes: the 1:48 B-1 and B-52 models, the 1/32 MRC planes, the Hellers from France, the DML armor kits from Hong Kong, the Paula and Antares resin kits from the Czech republic. It was all there, and I spent an endless amount of time looking at all of the kits, looking at the revised versions that had been re-released in the almost 20 years I’d been away from the hobby, and the new kits with generations of improvements in details, and technology. It made me really think about a lot of things, about life.

I’ll admit - I don’t really know where I’m going with my life these days. I’m punching the clock, eating the meals, sleeping when I can, but that’s about it. I haven’t been writing, and I haven’t been thinking about other projects. But I’m always hit with the whole “what am I doing?” volley of simultaneous and confusing emotions. I look at the people around me, the people my age, and they’re married, with kids, working, saving, buying houses, and in the conventional sense, they are DOING something. And then I look at what I’ve accomplished (which isn’t NOTHING, but…) and I look at my apartment full of toys and computers and DVDs, and I think I am not a grownup. And I think that if I was grown up, I would buy a new suit instead of buying a Slayer box set, or something. That I’d get my priorities straight. And maybe that would start the domino effect, of respect in my career, and meeting new people, and settling down, and everything else.

But then I also think that all of this is bullshit. I can’t - I don’t know, I can’t get up on a building and shout THIS IS BULLSHIT! and really fly my freak flag and… whatever. It’s more like a soft decision. But the decision is that I don’t really care. I don’t want to be a “grown up,” whatever that means. I can’t write the sequel to Rumored while I’m changing diapers, or busily shopping at The Gap, or whatever else. I care about eventually meeting someone, but I don’t care enough to ignore the opportunities around me that I’d rather pursue. I’d rather travel alone, and buy lots of DVDs, and stay up late at night playing video games. I don’t need to defend that against any other standard.

So I bought a model airplane. It’s a B-25, in 1/32 scale, and it’s a balsa kit, which I’ve never tried before. You actually cut out all of these balsa pieces, strigners and keel pieces and formers and stuff, and pin them to this big blueprint and glue it all together, so you get a skeleton of balsa. Then it is covered with a tissue paper and glue, and plastic pieces like windows and engine nacelles are included. It’s designed to fly with engines or be a static model. I’d like to build an RC plane, but I decided this would be my “learn from my mistakes” model, before I sink any money into a bigger plane.

I bought glue and knives and sandpaper and some other small tools, and also got a big piece of foamboard to use as my “table.” While it poured outside, I sat on the couch with the board in my lap and pinned down my pieces, cut out rib holes for stringers, and had the TV on in the background. It reminded me of what I really missed about building models, which is the almost hypnotic effect of working with your hands, going through the steps, trimming and eyeballing and test-fitting and inspecting, and actually building something that passes the time in such a different and more fulfilling way than just sitting on the couch and watching SuperStation reruns.

So that was my weekend. I mean, I went to dinner at Kiev on Saturday night in a short break of the rain, but I came back and kept gluing and cutting. I mostly finished the fuselage frame, then took a long walk to Home Depot and bought a Dremel MotoTool so I could cut things up a bit faster. But it was a good weekend overall, despite the shitty weather.

[2020 update: never finished that model. And I still have the same internal conversation about being an adult.]

v/a

Sat, 07 Jun 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I’d hate to think this has become a weekly journal, but it seems like it’s been going that way lately. During the week, I never really have any events to discuss, and I lack any kind of focus I could use to look beyond the sleep-work-food cycle that makes up most of my life these days. I have been in a weird holding period when it comes to any writing, and it’s hard to explain it, because it seems like explaining it also prolongs it. I hope I’ll eventually jump in on a writing project, but I haven’t lately. You’d actually be amazed how much energy it takes to not write sometimes. There’s a certain boredom in shuffling between TV and web browsing and video games without doing anything productive, and even when I don’t have the energy to do any work, it’s a huge drain. I’ve been reading a bit more lately, which does feel more productive, so hopefully that will sidestep into some actual writing.

It’s been another crappy weekend here, even though the weather got fairly decent all week. It has been pouring rain all day, and I’ve been on the couch, assembling a motorized RC 1/35 scale Tiger Panzer. I’ve discovered that my painting ability is much worse than I remember, or maybe it’s my lack of a good work surface. Either way, I’ve made good progress, and I have most of the hull together. I’m not very happy with the paint job, but the motors are installed and the tracks are in and it can now crawl around on its own. I built this small tank as a possible precursor to either a larger RC car or one of the Tamiya 1/16 scale tanks, but I’m not sure which I will do. I’m finding myself less interested in scale details and more interested in the mechanicals, so it might be a car.

Not much else is up. It was a very depressing week, and I spent a lot of time dealing with that and trying to avoid it. The summer is barely started, and I’m counting paychecks and trying to figure out travel, and I know it will vanish at the blink of an eye. I still remember the summers when I was a kid in school, the vacations that seemed to last an eternity, and now summer is just the time when I have to set up my army of fans to keep the apartment cool. I’ll have to find some cool stuff to do in the next few months.

Blah. Time to watch some ER reruns…

Jury Duty

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 00:00:00 GMT

So, jury duty. I found out Friday due to the stupid dial-up phone system (does anyone ever NOT get picked?) that I had to report bright and early at 9 AM to the Borough Hall in Kew Gardens, Queens, which is far enough away that it doesn’t appear on regular maps of New York City and you’ve got to get an atlas to look it up. On Sunday, I woke up past noon, so I knew waking up five hours early would be a near-impossibility. I went to a bodega and got some Tylenol-PM two-packs on my way to get some tacos for dinner last night, and took one gelcap before I settled into bed at eleven. I drifted off to a drug-induced sleep after browsing a book on educational vacations that I found in a stack of books by the curb on my post-lunch walk. (The book mostly discussed writer’s workshops and archaeology digs and other things I largely found too snooty to take seriously.)

I woke up almost every hour to get some water or take a pee or both, but slept remarkably well considering. At seven, the alarm clock armada went off, and I got into the shower by seven, and dressed in a pair of khakis and a neutral shirt by eight. I really wanted some breakfast, but instead sprinted to the not-my-usual subway stop down on Steinway to catch a ride in. The middle of June (almost), and I had to wear my army jacket. I knew I’d end up carrying it for the rest of the day, but it was 57 when I left the house, and it looked like a storm would hit at any minute. I didn’t bring a walkman, because I figured it would get confiscated or the guards would give me some shit. I did bring the Sidekick, and a Peter Farrelly book I’d read a few years back, along with a draft of something I’m doing for work. I knew that most of jury duty is the endless waiting game, and unfortunately, I can’t bring in a portable DVD player and a cooler of beer to kill that.

The train ride wasn’t bad at all. Kew Gardens is deceptively close and far from everything else, mostly because of the E express train. I can probably get from Kew Gardens to my job in NoHo faster than I can from Astoria, and it’s twice as far away. And this is a real, honest-to-god suburb, with trees and lots of low buildings and roads with speed limits and highways and lots of space between all of the above. People out there actually have CARS, and not just ones that they move from the left to the right side of the street three times a week. I honestly think I should go out there on a weekend and research this, find out if there are apartments with parking spaces and giant grocery stores and everything else that I miss about living anywhere but here.

I got to the Hall with a few minutes to spare, and dodged in to face the security guards. This is the full-on, airport, homeland-patriot-act drill, with the metal detectors and empty-your-pockets x-ray conveyor. However, at an airport, at least half of the fliers know the drill, and the fact that a metal detector detects METAL, and not cigarettes, plastic pens, paper money, hard rubber combs, and who knows what else. In front of me, I saw a million-year-old guy dump an entire Farm and Fleet store into the plastic bins and still fail the stupid detector. Meanwhile, I throw in my keys, jump through, no buzz, two seconds flat. That would be the theme of the day.

After the metal detectors, we got herded into a giant room with chairs that resembled the basement of a church. It smelled like the basement of a church, that weird smell that’s probably some kind of mold and a hundred coats of lead paint in battleship colors. I sat down and started reading. At about 9:15, someone came out and started to rattle off all of the various exceptions. People would try to ask their own personal questions in the breaths between her explanations and she told them to shut the fuck up and sit down. The whole thing reminded me of the beginning of Cool Hand Luke, when the boss rattles off the rules. I expected her to say “If you are not a US Citizen and you have alien registration papers, a work permit, or a passport, one day in the box. If you are over 75, one day in the box.” and so on.

None of those rules applied to me, as I triple-checked for any sort of exception to get me out, and there were none. I sat, kept reading, and waited for the lineup. After some initial confusion, they had everyone get into four lines at a little ticket counter-like structure, and we all queued up with our little blue and white papers. True to the theme of the day, every person in front of me arrived at the window and told their entire life story, starting back with when they were a soldier in the war of northern aggression. It wasn’t “I’m an alien and I want to leave now” or “I have kids at home and I’d like an exemption.” It was the kind of stuff that required 17 minutes of deliberation and a call to the governor. Finally, I got to the head of the line, with no questions, got my thing stamped, and went back to chairs.

Maybe 20% of our pack had now left. I scanned the room, and I couldn’t find any real demographic or funny trend in anyone there. A lot of older folks were there, and as a caucasian, I was probably a minority - but that’s Queens. I got busy on the book, The Comedy Writer, which isn’t Dumb and Dumber-type stuff, like you’d expect from Farrelly, but it’s more of a story of a writer coming to LA and trying to struggle to make it. I like that angle, but the guy is sort of a prick, and the events were just a little bit off. But it went down easy, and reading other people’s trials in this area always makes me think about my own writing, which was the goal of reading the book.

Shortly after we got settled in, a cop (or court worker or whatever - he had a badge, no gun) came in with a stack of tickets. He then rattled off names of people in his choppy Brooklyn accent, and told them to line up. After the group - maybe 30 or 40 people - assembled, he gave them a jury number (K7) and another cop (or whatever, this one had a gun) marched them outside and to the courthouse building across the street.

In the waiting area, some TV sets turned on with an old rerun of Dawson’s Creek, which we were forced to watch. I know it was just UPN9 or whatever, but I also wondered if it was some kind of psychological experiment to fuck with us. Probably not, as someone else was bitching about how last week, they were forced to watch the US Open for hours on end. The room echoed with two or three groups of old people talking about tumors and bursitis or whatever, and a male and female of about college age who talked and talked and talked and talked and FUCKING TALKED NONSTOP. Ok, I tried to tune them out, and kept reading.

At about 10:30, we got a 15-minute break, which most of the people used as a smoking break. I ran across Queens Boulevard to the little strip of stores and restaurants where I found a Dunkin Donuts. My stomach was still rattling, and I really wanted a hash browns from McDonald’s on the way in. I got a donut and a Pepsi (no Coke!) and headed back to the room. I saw a woman sitting on the bench in front of the Hall who really reminded me of a character in Summer Rain, and her general body language made her look like she was bored and looking for someone to talk to. But because I’m a genius, I just stuffed the donut into my face and went back inside.

We had a lunch at one, but just before that, the cop (or whatever) came back in with another stack of tickets. He read them off, and actually got my name right (he horribly mangled every other name). I got in line, and we were given the name of K25 before we went outside and to the other building. We all walked together in a sort of sloppy military group or something, following behind this cop and crossing the street to the much more modern-looking concrete and steel courthouse. Inside, we all went past the metal detectors through a special door, and into a faux art deco hallway.

While everyone else moped around the benches outside the courtrooms, I looked at the pieces of paper hanging up to see if I could deduce what was going on. One roster or schedule or whatever listed a Murder-2 and a breaking and entering, but didn’t say anything about what jury numbers went to what cases, unless it was in some lawyer code. While nosing around, I saw this woman come into a courtroom who looked like she was a defense attorney. Maybe Falli can tell me otherwise on how to tell what lawyers are what, but that was my guess. Maybe I should have written “Fast-neat-average” on a napkin and gave it to her. (Look it up on google.)

Anyway, we eventually got herded into a smaller room, about as big as a classroom, where they said they’d get to us in 10 or 15 minutes. The room seemed way too much like a classroom, except there was no stage or dais at the front of the room. I kept looking up to see if a teacher was coming in or something, and the whole thing was disorienting. But it didn’t smell in there, and it even had some sort of air conditioning. So I read and read and read. Finally at about 12:30, someone came in and told us to go to lunch and return at two.

An hour and a half - too bad there was almost no place to eat around there. I went to a Pizza Hut, sat in a booth, and spent too much money on one of those personal pan things that I didn’t even finish because I felt sick from the early morning and lack of real food. It was no place to kill an hour and a half, and I got out of there and went for a short walk before coming back in, scoping out the restroom facility, and then making a quick call on the cell to kill more time.

So I read. And read. And an hour and a half later, when I thought we would get a case, they came in and told us that the guy took a plea, and we had to cross the street (and go through fucking security for the third time) and go back to the pool. I sprinted back while everyone else moaned and smoked and got there fast enough to get through the metal detector before the “is my pencil metal?” crowd got there. I sat around for another 15 minutes, and got well into act 3 of the book, and then they told me to go home and come back at 9:30 the next day. So I came home and took a long cold shower to get the court funk off of me, and here I am.

Now, I need to find another book to re-read, and it’s 8:00 and I want to go to bed.

Getting out of jury duty

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Jury duty - done. I went in for another early morning, but actually got to McDonald’s on time, and had a shouting match at the counter with the idiot they put there over the sizes of orange juice. Remember when it was just small-medium-large? Anyway, I spent most of the morning sitting around, then right before lunch, got marched over and put on a case. I got the new steak and cheese at subway, and sat under a tree on a stone wall to eat lunch. After lunch, I got back on the case, and I was one of the 19 people (19? 18?) in the jury box, but the judge called me back in chambers when they were going over the jury questionnaires. (The judge’s chambers is, in fact, not a chamber in this court. It was more like a back hallway of cinderblocks. Very disappointing.) Anyway, turns out a good friend of mine from high school went to prison for the same thing the defendant was charged with. So without further delay, I was released back to the general pool. When I got there, all of the jurors were gone (it was like 3:30), and the court officer looked at my ticket and gave me my discharge papers. After a quick subway ride, I was back to work to check email and turn in my paperwork.

Not much is up here, except I just woke up from a nap and I’m waiting for a club sandwich…

books, road paving, fortran

Sat, 14 Jun 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Ah, the weekend. It’s actually pretty hot outside today, and I’m surprised. The last two weekends have been pretty dreary, and Thursday night a huge storm front started pissing away, so I thought it would be three for three on spoiled weekends. But I have no real funds in the discretionary spending account, since I just paid off the Amex bill for the Hawaii trip, and I’m trying to be good about paying up extra on bills instead of suddenly deciding I need a drum set or a scuba license or some other asinine pursuit that sounds good to me for about a week. Anyway, it’s beautiful out, and I planned on sitting on the couch and catching up on reading, but maybe I will try to find something sensible to do, or at least go for a long walk after I’m done with lunch.

I went to Marie’s the other night to loan her my camera, and met David and saw Poly, Mungo, and Henrey again. (Marie and David are humans, while the others are cats. Actually, it’s arguable that Mungo is a cat as he is as big as a mid-sized dog, but that’s another discussion entirely.) Anyway, Marie gave me a bunch of books, as she works for a publisher and is still in the loop as far as free promotional copies are concerned. One of the things I miss most about Juno is that it was in the same building as Random House and all of those other Bertelsmann publishers, so they always put racks and racks of free books down in the cafeteria. It would absolutely make Falli’s eBay mojo explode.

Anyway, I got, among other things, this book Pandora’s Keepers. It’s about the nine men who created the atomic bomb, and was written by Brian VanDemark, sort of. I say “sort of” because after the review copies went out, it turns out that a few other prominent nuke history authors found that he completely lifted parts of their writing in his book. So the book got recalled, and you can’t find it - but I have it! I’m about halfway through it, and as a person who was addicted to Richard Rhodes’ books on the bomb, I enjoy the reading. I can look past the plagarism charge, as all writing is essentially plagarism and I can see how he could have slipped up and accidentally boosted something. Or maybe I disagree, I don’t know. Either way, it’s a good read. Supposedly, a cleaned up paperback version will be out later in the year.

They are repaving several streets in my neighborhood, which means that if they repave mine and my windows are open, it will most likely turn my apartment into some sort of chemical death chamber. This is good only in that my survivors may be able to sue the city of New York for $50 million dollars, and 17 years later get a “buy 1 get 1 at half off” coupon for Pizza Hut or something. Also, if I do survive, it will make the street marginally better for cycling. It doesn’t cure the problem of a resident triple-parking his Crown Vic and opening their doors into traffic as I pass. I’m still working on a reliable way to mount an M203 grenade launcher on my bike frame, which will solve this issue.

My sister got a research position for the summer at Notre Dame. She is working with a professor on big bang nucleosynthesis, which has to do with figuring out how elements heavier than hydrogen formed right after the big bang. It sounds pretty cool, but the program they are using is written in fortran and is a mess. Still, it sounds like a pretty cool way to spend a summer. Better than teaching driver’s ed, at least.

I’ve decided to stop building models for the time being. I’ve found that painting models is pretty much impossible as a 32-year-old. It’s not like I’m going blind and shaking like a blender from Parkinson’s or anything, but I notice the difference when I’m trying to paint the instrument panel on a 1/35 scale model, and I wonder how I could do it when I was half my current age. (HALF MY AGE! Shit, I just thought about what I wrote about, and that’s way too fucked up.)

OK, time for that walk.

Intrepid

Sun, 15 Jun 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I spent the day at the USS Intrepid museum. It was a good day, and I finally got to check out the USS Growler, a submarine that’s also at the pier. It is the only deactivated nuclear sub open to the public, and it was neat to walk through it after recently seeing the USS Bowfin in Hawaii. The Growler was commissioned in 1958 as opposed to the Bowfin’s 1943, so some of the stuff looked a bit newer, although it had the same general feel and smell to it. What it did have different was a set of Regulus nuclear missiles, and it was cool to see the little room that was the equivalent of a nuclear missile silo’s launch control center. Going through small subs and their tight quarters with very innovative storage spaces always makes me wish I could do similar stuff with my apartment so I could store twice as much shit. I wish I had a welder and a place to use it so I could buy a bunch of steel and cut it into little shelves and lofts and other hiding spaces.

The aircraft carrier was cool, although after going to some much better museums, it saddened me to see the shape of some of their aircraft. Their A-12, a masterpiece in that it’s the first production model ever, has chipped and peeling paint all over it; the very nice A-4 inside the hanger had crappy paint all over, and the cockpit looked like it hadn’t been touched in 20 years. Some of the planes on the deck had spots that were primered grey like a beat-up Impala in East LA or something. Even the ship’s bell was tarnished! I wish I could donate my time to work on a few of these planes. I don’t know that much about the actual details, but I’d gladly get out the steelwool and brasso and get cracking if I was given the chance.

A pretty lax weekend aside from that trip. It’s starting to get hot, and my stand-up oscillating fan has finally died. It has broken a few times, and I’ve managed to repair it, but now it’s flat out dead. I spent $35 of the money I don’t want to spend on a new floor fan, a generic version of one of those vortex things. It’s pretty impressive - on the low speed, it whips up more wind than my air conditioner. It sounds like a small prop airplane, but that’s actually helpful, as it will hypnotize me to sleep.

I didn’t get much writing done all weekend, but I did decide to quit the Bloomington stories for now and get back on The Device. I outlined some stuff all weekend, but no writing yet.

Okay, gotta work on the photos and stuff a bit more…

Rent stabilization, career tests

Thu, 19 Jun 2003 00:00:00 GMT

The city board voted on rent stabilization rents today, which means that next year, my rent will go up 5.5%. That’s up from 2% last year. On one hand, a lot of people may think this is a huge number, but the landlord association originally wanted it to go up to like 18% or something. So at least at only 5.5%, I won’t have to sublet out my closets to pay my rent. This little scheme is one of about 863 different ways New Yorkers are currently getting screwed over at the current time. Sales tax is up; income tax will be up; grocery costs - up; subway fares - you know it; parking tickets - don’t get a parking ticket if you want to live. Pretty much everything is going through the roof, except of course the quality of life in the city. But I still have a job, so I won’t be moving any time soon.

Speaking of moving and jobs, I had to move cubes for the third time since August 2001. And what makes it slightly more Office Space-esque is that spot #4 is the same as spot #2. Okay, the first move was from our startup home, which was a floor and a penthouse of a building near Penn Station. That was a pleasant commute for the month I was there, because every day I had to step over at least a dozen bums splayed out on the sidewalk of 34th Street. There was a porn store nextdoor, which was convenient. The whole tech staff simultaneously got food poisoning from the Blimpie’s across the street. And someone serial-pissed in the salad bar of the deli right by Penn Station. So it was good to get out of that area, even if it added five subway stops to my ride in. And I’m glad to be tucked away in the back corner of the office again, with a slightly larger cube and a good deal of distance from the marketing/sales types who feel a need to talk on speakerphone constantly. Why the fuck do people do that? Does it make their penis feel bigger or something? Fuck.

Nothing is on TV now, not even stupid reality TV shows. I don’t have cable, except for my bootleg connection. But even so, there’s nothing but summer reruns, or shows too shitty to put on during the regular year. There’s an ER rerun I already saw; a curio clock for $1729.99 on ShopNBC; that horrible science show with Alan Alda (I almost accidentally typed Anal Alda) on 21; ancient ladies wearing chiffron mumus on HSN; a woman’s basketball game (WNBA?) on ESPN2; that stupid extreme Japanese game show on TNN; old people on CSPAN2; Steven Seagall on TBS; a shitty Yankees book for $75 on QVC (“Captures the TRUE history. The OFFICIAL retrospective. He’s talking as if photographs were invented just for this fucking book);catfish fishing on Food Network; I think that’s it.

I took a career test online today and it said I should be a techwriter. Not a rodeo cowboy, or a Navy SEAL, but a fucking techwriter. I don’t know whether I should be happy or sad. Actually I should feel cheated, because this was a plotline in Friends about four years ago.

C64, Matt Pinfield

Sat, 21 Jun 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve spent the last few hours hacking away at a new replacement to the underlying structure of this journal. Nothing major will change to you the readers; I’m just trying to redo the back part of it using PHP to make it run a bit smoother and make changes easier. The two visible changes are that the date that you are currently viewing will not be a link to the left, it will be a black, bold date so you can kind of see where you are in the list. And the better change is that I will be able to put an earlier and later button down at the bottom of the page. The only other noticeable change will be that if you go to the index, it will bring up the newest one, and if you click into older ones, the URL will end in ?date=20030101 or whatever. I don’t think that will be that big of a deal, although if you bookmarked an exact date in the past, that bookmark won’t work anymore. I don’t think that will really be an issue for many people, though.

Working in PHP is pretty cool, although I never sat down and studied it or anything - I just jumped in and tried to dig up stuff on google as I got along. It wasn’t really that frustrating, probably because even with a ten-years-rusty knowledge of C, I can figure out a lot of the syntax. It’s fun to have a small project like this to hack away at. It reminds me of when I first started this journal five - no wait, six - years ago, and I hacked together the indexing program that this new overhaul will probably replace. Although I don’t think I could ever become systematic enough to become a software developer on a professional basis, there is something satisfying about slapping together a piece of code that you actually use to get something done.

Speaking of computers, I got back all of my Commodore stuff yesterday. I have a C-64 that I got from eBay maybe five or six years ago. I haven’t touched it in ages; it was actually still in storage at Marie’s place. But I got it all back, and cabled together the unit and the 1541 drive on my living room floor, running the video into my VCR so it would display on the TV. The keyboard was dirty and a few of the keys wouldn’t work without slamming them a few times, and then they would work too much and print repeated letters. Also, all of my cartridges would not work. But I did get the disk drive running, and got the Ghostbusters game going, which is the only thing I have on floppy. It takes forever to load, and then has the most rudimentary voice samples ever, plus some very cheesy theme music in it. But it was still fun to mess with. Today I got some cleaner at Radio Shack and took apart the keyboard and got it running slightly better, and also got the game cartridges working after I cleaned the contacts. I spent part of the afternoon playing Omega Race and Jupiter Lander, and thinking of almost 20 years ago when I played the same carts on my original C-64.

Very tired, and not much else is up. I saw Matt Pinfield yesterday, in the elevator on the way out of work. I guess there’s a recording studio at the top of our building, run by Phillip Glass. I got into the elevator at work and saw the dude, although he was much shorter than I thought. He was listening on a cell phone and I wasn’t sure if it was him or not, so I waited until he talked, and then I definitely knew it was him. He was talking to someone about a recording session, but I don’t know what band or if he produces or what. I have no idea if he is still a VJ at MTV or not. I just did a search on him, and mostly found sites of people that hate him. Anyway, it was a weird sighting.

It’s been raining all weekend, pouring out. It’s been an incredible non-day and I think it’s time for bed…

Furby

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I’m officially sick. I really don’t feel great, and due to the fact that I drank about a gallon of grapefruit juice today, my digestive system isn’t doing well, either. I think I’m going to sleep about 10 hours tonight, or at least try. Being sick is not fun in the summer. And yes, it’s about summer now - I think we had hot temps for the first time all year.

I did hack away at the new journal program, although it isn’t done yet. I fixed most of it, but I am trying to streamline the stuff that handles what year is what. When I’m done, it should work so that each year is in a directory, and it will generate the archives links to the left automatically. I’m having trouble with getting the right order of years, though. I need to mess with it more when I can think straight.

I keep forgetting that I have a Furby in my closet somewhere, that I got at a K-Mart for about $5 after the end of that fad. I want to take it apart and do something evil or interesting with it, but I’ve heard that they are fairly useless despite the amount of stuff that it does. All of the firmware is in one chip that melted shut and virtually useless for reverse-engineering purposes. And all of the mechanical stuff, like the eyes and sensors and so forth, are all made of plastic gears interconnected in such a way that you can’t do anything useful with them. It’s like that old Radio Shack Robotron arm; the whole thing was driven off of one motor with a shitload of gears, and it was all mechanical, so you couldn’t just wire in a DB-9 connector and a cable and then hook it up to your computer and drive it with a BASIC program or something. I did see someone wire one of those up digitally, but they basically gutted it and totally regeared the thing with 4 or 5 RC airplane servos. It would have been easier to start from scratch.

Man I don’t feel good. I really feel like sitting down and watching TV for an hour or two, but absolutely nothing is on. I think I’ll sit in bed and read the PC Connection catalog until I pass out.

Boat shoes

Tue, 24 Jun 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I stayed home from work today, to ward off this cold and to catch up on a total lack of sleep. The douche crew was outside my window at midnight, talking and keeping me awake until about one, and then they were back after the bars closed. Can’t these people get their own living room to loiter in? Wait, they all live with their parents. Anyway, at about 8:00 AM, I heard a horrible buzzing sound, and in a half-awake nightmare, thought it was a hundred-year old fire alarm for my apartment and that my death was imminent. Instead, it was a concrete truck about ten feet from my head, making some horrible, 110 dB screeching sound as it shot concrete into some slum landlord project across the street. Probably burying a mafia hit. I put in earplugs, closed all of the windows, called in sick, and went back to bed. I woke up at noon with a horrific sinus headache, ate baloney and crackers while watching the windshield murder case on crime TV, then went back to bed. Woke up again at about four and started a day of adjusting fans, being bored of TV, and laying down but not falling to sleep. And here I am. Apartment is 90 degrees, and I can barely see in my left eye from the inflamed sinus pressing into my brain. Let me start over with a story, and stay with me for a bit.

-----

I’ve always worn boat shoes as a standard-issue summer shoe. I wear the Nike high-tops when I’m wearing a pair of jeans, but in the summers when I wear shorts (and I’m not a shorts guy by default, it takes a good hundred-degree wave of Hoosier heat to get me there) I like to wear a pair of old, beat-up boat shoes with no socks. No mess, no fuss, and no complex lacing or socks underneath - I can put them on when I wake up from a nap and need to walk to the corner store for a two-liter or a copy of the paper. They fit well, they matched anything, and they were easy to find on the floor. Those kind of simple qualities make anything a default in my life, from my trusty leather jacket to my trusty Timex watch to my trusty grey IU backpack that lasted me ten years and then some.

I think I got my first pair of the shoes when I started working at Taco Bell back in the summer of ‘87. They had a dress code, and most of it was made up of their uniform: the maroon pants, the dumb little visor, the blazer shirt that got covered with beans and cheese during each shift, and the tie-behind apron that wore every ingredient in the place. But we had to wear dress shoes, and that meant no sneakers. And I couldn’t wear the typical black dress shoes that cut off the circulation in my toes after five minutes that I had to wear to weddings and funerals. I needed something as comfortable as tennis shoes, but that looked like a dress shoe. And I didn’t know anything about shoes, but I went to the Thom McAnn and told the dude there all of this, and he produced a pair of low brown shoes with a standard tongue, a laced rim with eyelets around the back heel, and rubber soles that actually gripped the floor, unlike most death-trap dress shoes that were damn near teflon on the sole.

I wore the shoes every day I worked at The Bell, and kept them after I quit and moved on to my short career as a dishwasher and my much longer-term career as a paint salesman at a department store. The first pair wore out, and I found that Payless had the same damn shoes for about $15. (Yes, as a writer, I am irked by the fact that Payless and Pay Less are two different things, and the first one means “without pay.” Anyway.) I think it was when I had a new set in front rotation for the job and an older, more worn set of the shoes as my backup, around-the-house shoe that I noticed how comfortable the things actually were. By the next summer when I wore the old ones without socks, I found that they practically molded to my feet. My soles ground an imprint in the inside of the shoe, and the little ridges and seams and whatnot that had once itched when the shoe was new had now worn away almost perfectly. I kept these old pairs of shoes until I drilled holes straight through the soles and needed to go back to Payless for another $15 recharge.

So I have a lot of good memories of these shoes. Most of my first book Summer Rain, or at least the truth behind the fiction, was walked in shoes just like these. Almost every picture of me from back then had those $15 pieces of leather and fake leather stuff on my toes. I really do miss waking up at 414 South Mitchell, Apartment 13, after a post-work nap, slipping on my boat shoes, and walking over to Lindley Hall for some air-conditioned VAXing. I don’t wear boat shoes that much anymore, and I’ve found they are hard to find these days. In all of my days of driving to and from everywhere, and never having to dress up anymore, I found that I never wore out my one pair of boat shoes; I wore Nikes everywhere. I still had one pair, but I never had the time to wear them.

So today, I had to go to the store for some juice. I was in shorts, and I didn’t want to find some socks and get all laced into the Air Jordans. So I dug out my old boat shoes, a pair that I think I bought when I was interviewing for jobs maybe four years ago. And I put them on, and I found out… they weren’t really that great. My toes didn’t feel right, the finish was too slick, the laces seemed too wimpy or something. The thing that was so great in my head was really not that incredible.

Why the huge story about some fucking shoes? It wasn’t about the shoes. Truth is, I’m sort of pissed off at someone, someone who doesn’t even know I’m pissed off at them. And pissed off isn’t the right word; maybe frustrated, or even jealous. I guess it’s one of those things where you think that something is great and comfortable, and maybe it is. And maybe you think it was right all of those years ago, and suddenly you realize that it’s just a pair of fucking shoes that don’t fit anymore, and it’s time to go find some that do.

Tylenol PM lunacy

Wed, 25 Jun 2003 00:00:00 GMT

About the boat shoe story - if you’re reading this, it wasn’t about you. It was about mixing Nyquil and Tylenol PM, which has left me in a haze for the last 24 hours. A post-work nap seemed to help to a certain degree, but I woke up so tired and confused, I couldn’t remember what city I lived in.

It’s officially hot here, at least 90 out long after the sun has set. There’s a heat advisory, and I’m spending the day in a various patchwork of air conditioning and heat. The bedroom starts hot, and I take a cold shower. I take a long, sweaty walk to the train, and the subway car is like a meatlocker. Then I get another hot walk to the semi-cool office. It’s weird how you can walk past some stores on the street, and a wall of cryogenic mist pours out onto the street. Some parts of New York are supercooled, almost in denail of the climate in the asphalt jungle. And others, like my place, don’t even have basic climate control, and bake like a century-old village in a third-world country.

About the Tylenol PM/Nyquil thing - it amazes me how, on the very edge of sleep, I have an almost idiot-savant ability to think beyond my normal ability, in the most creative context. Right before I fall into the darkness of sleep, I dream, almost sleepwalk in a totally lucid state, and sometimes think of the most asinine but complex concepts. The design of a time travel device seems as simple as pasting two Word documents together, and I know every detail, but then I forget it as I drift into sleep. Last night, it felt like I wrote an entire book, a sequel to Rumored to Exist that made total sense, had incredible depth, and then I forgot all of it. Sometimes pieces of it come up in the dreams I have, especially the more detailed ones I remember that happen right before I wake. I think I am going to write a book where I lock myself in a hotel room with a crate of Tylenol PM and try to write down every dream I have.

It’s too hot in here to keep writing. The bedroom is twenty degrees cooler with the new aircraft engine fan, so I better go in there and read for a while.

28 Days Later, ultralights

Sun, 29 Jun 2003 00:00:00 GMT

The heatwave has ended, pretty much. It was pretty hot all day, but it cooled off last night, so I shut off the AC and enjoyed a real night of sleep, without the aid of over-the-counter drugs. It meant an okay day here to go to Chelsea and wander around the Best Buy for some DVD damage to the plastic. I spent most of this evening going through that Blind Date uncensored DVD, and the Old School movie. So, an evening of high entertainment.

Last night I saw 28 Days Later, which is a pretty weird British movie that’s basically about zombies and a post-apocalyptic England. But instead of the classic Romero zombie theory, these guys were created from an blood-borne, AIDS-like virus that creates pure rage and self-destruction in the host. Some dumb-ass, Greenpeace types try to liberate a monkey lab and basically end the world SARS-style when they unleash the shit. The movie then starts 28 days later when a guy wakes from a coma, completely islated in a hospital from the complete destruction of London. He goes around and finds other survivors to eventually journey to a military camp that promises a cure, only finding that the military junta is about as bad as the infected zombies. It was a well-shot, very humanist film, concentrating more on the plight of the post-destruction man, the lack of hope and desolation of living in this world. A lot of American films in the 80s themed after a Soviet-US war (Red Dawn, The Day After) have a similar setup, but this captured it much more three-dimensionally. There is gore, but the film is cut much more artistically, so you get shocked more by the jumpiness than the animated corpses vomiting blood onto their prey. It’s a great film and gave me a few ideas for the next book. Unfortunately, I wasn’t into the ending. But at least it wasn’t Charlie’s Angels or anything.

Not too much else is up here. I’ve just been reading the new Ultralight Flying magazine, wishing I had like 15 grand to blow on an ultralight, and maybe some more money to go to some place with a good flight school. I might save my pennies and try to take some kind of vacation to a place in Florida or Louisiana or something where I can try to rack up some hours. The FAA is changing some things around with a new classification called Light Sport, which is basically a step below the most basic general aviation license, and is easier to obtain. Most importantly, it does not require a medical - if you have a driver’s license, you can apply. It’s very limited, and only applies to very light planes, during the day, with good visibility, and so on. But it means I could get a license to fly something much bigger than a powered parachute or powered hang glider or something. I could potentially have a two-seater with an enclosed cockpit and everything. So that’s where my future earnings may go.

Not much else. Time to get back to the DVDs.

History Channel, Blind Date, eBay madness

Mon, 30 Jun 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I have the History Channel! See, I have cable, but not really. I plugged in the cable in my apartment and I get some channels, but not any good ones. I don’t actually pay for anything, so I’m not sure if this is the “basic” or “local” package that you get for free, or if I’m getting half of my neighbor’s feed or what. But I get all of the local network channels, and a bunch of the throwaways, like TNN, SuperStation, Food Network, Shop at Home, etc. I was dicking with the TV programming the other day, and found out I get the History Channel! I’m completely psyched because I could probably watch the History Channel 24 hours a day and never get bored. There’s nothing better than watching an hour about Chinese opium trade, then going into a special on guys restoring planes they found in a glacier in Greenland. So I might not be getting much writing done in the future, depending on their programming schedule.

I’m pretty pissed right now because I lost an eBay auction. I was bidding on a Tandy 102 computer, an old and primitive laptop that still works pretty neat and only uses 4 AA batteries. I had the winning bid up to the very last minute, and when it was 0.00, someone else came in and bid twice as much and took it. I was so pissed, I thought for sure I had it, because I was reloading the page every minute and watching. I think they used some kind of program to bid in the last minute. I also got run out on an auction for an Amiga 500 bundle that isn’t over, but that I didn’t want to pay too much for. I got onto another Tandy 102 auction, and I have a bid on an old MicroVAX. I don’t know if I will get any of them, but I hope that at least one of the auctions works out.

I watched all of the Blind Date DVDs and it pretty much reconfirmed my belief that I can never, ever, ever, date again. That doesn’t change that I want to, so the self-confusion level is still pegged.

And a freelance writer from AOL just used some of my pictures of St. Pete for an article, so I can add professional photographer to my long list of occupations. (writer, tech support, developer, designer, graphic artist, dishwasher, master paint specialist, truck loader and unloader, telemarketer, painter, landscaper, salesman, tutor, babysitter, game show contestant, cameraman, followspot operator, and fake advice columnist.)

The history of Lear jets is on. I better go.

New Coliseum

Sun, 06 Jul 2003 00:00:00 GMT

It’s hot as hell, still.

I did manage to get out today and find the new location for Coliseum Books. This was a pretty cool, non-chain bookstore up on 57th Street where I spent many a dollar on new books back in the day. Not only did it have a good location, but they had a cool selection, especially of history and literature. Unfortunately, they lost their lease, and the location is now a Fleet bank. I thought that was that, but on my walk the other day, I found they have a brand new store on 42nd Street, near the public library. I went in today and dropped about $50 on some new stuff, including a John Fante reader and a bunch of Asimov that I read back in high school, but really want to re-read. So that was nice, as was the air conditioning.

I thought that maybe eating hot foods from hot regions would maybe help me out here, so I had Mexican tonight and Indian the night before. I figured if they ate hot food all of the time, maybe they knew something that I didn’t. It didn’t help much, though. I think I really need to move, or build some kind of astronaut suit that has air conditioning.

2.4 Mhz of raw computing power, in the palm(s) of your hand(s)

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Still hot as hell here. I think I hit my upper bound on hot food, too. I never really got used to spicy foods, as I lived in the Midwest and ate a lot of really bland stuff. In college, I worked with a lot of people into the cult of the chile pepper, which seems to be prevalent in computer geeks for some reason. I had horrible stomach problems for years, so I didn’t get started on this, though. Since I moved to New York, I’ve slowly tried to introduce hot food to my diet, but I can only do it to a certain extent. I do okay with a chicken vindaloo, and I’m to the point where Tabasco is pretty middle-of-the-road. But I’m nothing like a coworker who is both New Mexican and of the aforementioned chile/tech geek cult, who can put ten ounces of pure nuclear habanero sauce on a single taco without flinching.

I don’t know if I mentioned that I bought a Tandy 102 from EBay. They are very neat little machines, especially given their mid-Eighties vintage. They have a full keyboard and a 40 by 8 character LCD display. Their 8-bit processor and up to 32K of RAM ran a tiny OS with BASIC, a text editor, and some other basic stuff like an address book and calendar. What’s cool is that the whole thing ran on 4 AA batteries for twenty hours, and when you hit the on switch, the thing immediately came on, more like a calculator than the five-minute wait on a current Windows laptop. It has a serial port to connect to a real PC, and should be a neat toy to play with on the train or while sitting in bed. Maybe I’ll run a serial cable from it and use it as a dumb terminal off of my Linux box. Of course, I have a real VT240 collecting dust in my closet, so I probably won’t do much with it. And the size on this places it smack-dab between my SideKick and my laptop. But for only $45, it’s not too bad.

I’m currently in the process of re-reading a bunch of Asimov stuff in order. In my senior year of high school, I only had to take a couple of classes in the last semester, so I had a few study halls, an hour that I worked in the theater, a piano class, and a lot of other filler. I had high hopes of reading every book in the library, or at least the ones I found interesting. After I read every World War II book cover to cover, I started reading all of the SciFi they had in the place - Bradbury, Orwell (okay, not really SciFi) and I worked through a lot of the Asimov. I don’t think they had any PKD, which would have been great too, although it seems like all of the good anthologies of his stuff have come out in the last decade or so. Anyway, I am reading through the robot books (I, Robot,The Robots of Dawn, The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun) and I’m considering going into the Foundation books, but it depends on how I do on the other stuff. I did some digging around, and I never knew that Asimov actually died of HIV complications. He had a heart bypass in 1983, and he got a bad blood transfusion. It was kept secret at his death, until a biography that came out last year. Pretty weird.

OK, I need to go write, if that’s at all possible in this heat.

68

Wed, 09 Jul 2003 00:00:00 GMT

It is sixty-eight degrees out! I don’t know how the fuck this happened. At lunch, it was mild out, but after work, I practically needed a jacket. I might actually be able to sleep tonight without taking a fistful of sleeping pills. It’s not even muggy or anything. I wish it would stay like this all month. (I hope I didn’t just curse it.)

I officially have too much stuff to read. The Asimov books are great, and I’m almost done with the first one. But I also got a copy of The Watchmen from Amazon the other day. It’s a graphic novel (i.e. comic book) from DC that everyone keeps telling me I really need to read. I don’t collect comics - I did for a little while in college, but got out of it when I was spending way too much money on Spiderman stuff. But I do occasionally like to read something when it’s good. The last good thing I read was the new Punisher title in the Marvel Knights series. I really like the faux-Mack Bolan anti-hero character, although he got a little too cartoony and weird during his run in other various Marvel comics. Ray told me to pick up the hardcover anthology of the first dozen or so of the new series, and they’re excellent. The art is much more realistic and gritty, and the stories have much more of a raw human feel to them. Like I said, I’m not the greatest fan of comics, but that book did it for me.

As far as other reading, I got a new book on flying ultralights today, but I forget the author/title. A quick flip on the subway showed a lot of good info about the meteorology side of things, which is good. I have a whole slew of books on my Amazon wish list. (If you’re curious, it’s here.) And then the other day, the guy who sits next to me ordered a shitload of books on Barnes and Noble, and they couriered the books to him THAT DAY. FOR FREE. Only in New York…

I think I’m back on the book of Bloomington short stories, and I’ve officially killed off any thought of working on my book called The Device. I did steal about 4,000 words out of it that I might use in a short story though, so that’s cool. I have 65,000 words of this book written, but much of that is in first draft format and horribly needs a rewrite. I hope I stay on this project, because I really need to get writing.

OK, that’s it. Time to sleep.

Hammerfall, writing, travel

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I have been doing nothing but eating pizza, drinking lots of Coke, and listening to this Hammerfall CD over and over and over and over. It is the best CD in the world. I’m sure I’ll be bored of it in a week.

I started writing a new book. It is like Rumored to Exist but way more offensive and it has more of a linear story. That is all I can tell you for now. But it will be cool.

I am going to see John Sheppard read in Boston on August 1st, and you should go if you have the means. There is a remote chance that I will actually read from Rumored to Exist, but it depends on my blood alcohol level at the time. Oh, and I bought tickets to go to Vegas on October 24-29. I have no idea where I am staying. If there is even a remote chance that you want to go to Vegas, you should go with me. Or bank up your change and go in January when I’m sure my cohorts will try to get me to throw up in another four-star restaurant.

I don't know but I've been told

Tue, 22 Jul 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I haven’t been writing in here much because I’ve been working on a new book. And I can’t talk about the new book because that would jinx it. But it’s going well, it’s getting there. And now I have a sore throat, so I’m expecting a cold and full shutdown some time this week. Some people can function fine on a cold, but it completely devastates me, and makes even the most simple daily routine difficult.

Got a whole new bundle of books from Amazon, but they are all at the office. I’m trying to finish up the 4-book Asimov trilogy, and just got done with book three. All of the other stuff I got is history, military. Good stuff.

I’m trying to run every day. It’s boring at first, and the boredom is pretty much my limitation now, moreso than shin splints or cardio. I just got a CD of running cadences recorded at Camp Pendleton, so you can march along with the Recon Marines. It’s actually pretty fun to march along with the CD, although my stupid portable CD player that advertises a 48-second skip buffer lasts about three good strides before skipping. I just zapped it all to the iPod, so hopefully that will work better.

OK, time to sleep…

Sneakers

Sat, 26 Jul 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I just watched the movie Sneakers, which is probably one of my favorite movies of all time. It has a nice, twisty plot, and even with the fake crypto technology subplot, it’s a very memorable and fun movie. I actually saw it in the theater three different times with three different dates when it was playing in Bloomington back in 1992. It’s another piece of proof that maybe that year was my high water mark, as I could get three different dates inside of a month or so, and I don’t think I’ve dated three different people in the last three years. Anyway, the movie reminded me of that era, not only in reference to who I saw it with, but also the look of things. The toy company-slash-enemy hideout is decorated in that early nineties tech look that existed in Lindley Hall and other newly remodeled buildings when I was on campus.

Not much is up here. I have been borderline sick all week, so I haven’t been in the mood to write. I’ve been falling asleep after work, eating dinner late, having the whole evening collapse onto itself, and then oversleeping in the morning. It’s a bad pattern, and hard to break. I slept for almost three hours after work tonight, but luckily, it’s Saturday tomorrow (today) and I’ll be able to sleep in. I have planned another weekend of nothing, except maybe getting work done on this (still untitled) book.

I’m very tired and it is almost 2:00 AM, so I better split.

Boston planning, memories

Sun, 27 Jul 2003 00:00:00 GMT

It’s been absolutely fucking unbearable here, heatwise. I spent most of yesterday sitting in bed with a fan pointed at me, reading and passing in and out of sleep. I managed to get out of the house today for a haircut, some shopping at St. Marks (including Toy Tokyo and Kim’s) and a late lunch of breakfast at Kiev. I also went to Barnes and Noble and got a book on Boston, so I won’t be completely lost when I get there on Thursday.

I’ve been to Boston twice already, both times at the end of ‘95. Both times were for work, when I was at CompuServe, and both times I was there for a week for a trade show. I had fun both trips, although on the first one, over Halloween, I got really sick and had to fly home with a full-on head cold, which became the absolute worst pain I’ve ever endured in my life. But both times, I saw a good amount of the city, although most of it was spent zipping around in cabs with people who knew more about the general geography, so I have no idea which way is up. But now my new book has a map, and I should be able to get around a bit better.

My memories of that whole era, the first six months of Seattle, are far enough back that I only remember mostly good things. I spent all of my time hacking on my first two books, I didn’t have a TV, I didn’t have any money, and I tried to do a lot to find out more about the new-to-me Emerald City. Most of that involved spending the last few bucks after car payments and rent to go to Elliot Bay books, buy whatever Bukowski I didn’t have, and go to whatever book signing they had. I remember meeting Barry Gifford, Richard Rhodes, and Kay Jamison within a month of each other in the basement of that old bookstore. And when I didn’t walk down to Pioneer Square, I would drive north and south on I-5, going up to see movies at Mountlake Terrace and wandering around the Northgate mall.

I just realized I have a shitload of travel books, both of places I’ve been and places I’ve wanted to visit. I wish I could visit each of the places I have a book for; it would be cool to go to Japan, Amsterdam, New Orleans. I don’t think I am taking any more big trips this year, although I am going to Vegas and probably taking one more long weekend. But next year, I’d like to roll all of my tax money into plane tickets and hit a lot of places.

Freaky dream

Tue, 29 Jul 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I had this dream Monday night that I had some kind of weird, parasitic, fungal growth under my fingernails. These little black dots, like tiny seedlings, were growing in a sort of paisley pattern that sort of reminded me of some sort of henna tattoo. But it was UNDER the nail, and was fucking FREAKING ME OUT. Any kind of fungal growth like that really bothers me. A friend of mine once told me she had some kind of infection or bacteria on her tonsils, and it was growing like little flowers on the back of her throat and it FREAKED ME OUT for like a YEAR. So I was going apeshit in the dream, trying to stick an x-acto knife under my nails to scrape away the stuff, and considering just going to the hospital and having them peel back my nails and then wear band-aids for weeks until they grew back. I was in a total frenzy, a shiver running through all of my skin, every pore itching every time I looked at my nails and saw these little creatures living under there.

I woke up, and looked at my clock, and it was about an hour until the alarms went off, so I turned on my desk light, and looked at my fingers, and THE FUCKING STUFF WAS UNDER MY NAILS!!

Then I really woke up. Holy shit, I hate dreams like that.

---

The Boston trip is planned and ready to roll, although I am no longer taking the last-minute special through Delta because they wanted to screw me into paying double for a hotel because I was traveling alone. So now I have another hotel booked, and I am taking the bus there, which only costs like $20 but involves four hours of sitting in a bus. I’ll bring a book, a gameboy, and the iPod.

What am I doing there, someone asked? John Sheppard is reading on August 1st. You can read more about the reading here. I am tempted to sign up for the open mic before the reading and rattle off a few pages of Rumored, but I don’t know if I will or not. Maybe, though. I will also be meeting up with a couple of other friends from IU, and I also want to check out the USS Constitution and USS Cassin Young, which are both a stone’s throw from my hotel. And I want to enjoy being out of New York for a long weekend.

Not much else to report, just playing Tribes: Aerial Assault constantly, and trying not to think about bugs under my fingernails.

Boston

Sun, 03 Aug 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I’m back, and I had a pretty good four-day weekend in Boston. The weather was nice (albeit a bit rainy on one day), the subways did not reek of piss, the restaurants had working public restrooms, and the cashiers actually talked to you, as if having paying customers was a virtue. Quite different from my home town, and a nice change.

The main event on Friday was the reading, and finally meeting my writer friend John Sheppard. He read last, from his book Small Town Punk. I read from Rumored to Exist, the first time I ever read from anything, and it went okay. After that, we went to a bar called Bukowski’s. I met some cool people, sold some books, gave away some books, traded some books, and got some books. So that went cool.

I also saw some old IU friends. Jeff Sumler showed up at the reading and had a few with us there and at Bukowski’s. I hung out in Harvard Square on Saturday afternoon with Brian Smith and his wife Sarah, where we ate some Mexican food and walked around the Harvard campus for a while. And even though our plans didn’t pan out, I got to chat a bit with my old friend Drew. So there was a lot of the conversation about where persons x and y were, and what it was like back in Bloomington, and how the campus has changed in a decade, and all of that. And that sometimes feels a little childish, like I’m one of those high school football player types stuck in the past. But sometimes it’s good, too.

And now I’m back. And I’m dead tired, and I’d love to tell more details or upload the pictures and make a web page, but I really need to crash…

Boys and Girls

Sat, 09 Aug 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I’m somewhat depressed. I just watched this movie called Boys and Girls on TV while I was sitting at home on a Saturday night, eating canned ravioli and frozen garlic bread for dinner. It’s one of those college comedy/romance movies, starring Freddie Prinze Jr. and Claire Forlani as these two college students that are opposites but very paired together. They keep running into each other by chance and don’t entirely click, but over the course of their college career, become the best of friends. Then they semi-accidentally sleep together at the end of Act II, insert cliche commotion, and the whole thing ends with her giant soliloquy as he’s on the plane leaving for home at the end of the year, about how she needs him and really does love him, etcetera.

It all sounds very cliche, and it is. But I guess it was very well done, at least as far as these sort of teen college movies go, and it caught me for some reason. Maybe part of it is Claire Forlani, who is not only very easy on the eyes, but also had this role where she seemed to be the perfect, down-to-earth female, the kind of girlfriend one would really want, both very sexual and beautiful, yet very carefree and open. But part of the reason the film stuck in my craw was the same reason I spent so long writing Summer Rain: I really do feel nostalgic over my years in college. Even if the fairytale romance like the one in this movie (or, for that matter, the one in Summer Rain, which was fictional) never happened, that era was the playing field for something like that to happen. So I did enjoy the movie, but it also brought this weird funk over me that I can’t seem to shake.

(Weird aside - the movie also briefly featured Heather Donahue, who was in The Blair Witch Project, although I didn’t even know it was her. It also had Jason Biggs as Prinze’s roommate, and Alyson Hannigan as Prinze’s first girlfriend. And then in the American Pie movies, Biggs and Hannigan end up married. Weird.)

So I got audited AGAIN, by the State of New York. They claim I did not file a tax return in 1999, which is humorous considering I DID file a return, and I’ve got a copy of it sitting right here, and then they later audited said return to squeeze a bit more money out of me. Fuckers. I would like to send them a letter saying “Dear NYSIRS: it appears your records are FUCKED. I did pay my taxes, you pieces of shit. You now owe me a refund of 25% of the amount of taxes paid for wasting my fucking time and another stamp to mail this stupid letter, you pieces of shit. Love, Jon.”

I got Command and Conquer: Generals and it is the most perfect way to destroy any writing ethic I may have remaining. It’s a pretty cool game, albeit a slight bit sluggish on my machine.

Not much else is going on. The weather is a bit shitty, and I am broke, so I’ve spent most of the weekend sofar either running errands or trying to clean the house. I am slowly making progress on the apartment, and there are a few new patches of floor visible from the shifting of things. I’m throwing out junk, trying to shuffle the bookshelves a bit to get things off the floor, and just trying to put things away as I can. Nothing major, but it’s getting there.

I should write, but I don’t know if I can. Either way, I should get something done now…

Blackout

Fri, 15 Aug 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Well, I had an interesting day yesterday.

At about 4:30, me and another guy were getting on the elevator to go downstairs for a drink/snack. As we got on the elevator, the lights started flickering, so we immediately got out before the door closed. Right then, the power went out on the whole fucking eastern seaboard. I got to see the emergency procedure of shutting down about a dozen machines that require heavy-duty AC, beeping and complaining as their backup power supplies tried to crash-land them. The machine room was prepared for the contingency - except for not having any backup lights. Oops.

We thought it was a building problem, but within a few phone calls, found out power was really out all over New York, New Jersey, even as far away as Detroit and Ohio. Without a computer, I had nothing to do, so I hit the road. I really didn’t want to walk, but at least I had my iPod, and I was lucky enough to wear shorts that day. Unfortunately, I only had about $2 in cash on me, and the ATMs weren’t going to be working with no power.

The walk reminded me way too much of 9/11, and I even took the same route for the first part of the trip. This time, there were way more people flooding the streets and sidewalks, and the temps were much higher, probably in the mid-90s. I was instantly dehydrated, and cut over to Park to hump my way north to 59th street. People on the street from bodegas and restaurants were selling their bottled water for about 100% above retail. I hope these bastards get anally gang-raped by well-hing, syphilitic SARS patients in the near future.

I finally bought a can of Sunkist for $2 before I hit the Queensborough bridge. (If you saw Spiderman, this is the bridge at the very end, with the battle with Green Goblin.) I have rode my bike across the bridge many times, and there is a separate lower deck for pedestrians, so you don’t walk as high, and it has no cars on it. As I followed the swarm of people to the bridge, I realized we weren’t going the right way. And a second later, I found myself walking on TOP of the bridge, on the upper deck, next to cars. It was very freaked out, being up there with no guard rails or sidewalks, marching next to a line of pretty much parked traffic.

After the long bridge, my body was ready to shut down from dehydration. I barely managed to cross the 39th street bridge over the Sunnyside rail yard and was desperately trying to find a way to simply give up and carjack someone, when I ran into a spa on 39th and Northern that was scrambling to give away all of their ice and big tubs of water with dixie cups. I drank about six glasses of water, the best water I’ve ever had in my life, and then saw that next door, a firehouse had a hose set up with a sprinkler. I put aside my bag and completely drenched myself from head to toe, which immensely helped me stumble the last few miles home.

Round trip: 8 miles. Just over 3 hours. Not too shabby. Of course, I can barely feel my legs today, but I made it.

I didn’t have anything to eat other than snack food and powerbars when I got home, but I really didn’t feel like eating after all that walking. I drank as much water as I could, and luckily I still had running water. I finished reading Skunk Works by flashlight, made a few phone calls (that still worked, miraculously) and tried to sleep. And tried. And tried. Outside, it was a fucking party until after midnight, so I put in earplugs, soaked a towel, and covered myself with it. No fans = sucks.

The power kicked in at about 4AM, turning on my lights and fans. I got a few hours of good sleep, until my boss called and told me to stay put. Turns out a big chunk of Manhattan is still screwed, as are the subways. So I get a day off. Too bad half of the cable channels are out.

I’m going to go take a nap in front of a fan, then hit an ATM and get a bunch of real food. Hope all’s well where you’re sitting.

sun/navigation tricks

Thu, 21 Aug 2003 00:00:00 GMT

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:

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.
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.

summer smells

Sun, 07 Sep 2003 00:00:00 GMT

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.

rain, ISBNs

Wed, 24 Sep 2003 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Winter

Sat, 04 Oct 2003 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Xmas in October

Sun, 05 Oct 2003 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Mungo

Wed, 08 Oct 2003 00:00:00 GMT

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.

headache, las vegas

Mon, 13 Oct 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve got a headache, and I’m watching Las Vegas on TV, sort of in the background now that only 15 minutes are left and I pretty much know where all of the plot lines are going. I’m also editing crap for the glossary, slowly trying to lock down the last of the changes. I noticed that all of my old comments had vanished, so I dug around the HaloScan web site and found out you need a premium account to get to your old stuff. So $10 later, all of my stuff is restored, and I think there are some new features I’ll be able to use at some point in the future. I also took all of the entries from the letter A and brought them into FrameMaker to see what it will look like in print format. The template needs a hell of a lot of work, but at least I know how much effort it will take when CafePress finally offers perfect bound books.

Not much else is up. I got a new DSL modem via UPS today, and when they get my line hooked up on that end, my home speed will go to 1.5Mbps download and 256Kbps upload via lineshare, at the same price as my current 768/128 dedicated line. It means I have to dig behind some dressers and the entertainment center to install line filters on the phones, so I will probably inhale a metric assload of dust bunnies in the process. But that’s a small price to pay for faster speed.

really winter

Wed, 22 Oct 2003 00:00:00 GMT

It’s really winter out now. Okay, 41 degrees, rainy, cloudy - it’s more like a Seattle winter. But it’s finally the weather where my leather jacket seems justifiable, and where it feels good to get out of the cold and huddle up in my apartment. The heat is on, which is no small miracle, given that my landlord tries to fuck us out of heat and hot water whenever possible. I remember exactly a year ago, when I had neither, and I was using an electric heating pad in bed and warming pans of water on the stove for a lukewarm spongebath. The downside to the steam heat is that I have my annual no-humidity headcold, which sucks and is slowly progressing, thanks to a regimen of about a gallon of juice a day plus as much extra sleep as I can possibly muster.

I’m leaving for Las Vegas on Friday, for a short trip until next Wednesday. This time, I will be going with my sister Monica and my brother-in-law Derek. It’s always fun to go with someone who has never been there, so we should have plenty to do. The only small issue is that my sister is currently about four and a half months pregnant. So this won’t be a trip filled with trays of stinger shots and trips to the all-nude strip clubs after several rounds of rollercoasters. I’m thinking we might hit a show or two, and take a leisurely walk around the neighboring casinos, but not much more. We’ll also have to go to the Star Trek thing, and they are getting there a day early and driving to Hoover Dam. The nice thing is that the current temperature out there is a high of 91, so I will get to break out those shorts one more time.

Nothing else has been going on. Going to bed early puts a cramp on everything. I’m reading Green Mars, and I’m past the point where I quit reading five years ago. Now it’s all new territory for me. I guess it will go with me on the trip, and I will also probably bring a printout of the glossary to mark up.

OK, time to hit the grapefruit juice again.

back from Vegas

Fri, 31 Oct 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I’m back. I had a pretty good trip to Vegas, and the photos and a quick bulleted list are here. [Now dead, sorry] It was cool to see my sister and brother-in-law, and it’s always fun to go to Vegas with people who haven’t been there before; it makes everything seem new to me. Probably the highlight of the trip was seeing Blue Man Group again, this time in the 5th row of the center section. The lowlight was getting delayed on my way out because of the California fires. And also the last day was depressing, being by myself and being almost out of cash as I walked around without much to do. The weather was beautiful the whole time I was there, but I didn’t feel like doing much other than going to the movies and going to Denny’s. But now that I’m home, I wish I was back there again.

I’m still sick - it never really went away, and just got worse in different ways. I stayed home today and slept all day, which seemed to help a bit. Now I hope that two more days of extreme sleep and much more juice will make it clear up. I have a lot of stuff around the house to get done, and I am editing the glossary on paper, which makes for a good in-bed project.

I didn’t do anything special for Halloween. I was going to watch Psycho, and I started watching Motel Hell, but I don’t have the attention span tonight to stick with a whole movie. Instead, I flipped channels and ended up on a Friday the 13th sequel, the one in Manhattan (8? 9?). It was funny only in that it belongs to that sub-genre of cinema best described as “I hate NY.” There were all of these films in the late 70s/early 80s that formed my early impressions of the big apple, the kinds of things like showed the city as a total disaster, with people getting killed on subways, and every other building on fire. Now that I live in the post-Giuliani version of the city, it’s very amusing to watch these films. It’s almost like watching campy 60s movies about the futuristing 1995, with floating cities and rocket jet-packs and stainless steel robots. I need to hunt down a copy of Escape from New York and see if it measures up.

Not much else is up. CSI is on now, so I’m getting pulled in…

projects, sick

Wed, 05 Nov 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Just a quick update. I’m so fucking busy I can’t find enough hours in the day, yet I keep playing SOCOM and I’ve been stuck on the same level since MAY. I could probably draw a map of the whole level and where all of the dudes are hiding in my sleep with my eyes closed (as opposed to that open-eye sort of sleep) and yet I play it twice or three times a day and always get killed at the last screen.

Anyway, two big projects here at home, and both of them are running at the same time, waiting to see which one hits the gate first. One is the glossary, and I am editing it on paper, adding new entries, editing stuff based on comments, and trying to get the text all locked down and in shape. That maybe will take another month, but I am getting bored of it already. Then it needs to be moved to FrameMaker, the cover needs to be designed, and then it will go out. That might or might not happen by the end of the year.

Then Rumored to Exist - there will be an annotated version. I have been working on the annotations for a long time, and they are almost done. It needs an introduction, which I am writing, then it gets into Frame and gets a design and a cover. That might happen first. Both books will be fairly cheap and only available from one online store at the publisher, not from Amazon et al. They will not have a UPC or ISBN or be in Books in Print, but they will be a bit cheaper. And they will be cool! So I am excited about that.

I think I am almost over this cold that has been killing me since I have been back. I do not have a runny nose, but I have a horrific yet productive cough. So maybe that means another day or two and it will be done. I saw an ad on TV for some shit that is supposed to help you not get a cold. It looked like Alka-Seltzer, which would be bad because I am allergic to aspirin, plus that fizzing shit is NASTY. But the ad on TV said no details, and I don’t remember the name of it, either. It would be nice if there was some sort of inhalant that you could take, like maybe before of after you got on the germway (i.e. subway) and it would somehow protect your lung lining so it didn’t immediately absorb all of the vile shit you breathe down there from a 45-minute subway ride. Or maybe I could bring a scuba tank.

That’s all.

Shoe burial ground

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been in overdrive, trying to get the annotated version of Rumored to Exist ready. I have the front cover and back cover designed, and they look cool. The whole book is in FrameMaker, and it’s amazing how smooth things have gone with it. I mean, I use Frame all day long every day, so I should have great faith in its ability, but this project has been wonderful. The footnote numbering problem was a ten second fix; the new template was about five minutes of work; the importing of the document from Word took no time at all. Now I need to finish writing the introduction, and comb through the thing for any style issues, and it will be ready.

Every time I buy new shoes, I do not throw out the old ones, even though I typically wear shoes down to the point where there is a hole all the way through the sole. But I need the backup pair, and there have been many times I’ve bought new shoes that simply didn’t work, and I had to go back to the backups until I could find another store with another shoe that did work. Anyway, today I was sitting in bed and realized I had five identical pairs of white on white Nike Air Force III Mid-height hightops, each right one with a hole right through the toe side of the sole. Each left one was fine. I put them all in a garbage bag and hauled them out - that’s a lot of square feet of space. I wish I could simply replace the soles, but now this paragraph is turning into an Andy Rooney rant, so I’ll shut up.

I have been reading the Chuck Barris book Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and I really like it. I don’t know that I’d like the movie so much, but the book has a certain gritty feel to it that reminds me of Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, Elmore Leonard. I’m pretty far into it, I should finish tomorrow. I got the Bukowski book Open All Night, but that’s a poem book, so it will probably be read random page by random page at night when I can’t sleep. I think the next book is this one on the history and invention of the television, which I got at Strand this weekend, along with the Bukowski and an old book on modern warplanes by Bill Gunston, a book from 1980 full of pictures that I remember from the school’s library, so I figured it was worth the five bucks.

I actually wish I knew anything about Bill Gunston. He published hundreds of these books for Jane’s, and a million other aviation-related magazines. Maybe he’s just a figurehead, or a pseudonym for like a dozen other writers, like Louis Lamour, or Don Pendleton, the “author” of a few thousand Mack Bolan books. Anyway, when I was a kid, I used to eat up any of those airplane books, the ones with tons of photos of planes in action. It’s funny to look at these books now, and see how all of the text in the books has to do with the “looming” war with the USSR, and how various US planes were well-poised against Soviet counterparts. It’s also weird, especially in this book I got yesterday, how the MiGs and other Warsaw Pact planes had very sketchy details; the photos were grainy and improvised, the artists’ renditions were just educated guesses. Of course now, if you flew to Moscow with a suitcase of money, they would practically give you a MiG-25, teach you how to fly it, feed you like a king every day, and let you date their sister. It’s amazing how things change.

Oh, my Latitude laptop died. I should be more pissed about this than I am, but it’s almost a non-issue, given how little I use it. I think the hard drive is fried, or it could just be the registry. I guess I could nuke it and start over, but I don’t feel like messing with it right now.

Okay, I’m done for the night. Time to read for a bit.

TD

Sun, 16 Nov 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I got a voice mail from Simms last week, when I stepped away from the desk for a second. Tom Donohue died, he said. Tom was a really great guy who worked at a used CD store back in Bloomington, and eventually opened up his own place. Most used CD places in town are just out to rip off students coming in and going out, but he always seemed to give everyone the “friend” rate. He would talk to you about whatever music you were into, if it was the Flaming Lips or the Beatles or Cannibal Corpse or anything else, and he’d know weird trivia or obscure releases better than you would. He always kept aside weird Death Metal when I was into it, and then cheap Zappa stuff when I was into that. He also did a lot with WQAX and WFHB, and sponsored a lot of local bands. He was a class act indeed.

You know, I even mentioned Tom in Summer Rain, because back in the day, I was in his shop constantly. I went in there last August when I was in town for a split second to have lunch with Alana, and I ducked in and said hi. It was good to see him, and now I’m glad I did catch up with him. Anyway, here’s another tribute to him, courtesy of the IDS.

sodium, travel

Sun, 30 Nov 2003 00:00:00 GMT

The longer I don’t update, the less important it seems, and the more I think I have nothing going on that’s worty of an update. So I’ll randomly try to mention everything that’s going on.

First, I’m going back to Indiana on the 6th, for a week I’ll be flying straight into South Bend (well, via CVG) and staying with Ray the whole time. This is sort of the pre-emptive holiday visit, since I don’t like to fly during the blackout period and I wanted to get a frequent flier ticket. The original plan was to just go to Ray’s and sit around for a week, get caught up on various video games, and not much more. But I will also see the various family factions and I guess have christmas early. So I’ve had to do all of my shopping early, but I did it all on Amazon, so that’s not too bad. I have not thought about the trip at all, so I feel like I should be doing some detailed planning or scheduling, but I realize that it will all be thrown off anyway.

I am on a diet, I guess. I’m having various medical issues I don’t want to discuss here, but I’ve basically got to cut the shit and stop with the sugar, sodium, and fat. So I went to the grocery store today and bought $67 of food that might be healthier for me, provided I don’t eat it all in one sitting out of some sort of starvation kick. Shopping for low-sodium food is imporrible. Everything has a ludicrous amount of sodium. Even those hippy-trippy, east asian, vegan-macro-micro-whatever diets are a total salt bomb. If you have any wise ideas on low-sodium cuisine, get them to me, and fast, because my heart is about ready to explode. Also, I go to a grocery store that’s smaller than the deli section of a Kroger, so the aisles are barely wide enough to walk through, and it makes it hard to study the labels on various foods without getting kicked in the shins by a four-foot-tall Greek woman.

I’ve been very apathetic about the annotated Rumored or the rerelease of Summer Rain, both of which have sort of fallen by the wayside. I got a test print of the Rumored thing, but they messed up the spine and I have another round of hell to go through with them, and I really don’t see the point or feel like it right now. Maybe after the holidays. I have been vaguely been thinking about a new project, but just vaguely.

I just finished SOCOM II on the easy level. It wasn’t too bad, but the last level was actually a bummer. There were much harder levels before that one.

OK, I need to get out of here…

don't ever get a flu shot

Sat, 06 Dec 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I was supposed to fly to South Bend this afternoon. Adding to the stress of this family visit was the fact that I’d been sick all fucking week due to the stupid flu shot. DON’T GET A FLU SHOT. EVER. Especially don’t get one if you have an immune system already deeply weakened by the fact that I drink a lot of Coke, don’t eat right, and don’t happen to be a marathon runner or mountain climber like everyone else in my office. I’m not going to lay out any kind of conspiracy about the shots or anything, it’s just that the dead flu stuff got on top of me quickly, or maybe they just took out my defenses and I got infected by some other thing. Either way, I spent all week completely laid out by some kind of fast-acting and brutal flu or viral infection or something. Leaving the house and trying to breathe the air during my quick run to the subway made my chest feel like I was breathing pure kerosene. Sleep helped a lot, but you can only sleep so many hours a day, especially with the whole job thing. I went to a doctor to see if it was maybe some Chernobyl strep throat, but after a swab, he said it was viral. As of today, I’m slowly getting better, but it’s not done yet. I had to cancel a date on Friday which really, really pissed me off, and on Thursday I thought it would be even money that I’d have to cancel the whole trip and spend the week in bed.

So I was sick, and to add to that the fact that organizing anything with my family is like trying to organize a labor dispute between the Teamsters and the WTO or something, and every 7 seconds, I was getting another phone call from another random person wanting to know the obvious. And then, to spice up the whole thing even more, it started snowing.

First, let me say that New Yorkers are horrible when it comes to snow. Yesterday, the stuff was barely coming down, and the ground had the consistency of a Slurpee you left in your car for a few hours in July, and people are running to the grocery store to buy like ten loaves of bread and a few gallons of milk. Why do people buy so much bread and milk? How much do you go through in a weekend? Are they starting a bootleg french toast restaurant? You’d think these Atkins-obsessed health freaks would be buying power bars and backs of bacon or something. Anyway, the stuff was barely dusting down, and people were abandoning their Hummer H2s on Houston or something because they were “snowed in.” Anyway, all day people were giving me shit about how I would miss my flight, and I ignored them, or at least tried to.

I woke up this morning: flight cancelled. I spent about an hour on hold with Delta, hoping they wouldn’t pull some bullshit and say my ticket would not be reassignable and I’d have to pay $27,000 for a new ticket to leave within the next month. Finally, I got an agent, and she was nice enough to push me to a flight that left at 7:00 tonight. So I was happy, it didn’t cost anything, and I went back to bed.

So I woke up at about 2:00, and guess what? That flight got cancelled too. After another hour on hold, I ended up getting on the first flight back I could get, which is… MONDAY. So I get two days trimmed from the vacation, and we have to reschedule christmas, maybe to Wednesday. On the plus side, I get to hide in my apartment and have some time alone to get over this death sickness, and maybe if I feel better, I can reschedule the date for tomorrow.

BTW, the whole low-sodium new diet thing did not work out. It’s impossible to keep on any kind of diet when you’re sick and all you want to eat is soup and grilled cheese. I’ve been reading more about low sodium stuff, and it’s all very depressing. It’s amazing how so much stuff can have sodium in it, even if you don’t know it. I’ll worry more about this when I get back from this trip.

OK, now it’s time to relax…

[Also, please ignore my stupid advice and get a flu shot.]

Sadaam is back, and so am I

Sun, 14 Dec 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Sadaam is back, and so am I. I, however, feel a lot worse than he looks. I’m still trying to kick the last remains of whatever I caught from that flu shot, and a week in Indiana didn’t exactly help me shake it. I got back last night at about 8:00, and found that my phone and DSL service were tits-up, and I didn’t even have a dialtone. I suspected either that Verizon had randomly disconnected my service, or my stupid fucking landlord decided to snip some copper pairs in the basement and sell them on the black market or something. After a week of getting by with my Sidekick, I was looking forward to some real web browsing and email catchup, but no dice.

Verizon got a guy out to the house at about 10:00 this morning, and he had to go through the usual bullshit shuffle because out landlord doesn’t have a super (which is against the law) and the phone closet was locked. After a few hours, the repair guy got in there and determined the problem was in the CO, and the pair was fine at my place. He phoned it in, and within an hour or so, I had service again.

So about the trip… the whole thing was very subdued, and I didn’t really do a lot, so there is no trip report and there are no photos. I did see all of my family, see both of my sisters’ new houses, and hang out at Ray’s place. Elkhart in general hasn’t really changed much, at least in my view. Some stores are new, and some buildings have been built, but I had an incredible sense of deja vu for most of the trip. So much of the scenery reminded me of my time driving around Elkhart and South Bend in 1990, 1991. I had this incredible nostalgia, this feeling a step above depression but still a strong pull back into the past. I did not like the year of college I spent in that town, but I wished I was still in that timeframe, maybe so I still had the friends, the job, the old favorite restaurants and hangouts to return to. Being there without any of those things made it all seem like a huge daydream to me, and very unsatisfying.

I also had mixed feelings because everyone had houses, new houses with full basements and spare bedrooms and giant kitchens and lots of closets and driveways and garages, and here I am in a tiny one-bedroom apartment overrun with DVDs and books. When I see this, it makes me wish I could settle down into 2000 square feet and a decent mortgage. But there’s no way I’ll find that in New York for under a half a mil, and there’s no way I could move back to Elkhart. If I could keep my current salary, and keep my current DSL connection, and have a house, and find the perfect woman there, I would move back. But those are four things I don’t think will happen in Elkhart.

I read a big chunk of Summer Rain while I was gone and decided that while I still like the book, it would be a waste of time to try to correct or reissue it. I really need to write another new book, and it won’t be some straightforward, sappy, nostalgic thing. It needs to be Rumored to Exist times two. I don’t know beyond that what it will be, though.

Okay, it is almost 6:00 and I have not eaten all day, so either I need to stall a bit, or think about an early dinner…

There has to be a better way to wash dishes

Tue, 16 Dec 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Jesus, I hate washing dishes. There has to be a better way. And don’t tell me “a dishwasher,” because I had a dishwasher in Seattle, and I had to wait until I had a full sink of dishes before I ran it, and then it ran like as loud as a god damned Harley with straight pipes for an hour and a half straight, and I spent just as long rinsing off the dishes before I put them in, and then half the time I had to rinse them before I put them away because they reeked of lemony fresh calgon scent or whatever the shit was, and all of that water and energy was wasted and it would have been easier just to hand wash the god damned things. What I’m looking for is a machine where you just put the plates right in it, and it blasts away everything, like the kind of machine you use to take the paint off of car parts before you chrome or paint them.

Okay, here’s the deal. And don’t screw with me about this, because for six weeks, I washed the god damned dishes at Columbo’s in Elkhart, and I spent about a semester cleaning the shit off of dishes at the Collins lunchroom when I was in college. So I’m a professional here. Anyway, I only have one sink. And the usual procedure is that I stack up plates in the sink until I have completely run out of plates. At that point, because I have like 16 or 20 sets of Faberware, the stack of plates has like the Swamp Thing growing on it, with all sorts of slime trails and other growths that a god damned biologist could write a thesis on. Then I get out one of those little things with the sponge and the handle and the dish soap in the handle, and I wash like one or two plates when I get some delivery food, then throw them back on the pile when I get done eating. So it’s like a stack in computer programming jargon, which means the bottom plates are fused to each other like some sort of natural cement, like what some ancient Indian tribe would use to build a fort or a pyramid or something. Plus the stupid handle always leaks the soap all over the place between uses, so a bottle of Dawn washes like four plates total, and costs like $6.79. (I know it costs like a dollar out in Indiana at Kroger, but you have to realize that the stupid, tiny, piece of shit grocery stores here overcharge you on everything and only have the smallest size possible, and like no variety, so like out there you probably have 863 different flavors of Dawn with various antibacteria, antivirus, antigrease, antifood, anticarb, or whatever else, and we only have the old-school blue shit.) Also, the sponge tore off of the handle, and now I will have to buy a new handle and a new set of sponges, since there is no compatability between sponges and handles, because why would there be when we still have a little bit of room in landfills.

So here’s a system for washing dishes the old-school way. Sink A has the dirty dishes, with hot water and dish soap. Sink B is clean and is the “rinse” sink. Then there is a strainer, where you dry them. You soak and scrub the shit in A, then move it to B and queue up a bunch of stuff there. Then when A is done or B is full, you rinse off the items and put them in the strainer thing to dry. Easy enough, right? I used this method at the horrible Italian restaurant, and it worked fine (although sometimes on Saturday nights, me and the other guy John used to have contests to see who could go the longest without changing their water in sink A, because you’re continually adding new dishes to A, unlike your situation in a domestic environment, because unless you have a fuck of a lot of dishes, sink A is like a one-shot deal. Anyway, we’d go for hours, and sink A would look like the Exxon Valdez crashed in it, with oil slicks and chunks of pizza crust and pasta and cigarette butts and who knows what floating in it.)

Well, I DON’T HAVE TWO SINKS. So here is my system. Sink A: water, some dirty dishes, soap. Then a wash tub as sink B. I can stack stuff in there, but I can’t rinse into it, as it doesn’t have a sink or drain or whatever. So I stack everything in there that is cleaned but not rinsed. Then I take it all out, one at a time, and rinse it as I am overflowing sink A and water is going all over the floor and flooding my kitchen, unless I pull the plug and lower the water level and dilute the soap in A. So it works better with less shit in A, and all of those dishes stacked on the floor and the stove and the living room and whatever else. So I did this for a while, and it sort of worked, but I only got like three plates cleaned and then all of the bowls and silverware and stuff. Tomorrow, I will put away all of the shit, and then start over.

I bought a box of brandy cherries from the discount wholesaler store, which is right below where I work. They were horrific. They tasted like they were filled with kerosene. I ate one, and even the faint thought of it makes me want to go hurl chunks. I am never, ever eating another alcohol-based confection again in my life. I am also never drinking any hard liquor again in my life, as I overheard a completely stupid conversation today about the merits of hard liquor because of its lack of carbs. I realize I do not eat that healthy of a diet, but I am hoping to improve it to the point where in ten years, I will be fairly healthy at the same time that everyone who was preaching Atkins is on an organ donor wait list.

Speakeasy, acid

Sun, 21 Dec 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I forgot to mention this, but Speakeasy tried to screw me out of $200 while I was on vacation, and of course I found out about it when my phone and internet were destroyed last weekend. See, a little while ago, they offered to switch me from a straight-up connection to a linesharing connection, and the two things that made me hesitant were the startup costs, and the fact that if something ever happened to my phone, I would also lose my internet connection. They got me to pay $200 in startup equipment costs at a time when I was saving every penny for vacation and eating easy mac for lunch and dinner because I really needed the money, by promising me a refund on all of the equipment costs. I got screwed on that. And the second point, well within a month or so, I did lose both phone and internet in one swoop, probably because the geniuses at Verizon got a disconnect order on the old straight-up line and he accidentally disconnected both because as he was leaning over the frame rack, he was smoking crack, bumped his arm and it disconnected both lines. That’s my theory anyway.

The rebate signup page reminded me a lot of the old Juno DSL rebate page, which I think got customer complaints at a ratio of maybe 1 to 1. I filled everything out, and I think they said they would pay me back in 8 to 263 weeks. That really pissed me off, as I thought maybe I could get a check before xmas and spend it on presents, or at least buy myself like four or five of the new Criterion DVDs that are out. So I get back from vacation last week and find a postcard in my mailbox that says “the address submitted on your rebate form did not match your DSL service address.” So if my rebate address is so wrong, why the hell did they send me a card there? Of course, it’s addressed to John Kenroth and they omitted the hyphen and changed the Street to ST and the apartment # to apt# or some other shit that is obviously going to break a diff script or whatever.

In all fairness, I shouldn’t blame Speakeasy. I have had accounts there since 1996, and although they’ve had some fuckups over time, they have also been fairly cool, both at the larger corporate level and at the tech support level. Also, from my experience at Juno, I know that they probably don’t personally handle these rebates. They probably hired some fulfillment center with an office in Delaware or whatever who they subcontracts all of the postcard sorting and data entry and complaint hotline answering. Back when I was at Juno, they mostly farmed this stuff out to high-security prisons, mostly because of a lack of organized child labor in this country. Who knows what they do now.

I managed to call someone a couple of days ago, and he managed to get my shit straight, and said I’d get a check to me in two weeks. I’ll hopefully have that money in my hands before I go to Vegas in January, so I can rent a fast car, some automatic weapons, and lots of ammunition. End of story.

I bought another quart of sulfuric acid and dumped it down my tub drain yesterday. That shit works wonders - I know how I’m getting rid of any bodies The Cleaner-style if it ever comes to that (and I don’t have any quicklime.) A quick aside, speaking of John Wayne Gacy - does anyone remember how the Blimpie’s in Bloomington had that weird, animated clown statue in the front window that looked exactly like JWG? I remember driving by there at night, and this animatronic killer clown was sitting in the shadows, and it always used to be really freaky. That’s my only Blimpie’s story, although everyone in my office has a better one: back when we used to be temporarily located in a bunch of apartments near Penn Station, a bunch of people from the office went to lunch at Blimpie’s, and everyone got totally, completely, shitting-blood-and-praying-to-die food poisoned there. So Blimpie’s isn’t a good word around the company. Anyway, the acid - a while ago, I went to this local hardware store and asked if they had any Drano or Liquid Plumber in like a gallon size, or something cheaper than the grocery store, where it’s like ten bucks a pint and you need to buy like 13 of them to clean even a slow drain. So the dude looks around, pulls down a shade over the front window, and asks, “Are you a cop?” and I say, “no dude, I just want some liquid plumber!” And he knocks me on the floor, and starts checking my jacket, and yelling, “ARE YOU A FUCKING COP? ARE YOU WEARING A WIRE, YOU MOTHERFUCKER?” And I’m screaming, “No! Get the fuck off of me!” So he goes back behind the counter, and says “Okay, check this shit out…” and pulls out a bottle with more warnings and disclaimers on it than a nuclear warhead in California. “You ever see this shit before?” he asks. “No, what is it?” And he’s like “Forget it man, maybe you should go to the Key Foods and buy more foaming Drano.” And I’m like “No dude, let me have it! Nothing else works.” And he’s like, “Okay here’s what you do. You don’t have a weak heart or anything, do you? Anyway, put on some goggles and gloves and a rubber suit. Then open this shit with a knife, and then throw away the knife, but not in your own trash can, or it will eat through it - put it in your neighbor’s can at like three in the morning. Then pour it all in the drain, and run like a motherfucker to the subway and get on a train and don’t come back to your house for like three days. AND DON’T TELL ANYONE YOU BOUGHT IT HERE!”

So anyway, I got some of that acid, and my drain is still slow.

And yes, I am going to Las Vegas in January for my birthday. I think it will be me, Bill Perry, Lon Tierney, maybe Todd Duffin unless he pusses out again, and maybe some other Aventail people I don’t know. So once again, if you are also interested in dropping in, let me know…

New Year, New Gout

Sat, 03 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT

OK, I think I figured out how to change this site over to 2004. I hope it works. I’m starving and need to find something to eat, and I don’t have time to dick around with this anymore.

Nothing else to report. It was very nice outside, but the sudden temp change has triggered my gout and now my toes are sporadically killing me. I know it sounds like some funny disease that old, crotchety people have, but it fucking kills me. Imagine someone slamming both of your big toes in the trunk of a car, and then leaving you there for a week. I’m popping allopurinol like candy and eating cherries by the pound. There’s some enzyme in cherries and strawberries that helps dissolve it. I can still walk fine, no problems or anything, it’s just at the annoying stage.

OK, food, before everything closes. Contrary to popular belief, the city of New York does sleep. Later.

Zappa dreams

Sun, 04 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I was up almost all night last night, then woke up early and read until I could fall asleep again. Then I had a weird dream that I was listening to this new album that was by Stanley Clarke, but it sounded almost exactly like if Frank Zappa had come out with a new album that continued on from the stuff he did right before he died. I half woke up, and still heard music, and then heard that it was really shitty Spanish music, like the stuff that sounds like flamenco or almost country, but with some crooner guy singing in a really awful style. It turns out that the landlord had some guys working down in the basement all day, banging around and listening to this total shit. So I had to listen to Hammerfall and Slayer at top volume to drown it out and possibly scare the people.

I went to Barnes and Noble today, because it was pouring rain and it seemed like the thing to do. I’m reading this book that’s an oral history of New York, lots of interviews of people about New York in the postwar period. I think I got the book for free last summer when I bought more than fifty bucks at Coliseum, and never read it. I’m really digging through the house for stuff to read; I have stacks of books I haven’t read, but it’s all stuff I don’t want to read. Does that make sense? Anyway, I went to B&N and looked around for a while, mostly trying to find books under ten bucks. I ended up getting books on Pearl Harbor, Lincoln’s assassination, and a cool pocket editon of Tale of Two Cities that’s printed like one of those little Gideon bibles, with thin pages and Metal Curse fonts, but a very nice binding. I also finally found a copy of the new release of The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. I’m listening to the commentary right now in the background, which is funny in a strange way. The director, Renny Harlan, has that halting Finnish sort of accent, where his English is perfect, but it has just that little bit of a pronouncement to it. Anyway, it’s entertaining to me.

The gout is about gone, so everything worked. Still eating cherries by the firstful, though. OK, gotta get back to Renny.

It is so fucking cold.

Sat, 10 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT

It is so fucking cold. It is so fucking cold. It is so fucking cold. It is so fucking cold. It is so fucking cold.

I haven’t left the house since I got home Friday. I don’t even know how bad it is outside except that NY1 is saying it’s 10, and with the windchill, it’s -2. It is actually ten degrees WARMER at my birthplace of Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota. I spent my first few decades hearing the horror stories of how cold and miserable it was up there, and now it is WORSE here. Why haven’t scientists built some kind of weather dome to stop this shit? What about building a bunch of nuclear reactors that bilged into the Hudson River so the temperature went up about sixty degrees and we never had another fucking blackout again? And what the hell happened to that global warming we were supposed to be looking forward to? Jesus fucking christ.

At least this means I will have an even better trip to Vegas. I’m leaving on Friday morning, and I’m pretty psyched about getting out there. I haven’t actually thought about packing or what I will be bringing, but I am excited about seeing everyone again, eating some real food, and spending some money.

I’ve actually been spending some time reading Tom’s Hardware and all of the other usual sites to gear up for another big hardware upgrade. It’s been two years since I built my last machine (aside from the video and firewire upgrades) and I think it’s time to give her a new lease on life. I’m thinking about swapping in another motherboard with a fast Athlon 64 and a boatload of RAM, possibly swapping in a different video card, and maybe another drive (although I think I’ve only used 28% of the existing 40 Gig, so that could wait.) My ultimate goal is to run mythTV and turn the thing into a TiVO-killer. So I’ll probably try throwing in a TV tuner card and maybe two of them, one with an IR receiver and remote, and get everything built. I know that will be a bitch and a half, because I will have to upgrade to a new Linux distribution, and then get one that supports all of the new hardware, and I think Red Hat is about at the end of the line for me. I have vaguely thought about Debian, but I haven’t done any research yet. I know that will mean a whole new world of hurt, not because Debian is bad, but because I will have to unlearn all of the bad habits and small hacks I’ve picked up in the last six or seven years and start over.

Six or seven years?!?! Fuck, time is going too fast. I guess I did switch from Slackware to Red Hat back in 97 or so, when I got an unexpected bonus at my old job and nobody told me, and I seriously spent an entire weekend mortified because it looked like two paychecks had been direct deposited in my account, and I wondered if I should immediately call someone in payroll at 9AM on Monday morning or I should take the money out of my account immediately. I did call payroll, and they said nothing wrong had happened. About an hour later, my boss came in and said “sorry, I forgot to tell you on Friday. Good job, etc.”

I immediately concocted ways to upgrade my old computer that at the time had a fast 486 in it, which was about two generations behind the curve. Any time I have money in my pocket, it always seems to go to new hardware, because I can always justify the purchase of any equipment that could be use for writing. Peter, the guy across the hall from my office, was also hitting all of the hardware web sites, and told me about one of those hole-in-the-wall places that sold parts on the web, but they were also local and you could go in and buy stuff for the same prices, which sure beat going to CompUSA for stuff. So I rushed over there after work and bought a K6-2 motherboard and a bunch of RAM, a new hard drive, and the first CD-ROM ever to grace my computer. I got the newest shrinkwrapped Linux I could find at that point, which was Red Hat, I believe 4.0. And that started the allegiance to that particular distro.

Anyway, I have a horrible headache for some reason. Maybe I haven’t drank enough Coke. I should get back to playing SOCOM II for a while.

eBay Astronaut Suit

Sun, 11 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT

It’s amazing how quiet it gets when it’s so damn cold that you can’t go out without a heated astronaut suit or something. Last night, I closed my bedroom door to trap some of the heat, and it blocked out the sound of my computer’s fans and the occasional refrigerator noise, and I was stunned at how quiet it really was. It reminded me of when I was sleeping in Ray’s basement in the middle of nowhere, Indiana, or when I get the huge, soundproofed suite in Las Vegas, and all I can hear when I get in bed is total silence, and maybe my own heartbeat. By morning, it was almost warmed up to 15, and the mafia wannabes were outside yelling at the tops of their lungs while moving around cars. But it was nice to have a few hours of peace, and I do get that Vegas suite in a matter of days.

I haven’t left the apartment all weekend, as I mentioned, although I did go out to throw out about eight bags of takeout food garbage, and I made a quick run (literally) to the Korean bodega on the corner for some supplies. There weren’t many people on the street, although it’s now about 26 degrees outside. I believe the temps will slowly crawl up into the 40s and then drop down into total devastation again before I leave.

I realize it may be boring to be reading the Weather Channel here, but not much is up. All I’ve done all weekend is read or cycle through the channels, but I guess I’m pretty happy with that. If I had the opportunity to do it for another 10 or 20 days, I think I would. I mean, eventually I might do something drastic, like actually write on the new book or do some sit-ups or something, but I don’t think it will come to that.

OK, food is on the way, so I better find my wallet and eagerly await the door.

Pre-trip panic

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I’m in that pre-trip panic where I think that I need to research or read a bunch about the place I’m going, because once I get there I will want to do nothing but watch TV in the hotel and eat at McDonald’s because I have no better plans. I have probably a whole shelf of books on Las Vegas, and I could probably name off every casino from Tropicana to Stratosphere without even thinking, but I still feel a great need to find other stuff to do.

To be fair, I think we have a lot of stuff already planned. We have tickets (front row!) to see Dave Atell and Louis Black on Saturday. I think we also have Penn and Teller tickets at the Rio for Sunday. Add in all of the meals and some gambling and shopping, and that’t at least two or three days of stuff. But I always want to eat somewhere new, check out something off the beaten path, or do something that isn’t part of the same old routine. So maybe I need to hit citysearch or something.

There’s a small part of me that also wants to do something outrageous and expensive on my birthday this year. It’s the 33rd, not a nice round number of any significance, but I think I should jump out of a plane at 15,000 feet or take an open-wheel racing course at the Vegas Speedway or do something else involving high adrenaline, higher cost, and little practical value. Sometimes I wish I could do MORE - climb a mountain, eat every single item on the Denny’s menu, marry a complete stranger, total a rental car and make my old insurance company pay for it. Something.

I have this vague idea that I am going to write an offbeat, quirky, and hilarious travel guide to Vegas, laced with personal anecdotes and useless advice and trivia. Maybe I will try to write some more damn stuff down this time and see what I can come up with.

OK, food’s here. Two more days of work and I can (temporarily) leave this awful land of high winds and low temps.

preflight

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I have a 9:30 flight tomorrow morning, so this will be a quick update before the Tylenol PM kicks in and I try to get a few hours of sleep. It is catastrophically cold outside, two degrees with a -17 temp when you add in the 29 mph gusting winds. My old windows in this place might as well be screen doors, because the wind blows right through them. I am very glad to be going to a place where the apparent temperature difference is about 70 degrees.

So I’m packed, I got my damn haircut before I left, and I have the laptop and camcorder ready to go. I’ll be out of town until Wednesday, but I’ll post a full report when I get back. If you know my real email username and know that I have an account at tmail.com, do the math and send me an email on the 20th when I become a year older but not wiser. Anyway, I’m off to bundle myself up to avoid the wind…

In Vegas

Mon, 19 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I’m in a web cafe on the Las Vegas Boulevard, in a crowded strip mall just south of the Harley cafe. It’s not really a cafe, though: it’s really three computers in a giant gift shop containing Las Vegas shot glasses, ashtrays, t-shirts that disintegrate in two washings, and pretty much everything else that could have the words Las Vegas printed on it and could be made in China by slave labor for under ten cents. It’s also a Budget rental car desk and sells tours of the Grand Canyon. They are mostly empty except for the occasional wanderer, and the overhead speakers are droning some local 80s station, which is marginally OK but mostly sucks. I turn 33 tomorrow, and I’ve got a suite at the Stardust that’s roughly twice as big as my apartment and much better furnished. I have a thousand dollars in twenties in my pocket. I’m depressed.

I spent all weekend with Bill and Lon and Jaime, and just ate a taco dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe with Lon, the last to depart except for me. Then I took the long walk back to the strip to get on this place and delete 188 messages of spam and two legitimate messages from my friend Dani. I have to leave on Wednesday at seven in the morning. But tomorrow afternoon, I will jump out of an airplane at 15,000 feet. I try to do the most dangerous things on my birthday, so both dates will match on the tombstone. This seemed to work well for Shakespeare, because we’re still reading his stuff.

We did a bunch of cool stuff this weekend and I ate a bunch of good food and we saw some really incredible comedians. But sometimes when I’m out here, all I can think of is what I’ll do when I get back. And that’s what’s bothering me right now. These big milestone dates really make me wonder when I’ll get my shit straight, or what I should really be aiming for.

Ah crap, this is all pretty whiny stuff. I should pack it up and get out of here before they play some bad Madonna song that gets stuck in my head all night. I have a long walk ahead of me, and my iPod is in the hotel room. I see a cab ride in my future…

Hell travel day

Wed, 21 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT

OK, I’m back. I had a hell of a travel day today, but everything seemed to go my way, which I guess means a grand piano is going to fall from orbit and hit me tomorrow, so maybe I shouldn’t have said that. I had to get up at FOUR AM this morning to make my flight, so I went to bed at ten and loaded up on Tylenol PM. For whatever reason, I couldn’t sleep though, and I ended up waking up at about two and watching the clock for a while. Then I spent the rest of the day flying or hanging out in the Houston airport (oh sorry, the GEORGE BUSH airport) or trying to sleep on planes. I got back to 25-81 around 7:30 PM EST, and now I’m waiting on my sushi and listening to Spock’s Beard and bitching that my CD-R is not ripping CDs correctly. Business as usual.

Yes, I survived skydiving. It was an interesting experience, but I wouldn’t highly advise it for everyone. There’s something about looking down at the ground from three miles up through an open door and having any reaction other than wanting to secure yourself to the nearest bulkhead, let alone letting someone else push you out of the door.

Anyway, I am writing the story. There weren’t many pictures for the trip, mostly because there aren’t many things I haven’t already photographed. I will also have a DVD of the jump, but they will send that to me in about ten days.

OK, I am a year older. And I have a lot of crap to do, including the ripping of about 20 new CDs, and that whole eating thing.

How to upgrade linux

Sat, 24 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT

GOD DAMN IT I hate upgrading linux. Well, I hate it mostly because the easiest way to upgrade it is to throw your fucking computer out of the window and then hit your testicles about five or six times with the sharp end of a claw hammer and then pour everclear in the wound and spend about 200 hours trying to download a brand new distribution at teletype speeds just so you can get a system that allegedly works better than Windows. As a side note, I plugged in my new DVD burner and TV tuner card and fired up Win2000 just for shits and giggles, and in about four minutes, I was watching TV and recording video and burning DVDs and having fun. Tonight, I have invested about the last five hours into installing Debian, and I just decided to fuck that and turn around and install Red Hat 9, despite everything that everyone tells me about the big evil corporation called Red Hat. I’m sorry, but I don’t like the ass-backwards bullshit factor in Debian, and I really don’t like the fact that it has an interface that only a sysadmin would love. I don’t really like to write a sixty page paper about the internal workings of my machine every time I upgrade, and I don’t want to have to write down the numbers of every chip of every board of my computer so I can search them all on google and find out what kind of obscure module needs to be added to my kernel on its 863rd recompilation. Fuck all of that.

I got the skydiving video today, and it’s pretty cool. I’ll try to tear a few images out of it and put them on the web when I do up the Vegas trip page. I haven’t had time to write anything about it given the machine situation, but it will happen.

It is once again so god damned cold that I probably won’t leave the house for the weekend. I am reading that Po Bronson book on what to do with your life, I forget the exact title. I enjoyed his book Nudist on the Late Shift, and a few people have evangelically mentioned this new book, so I bought a copy while waiting for a plane in Houston. I haven’t thought it was anything spectacular, but I’m still reading it. I think I like the way he has interviewed a bunch of people about their lives and how he strung this stuff together. I like the journalistic sense of it, mostly because I wish I could write a book like that. But as far as being motivational or telling me how to change my life, it’s mostly dreck. But like I said, I keep turning the pages.

It’s going to take another two hours to download Red Hat 9, so I guess I’m going to bed.

In the library, Djibouti

Mon, 02 Feb 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I found out something interesting today: the Monroe County Public Library in Bloomington has ordered a copy of Summer Rain! This is, as far as I know, my first library sale. It’s very strange that ten years ago, I was picking through their used book sale books trying to find something to write about, and now they have one of my books. So if you go to their site, do a search on “Konrath”, and there it is.

Two copies of the annotated Rumored just went to Djibouti. Try to find that one on your globe. Hopefully, I will get some good photos to add to my collection.

Not much else is going on. I got a metric assload of new CDs this weekend, and got the new Simpsons game. Plus I had a ton of books show up today, so I’ve got a lot of media to consume. But now, I need to shut down this machine to put in a hard drive switch, so I can boot from Windows or Linux without having to swap cables each time.

Snow Crash

Sun, 08 Feb 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I’m getting so restless around the house, I actually cleaned. I really want to go out and do something, but it’s freezing again, and I don’t really want to blow any money, either. So I’m watching Die Hard with a Vengence on TV, although I missed the part where they digitally edited McClane’s sign that says “I hate n-words” to “I hate everyone”. I did just catch the part where the 7 train is at the fake 2-3 Wall Street station and blew up in a way that completely defies physics. Despite about 20,000 goofs, this is still a good movie. If I ever see it in the $7 bin, I’ll have to pick up the DVD.

One fun thing about watching the Sunday afternoon movie is you see the most pathetic, low-budget infomercials for junk As Seen on TV products. There was just one for the Eggstractor or something like that. It starts out with black and white footage of a woman with really crappy, frizzed out hair and no makeup, trying to peel eggs in the most pathetic way possible. Then they switch to full color and show the woman with totally Jenny Jones makeover hair, full makeup, and happily plugging eggs into this device that looks like a plastic squeze tube and another piece of plastic that extrudes off the egg shell. She’s happily de-shelling eggs like the thing’s giving her ten orgasms per egg. Then it shows the kids using it, and it’s the greatest thing since GI Joe with the Kung Fu grip. They also use the phrase “high protein” about 80 times in 30 seconds to placate the Atkins freaks. I never knew peeling eggs was such a god damned problem.

Anyway, I finished reading Snow Crash, and I was really happy with it. It’s probably one of the best books I’ve read in a while, and something so completely different. I’ve always wanted to like cyberpunk, but the Gibsonesque stuff wasn’t that great too me. It was good, passable, but too much like the crappy SciFi shows that they make to fill up time on the WB network on Saturday afternoons, and not enough like the very first time I saw Star Wars or something like that. But this book really blew me away, because it was like one part Mark Leyner’s humor with one part Kurt Vonnegut’s ability to take a couple of disparate stories and slowly weave them together by the end of the book. It’s also got all of this weird religious theory in it that almost threw me, but was still very interesting, and I wish I could learn more about that without tackling some giant, 1200-page theory/reference book I will never read.

Nothing else going on here…

The most popular poet of the 20th century

Thu, 12 Feb 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I think one of the fundamental problems when I read too much is that I find out facts that make me essentially think that my worldview is completely fucked, and I am the only person alive who is not a robot, or possibly I am really in a coma or a heavy dream after taking too much Tylenol PM and Robitussen and I’m just imagining everything around me, like some kind of Twilight Zone episode, and I’ll suddenly be awakened by space alien people with pig faces.

For example, did you know who, by publication volume, is the most popular published poet of the entire 20th century? Put down your drink before you read any further. It is JEWEL. No shit. Not Robert Frost. Not Ezra Pound. Not William Carlos Williams. JEWEL. Jewel Kilcher, the Alaskan elf folk singer. SHE SPELLED BUKOWSKI’S NAME WRONG IN THE GOD DAMNED BOOK AND SHE SOLD MORE COPIES THAN HE DID OF ALL OF HIS STUFF COMBINED.

That is all.

Apple Confidential

Mon, 16 Feb 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been sort of sick this weekend, although I think drinking my weight in grapefruit juice and sleeping 14 or 15 hours a day has mostly stemmed it off. It was that kind of sore throat, coated tongue, back of throat crap that is usually the first stage of something worse. What’s weird is that I have only had this sort of sickness all year, and not a full-blown cold. I hope I did not jinx things by saying that. Anyway, the three-day weekend plan has been to mostly sleep, and do some reading and other vagueness around the house.

The other day I read Apple Confidential 2.0 by Owen Linzmayer. It’s a very good history of Apple, from the birth of the two Steves up to the present. It was just published in 2004 by No Starch Press. I enjoyed reading this book a lot, because it reminded me so much of the “ancient” history of ten years ago when I supported the Mac at IU. I read through the various timelines and it made me think back to when we got our first PowerMac, when I first saw a Newton, when I first got to mess with a color Mac, and all of the other intersections with my computing past. Anyway, it’s an excellent book. I paypaled Owen twenty bucks and he sent me an autographed copy. You really should go to his site and do the same.

I had to get out of the house today, so I went to Union Square to shop for books. I went to The Strand, which for the first time ever was actually too cold instead of too hot, but didn’t buy anything. I also bought tickets to see that new hockey movie about the 1980 Olympic team, but I chickened out and decided I’d rather sit around the house for two hours instead. I know that sounds stupid, and even I can’t figure it out. Anyway, I hate sports, but I really like sports movies. I know that makes no sense, but it’s true. I have never sat through a college football game in my life, and I’d rather jam a pencil into my ear than do so, but I really loved the movie Rudy. Go figure.

I won’t go into the whole Valentine’s Day/anti-Valentine’s Day because things are just too far gone for me to deal with it, and I realize that it’s totally my fault. So I did not leave the house on the 14th, and then today I went to Duane Reade and bought about two pounds of candy for 50% off and ate them until I was sick, then I downloaded a lot of really sick pornography. That did not really solve any of my problems, but it took up as much time as the hockey movie would have.

It’s freezing outside, but it’s not bad in here, and it will be even better when I’m in bed reading and staying up late because I have the day off tomorrow. So here’s to that.

5th grade teacher sadist

Thu, 04 Mar 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Back in the fifth grade, I had this sadist sociopath of a homeroom teacher who, in the interest of not getting sued if his kids ever decide to google his name, I’ll simply call Mr. Cool. Mr. Cool was not, in fact, hip or neat or whatever; I chose the somewhat ironic name because his real surname is a phonetic synonym for cool. In reality, Mr. Cool was a high follower of one of those overly zealous splinter factions of Christianity like the Mennonites or Quakers or something, the kind of we-think-the-bible-is-a-literal-document idiots that people in New York cannot fathom actually exist when a discussion on gay marriage or posting the ten commandments in courtrooms.

Okay, Mr. Cool. He looked like Les Nesmond’s older brother, with a bad comb-over and a lot of generic clothes and everything but the bow-tie. He came from Kansas or Iowa or something, and like I said, was really religious, but also had a short fuse, and while Jesus may have said to turn the other cheek, this guy would rather put his foot in your ass when you crossed him, and that’s a talent that seldom works out in a fifth-grade classroom. Other than flooring the whole group of us in science class by pulling out a bible and reading Genesis when we got to the part of our book about how the world was created, he also had a bad habit of going completely apeshit when you fell short of the stature of, say, a military school’s ideal behavior model. So pretty much everybody in my class got yelled at or shook or smacked in the back of the head, and regular hellions like Gary Rink got beaten within inches of their lives on a daily basis. In the fifth grade, I was old enough to know that something was wrong with this guy, and it probably wasn’t right for him to be hitting kids in class. I mean, I couldn’t look up the exact law or rule or anything, but I knew the guy was whacked, and I dreaded every day of the fifth grade because of him.

Another reason the fifth grade sucked is that instead of sticking to the books (or his god damned bible), Mr. Cool used to have us do these asinine projects that were meant to broaden our horizons. The most corporal of these was the 50 states and capitals book, which was a thing where we had to draw a picture of each state with its capital and three or four major cities and all of the rivers and stuff, and then list its resources, populations, and other interesting and/or useless factoids. To a fifth grader, fifty pages is a damn book, so this took more than a Sunday night to prepare. And Mr. Cool knew what encyclopedia we had in the school library, and would bust your ass if you simply copied shit out of there. I’m sure he meant good by this sort of thing, and probably got the idea because some Jesus magazine like Reader’s Digest had a fear-inducing article about how kids couldn’t name more than five states or their major cities and the Russians would be using that to our advantage and killing us all Real Soon. And I guess it was better than the fact that my dad had to memorize all of the states and capitals, and could still rattle all of them off faster than I could currently name off a random list of, well, anything. (To be fair, there were only 13 of them when he was in school. Sorry dad, old joke.) Anyway, he was always coming up with dumb shit like this for us to do, little take-home projects which would have been great if we all had Beaver Cleaver families, which none of us did.

So one weekend, he came up with this great project: to prove to us that TV was warping our minds with Satan, we were to completely abstain from the glass teat for the next 48 hours. The project was to tune out and then see what we did with our time when we didn’t rot our minds with cartoons. And in some fit of stupidity, I actually mentioned this assignment to my mom when I got home, and she thought this was a real great fucking idea. So I had both parents lording over me about this stupid assignment, and instead of watching the usual cartoons, I went outside and tear-assed around the neighborhood on my BMX bike.

Granted, I watched a lot of TV back in the day. In fact, since we only got five channels and didn’t have a VCR, I watched pretty much every damn thing on, even if it totally didn’t appeal to me. I mean, I remember religiously watching Barney Miller for the plot, because I was too young to get any of the jokes in it and I needed a way to kill time until WKRP was on. (And it’s not like Johnny Fever’s dope addicts or Herb’s attempts to diddle Loni Anderson would have been that funny to a completely uninformed ten-year-old like myself.) BUT, I also spent a lot of time away from the tube, too. I had a regular gang of friends, and I rode my bike around a lot and killed bugs in jars and buried army men and played out Star Wars episodes two through ten with the unending amount of 3” tall plastic figures I had and everything else. So I guess I could survive a lack of TV with no problem, except one:

Superman was premiering on TV that Sunday.

Fuck! This was the original Superman movie, with Christopher Reeve and Margo Kidder and live action and all of that shit. I never saw it in the theater because half the time when I asked to go to a flick, my parents would say “god damn it! That’s going to be on TV for free next year, why do you need two bucks to see it now?” And not only that, the network was going to show an extended version of the film, with all kinds of scenes showing Clark Kent growing up and pushing ten-ton locomotives on tracks and bending shit and using his heat vision and everything else. And my sisters were going to get to watch it, even though they didn’t give a fuck about Superman at all. I loved Superman! I had a paperback book of all of these old Superman comics, and I could tell you backwards and forwards every plot of every one. That January, I even had a superman CAKE for my birthday. And I couldn’t watch it because of that stupid Quaker Jesus freak motherfucker and his stupid assignment! I was so god damned pissed that Sunday night. And the next morning, when I got to class, every fucking person but me had completely forgotten about the assignment about an hour after they got home, except me.

Anyway, I haven’t watched TV in a week now, and I’m back to being TV-less thanks to, not a Jesus freak, but a lack of cable TV. (OK, maybe the people who found out I had illegally had cable and cut it worship Jesus. Maybe it’s even Mr. Cool, fired from teaching and working a minimum-wage job at Time Warner. Who knows.) It hasn’t been that bad this time, though. It’s just a matter of not caring anymore about the regular shows. I will miss ER, but that’s about it. I also miss the background noise, like during a meal, but I have DVDs for that.

Fuck, I feel like there’s more to talk about, but I’m tired and want to do nothing but read for a while.

New nephew

Sun, 07 Mar 2004 00:00:00 GMT

My sister Monica had her kid this morning, after about 15 hours of labor. It’s a boy, and was something like 7 pounds, and both are healthy and okay. I didn’t get any other details yet, but photos are forthcoming. So I’m happy to have another nephew, as this will mean another round of buying all of the toys I wanted as a kid. If she had a girl, I would have had no idea what to do, unless I just stuck with Lego anyway.

It’s mostly been a boring weekend, and my biggest excitement was going out into Queens to shop at Target. That used to be part of my big weekend routine, going to Target to get the usual junk, like deodorant and cases of Coke and film and batteries and other supplies. I really miss having a Target just a quick drive away, like I miss having a car to drive to places like that to convenience shop. I can always walk to the crap grocery store here, but then you have a choice of like three kinds of deodorant, and each one is $20. At Target, there’s a wall of deodorant bigger than the grocery store down the street. Unfortunately, the Target in Queens Center didn’t really do it for me, as it’s pretty small and split up into two floors, and it’s fairly run down. It’s nothing like the Super Targets that spring up all over the Midwest. Oh well.

I’m allegedly going to the bookstore today so I need to get moving…

Missing Emerald City, sort of

Tue, 09 Mar 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Re new nephew, his name is Wesley Douglas Owens, and all is well. I know that me gloating over a new nephew is very unkonrathian given that I hate kids, but I’ve found that I’ve actually enjoyed having my first nephew Phillip. My younger sister managed to be a good mom and raise a kid that’s smart, funny, and well-behaved, and I’m more than certain that Monica will be a good mother too. And what’s weird is that I remember when I was Phillip’s age, and being around him is almost like a portal into my past, the days when I spent all of my time playing with Legos and the last Star Wars movie was bigger than Jesus. So that’s cool, and I’ll enjoy watching another one grow up.

There’s a new guy at work who came to us from Seattle, and when I first talked to him on Friday, it turns out his wife also worked at WRQ, my last employer in the Emerald city. I always have the same conversation when I meet another Seattleite, similar to the one I have when I meet a fellow Hoosier that is expatriated and living in New York. It’s the conversation that starts with where you lived, where you worked, where you hung out, and goes into how much you miss Safeway or the Upstairs Pub or Garcia’s, and how cool it was to hang out in the Pike Place fish market or the Irish Lion, and how you can’t get good salmon or parking or whatever else. But this conversation was even more detailed, because we talked about the offices on Lake Union and the benefits policies and the Fourth of Julys on the terraces with the fireworks on the lake and the company picnics at Mount Si. And then I thought more about it, and realized it has been FIVE YEARS since I left. FIVE YEARS.

That’s a real sack of bricks in the gut right there. I guess when I talk about Seattle, there are a lot of reasons I’m finally glad I did get out when I did, and try something new. I mean, it’s not hard to create a list of reasons why the place hit the shitter around 2000: the vanishing job market, the WTO riots, the vaporware monorail and the taxes that prop it up, the taxes for the two stadiums (a quarter billion dollars to a football team that was 6 and 10 in 2000, so they can play six home games a year in a non-multi-purpose stadium), the traffic, the Microsoft millionaires driving up the rents, etc. etc. etc.

But I still miss it. Seattle was a far more liveable city if you can overlook the flaws. I mean, New York has way more to offer to most people, but the quality of life issues are so horrible, and you’ve got to spend some cash to avoid them. I have a lot of good memories of Seattle though. I think the real problem is that the Seattle in my mind is Seattle 1997, and I can never go back to that, just like I can’t go back to Bloomington 1992.

Speaking of getting out of New York to improve the quality of life, I’m thinking about vacations in a vague sense. I might try to skip out of town for a week in August, to spend it in cooler climates or at least in air conditioned hotel rooms for the worst part of the heat. I bought some book called 1001 things to see before you die or something, it is a giant flip-through book that you read when you are bored rather than when you want to travel, but it has all sorts of crazy ideas in it. I’d like to do something cool and travel-oriented like drive a dune buggy around or go rally racing or even snowmobiles, but I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about. Maybe I’ll just go to Coney Island and ride the kiddie go-karts.

OK, gotta go write…

Dell Axim

Sun, 14 Mar 2004 00:00:00 GMT

My newest toy showed up on Friday, a few days ahead of schedule. I got a Dell Axim X3 pocket PC. I know I’ve railed on Windows CE devices in the past, especially as a former Palm OS user. I’ve always thought they were underpowered, with an anemic version of Windows trying to run full-sized apps in a downsized way. But as the Palm becomes more and more lacking and the hardware behind mobile Windows becomes more powerful, I’ve become more interested in these machines. And I haven’t been entirely happy with the Danger Sidekick, either. It’s a good machine for a few things, like mail and instant chat, but it’s entirely worthless as a game machine, and I don’t like the fact that you can’t add or modify any of the existing apps.

So I think the sweet spot in price and performace finally happened, mostly due to Dell offering the X3 at a slightly reduced rate. Most Pocket PC machines start at about $300, and price modifiers include processor speed, WiFi, or Bluetooth, with features like physical size, looks, memory, and expansion slots fitting in there also. I thought about getting some sort of wireless, but as neither my work or home is equipped, I worried that it would become a huge money sink, with me eventually spending a grand on routers and wireless access points and cards and whatnot. So I hemmed and hawed on different configurations and different manufacturers before I finally went to Dell.

Dell originally released the X5, and now came out with the slightly smaller X3. The X3 is also available in a WiFi version that’s called the X3i, and I decided not to spend the extra $50 on it, although now I wonder if that was the right decision in the long run. (In defense of the no-WiFi version, it gets much better batter life, and I don’t need to rush out and buy all that extra shit and spend the next 9 weekends configuring it.) Anyway, there’s a low-end X3 with half the memory and a slower processor, but I spent about $270 on the version with a 400mhz XScale processor and 64mb SDRAM and another 64mb of flash ROM. I’ve had pretty good luck with my Dell laptop and other Dell machines at work, so I figured I’d be okay with trying them out with this, too.

My first impression was that this thing is LIGHT. I mean, it’s lighter than the cheap 4-function calculator you get free with a fillup at your local Marathon station. There’s absolutely nothing inside of it, and the battery, which is smaller than a nine-volt and a third as thick, also feels completely hollow. It’s also a very good-looking unit. The cradle is very strange, because the front of it is chromed, but the chrome is see-through, like mirrorshade glasses. There’s a blue glowing Dell logo inside the cradle, and when it is on, it looks like a hologram or something.

Windows Mobile 2003 (the marketspeak name for the latest WinCE) is pretty weird at first. Many of the GUI rules are different than Windows or just not there. Instead of right-click menus, you click and hold on an item, and a menu comes up. And because every window takes up the whole display, it’s a bit off when you are running more than one app at once. There is this switcher app you can run that lets you swap in and out of things fast, but it takes a few minutes of dicking around to get the hang of everything.

The interface dumps you into a “Today” page by default, where you can have your appointments or other various things show up. There are a lot of apps included, like pocket versions of IE, Word, Excel, a book reader, and Windows Media Player. I immediately got the Bubb Rub video and dumped it to the device. It was pretty easy to do: there is a link on my desktop of my Windows PC that now goes to the Pocket PC. So I just dragged the file to that directory, and a couple of seconds later, it was on the handheld. The Windows Media Player lets you do a landscape full-screen mode, and the 3.5” screen showed the video with as much color and clarity as a TV set, if not better. This thing will be excellent for watching movies on a plane.

There is a single Secure Digital slot on top of the unit for memory cards and expansion. I almost wished I would have paid $100 more for the X5, which includes SD and CompactFlash, because there are far more peripherals with CF. I hope that the new generation of SD-only handhelds will push manufacturers to make more devices for SD. I went out on Saturday and picked up a 256mb card, which should last me for a while. I also eyed some of the shrinkwrapped software; there are a couple of dictionaries and games out there, in the $20-$40 range, shipping on SD cards. Maybe when I grow bored of the freeware on the net, I’ll consider that.

I now need to install a bunch of junk. I didn’t bring the cradle home this weekend, so I filled the SD card with stuff from the web. Most freeware consists of an installer that runs on a desktop machine and shoots the installation through the ActiveSync conduit and onto the handheld, so I can’t do that without the cradle and it’s assorted services. I did manage to get AvantGo set up before I left work on Friday. This runs a program on your Windows machine to grab various web news articles and then smash them down into a handheld-friendly size and push them onto your PocketPC. So I’ll be able to catch the news and a few articles from Wired on the train.

Not much else going on. I finished reading Idoru by William Gibson, and had mixed feelings about it. There was a lot of cool imagery, neat technology ideas, that made part of it really appealing to me, in a Snow Crash sort of way. But it also really felt like he phoned this one in, and it’s one of those “two people with plots colliding” thrillers where halfway through the book you know how it will all end. It was not horrible, but it wasn’t Gibson’s best. I started reading something else that I am not really into, and I have a huge Amazon order that got delayed that is finally shipping, so I’m finding it hard to commit to anything in order to keep my plate clean.

P.S. a random aside - if you read this and you have an AIM username that I don’t know about, mail it to me. I always keep mine open, but I feel stupid looking for those of friends or whatever. And if, for whatever reason, you don’t feel comfortable emailing me or commenting about anything (tinfoil hat, etc.) you can use this to write me. It tracks your IP and hostname, but maybe for some reason this would be better than putting my name in a mail program and hitting send, who knows. I mostly use it so I don’t have to put my real email address on all of my web pages, although I still get more spam than ever.

over and out.

back

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Okay, I’m back. I’m a bit bored of the current project, and I don’t know if I will keep with it or jump off onto another tangent. I hate that I’ve basically been doing this for two years, but as long as I keep putting words on the page, I will be doing SOMETHING. And I was going back through old entries on here as I tried to complete a list of every DVD I own and I did like some of the things I wrote. So, here I am. Sorry if you hoped I wouldn’t write for a while, and glad if you didn’t.

The book I’ve been working on is a lot like Summer Rain in its style, and the fact that it roughly takes place during a pivotal summer in transition of the main character, but this time it happens between high school and college, and is a lot more centered around the underground heavy metal culture (or lack thereof) in Northern Indiana in 1989. It has been interesting to hack out, and I have many 20,000 words of pieces of essays and experiences, but there’s not enough central “stuff” to really keep the stories going. I had the same problem with Summer Rain in the early drafts - there were these stories, these things happening, but there are no great revalations or points where the reader goes “yeah! exactly!” and it’s hard to just throw those in without really planning out the whole thing. I mean, you can write a bunch of riffs that sound cool, but you need a SONG to put them in to make it all work. (Unless you’re a stoner metal band - then you can just repeat the riffs over and over and over, and put a pot leaf on your CD.)

I’m happy to say my bitching about groceries is over, as FreshDirect.com now delivers to Astoria! I have been waiting for this for years - when Amazon.com started selling books in the mail and I got my first package in the mail, I said “god damn it, they need to do this with food.” And they have! I logged in, signed up, and started pointing and clicking at all of the food, with nice examples and nutritional information and cooking tips and everything else. I put in the Visa number, selected a delivery time, and that was it - just like ordering books or DVDs or whatever else. Tonight, two guys showed up and unloaded three boxes and a bag of food at my doorstep. I spent just over $100 and got $20 of it free for my first order. I can’t complain about the food, either. The produce all looks fresh and in great shape, properly wrapped and unbruised. They have their own brands of frozen stuff like pizzas and seafood and whatnot, and that all looks great. The usual staples are at decent prices, and there’s a good brand variety. I got my 2-liters of Coke for 99 cents and didn’t have to lug them back from the Key Food, or pay $1.89 at the bodega across the street. So it worked great, and I’m going to keep doing this and cooking my own dinners. You can’t buy stuff on-the-spot or anything, but if you plan ahead a day, it’s great. And you can figure out your menu or list online and then drill it into the browser without going to the store and seeing what size of tomato paste they carry or whatever the hell. It’s all very awesome.

I got the new Joe Satriani album today, which was a surprise, because it isn’t out until the 13th. I ordered it (Is There Love In Space?) direct from Sony a week or two ago, and they sent it early, along with an extra booklet that was signed in silver marker by Satriani! The album’s interesting - he has largely ignored his electronica interest that was on his last couple of albums (which is good, because I hated it) and focused more on exploring what he can push the six-string into doing and saying. The guitar work is a step above everything else he’s done, and the songs are for the most part memorable and deep, similar to what he did on Crystal Planet. But there are a couple of real stinkers on there too, similar to what he did on Flying in a Blue Dream, with him singing and this white man’s boogie blues thing going on, and that doesn’t work at all for me. It’s probably one of those things where I’ll leave two or three songs out when I move the thing to the iPod, and then listen to everything else 20,000 times.

It’s been a deluge of media lately. I got Geoff Tate’s solo album, which doesn’t sound much like Queensryche at all, but works rather well with his voice and range. I also got a Queensryche CD-single for “Jet City Woman” that was signed by Chris DeGarmo, which is slightly humorous in that he left the band. I also found the UK import of Peter Gabriel’s “Burn You Up/Burn You Down” song, which is a relief because I thought it would only be available in the new Myst game, and the song sounded cool, but not cool enough for me to buy the game and try to capture the sound or whatever. I also finally got Carnivore - Retaliation, which I haven’t heard in almost ten years. We were listening to it at work and cracking up at some of the classic lines in it, like “I shit my pants and wait for the reaper” in “Ground Zero, Brooklyn”, and “every hole in my body drips blood”, from “Inner Torment”. Very cool, but it set me back $17.99, and nobody cut me a deal on it.

Man, these grape tomatoes are incredible. I didn’t even pay for the vine-ripened ones, and I could sit and eat these all day like candy…

Dream Theater bootlegs

Sat, 10 Apr 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I bought some CDs today and got a few more in the mail, and that brings the total in my collection up to 900. I think the goal is to get to 1000, but I don’t know if that’s doable by the end of the year or not. I’m buying CDs at a much more rapid rate these days, but I’m sure things will slow down as I get toward the end of the year. There’s also the issue that I am out of room for the damn things.

Five of the CDs that arrived in the mail today were from a company making these offical bootlegs of Dream Theater stuff. I guess a couple of the guys in the band got together with some small record company or something and somehow got permission from the record company to do small runs of each of the titles. I do not entirely know who is really responsible on the business end, and I felt a little scared sending a credit card to this unknown business, but they came through, and the products are pretty incredible, with real CDs and color booklets and lots of liner notes and everything. They have six titles, and I bought three of them. One is a collection of old demo tapes before the band was Dream Theater; one is a 2-CD live show from ‘98 (when I saw them in Seattle); and one is the making of the album of Scenes From a Memory.

I listened to the demos, and they really brought back some strange memories for me. I never heard these tracks before - they came from when the drummer, bassist, and guitarrist first got together at Berklee school of music and started laying down stuff into their portastudio. And that reminds me a lot of when I used to hang out with Derik and Jamie and they got a portastudio and started recording all of this crazy shit, prog-rock stuff that they put together after listening to the first Dream Theater album a thousand times, plus way too much Rush, Marillion, Yes, Steve Vai, and so on. In fact, these demos include a version of the Rush instrumental “YYZ”, which reminds me of the thousands of times I sat next to Derik’s drum kit as he tore through the song. I have many fond memories of listening to Derik, Jamie, and both of them together work through all sorts of songs and arrangements, some written by other artists and some brand new, but all getting better and better with each jam and each mix. Unfortunately, I don’t have the pleasure of sitting down to a finished product by these two, as they eventually went their own ways without ever making a CD or tape.

The other CD I am listening to now is the making of SFAM, and it’s a very strange one. I first heard this album the weekend it came out (I think), which was when I drove to Cincinnati for my uncle John’s funeral. The whole trip out, my stay at a strange little hotel near some college campus (and, coincidentally, a stone’s throw from where me and Ray drove in 1993 to see Unleashed and Cannibal Corpse) is another long story I may have told elsewhere. And then I spent a few hours in Bloomington on Halloween. Then on the 13-hour trip back to New York, I was going nuts from boredom, and stopped in some little Pennsylvania town where they had a strip mall. The place was absolutely vacant, and reminded me of the days when me and Karena used to go to the mall in her hometown of Longview, Washington; there were about a dozen stores and a Target and Red Lobster all congealed together, maybe with a two-screen movie theater, and the inside of the place pretty much housed like three or four old people waiting to die, and nothing else. So I went into this mall and went to a Sam Goody or Musicland or whatever they are (I think they are all owned by the same company) and found a Jerky Boys tape that I knew would entertain me for about 20 minutes of the remaining 8 hours, and then I saw A NEW DREAM THEATER ALBUM! I got it and rushed the car to listen to it and see if it was as cool as the last one.

It turned out it was much cooler. Someone in Metal Curse (and I forget who, but it wasn’t Ray. King Foley? Jack Botus? Not sure.) said there are only two concept albums out there, Rush’s 2112 and Queensryche’s Operation:Mindcrime, and everything else sucks shit. He is partially correct, but wrong on two counts: first, 2112 wasn’t a concept album, it had a full-side song that was conceptual, but the B-side contained 5 regular-sized songs; second, this then-new Dream Theater album was a concept album better than either of those put together! I could not believe the total perfection, power, precision, and depth this 80-some minutes of music could lay down. The story, which is complicated to tell, is about the 1928 murder of a woman that haunts a modern-day man’s dreams. He goes to a hypnotherapist who helps him peel back the layers of the onion and find out about the conspiracy behind the woman’s death. Instead of being one song, there are a dozen tracks, some of them clocking in at over ten minutes each, some of them serving more as short introductions and bits for the story. Prior to this album, DT spent a couple of discs stripping back their sound, playing pieces that might get the occasional spin on an AOR station or that could make a good video, with the guys in stupid leather costumes probably, that might get played on some European metal show. It’s almost as if they said “fuck this!” to all of that and decided to completely Zappa out and pour as much black ink onto the music staff as possible to build these incredibly fast and complex rhythms. But it’s not all just a shredfest either; they make it all emotional and build strong songs where it’s needed for the story.

Anyway, I listened to the tape a half-dozen times straight through, then bought the CD, bounced it to an MD, and listened to the whole concept album at least once a day for probably six months straight. I still pop it in every once in a while and I’ve got every note memorized. It’s on a DVD and a live album of theirs, so I hear it there too. And now, it’s truly strange to hear this CD of them writing the songs in the studio, changing around riffs, fucking up and then swapping things around. Jordan Rudess replaced their previous keyboard player on the album; the old guy, Derek Sherinian, was more of a hard rock guy, and wanted to be some big rock star, so they fired him. Rudess is more of a classically trained guy, and you can tell the other guys feed off of his ability in the studio to put down good lines and structure. These guys worked together in the side project Liquid Tension Experiment, which is an equally project that involves the guitar, drums, and keys of Dream Theater with the bass and Chapman stick of Peter Gabriel and King Crimson’s Tony Levin.

Anyway, it is hilarious to listen to this studio work - sometimes they slow down a line, go back over it, then speed it up until it works again. I have every microsecond of this album so memorized, when I hear it performed differently, it’s very noticeable. Some of the stuff is interesting, though. There are occasional guitar licks and even some saxophone lines that were recorded but dropped from the final mix. And then there are just strange placeholders, like when vocalist James LaBrie doesn’t hold a long note in a scratch track and and does an almost yodeling song, or when the writing track for “The Dance of Eternity” breaks into an impromptu (but very kick-ass) version of “Foxy Lady” by Hendrix. It’s all very good stuff.

I thought my eBay auction was over, but it’s on PST, so I still have almost three hours. It’s up to $61, but I hope someone snipes out the thing and pushes it up to a hundred or something. Okay, time to go play the Simpsons game.

Florida again

Mon, 12 Apr 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I have been in a weird state lately, in which I can’t really find anything I want to read, I can’t figure out what music to listen to, and most importantly, I have no fucking idea what to write. I think I’ve been doing this for about a week, but in the bigger sense, I have been avoiding a new book - a real one, not a collection of shit - for about two years now. I think part of it is weather and part is diet, and there’s also the fact that I haven’t taken any time off since January, so I’m getting pretty burned out. So maybe I need a vacation. Maybe I need to find a way to pay for a vacation.

I went to JetBlue today and found that it would be fairly cheap to get down to Florida again. I had a lot of fun down there in 2001, on Treasure Island, driving to random places and taking lots of photos. I’m afraid though that if I go now, I will get deathly depressed. That area is a good place to go if you want to see a lot of nobody, because it’s a ghost town during the summer. I occasionally saw some teenager locals, kids that probably worked shitty jobs and smoked a lot of bad pot when they weren’t flipping burgers or mowing lawns. I related to them about as bad as I did the older folk that bumped around down there. I’m not saying I fit in with everyone here in New York, but at least I see people here when I’m walking around. I’m afraid I will start thinking about 2001 all over again and get into some heavy depression and piss away 3 or 4 of the 7 days of the vacation. And also, it would probably be like a hundred degrees when I’m there, and that might be bad.

I know everyone had the typical migratory path for winter vacations, of heading to Florida or some island or Mexico or whatever, so they can cheat mother nature and catch a few rays. But does anyone ever do the opposite? I mean, I don’t really hear of people going to Alaska for the summer, or Iceland or something. I’ve always wondered what vacation spots would work for this. It doesn’t seem like there’s as much air travel infrastructure going north as there is going south. Sure, Montreal is well-connected, but I don’t see many planes leaving for Yellowknife at JFK.

The other issue is I want to do something that basically involves a 200-some dollar ticket, a hotel that won’t bust my balls price-wise, and maybe a rental car. I don’t have thousands of bucks to fly to central america or rent out a fucking cabin in the mountains plus all of the gear I’ll need to pack out to cook my meals. One of my reasons I like Vegas so much is I can always find a cheap fare and a cheap room and slap it all together with minimal Visacard damage in about two minutes flat. Unfortunately, I am bored of Sin City right now, and the bug to go back won’t hit me for a few more months. I’m actually thinking of going in August, when the room rates will be like $50 a night and the AC will be blowing full-blast everywhere (which it won’t be in my apartment.)

I think I’m going to read some Hunter S. Thompson now.

bored of rants

Sun, 02 May 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I haven’t written just to write in a while. Getting bored of writing rants, but I’ve also been too busy working on other stuff. I am still working on a book of short stories about my time in Bloomington. It’s at a good length now, but still needs a lot of work. It’s a good waste of time, anyway. I still feel like I should be writing something else, something new, but nothing’s come to me yet.

I decided to take a vacation next month, and I’ll be heading back to Treasure Island, Florida. I went there in 2001 for two weeks and had a good time, so I’ll be going back and staying at the same place. A one-bedroom apartment with a full kitchen right across the street from the white sand beach of the Gulf only costs $240 a WEEK. You gotta love the off-season. It’ll be hotter than hell, but the room has real AC, unlike my apartment, and so will the car. And I get to drive, which I miss. Plus the pool’s right there, and the place is almost abandoned during June. John Sheppard lives down there now, so I’ll drop in on him, and I’m making my list of things I missed last time I was there. It should be fun.

Weather’s finally decent here in New York, although it has been a bit weird. The temps drop then rise then look beautiful then get a bit crummy, and it’s always a coin toss on whether or not to bring a jacket. I went for a long walk tonight to maybe see about taking photos of Rikers Island as the sun set, but I missed that golden bit of time and ended up circling around the northernmost tip of Astoria, before it falls into the water. There’s a huge ConEd power plant that takes up some serious real estate. It’s got all of these fences and guards and whatnot, but it’s also surrounded by acres and acres of green grass, which always looks out of place in the middle of New York. It looks like some kind of sanitarium, like what you’d find on Wards Island, but no triple tiers of razor wire like the psych center out there has. Anyway, the walk took me through a lot of little areas I’d never seen before, and even though I didn’t find any new stores or places that would be useful later, I do like to see something other than the same usual shit, even if it is different brick buildings and fire escapes than the usual ones.

I got a power antenna for the TV for $30, which was a waste of money. I can barely get in 5 channels, very fuzzy. Now I can watch ER, at least. I watched all of the Must See lineup on Thursday, and after however many weeks of no TV, it all looked alien to me. Nothing was funny, and I couldn’t even understand the point of any of the sitcoms. Everything in ER was extremely predictable, and I spent most of that hour playing solitaire on my PocketPC, occasionally looking up to watch snippets of the show. I don’t see TV coming back to my life full-strength, at least like it was before.

I replaced the battery in my iPod, which was pretty untraumatic and simple. I bought a new one on eBay for about $40, and it’s been sitting on my desk for a few weeks. Opening the case was a bit of a trick, and I had to use two screwdrivers to carefully pry it apart. Aside from that, everything was a snap: unplug the old, plug the new, close the case, put it on a charger. It was very anticlimactic and so easy, I wanted to write a shitty letter to that whiner that created the anti-Apple site bitching about how his battery went out.

I can’t believe it’s past two already. I should think about sleep.

busch gardens

Sat, 08 May 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I just tried to clean off my desk in some fit of productivity, and threw out a metric assload of paper. It’s amazing that one of the big sells of the whole online billpay thing is a lack of paper, but all of my billers still send me a paper duplicate, and of course for every paper of important information, there are about five pages of crap about credit card insurance, discount travel offers that are more expensive than just going to the airline and buying the ticket, and offers for free magazine subscriptions (postage and handling not included, $20 per issue.) I have some paranoia for keeping old statements, so I went through and excised them from all of the other paperwork and threw that shit out. Yeah, it’s been an exciting Saturday.

I’m still working on short stories for this next Bloomington book, and I posted the rough start of one in my livejournal (look below and to the left for the link.) I don’t usually post to livejournal, but I know that absolutely nobody reads this journal, so whatever. Anyway, the stories are going okay, but it’s the kind of thing where I am pretty much sure nobody will ever read them, and I am simply writing them for the sake of writing them, and I hope that the work will eventually get me in the right mood to do something else.

I’m still excited about going on vacation next month, and slowly picking at google to figure out what to do when I have the time, which is almost never. I am vaguely thinking about taking another glider lesson when I’m down there, because there’s a gliderport around Orlando and they have reasonable prices, but it all depends on time and money. The last time I was there for two weeks and with more money in my pocket, I vowed to drive to the Space Coast or at least to Orlando to check everything out over there, but every day I slept in or decided to do something else. Maybe some other time I might go out there exclusively, although I wonder how morose all of the tours of the space facilities are since the Columbia accident.

Another vague thought of mine was whether or not to go to Busch Gardens. I went as a kid, but I wonder if now it’s tiny and busted compared to my memories of it. I know there are a few rollercoasters, and I’m always a big fan of those, but I’m wondering if $50 and the drive to Tampa is worth it or not.

Food’s here. I haven’t ordered delivery for a while, but I was bored so I called up the Thai place. Now I need to find a movie to watch and eat.

Fun and profit when one of your zine writers joins Al-Quaeda

Fri, 28 May 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Okay, things have been weird here lately. Let me explain, although this story doesn’t have much of an ending.

I got home from work on Wednesday and had a message on my machine, which was from a reporter at Knight-Ridder. He wanted to ask me how I felt about “having one of my writers be a member of a known terror group”. My initial reaction to this was “what the fuck is he talking about?” Then he mentioned the name Adam Gadahn, and I hit the computer, firing up google in one browser window, CNN in the other.

John Ashcroft and crew had released a new terror warning that afternoon, and that included a list of seven people wanted or wanted for questioning, along with a group of seven headshots that were immediately glued all over the usual news sites. I didn’t recognize any of them, but the newest addition to the list was a US citizen by the name of Adam Gadahn, and I knew where the reporter’s call came from, and why I was associated with the guy. I immediately checked to see how bad the damage would be and exactly where I might have mentioned his name.

Here’s the deal: I used to run a music fanzine called Xenocide. It was a photocopied pile of pages stapled together, filled with music reviews, interviews, and other news about underground heavy metal bands, particularly Death Metal bands, which were big at that time. In addition to trading and selling these zines through the mail, I also posted ASCII copies to various heavy metal newsgroups on the internet, in hopes of meeting new people, and mostly to get more free stuff from bands are record labels.

Back in 1993, as I was preparing for the fifth issue of the zine, I started to get mail from this guy named Adam. I don’t remember much of the exchanges, and I don’t have copies of anything but two paper letters, but he did send me some record reviews for some of his favorite stuff, and I folded them into the rest of my other writing. He seemed like a cool enough guy, not overtly into the whole campy Satanism thing, not too weird, and he always sent me artwork, like little scribbled or doodled zombies or demons or whatnot.

We traded mails a few times, and I printed about six of his reviews in Xenocide 5. I also mentioned his name there, and used some of his artwork. The copy went out to usenet (but not the art), and I didn’t hear much more from him. I never did another issue of the zine, out of general lack of momentum, and two years later I graduated and moved to Seattle. I actually heard from Adam again in November of 1995 at my new job and new email address, except he was calling himself Yahiye then. (He’d always signed his artwork “yagadahn”, but I figured he had dumb hippy parents that named him “Yellowsun” or something, so he just went by Adam.) I exchanged a couple of emails with him then, mostly on the “hey, what’s been up” level, but they didn’t mention terror camps or Islam conversion.

And that’s it. He didn’t seem like a nutjob, he didn’t send me a giant diatribe on the teachings of Muhammed, and I never met him in person or talked to him. But, that issue of Xenocide lingered in Google, and when the story broke on Wednesday, I was the only search result in Google that wasn’t some Islam web resource.

So, in the last few days, I’ve heard from Time, Fox News, AP, and a couple of independent reporters. I also got a call from the FBI, following up on the whole thing. There’s not much to say about it though: we traded some mails, he wrote some reviews, but I could not vouch for his personality, explain his motives, or give any details on his whereabouts.

Normally, I’d be much more sarcastic about this, or try to twist the story a bit to get a laugh or two, but it’s hard to be anything but serious when you come home from work and you have a message from the FBI on your answering machine. Do I think Adam is a terrorist? I don’t know. Do I think that the evils of heavy metal caused him to pick up an AK-47 and praise Allah? Probably not. Most people who fall out of heavy metal when they end their teen rebellion years usually cut their hair and go back to a Christian lifestyle, so it’s weird to hear of someone who turned to Islam, especially since most headbangers are white and conservative and would probably just call Muslims towelheads or worse.

If anything, I am relieved that the FBI did call. That means at least they are checking leads and doing work and not just sitting around with their thumbs up their butts, which is what most people think they do. It shows that federal law enforcement is trying to do something to find out more about these seven, and stop them if they are involved in criminal activities.

Okay, I am at work and get out of here early today, and I will hopefull get in a weekend of no distractions, other than the DVD-related ones I create for myself…

orange county

Mon, 31 May 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I think all of the FBI business calmed down by Friday or so, and I spent most of the weekend moping around, trying to make some progress on things, but mostly just passing the hours from when I got out of bed to when I got into bed, and then making sure that I was sufficiently passed out for the in-bed hours, which always seems to be a trick, except when I take a mid-day nap that demolishes my sleep cycle. I didn’t have any grand Memorial Day plans, other than to not do anything. That always seems to be the plan on most weekends, and it never really seems like it happens.

I don’t know. I watched the movie Orange County this weekend. It’s not that incredible or mind-blowing of a flick, although Jack Black’s character is pretty good in it. It’s mostly the sort of build-up-tension-with-fakeouts sort of plot that would make a Julia Roberts movie look sophisticated. But the one thing is that it’s got a main character, a kid who wants to become a writer, and becomes obsessed with writing almost constantly. It’s similar to one of the things I took from the movie Almost Famous, the Lester Bangs character that talked about how on some nights, he just sat at the typewriter and wrote and wrote for hours. And both of those made me wish I was spending all of my free time writing for hours, just scribbling in notebooks until every blank page turned filled, or chipping away at some mystic novel and before I turn back to look, I’ve got a quarter-million words behind me.

But I don’t do those things, and I almost never write anymore, and that depresses me. And part of it is the lack of projects on my horizon, the lack of any concrete thing that I should be filling with words. And part of it is this general apathy because so many things around me are eating away at me, each one taking a tiny part of my energy. When it comes down to it, I sometimes have the hours to write, but I simply don’t have the motivation to sit in the chair and put my hands on the keyboard and make the cursor spit out words as it coasts from left to right in my document buffer.

I spent part of the weekend trying to think about reorganizing media in my apartment, trying to find places to put new shelves, trying to find new ways to stack books or hide boxes of magazines under other furniture or whatever else. I’m not saying I DID any of these things, I just thought about it, and then I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond to look at shelves and other storage solutions meant to provide my life with more completeness. I didn’t find anything that worked that I wanted to buy that second, but I did see many things that I would buy at some point if I had money burning a hole in my pocket and wasn’t going on vacation in 19 days. Instead, I spent twenty bucks on a zen rock garden fountain for my desk, and rearranged the piles of bills and papers and other crap to get the thing assembled. It looks nice sitting next to the black-framed ViewSonic flatscreen LCD, since the bigger slate pieces are also black, and although the most frequent complaint about these things is the sound of the pump, it’s more quiet than the Athlon power supply under the desk, so no worries there.

Actually, I’ve always wondered about combining the two technologies: a water-cooled manifold on a CPU, with hoses that run out of a case and are connected to a display fountain up on the desk. The fountain would cool down the water, and it would cycle back into the case. Has anyone done this? It’s a thought.

Okay, awaiting food so I can eat so I can write…

Meeting with Fox News

Fri, 04 Jun 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Just woke up from a post-work nap, and now I’m pretty groggy and don’t feel like doing anything, but don’t exactly feel like going back to bed, either.

I met with the Fox News people today, which was a pretty weird situation. It was a cameraman guy and a woman producer. They showed up at about noon, and I quickly shuffled them into one of our nice meeting rooms, which is a fringe benefit of working in a SoHo dotcom lair. I had two letters from Gadahn, plus a bunch of assorted fliers and artwork, and the copy of Xenocide in which his stuff appeared. The camera guy had one of those huge TV camera rigs and tripod, so he set stuff up so he could tape stuff to a black piece of posterboard sitting on the whiteboard’s marker tray, and take shots of the stuff. I don’t entirely know what he was doing, but it took a while for each shot. Maybe he was zooming in and out, I don’t know. I also don’t know the specs of the camera, but it was digital and video and obviously not just a little DV toy you pick up at Best Buy to tape your kids’ birthday parties. She said they would dump the tape to some direct satellite system that would zap it to the LA office, where the guy primarily writing the article was located.

While the cameraman did his thing, I talked to the producer, mostly just more repeating of the stories and little details. She seemed younger than me, red hair and very cute, more like the English major type than some kind of TV anchorwoman you’d see on the news. I felt really nervous about the whole thing and wished I had more to chat about, especially because I didn’t want to seem like some bizarro Satanist metal dude or whatever. After they got the paper stuff pulled in, we both sat down and she asked me a handful of questions on video, just the basic stuff like how I started the zine, how I met Adam, and so on. I had to wear a wireless mic, which was odd, and I also spent the whole thing oddly uncomfortable, knowing that I’d look like a dork on video. I also had a vague fear in the back of my mind that if my likeness ever showed up on TV, I’d end up with molotov cocktails thrown through my apartment window from nutbag jihad fundamentalists, or angry heavy metal fans. Finally, they taped a b-roll image of me sitting at the desk, shuffling through the papers, which seemed kind of silly. The whole thing took about an hour, and the people were very nice. She told me she’d get in touch when anything became of the report, but I’m also hoping the reel gets shelved away in a vault somewhere and forgotten.

I’ve been very vaguely thinking about trips west again, to see the property and maybe get some work done. I get two or three emails a year from people who have also bought land out in the San Luis Valley, and when I do, it rekindles the thoughts of getting some money together to get a well dug, maybe set up a wind-powered water pump and a shitload of garden hose and sprinklers, and plant a few dozen saplings so there are more real trees there by the time I get around to building a place. I have no idea how much getting a well drilled costs, probably thousands of dollars, and I don’t know how they will ever get a drilling rig out there, since the access road is dirt and is about as soft and fluffy as a good angelfood cake, which isn’t conducive to heavy trucks. Speaking of, I was just digging around (pun intended) ebay motors and saw an old D6 cat dozer with a busted block but still running for a grand. It would probably cost more like five grand once you got one in good shape and hauled it out to the property, but that would make one hell of a toy. I’d have a 40-acre sandbox with a really nice shovel. I could improve the hell out of that road, and then dig some kind of giant underground catacomb.

Or maybe not. Anyway, I heard about a place in Albuquerque that rents out VW campers, the newer Westfalia Vanagon ones. It would be a lot of fun to rent one out, drive up to the property, hang out there for a week, and maybe plant some trees or do some other digging around. I could also maybe buy one of those little metal sheds at the WalMart in Alamosa, drag it out there, and have a building to hide my ammunition cachegardening tools.

Man, this Indian food TV dinner I made tastes like garbage. I need to go find something else to eat.

new bookshelf

Sun, 13 Jun 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I have a new bookshelf! It is one of those folding 3-shelf wooden things, and I put it in the alcove by my front door, one of the only spots where there was actual floor room for it. I threw all of the books on the floor and some that were balanced in front of other books on shelves or laying on couches or whatever, and I actually have a slight amount of extra room on one shelf. Empty book storage space is a rarity, but I do have a small pile of books on the to-read queue sitting next to my bed, so it will fill up again. This shelf is equipped with pegs and holes enabling another unit to stack on top of it, so I’ll probably buy a second one when I get back from vacation, which should last me until xmas or so. I bought this thing at a local furniture store down the street for $50, so it worked out pretty good. I wanted to get a similar one at Bed Bath & Beyond, but then I’d have to drag it onto the subway, and that would be a huge mess. Anyway, I am very happy about it, and it looks weird in my room now that I got all of the piles of books off the floor.

It’s been a blah weekend sofar. We got out of work a bit early for Reagan day, and I came home and completely blacked out for 4 or 5 hours, just enough to catch the end of his funeral on TV and order some Chinese food. I ended up staying awake until daylight because of that extra sleep, which meant I didn’t get awake and get lunch until like 4:30 today. I watched Escape from New York with the commentary, and eventually headed into the city to buy more movies or maybe go see a movie. But there was nothing in the theater worth seeing, and even after browsing a dozen times in Virgin, I didn’t find anything I wanted to buy, so I turned around and headed home.

I haven’t been writing much, just taking notes for this next book and thinking about it. I think I might just continue with the notes all through my vacation. That’s easier than trying to work on something with no network connection to check stuff online and no emacs to write with on my Windows laptop. I’ll just take a legal pad or two and a handful of pens, and sketch out some ideas while I’m at the pool or whatever. I’ll also have a week of cable TV, so that will be good for ideas.

Okay, back to work…

almost out

Sat, 19 Jun 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I’m almost out of here - I have to finish packing, then get to the airport for a flight to Tampa. I will be back in a week. I’ll have a full report then…

war zone

Sun, 04 Jul 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I finally finished my trip report from Florida. Go here to read it. _[deleted, sorry…]_Warning: it’s not terribly exciting, but at least it’s done.

I just got back from the movies and returned to a war zone. Greece won the world cup or whatever big soccer tournament is going on right now, and my predominantly Greek neighborhood currently looks like the Tet Offensive or something. Pretty much everyone with a last name ending in -opalus is driving around drunk with their car horn welded permanently on and 17 Greek flags hanging off of every side, along with a half-dozen screaming people, yelling phrases I don’t quite understand. The main drag on 30th Avenue looked pretty much like New Year’s, with people throwing paper and bottles and cops in riot gear and a median BAC of about .27 for the entire crowd. Call me a hick, but I really don’t understand the allure of soccer at all. Aside from my complete hatred of all sporting events, the game is about as exciting as watching someone repair the drain to a sink. Hopefully everyone will lapse into alcohol poisoning in the next few hours and I’ll be able to sleep in peace.

I’ve watched lots of movies this weekend. Last night, I went to see Dodgeball, and found it to be very funny, considering the fact that it has Ben Stiller in it, and I consider him to be the kiss of death as far as comedy is concerned. (You know how everyone said that if Adam Sandler didn’t do the potty humor and dumb voices, he wouldn’t be funny at all? Well, Ben Stiller is Adam Sandler minus the poo jokes and characters.) I’ve come to the conclusion that with Rip Torn, you can’t go wrong. Vince Vaughn’s also pretty good, especially when playing a jerk. And even Stiller’s stuff wasn’t bad. The film was mostly a remake of the slightly funnier Basketball, but it’s still worth seeing.

And then Spiderman 2 was tonight. I actually liked the film a lot. It didn’t have the comic book geek baggage that the first one did, in which you have to basically pause everything and take a bunch of time to explain all of the superpowers and storyline and the entire universe of the comic before you start in with the action. They did pretty good with the script, the action is very immense, and the special effects are so complex and detailed, you can’t even imagine how they did any of these shots except to totally immerse yourself into the film and imagine it is a giant comic come to life. It’s great and I hope it does well this weekend.

I added another shelf yesterday, a duplicate of the one I got a few weeks ago that has pegs and holes so it stacks on top. Now I really have extra shelf space, although I expect it to be filled in no time. I moved some of the DVDs over there for the time being. The next goal is to redo some of the CD and DVD storage, and maybe get some new floor-to-ceiling unit to eke a bit more space out of it.

That’s about it. I think I’m going to flip in a DVD (maybe part of the Simpsons season 4 set that arrived this week) and get a late snack. Happy 4th to everyone.

The Day After

Sun, 11 Jul 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I went to buy movies yesterday after a haircut, and found out that The Day After just got released on DVD. It wasn’t ever on DVD, and I never thought I’d get to see it again, unless I bought a tenth-generated pirated VCD copy from some guy in Brazil off of eBay, so I was very happy to see a real version of it for only ten bucks, and I grabbed it immediately. I managed to watch it last night, and had a lot of thoughts about it, so here I am.

The Day After was a two-hour disaster movie about nuclear war shot for TV and aired on ABC, and it was a really big deal when it was aired in November of 1983. This was at the height of Reaganism and when the Soviet Union and the US were standing toe to toe on the brink of atomic war, and the idea of a movie that showed all of this in great detail created a groundswell of controversy and interest. This was around the time of movies like Red Dawn and Wargames, when movies about nuclear apocalypse were in vogue. Also, at a time when few people had cable or satellite dishes and all of the minor TV networks and cable outlets hadn’t bled away the focus of the big three networks, it was much easier to get people to crowd a TV premiere and make an event into an Event.

I remember watching the first half of The Day After as a twelve-year-old kid. They divided the movie into hour-long pieces, with the nuclear blast happening after the first hour. They also went commercial-free for the last hour. Since they publicized many warnings about how traumatizing the post-apocalypse scenes might be, my parents would not let me watch the last hour, and I was pretty pissed. I mean, at this point, I’d already seen Freddy and Jason slice open a million people, and I think Salem’s Lot was more scary than watching a bunch of people with bad rubber makeup of flash burns on their faces. What was even stupider was that my bedroom was right next to the family room where my parents continued to watch the show, so I HEARD the whole thing. Well, looks like all of that cautious parenting turned me into a well-adjusted normal person, right?

Anyway, I watched the DVD last night, and it’s always amazing to see something you haven’t seen for twenty years and add a fresh layer of detail to the distant memories you have in the back of your head about it. The movie takes place in Lawrence, Kansas, a place I saw a few years ago. Lawrence and the nearby Kansas City are about as Midwestern as any part of Indiana was back in 1983. The movie opens with panning aerial shots of farmers working in fields, kids playing football, the stadiums for the Kansas City Royals, the college campus at Kansas University, and the people walking through town. It all had that late 70s/early 80s feel to it, like Breaking Away did - the signs are all different, less corporate; the stores look friendlier, more like that old IGA instead of the big mega-grocery; the people wore earth-tone colors and big collars and dorky hairstyles like those old grade-school photos you try to hide in the rest of your picture collection. Despite what MTV might tell you, the 80s weren’t all like Miami Vice and Joan Jet and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. To a lot of us who did not live on a coast, the 80s were a gradual extension of everything bad about the 70s, except we got personal computers with 64K of memory.

The movie starts out by building up a troop of characters and families. Jason Robards plays a doctor working at the college medical center; John Lithgow is a scientist also at the school; a whole family, including a daughter about to be married, is headed up by John Cullum (who most recently played Mark Greene’s dying father on the TV show ER); Steve Guttenberg is a wandering college student; there’s also an Air Force airman and his family, and a few other people. It’s a nice little cross-slice of America, and makes you think you’re about to step into some sort of sappy situation-comedy as you get to know each group.

Just as you see these people introduced into their daily routines, the shit hits the fan. There’s a lot of vague pieces of news thrown at you about the fall of Berlin, different countries being taken over by tanks, and Russians moving ground against Europe. This is all in the form of TV bulletins and stuff on the radio, shown in snippets. You never get a clear idea of all of the politics behind it, but that’s the intention; they aren’t going to sit back and explain World War III at a later point, like they did in Red Dawn. You just get the shots of people freaking out, hording food at the grocery store, boarding up windows, or standing there paralyzed with fear. This is mixed with stock footage of Strategic Air Command putting people in missile silos and communicating with their airborne command center, which holds all of the codes needed for an all-out nuclear war.

Finally, it all falls apart. Lawrence used to be home to SAC and had tons of missile silos scattered around farmland. So people are sitting on their back porch of their farm house, and all of a sudden, giant columns of white smoke erupt from the ground as Minuteman missiles leap out of their silos and head off to Russia. Then the everyone-running-down-the-street footage starts, mixed with the all-out military footage of guys running to B-52s, pulling the safeties out of ALCMs, getting on the horn with Looking Glass for confirmation codes, and all of the cool stuff that you never ever see except for about 18 minutes before the end of the entire world. There’s also a great quote in which Lithgow and a few other science students are standing outside watching the missiles launch and this girl says “What is it? Is it some kind of test?” To which he replies, “no you bitch, there’s an alien on the wing of the plane!” (Oh wait, wrong movie.)

When the nukes hit, it’s an eerie and paralyzing feeling, even though the special effects look like something my 7-year-old nephew could do in Microsoft Paint. They do a lot of the thing where the bodies get zapped and you can see the skeletons inside for a second, which is pretty spooky. However, the whole thing is marred by the fact that if Lawrence, Kansas got hit by a Soviet attack in 1983, not one god damned person would live to tell about it. And they’re showing people that are like ten miles away from the air blast of a 500 Megaton bomb ducking down in their car and putting an arm over their eyes, and then getting up a second later and saying “what was that?”

A lot of people do die, but many of our main characters are around. Cullum (who, by the way, would be my first choice if I was casting a movie about Richard Speck in his later years. He doesn’t wear a shirt in one scene where he’s digging with a shovel, and THAT was more traumatizing than seeing two billion people die.) and his family are boarded up in a basement that is sealed with a radiation-stopping inch of dirt over the windows, and they all live. His son looked right at the blast, and has bandages over his eyes for the rest of the movie, although he has some hope that he will regain his vision, despite the fact that his retinas were deep-fried and there is absolutely no medical technology on the planet anymore. Also, his mom and daughter are going increasingly nutso, and Steve Guttenberg’s character drops in and becomes sort of an adopted son to them. It’s strange to see Guttenberg so early in his career, because you expect him to break into some kind of Police Academy shtick at any moment. The airman spends his whole time wandering around the countryside, which is pretty stupid, but there you go. The doctor played by Robards basically spends 24 hours a day dealing with severe radiation burn victims with no power, lights, fresh water, sterile conditions, or medical equipment. Lithgow spends his whole time fucking around with a shortwave radio and a Geiger counter.

A lot of the movie plays like a bad filmstrip teaching facts about nuclear annihilation, in a way that makes the actors look like they are reading straight off of cue cards. A girl runs outside and Guttenberg runs after her and the exchange is like this:

Him: “Come back inside. There’s, um, radiation out here.”

Her: “What’s, um, that?”

Him: “Radiation is all around. us. It’s, going through. us. now. Like. An x-ray.”

Most of the post-war world is nowhere near as bad as it really would be. In fact, at the end of the movie, they ran a disclaimer, that basically said “Know how bad it looked in this movie? Well, it’s going to be a hundred times worse in real life, so kiss your ass goodbye.” They did a reasonable job of trying to show radiation sickness, given 1983 makeup technology and the masses of people that had to be shown. There were ruins everywhere, and everyone was losing hair in weird, funky patches, and had fake burns on their faces and all kinds of dermatological nightmares on their skin. But in reality, that entire area would be a crater. And while some nuclear winter effects were shown, they neglected to mention that the ash thrown skyward from the bombs would create a cloud of darkness that would last decades. I guess that darkness interfered with their film cameras, so they had to work around it.

The movie has no real ending, no “we’ll get through this together” or “we will persevere” or anything else, and I think that’s good. If they made this into a miniseries, I wouldn’t have minded seeing more of what happened around the world, or what became of the rest of the country. But I think the idea was to show that Lawrence, pretty much in the middle of the country, would have taken the least of the damage, so New York or LA would have been completely fucked compared to Kansas.

Despite the goofy special effects and the fact that you had to ignore reality a bit, I actually enjoyed seeing this movie again. The first half of the movie, like I mentioned, was a time capsule to that period right before I started Junior High, the wood-paneled living rooms and giant console TVs and portable radios as big as ten iPods. The second half was a time capsule into the fears and politics of the era. I remember around the time of this movie thinking about what would happen if there was a nuclear war, how we’d probably be fucked because we lived just east of Chicago and just north of Grissom AFB. I can’t say that I missed a lot of sleep over it, but the thought was there in my head for my whole childhood. I wonder if kids now worry about terrorists the way we used to worry about Soviet nukes. Probably not. It’s not like it was a great thing, but it was part of my culture as a kid, and now that’s gone, so it’s always interesting to take a peek back at it and see how much the world has changed.

Okay, time to go get some work done.

Seattle nostalgia

Sat, 24 Jul 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I think I’m already stuck on this book. Maybe I just don’t feel up to it this weekend, but I can’t even think about it without thinking it isn’t that good. I don’t know, I never had this problem with Summer Rain because the whole plot was there and it was just a matter of doing the work and coming up with the details, and Rumored had its problems and there were many second thoughts, but it eventually pulled through. The problem now is that a lot of the notes I’ve taken in the last few months don’t really fit this book, and it makes me wonder if I should just finish this and start something else with those notes, or just start the something else, or do both, or do neither, or who knows what. So tonight I’m just dicking around, maybe editing the web site, and playing video games.

I was thinking about Seattle today, which is always bad news. I was playing around with traffic cameras on the web, because part of an underpass collapsed here, and I wanted to see if there was a picture of it or anything, and while googling around, I found the WSDOT web page and started checking out their cameras, and it made me miss Seattle so much, it was pathetic. It’s hard to explain, but back when I was there, I always spent my Saturdays driving around. When I first moved there, I was always broke, but I still had the almost-new car and it got great mileage, and I’d spent all of my time driving up I-5 to Northgate mall, or down I-5 to Southcenter, our out on I-90 to Bellevue or across the 520 to Kirkland, or wheverever I needed to go. I drove a lot, because everything had a parking lot, and even though traffic pissed me off, I had a tape player and an air conditioner and the new car smell and I didn’t care.

And looking at the pictures… I mean, check them out sometime. Every road in Puget Sound is perfectly carved into the hills, with grassy meadows and evergreen trees wrapping around every terrace. You can’t drive five miles in Seattle without crossing over a lake or passing by a large body of water. Maybe it’s just something familiar to me about looking at these cameras, all of them positioned right at places I remember, that makes me reminisce. But when I look at that and then I look at what I do on most Saturdays here, it’s depressing. I know I took the scorched earth approach when I burned my bridges leaving Seattle, and I think assistant managing a McDonald’s here probably pays more than doing my current job back there, so I’m not in any rush to leave New York, but I just wish I could hop in my car that I don’t have and drive when I’m sick of staring at the same four walls and I want to get out.

New Keyboard

Sun, 01 Aug 2004 00:00:00 GMT

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…

---

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.

weather control

Sat, 07 Aug 2004 00:00:00 GMT

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…

storms, projects

Sun, 22 Aug 2004 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Summer Rain re-release

Thu, 16 Sep 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I am happy to announce that I have re-released my first book Summer Rain with a new printer, lulu.com.

Summer Rain is a book about a summer in a big college town in 1992. Here’s what the back cover says:

John Conner has lost his girlfriend, his job, a scholarship, and has been kicked out of college. Instead of retreating back to his parents’ basement and a life of mediocrity and factory labor, he decides to stay the summer in the college town of Bloomington, Indiana.On the lazy Indiana University campus, Conner explores the worlds of death metal, zines, no-budget radio, and slackerdom while trying to learn about women, deal with depression, and get his life back on course. While he works telemarketing jobs and hawks glowsticks as a street vendor in order to survive, he learns who his friends are in the strange mix of people left at the college for the summer. The atmospheric and descriptive narration weaves the hidden beauty of the Midwest and the crossroads of the early Nineties into a timeless story of the follies of youth.

Conner’s ramblings through the desolation of an empty campus parallel the meaningless jobs he must take to scrape by while he decides whether to remain sequestered in the relative comfort of college living or leap into an unstable world fueled only by his own creativity.

As for the new edition, it is the same text, but this time, I was able to do the layout myself, and I managed to shrink it from about 660 pages to about 480 pages without affecting readability. It gave me a chance to go through and fix some typos, and I got to redesign the cover so it didn’t look like a damn modern art masterpiece.

The big difference is that this version, aside from being lighter on your hands when you’re reading it, is also MUCH lighter on your pocketbook. The iUniverse edition was $29.95; now it is only $16.95. In order to get the price this low, I had to forego distribution through Ingram and an ISBN/UPC/EIN, so you can’t get it from Amazon or your local bookstore, but only online from lulu.com. (If you’re in town or you ask real nice, I can sell you one in person with real cash or paypal or whatever. And I trade, if you have a book out, too.)

Anyway, the lulu page is at www.lulu.com/jkonrath. They ain’t amazon and their prices on shipping aren’t the lowest, but they’ve improved them since last time, and they’re getting better. The quality of the book is the same, and the big thing is the lower price and the fact they didn’t have a trained sloth design the cover for me. While you’re at lulu, you might want to check out John Sheppard’s books at this page, as he is also rereleasing all of his books in the lower-cost format, and Small Town Punk makes a nice companion to Summer Rain, if you’re into that whole youthful angst thing.

Enough of the plugging, I am going to go do something I haven’t done in a long time and read someone else’s book, instead of mine.

emergency root canal

Sun, 26 Sep 2004 00:00:00 GMT

My tooth seems to be better, even though I bitched and moaned a bit about it on the livejournal yesterday. Saturday morning I went in to get a resin filling replaced and ended up instead getting an emergency root canal. It was actually part one of a root canal, and I have to go back in next Friday for the rest of it, and to get a post put in so I can get a crown made. This means that, depending on how much my insurance kicks in, you all are getting donations made to the Human Fund instead of Christmas presents this year. The worst part of a root canal is paying for it. I’m doing fine pain-wise and eating pretty much whatever I want with no problems whatsoever, but my stomach is tied in knots thinking how much I’m going to have to lay out to this guy for the work. I know he said the root canal is about $550, the post is about $250, and the crown is about $850, but the question is how much the insurance will screw me when it comes time to whip out the checkbook. It would be nice if I had to only pay like 30% or 40% of that out-of-pocket, but insurance is such a fucking scam these days, I’m sure they’re going to bend me over the counter on this one.

Now that I’m not spending my evenings dumping tube after tube of Anbesol into my jaw, I’m actually chipping away at the writing a bit. The Vegas book continues to progress. I am putting photos into the layout and fixing the little crap that didn’t transfer over right, like all of the straight quotes that need to be moved to smart quotes and whatever else. I was initially pretty bummed because I pulled in everything but the last little story, and the whole book was only 126 pages. I was really hoping that it would be closer to 160 or so. Granted, I do have the fonts Metal Cursed down to 9 or 10 point, and more pictures will break it up a little. But still, I want this thing to be a book and not a pamphlet. I’m about done with the last story, which was a last-second addition since the piece I wrote about shooting guns in Vegas turned out to be too lame to include. Anyway, still no word on when this will be done, but it’s getting there.

It’s almost turned into fall, but not quite. Fall is always my favorite season, and brings back a lot of strange memories of a lot of different eras in my life. I will be happy when it’s consistently light jacket weather and it’s the kind of weather that makes me want to hide under the covers in bed and read on a brisk Saturday morning, as opposed to “why is it so damn hot at the end of September?” kind of weather.

silence

Sat, 02 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT

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.

cover-text.txt

Sun, 03 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I have a blank emacs buffer open for the filename “cover-text.txt” that will become the back cover of Dealer Wins, the Vegas book. I can’t think of what to write. I’ll drink about nine more Cokes and then use whatever appears.

My temporary crown came off this morning when I was flossing, and fell behind the toilet. You’d think that, even with 97 minutes of rinsing with hot water and Listerine, I’d have serious germophobic fears about putting it back in my mouth, but I guess the sheer panic of popping the thing out and the anticipation of a metric fuckload of pain overrode all other senses. The pain didn’t happen, though. And it looks really weird with the thing off; there isn’t just a metal post, but rather what looks like a little, rounded-off tooth under it. I bought some Fixodent at the drug store and all is well. I also got a waterpic, which I might or might not use regularly. Maybe I will just fill it with Coke and use it to drink a steady stream while I’m sitting at the computer.

I am listening to The Fight Club Score by the Dust Brothers for the first time, and I really, really like it. I realize I’m like four years behind the curve, but this has to be the coolest background music ever. I don’t know anything about techno or the Dust Brothers or anything else, but I have a feeling this CD will be on during a lot of the writing of the next book.

I have decided that after this Vegas book goes out the door, I will seriously get on Zombie Fever, the tentative title of the next book. It will be, in a stylistic sense, a sequel to Rumored to Exist, and it will share some of the secondary characters, but it will be a new, start-to-finish fiction piece. I probably have about 20,000 words of notes and snippets, but I need to take a big step back and think through the whole thing again before I get started.

As far as media consumption, I finished reading John Sheppard’s Home is Where You Hang Yourself last night. It’s a pretty tight little book; at 136 pages, it seems like it’s a lot longer. Some of the short stories continue loose threads from his other books, but for many of them, he created new characters a lot different than the punk cast he’s used before. The stories aren’t all the beginning-middle-end typical MFA creative writing workshop format, and tend to spend more time building up characters rather than pushing people through the movements. I like that, at least that it makes you think a lot more about the people rather than the events. Anyway, it’s only $7.75 on Lulu, so check it out.

I also got through 3 of the 4 discs of the Star Wars trilogy. I haven’t watched Jedi yet, but I might do that this afternoon, just to see if Lucas admits that the Ewoks were simply a bad idea. He probably won’t. He’s given little time in the commentaries to mention the obvious about the special edition additions or the stormtrooper hitting his head or anything else. This is outweighed by him spending a ton of time talking about stuff I had no idea about. If you even vaguely like the original trilogy, you should immediately lay down the $42 on Amazon to get a copy of these. I know, everyone thinks there will be some big 6-movie set coming out later, but it’s worth it to buy this now, especially at the cheap price. I have mixed feelings that I spent $100 on the super-ultra boxed edition of the original films on VHS, but at least I can go back and see Greedo shoot first if I really want to.

Okay, I better get to those Ewoks. I was thinking of going into Manhattan and spending some cash, since the tooth debacle ended up being cheaper than I thought, but I have such a huge pile of DVDs to watch and work to do on this back cover, I guess I will stay here for a bit.

Dealer Wins

Sun, 10 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I finished and submitted Dealer Wins, the Las Vegas book, last week. I’m waiting for a proof to approve, and apparently the USPS tried to deliver it yesterday to my office, but since nobody was there, they got a slip. Or maybe they didn’t, I’m trusting the USPS web site on this one. Anyway, I might or might not get to actually see it tomorrow. I’m pretty happy with how it looks in the PDF, and the pricing turned out about as good as I could have hoped. It will be available on the publisher’s site right away, and be on Amazon et al in like 6-8 weeks, or whatever. It’s kindof stupid because it will actually be $3 cheaper to order from the publisher, and I make like 40 cents more and it’s faster, but I’m guessing most people will wait until it is on Amazon.

This, like other books I have done, doesn’t really feel done at the end. It seems like finishing a book is a qualitative thing, and it’s more a matter of “I’ve looked at this 937 times and I’m sick of it” rather than “it’s end-to-end complete”. I mean, it’s not like building a brick wall where you can just say, “it’s this tall and this long and this thick and the cement is dry - it’s done.” When I send a book out, I always feel like there’s something missing, something I didn’t do with it. And usually, by the time I actually look at the finished product weeks or months later, I like it. So we’ll see.

I have no idea what I am doing next. I have a book of short stories about Bloomington that I want to finish, but I hate them all and I absolutely can’t motivate myself to work on that. I would like to write another book in the vein of Rumored to Exist, but I don’t even know where to start. I actually had a good start on one, and I guess the notes are okay, but it was a false start and I really need to think of something new.

I haven’t done much else this weekend. I did go to Best Buy with the intention of blowing several hundred dollars on CDs. I ran the gauntlet, going from A to Z twice, picking out everything I wanted, and I think I only ended up with like five things, and two of those were remasters of Queensryche albums that were very low on the “buy someday, but in no hurry” list. I mean, I even got a George Lynch solo album, I was grasping at straws so much. I don’t know if I was just in a bad mood (which I was) or if Best Buy has no good music anymore (they don’t - but at least they are cheaper than Virgin) or if I simply don’t know what I want in music anymore. I still want to push to get the music collection above a thousand at some point. It’s roughly 75 away, and it’s getting there, but won’t happen by the end of the year or anything.

I’m bored. I’m tempted to go into Manhattan and shop for books or something, but I have a pile of books taller than me to read, and I should think more about this whole writing thing.

Dealer Wins

Tue, 12 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I am happy to announce that I have finished my fourth book, which is called Dealer Wins: Misadventures in the New Las Vegas. (Click that link to go to my pitifully underdone web page for the book, which I am trying to finish as I overindulge in fun-size 3 Musketeers bars.)

The book is a collection of my travel stories about Las Vegas, plus a handful of new essays about various Vegas-related stuff. It also has a ton of black and white photos that I took. The stories and photos are the same as those on my travel site, but I heavily edited the stories. This isn’t a guidebook, or a tell-all “I worked as a stripper” or “and then we buried the prostitute in the desert” sort of book. It’s just me and my observations on the place, and hopefully you will find it funny and interesting.

It is currently available from lulu.com. Their price for the book is $9.99 plus shipping, and it’s 150 pages perfect-bound, with a nice color cover that I designed myself, using my own photos. I think it’s the best cover design of all of my books. I do have an ISBN (1-4116-1460-7) and it is listed in Books in Print and distributed by Ingram, which means it will be listed in all of the online stores (Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Wal-Mart, etc.) But it won’t start to show up for 6-8 weeks, and the bad news is that the MSRP of the book is actually $12.99, so you pay more for the same thing. I know a lot of people are well-rooted to Amazon, because I am too, but you can buy this for three bucks less and get it months earlier.

And while you’re there, you can also get the new edition of Summer Rain, or pick up one of John Sheppard’s books. I am going to order a couple dozen, so if you want to buy one in person, I will sell them for ten bucks. I also, for the first time, am offering review copies to anyone who will post (on the web, at some googleable site) a review and/or some linkage back to me. So contact me about that.

More dental horror

Sun, 17 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Now that I have the new book done, things have gone back to normal, and I can get back to my regular routine of dental horror stories. I went in Saturday for a session that ended up being fairly pain-free, except for the fact that the TV set was tuned to the VH1 top 20 video countdown. Maybe I’m getting old, but I guess I am totally out of touch with what kind of music is on the radio these days. It’s bad when you watch a half hour of videos, and the best one is by Velvet Revolver. Anyway, I got my crappy, always-falling-out temporary crown replaced by a nice, new, expensive, firmly adhered crown. When they had to take out the old one and the assistant went after me with a medieval-looking pair of pliers, I got a little freaked out, but then I remembered there are no nerve endings there anymore. A few minutes later, I was on my way, my tongue constantly running over the new, glossy porcelain. The bad news is that I have to go back next week for another root canal and some kind of involved dental cleaning that will probably resemble some kind of North Vietnamese torture technique.

That said, I don’t seem to be creating much of anything these days. Maybe I should end this entry and find something better to do.

writing about not writing

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I uploaded a “preview” of Dealer Wins to lulu today. If you go here, you can download it for free. I say “preview” because on lulu, you are supposed to upload a PDF of a chapter or whatever as a preview, and then people can buy the full PDF as an ebook. Well, the full PDF of the book in press-ready format is 23 megs. I made a crunched-up PDF that’s only about a meg and a half, and made that the preview. So the preview is the whole book, although the photos are all lossy-compressed and dithered and a bit blotchy. They aren’t bad, though. Anyway, click that link and download the preview if you want to look at it without buying it. But you should buy it, of course.

I still haven’t been writing much of anything, other than writing about not writing. I’m at the start of a cold and I tried to avoid eating any sugar all day except for a Coke or two, and now I have a tremendous headache. Yesterday on the train coming home, I tried to think of things besides writing that I really wanted to do to keep busy, things I wanted to research. One was that I wish I could find a lot more information on making my apartment more liveable. Like, on one hand, it would be cool to do more things to make the place soundproof, or put down some nice rugs or different art or whatever, to make it a better environment. Or I always think I should throw out this desk and get something that is really ergo-oriented that would make it more productive to write. And I wish I could find things to make an apartment more efficient, as far as storage or whatever. But most of the sites I find are Pottery Barn sort of bullshit. I’m not interested in buying more things to have more things; I would, however, buy better solutions that would replace things and make the space more usable.

The other thing is I want to plan out my travel schedule for next year much better. I would really like to go back to Hawaii again, but I’d also like to do a lot of other things. Like, I’d love to go to Tucson and visit the Pima Air Museum. It’s across the street from Davis-Monthan AFB, better known as “the boneyard”, or the big place in the desert where old planes go to rest and eventually die. Some new planes go there for temporary storage; older stuff sits in formation, with crew chiefs occasionally scavenging parts to keep other jets current. And some planes are destroyed, which sucks, as I’d really like to buy an old B-52, either for my own personal use, or just to convert into a house out at my place in Colorado. Anyway, that might be an interesting long weekend, and I’d like to think of a few more of those and line it all up in advance.

Blah, this headache is killing me. I think I may nuke it from orbit with some Tylenol PM and go blotto.

Nintendo tapes

Thu, 21 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I wish I would have kept a journal when I went to high school. Okay, it would have taken more time to carve out the daily entries from the stone tablets way back then, but there are times I wish I had greater memory of day-to-day activities, even if it’s just so I can write another crappy book that’s based on part of my life.

I’ve been thinking back to the past in order to recycle some crap in my head into a new book, and I’ve also been reading threads on SomethingAwful that are absolutely drop-dead hilarious, and I wish I could do something similar. One of the recent threads was about experiences in working at grocery stores, and it contained some of the most hilarious stories about irate customers and general mischief, the sort of thing that is so damn funny because you know there’s no way you could make that stuff up.

And thinking back, I have a lot of funny stories from my days of working at Montgomery Ward back in high school. I worked in the paint department, mixing paint and unloading pallets of boxes of cans, each weighing about ten pounds each. Over the years, I managed to work in almost every department of the store, filling in to get extra hours and unloading trucks at 6AM during the summer for the extra money. I didn’t socialize much during high school because most of my classmates were dicks, so I spent most of my time back in the paint department, huffing mineral spirits and carving wooden paint stirrers into punji sticks and potential ninja weapons.

The general idea of working in a retail store puts you at risk for many encounters with the criminally insane. I don’t know who is responsible for it, but long ago, someone came up with a saying called “the customer is always right,” and that bit of mistruth will make any job behind a cash register sheer hell. There are people who cannot remember how to add two and two who can somehow instantly recite that bit of propaganda. I mean, I would think the small amount of brain matter it would take to store that phrase would also be enough to comprehend why it is impossible to put a lawn tractor on the roof of a Chevette and drive it home, but I’ve seen that one happen.

Monkey Ward was a step up from Target or K-Mart and akin to Sears in their paint offerings. They had their own brand of paint (which was actually superior to almost all other paints, because Wards owned a chemical company from back when it was part of Mobil Oil, and they made an incredible paint for a steal of a price) and we custom mixed it to one of 768 or 863 colors on a chart. We also sold all the fixins’ as far as brushes and drop cloths were concerned, and there were a few bins of wallpaper. But we were peons and jerk-offs, not trained interior decorators. I don’t know how you’re supposed to tell, as there is no accreditation program or professional degree for decorators. You can’t just go, “oh, he has a PhD from Rutgers in wall coverings, he knows his shit.” So I guess price is the only real gauge, and when you’re paying ten bucks a gallon, you aren’t getting shit in the way of design help. Most of the time, people came to me and said “four gallons of #221 in semigloss” or whatever, and I slung that shit out like I was making chocolate shakes in McDonald’s. I’d take their money, tape a can opener to the lid of the shit, and tell them to come back soon. If they got really crotchety about it, I carried the paint to their car, mostly because it gave me a chance to check out the ladies of Housewares on the way back in. But then I quickly forgot the home project in question and went back to seeing what I could break by putting it in the paint mixer.

About once a week though, I’d get one of Them. They would come in with a piece of tile, a scrap of carpet, some wood off of a door frame, a few slips of paper, a magazine cover, and who knows what else. They would then slap all of the shit down on the counter and say “what looks good with this?” I would refrain from saying, “my dick would look good on it, you wanna see?” and tell them that I was, despite my professional appearance as a 16-year-old jagoff who could barely tie his tie plus an ugly maroon paint smock that had more paint explosions than cloth visible, not a professional decorator. My car was six different shades of bondo; I couldn’t match my ties to my shirts, so I bought all white shirts and all grey ties; the biggest thing I’d ever painted in my life were the Led Zeppelin runes in four-foot high letters on public property. And when I told them that they were up shit creek and I would not hold their hand while they compared each of the 863 colors twenty two times to all of their samples, they looked as if I told them I’d just told them I was selling their house to the Viet Cong.

The paint department lived in Four Seasons, which held a mix of different merchandise, depending on the time of the year. In the summer, the lawnmowers, tractors, and weedeater paraphernalia rounded out the area, with kiddie pools and lawn furniture and the barbeque grills. When fall came around, they moved to snowblowers, plows, and tire chains. And as the season started (usually after July or August), the Christmas trees and lights and toys made our department the default playground, as shoppers dumped their cold virus-saturated bumdles of doom in our aisles the terrorize the shelves and convince us all that breeding was a bad, bad, idea. As the defacto toy department of the store, we also had to field the calls and inquiries about the Big Thing of the year. Cabbage Patch dolls made a comeback one year, and we got exactly four of them from the Franklin Park warehouse. In a strange bit of irony, we got all black Cabbage Patch dolls. Even though these insane screaming mother robots were willing to crack someone in the fucking head for one of these dolls, they would dodge into our store, look at the four remaining items in stock, mentally think “I’m not givin’ mah kid a black doll” and then rush back out to look for a “REAL” cabbage patch.

The Nintendo was the sure kick in our collective balls, and that one happened twice in a row. The first time, we got two shipments of four; one in October, and the other on December 24th. We got approximately 427 million phone calls about it for three months straight. I started answering the phone “Montgomery Ward, we have no Nintendos, this is Jon, how may I help you?” 50% of the time, the people would still ask us if we had Nintendos. That remaining four that came in on the 24th was probably a mistake, but when they showed up, I had the front desk page over the intercom that we had them for sale, and they were gone in 20 minutes. Of course, the next year, you’d think they would order 200 dozen of them per store and make up half the company’s profits on game consoles, so they gave us exactly six of them. And twice as many phone calls. And every person that called would ask me, “Do you have any of the TAPES left?” “Do you have any Intendo TAPES?” “TAPES? TAPES?” THEY ARE NOT FUCKING TAPES! THEY ARE CARTRIDGES! THEY CONTAIN A ROM CHIP! NO MOVING PARTS! NO TAPE! NO MAGNETIC MEDIA! IT IS NOT A GOD DAMNED 8-TRACK! “Um, so you got them Mintendo Tapes or not?”

Christmas music was on a loop. It played about 5 hours or so, because there were many times I heard the tape three times. We opened early, we stayed open late, we had extra hours and mad dash sales events and special sales and I usually got a couple of 40-hour weeks, even with school. Our only escape during the day was to go to a boarded-up, cigarette-infested, paneled back room that was our break area, or go out in the mall and fight every fucking degenerate to get a spot in line at the pretzel stand for a lunch of corn dogs and soggy fries. It’s almost sad that I now miss the food at that place, especially considering the number of years it took off my life.

I should talk about this more, because I haven’t even started to discuss the people I worked with. As an aside, this isn’t the stuff I’m researching for a book - I have found a great new idea and I’m working on it, but this is just a way to get the cobwebs out of my head. Anyway, ER is on in 15, so I better get situated.

mixing paint

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Okay, I had fun rambling on yesterday about my old job at Montgomery Ward, and it was a good warm-up exercise for writing, so I thought I’d do it again for a bit. Here goes.

I don’t know how I lucked into the job at Ward’s, but it came at the best time possible. Before that, I worked at an Italian restaurant hellhole as a dishwasher, busting my ass for $3.35 an hour and taking the abuse of the old-school Italian owners. After about six weeks of breaking my back on a sink hung about six inches too low for me, I walked out on a Saturday night during the dinner rush and planned to never come back. The owner called on Monday, cursing in Italian, and said if I didn’t finish out the next week, he wouldn’t pay me. I came back and worked at half-speed, putting greasy plates on the clean rack, never changing the water, and giving them every excuse to tell me to leave. On my last night, I had to clean the cheese grinder, this huge, cast-iron piece that weighed a good twenty pounds, with big screw-threads inside that filled with raw mozzarella cheese. You were supposed to spend a ton of time carefully scraping the extruded cheese out of each thread, scrubbing the insides until sterile. I said, “fuck this,” and gave it a quick once-over on the exterior before putting it away, leaving the cheese to dry into cement inside. The next week, I filled out applications, and basically fell into an interview and callback for Wards, and had the job.

The paint department had two older women and two teen-aged guys. There was me, and another guy named Joe, a year older. He looked like the actor Eddie Kay Thomas from American Pie, except much more sickly and emaciated, and he was even more of a slacker than I was. He perfected the ability to sleep while slumped against the paint counter, so at a distance it looked like he was actually waiting for the next customer. He wanted to go to film school, and his stepdad was one of the top microphone designers in the country. He worked for Crown, designing mics, and wrote articles for many top-end audio magazines. What that meant for us is that he had tons of audio and video equipment lying around the house. Joe got me hooked on punk bands like Black Flag and also on old Troma films like Surf Nazis Must Die and Bad Taste, so we were continually trying to get a band together and/or shoot a movie with no talent, no money, and whatever equipment we found in his basement. Luckily, only a few copies of our attempts actually survived over the years, and I keep tight control over them to avoid shame and embarrassment.

As for the two women, there was Bev, who worked the regular day shift and was our somewhat-manager. She set the schedule and did other managerial tasks, but she wasn’t a salaried manager, and that was a big point of contention for her. Bev was this middle-aged woman that took the job a bit too seriously, and always wanted to claw up a level on the Wards corporate ladder, but would always be back in paints. She helped out the housewifes with their wallpaper samples and worked slowly yet diligently. When there was a shift change at five, she babied us “kids” a bit, and that got old after a while; after all, we were teenagers and knew everything in the fucking world. Joe and I talked behind her back all the time and went on and on with long, mocking dramatic parodies of her and Pearl, but she kept things going during the day, so that worked for us.

Then there was Pearl. Pearl was a crotchety old woman with white curly hair and a constant look of fear and confusion on her face. I felt sorry for her, because she actually worked some other job and needed Wards to make ends meet. I didn’t know her social situation, but I imagined her to be the hermitted old maid, the lady in the neighborhood that all the kids said was a witch, with no family to help her, and this big, scary Reagan-spun world of evil ready to collapse on her at any moment. Pearl was very highly strung, and tended to lose her shit at a moment’s notice. Put her in front of a cash register with a transaction that’s anywhere near abnormal, or have her mix more than four cans of paint, and she would freak the fuck out. She often put cans of paint in the orbital mixer without closing their lids all the way, causing an explosion of pigment everywhere. That and the fact that she was creepy made it difficult to work with her, although maybe it was slightly better than a shift’s worth of Bev’s momming you around.

Me and Joe never worked the same shift during the week; sometimes we’d team up on weekends, but most school nights, it was one or the other of us watching the fort. One of the games we played was repainting stuff in the department. We’d get a lot of damaged, mismixed, or extra paint, and since we’d only get like one or two customers a night sometimes, we’d use the extra supplies to refinish equipment. Joe started the trend by completely disassembling the pigment dispenser one night, and spraypainting the base and turntable with some nice beige spraypaint, the hard-metal finish crap you use on filing cabinets. Compared to the previous million-color splatter, it looked showroom-new. I took apart the paint can closer, that press-thing that seals can lids, and did it up in two different colors. Joe then resprayed our orbital mixer, although shortly after his new paintjob, we got a new one that didn’t shudder and shake like an out-of-balance washing machine during each can of paint.

We did another collaborative art project, which was a book of modern art we created from found objects in the paint department. We only had one or two colors of marker, plus ball-point pens, but we also worked in paint samples, weekly circulars, security tape, wallpaper pieces, and anything else we could find. Once Joe found a cockroach and taped it to the page. We kept the book (really just a legal pad) hidden in the back, and worked on the modern art masterpieces during slow time. I still have the book and often threaten Joe that I will scan the pages and make some kind of web-based interface for it. Just for posterity, here’s a page I scanned in for my glossary; the top piece (“Sunset From Hell”) is Joe’s, when he was in his blue security tape and wallpaper-as apocalypse period, and the bottom piece (“The Analog Kid”) is my deconstruction of the Sunday sales circular into mosaic, representing the complexities of a post-Freudian individual in the new world Reagan era of digital change. Or something.

Any idle time was spent making fun of Pearl and Bev, or devising complex games or diversions. First, both of us would imitate Pearl, and sometimes pretend she led a secret life as a deranged serial killer, mostly because she resembled Norman Bates’ mom’s corpse from Psycho. When that got old, we’d do stuff like put metal can openers in the orbital mixer and hit start to see the thing shoot around; it sounded like dropping a wrench in a large printing press. I manufactured a blood pack from plastic bags and pigment; Joe started a game of seeing who could steal the most can openers a night. We did all of the regular work: dusting off cans, putting away stock, tending to customers, facing shelves, and all of the other usual retail labor. But sometimes, in those non-holiday months, you had nothing to do but listen to Muzak for four hours, and you had to pass the time.

Shortly before I came aboard, our store switched to Nixdorf Point-of-Sale terminals, replacing the old cash registers. These things looked like a slick (at the time) grey PC, with a full keyboard, a tape and form dot-matrix printer, a small greyscale CRT screen on a swing-arm, a magnetic card swipe reader, and a disembodied CPU unit hidden in the counter below, and connected to a main computer, the offices in Chicago, the credit companies, and who knows what else. They gave me a couple of days of training on the machine, but it really took about seven minutes to master them. If you could order food at McDonald’s, you could understand the intricacies of this machine. That meant, of course, that Bev and Pearl were constantly at war with the little grey box. Something as simple as a return and exchange for a different amount would send them into a fit, and I would be asked to step in because I “knew computers”. One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone finds out I’m “into computers” and then asks me to debug something like a garage door opener or a VCR timer. I didn’t learn how to fix a damn toaster in my compilers class, people.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time going through all of the menus on the register, trying to find secret screens or undocumented easter eggs. After hitting all 101 keys in every combination on every screen, I found a way to change the idle screen on the monitor. Normally when you leave the register, you flip around the monitor and it says “Montgomery Ward - Register Closed” with a bunch of asterisks around the text, in an ASCII-art box. Well I found out you can add your own line of text below this, maybe to say “Go to Housewares” or something. Instead, Joe and I found great pleasure from changing it to “Go fuck yourself,” or “Pearl, this is Jesus, you’re going to die.” We had several close calls where we forgot to change a register back and had a manager wondering how the hell the idle screen said “Holiday in Cambodia” or whatever punk anthem we were into that week.

Another time, we were playing with the igniter from a gas grille. It was a push-button assembly with a wire coming off of it, and when you put the wire’s tip near a piece of metal and pressed the button, it would click and shoot a spark across the gap. We had a lot of fun one afternoon shocking each other with the thing, playing games of paper-rock-scissors-electric shock or whatever. Then Joe was ringing up someone’s paint at a register and I found that when you shocked the glass CRT screen, the system FREAKED THE FUCK OUT. The screen would completely blank, even more than when the register was turned off, and all of the peripherals acted like the thing was in the middle of a cardiac arrest, the print heads moving back and forth, spitting out and pulling back in paper. Right when we were ready to fess up and call someone from the front office, we found out that cycling the register to another screen woke it up again and everything was well.

After a few months there, I could take apart the entire Nixdorf terminal with no tools and no keys, in my sleep with the lights turned off, in probably ten seconds. I knew how the printer worked, and was shocked to find out they were paying some doofus 50 bucks an hour to change ribbons and clean printers, when I could do it for nothing. I even had fun taking off the keys and rearranging them, so nobody could type in addresses unless they were a touch typist. Word got out that I could “fix computers”, and I got called to do stuff like unjam printers, pull out shards of documents that were fed wrong, and re-thread ribbons that were totally fucked by people trying to print on cardboard or something.

Wards wasn’t a “real” job, I mean, compared to stuff after college, but it didn’t involve food or wearing a headset and saying “would you like a drink with that?” so it was a big step up for me. There was a dress code, and I had to look reasonably like an adult: dress shoes, no jeans, collared shirt, a tie, and unfortunately, a maroon smock-jacket for the paint department, where I worked. We did have nametags, and “Master Paint Specialist” badges, which Joe and I would use white-out and marker to change to “Master Pain Specialist” or “Master of Puppets” or whatever. Most jobs a sixteen-year-old can get are places that employ “kids”, like fast food or other places in the mall, and everyone worked with other kids their age. But I mostly worked with other adults, and to a certain extent, was given the same respect as one. I mean, Bev still babied us and kept us in our place, but all of our customers were adults who asked us for advice, and I went from being a 16-year-old punk building model airplanes in his basement with Iron Maiden on the stereo to someone who could have a conversation with other adults in a pretty short time.

I have been rambling - this is about like a book chapter, and I haven’t even started. Okay, I’ll get back to this later. Let me know if you enjoyed it.

Kentucky McRib

Sat, 06 Nov 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I’m back. All of my clocks are an hour off. I ate a McRib for dinner in the Cincinnati airport, which is actually in Kentucky. I’m mostly unpacked, but I feel like I need to do some mass cleaning in the apartment, except I don’t feel up to it right now.

Indiana was a good getaway. I got to see both of the nephews and all of the other immediate family, and even anti-kid-me has to say that eight-month-old Wesley is pretty damn cute. I borrowed my mom’s car for most of the trip, and drove around all of my old haunts, noticing both the changes and the fact that a lot of stuff is pretty close to the same fifteen years later. It’s weird for me to drive, because all of the routes and trips are so burned into my brain, I just think “I’m going to University Park Mall” and without realizing it, I drive the entire journey from memory.

It’s strange for me to be back. In some sense, it’s sad, to think back to the time I was there, and know that everyone is now gone, changed, moved on and into their own families and not what I remember from high school. It’s not that I want to re-live that time, it’s just it would be nice to run into some people from back then, talk about it, see it again, and the only person that I still know in town is Ray, and he never wants to leave his apartment, aside from going on his weekly comic book run. On the other hand, I find Elkhart to be infinitely more habitable now that I have lived in New York. Everyone I know has a gigantic house with room after room of storage and furniture, usually purchased for the cost of a new car here. I realize I would go batshit insane after living in Elkhart for more than a week, but I really wish I could have a place like that, a car in the garage, a Super Target down the road.

But NO, I do not want to move back to Elkhart.

Okay, I need to crack open the photos I took and get them uploaded.

Pouring sushi

Fri, 12 Nov 2004 00:00:00 GMT

It’s pouring rain outside, a light but steady shower that’s been going on since morning. The city has been working on a few intersections in my neighborhood, grinding down the pavement really low so the manhole covers and drains stick way up from the surface, and then covering it all with lower quality, shitty patching material so it will fall apart in three months and then spend most of the year in disarray until the end of next year when they blow the rest of their year-end budget on another crappy patch job. Anyway, this has left several lake-sized holes directly in front of crosswalks, which quickly filled with water, the construction dust in them mixing into a nice mud. As I walked home in the rain, people charging off the subway met with these moats like the boys coming off the landing craft in Saving Private Ryan; some charged right through and were immediately incapacitated, while some squirmed and tried to go to the side, where no safety awaited them, and the ones in the back pushed forward on everyone, trying to move the huge clusterfuck of traffic onward and out of the hail of rain falling from the sky.

I’m working on some sushi that I paid too much for, and it’s not a good rainy day food. I’m thinking I should have made some grilled cheese, got a good broccoli and cheddar soup going, something heavy and warm and filling. Tuna rolls don’t really do it. Anyway, it will be nice to have a rainy weekend to do nothing. I’ve got Ace Combat 5 in the PlayStation 2 and there’s always that next book thing.

Speaking of which, I think I will go work on finding some more food that sits better than rice-wrapped fish.

The Wards nightmare

Sat, 13 Nov 2004 00:00:00 GMT

It seems that my most common recurring dream/nightmare has to do with me working at Wards, or rather not working there. There’s usually some part of the dream in which I am not working there and I’m probably on the schedule, but I haven’t quit or anything, and I’m too embarrassed to go back in and tell them I’m not working there anymore. There’s also usually some component in where they still owe me a paycheck or two, and I’m not sure whether or not I should go ask for it or if they will eventually mail it to me. There are a lot of other side plots and situations to the dream, but that’s the basic deal.

This is the part where some wise ass says “have you ever had that dream where you’re in college, and you find out you have a class you didn’t know about?” Let me tell you something: that really happened to me, on a pretty regular basis. Okay, maybe it didn’t happen every semester, but I skipped a lot of class in college (because I was an idiot) and there were many times I had like a Calculus 5 class that I had only gone to the first class and I was somehow planning to go in and take the midterm cold and somehow get enough points for a half a semester of missed quizzes and homework. I have that dream regularly, to the point where I wake up and I have to verbally tell myself over and over “I’m not in school anymore. I graduated. I’m not in school. Go back to bed.”

Anyway, I always wondered if there were other people out there that worked at Wards on the web, like an alumni association. I mean, this place was around for a hundred years, with a lot of people that worked there for their entire lives, starting out in the shoe department and working up to be store managers, in charge of hundreds of employees. Some stores were the only thing in their communities, the equivalent of Wal-Mart these days, except even bigger because there was no Target or Meijer or Best Buy to go against them. I wish I could remember or write down a tenth of the stories I heard with people as I watched the clock and dealt with customers on the watch at that store. Everyone that worked there had a story, from the giant pro wrestler-looking receiving manager who still lived with his mom to the ex-schoolteacher who lived in the UK for ten years in the Air Force and now sold NAPA parts at the auto counter, to the janitor who seriously won like $2.6 million in the state lottery, yet loved working so much that he still kept his $5.15/hr job mopping up puke in the restrooms. (He did, however, buy a house on a golf course, a Lotus, and entire dispensers of those scratch-off lottery tickets from 7-Eleven, because he had a severe gambling habit and was convinced lightning would strike twice.)

So there’s never been much out there. But now, it seems someone has re-bought the Wards brand. I knew they were trying to sell everything but the fillings out of the employees’ teeth when they got down to the last days in 2001. GE credit bought them during their earlier chapter 11, and I’m sure they counted on salvaging out every sign and shelf when they tore out the stores. Now it appears the domain name and trademarks went too, because wards.com is now an online store with the same logo and look, selling housewares and other junk to web surfers. I couldn’t find any more information about how it happened, who is running it, what kind of PR went out, etc etc. You’d think there would be a picture of the president or a letter from the CEO or some sort of news item that said “we’re back!”, but I can’t find anything. It appears to be some kind of shithole, cookiecutter business-in-a-box that was incorporated by a paralegal in a strip mall and run out of someone’s basement. Too bad, because part of me would almost be interested in seeing Wards come back. I didn’t drink all of the Kool-Aid they fed us back then, but I took a few sips, and I really did believe in the place, as much as a kid in high school could.

What’s funny is that this is the second time this has happened to me. My first job out of college, spry.com, is now running as a pseudo-bizarro phantom business, this time an ISP. I don’t know if it has any relation to the original company - maybe someone bought their network infrastructure and name and tried to run with it - but it also has a fake-ass web site that doesn’t list who works there or what their deal is. I care less about Spry, but it was still an interesting place to be for a year.

Not much else is going on here. I am barely scraping at the next book, maybe writing 40 words a day, just trying to write down ideas and not much else. I have lots of scraps and pieces, and the eventual goal will be to melt all of that down into a real book, but the theme isn’t there at all. The pieces, though, are great. I haven’t named it yet, but it goes through title changes weekly like a bad heavy metal band. It was Zombie Fever!, then Toast Fucker, then Anal Sushi, and there were a few others.

OK, I fell asleep this afternoon, so it should be a long night.

The liberation of nothing

Sun, 14 Nov 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I did nothing this weekend. NOTHING. It was both depressing and liberating. I really do enjoy being in my apartment when it starts to get cold out, when it’s chilly outside and the thoughts about holidays and winter first fill my head, and long before I realize how shitty the insulation and heating in this place really is, when the January wind pounds through the windows at eighty miles an hour. But for a short period, there’s that warm feeling of being inside with a crisp and cozy amount of heat in the place, and the feeling of cold outside, and a good video to watch and maybe a nice drink and something to eat and an afternoon on the couch thinking good thoughts. I don’t know, I think growing up with a woodburning stove changed my internal wiring somehow. My parents got this giant cast-iron Fischer stove and had an installer build a little “stage” for it in the family room, along with a wall of bricks and a big chimney. And since I was a kid, there’s some kind of social aspect to being warm. You come home to a cold house, and someone starts the fire, and it heats up the whole room, the whole house, and that feeling, that dry heat in the air while you sit on the couch with everyone else, watching TV and waiting for supper, it somehow sticks with you. It seems so much more human, or communal, than just pressing a button or setting a thermostat. And I guess now, even when the impersonal steam heat kicks through the radiators, it reminds me of that comfort.

So yeah, no going out this weekend. I’m also taking it easy on the wallet and preparing for another round with the dentist tomorrow. This will be for another post insertion, another piece of titanium that will be with me forever, or until I do a Bruce Willis-12 Monkeys and tear it out so the men from the future can’t track me anymore.

Not much else. I think I’m going to read some Lester Bangs before bed.

Thanksgiving

Thu, 25 Nov 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Thanksgiving’s always weird. I’m not one of those people that ironically scoff about how the pilgrims raped the indians, and I’m not the kind that gets all weepy and talks about being thankful for the baby jesus or whatever the hell else. I have problems eating large amounts of food, so eating 8000 calories of turkey and then passing out isn’t my style. Both parades with floats and football bore me.

To the introvert like me, Thanksgiving is a nice day to not have to be around people. I woke up at the usual 7:30 or so today, but then went back to bed and enjoyed drifting in and out of sleep, feeling the cold outside and hearing the rain and wind, and being nice and comfy inside my fortress of blankets and pillows. I did get up to drink juice, take medicine, use the restroom, then go back to bed. I kept repeating the cycle until about two in the afternoon.

On a work day, I rush through the whole teeth-shave-shower cycle as quickly as possible. But on days off, I almost savor it, and spend a lot of time on small details. I spend forever going over my teeth with floss, inspecting each gap and gumline. I usuaully clean the bathroom as I clean myself, spraying the scrubbing bubble stuff and rearranging the things in the cabinet to find some optimum order maximizing storage space and access to frequently-used medical products. I spend too much time with q-tips and peroxide, dousing out my ears. And then, once in the shower, I spend forever under the hot water, never wanting to get out again.

I got dressed and considered going out for lunch, but it looked like hell out: thunderstorms dumped rain from the dark sky, and cold winds tore across the streets, blowing the rain almost sideways. I didn’t need to be anywhere, so I watched a show on PBS about old railroads and played Ace Combat 5 for a while. Finally, at about 4:00, I got the wise idea that maybe I wanted to cook dinner. I figured the stores would probably close at 5:00 (city that never sleeps, my ass - crap closes here like a small church town with blue laws, and meanwhile in Goshen, Indiana, you can go to Meijer and shop for groceries at three in the morning if you want) so I bundled up and headed out.

The rain stopped, and the sky looked dark, but it was that kind of perfect bad weather, the eye of the tornado kind of stuff. Once again, another reason introverts like me love Thanksgiving is because I get the city all to myself. Everyone else is passed out in front of the tube or has a day off, which means nobody is on the streets and I can roam around without running into the usual assortment of derelicts, idiots, yentas, bad drivers, and everyone else that make this neighborhood a pain in the ass. It was absolutely quiet and still. I loved it.

Even the normally idiotic Key Food store wasn’t that bad at all. A few stragglers were in there, buying last minute stuff or stopping in on their way home, probably. But I got to wander the store with no screaming kids, no people leaving their carts blocking the whole damn aisle, none of the usual madness. I didn’t even have to wait in line.

I spent the evening alternating between watching the tube and doing various household crap like washing dishes and working on organizing my CD collection. It feels nice to spend the evening getting stuff done, relaxing, and eating a bunch of food I just cooked. It’s also nice to know there will be three more days of this ahead.

I guess when I spend Thanksgiving doing nothing, I feel slightly guilty in some weird way, that some relative or person will get all weepy about “oh my god he’s all by himself and he’s building a gallows in his bedroom” or whatever. But the truth of it is that I’ve always been alone on holidays like this. At any family gathering, there’s always the group of men, who want to eat their weight in turkey and drink a bunch of beer and watch football and pass out, and then there’s the group of women, who want to talk shit about all of the members of the extended family that aren’t there and exchange their voodoo/gossip, and there’s the group of kids running around like tasmanian devils. That always left me in the middle with nothing to do, and I learned from an early age that the best way to deal with family dinners was to bring a book. (This was long before the days of the GameBoy or portable DVD player.) So even though I had a dozen people around, I was essentially alone. Actually, I was alone but wanted to really be alone, but instead I was in a basement sitting at a card table or whatever, reading my Fiend Folio or something, wishing I could be away from the people passed out or catting out upstairs, except my parents usually drove. And okay, my maternal grandmother was an excellent cook, and I had enough cousins on my mom’s side that I could find someone to hang out with. But we didn’t go to Chicago that much, so Thanksgiving and many Christmases were spent at my stepdad’s folks’ house. And his mom could not cook. Imagine the mom from Better Off Dead and her grotesque cooking, and that was it. So sitting at home, cooking my own food that I chose, changing the channels on my own TV, and enjoying myself, that’s cool. What I did today made for a good day.

Okay, this Seinfeld thing is on TV, so I am going to watch that.

Heat

Sat, 11 Dec 2004 00:00:00 GMT

When I lived in Seattle, my studio was on the top floor of the building. Okay, there were only five floors, but with the couple of levels of parking lots underneath there, it gave me a bit of altitude over Pill Hill. Seattle winters aren’t too brutal, and I probably could have survived the whole season without a winter coat, especially given that I drove everywhere. My apartment had a single baseboard heater next to my bed, about four feet of inductive coil inside a metal case, maybe something you could buy for $30 at your local hardware store. I seldom ran the heater, though, because everyone below me ran theirs. I’d often get home from work and find my apartment about the temperature of a bread oven, because the jerkoff below me left his heat on full and then went to work all day or all week. That meant, I opened the window or the patio door, and let the cold and usually rainy Seattle winter battle the apartment until it got comfortable.

I don’t have control of my heat system here either - most apartments in New York have steam radiators that are centrally controlled by who knows what kind of mechanical or manual algorithm. This usually means in mild weather like today - mid-40s or so - my apartment also approaches the temperature resembling a kiln. Unfortunately, the opening the window approach isn’t as pleasant. For one, my crap windows are very difficult to open, and are more binary than linear; you apply way too much pressure to a non-ergonomic handle like you’re trying to open a can of pickles, and after too much time - CREEAK - the window opens about as far as you’ll be able to correct it. Compare this to my Seattle digs, which were only a few years old and had all-new, tight-sealing, perfectly-balanced Andersen windows. And in Seattle, the distant rain and hum of traffic (with no horns or car alarms - I think most people in Western Washington aren’t even aware their cars HAVE horns) sounded so much better than the too-present sound of jocko-homo-italiano guys beating their wives or whatever else I hear outside my window on a regular basis.

I had another round with the dentist today, the last for the year. He finished up a root canal, put in another titanium post, and sealed it all up in temporary crud to await a real crown next year. I’ve burned up all of my insurance for 2004, so I will come back right before my Vegas trip for the porcelain replacement. And I’m doing the flex-spend thing so I will save a little bit of cash and not pay as much in taxes. I am all for any way to pay less tax, although I wouldn’t want to go through all the hoops of considering my writing a “business” so I could write off my computer and stamps and pencils and whatnot. It’s too much work, and I haven’t even bought a new computer in a while. Maybe I should, and deduct the whole deal. Those Tablet PCs look nice…

I finished reading the stock market book I was talking about, and I guess it is good, in the sense that the guy lost like a million dollars and was a total dumbass and admitted it at the end. The whole thing makes me NOT want to invest, to just shovel cash into some kind of blind trust and not look at it, and not buy anything and just read and write and let the money quietly accumulate. I guess that’s what the 401K is for. I have like a dozen choices in the thing, in contrast to old jobs that used Fidelity and offered a bazillion options. All I know is that I max out the thing every year, and I actually made a decent amount of money from my picks last quarter. So that will be there, and if Social Security survives, maybe I can use that money for books each month.

I came to the realization that my biggest fear about retirement now is not getting the money to stop working, but actually living long enough to spend the money. I know that sounds nuts, but 67 is a long way off. I mean, all of my grandparents died at just a few years older than that. Okay, I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, and I don’t sit around eating giant blocks of organ meat doused in lard like my grandfather. But when I get out of bed in the morning, my 33-year-old ass doesn’t exactly feel young. What will it be like when it’s twice as old. Maybe I need to get my ass off the couch and run around the block a few times. I mean, having five million in the bank doesn’t do much if my arteries are 99% clogged and my bad cholesterol is a four-digit number. Of course, maybe in 30 years, I will take a roto-rooter nanotech pill and have my circa 1985 heart back again.

After spending the whole day veering in and out of sleep and hoping the dull pain of the new metal in my mouth would go away, I’m now far too awake, and I don’t feel like writing on this new book. I need to dig through my pile of unread books and find something new…

Shuffling

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I’m listening to MP3s on random shuffle on my PC, which is new to me. I know, this is something I was supposed to start doing five years ago, which is also when I was supposed to chuck my CD player and receiver and start stealing all of my music. I used to listen to a lot more music in Seattle, when everything was in one room and my bed also served as my couch, my kitchen table, and the place where I read, wrote, watched videos, and played music. Now I never seem to want to find a CD I like, and except for the times when I’m writing and I listen to the same handful of discs, I usually turn on the tube when I need background noise. I need to stop doing that.

I have been interested in some kind of master convergence solution that would somehow solve all of my media woes and not cost a fortune. I was just having this discussion with Ray last night, although his idea is more like a credit card-sized drive that holds fifty gazillion terabytes and can wirelessly communicate with every type of electronics in his house or anywhere else. He’ll never find this, and with about 20,000 CDs in his house, he’s never going to find any kind of mobile drive to hold all of that. I have less of a problem, as I don’t need a car unit, and my iPod takes care of most of the mobile issues. Also, if my stereo is up loud enough, you can hear it in any room, so that solves the multiple-speaker/multiple-zone problem.

I saw a writeup on a new system by Sonos which is promising. You hook up your computer to their box, and then you have a ~$500 unit per zone. Each unit talks to the PC wirelessly, and has a built-in amp and inputs for other audio components (turntable, CD, iPod). Each one operates on its own; you can be listening to something downstairs while someone upstairs has another song going. The whole thing is controlled with a very slick handheld remote that has a color screen driving a good navigation system, and touch controls that look easy to use. I like the controller a lot, but I already have a good receiver and don’t like the idea of paying for another one and then somehow wiring it in tandem with my DVD sound setup. I also like its general looks, but I don’t like that it probably requires me to run in Windows all the time.

My predicament now is that I dual-boot into Windows to use my iPod software, so all of my MP3s have been stranded on a different hard drive. I just got NTFS mounting to work in linux though, so now I can just fire up xmms and point it at that directory and it works. But I am playing through the tiny speakers built into my LCD, which are about as big as the one in the back of my watch. I need to figure out a way to string some cables across the room and get the signal to my receiver. Then I need to figure out how to get XMMS to run so it isn’t microscopic. Also, it would be cool to do some kind of web-based control for it so I could fire up a browser on my laptop in the next room and change songs. Or maybe I should do something useful, like clean my bathtub.

I’m now listening to an Asia song from the Over the Top soundtrack that rhymes fire with desire. I think all of the songs on this soundtrack do, though. Anyway, I think I’m going to either write or play videogames.

After Hours, F/X, Goodfellas

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 00:00:00 GMT

All I’ve done this weekend is consumed movies and consumed food. Well, I’ve done a bit more than that; I actually broke down and did the whole stereo rewiring project I have had on the back burner for years. It involved a lot of dusting and me crawling around to figure out where wires should go. I retired my Kenwood 6+1 CD player that I bought in 1994, since I usually only listen to CDs on my digitally-linked DVD player. And I got my computer hooked up to the stereo now, so I can run xmms on continuous shuffle. The line level is a little weird, and I keep readjusting it at the mixer level, xmms level, receiver level, etc. to try to get it right. Sometimes it’s perfect, and then an MP3 sounds louder and muddy and I have to dick with the volume. I’m not really into that, but it’s cool to have 5000-some songs on shuffle.

Movies… I’m getting a lot of stuff in for xmas, so I’ve been trying to watch stuff and get ideas for writing. The other night was After Hours, which I have only seen once, and that was five or six years ago. It’s funny because it all takes place a few blocks south of where I work, but even though they did film there, the place looks like a closed-off movie set more than it does look like New York. I mean, there are some 80s stereotype things in there, like the bohemian artist’s loft (which honestly looks like my office building before a good cleaning, a corporate paintjob, and a cube farm installation) and the guy working as a word processor. No, he’s not working WITH a word processor, he IS a word processor, typing archaic commands on an old greenscreen mainframe terminal. After Hours is one of those films that formed my only opinions about living and working in Manhattan before I actually came here, and it’s almost nostalgic and strange to revisit that old opinion and see how different it is from the reality of being here.

There are two other things that are captured in After Hours that I took away from this recent viewing. One was the way it captured the chase that crumbles in your hands to but still keeps you on your feet. I used to feel this back in college, the blind date that falls apart but leaves you at a bar where you run into someone else and then follow them to a party, where you end up talking to someone else and going to a different bar and then running into other friends and so on and so forth. It’s the kind of thing that only happens when you’re around other people who look around the usual social convention and chase the same thing just like you. I mean, now, dating and socializing is such an alien thing to me, and it’s such a formal constraint. When I was in college, I’d hit on someone in the student union, I’d ask a couple people working in a store a totally random question and then end up in a long conversation that would turn into a years-long friendship. Paul (in the movie) ends up in the apartment of a waitress after knowing her for ten seconds, and they’re listening to Monkees records and she’s drawing a sketch of him. It seems like in college, weird shit like that was happening all the time, ending up in a dorm room at three in the morning talking to someone about the Civil War or going to Germany to paint or whatever. And I miss that now. Maybe I should write about it - there are bits of it in Summer Rain, but I wish I could write more like that.

And speaking of wishing and writing, I love the way that After Hours flows. It’s the granddaddy of Clerks and the “I wasn’t even supposed to be here today!”, with this guy looking at his watch and knowing that in the morning, he’s gotta be at the desk doing his word processing, and he just wants to put head to pillow, but with someone as beautiful as Rosanna Arquette kissing you, you want to keep going after it. Screw sleep, you can catch up when you die! And of course, she’s insane and giving more mixed signals than a bad traffic light, but… man, she is beautiful! The whole film unwinds like that, mostly in real-time but with the tension of getting the fuck home and the drama of the million related coincidences, that it works so well. I would love to write a book like that.

Last night I saw F/X, a very underrated suspense movie that I used to love back in high school. I rented the hell out of that thing back in the day, but I haven’t seen it in years. I never thought about it, but it’s another New York Eighties movie, with lots of cops in the old cop cars and huge loft apartments and “dirty” streets that are far cleaner than when they actually clean the streets here. What was funny is how new the movie felt to me, although I remembered so many of the little nuances, especially Jerry Orbach’s acting.

Today, as I waited for my shipment from FreshDirect, I watched Goodfellas for the New York trifecta. I saw most of it recently on TV, but of course, Joe Pesci was talking about “Mother melons” or whatever else they dubbed over his cursing. I liked the movie, although I’m somewhat reluctant over it, because every jerkoff in my neighborhood worships it like it’s the new fucking testament, and they all think they are fucking gangsters and can double-park everywhere and act like they own the damn neighborhood. Even though the moral of the story is that if you’re in the mafia, you’re basically fucked, the people here don’t really see that. But it’s entertaining to see Pesci go off, and Ray Liotta’s a great actor in this kind of role.

The thing I got out of Goodfellas was the “last day of the wiseguy,” the last sequence where Liotta is driving all over, getting coke, trying to sell guns, making the meat sauce, looking for helicopters, and so on. I love how that sequence is cut together, how it makes you feel like you are him, paranoid on coke and rushing through a futile set of obstacles. I would love to try that in a book somehow, although I really need to think about it.

And then I saw Real Genius tonight, which was good, but it made me absolutely wish I could date that girl Jordan in the movie. I went out on a date once with a girl who looked almost exactly like her, but she was really shy and the whole thing didn’t work out. I don’t know, I had this strange idea that maybe she did like me from how she acted, and I cooked her dinner once, but she was a vegetarian and I had to scramble to do everything right, and I don’t know what happened. This was all the semester before Summer Rain starts and I guess I forgot about her in the wake of everything else going on, but then years later she suddenly popped in my head again, but by then I was 2500 miles away and couldn’t even remember her name let alone how to get in touch with her.

Speaking of which, I was reading old paper journals last night. Man, that’s always fucked up. That’s like starting a story with “Okay, I smoked a bunch of PCP first” - there’s really no way it can get better. I don’t know, I guess I at least feel better about money, reading myself bitch about cash back in 1996. Sometimes now I’m a little tight in the wallet, but I guess I’m more above water than under.

Okay, I’m debating Mean Streets or trying to get some writing done, so I should go flip a coin or something.

Dead arm

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I fell asleep for a couple of hours and woke up to find my left arm all fucked up, slept on and twisted around the wrong way. It feels like if I could contort it in just the right way, it will pop back into place and stop hurting, but nothing has worked yet. So I thought I’d start by bitching about that a bit.

I actually got out of the house today, to drop off laundry, pick up a prescription, and go buy books. Barnes and Noble was pretty nutso today, with lines out the door and lots of people running around with stacks of books. I got this new collection of Kerouac’s journals edited by Douglas Brinkley, which I was actually a bit reluctant to buy. It’s weird, because a few years ago, I would have dropped twenty or thirty bucks on any Kerouac stuff I didn’t already have. But the cottage industry has grown so much, and there are so many players that are seeking to twist things around to fit their own agenda. Kerouac’s family (really his wife’s family) has supressed so much of his writing and tried to mask any work that might suggest that Jack occasionally messed around with men or took drugs or whatever. And then the hippy crowd on the far left wants to comb over the fact that Kerouac was a Catholic, supported the war in Vietnam, and didn’t really care for the whole political thing that Ginsberg was into. So now all of these books are coming out, and you don’t know who to trust. It’s too bad, since Kerouac was such a working-man writer, someone with many sides but who came from a solid background and loved America as a whole, not just the two coasts but the whole country in between.

I got that book, and also some other random book from the sailing section, containing a score of tales about people dealing with extreme emergencies out on the seas. It’s basically Perfect Storm sorts of things, but a wider variety and not as dumb. I like reading it, because there’s this whole new vocabulary of different equipment and parts and pieces and knots and terms. And I like stories that are told on the road, even if the road is a shipping lane cutting across the Pacific. So I hope that turns out to be a good read. And I hope I don’t end up wanting to buy a boat by the end of it.

Not much else to report, other than that I’m enjoying having all of my MP3s on shuffle and feeding through the stereo. I found a plugin to take care of the volume normalization problem that works fairly well. There’s another method that puts some kind of gain number in the ID3 tags, but I haven’t fucked with that yet.

OK, on to writing.

Single serving

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I’m a big fan of the single serving size. I know it’s the big imperial evil American way, but I love it when I can make a meal without having 3/4 of it left after I’m done, and I’m not really into the whole leftovers thing. If I have spaghetti on Monday, I’m damn sure I won’t want it on Tuesday. So things like Lunchables and snak-paks and tiny jars are my friend, and I hate that the grocery store down the street only sells spaghetti sauce in the making-dinner-for-18 size. One of my favorite meals ever is the Dinty Moore beef and potatoes microwave bowl, which is served in a vacuum-sealed package that doesn’t need to be stored in hot or cold, and can be nuked in two minutes. Ten years ago when I worked at Wrubel’s machine room on Sunday nights, I used to hike across campus with one of these in my pack, plus a shitload of CDs to keep me busy. And now I found that the Rite-Aid drug store carries them, so I always buy all of them they have in stock when I’m there. And I just read about a new kind of coffee in a can that’s coming out that has a chemical heater in the can. You just bust open a seal, shake it up a bit, and in a couple of minutes, there’s hot coffee. It’s only a matter of time before someone puts one of those bitches in a soup can, and I’ll buy them by the case.

It suddenly turned winter last night. When I went to bed, the wind was tearing through the windows, and I got a good night of sleep in the cold. But when I woke, the weather page said it was -3 out with the windchill. (That’s Fahrenheit; I’m not a metric geek.) It took a lot of work to stumble to the train station; even with a thick hooded sweatshirt on under my leather jacket, it felt like the wind was knocking straight through my skin and splitting apart my DNA. There’s some snow on the ground here and there, but it’s mostly just little patches of glare ice here and there that threaten to knock you on your ass when you’re trying to run at top speed toward a heated building. And just yesterday, I was wondering why the hell it was so warm in December. I guessed I cursed it for everyone.

I wanted to get some more writing done, but my head is pounding, and I mostly want to lay in bed and do nothing. This is why I need a tablet PC, although I have a feeling I’d spend three grand on one and it would get about as much use as my laptop, or my Pocket PC, or any other gadget I’ve bought. Maybe I should throw $2998 in the house-building account and buy a good pad of paper at the drug store and write in there.

OK, Tylenol, TV…

34

Sat, 29 Jan 2005 00:00:00 GMT

So I turned 34 recently. I didn’t write an official story about the whole trip, but it seems like every January when I go to Las Vegas, something weird gets thrown in the mix, and the trip mutates just a little bit from the original plan. There, of course, is no real plan to start with, just the idea that I’d bring a bunch of my friends to Las Vegas in January, hopefully armed with a bunch of year-end bonus money, and then act like an idiot in some new and exciting way. This usually goes wrong in that all of my friends are cheap fucking bastards who cannot comprehend going on a plane to a place where 1) drinks are usually free 2) the hottest women in the world degrade themselves in the sluttiest outfits possible and then walk around in public and 3) hotel rooms are always under $50, and if you know me, you know how I always get a big stiffie about hotel rooms. But no, that’s horrible, I can see why you’d want to sit in the -50 degree weather and not miss the latest episode of Joey or whatever.

I should mention that my friend Bill wimped out on us for the first time in like three or four years, and that kindof sucked, but he had like two other back-to-back vacations with just a few days between them. I guess Bill is mellowing with age a bit, and he’s stuck commuting between Seattle and Indiana, so maybe fitting his six foot eight frame into a plane seat designed for a midget for six hours is something he wants to minimize. At least he had the balls to come out several other times, unlike others.

Okay, so before I left, I bought a Tablet PC. Actually, I bought two. First, I bought the one I really wanted from HP, along with some memory and an extended warranty, through their online store. There was a snowball’s chance in hell I would get the unit before I left town, but I resigned to the fact that I’d probably just get it while I was gone and have a new toy to play with when I returned. I then checked the HP web site about four times a day and called them daily to try to get a tracking number or updated shipping info, or whatever other info I could score on my far too expensive new toy.

Of course, I got fucked. They kept back-ordering the computer, and the day before I was due to go to Vegas, they updated my order to an estimated ship date of the end of February or something. I called HP, told them to lick my balls, and give me my damn money back. One small issue was that I already got a 512 Meg memory expansion in the mail, and they also charged my credit card for that extended warranty. I still haven’t seen the refund on the warranty, even though I’ve called them like 19 times and told them to just take the cock out of their mouth and press the three buttons on their terminal that will debit the $200-some bucks back on my card, but that never seems to work. Oh, by the way, fuck HP. Don’t buy a computer from them.

I went to CompUSA and immediately bought a Toshiba Portege (there are gay accent marks on them, but I’m not going to go all stupid and try to find out how to put them on there) and it ended up being cheaper and with more stuff. It’s a convertible laptop, meaning the top screen swivels and then closes on top of the keyboard, so it looks like a writing tablet or one of those weird computers that UPS dudes have, except bigger and not brown. The 12” screen (1400x1050 native) has a writing digitizer built in, which is basically one of those Wacom tablets but see-through, embedded in the screen. So you can write and draw and use the special pen like a mouse. It’s very nifty.

I am still getting used to the whole idea of a Tablet PC, but it’s a cool concept. I can sit on the couch with the wireless connection and a good battery and browse the web or take notes or look shit up on IMDB or whatever else. It’s excellent for sitting in bed. The writing uses a very good handwriting recognition thing for input into any program, or you can use programs like OneNote to sketch away any old crap in the ink format, which is nice for brainstorming or sketches or whatever. I have some other specialized programs that I downloaded, like a version of the New York Times crossword puzzle that you can fill in with the pen. It’s very cool. I also got an external DVD player and CD burner, which is a bit more awkward than having a built-in, but then the whole computer only weighs like 4 pounds.

I don’t really feel like mentioning a whole blow-by-blow of the trip, because it’s not like we did tons of action-packed stuff every day. It started as me and Lon (a friend I met from Bill on previous trips) and then the next day, Jaime (a friend of Lon’s) met up with us. For the weekend, an old female friend of Lon and Jaime’s came out for the weekend. This was a bit odd for me in that I’m not super-duper best buddies with any of these people. I mean, I don’t dislike any of them, but I’ve known Bill for like 15 years or something. I was in his wedding (okay, I got his wedding crashed by the cops for being a drunken idiot, drinking tap beer out of giant iced tea pitchers, and running around building like a crazed Viking on a pillaging conquest, inviting everyone who even walked by to come in with me and get fucked up) and he got me a job in Seattle and everything. I’ve spent very limited time with Lon and even less with Jaime, so I vaguely feared that at some point, there would be some kind of long, uncomfortable silence that passes without event when you’re around people you’ve known for decades, but hangs in the air like a soggy discount beer fart when you’ve only known someone through a dozen emails and a trip or two.

When I got to Vegas and met up with Lon, we got to the cab stand and found a beautiful seventy-degree Las Vegas around us. SEVENTY. It was about -9 when I left New York. Aside from deploying to Vietnam from Alaska or something, you don’t get much more change in climate. Our cab driver was a retired rancher who knew tons of stuff about horses and guns and cowboys and everything else that makes you want to talk to Las Vegas cab drivers constantly and maybe covertly videotape it for some kind of TV show or book project. And when we got to the Tropicana (we originally had the Boardwalk all settled in, but at the last second Lon saw some kind of deal and jumped on it), we had the best set of rooms in the tower at the front of the hotel. The last two times I stayed there, they gave me shitty rooms in the towers on the back stretch, about a twenty mile walk from the strip, with a scenic view of the trash compacting facilities. This time, our windows looked out onto the strip, we didn’t have mirrors on the ceiling, blood stains on the carpet, or vibrating beds, but we did score our own fridges and a room safe that didn’t involve stuffing a dollar of quarters in a slot before you locked it.

I think you could sum up the trip by saying we ate, we drank, we went to comedy clubs, and Lon tried on 863 pairs of shoes. I got all of my hair cut off for about three times what I usually pay, but the stylist was pretty cool and told me a lot of crazy stories about people that got kicked out of casinos and ran to the beauty salon to get a haircut and disguise their shit. We went to the Apple store to harass the help, and ran into this Mac evangelist with one eye. I almost understand one mouse button, but the one eye thing sort of freaked me out, especially as he’s rambling on about how the new iPod is so damn great and the glass eye is wandering over to the left or whatever.

Jaime got a rental car from Hertz because his company has some kind of gold card where he can always get one for like $30 a day or something, no matter what. While Lon and Jaime went to the airport to get the car and then find a liquor store, I sat around and watched the highly viral “I love the 90s” TV show on VH1. Okay, normally I would make fun of this shit to no end, and I will - I mean, these people are doing a tribute to the long-lost years of like 20 minutes ago. But they’re really funny, and it’s weird how much of the stuff I remember, and scary how much I forgot. I mean, the early 90s I remember some things, but I didn’t have a TV in college and I didn’t tune in to 90210 or Melrose or whatever. And as far as the late 90s, that’s the stuff that depresses me. Because I remember very vividly years like 1996 and 1997 like they were yesterday, because in my mind, THEY WERE YESTERDAY. It was only a little bit ago that I was in Seattle and dating that-Seattle-chick and driving around that Ford Escort from Evergreen Ford and everything else. And looking back, that was a nice, comfortable, post-college, corporate, I-almost-had-my-shit-together era. And in some ways, I really miss it. And to think that it’s such ancient history that a TV show is being made about it as if it was the 14th century or something is really creepy. But I watched all of them, for hours, like I was watching a video of a BASE jumper slamming his nuts into a wall, over and over and over.

I gambled a dollar while waiting for a show, and ended up winning five dollars. So by percentages, I ruled. Otherwise, I didn’t feel like gambling. I did drink a fair amount, although Lon ended up buying Jack Daniels and some kind of fruity raspberry Bacardi, which are two things I can’t really stomach. I didn’t entirely lose my shit at any point like I did in 2003, although I got close a few times. At one point, I was so pissed off at everyone that I got up out of the restaurant, went to an ATM, took out $500, and vowed to drink all of it and then go on a complete fucking rampage, but by the time I got back to the table, our food had arrived, and I forgot all about it.

The only other thing of humor was that Lon and Jaime got talked into going to a timeshare presentation when we were shopping at the Venetian. I mean, they got a ton of coupons and swag and crap and everyone was really nice to them when they had to sit through the three-hour, high-pressure sales thing, but I thought it was sort of amateur-league. I mean, I ignore people like that as if they didn’t even exist. I’ve got the Greenpeace idiots and the children’s fund people and the moonies and the Scientologists and the copy shops with their color printing price fliers, and I can pass through them like a gallon of orange juice goes through an empty stomach. So I got a chuckle when they actually stopped to listen to them.

Anyway, four days of wonderful weather and good food and no fucking ingrates laying on their car horn like it was directly hooked up to their prostate, and not a single person telling me how Bush’s inaugaration had to do with Hitler or something, and then I return to spend two hours stuck on the runway, an hour waiting on my bags, and an hour and a half in subzero weather waiting for a god damned cab home with no gloves or hat. By the time I got home to my shithole apartment, I almost felt grateful, except for the part about having to be at work in like seven hours.

So that’s that. How are you?

Shelves and boats

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I need more damn space. I spent a good chunk of today shuffling around things, walking around with a tape measure, and trying to find some way to squeeze in a new big bookcase, or possibly a few smaller ones. There’s no hope in getting a larger one, unless I can sell my bike, throw out one of my chairs, or otherwise displace some big piece of furniture. I did find two or three places that I could fit a smaller set of shelves, like one of those deals that’s a foot wide. I had one of those I bought back in Bloomington that was all black enamel, very modern looking. It became the home for all of my favorite books, all of the Bukowski and Kerouac and Burroughs and other things I cherished most in my collection. Unfortunately, it got left behind in Seattle, and now I can’t find a place that sells the same model anymore, or I’d order three or four of them and cram them in every odd corner where there’s a fractional amount of floor space.

I did buy some shelves online at Target, though. I bought two bookcases that are 16” wide and have five shelves, with the lower ones being almost square and the top ones being half that size. I then spent an hour cleaning out behind a dresser and the bed in my room, vaccumming out dust and picking up change and forever lost CD cases and stray socks and whatever else migrated back there. An even bigger project will involve moving over my three big bookcases in the room, pushing them nine inches to the left. Yeah, that sounds stupid, but I want to put one of the new shelves next to the old ones. I wouldn’t mind getting one of these that’s about twice as wide, to fit in the area between my door and closet door. I like the idea of having a room that almost completely surrounds me with books. I also like the thought of getting all of the piles of books on my bedroom floor into some shelves. And maybe someday having a filing system for everything would help.

As far as reading, I started on Tania Aebi’s book Maiden Voyage. When she was a teenager, her dad made her a deal that instead of paying for her college tuition, he would buy a boat and let her use it to take an around-the-world sailing cruise, solo. She would write articles on the go and sell them to a sailing magazine for money, and spend two years seeing the world, learning to solve problems, and getting more education than she’d find in a dull classroom. With almost no sailing experience, a pile of textbooks, and a 26-foot sailboat, she headed out of New York City on her grand journey.

The book’s one of those things that makes me wish I could do the same thing. The idea of spending that much time alone, seeing the ocean, and experiencing the voyage the way people did hundreds of years before - that just sounds incredible. I have spent a lot of time driving in a car, looking through the glass as the country rolls past me, but spending the time in the open air of a boat, with little technology other than ropes and cloth and a sextant sounds like it would be a completely different experience, like the difference between riding Amtrak and pedaling your ten-speed across the country. Of course, she ran into just about every imaginable problem when she got out of port, from engine trouble to contaminated water tanks to endless leaks to a dud sextant that threw off her navigation. But still, it’s an interesting read sofar.

It was fifty degrees out today. I went for a walk for a bit, mostly to see if the cheap store on 30th had any sort of plastic magazine holders, the kind where you put a bunch in a vertical sort of thing and then put it all on a shelf. I figure if I bought about a dozen of those, I could get all of the damn magazines off my floor. I think I now subscribe to about a dozen things, and I never seem to read half of them. Anyway, they had no plastic things like I wanted, although they had a pre-built ship model that looked like the one in Napoleon Dynamite. It was like thirty bucks, and I have too much other junk around, so I didn’t buy one.

I want to buy a real sailboat, though. I also want to buy a bunch of space-saving technology. And some sound-absorbing curtains or panels or something so I don’t have to hear my neighbors yelling.

OK, I should go write, but I probably won’t.

Rebuying history

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Way back in 1997 when I met Nick Hornby at a book reading in Seattle and told him about how High Fidelity possessed me to buy way too many CDs, I made a vow to re-buy all of the old albums from my youth that have stuck in the back of my head. See, I bought a lot of tapes back then instead of CDs, because my car had a tape player and cassettes were noticeably cheaper back in the day. But my car had rust holes in the floorpans, and lots of those tapes got loaned, ruined, melted, lost, or dropped through the carpet onto the pavement below. And now I’m always on a hunt to find those last few albums on disc.

Amazon and GEMM have found many ways for me to empty my wallet in pursuit of older music, as have ebay and google. I went on amazon a few months ago and put every Saxon album I used to have but couldn’t find on my wish list, and I got the album Innocence is No Excuse in the mail today as part of a belated birthday gift. Now, I remember this album in the stores back when I searched Super Sounds and Camelot for any sign of a metal record on Combat Records or with the drippy-blood or Old English font that might indicate heavy metal coolness. And I thought I had this particular 1985 release in my collection at some point, but after putting it in, I realized I’d never heard any of the tracks, except for one or two that made their way onto a live album a decade later. It had the same sound as some of their other old albums, but just different words and songs. So I’m looking forward to many listens of that in the future.

Saxon’s a strange band. I got into them initially because Vyvvyan, the red-haired punk with metal spikes in his forehead on the British cult classic show The Young Ones wore a Saxon shirt. He also wore Mot

Thirst and travel

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 00:00:00 GMT

God damn it, I am thirsty. It’s about 12% humidity in here and way too hot, and no matter how many glasses of water I drink, I’m parched. I just chugged a quart and a half of ice-cold, Britta-fresh water, and a second later, my throat was sandpaper.

I’m still reading this book about the girl who sailed around the world, and I’m almost done with it. It makes me wish I could get a small boat on eBay and pack it full of surplus MREs and powerbars and try to do the same thing. It’s enticing when you think that you aren’t paying for a hotel room to sleep in each night, and the wind is your fuel. But pretty much every thing that could go wrong with a boat is serious money, and I’m pretty sure I would fuck up majorly and hit a reef or flip the thing over or something, and I can barely swim. The idea of being alone for that long of time is appealing to me, though.

I’m always getting caught on these books about long, solitary travel, like motorcycling across Alaska or pedaling through Cuba, or whatever. I think I would enjoy driving across some insanely long journey, like I did back in 1999 when I moved to New York, except some longer, more open-ended journey. One approach would be to get a truck and some kind of camper that fit on the bed, and then equip the whole thing up with supplies and a laptop or two and head out to Alaska or Baja Mexico or whatever. Each night’s stay would be free (aside from camp permits), but I’d have to pay for the gas. Another journey that would be fun is if I get a Light Sport pilot’s license, which would allow me to fly small planes with a bit of gear in them. You have to fly during the day and only in the best of weather, plus you can’t go in the more trafficked airspace, but if you swung around major cities, you could probably go cross-country from small airport to tiny airstrip, and then put up a tent or hitch a ride to town for a Motel 6 at night. That would make a pretty damn fun trip, and an interesting book, too. Maybe someday, when I get the money together.

Not much is going on here otherwise, except I am insanely tired again. Feels like a good time to sit in front of the tube and see what happens on Law and Order.

Bookcases and citrus overload

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 00:00:00 GMT

It’s Friday. Half of my bookcase ordeal is over. I bought two bookcases from Target, and had them delivered to work, since I am 100% certain that any package left outside my apartment during the day would be stolen. Yesterday, I took home the shelves and hardware for one of the bookcases, and today, I slugged home the long side boards. Despite my totally ripped and muscular apperance, I’m not exactly in shape, and after hauling home that shit, I felt like Jesus carrying the cross or something. Okay, Jesus had people throwing shit at him, but he didn’t have any stairs, turnstiles, or New York subway riders to deal with. I got the damn thing home and assembled, and it’s now next to my dresser and full of books. I have pretty much all of my books off the floor now, and have another new bookcase to spare, so I’m pretty happy and ready to rush out and buy a shitload more books.

I’m slightly sick today, in that limbo of almost catching a cold where I want to sleep for days and eat nothing but soup and Gatorade. This is caused by the rapid swing of climate here in New York, and my heater’s lack of reaction to it. This happens so much in the winter that I know a good dose of vitamins, a lot of orange juice, and many naps will make it clear up in a day or two. It’s a good weekend for sleeping and doing nothing, too. I have to go to the dentist tomorrow to get a new crown fitted, but other than that, I’m hoping to sit around and read and play with the new computer and do little else. I’m slowly learning more neat new tips at tricks about the Tablet PC and about OneNote, the Microsoft program that’s designed for free-form notes and scribbles and other organizational doodling. I’m actually trying to figure out a good way to post OneNote pages straight to this journal, so you’ll go here and just see a page of images that look like my notebook page. I don’t really want to do that every single day, but it would be nice to do sometimes, like if I was trying to explain something that begged for a drawing.

I am still thinking about books and book ideas, and I’m back to the concept that I should write a book in Summer Rain’s style that covers all of my consulting experience back in the golden days of computers, from 1991-1995, basically. Every time I read Bukowski’s Post Office, I think I should do a book exactly like that, but about all of my old days in UCS. Well, I’d change the names, glue together the events a bit, and focus on the funny and ironic events. I need to start taking some notes on this and see if I can do it or not.

The death of HST

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I just finished snaking out my tub drain with an $8 auger I bought at the National Wholesale Fernandez store next to work. (It is so nicknamed after a coworker who has far too strange of an attraction to the place, buying made-in-China snack food by the cubic ton.) I extracted a good five years’ worth of male pattern baldness in a greasy, black, slimy turd hanging off the end of the corkscrew tip of the low-tech endoscopy tool. I hope this means my shower will drain in under an hour from now on, but I’m expecting many repeat performances, so I’m glad I finally made the investment.

Speaking of roto-rootering, I just ate an immensely hot Indian meal from the local delivery joint. They are pretty bipolar as far as how they spice the food. Sometimes, the vindaloo is about as spicy as a mean cinnamon applesauce, and other times, it’s eternal damnation to a weekend on the throne, after you drink a gallon of milk to kill off the burning in your mouth. I never ate Indian food at all before I got to New York, except for maybe Simms’ experiments from cookbooks. For whatever reason, Bloomington had no Indian restaurants when I was in school, and I don’t even know why I never found any in Seattle. It’s possible that my whole digestive malady during those years, plus my white-bread childhood, made me avoid anything spicy. Now, I actually like the stuff.

I should probably write something about the fact that Hunter S. Thompson killed himself on Sunday. It was weird to hear about that, although I agree with the concensus that he’s probably overdue by about 30 years, with all of the shit he’s pulled in his lifetime. It’s strange, because HST is in many ways a huge influence on the work I’ve done and the path I chose with some of my fiction, but I didn’t choose to do the kind of journalism he did. And while he had a couple of really great books and some pretty good moments in his articles, his body of work is also pretty small when you discount the volumes that are nothing but reprints of his articles and letters. And there’s Rum Diary, which was a great book, but totally not his style. Compare that to someone like Burroughs or Kerouac or Steinbeck, and it makes you wonder what the role of media stuntman really leaves behind. Years from now, only the Johnny Depp caricature of the man will remain, and nobody will remember his interaction with the media regulars, the politicans, or the sport coaches. All that will be left will be a few books that don’t entirely add up to the life he lived.

I’m sad to see him go, but if he had his reasons, it’s his life. I mean, the rumor is that he was having health problems, with a broken leg, some hip and back surgeries, and a lot of time with his ass in a chair. Maybe it got worse, maybe a doctor told him he’d never walk again or he’d need another painful surgery or seven. I don’t know why he put the .45 through his head, but if he felt he didn’t have another ten volumes of investigative journalism ahead of him or twenty years of twilight in a wheelchair and didn’t want to live a life of shitting and pissing into plastic tubes in a hospital bed, well that’s his game.

The livejournal group for HST has other thoughts on the matter, and they’ve spent the last few days whining the most inane babble about Thompson’s death. Most of it goes like this: “D00D, I’VE BEEN READING HUNTER FOREVER, SINCE LIKE 2003 AT LEAST, AND I DID MY SENIOR PAPER ON HIM, AND OH MAN, WHAT A LOSS OF A VOICE FOR OUR GENERATION! I MEAN, FUCK CHIMPY BUSH AND AMERIKKKA AND NOW WE DON’T HAVE DOCTOR GONZO TO HELP US. OH DUDE, PASS THE BONG MAN. HERE’S A 47-PAGE TONE POEM I WROTE THE OTHER NIGHT AT THE SKATE PARK ABOUT HOW I FEEL ABOUT LOSING THE GREATEST MIND SINCE THAT NIRVANA DUDE.” Basically that, about 478 times a day. I should unsubscribe.

I ordered another laptop bag. I think I’ve bought three since Christmas. I can’t find one that fits right and holds the laptop and feels comfortable. I have this Ogio one on the way, and it looks a little bit better. I had a Trager bag that was perfect, but after about a million miles and four years, every strap and zipper and buckle was broken or fucked, and I gave up on it. I think Toshiba makes some “solutions” for carrying the damn computer, but that basically means they got some cheapo company in Korea to make Jansport bag knockups they could price up at four times their value. Meanwhile, my 15-year-old IU backpack is holding up fine. Too bad it doesn’t hold my laptop.

OK, the new Wired is here, so I have to go read that and make fun of every other page.

Baby powder air freshener time machine

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I went to New Jersey yesterday, in an effort to see something other than my job and my apartment for once. It was okay. I’ve been trying to sleep without Tylenol PM lately, and went through the whole week without taking any. By Friday night at about 11:00, I was pretty much dead, and fell asleep. That meant I woke up way early and spent the morning reading in bed. After that, I went to Neptune for a grilled cheese, then hopped the subway down to 34th street. Then I got a ticket and got on a PATH train to New Jersey for the trip to the Newport Mall.

I know a lot of people go to NJ every day, but it’s still a rare novelty for me to take the PATH. It’s a completely different train system than the MTA, with different cars, different announcements, little paper tickets, and fairly clean train stations that look much more modern than the century-old New York system. I only go to Newport maybe once a year, and it always reminds me of when I first lived in New York and found it a really Big Deal to go out there.

I guess part of it is that I never go to malls anymore unless I’m in another city on vacation, and I have this strange obsession with them. Even when I am not buying stuff, when I’m not shopping, I still used to love to go to malls and just walk around and look at people. I grew up working in the Concord Mall after years of riding my bike there as a kid, and then I spent a lot of college going to the mall in Bloomington to do my laundry, go to Morgenstern’s, shop at Target, and just walk around the place. In Seattle, when I didn’t really have any money to do anything for the first year I was there, I would always drive to different malls, trying to find new ones to check out. I know that all sounds strange and pathetic, and I know a lot of people think the mall is the death of society and the symbol of homogenization of our culture, but I guess I see it differently. A mall is a huge open space that’s always static, the perfect place to go during the winter when you can’t walk around outside, but strolling a mile or two indoors might get things going. The culture of the mall is very relaxing, at least to me, and it always seemed futuristic in the sense that so many different wares are presented in this single modern building, the next step toward just having a teleporter that magically made corn dogs and new CDs for you to consume.

New York City doesn’t have malls, of course. You’re supposed to go from store to store in the rain and sleet and shop from an even more limited selection that’s marked up 400% because the place has to pay an insane rent to keep the store going, and you’re supposed to like it. I don’t care about the shopping aspect, seeing as I just buy everything I need online, but the giant open space aspect is something I miss. There are malls within a dozen or two miles of NYC, but without a car, most of them are not reachable. I know that seems silly, seeing as we lived in Elkhart and would drive to South Bend to shop all the time, but a Target store four miles away from me here is practically unreachable because it’s not on a subway line.

I got out to Jersey City, and the first thing I notice off the train is the faint perfumy smell of whatever they use to clean out the stations. It smells almost exactly like some kind of baby powder air freshener that was in my mom’s old station wagon in the summer of ‘93, when I had to borrow it every night and drive to my third-shift job. So in addition to memories of the summer of ‘99 and when I first explored the PATH, I also have memories of Indiana twelve years ago as I walk up the tile-lined tunnel that empties out to the street level.

The area around the Newport Mall is that sort of generic suburban commercial genre of architecture, with lots of five or ten story office towers covered in mirrored or emerald glass, belonging to anonymous insurance companies. It’s a drastic change from the buildings-everywhere look of Manhattan, where everything is a hundred years old and brick, instead of late Eighties corporate expansion modernism. It reminds me of the east side of Seattle, or the north side of Indy, or any outlying part of a major California city. The transition from Penn Station to the open air surrounding these buildings always astonishes me. It also makes me think that I’m some kind of weirdo, the only person who actually enjoys being around office sprawl architecture instead of the look of New York City.

You have to walk through an office building to get to the mall, and then you’re in a typical Simon mall. Simon owns a bajillion malls in America, including College Mall in Bloomington; Northgate Mall in Seattle; and Newport Centre in Jersey. I can tell I’m in one of their malls the moment I set foot in it, just from the arrangement of the stores and the look of the common areas. It seems like every one of their malls is a wormhole into some other part of my past, which is another reason I like to go there.

I didn’t actually spend a lot of time at the mall once I got there; I was mostly interested in the trip, in killing a few hours to get out of the house and do something different. I made a couple of laps of all of the stores, walking through the three stories and looking at the shops for anything I might need or want to buy. I did spend some time at Sears looking at power tools, but didn’t really think it would be worthwhile to spend a few hundred bucks on a table saw and then haul it home on the PATH. I also went to the pet store and looked at the dogs, wishing I had a big house with a yard so I could get one or two of them. Mostly I just window-shopped, then got bored and headed back to Manhattan, so I could go to Best Buy and blow some money on new DVDs.

I had a state tax check burning a hole in my pocket this weekend too, but I dumped it into E*Trade and bought some stock. Despite the fair amount of stupid discretionary spending I’ve done this year, I’ve actually managed to sock away some cash. I wonder if that trend will continue. (Probably not, especially when I start thinking about vacation again.)

Made tacos tonight, for the first time in a while. Sunday turned into taco night for a while, a worthwhile tradition. I just finished reading a book about the post-Soviet expatriate bubble when capitalism briefly flourished and everyone bought lots of Russian bonds at 220% interest and drank thousand-dollar champagne like it was kool-aid, until the bottom fell out in ‘98 or so. I have a stack of other books to read now, I need to find out what is next. It’s good reading weather, dark and cold outside, the perfect conditions for bundling up in bed with a good book…

Sadaam's gun course

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 00:00:00 GMT

This has been the longest week in the god damned world since they switched to the 7-day calendar. I forget when they actually did that, but I remember writing the Gregorian to Julian crap in Pascal about 15 years ago, and I seem to remember something about the Mayans using ten-day weeks, but maybe I just made that up, I’m not sure. Anyway, I’ve been slogging through a cold all week that hasn’t done a lot to my respiratory system, but has made my eyes all runny and gunky and crud-encrusted, and it’s made it impossible to focus on the screen for too long. To add to the mix, I’ve got this differently-resolutioned tablet PC that I use in bed, and today I got a new LCD panel at work, and it supports higher resolution, hence tinier fonts. So my eyes have felt about ready to explode all week, and I think I might just sleep all weekend, except for the thing about wanting to write.

Wanting to write: I am still picking away at this book, or ideas about this book. I hate the story I have written so far, but I read all of my random notes are really incredibly funny. So I need to spend more time on getting that stuff to work out, or drink a bunch of Robitussen, or something. But mostly, I need to get more time into this thing. I wish I could work out some kind of short stories from this material so I could put them up here and get some reaction, but everything’s in too much of a jumble right now.

I had this intensely realistic dream this morning that I was riding in some bike race around the city, and I had it planned that after the first ten miles, I would be right at the front of my apartment and I could stop to get a drink and go to the bathroom. So I chugged this entire 64-ounce glass of cold water, and then I went to the bathroom to pee, and I pissed for a moment and then started urinating pure blood. The dream continued and I was trying to clean up this blood, and then I woke up and it was about six in the morning, and I really had to pee. Let me tell you, that was the scariest piss in my entire life, because I was 100% certain I would start bleeding and need to rush to the ER to get a new set of kidneys installed. But all was well.

A few weeks ago, I had another very vivid dream in which I went to this gun place in Florida and I was going to take an AK-47 class. When I got to the classroom, there were 4 or 5 other dudes, and… Saddam Hussein! He was secretly being held at a prison outside of Tampa, and through some kind of federal work-release school tuition program, he was allowed to take classes, so he took this gun course. I was really scared to even look at him or say anything, because I was certain if I somehow disrespected him in some subtle way, a couple of Iraqi expatriate goons would jump out of an alley some night and destroy me ten times over. But, surprisingly, he turned out to be a really cool guy. He was cracking a lot of jokes as the instructor taught us how to field-strip the AK-47, and he even gave me his mini-butterfinger bar from his Lunchables when we all stopped for lunch break. At the end of the class, I got him to change my answering machine message to freak people out. It was a pretty abnormal dream.

That said, I’m about ready to hit it. I haven’t been taking any Nyquil lately, but I might just dose up a bit to make sure I sleep in tomorrow morning.

Cockeyed Ghost, Naked Lunch

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I’m waiting for dinner to show, listening to Adam Marsland’s band Cockeyed Ghost, a CD I got for free a long time ago (99? somewhere back in Seattle, anyway). I don’t even know what category in which to put this CD, except that I never would have bought it on my own, and now I think it’s one of my favorites. I guess if you started with something like Verve Pipe or something and added in more of the whole singer/songwriter tradition of the late seventies with a bit of later Beach Boys (after they were done trying to get chicks on the beach and were trying to tell you how truly fucked up life really was) and made the whole thing fairly modern with a decent dose of alt-indie sprinkles. Anyway, I don’t know why explain any of this except I don’t want people thinking I just sit around listening to Gwar all the time.

I have been on and off sick all week, mostly with this pinkeye thing. My right eye has been alternately been seeping battery acid and/or wanting to clog shut and/or feeling like it’s got a large grain of sea salt stuck deep under the eyelid. I think the best thing you can do for pinkeye is not mess with it, which of course is exactly what I do on a constant basis. It seems to get about 10% better a day, although staring at a computer all day also makes it get about 8% worse, so maybe it will clear up by the fourth of July. I also have a slight runny nose, just enough to mess with me, and a certain amount of wheeziness that is probably just because of the 4% humidity in my apartment. I really do wish I had one of those Bacta tanks like they had in Empire Strikes Back so I could just sleep in some fluid healing gel all night and maybe make some headway on this whole cold season disaster.

I woke up about three hours early today, mostly because I called in sick yesterday and slept all day, and decided rather than sit in bed and listen to the radiator wheeze for three hours while tossing and turning, I’d just give up, take a shower, and go to work early. I found that before eight in the morning (at least at this point in the year), my cube is absolutely flooded with sunlight as the sun rises. It was nice to eat breakfast and get a ton of stuff done before people started showing up, and it was even nicer to split just after five and go home early. I saw a completely different crowd on the train, which mixed things up nicely. It’s so weird to see the same people on the train every day, and yet never know who they are or what they do. It was nice to see some new faces.

I’m re-reading Naked Lunch for the first time in years, and enjoying it so far. There is a new edition that came out in 2002, based on some old thought-to-be-lost drafts that were recently found in a library collection. Burroughs is a strange influence on me; I think if you read Rumored to Exist and any Burroughs back to back, you might see how I structurally and stylistically owe a lot to him. But I think when you talk to most people about William S. Burroughs, they assume queers and junkies and whatnot, and that’s not my gig. It’s like how I’m reluctant to tell people that I’m a big Bukowski fan, because they’ll automatically assume I write bad poetry about getting drunk and beating women, when that’s entirely not why he interests me. Oh well.

Looks like I will have a reading in Boston on the first Friday of June. I am planning on making a min-vacation of it, driving up for a long weekend and exploring points north. More details when I have them. I also have a brand new/never published snippet of a piece in the next issue of Zeno’s e-zine, whenever it comes out. And I got a royalty check from iUniverse for a whopping $28.85! Drinks are on me! (If you’re drinking Big K soda. Limit 1.)

Food’s here…

Mercenaries

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I’m in the middle of eating a huge burrito from the tortilla joint on 30th ave and failing miserably. Time to go get a fork…

This was a weekend of media consumption. I did get out on Saturday and do some shopping with some fairly decent weather on hand, about 40 degrees and clear. I made a mega-purchase at Best Buy, since I was still getting over the whole sick thing and wanted some stuff to do while planted on the couch. The big thing that I spent too much time on was Mercenaries for the PS2, which is a very strange little game that’s a mix of Grand Theft Auto with SOCOM, and then some. You play an “independent contractor” who is dropped in North Korea to go through a deck of cards that contains all of the evil generals and lieutenants serving under the big man dictator. Like GTA, if you see it, you can pretty much steal it, as far as all modes of transport are concerned. Pandemic (Star Wars: Battlefront) did the game for LucasArts, and it’s got all the little touches while still being immensely playable. I’ve finished almost the whole lower rung of lieutenants, although I still haven’t figured out how to take people alive, since I usually end up nuking everything from orbit and then identifying the corpses for my reward money. It’s a lot of fun, but I think it’s going to turn into a huge time-suck. And I finally got the first season of the Chapelle Show on DVD, and laughed my ass off at that for a few hours.

I’m waiting on an eBay auction for a new mountain bike frame for another endless project I think I’m starting. I have this idea to strip my old bike of components and build up a new one with a lighter frame that doesn’t have a rear suspension. The rear shock is a nifty looking toy and all, but it actually sucks when you’re really torquing down on an uphill and the whole frame is bouncing up and down on you. Also, the bigger problem is that I have two different racks I’ve tried to put on the back of that bike, and neither one works well because a bike with half of its frame moving doesn’t really have three stable points to mount a rack. I want to get a good, rideable bike by spring and maybe get out of the neighborhood a bit more. I’ve rode from my place to Flushing Meadow a couple of times, and although it’s slightly a pain in the ass to get there, you have miles and miles of strips of asphalt to ride up and down, and also a lot of dirt trails with fun hills and stuff.

There is no way I am going to finish this burrito. I need to put this thing down and get back on the Playstation or something…

big trip

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I am excited - I finally planned and booked my “big trip” for the year, and it will be… Hawaii!. I didn’t get anywhere near enough time there in 2003, so I will be going back at the beginning of May. I’m going to Oahu again, flying into Honolulu and staying in a hotel in Waikiki. It’ll be a different place this time, the Ohana Maile Sky Court, in an oceanview room that purports to be a little larger than my micro-capsule of a room last time (but hey, I had my own deck!) I got the whole deal through Delta for maybe a hundred or two more than my ultra-stellar deal back in ‘03, although this does include an extra night free, and most other deals I found cost twice as much. It’s not the cheapest time to fly, so I’m happy I locked in this rate. I’m also happy I will get another 10,000-odd frequent flier miles, which means a free trip later in the year.

I haven’t planned at all what I will do when I get there. I’m not sure if I will go flying again - it was fun, but it was also expensive and took up the better part of a day. I think I will climb Diamondhead again, although I’ll try to remember a flashlight and some suntan lotion this time. I’d like to find some more stuff like that to do, and bring a bit more money for shopping. I also didn’t try any good food while I was there last time, unless you consider the Spam at McDonald’s to be good. (It’s not horrible, but not worth the trip…)

I had Balti beef tonight, from the local Indian delivery place. I guess I’ve never tried it before, and when I googled around, I found several sites explaining the origins and virtues of this style of cooking that’s named after the Hindi word for “bucket”. It’s essentially a poor man’s stir fry, done up in a pot that’s brought out to the table, and then eaten with nan bread. It’s a northwestern/Pakistani style of spices, hot but different than the curries you’d get from Southern India. I like a good vindaloo, especially when it’s cold out and I’m trying to beat a head cold. But the Balti is a slightly different mix, and I really like it. Also there’s just this whole tactile difference, the novelty of having it all together, that somehow appeals to the gadget-head in me. Plus you get a shitload of food for not much. So that’s cool.

I really feel that I should be writing this book, but I really want to play Mercenaries. Which one do you think will win?

new camera

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 00:00:00 GMT

My new camera is here! I got a Fuji S3100 from Amazon. It is very neato and the first test photos look pretty good, although some are out of focus because I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s a neat new toy though, and should be good for the trip to Hawaii. I have some rechargeable batteries on the way, as well as a 512 MB xD card, which is good because the 16 MB card holds only 16 pictures.

It’s also a good time to mention my little project to put together a PHP-based gallery that works and doesn’t require MySQL and half the Linux libraries and packages available in the world to operate. Go here to check it out and look at a bunch of old photos. It’s very crude now, but it’s all dynamic and doesn’t require a lot of editing each time I drop in new photos, and that’s cool. (2026 note: this project is long dead…)

It’s weird to think that I bought my old camera about five years ago, and it was 1/4 the resolution and about 1/4 the zoom, but it cost about twice as much. Moore’s law in action. Anyway, pizza’s here.

3

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I just had to restart xmms (aka my mp3 player), which meant that it went back to the beginning of my play list and went to the first album in the mp3 directory. For most people, that’s probably AC/DC’s Back in Black, but for me, it’s an odd little album called …To the Power of Three, by a band called 3. They’re basically Keith Emerson and Carl Palmer, 2/3s of the prog-rock band ELP, with Robert Barrie singing. This is a 1988 attempt at a serious rock album, back on the tail end of when Yes actually got a lot of mainstream airplay and even time on MTV. (Anyone else remember the April Fool’s day when they played like 267 different versions of the video “Leave It”, with the band upside down and singing? Except they swapped out band members for roadies and office staff at the studio and whoever else for the different iterations, and even played some of the commercials upside-down to keep with the joke. I know only like three people found that truly hilarious, but I was one of them…)

Anyway, the 3 album is a pretty weak stab at world domination. It’s got a cover of “Eight Miles High”, and the whole thing is basically 37:38 of vintage cheesomatic synth and very cookiecutter drums. I think I borrowed the tape from my friend Derik Rinehart at the time, and I’m not sure if I ever returned it (my old car had holes in the floors, many tapes didn’t make it.) A couple of years later, I found a copy of the CD for 88 cents, and picked it up. It’s one of those albums that is definitely stuck in my head, that I listened to at the time and thought “wow, Emerson sure can fucking play! This MIDI shit is the wave of the future!” and then got sidetracked when like Primus came out or something.

It’s been a nice three-day weekend here. I woke up way too early on Friday and had a bug to rewrite the backend of the glossary. I have a lot of work done on it, but I got stuck on something and decided to take a quick break and work on other stuff. I’ve been messing with this bike too, although it’s been a total pain in the ass trying to scavenge parts off of the old bike. I should have just parked that piece of shit somewhere without a lock and bought a completely new bike instead of trying to build one. I realized it’s been almost 20 years since the last time I built a bike, and everything’s changed. Every piece requires a specialized tool. It used to be with a POS Huffy all you needed was a crescent wrench and maybe a screwdriver, but now it’s like working on the Space Shuttle. I stripped off and totally fucked the crank on the old bike, so I gave up and bought a new crank and bottom bracket on eBay. That’s another hundred bucks and week and a half of time, but at least I will get a nice one, and save more weight. I have a huge problem with the front headset, but I think I’m going to tap out on that too and just bring the thing to the shop and have them put on a new one. (Probably another hundred.) Those things used to screw on, but in order to save like a dollar a year, they moved to these threadless ones that have to be pressed on with a hundred dollar tool. Well, at least I’m going to lose a lot of weight with this new bike. Not from the exercise, but from not being able to afford food anymore.

More photos are online. I’m also in the process of setting up a section of free stuff where you can download any of my books for free. You pretty much can do that already, but I want to put some section that screams “FREE STUFF! TOTALLY FREE! (p.s. sign up for my mailing list.)”

Also, has anyone ever installed vinyl flooring? Like those stick-on, foot-square things? I want to redo my bathroom and maybe kitchen floor, which have ceramic tile, but the shittiest tile in the world, and I figured if I could buy a hundred bucks of the stuff and a box cutter and invest a Saturday in it, maybe this place would look less like a crack den or something. I just don’t know if this stuff will stick to tile OK or if it’s a bad solution for what I just described. I was actually at Bed Bath and Beyond, and they had a big rack of it and no sorts of samples or pamphlets, so I took out the camera and started snapping away, and two big security guards sprinted into the flooring section like I was about to shoot the president or something. And when I asked if they had any samples or pictures or whatever, and they were like “look at our web site.” Which is pretty stupid, because what’s the difference between me taking a digital picture of the tile by myself, or going to their site and downloading a picture? So I just go to their piece of shit web site, and I CAN’T FIND THE TILE.

Oh yeah, and Best Buy was closed for Easter. I had to go buy DVDs and Barnes and Noble for like double the MSRP. I’m going to write them a pissy letter and complain that they don’t close for any of the Satanic holidays. Or at least a half day off for the Firestorm.

New bike

Fri, 01 Apr 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Remember when you were a kid, and Honeycomb cereal used to have those contests where you could win a free BMX bike? For a while, they had those tiny little metal license plates that said “HANG 10” or whatever stupid slogan would be on there, and they were each a miniature replica of a state license plate, and then you would rig them up on your seat bottom or handlebars with a bunch of twist-ties. They probably eventually discontinued them because a kid split open someone’s face with one, or because actual metal cost too much or something. Anyway, the old contest was to get a special license plate, and you’d win the bike. Later, it was just some sort of puzzle book where you scratched off some silver lotto ticket paint off a page that said “sorry, try again!” or “25 cents of Honeycomb economy size”. Well, once after a trip to Kroger, I tore apart the cereal box and went through the book and scratched off the matte grey boxes, and I WON! I won the BMX bike!

My mom checked and double checked the rules a million times, figuring there would be a catch or that I won a chance to enter in a raffle or something. But no, it was legit. She sent the thing off, and I waited what seems like years for the package to show up.

One rainy Saturday, it did. UPS dropped off a box from the Huffy corporation, and inside was my brand new bike. It’s probably worth explaining that at the time, I was riding a total POS Huffy with a banana seat that was not cool at all, very far from BMX. And this was when BMX was bigger than Jesus. This bike had a red frame and all of the chrome parts were a bronze/gold plated finish - the rims, the handlebars, the crank, and the chainguard. It had the handlebars with the extra bar across the top that was dipped in the center, the four-bolt neck, coaster brakes but also a secondary lever brake on the rear wheels. The tires were red knobby BMX tires, and it had the pads on the bars. It was AWESOME. I put that thing together in record time, and brought it outside for my trial run.

I remember that day so clearly. It had rained like a mofo all night long and all morning, and it was just starting to let up, but there was still a haze. And there were earthworms EVERYWHERE. Sometimes after a good rain, they get flooded out and are all over the street. I got out just as the sky was starting to clear, and took off through the subdivision. Everything about this bike felt 100% better than my old clunker. It all looked cool, every part spun perfectly against every other, and most of all, I WON THIS BIKE! It was awesome.

I think I rode that bike well into my Freshman year, when I finally got a real ten-speed, and probably long after (or before) it was cool to ride a 20” BMX bike with no speeds. Come to think of it, it was probably never cool to ride any kind of bike to our school, but the bus sucked, I always worked late at the school theater, and it’s not like mommy and daddy bought me a 5.0 GT Mustang when I turned 16.

So the reason I’m excited NOW, is that I just bought a new bike. I know I already have two frames and a bunch of pieces in my kitchen and neither run. And I’m not sure how long it will take before either will run, so I decided to make a small (~$300) investment in a complete turnkey bike that actually rode well. The lucky purchase was the 2005 Dahon Boardwalk D7. It’s a folding bike, which is pretty cool; with the pop of a couple of latches, the handlebars fold down, the frame folds in half, and then you lower the seat and fold up the pedals and you have about 25 pounds of fairly compact metal to throw in the trunk or schlep onto the subway.

The bike’s based on 20-inch tires and a very low-slung frame, with highly extended seat and handlebar posts. It’s got 7 speeds in the back and none on the front, so it’s not like one of these new 78-speed mountain bike mofos, but the smaller survey of gears, switched with a twist-grip on the right side, works pretty well for the city. All of the components are full-size for the most part, very well thought-out and they are made for a big guy to ride around, not as a toy or for kids. It came with a rear rack, a set of fenders, and a fairly comfy standard seat.

I bought the thing at lunch, and rode back to the office from Bicycle Habitat, maybe a few blocks at most. Later, I took it out for a quick spin around the office, and I hauled it home on the subway to the first stop in Queens, then rode the rest of the way back. It was dark and I had no lights and a black jacket, plus I didn’t want to get stranded if something broke right out of the gate. (That happened on the first MTB I bought here in New York, the Mongoose. I rode way the hell out in Queens my first time out, and the fucking derailleur SNAPPED. I ended up walking the fucking bike home five miles.)

Anyway, the little thing is FUN to ride. The balancing is a bit different, but it’s not like pumping around on a little BMX. It’s very compact, easy to weave through traffic and up and around stuff in the city. I thought there would be some warble or flex in the frame, but it’s solid, almost as tight as my old Giant road bike. Everything works well; the brakes are tight, the shifting is good, and the headset is very smooth. It’s not as smooth on the New York excuses for streets as a good rockhopper with full suspension would be, but it’s decent. And I couldn’t see riding 100K in one of these things, but I could see commuting every day with no problems.

The folding isn’t hard to do, although it took a few practices. The worst part is that everything I have for the old bike doesn’t fit. I have water bottle cages with allen screws that go into the frame, but I really need some kind of handlebar-mounted clip thing to hold my bottle. I have a nice computer that even has a heartrate monitor, but the cable on the sensor is too short, and I’m sure that’s a huge witch hunt and a $30 purchase. I can’t find the frame mount for my Kryptonite lock. (NO it is not the one you can pick with a pen, you motherfucking blog readers.) But I think maybe I shouldn’t add anything to the bike, and just tough it out. I mean, I could spend the cost of the bike getting the approved Dahon-Apple iPod mount with the Bose wraparound handlebar speakers, or I could just ride around with no music and either hum a tune or think about something else. I could spend a few hundred on the official Dahon panniers, or I could just bring less stuff, or bungee down a gym bag. I think I need to do the less is more approach.

Of course, I picked the wrong day to buy a bike - we’re supposed to get about twenty feet of rain over the next two days. Maybe I should go down to the bike store and buy one of those euro full rain getups and slog through it anyway. Well, except for the pneumonia and the possibility of a wreck on a brand new bike, that’s a grand idea.

So I’m seriously thinking of saying “suck it” to the MTA and riding in every day. I don’t think the bike will go with me to Hawaii, but I’d sure as hell like to ride every day from now until then, and then rent one local and have the energy to get up those damn hills. I am so out of shape now, it’s not even funny. But I sure feel great having a motivation to get some regular exercise…

The useful/uselessness of the new Napster

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been busy lately, with a thing or two I can mention and maybe a couple that are secret for now, but nonetheless, busy. The one thing I can mention is the zine, which is still going strong. I had a near-aneurysm trying to think of a new name for the thing, and now I’ve just decided to go the ‘fuck it’ route and keep the original name of Air in the Paragraph Line. It’s neutral, it sounds weird, and it doesn’t involve me thinking of a new name. I have a bunch of writers on board, a couple of extra spots, and I hope to have enough stuff so I can print out a huge stack of shit and bring it on the plane with me when I leave for Hawaii at the end of the month.

Here’s one I keep forgetting to write about. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to join the new Napster. Sounds stupid, you think. Well, I found it an interesting offering for a few reasons, and I thought I’d mention the pros and cons and why I think it’s a great product. And I’d first like to start by saying I don’t own stock in them or get paid per new signup or anything like that. So here goes.

Napster has a new service, and instead of being the old peer-to-peer setup where you steal music from the world around, this one is basically like an iTunes sort of online store, but with a twist. You can pay 99 cents a track like iTunes, but they also have a subscription service where you sign up for $9.99 a month and you get all-you-can eat downloads from their catalog. The way this works is they use Windows Media’s licensing scheme so you get all of these files, and they work as long as you’re a paying subscriber. When you stop paying, they don’t work. So you can’t sign up for like a weekend and then fill your hard drive and quit. Napster to Go is an upgrade from this, where at $15 a month, you can take the tunes with you on your Windows Media-enabled portable player.

Of course, most people’s immediate reaction is “WHAT A FUCKING RIPOFF! YOU DON’T GET TO KEEP ANYTHING! THEY STEAL YOUR MUSIC! WHAT A JOKE!” and so on. But here’s the deal, I know that. I’m not using Napster to buy my music. What I am doing is using it to find music that I like. It’s like I have the ultimate in-store kiosk, except I don’t have to go to the store. I can download an album, give it a few spins, and if I really like it, I’ll drop the $15 on Amazon for a copy. People can’t wrap their heads around the idea that you aren’t paying $9.99 a month for a shopping spree in which you have to download as much shit as possible; you’re really paying $9.99 a month to rent music. It’s like paying for cable TV or satellite radio. You don’t get to “keep” anything from HBO if you pay for cable; you essentially rent the shows and watch them. (Maybe you tape them, but that’s a grey area.)

The Napster interface has a lot of clicky-clicking to do as far as finding bands related to other bands. They license some of allmusic’s information, so you get related items and whatnot. A neat feature that they have is that you can build a radio station based on the items in your library. It will look at the stuff you have downloaded, and then dump a playlist of similar stuff, so you can stream each song, or click on the album cover and go find out about the band if you are interested and want to download other stuff. This is pretty much why I was interested in doing this. I want an interactive way to cruise through allmusic, finding similar artists to the stuff I already like, listening to albums and deciding if they are worth the money or not. Amazon has had a recommendation feature for a while, and I’ve found a good number of books that way. They also have music, but just dorky 30-second clips, and it’s not driven in the same way as this guy.

Other features that I like include a good playlist system for dropping tracks into a list. I know, everything has playlists, but it’s more of a concern when you’re downloading a fuckload of stuff like me. You can use your account on up to four other machines, and there is a certain amount of persistence between logins. Let’s say I’m at home and I find a bunch of neato albums and download them. When I get to work the next day and fire up my napster client, I can then view the “out of sync” track list and download them onto my work computer. Playlists also persist across accounts. Another nice feature is that you can burn a CD of items in your library, Napster or your own MP3. It has some sort of built-in CDR software, so you don’t have to fuck with Nero or whatever. Just add your tracks to a playlist or drop them to a little burn staging area, and it figures out the minutes left and all of that. There are also a lot of browse-oriented features, like people put together their own radio stations (you can too), there are genre-specific pages of what’s new and music news-type stuff, and they have given it a good stab as far as creating community stuff (although most message boards are full of 14-year-olds screaming “THIS SUCKS! I WANT TO FUCKING STEAL MUSIC, NOT PAY FOR IT!”

There are caveats. The iPod flat-out won’t work with Napster to Go, since it doesn’t support WMA’s licensing features. You can “keep” songs, but you have to pay 99 cents each. You also can’t burn a Napster song unless you downloaded it for a buck. Not all songs download and cache; depending on the licensing and label, some will only stream, so you have to be online to play them. I’m not sure of the algorithm of when you have to be online or not to keep your license current; I have messed around for a day or so with my Tablet offline and it worked fine. We’ll see if it works when I go to Hawaii for a week.

Anyway, that’s been my new toy as of late. I’m finding old albums I’ve long since forgotten, and it has given me at least a few suggestions that actually turned out great. Another related project is that I’m throwing my CD collection into a MySQL/PHP site that I whipped up, with hopes of adding links on individual CDs or bands to reviews or little stories or whatever other crap I have. I have a few CD reviews laying around the site, but I’d like to have one central repository for them. So that’s the goal, but I have fucked up the edit page in my little project and can’t seem to get it to smash the contents of an array into the database and have it stick. I’ll deal with that after about 12 hours of sleep, I hope.

fingers, food poisoning

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 00:00:00 GMT

OK, last week was pretty much a wash. First, a week ago Sunday, I was running up the subway and fell, and put out my left hand to stop myself, and smashed two of my fingers down in a way they aren’t supposed to go. Imagine doing the Spock thing with your fingers, then sticking them out of a car window at a hundred miles an hour and running the “V” into a metal signpost. That was cute. Luckily, I don’t think anything’s broke. It just took a few days to be able to type properly.

Then last Tuesday, I went to the Quizno’s at St. Mark’s for a sandwich, and in reality picked up a two-day vacation spent in my bathroom, also known as FOOD POISONING. I was at the point where I couldn’t even hold down water anymore, and I had a high fever and was hallucinating about making a film of my web searches and then scanning the screen captures and running them through OCR… or something, I don’t remember. The only real advantages to this was that on Wednesday, Sarah (the new girlfriend) came over and took care of me, which was more than nice, and also I managed to read that Motley Crue tell-all book in its entirety, since I had a lot of reading time, so to speak. Anyway, it took about a full week to get over that horror, and I lost about seven pounds, so here I am, ordering a reuben from the local greasy spoon, so I can gain it back.

I have not been able to ride the new bike once, between the stomach stuff and smashed hand and the fact that winter is upon us again. At least I will be leaving for Hawaii on Friday, so I will get a sudden 30 degree temperature boost for a week. And no, I have not begun doing a god damned thing to get ready yet, other than starting to move some reading material onto the laptop. I have two books and everything in my head and all of the maps and other junk you get from the hotel and the rent-a-car place and the airline package deal, so I will be able to keep myself busy for a week.

OK, food’s here.

Ear infection

Sun, 15 May 2005 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Summer Rain flashbacks

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

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…

Kid in a vending machine

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

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…

Reason #8,234,123 New York City Sucks

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

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:

Bars on windows. No way to put in an AC unit.
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.
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.
All of the windows are on one side, so there’s no breeze, and no real way to get one going with fans.
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.
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.

headache

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Ten years of unhoosierdom

Sun, 03 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Moleskine, GnR

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT

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 8.5x11.

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 Illusion_s, 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.

Killing Bono

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT

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?

AITPL #10

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Air in the Paragraph Line #10 is now available! Go to http://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.

Making the Mac switch

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT

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…

Let it Blurt

Sun, 14 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT

It’s hotter than living hell out. It’s been an entire weekend of unrelenting weather, but this afternoon we got a wicked thunderstorm and some rain, so it felt good for a few hours. Now it’s getting hot again and the apartment is returning to swamp-like consistency. I should probably stop bitching about the weather, but the problem is that when the weather is like this, I have nothing else to write about, because my brain pretty much shuts down and all I can think about is moving to Antarctica, or how I can somehow take all of the computer parts in my house and build a bootleg air conditioner that will work better than the stupid portable one I have in my bedroom.

I finished reading this biography of Lester Bangs - I don’t remember the author [Jim DeRogatis], but the title is Let it Blurt and the author is/was this fat kid who went to visit Lester for his high school writing project, and met him at his apartment, and Lester was incredibly nice to him and talked to him for hours, and then like two weeks later he was dead. The book is the best one out there, but it was still a little weird or lacking, and I don’t know if it’s the writer (although he put a lot of effort into it) or just the arc of Bangs’ life. I mean, it seems like he was just gaining steam, and then BAM, and it wasn’t like Johnny Chapman jumped out with a revolver yelling “death to music critics” or something - he just died, and it’s still disputed if it was a drug overdose or a bad case of the flu or some mystery disease or what.

I think the thing with Lester Bangs is that describing him or what his deal was is a lot like trying to explain Devo to your mom, and you can’t really describe it, and it’s the kind of thing you just have to get right in the middle of and dive in without looking how deep the water is. And I’ve read a couple of the Lester Bangs books, and they kick total ass, and you realize how incredible this guy must have been. But all of his books were postmortem anthologies, and the little bits and pieces are good and bad and glued together at the whim of a third-person editor, and every time you read anything, you wish there was MORE somewhere. I mean, imagine Hendrix never released those first few albums while he was alive, and his entire discography was just these fucked-up, spliced together CDs that Steve Ballmer or whoever puts together. You’d get bits and pieces of the same riffs and jams, but would always walk away thinking “fuck, I wish he had some ALBUMS out!” And now, you put in Are You Experienced, and every song fits together perfectly, and every time you listen, you find some little sound that’s new, and I just wish Lester had put together some damn books in his lifetime so we all had that same experience.

The other thing about Lester Bangs is that in reading this biography, he really reminded me of my old roommate Simms, and I don’t know if Simms would take that as an insult or a compliment. I guess they, at least to me, have/had a similar persona, and Simms is totally this kind of guy that you could have a four-hour conversation about everything and nothing and that was a big Lester Bangs trademark, to the point that he had his phone cut off half the time because of huge bills to the phone co. And Lester Bangs sounds like the kind of guy who would go out and buy every Criterion Collection DVD and totally get on top of all of them as far as what was phenomenal and what was shit and somehow relate all of it to Frank Zappa. And I’m sitting here in iDVD, rendering an old video to disc, and the “burn” button is a spinning radiation-type symbol, like a six-piece circle with half yellow and half black, and it totally looks like this button Simms gave me of The Who that I still have in a box somewhere. So Lester Bangs reminded me of Simms, who I have not heard from in forever, but I just called his voice mail, so we’ll see.

It is POURING out. The top foot of my bed is drenched in water from the wind tearing the drops into my apartment. I hope that will dry off in the next hour or two. I also have about 20 CDs I bought in the last week, and I don’t want to listen to any of them. I am listening to Gordian Knot, this prog-rock project thing that is one of the guys from Cynic, along with a bunch of other prog-rock favorites like Bill Bruford and Steve Hackett, and it’s good. But I bought a bunch of stuff to fill holes in the collection, and I was bored of them before I got them out of the bag.

Okay, time to pay my bills and listen to the rain.

glossary stuff

Sun, 28 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Have you seen the glossary? Also known as The NecroKonicon, but I think I’m changing the name soon. I am saying this because if you haven’t seen it in a while, it has changed a lot. I’ve been adding a lot more entries, the layout is changing, there are a lot of new pictures, and it continues to grow. I don’t know how many people read it like 2 or 3 years ago and said “oh, ok” and then forgot about it, but I’ve added a lot of stuff since then, so maybe you should check it out.

Also, I am kind of hoping those people who are sort of involved (lived in Bloomington, worked for UCS, whatever) would please leave some comments, or at the very least, email me and tell me some of your stories. I am planning on making this thing into a book sooner or later, and I want to include stories from other people, like in little boxes in the side heads or whatever. I am really trying to finish things up and get this book out - I realize I have said in the past I wanted to do this, and I stalled, but this time I really am trying to remove as many of the obstacles as I can so I can get this book done. I don’t expect to sell one god damned copy of it, but my rationale is that once it is done and published, I will have it out of my way and I can start working on something else.

Not much is going on here. I have a sore throat and have been congested and sneezy all day, plus I am completely brain-dead, which means another cold, which sucks because I just got over one. I don’t know if I get 24 colds a year because I have a weak immune system, or if it’s the fact that I live in a city where people literally shit in the street, but I wish I had something else wrong with me, like say a brain tumor or something, that clearly showed up on an x-ray that a doctor could just easily cut out and then charge me $60,000, because I would rather have to deal with that than having half of my life essentially stolen from me.

Oh, I did get some dental work done on Saturday, so maybe that’s why I got sick. I actually got a chipped tooth fixed, and I realized that it was about twenty years ago that I chipped it, and that suddenly made me freak out that something I remember so clearly was two full decades ago. Of course, you tend not forget things like getting hit in the face with a wrench, but still.

Okay, my soup and applesauce are about done, so I think I’m going to go read for a while. If I was clear-headed, I’d work on the glossary, but I’m not.

bachelor's weekend

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT

It’s bachelor’s weekend here in Astoria - Sarah’s visiting her family in Milwaukee for a few days, and I’ve been here on my own. That doesn’t mean scores of Mexican hookers having sex with mules and snorting coke off my bathroom floor or anything; it mostly means I’m sitting around getting over this death-cold-flu I’ve had all week, and a lot of PlayStation. It has been incredibly boring, and after five months of having someone to share my weekends with, I’m surprised I was able to do this every weekend without Cobaining myself years ago. I’m so bored, I even went to K-mart and bought a Stephen King book.

In my last post, I talked about getting the glossary ready for a print book. I decided not to do that. It’s a long story, but I basically don’t think there’s any demand, and it isn’t worth the time. I need to work on a “real” book, and it isn’t one. I still have this book of short stories about Bloomington, but I’m not sure that’s going to make it either. I’m picking at some ideas that might make a new novel, a few really vague themes that didn’t make it in Summer Rain, but that if given a new place and a new look, would make for an interesting story. Maybe. I’m still having a lot of trouble figuring out what’s next, because the only advice I get on what to do next is extremely conflicting. All I know is I need the challenge and the pace of writing another book like Summer Rain (except maybe half as long) but some distance from my own life, a completely fictional story. So, we’ll see.

It’s been a great morning, very cool in the apartment and quiet. I still love how my living room is completely silent now, thanks to the Mac Mini. I’ve got it plugged into my stereo so iTunes can serve up all of my music. With my old setup, to update the iPod, I had to boot to windows, then run MusicMatch and this horrible bag-on-the-side solution that totally sucked. Now I just plug in the iPod and it works. And as bad as this sounds, I used to have a copy of the music in Linux and a copy in Windows, and use xmms, which sucked, and it made the whole operation very kludgey. Now I just use iTunes and that’s it. So I’m enjoying the Mac thing a lot.

Sarah’s back tonight and I get Monday off, which is nice. I think I’m going to go for a long walk, think about this book, and get some lunch.

Writing about work

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I just read Stephen King’s On Writing, not because I’m a huge fan of his writing, but because I needed some kind of kick in the ass because of this writer’s block, and usually looking at some other writer’s process gives me a bit of a boost. The book is about 70% good and 30% “no shit, sherlock”, so I liked it in general. One thing that stuck with me was that he said people like to read about other people’s work. I guess that’s true, since a lot of the stuff I read online involves police blogs and ancient tales of inventing old computers and airline pilots and the like.

My current career probably isn’t that interesting, though. A blog full of details on how I edit pages and check them in to CVS wouldn’t exactly blow your skirt up. But I do enjoy writing about old jobs. And I’m always surprised that most people have never worked in a factory. Maybe it’s because I’m in a blue state, but most people I know here can’t even fathom the idea of working on an assembly line. Yet I grew up in Elkhart, Indiana, where almost everybody works an industrial job. Four of my summers (well, 3.5, really) were spent inside prefab corrugated steel buildings with concrete floors and high ceilings, wearing eye and ear protection, and doing the same thing over and over for eight or ten hours. I couldn’t bear to do it forever, but it was better than working at Taco Bell, and paid two or three times as much.

There’s not much to say about the work. I spent a half-summer before college silver plating clarinet keys. The next two summers were at two different factories belonging to the same company, making and packing plumbing fittings and faucets and stuff. The next summer, I temped a few places (UPS warehouse, a place that painted the boards that go into prefab Target bookcases), and then got a gig working a punch press at an RV factory. Factory work is mundane, but it isn’t that hard. The worst part of it is most of these box-packing jobs are at rate, meaning somebody has measured exactly how long it takes to do each movement, from picking up the box to putting on the sticker, to picking up a part, to putting it in the box, to sealing the box, to putting it on a skid and getting a forklift to take the skid of 768 boxes of 984 parts off to the truck. It’s almost always impossible to make rate, but if you go above it, you make more money. I never did. I was too lazy, and I couldn’t shut my mind off and move my hands in the exact way it had to happen without dropping a piece or fucking up a box label or something.

One time I DID make rate, actually. I had to take a hollow tube, maybe an inch around and a foot or two long, lock it in a special vise, and then drill a bunch of holes in it with a drill press. You had to stop halfway through, flip it over, and re-fasten it for another set of holes on the bottom. According to the rate schedule, you were supposed to raise the drill all the way up and go all the way back down between each hole. Fuck that! I didn’t back that drill up more than two microns each time I moved it to another hole, and was doing parts four times faster than rate. I worked on the machine for two and a half days, and made like 468% rate for like 20 hours. Every full-timer there was pissed as hell, and they shut down the machine and re-rated it. Next time I got on it, you couldn’t make rate if you were The Flash.

Most of the full-timers hated college kids. The first summer at the plumbing parts place, that was actually the factory where my dad worked. The people there were nice, in the sense that my dad worked there since I was an infant, so they remembered me from the company picnics and whatnot. But they didn’t get me. Instead of sitting around talking gossip or whatever, I usually brought a book to lunch, and almost every day, someone would asked me why I was reading. I remember reading the Richard Rhodes atomic bomb book that summer, and everyone kept asking me WHY I would read a book that was three inches thick. I don’t know, it’s not as if the people were bad in any way, they just had different goals. Everyone had to struggle to feed kids and pay bills and everything. People with some tenure bought pools or bass boats or fixed up old Mustangs or added to their houses. Some people put a kid through school, but some had their kids come in at 18 and start work on the line. I guess I got to see both sides of the story.

Anyway, some of this stuff came up while I was writing on this new book. I need to capture it a bit better sometime, although there’s no real plot to ten hours of wiring down saxophone keys to plating frames. I spent every hour of every day wishing I was back in school, back with friends, back with whoever I was dating at the time. I drank a lot of Cokes and took a lot of “allergy medicine” to make the hours pass faster, but I still took in a bit of the culture.

OK, I ate during the update today, and now I’m ready for a nap, but I’ve got to get back to work…

Procter and Gamble picnics

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT

As always, I was playing around on google yesterday, trying to scouring my brain for a tiny clue to something from my childhood, to see if anyone more afflicted than myself had any related pages on the web. I’m not sure how I found the link, but I managed to find enough info to find a name, a town, and even some pictures, which is a victory in my book. Okay, here’s the story.

When I was a kid - probably in the late 70s/early 80s, I used to go to Procter and Gamble’s huge corporate picnic there, which was held at this place just outside of Chicago called Hillcrest Park. My grandfather and my aunt both worked for P&G, and it was a big deal for everyone to attend the picnic every year. To me and my sisters and all of the other cousins that were my age, this was the chance to ride rides and eat tons of ice cream and other junk food and have a lot of fun. At that time, we lived in Elkhart, which was a couple of hours east of Chicago, so this meant a trip to the big city, and a chance to hang out with all of my cousins, who were infinitely cooler than me.

Back then, P&G corporate was in Chicago, and I think they also made soap and other stuff there, because we’d go to the factory, and the place would smell horrid. The only other thing I remember about the factory was that they had an automat, which is another lost concept in American culture and a pretty nifty idea. Anyway, we never hung out there for long; they’d load us up into a bunch of chartered busses that drove us to the park.

The park was about 60 acres, so it was no King’s Island or anything, but they only did these corporate picnics, so it was just people from the company there. Inside, the grounds were wooded, with pavilions and picnic tables, and a couple of buildings, like a food court, and some restrooms. The elders usually sat around the pavilions and formed these enclaves, where people watched over the little kids and everyone’s stuff, as everyone else wandered around. My Grandpa worked for P&G basically his whole adult life, so he knew a lot of old-timers, and he’d wander around running into those guys and trading complaints about their latest health problems or whatever. My mom usually spent time with all of my aunts, her sisters, trading their stories or whatever. That left us kids to go on the rides, and to eat food.

One of the rides I remember more than others was the railroad. I was really into trains as a kid, and the train was also the ride that you could go on with adults and little kids. The park ran this narrow-gauge train with a real steam locomotive that chugged around the perimeter of the place, through the woods and around the fields. It gave you a good view of the whole park, and passed the sports grounds, which featured a huge outdoor pool that at any time was filled with about 10,000 kids. The train also looped back around and ran right next to the roller coaster before it came back to the station. It was always neat when the timing was right and you were chugging along and the coaster’s cars whipped past right next to you. The train was pretty slow and not exactly a thrill ride, but I always liked to ride it at least once per trip, just to get the lay of the land.

There were some other rides grouped right by the coaster, in a little promenade area. They had a merry-go-round (which we considered lame, but me and my cousins were all like 10-12 years old at the time, so you get that) and a whip-a-round type thing that was marginally fun once or twice, but repeat rides did not reap any rewards. A set of electric bumper cars, the kind with the scraper bar that went across the ceiling, were a fun opportunity for some bumps and always had a long line. There were a couple of coin-op games, a rifle game where you shot at various targets like a piano player, and maybe a skee-ball game. We never played those because I could never shake down the change from my mom and the cost wasn’t included in the picnic.

The big show was the roller coaster, called The Little Dipper. It was a wooden coaster, painted white, with a figure-8 pattern that pulled up 16 riders with a clicky chain and a creaky first hill that dropped off and gave a huge rush, even though now I found out the stats, and it’s only like a 20-foot drop that gets you up to what a car’s first gear does. But the Little Dipper was my first coaster ever, though, so I have fond memories of it. It was a little rough, but at the time it seemed like the fastest, most brutal thing ever. I was reluctant to ride it at first, but then I wanted to get back in line and ride it all afternoon. Once we did get there early enough that we got through the lines three or four times really fast before a crowd built up, and that was absolute paradise.

I have a lot of other good memories of that park, too. I think they had some kind of paper ticket system for the food, and we’d always end up eating an endless supply of hot dogs, hamburgers, and ice cream. P&G was pretty good to their people, and always had random drawings that somebody in our big extended family would always win, which consisted of huge bags of P&G products.

I was sad to hear this place closed, though! I always expected it to be long gone, because even back then, it was pretty weathered and beat. But I guess they pulled through until 2003, when less companies were spending the money on picnics, and that 60 acres of real estate was worth more than their draw. The rides were auctioned off, and I am glad to hear that the coaster made the transition to another park. I don’t know what happened to the other rides. Lemont, Illinois will now have a new warehouse, but that doesn’t really make up for losing the park.

I guess I’ve rode a lot of roller coasters since then, but that’s not why the memory stuck in my head. I guess it was a combination of the food (which probably wasn’t that good, come to think of it), seeing all of my cousins, being in Chicago, and just being able to see everything in the park. For whatever reason, this was like my Christmas in the summer, one of those things that really stuck with me.

Anyway, another distant memory solved by google. Now I need to find someone auctioning off another roller coaster like this one, so I can set it up out on my land in Colorado. Any ideas?

Junk yard

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I was watching a show last night that’s about bad jobs - it usually involves someone removing feces from subways lined with rats bigger than dogs or something, so I never watch it. But last night, it was about guys working in a junkyard, which I thought was funny. Not ha-ha funny, but because it was the kind of intellectual porn aimed at blue-staters to show them how horrible life is out in the flyover zone. But to me, it brought back the vivid memories of the wrecking yard, a place I knew well from my teenage years.

Growing up, I did not drive a new Mercedes provided by my parents on my 16th birthday, and my idea of car service went beyond self-service gas. When I was 15, my stepdad bought this totaled Camaro for $300, and along the way, it eventually became my project. By the time I got my license, a lot of major work had been done, from brakes to tune-up to tires to a new interior. A month or two later, I bolted on a new exhaust from stem to stern, while trashing three socket wrench handles in the process of wrenching off rusted bolts. But one of the biggest things I needed to fix was a badly dented fender on the front passenger side, along with a cracked fiberglass nose. I couldn’t buy those parts from the local AutoQuest, so I had to make a trip to the junkyard.

The junkyard in Elkhart, or at least the one I went to, is out on CR 10, west of the Nappanee extension. It’s way up north of town, in an isolated corner of the county, by the regional airport. It’s also coincidentally by one of Elkhart’s several EPA superfund sites, the old Himco dump site, but I didn’t know that at the time. I’d never been there before, but my stepdad used to go out there back in the 60s and 70s when he was always working on muscle cars, and I think I made a call or two out to the place.

I planned a whole day around the fender swap, a Saturday, and awoke early to find a few inches of snow on the ground. That bummed me out, but I vowed to put on an extra layer of clothes, some old boots, and forge onward. Because I didn’t have a truck, I took out the passenger seat and carefully measured the existing fender to make sure I’d have enough room. I left early enough to head across town and get to the place just as the chain-link gates were opening. When I got there, I found a big prefab metal building with a run-down front office and a set of big garage bays that could probably fit a Peterbilt semi, if they cleared out all of the junk first.

I remember getting there, and the guy in charge told me where to head for the Camaros, to pick out a donor and then come get one of the guys to wrench off the parts for me. He set me loose in this labyrinth of dead vehicles, everything dusted with a powder of snow. The white padding muffled all of the sound around me, except the crunch of my feet on the dirt path. Most of the narrow roads within the yard were heavily rutted, and muddy and wet, since the temperature hadn’t been freezing for that long.

I found a row of F-body cars, Camaros and Firebirds, along a treeline. None of them were on tires anymore, and half of them were missing engines. I could imagine someone around town driving a piece of shit Chevelle, bragging “yeah, I got me a Z-28 motor in here” for each of the engineless cars. Some of the cars were smashed in the front; others had extensive rust damage in the rear panels. A few had smashed glass in spiderweb patterns that suggested a fatal collision.

To say that I’d spent a lot of time in my Camaro would be an understatement. I took apart and put back together so many pieces, spent Saturdays scrubbing the interior, running speaker cables under carpet, changing fluids that I’d just changed 100 miles ago, and dreaming about what parts I’d tear off and replace, when I had the cash. I memorized the Chilton’s guide for the car like it was scripture, and had a solid mental image of every part of the car, inside and out. So to look at all of these cars, at the minor differences from year to year, the missing chunks and damaged pieces, felt a little weird. It was like seeing a relative without a head, your house with the roof removed. But it was also exhilirating in a way, to think of buying a more tricked-out center console from a newer model, or a faster engine from a different car, or whatever else. Mostly it was weird to see all of these rows of cars, missing pieces, gently frosted over by that winter day.

I found a white ‘77 with a front fender that looked good, and trudged back to the front gate. When I got there and said I found it, a guy that was maybe in his early 20s waved me over to the most motley car I’d ever seen, an old Suburban or some sort of pre-SUV truck, but with half of its parts missing. It had no hood, half of its glass gone, no front lights or bumpers, little interior, but the back held a set of welding tanks and a haphazard bucket of tools. The dude, who looked like Alice Cooper but no makeup or anything, told me to hop in, and we creaked across the lot. The truck rocked and swayed so much, the windshield was flexing and I was sure it would explode at any moment, but we got there.

It took the guy a few minutes, and I carefully watched what screws he took out to extricate the sheet metal from the old car. I also got a rear-view mirror for the side door (and unfortunately, broke it before I got it back on my car - oh well, five bucks.) The fender, still wet from the snow, just barely fit in the car, and I got a baggie full of hardware to bring with me for the transplant. It felt so weird, driving across town, listening to Iron Maiden or whatever I was into that week, with no passenger seat and a huge chunk of metal taking up half the cockpit.

There’s not much else to the story, except that it’s a bitch to work on old metal that’s rusty, with concealed little sheet metal screws in hard-to-reach areas. I had to take off the hood, and spent an hour or two playing the “I think all the screws are off but maybe there’s one more” game. I had a 5:00 shift to work that night, and almost entertained the idea of driving to work with no hood on, but I got everything set up, and made it to the mall in my red and also white car.

I went back a few more times for a few more cars, and I always liked the whole idea. Every car there tells a story, and it’s sad to see them dead like that, but it’s also cool to know they will be recycled, and other cars will live longer lives with all of the parts. It’s a weird little bit of midwestern culture, and a pleasant memory, even if more of my cars ended up in the junkyard than not.

Tombs of rememberance

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I love google. More specifically, I love searching the web, because way before I used google, it was all about AltaVista, and before that, I was using yahoo when it was still a machine on Stanford’s network. I love putting in people’s names, looking for old bands, searching on the places I’ve lived and the cars I’ve owned and the places I’ve worked. Some people might think this is a waste of time or sad, but it’s not like I’m non-interactively watching a screen that displays a fictional character’s life in half-hour intervals each week, and pretty much everybody does that.

I still remember clearly a day about five years ago, when Google Groups found an old Usenet archive on a dead machine, and launched it on the world. This might seem silly, to read a bunch of old posts by people arguing about whether or not Clinton inhaled, but the thing was, this archive contained MY POSTS! I plugged in my old email address and found hundreds of articles I wrote a decade before, going all the way back to 1990. It was like looking at the rings of an old tree to determine what seasons were festive or famine-ridden. Way back when, I posted a lot about the Space Shuttle and homemade explosives. Then I got into hacking and old computers. Then death metal and tastelessness. I found posts where I was selling old computer hardware; others where I reviewed then-new albums. Saying it was like a time machine would be an understatement. And now, I’m always looking for the high of learning something new like that, finding an old house on a satellite map or an old buddy with a new business or web page.

My latest diversion that I found on the web is a database served up by the Indiana Department of Corrections, that shows not only who is currently in the pen, but those who previously served time there, along with their infractions and sentences. I originally found this looking for my friend Jim, who may or may not be heading back to the state prison because he allegedly robbed a warehouse. But then I thought about it more, and started plugging in the names of everyone from my high school that, well, was on that career path. I quickly found at least three or four other guys who were in and out of prison for stuff like conversion, theft, breaking and entering, and battery. I emailed Larry and he gave me an armful of names to try, including our old assistant principal, who had some frequent problems blowing below a .08 while driving. It was all very interesting, to see the people who fell off the map. I mean, in the high school reunion page, you see everyone registered who became a mommy and has to tell everyone, or those with good jobs, good degrees, and all of that. You don’t see the people who ended up working at Pizza Hut or whatever, and you don’t see the ones who call Pendleton their alma mater.

I still didn’t find out if Jim was guilty of that burglary charge. He was arrested at the end of May. That either means he got bailed out (not that likely) or he’s in Elkhart County Jail, waiting for his trial, which might not even happen this year, given the court system there. And man, from the looks of the system, it is meth central up there. Anyway, if anyone has any wise ideas on how to find out more, let me know.

This reminds me of one of the things I always wanted to research, but found many dead ends. I went to school with this guy named Greg. He is, apparently, dead. I say apparently because the Elkhart Truth has a piss-poor database, and I have no other way of checking. But supposedly, he got killed in an accident while riding his bike. What’s touchy about the situation is that he was like the lowest member of the social pecking order at Concord. He came from a poor family, had greasy hair, some kind of speech impediment, and was into geek stuff like Dungeons and Dragons, but wasn’t a bright guy, either. All through junior high and high school, he was the whipping post for most of the guys, and he got beat up a lot and just took the punishment. He actually tried out for a lot of sports, and tried to become athletic, and play basketball and football, and I guess it says a lot to be involved in preppy-dominated sports like that when you’re the most hated kid in school.

I didn’t hate Greg, but I wasn’t his best friend either. He was in a lot of my drafting and architecture classes, despite the fact that he could not draw at all. In those classes, a lot of us always ragged on each other, and the whole thing was a lot of this who-isn’t-getting-laid and who-takes-it-in-the-ass sort of shit. Greg said he wanted to be an architect, which sounded ludicrous to me, because I already knew most architecture programs were too hard, too expensive, and too competitive for me, and I knew how to draw. I didn’t come right out and say “you’re fucked, buddy,” but I did tell him as tactfully as possible that maybe he should get a backup plan in place.

And I think part of why I didn’t outright just haze the guy continuously was the fact that I didn’t want to be his friend, but I realized I had a lot more in common with him than I did with the jocko sport guys in school. I mean, I had this thing in high school where everyone thought I was some kind of kid genius, so it didn’t matter if I only weighed 110 pounds of bones and skin and couldn’t do a single chin-up, because someday I’d start the next Apple Computers or something. But Greg didn’t have that going for him, so he tried to become a jock, which I guess didn’t work that well either.

Anyway, there is no Greg tomb of remembrance on the web, and I couldn’t even find an obituary or anything else online, except one hit that the public library would have one, but I’d have to go there and waste a day hunting for it, and it probably doesn’t have a story of what happened or anything.

Blah, I have no ending for this. I’m going to go search the db to see how much of my shop class is behind bars.

Back on the bike

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I rode my bike to work today, for the first time in a while. When I originally bought it last spring, I planned to ride it every day, but I was thrown off by cold weather, hot weather, food poisoning, vacations, and a bunch of other lame excuses. But today, I made it. Of course, I cheated a bit. I’ve been spending more and more time at Sarah’s lately, because my apartment sucks, and I’ve been gradually moving over things. First, it started with an extra deodorant and toothbrush, then a few extra pairs of unmentionables and socks, and then I started leaving books and DVDs. Now I’m moving over stuff a gym bag at a time, and on Saturday we got a limo (no, you non-New Yorkers, not a 68-foot-long stretch Caddy with a wet bar and hot tub - here limo means “non-yellow cab”) and pulled over a few hundred pounds of stuff, including my bike. So, now I will try to ride more.

It’s in my favor that my door-to-door trip is about a mile. (Okay, 1.59 - thank you mapquest.) It’s also much easier for me to get the bike in an out of the place here, since the old place involved a dozen tight turns to get out of the door. There’s no bridge to contend with. And a horrific trip through midtown is no longer needed. But, I no longer have long passages of nothing in Queens, which is kindof nice, and I have a lot of pretty testy drivers and pedestrians on my trip through Chinatown. Most of the ride is of the heavy-defensive sort, with little in the way of long cruises. So that sucks, but it’s still fun. Bicycle is about the best way to get around Manhattan, if you’re up for it. After riding a bike, I really hate walking - it seems so slow and monotonous, especially after you can cruise down a long block in a matter of seconds.

I’m glad to be back on the bike, too. There’s a real difference between your time and personal space on a train versus driving or being on a bike. I’d really want to be in a car, where you can totally cocoon yourself from the world and just have totally private time to yourself. From the second I had a license and a set of keys, I totally enjoyed being able to just put in a tape and drive loops around nowhere, to the mall and back, out on the back roads, and to friends’ houses for no reason. I always bitch about it, and even at three bucks a gallon, I miss that freedom. That’s one of the biggest problems with living in New York. (I mean, aside from the smell.)

But before I had a car, I had a bike. And I spent ALL of my time riding somewhere, or nowhere. The same people who have a hard time imagining that I used to weigh a hundred pounds less than I currently do probably wouldn’t believe that I used to ride hundreds of miles a week. I was not competitive about it; I just liked to get out and explore. Northern Indiana was set up for it, since most of the outlying area was meshed by county roads a mile apart in each direction. That made it easy to keep track of mileage: you get on CR 17 and ride from CR 26 to CR 28, and that’s a mile. CR 30, another mile. I used to have this loop from my mom’s house to Bristol and then out almost to Nappanee and back, and it was just over 25 miles. I used to ride that pretty much every day, and I’d double it on Saturdays and Sundays.

This started back when I was 15. I bought a new 10-speed, and it wasn’t anything special, just some Huffy piece of shit or something. But every time I had a couple of bucks, I’d buy some gear for it, a new helmet, some gloves, whatever. No spandex. I rode all through the fall, and rode this St. Jude’s rideathon where you did laps of a church parking lot that was a quarter mile around. I brought a walkman, extra batteries, and about 50 tapes, and spent the whole afternoon doing the same stupid lap, over and over. This was the kind of thing where kids came and rode their BMX on training wheels and made 5 laps and everyone was all happy and the money went to The Kids or whatever, and I listened to like every Rush album to date in a row and ended up doing 50 miles.

I kept riding into the fall and through the winter, still going to Bristol every day. The cornfields went from amber to wispy brown and then fell into husks and broken stalks, and the cold made it harder to pedal, but I could do the 25 miles in my sleep at this point. I explored the back roads and took different routes, but they were all mostly the same, identical miles of farmland, with the occasional farmhouse. I had the roads to myself for the most point, except for the occasional car that blew past at sixty. I probably averaged about ten miles an hour, sometimes faster. I usually went out for about two hours, longer on the weekends.

I thought about a lot of stuff back then, which seems stupid, as I’m more than twice as old and I have way too much stuff to think about, to the point where I wonder if I need some prescription medication to possibly think about less. But back then, I somehow needed the time away from my family and away from friends and classmates to - I don’t know what. I mean, I listened to a lot of music, and I guess at that point in your life, your favorite bands require some great amount of dissemination, whereas now you listen to stuff just to have a sound in the background that sounds nice. But when you’re 15, that Rush album Subdivisions - it means something, because that’s you. And I’m sure I thought a lot about the opposite sex, and how I’d ever talk to girls, and all of that shit, and I wish I had a record of that, because it eventually all worked itself out, but I remember burning a lot of cycles thinking I was different and I’d somehow need to escape all of this. But I also spent a lot of time thinking about my first car, and maybe how cool it would be to ride my bike across the country, like maybe by strapping a bunch of racks to the front and rear and filling them up with bottled water and snickers bars and maybe some kind of tent so I could camp between stops. Now that I think about it, I have no idea what the fuck I thought about, but I spent a lot of time doing it.

And I still remember Indiana roads, and the kinds of roadways they had there. Most county roads were this asphalt, but they were old, and weren’t black, but maybe this greyish color, like a really overdone hamburger. The roads had a decent texture, like the kind of thing you could only mold out of plastic now. And those had a lot of cracks, and gravel in a bead on the side, and cars made this humming sound from ten miles back on this kind of road. When those got really old and fucked up, and they weren’t a main road that got a lot of use, the county would spray them down with this gluey tar and then dump a fine gravel on them. This kind of road totally sucked shit for a bike, because the underpainting of glue stuck to everything on your bike and was a horrible smelling petroleum product - it was like they just dumped out a bunch of engine oil, and then covered it with coarse sand. And that sand-gravel didn’t do much good on a bike with one inch wide wheels, either. Those roads sucked, and I always avoided them. The best were the main roads, like State Road 15, which were more concrete-like, and made from real asphalt, with a good surface that made you feel like you gained five miles an hour on it.

So I rode a lot. I think the last big thing I did was this 100K bike ride sponsored by WTRC, a local country station. It ended up being closer to 80 miles, and I think I rode it in eight hours. It was total hell, and it rained all day, with huge wind gusts. I remember turning into this really long stretch, and it had a totally killer headwind, and I was pretty much ready to just put down the bike, lay in the road, and hope someone would kill me. It was an okay ride though, and it was pretty weird because it went way north into Michigan and through Edwardsburg, and I saw all of these things that normally I’d just see when hanging out with my dad, like my uncle Don’s house, the golf course, and a bunch of other little landmarks. It was fun, and I wonder how I ever had the discipline to stick out eight hours of that shit, given that now I seldom have the discipline to make a sandwich.

Anyway, a year later, I got a car, I almost never rode the bike after. I brought it to Bloomington for a year, but almost never rode it. (Tip: do not wear toe clips in a college town.) I brought it back, had to ride to the mall when my car was broken, and got a flat. Left it at Concord Mall, and forgot about it until months later, when it was gone. Oh well.

Speaking of sandwich, I’ve been writing forever, and now I’m starving. I was going to put some kind of lofty conclusion on this tying together how much I like riding my bike now and all of that stuff above about how I used to ride my bike and think about stuff, but now I’m thinking about food instead, so you’ll need to put that one together on your own. Bon appetite.

Wasting time with MAME

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been wasting all of my free time lately reviewing CDs. I’m not sure why, because I don’t want to be in the business of having a bunch of crappy death metal bands emailing me their mp3s to review. But I have a lot of loose reviews around, and I wanted to write more long-form reviews and find a place to put them, and I’ve got it about figured out now. When I get more than about 7 reviews done, I’ll post a link. Anyway, that’s why I haven’t been writing here much. It’s far easier to write 1500 words on an old Metallica album than it is to try to come up with 500 words when nothing is going on that I want to write about, except maybe the weather. So, there you go.

But, the other day, I was digging around and found a bunch of ROMS to various stand-up arcade games I had from my old laptop. So I downloaded a MAME emulator program for the Mac, and started digging around all of these old games. I don’t know about you, but I played a lot of arcade games back in the day, and I don’t just mean the really popular Pac-Man/Donkey Kong/Centipede era. I found a lot of these games and played them, and they totally reminded me of my days in a Bally’s, wasting a couple dollars while at the mall. And video game brand loyalty is a huge thing, and it made me think about all of the different brands and games and the whole caste system of consoles, and who played what.

For example, there were certain games that I absolutely loved to play. Like there was the Star Wars vector game, the original Tetris, this Tetris plus enhancements called Bloxxed, and Roadblasters. If an arcade had all of those, it was excellent. If it had one or two of them, it was good. If an arcade (like that shitty one in Pierre Moran Mall, or maybe one in an airport or something) didn’t have any of those games, it sucked, and either I’d play nothing and go off to the Walden Books, or maybe drop a quarter on a sub-par game, just to see if maybe it was really okay. There were a lot of games that either I didn’t like or didn’t see the point of, like most of the three-button-attack quarter-eater types that came out later, or the driving games that didn’t have a good catch to them. I mean, for a buck in gas, I could drive around the parking lot of the mall in my real car and have more fun than half of the sloppy-controller stand-up drivers out there in the early 90s.

But different people liked different games, which always made it weird when you went with other people, because people always had different allegiances to different games. It’s weird, because now, decades later, I can still remember what friends liked what games, way more than I could remember their favorite beer or band or movie. And that would be cool, but sometimes, based on the games there, it would cause problems. Like, sometimes I’d go to the Bally’s in College Mall in Bloomington with Bill, and I’d inevitably buy into some “a shitload of tokens for $20” deal before I’d remember that they had absolutely no machines I liked. I mean, the best game on the list was a Ms. Pac Man, and I could play that for about six months on $20 of change, given that I wouldn’t die of boredom. But there was some game there that he loved, and he’d play it all day, even though I was either no good at it or hated it. So you have that. Another example is that Spaceport had some pretty esoteric game machines, so if you stopped in there with someone who just wanted to play the core Atari games, they’d be screwed.

Oh, at the lowest end of the totem pole were the situations where you only had one or two games, and you had to pick one. A classic example is when you’re with your family at Pizza Hut, and there are two games, and it’s either Bust-a-Move or Robocop, and neither one are very good, but you need something to do until the breadsticks arrive or something. This also applies to dorms with a couple of stray machines, or little arcades in laundromats or whatever.

Another game I didn’t get were the sports games, like the football, hockey, and whatnot. None of my friends played these, because I think you had to like the sport in question, and none of my friends were huge soccer fans. The only sports game that was the exception to the rule was Summer Games. This - I think it came out around the time of the 84 Olympics, but wasn’t a sponsored game or anything - it was all of the track and field events, like throwing discus and running around a track and soforth. But the thing is, to run, you had to slap two buttons really fast to get your dude to run or throw or something. And for some reason, that made it different; it wasn’t about your ability to know about NFL football. It was about how fast you could slap two buttons, and dammit, you knew you could do it faster than the other guy. The sport part was secondary - it could have been monster trucks or shooting dragons or anything else, as long as it was competitive and measured your ability to pretty buttons at light-speed. I knew a lot of people who were really into that, and you could always tell when someone was playing, because it sounded like someone was bitch-slapping a keyboard. And now we wonder why so many people have RSI.

The competitive games, or more likely the collaborative ones, are the things that have so much memory to me. I’ve already written many times about how me and Ray used to play Smash TV for hours, feeding many quarters into it. I think the first game like this I remember is the original Gauntlet. When I play this now, it reminds me of Adam Pletcher, who I knew from school, and who is now more known for working on the video game Descent and a million others. We played the game a couple times at the Aladdin’s Castle in the Concord Mall, although at that point, the game was so damn popular, all four slots would be full, and the second someone ran out of change, someone else would jump in. Games like this were great, and it’s amazing how shitty some of them are when you look at them now. There’s a Simpsons game that came out in 90 or so that was the same console as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and X-Men game. Then, the graphics were mind-numbing, but now, I cannot stop laughing my ass off the images are so blocky and bad. But being able to get two or three people on a machine to all kick ass hid the poor graphics somewhat.

One of the games that I played but didn’t entirely like at first was Golden Axe. The student union had a room with maybe six or eight game machines, all of them duds, and one of them was Golden Axe. I reluctantly played the side-scroller for a while, and it really grew on me. The animations weren’t bad, but the sound effects were horrible. (When I was playing the other day, Sarah said that the dying people’s screams sounded like some kind of Crunk rap.) It’s also a collective game, although I played by myself a lot. I got the ROM and actually finished the game, which I guess is easier when you’re pressing a button instead of feeding in a coin, but it brought back so many memories of wasting time at the IMU.

Anyway, just some vague thoughts. I think if I had a lot of time and could remember more of this, I could write some kind of book or at least a good essay on greater taxonomy of video games. But, I’ve got these music reviews to write…

New iPod

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I bought a new iPod yesterday, to replace the second-gen 20 Gig one that I’ve had for a few years now. The battery was starting to go, and it’s on the second battery, plus I wanted more space and all of the new features, so I went to the Apple store and ponied up the plastic for the new one. They are really starting to nickel and dime you, though; I had to pay an extra $39 for a dock, and it didn’t come with a cable. I also had to pay $39 more dollars for a cabled remote. You’d think at least one of those two would be included on the highest-end model, but then you’d think people would want a model that held more than 100 songs, and I guess nobody does.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that iTunes (at least on the Mac) properly behaves when given a new iPod. I assumed that there was a direct iTunes to iPod relationship, and I would go through sheer hell getting all of the old tunes onto the new guy. But it turns out that there is a profile for each iPod, and the profile does the library to iPod mapping. So I could have one iPod only sync a subset of my library, or something weird like that, and it’s no problem. My old iPod will go to the Konrath Museum of Old Technical Devices, to be forgotten about for a decade or two, until people are like “What’s an iPod?”. Or something.

The new color iPod display is incredible! I have not messed with the photo features, which are kind of useless to me. (The iPod “Photo” model was rolled into all of the models as of the last rev.) But the screen is incredibly readable, very crisp and smooth. It’s also nice to see a few new features in the BIOS (or is it OS? whatever.) You can enable and disable the items shown on the menu, so I can finally make that stupid podcast link go away.

One of the coolest non-features is that a little thumbnail icon of an album is shown when you are playing a song. The JPEGs are put into the MP3 tags by iTunes, sort of. The pain in the ass is, there isn’t a “go find every single album cover” button or script. The closest I’ve found is that Konfabulator has an “iTunes buddy” that shows the album cover in a little widget. It hunts all of the Amazon sites and finds the image for you, and then shoots it into iTunes, which then gets it into the MP3s and onto your iPod. But this would only really work if I sat and listened to every single song in my playlist to get the tags fixed up, and that would take about 7 years. If you know of any other solution for this, let me know.

I’ve been pulling albums to add albums and stay under 20 gigs for about a year now, so it sure is nice having about 2.5 times as much space to add more stuff. (You don’t really get 60 gigs; it’s more like 55 after formatting and that crap.) I’m now on a mad rampage to rip all of the b-string CDs that I previously didn’t add to iTunes. Because I’m in the middle of moving, I have a third of my CDs in the new place and the rest back in Astoria. I think most of this weekend will involve shuffling CDs around. And I’ve decided that the days of having CDs out on shelves and racks is over. With most of my stuff being retired to “backup” status, I am planning to pack away things in corrugated plastic boxes. Each box holds a hundred discs, and those will go on a shelf or in a closet or something. I don’t really feel a need to have my house look like the back storage room of a store in the mall. My DVDs are now put in binders, which massively saved space. (About 99% of a packaged DVD is air.) And the CDs will now be hidden. The books - that’s still a big issue.

I have been at war with IKEA over trying to get a new desk. I ordered a $100 desk about three weeks ago, and they sent a vague response basically saying “don’t call us, we’ll call you.” Today, they responded, saying that shipping would be… another $100 bucks, plus about $40 of tax. (And to be fair, Sarah handled war-dialing them and trying to keep track of the order, so most of the credit for dealing with these idiots goes to her.) I just ordered another desk from Staples. Maybe I’ll get that by the end of the year. I’m currently working off of a small folding card table that sort of freaks me out, because it’s the type with legs coming out of the middle, and it sometimes makes a little creak and changes height by a couple of millimeters. I have fears of the Mac and giant monitor falling to the floor when I get up to move my chair or something. It’s a brand new table, and very nice for the occasional dinner party, but I don’t think it’s suited for all of my computer gear.

Oh, I now have three pair of those white iPod headphones, and I don’t use any of them. I guess I could “look cool” and/or get targeted by thieves, but I really hate those in-ear things. I’d sell them on eBay, except anyone can buy them new for $12 or something. Oh well.

Crossing the river East

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT

First things first: I’ve moved. It’s just across the river to Manhattan, and it’s not 100% done. But I’m in the new place 100% of the time. So if you have need for my phone or postal address, please drop a line. (It’s at the username jkonrath plus this domain name, if you don’t know already.) Also, please drop a line with your current contact info, as I’m trying to get all of this stuff organized so I can sent out another holiday card this year.

I’ve had a back-breaking long weekend here. Sarah is in LA, so I’ve been trying to get the last of the worst stuff done in the old place. I hauled the last of my CDs here, and boxed up all of my books. I also went through a lot of old stuff, recycling papers and junking things that won’t make the move. I also did a lot of cleaning, although you can’t tell from the look of the place. Being on the first floor of a New York apartment means a constant layer of dust and smog, and it accumulated all under every piece of furniture. It’s a horrible thing. Now I am nervously trying to plan how I will move 21 boxes of books plus four huge bookshelves and all of my AV gear, plus how I will give away, sell, throw out, or burn a bunch of half-assed furniture that did not make the cut.

I’ve been thinking about the past too much lately, which is dangerous. I have this huge stack next to my desk that contains probably 20 or 30 spiral notebooks dating back to 1993, filled from cover to cover with daily notes about my aspirations, conquests, fears, and failures. And since all of my other books are in transit, I’ve found myself pulling out a random journal and paging through it in my downtime. What amazes me is how much I used to write, and how varied each entry was. And it also boggles me to see how great my dreams were ten years ago, when I was fresh out of school and had nowhere to go but up. You would not believe all of the wacky future plans I sketched out on Mead college rule while waiting for my food at a Seattle Dennys. I found academic plans on attaining PhDs, house layouts, book outlines, magazine pitches, movie script pieces, just about everything. It’s weird to me now, because my current future goals pretty much have to do with getting a Ryder truck to move all of these fucking books.

I found more of this stuff when cleaning today, pieces of printer paper with outlines or paragraphs scribbled on them, pieces that don’t make a complete puzzle, but are filled with ideas that I never get now. And I try to think of what would someone swing this back in my direction, like saying “yeah, well, I wasn’t planning for retirement back then” or something, that somehow justifies why I’m not doing stuff like that anymore. But I can’t really find a reason. I don’t have kids or commitments or anything else eating up my time. The only thing I can think of is that I used to have all of these great ideas, but they were just that - ideas. I was never able to take any of those wild thoughts and turn it into a concrete book or degree or story or whatever. Through experience, I learned what could and couldn’t fly, and I stopped chasing the things that would end up dead on the vine. And while it has saved me a lot of time, it’s also made life a lot more boring. And that’s the one thing I really miss when I go through old journals or old writing, is that it always seems much more interesting than where I’m at right now.

The stupid part of all of this is that at some point N years in the future, I will be reading this entry and saying “man, things were so much more happening back in 2005.”

As I was getting ready to head out of the apartment tonight, the dimwits that live in the back apartment started some sort of altercation with each other, with the usual screaming and yelling and door slamming and other bullshit. Normally, this would bug the fuck out of me, but it was so nice knowing I wouldn’t have to hear it anymore. I’ve had real mixed emotions leaving this place - I mean, I’ve been there for six years now. I’ve seen some good times there, and despite all of the problems, it’s been a good place to hole up and hide out. There are times when the neighborhood is quiet, the drug addict neighbors are passed out, the car alarms aren’t going off, and all is peaceful, when I’ve really enjoyed myself there. I will miss the place. I won’t miss the ceiling collapsing in the bathroom, the hot water going out, the heat not working in the coldest winter ever, my mail being stolen, my phone line going out at the drop of a hat, my power lines blowing out when you turn on three lamps, the insane neighbors, the heat, the bars on the windows, the truants dealing drugs below my windows, or the biggest bugs I’ve ever seen outside of a David Cronenberg movie. But you always miss an old place. Hell, I still miss my old place on Mitchell Street.

Okay, I’m dead tired…

Upstate

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I just got back a few hours ago from a nice little weekend in upstate New York with Sarah and her friends Guy and Scott. They have a place in High Falls. It’s hard to explain directions and locations upstate to people, because to some, upstate means Lake Placid, and to others, it means everything above 125th Street. This is, for lack of a link to google maps, in the same general ball park as Woodstock. (The actual city, not the location of any of the concerts.) Guy has a fabulous place up there, and we spent part of the time driving around the country, looking at the leaves that have turned, buying apple cider at the roadside stands, and all of that nature-y jazz. We also spent part of the time shopping.

As far as the nature, it sure is wonderful to be in a place where everything is spread out, with lots of winding roads and hills, and trees in every color of the rainbow, but mostly gravitating to the reds and yellows and oranges. It was cold up there, not freezing, but enough that you really needed a coat. I especially liked, though, that at night, you could hear absolutely NOTHING. And it was so damn dark. I got up in the middle of the night to get some water, and I was shocked that I actually had my night vision. A small part of that was the 10000% RDA of vitamin A I’ve taken in the last few weeks to fight colds, but I just never get to be in a place this devoid of light pollution, unless I’m in a Vegas suite with the bomb shelter blackout drapes.

The other part of the equation, of course, was driving into Kingston and shopping at the mall. I love my malls, and since there are none in Manhattan, that further fuels my need to go to suburban shopping centers. We went to a huge Target for a round of buying stuff, then walked through the small connected mall, mostly to see what stores were there and what was new. There were a few places selling Halloween gear, but most of the retailers were bracing themselves for a huge holiday season. We finished off the trip with some lunch at an Applebee’s, and then the crown jewel, a trip to Hannaford’s, the local grocery. That place was about as big as an old Indiana Marsh store from my college years, with a produce department bigger than most New York grocery stores, and a cereal aisle with stuff that I didn’t even know existed. The frozen section also contained a deluge of products I wish I could have at my convenience on a regular basis, except that it would eventually involve me getting cut out of my apartment by paramedics. But overall, the shopping really hit the spot.

Another strange thing about the area is that I’ve been up there before, and it was a weird sort of worlds-collide thing for me. Back when I was 17, my dad and stepmom Diane took me and my sisters to upstate New York for two weeks. Diane’s family in “the city” vacationed up there in the summer, at one of these little resort-camp things that has a bunch of little bungalows and a center building with a kitchen facility that cooked everyone three meals a day and had some AC and a TV room and whatnot, in case you got bored of bocci ball and complaining about your various nephews and grandkids and medical ailments. We did not stay at the main compound, but rather at a motel that was made of a bunch of cabin-type rooms. That was just west of Cairo, which is a bit west of the actual city of Catskill.

I distinctly remember hating about 80% of the vacation at the time; hating is actually a pretty strong word, but if you can imagine being 17 and not having your car, your CDs, your job that lets you buy CDs, your phone, and everything else, and then being in this weird land that’s mostly the same as Indiana and isn’t some monumental scene-change, like going to a desert or an island in the Bahamas or whatever, and that sort of sucked. And my dad’s cool and all, but every morning, we’d pile into the truck and drive an hour to some random thing and look at the historical plaque or whatever and then turn back around. At the time, I did not appreciate that sort of thing, but now, 20 years later, it’s the kind of thing that’s totally stuck in my head, and it’s also the kind of thing I’d pay thousands of dollars to do.

And we did some neat stuff, like going to downtown Woodstock, and going swimming a lot, and cruising through these little one-horse towns in the mountains and sort of absorbing in as much of it as I could at the time. I remember we went to Hunter Mountain and rode up the lifts and looked at the bare August mountains on the way up and then back down. And then we went into these huge lounges that were built for thousands of people during the height of ski season, except the place was totally empty except for us, and it totally made me feel like I was in The Shining. And the first time I ever flew was up there, at this little podunk airport that advertised 15 minutes for twenty bucks or something, so me and my sisters went up in a Cessna and did a loop or two over the hotel and above the Catskill Creek. So in the end, I did like our time up there.

And so it was weird driving around the hills and valleys, looking at the trees, and knowing that I probably drove around some of the same roads with my dad two decades before, and those kind of weird worlds-colliding moments always get me in a good sort of way. And at some point, I’ll have to drive around up there a bit more, and find the old swimming holes, or maybe the diner we always went to for lunch, and maybe even see if that pilot’s got his plane going up there so I can put down a few more twenties and get some good pictures from up there.

A few other things - yes, we are supposed to go on vacation in Cancun on the 9th of next month. Yes, we’re aware of the hurricane. We’ve gotta call back in a few days and see if the hotel is still standing, and if not, we get to plan the vacation a third time. This time, I’m not announcing where we’re going, even though we have decided, just in case one of you is fucking with the weather somehow. And on Friday, I pick up a ten-foot moving truck and we begin the heavy lifting to get the books, AV gear, and bookcases into the new place. So that will be fun. Okay, that’s all.

Collectorism

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I am beat. This weekend, I rented a moving truck and we hauled over everything that I’m going to keep from the Astoria apartment to my new place. I got the truck for the whole weekend, and envisioned lap after lap between the two boroughs. But on Friday, we got everything loaded into a single, densely-packed truckload, then parked the car overnight in a locked lot and spent most of Saturday afternoon hauling everything in. I think we were back at the Budget lot and done with it by maybe three. I spent the rest of the night and some of today unloading boxes, packing away things, and hooking up electronics. It’s not done, but it’s really getting there.

As far as what fits in a ten foot moving truck, this load included five bookcases, a wood and glass TV pedestal, a 27-inch TV, a surround sound receiver, DVD player, CD player, tape player, VCR, 12” 3-way speakers, five surround speakers, a powered subwoofer, a bass amp, my keyboard, a bunch of bike parts, my tools, all of my dishes, papers, fans, an air conditioner, a ton of old cassettes and VHS tapes, and probably a thousand pounds of books. I wish I was joking about the book thing, but I’m not; I had about 20 boxes of books, each one weighing about 40 or 50 pounds. That’s why I feel completely devastated today. I never want to move again. I know we will move, but I don’t want to be the one doing it. It’s much easier for me to write a check than it is to unload boxes of books. I know I’m out of shape and everything, but this was a true affirmation that I am getting old. When I was 22 years old, I unloaded a 40-foot semi truck full of furniture, lawn tractors, refrigerators, and boxes of consumer crap every morning for a summer. Now I’m tired just typing that sentence.

This move has also created an entire phase-shift in my relationship to Stuff. I used to, for some reason unknown to me because I was in the center of things, like to accumulate Stuff. When I was single, I would buy Stuff. To me, Stuff consisted mostly of DVDs, CDs, and books, but once you get locked into those things, your collection of Stuff also grows to things like magazines or ticket stubs or photos or clippings about the creators of your Stuff. I’ve also gone through various other collectorial phases, collecting Stuff like gadgets and electronics. I’ve never gone over the edge as far as comics or toys or japanimation or any of that. But I’ve bought a lot of Stuff. And maybe I bought Stuff because I was unhappy, and I thought it would make me happy. But it never really did. All it did was take up space.

If you divide the world into people who are all about collecting Stuff and those who think it’s disgusting to collect Stuff, it’s funny, because one side will never understand the other. People with no food on their table but their entire house swarming with unopened Beanie Babies from eBay will recoil in horror at the thought of a nice apartment with nothing on the shelves. People with tens of thousands of records in their collection immediately pounce on someone’s 40-CD collection when they visit in the most mocking of tones. And hey, I’ve been there. But I’ve never taken a big step back to think about what all of this Stuff really gets me in life, how much I really need it, and how it really impacts me.

One of the big things in this move is that I’ve tried to shed some Stuff. A lot of stuff that I’d never really need again went in the garbage. Lots of papers, little tchotchkis, unneeded cables and adapters (no need for all of those 9-to-7-to-male-to-female-to-usb-to-printer cables with the new Mac) and other crap. Any time in the past when I said “hey, I might need this later” led to something in a closet that went. And I did save some stuff, but a lot of it went. The same philosophy went to the DVDs, tapes, CDs, and other media. And I shed a few hundred books before I left.

I’ve pretty much stopped buying DVDs, oddly enough. Part of that is Netflix, part is that I’ve been introducing Sarah to a lot of the old stuff I have in my collection, and part is that we simply don’t sit around and watch that many movies. All of the DVDs went into leather binders with plastic binder pages inside. This turned a giant wall of a collection into three small binders that hide away nicely. And now the notion of buying DVDs seems silly, since for the most part I only watch them once, if that, and then they take up space. I used to think it was ultra-important to have every DVD that I personally liked on-hand so if I woke up at three in the morning and absolutely had to watch Blade Runner, I could. But you know what? That doesn’t really happen that much. And the more DVDs you get, the more you need.

I still get the occasional CD. But I listen to CDs (or the derived MP3s, anyway) on my iPod or at home or work a lot. I might listen to a CD five times in a week, and I never do that with a DVD (except maybe Platoon.) But now that I use iTunes and the iPod for everything now, I don’t really need the CDs around. Those got banished to the closet, in some cardboard boxes I bought especially for that purpose.

At some point, I used to think it was great being surrounded by all of this media, the CDs and DVDs sitting spine-out on shelf after endless shelf. I think it was part of the mental sickness of whatever disease creates completeists, the people who live for Stuff. I guess I struggled with this as a writer for a while, because sometimes I wanted to just buy Stuff, and hunt down that long-missing, elusive Stuff on eBay that would somehow make life better. But then part of me thought instead of getting or buying this stuff, I should be making it. And my most creative periods were when I was so broke, I could barely afford food let alone Stuff, but typing into an emacs buffer is always free. Okay, of course you have to pay the power bill. And maybe you always wanted the latest computer, which is also Stuff-ism, or maybe you need some CDs to play while you write - that’s how you start to justify buying more Stuff instead of writing, which is what kills the muse.

Books are still a problem. I’m paring them down, but I have much more of a connection to the books I read, and this will be a harder bug to kill. But it’s getting there.

P.S.: No more trip to Cancun. We rebooked, and will be going to Amsterdam on the 9th. I realize it will be a bit cold, but at least it’s not underwater. (knock wood.)

Amsterdam

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I’m back from Amsterdam, and we had a good time there. Part of me wants to write a big trip report, but part of me wants to do a rm -rf ~/www/journal on a fairly constant basis, (and that might be coming soon), so no report. The basic synopsis is that the jetlag really fucked me, I got a bad cold and was not able to buy any medicine to get better, but we still got a lot in, and the trip was more than worth it. Pictures are posted, but I’m too lazy to add a link, so figure it out.

Although I’ve been to most of the 50 states, and I’ve been to Canada a half-dozen times, I’ve never left the country otherwise, so this was a cool trip. Ever since the first time I went to Canada in high school, bought a Coke can from a machine, and felt the slight difference, I have been fascinated by finding out the differences in places based on their consumer goods. I don’t land in Utah and seek out the Mormon people or find out why it’s called the Beehive state; I immediately find out if they have a Denny’s, an IHOP, a 7-Eleven, or where people go to buy their records. I enjoy travel to states that are test markets for new soft drinks, or that have odd hamburger chains I can’t find anywhere else. I know I should care more about the history or culture or climate or something else, but seriously, fuck that. I want to know about the things I consume, that I use.

In that sense, The Netherlands were very interesting, because EVERYTHING was different. Okay, this wasn’t like going to some third-world former Soviet shithole where people drink chlorinated rainwater and eat gamey horsemeat on important holidays. The Dutch speak English and enjoy many of the same foods as Americans. But the differences I look for were there in spades: .33L bottles of Coke; Fanta everywhere; bottled water in those plastic-impregnated cardboard boxes like soy milk; automats; coin-op bathrooms that were cleaner than hospital operating rooms; weird soaps; weird cell phones; weird cars. Everything was interesting. I wanted to buy one of everything just to open it, taste it, smell it, and decide if it was better or worse than what I’d become used to over the last 34 years. Even the money was weird; it took some time to get used to having a fistful of coins that was worth like forty bucks.

Everyone in Amsterdam speaks English. I read that before I left, but I was very surprised at how well most people did. And I’m not talking “your total is ten Euros” sort of proficiency; I mean, I had conversations with people who spoke such unbroken English that I could have sworn they grew up back in the states. The bad news is that everything is in Dutch, with occasional English subtitles. Shopping in a grocery store was a little difficult; I almost walked out with a large bottle of drinking water that was in reality vinegar. The most odd aspect of the whole English-Dutch thing was the number of times a cashier started talking to me in Dutch instead of English. You’d think I would have a giant “American” sign above me, but I guess not.

I mentioned elsewhere that things were completely politically neutral, which was nice. I was at the very least expecting a huge fuck-george-bush display in a city square, or some hippies hassling the American tourists over their fascist leader. But nobody said shit, and furthermore, there was no real display of political strife or issue locally. I was very pleased to find a place to go where I didn’t have to hear someone drone on and on about it.

I think my favorite thing was the botanical garden, which had three different big greenhouse climates with different temperatures and humidities, plus some smaller rooms and a lot of excellent landscaping and scenery. It was maybe in the fifties when we were there, but one of the big rooms was a jungle climate and so humid that my glasses and camera fogged over. They had some huge trees in there, and of course, this immediately made me wish I had a similar setup out on my Colorado land.

Anyway, that’s the basic story. Now I have to get over this cold, and start on my next project, which is learning Apple Pages, the new word processor/page layout program that’s part of iWork. It’s basically an Apple version of something like Adobe InDesign, and I think it might enable me to drop FrameMaker when I design my next book. I have only played with it for a few minutes, but it’s very fun.

But first, the evening’s Nyquil…

Goodbye Astoria

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

The last of the Astoria move-out was completed on Saturday. Now all I need to do is send my keys to my landlord and get ripped off for my entire security deposit. Saturday’s work involved a last trip to the Neptune Diner, and then about three or four hours of clearing out every remaining item in the place. I had some grand scheme of donating things to some charity, selling stuff off on craigslist, listing stuff on freecycle, or whatever else. But when it came down to it, I simply couldn’t deal with waiting on other people and whatever else, so it all went to the curb or in the garbage cans. And as quickly as we could put stuff out there, it vanished. It was like christmas for some poor bastards that hauled that stuff out of there.

The worst of the last stuff were the loveseat and single chair that I bought back in 2000. Because of the weird s-curve layout of my front door, it was like a very bad 3-D tetris game trying to get the couch out of there. It was too wide and too deep, and the depth of the curve made it impossible to take it out long-ways at an angle. I can’t even really describe it, but it was a horror to get that thing out. After clearing everything, we did a real quick sweep of the place with broom and swifter, just to get the big chunks up. Like I said, the landlord’s going to fuck me on the deposit anyway, so there’s no reason for me to get out a toothbrush and go OCD on the place.

As we left, it hit me that I’d never see the place again, and despite all of the horrific problems with it, I’m sort of sad to see it go. I lived in the place for six years, which is longer than I’ve ever lived in any place since my parents’ house. A lot’s gone on there. Every book I’ve published was cranked out while I lived there. (Some of them were started before then, but the ISBNs hit the jackets while I was living in Astoria.) I crossed the millenium there. It was a good run, I guess. I didn’t like the place as much as, say, the 600 7th Ave place in Seattle, but I’m glad to move on, but shit, that’s a sixth of my life. Leaving didn’t blow me away as much as it did to leave the Mitchell Street House in ‘93, or leaving Seattle in ‘99, but still. End of an era.

We had a good Thanksgiving, too. We went up to Guy and Scott’s, Sarah’s friends, up in upstate New York again. Sarah went up on Tuesday night to help with the shopping and the preparation, and I worked on Wednesday and then took the bus up. The Port Authority looked like some kind of apocalypse disaster movie on Wednesday afternoon, but once I got on a bus and headed north, it wasn’t a bad run. I think I made it to Rosendale in under two hours, door to door, and was greeted at the bus stop by Guy and Sarah, who then took us to a shopping center where we got Chinese and pizza from two different places, and I headed into a Dunkin’ Donuts for a dozen of those, just in case.

Guy and Scott’s friend Beth was there with her two-and-a-half year old son Ian and her dog Gus. Guy already started the dinner preparation, and we all ate and hung out that night, knowing the oven would get fired up in the morning for the big bird. We crashed somewhat early, and in the morning woke to find a couple of inches of fresh powder covering everything outside. Given that this is in the middle of nowhere, it meant there was virgin white snow all over everything. When you live in the city, where snow is immediately smooshed by busses and trucks and turned horrid colors of black and grey by pollution, you really appreciate the pure white of a real snowfall. Gus, a collie/alaskan husky mix, enjoyed it too. He spent a lot of the day outside, running through the drifts, trying to chase the wild turkeys and deer that cross through the yard. He was so happy, he would roll around on his back in the snow and jump around like a kid on Christmas morning.

Guy’s dinner was perfect. I’d put Guy up against anybody’s pefect grandmother’s cooking dinners anyday. He’s totally into cooking way too much food and making all of it great, so you don’t want to get in his way when he’s cooking, but you totally want to be there for the product. Guy’s pre-dinner dinner is better than most dinners, and it’s just a long onslaught of food. It’s like the iron man triathalon of food. I had to pace myself and quit early, before the handmade pies happened. We stayed Thursday night again, and then I had bacon and eggs before Beth drove us back to the city. We got back before 2:00, which meant we had the rest of Friday plus the whole weekend to chill out and do nothing, which we did.

I should throw out a few book reviews for good measure, since I’ve been reading a lot. First, Andrew Smith’s Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth. I’ve been reading a lot of space stuff lately, but this really put a new twist on things, by trying to catch up with the nine remaining Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon. Smith chases after the elusive lunar explorers, trying to bring out more than just the stock NASA facts, but to really determine what happened to these men who had the great apex of their life happen at a young age, and then had the entire country’s interest in space exploration collapse after the moon walks. Some guys are still trying to champion space missions, like Buzz Aldrin, while others turned to religion, philosophy, art, or private industry ranging from beer bottling to football team management. Many divorced and had family problems, many felt betrayed by their country for dropping the ball on the space program. Overall, the backstory is excellent and a great page-turner.

An impulse purchase I greatly enjoyed was Sam Posey’s Playing with Trains. Posey, a former Grand Prix race car driver and long-time race commentator, also spends a lot of time playing with HO trains down in his basement, something that goes back to his childhood and a Lionel train set around the Christmas tree. The first half of the book goes through the fifteen-year saga of Posey restarting his hobby as an adult when he has a baby boy, going through the construction of a massive layout in his basement. During the steps of this journal, we learn a bit about the industry behind the hobby, and the various steps you need to go from a little loop of track to a full-blown system. In the second part, he gets his journalistic background fired up and starts to go out and meet the other people with his obsession, as well as the major suppliers and magazines covering the hobby. He also goes out and tries a 1:1 scale steam locomotive, and makes a few field trips to the crumbling remains of the once-mighty rail system in this country. While I never re-started the hobby (no basement, no attention span), I had the Tyco starter set and a bunch of Life-Like buildings nailed to a piece of plywood when I was a kid, and always dreamed of a giant 1:87 reproduction of some Santa Fe freight line rumbling through a scale city. The book reminded me of all of that, and I’m sure if I did have a basement, I’d be down there right now with $700 of new HO-scale equipment.

Another great one was Michael Harris - The Atomic Times: My H-Bomb Year at the Pacific Proving Ground. Harris was drafted back in the fifties, and spent a year of his two-year commitment at the Eniwetok Atoll. He was there in 1955 for Operation: Redwing, a series of some of the biggest H-bomb explosions ever. He spent the first part of his stay editing The Atomic Times, a little mimeo base newspaper, which reminded me a bit of John Sheppard’s stories of Army journalism. He later spent time typing requisition forms and destroying carbons for top-secret shipments of nuts and bolts. On the day of the tests, with no morning, the enlisted would get pulled out of bed and ordered to stand at attention, facing away from the blast, while 20 megatons of test-device vaporized islands and ocean water. Much of his story deals with being stuck on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere (a lot like Lost, but no hot chicks) and dealing with the stupidity and pranks of various draftee-quality Army privates removed from their small towns for the first time. A minor caveat on this one is that Harris tends to be a little choppy and informal in his writing, and loves to use incomplete sentences. But the subject matter is great, and it’s a unique look at the history behind the H-bomb.

I also bought the new Vonnegut book, A Man Without A Country. Vonnegut said he’d stop after his last one, Timequake, but he came back to cash in a bit with a thin little volume of retread material. If you’ve seen Vonnegut speak in the last 10 or 15 years, take that stock speech and add in a bit of whining about George Bush, and there you go. Vonnegut’s always been a favorite writer to me, and I love all of his novels and books, but there wasn’t much to this collection except maybe a sly way to get the Air America crowd to rush out and buy it and say “best book ever!” because he compares Bush to Hitler. There’s a really funny example (or 40) of this on the Amazon reviews for the books; all of these people’s reviews are like “Hi, I’m 23 and a college graduate and I’ve never heard of Kurt Vonnegut, but I saw him on the Daily Show, which I think is a real news program, and rushed out to buy his book.” It’s also somewhat sad to see that Vonnegut has been preaching this “the world is ending tomorrow” luddite viewpoint, but he’s been doing it for 40 years now, and the world hasn’t ended. Oh well. Three out of four ain’t bad.

This entry is far too long. Sorry.

EKGs and LASIK

Sat, 10 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

It has been a long week, and has involved many views of myself I’d normally not see. First, I had an annual physical, and I guess that view involved an EKG, which is always weird, but was, luckily, fine. I am under 40, so I did not get the pleasure of another little test that won’t be discussed. I did get a bunch of blood tests done, so in a few days, I will get to see another view of myself, in the form of little numbers telling me the range of various chemicals in my blood, which is always a little more interesting than just a glance in the mirror. Nothing strange expected there, although I’m sure my cholestorol is high and that’s always a fun bridge to cross with any doctor, especially one who loves writing prescriptions.

On Friday morning, I woke up three hours early to Blizzard 05 (a couple of inches) and trudged my way to another doctor, this time to look at my eyes and see if I can get LASIK. I had a short battery of interesting tests, including a computerized photo-mapping of my eye, which is a new one for me. I got to see a big color digital picture of my ocular devices, which resembled a view of a sun-like star, but crossed with a couple of blood vessels of some sort. I also got some numbing drops, which are not exactly the fun party game you might expect, and the nurse stuck a very sharp, very tiny probe right into my eye to get a depth of my cornea. Unfortunately, after all of this fun, it turns out I can’t get LASIK, or the also-nifty LASEK or PRK surgeries, because my prescription is too high and my cornea is too thin for all of that slicing and dicing. When they do the correction, they carve down the cornea to get the right shape, and in my case, there’s just not enough to carve. There is a procedure that’s brand new where they implant a tiny sliver of a lens underneath there, and you have a permanent contact lens that never needs cleaning. But this is about twice as expensive, and it’s more of a pain in the ass (or eye, rather), and it’s all too many if if ifs.

So today I went to LensCrafters and ran through another set of tests, this time for plain old glasses. I got more pictures of myself in the form of eye shots, and did a bunch of “this or this.” The doctor, it turns out, is also a graduate of IU, and we roamed the Bloomington campus at the same time. Small world. Big prescription though, and even bigger bill by the time they got those high-index lenses all figured out. Hey, more views of myself, with new frames! I won’t get to see them for a few more weeks, while they hunt down the vintage Coke bottles on e-bay to make my lenses. And then I got a haircut, and I can see my ears!

And that’s about it. I need to go shop for a few more presents online, and spend the last few dollars I have on that. And I’m reading the new David Foster Wallace already, thanks to Marie, who was also thanked inside. So, off to that.

Transit strike

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I stayed home today to try to beat the end of a bad cold that has been going on for almost two weeks. It was made worse by the fact that I had to walk to work the last two days because of the transit strike. The strike is allegedly over now, and the busses and subway system are slowly coming back to life, but I think it’s 50/50 on having my F train operational tomorrow morning for work. A bus runs right outside of our apartment on Grand St, but I haven’t seen one yet. Who knows. I’m sure someone in Chinatown has “I survived the subway strike” t-shirts for sale, though.

I’ve been reading a lot, because I’ve been sick and also have a lot of books coming in as presents. I started reading Neal Cassady’s collected letters, which were interesting, but I stalled about halfway through. Maybe I’ll get back to it later. I still have more astronaut stuff to read, and I’m about halfway through Michael Collins’ autobiography. He was the CSM pilot on Apollo 11, i.e. the one that didn’t walk on the moon. His book is probably one of the best astronaut biographies I’ve read. He was a test pilot, and seems much more “human” than others, in the way he describes things. He’s not writing as a big huge mega-person who is larger than life, or a politician, or someone shilling you a message via the fact that they were spam in a can a few times. He spends a lot more time talking about how they got ready and developed things for these trips, and most of his writing is as a pilot, not a scientist or a spokesman. It’s good stuff. There’s a new Neil Armstrong authorized bio out now, so I will have to order a copy and contrast/compare. I guess Armstrong was on 60 Minutes recently, and they showed him flying his glider. I wish I could track down info on that and find out what he’s flying.

That’s about it here. I think I’m going to go back to bed until dinner.

Goodbye 2005

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Okay, it looks like the annual archive-last-year-and-start anew journal maintenance worked, and I’m ready to start 2006. Because I cobbled together this system back in 1997 and slowly added new features to it over the years, I can never remember exactly how to do this big shift at the end of the year, and every year I swear I will rewrite the whole thing to make it easier, but I never do. Maybe before 2007.

We had a pretty quiet but nice new year. We went to Balthazar for an early dinner, and that was pretty damn good. Actually, the problem there is that the same owner or restaurant umbrella or whatever also runs a bar called Schiller’s in our neighborhood, and they have a decent bar food menu with some similar entrees, and they deliver. We’re pretty much on a first-name basis with their delivery guy because they’re now the default delivery choice, and having their entrees constantly sort of ruins going to the restaurant and ordering them. But it was neat to see everything in full swing for the big night. We got out of there by like seven though, and went home to lay in diabetic coma after the big meal and watch TV. Nothing exciting, but it was nice.

In conversation, Sarah asked me what I did last year, and I couldn’t even remember. I probably watched Platoon for the 8000th time and contemplated rigging up tripwires and punji sticks to take out my neighbors. I haven’t done anything for the new year in a while. I know everyone thinks that all New Yorkers stand in Times Square, but I haven’t done that and probably never will, since even if the weather is ultra-nice on the 29th and 30th, it always turns horrible on the day of the 31st and dips below freezing, as if someone out there knows there will be tens of thousands of people standing out there waiting to get frostbite. The flipside of this is that every bar and restaurant in the city suddenly adds an extra zero or two to their rates, and you end up spending a grand to sit in a greasy spoon with a thimble of champagne bought at CostCo, getting loaded with a bunch of strangers. So I’ve always avoided leaving the house.

I think the last time I actually threw a party was when I lived with Simms and Liggett in Bloomington at West Sixth. That was in 94/95, and we had a huge bottle rocket war outside, lots of Simms’ chili, a keg in the kitchen, a ton of people, and Chuck’s nephew Eric made this fortified distilled champagne that was like rocket fuel and gave me a hangover for like a week. But without the huge college house and a bunch of roommates and ultra-cheap Big Red Liquors right down the road, it’s hard to throw a big bash like that. And the whole “too old” thing comes into play, especially since I don’t drink anymore, and it actually took some effort to stay up till midnight last night.

I considered typing up some huge year-in-review meme and decided not to. I really don’t give a shit about what happened this year outside my life, and it seems like most preassembled sets of questions seem to require me giving a shit about the hurricanes or Tom Delay or whatever else, and I honestly don’t. I had a good year in the sense that I met Sarah, and moved out of Astoria, and finally got out of the country on vacation (Canada doesn’t count). I got to Hawaii again, and I got some new states checked off of my list (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island.) I got the next issue of the zine out, which was good. Nobody bought it, which isn’t.

I really don’t feel like I got much done as far as writing this last year. I barely wrote in here (50,000 words compared to 2004’s 80,000), and a lot of that has to do with my own neuroses about what a blog should be and what I should put out there for people to read and all of that shit. Part of it is also just apathy. I didn’t write much in my paper journal, either. And other than the production of the zine, I didn’t really get any work done on any large projects. I think I cycled between six and eight ideas, all somewhat bad, and did little work in any of them. I don’t set new year resolutions, but if I did, it would be to get my shit straight on all of that, pick a project, and get some work done on it. I don’t even give a shit about the whole selling and finding a market and all of the other stuff that other so-called authors get stuck on. I just want to find a project and WRITE and get words on paper and come up with something that rivals the other two books in length, depth, complexity, etc. I have a bunch of ideas for scraping together various crap and stories and journals and photos and putting them into books that nobody will buy, but I’m so tired of the fact that all of those are the equivalent to “greatest hits” packages, and I need to move on to something new.

Add to that the usual resolutions, like getting in shape, paying off debt, etc. I also want to focus a lot more on completely ignoring politics, which will be important with the elections in the coming year. I’m also trying to read more this year, and maybe I should help enforce that by writing more book reviews and stuff. I have a huge stack of books from Christmas that I need to get through, so that should keep me busy.

We have a nice, three-day weekend, so today’s a day for lounging around. We also got started with zipcar, and tomorrow we are taking the afternoon to drive to New Jersey and go to the mall and to Target and just to get the hell out of the city for a day. I know there’s a common perception that Jersey is horrible, but after being cooped up on this little island for the last month or two, going out there is like panacea. So, happy new year and all of that stuff. I’m going to go read for a while.

Xanadu House and 80s nostalgia

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I sometimes have this weird nostalgia that’s much more complicated than just “remember the 80s,” but rather a deep nostalgia for what I saw as cutting edge or a glimpse of the future way back when. It’s hard to explain, but it’s that weird feeling I had twenty years ago when I looked at some futuristic computer or technology, and I had this premonition that in the year 2000, this would be “it.” And the feeling is stronger when there are a lot of other interconnected memories or feelings about it. And the other day, this totally happened in a way that is easily explained, but probably still doesn’t capture what the fuck I’m rambling on about.

Okay, Wikipedia had a featured article the other day about The Xanadu House. No, it has nothing to do with Olivia Newton-John or the Rush song from Farewell to Kings. It was a series of three houses built as demo/museum units by the architect as a showcase to “the home of tomorrow.” They were made of sprayed polyurethane foam and looked something like Yoda’s house or maybe something a Hobbit would live in. They were a very 70s-looking design, and I could totally see something like them in a Roger Dean-airbrushed Yes double gatefold album cover, or maybe done up on the side of a van with a wizard shooting lightning bolts that lit up along with the 8-track player.

Okay, the outside did look pretty borderline artschool-project, but the inside was the interesting stuff. There were computers everywhere: controlling the lights, monitoring the bitchin’ hot tub, cooking your food; measuring your calories and watching your weight; integrated into the Elvis-like wall of TVs, one tuned to each station (total: 3); and everywhere else. The house was a full-on wet dream of automation. Now you see why I was somewhat pulled into reading all about this house and scouring the web for more info. I’ve still got this land out in Colorado with nothing but cacti and prarie dogs on it, and the idea of building some huge, fucked up, unconventional structure like a geodesic dome or a decommissioned jet airliner or a giant tube made out of a million egg cartons and some nuclear-proof epoxy solution is pretty appealing. Add to that a slew of computers that I don’t really need and that’s damn near what-I’d-do-if-I-hit-the-Lotto material for me.

But as I dove deeper, I found a lot of threads that pulled me back to when they got this house built down in Florida, in 1983. These computers back in the day weren’t a bunch of IBM blade servers or anything; turns out the builders were using a slew of good old Commodore 64s in the styrofoam innards of this dream palace. The TVs weren’t giant plasmas like Bill Gates would have, but rather the old-school, silver, two-knob not-so-flat CRT sets like you’d find at your Aunt Barbara’s rec room back in ‘80. The online shopping system wired into the food-processor kitchen used a 12” analog laserdisc for its info. The “home gym” consists of the same non-resistance exercise bike your parents bought back in ‘78 and used as a clothes rack for ten years before unloading it at a yard sale. This wasn’t a Jetsons home as much as it was my Christmas list from 1983.

And that’s when this unfamiliar house became a home I knew, at least in proxy, for some weird reason. I was IN Florida, in Orlando, in 1983. My parents loaded us up in the station wagon and drove south a thousand miles, first to Tampa, and then to the Disney kingdom. And we didn’t go to the Xanadu house, but it looks a lot like the kind of place we would have stopped. We hit a lot of roadside attractions that trip, and a lot of the gift shops and historical viewpoints, from Tarpon Springs to the Atlantic coast, had the same tacky yet “futuristic” sign that graced the front of the Xanadu house. Everything about the old pictures, the way they were framed, the style of the furniture, just rubs some weird brain cell deep in my head that makes me think of a million memories that have nothing to do with this house and everything to do with my own life.

For example, I remember, again on the trip, going to a Showbiz pizza with my family. For those who don’t remember, Showbiz was similar to Chuck E. Cheese, the pizza parlor where you bring the rugrats for birthdays and parties. But back in the day, Showbiz was very oriented toward arcade games, and had a fuckload of consoles, including duplicates of many popular games. And at that time, the big deal were laserdisc-based games like Dragon’s Lair. Nobody seems to remember this particular fad, but these machines had a big giant laser disc player in them, and when you jerked around the joystick, different scenes from this Disney-eque cartoon would play. The game totally sucked from a playability standpoint, but everyone was too busy circle-jerking over the fact that the output was basically like DVD-quality animation and sound, and this was at a time when most arcade heroes were 16 by 16 pixel sprites. I remember staring at people playing these games in amazement, thinking this was the future of arcade games. Of course, the future was that nobody wanted to pay 50 cents per game (this was one of the first two-coin titles), the laser players crapped out and took forever to load, and in another year, the entire coin-op arcade game industry would take a crap and completely implode, meaning nobody would be too interested in the progress of games for another five years. (About when Nintendo started slapping NES guts into consoles and charging people to play games on a console you could just buy and play at home on a TV - that is if you could find a NES, which you couldn’t, because Nintendo was in the middle of a price-fixing, fake-supply-problem war.)

And I went to Epcot on that trip, which was right when it opened and they had a lot of cool displays about the future and how science would win everything. (They’ve long since ripped all of this shit out and replaced it with “Bob the Builder’s Why Every Kid Should Buy More of My Garbage” exhibits.) And the exhibit showed electronic cars that we’d all drive to work in 1997, and ways to raise more food for the world through hydroponic greenhouses we’d all use when we went to Mars, and so on. Epcot was originally going to be a huge experiment in sustainable living, but when Disney realized there was no money in that, they had GE, GM, and AT&T drop these huge advertisements for life in the future. And the same thing is, in 1983, it all seemed so fucking feasible that in 20 years we’d all have video phones and TVs with smellovision and pod cars, and I remember that view of the future so vividly. And now that future is in the past, and none of it happened. I used to read in Compute magazine about how, maybe if we all tried hard, cars might have a single microprocessor in them, and it would be so cool to get so much blazing power out of an 8-bit 6510 wired into our engine. And now, I’ve got at least twenty processors sitting on my desk, in my watch, in my camera, in my mouse, and none of them are doing anything remotely as interesting as what I thought they would be. I have ten times the computing power of that Xanadu house sitting in the battery charger to my camera, and none of it is being used to automatically cook my food or turn on the jaccuzi when I get home from work. And that’s sad, in a way.

The house has a much more sad ending, though. It ran as a museum until the ’90s, then sat vacant, as Florida mold consumed the sterile white interior. Squatters broke in and tore up the interior, and eventually, last year, the owners bulldozed the place, and plan on putting in a condo on the land. There are a lot of pictures on line of the interior in disrepair, and then the dozer taking out the foam walls. Very sad stuff.

Anyway, I forgot what my point is, other than to somehow describe that feeling I get when I look at an old Amiga or something. I remember the summer of 85 when all of the computer magazines were abuzz about that thing like all of the glamour mags are currently abuzz about the Jessica Simpson divorce or something. I mowed lawns and babysat and applied at every McDonald’s and Hardees within 10-speed distance of my house to scrape up money for that A-1000, and never made it. Just looking at the magazine pictures was like a view into the future of computing, something that could draw multiple windows and 4096 simultaneous colors! Looking back at the old beige-platinum machines, I imagine this massive future, but then I realize that my old Palm Pilot is probably faster and with a better screen.

Ah well, enough rambling. I’m still reading this Neil Armstrong book and it’s going to take me forever to finish. Better invest some more time into it…

Log analysis is masturbation

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I thought I’d start with some year-end statistics and bookkeeping, since I thought it would be a good time for answering the question “How many people read this thing, anyway?” So I downloaded all of my logs to my home machine, and used the handy grep, cut and wc commands to crunch away on the raw logs. But before we start, a few disclaimers.

Disclaimer #1: I did not “wash” these logs to remove search engine crawling in any way. I’m sure there are nice tools to do this, but I’m doing this in the most rudimentary way. And just from looking at raw logs, there are a fuck of a lot of search engines out there hitting web sites. If someone told me that 50% of all web traffic was currently web crawlers, I would not be surprised. And even though Google and their huge image-crawling project are the cause for much of the traffic, everyone and their brother is running a web crawler. Jabronis in garages running searches to find email addresses for spam operations are all over my logs, with malformed headers and IDs to try to protect their get-rich-quick operations. Oh, and they’re doing it with the bandwidth I pay for, which is even more heartwarming.

Disclaimer #2: I’m not using a log analysis program. There are hundreds of programs out there, and 99% of the web is using Analog, one of the least interesting of the bunch. Why? Try to get any of the others to work and you’ll find out. If your ISP has some neato package to generate reports on how long people view your pages and stuff like that, great. I’d rather pay for an ISP that’s always working and won’t be shut down in a year when the owner goes to college. So anyway, my stats are based on just raw searches and counting of logs, and nothing fluffier.

Disclaimer #3: Of course, hits include both people who read every word of a page and enjoy it, and people who typed “butt sex” in google and somehow ended up at my page and didn’t read one damn thing when they saw there were no free videos.

Okay. In 2005, 34.216.9.77/ had 1,508,132 hits total. In comparison, there were 86,022 hits in 2004, and 53,972 in 2003. That’s about double from last year. There was a similar trend on just the people that came to any of the URLs south of 34.216.9.77/journal (I.e the page you’re currently reading.) 2005’s total hits were 153,586, while 2004 was 86,022 and 2003 was 53,972, which is close to the same trend.

What about unique users? Overall, the entire site had 55,044 in 2005, compared to 44,917 in 2004, and 40,592 in 2003. (I calculated a unique user as a unique IP number or hostname in the logs. I realize that the same person could read both at home and at work and be counted twice; but then many people reading behind a firewall or NAT appliance or whatever could all be considered one visitor, too.) That means that in 2005, the average person read just over 27 pages. Of course, when you factor in all of the people who googled over to my page hoping to download some free Metallica MP3s and only read one page, it balances out with those of you who read all of my entries.

As far as the unique visitors on the journal page, there were 7008 in 2005, which is down from 2004 at 8612 and up from 2003’s 6994. I don’t know why there was a drop, although it’s possible that all of the press I got about Adam Gadahn in 2004 bumped up the number, plus I didn’t write as much in 2005. (56 entries in 2005 versus 91 in 2004.)

So those are the numbers. 7008 readers (minus the search engines and people looking for free porn) is orders of magnitude higher than I would expect, based on the comments and the fact that I really don’t know that many people that read this thing. I don’t advertise; I am not in any weird web rings or communities or whatever; I don’t really socialize with bloggers (I don’t even consider this thing a blog to begin with) and I don’t really whore things out as far as links and whatnot. I did blogexplosion briefly, and go there when I’m eternally bored, but most of the blogs there are either mommy blogs or are so hopelessly useless because they’re nothing but political repostings of day-old news.

I’m happy with the numbers only in that this isn’t my life. It’s a side project, something I do when I can’t write and I don’t have other things to do, and the main reason I do this is so that in five years, I will be able to go back and read this and enjoy it. My guilty pleasure is to go back a few years and read my old entries, and I really love it when I hit stuff I’ve almost totally forgotten and I love the old writing. I put out a book of the first three years of the journals, and it sold about 6 copies, but I admit one of the reasons I did it was to have a paper copy I could read in bed. I still waver back and forth on whether or not I should do a second volume, and maybe throw in some pictures or scans of paper journals or something just to make it interesting. Maybe I will. Who knows.

In other news, I finished reading First Man, James Hansen’s authorized biography of astronaut Neil Armstrong, and I really did enjoy it. Armstrong kept out of the public light for years, hoping he wouldn’t get mauled by the media like his hero and friend Charles Lindberg. For years, there’s been little information about his life, and various second-hand info from other NASA colleagues about the lunar mission. This is a huge book (almost 800 pages) but it was very rewarding as far as how Neil grew up in rural Ohio, went to school at Purdue, joined the Navy and flew jets from carriers in Korea, and became a test pilot before getting tapped for the astronaut job.

I think a lot of the reason I liked the book is that Armstrong was so different than other astronauts or test pilots. He was all about the science behind the mission, and he loved the engineering aspect. Strapping into an X-15 rocket plane and flying to the edge of the atmosphere wasn’t about the joyride, or the “extreme” aspect of the mission; it was totally about gathering the data to prove or disprove the theorems that the guys with the sliderules were throwing down in the labs. Armstrong probably could have been elected king of the world in 1969, but he was always shy about politics, and though it was best to not discuss one’s political views, as has become the national sport in the 21st century. He was greatly honored to meet both LBJ and Nixon, but not because they were the highest red or blue, but because they were in charge, and you honor the office over the person. He was from a very religious family, and certainly was religious, but he said so little about it, people accused him of being an atheist. Instead of becoming a token president of a fortune 500 company, like some of his other Apollo buddies, he taught undergrad physics at a small university. He could have just had his name put on the door of a big university, so he could do nothing or maybe dabble in research. Instead, he wanted to go somewhere that would let him teach, because he thought furthering kids’ educations was more important. It’s all of those little things that make him so much more interesting to me, and now that I got a full dose of the official story, I’m happy. (But, Neil’s crewmate Michael Collins’, autobiography still stands as the best I’ve read sofar.)

Quiet Saturday here. In a week and a couple of days, we go to Vegas for the annual birthday celebration, and I can’t wait to get out of town. Until then, I’m taking it easy…

Hardcover SR

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

First things first: A hardcover version of Summer Rain is now available from lulu.com. It’s the same size and same text as the second edition book I published with Lulu, but instead of perfectbound paperback, it’s bound in navy blue linen with gold foil spine printing and a full color jacket. It costs more ($25.99) and it will cost more to ship because it weighs more, but it’s a real hardcover book, and I’m very excited about that. Go to lulu.com/jkonrath to purchase it or any of my other books on Lulu. I don’t expect anyone to actually buy this, but I had the option, and I wanted one for my bookcase.

Speaking of which, I have decided to publish a second book of journals. I know nobody bought the first one when it came out, and maybe nobody will buy this one either. But I don’t really write books to make money, and I really wanted a new book on the Konrath shelf of the home library. So I pulled together all of the HTML from the 2000-2005 journals, threw it into FrameMaker, and started down the hellish path of trying to edit things together.

Most of the initial problems involve stripping off HTML for scripts and tops and bottoms of pages, and turning headings in HTML into headings in Frame, and all of that garbage. FrameMaker doesn’t have a smooth way to import HTML, believe it or not, and that makes a lot of work. It also totally fucks things up, like making individual lines into paragraphs, which require monumental amounts of repetitive labor in stripping things down and applying the right styles.

Once I got the text into the book, I had about 1200 pages. That’s not really accurate, because I still had scripts and markup and junk, and pages weren’t flowing right, and paragraphs were all fucked up. While formatting, I dropped a few entries that were either short, or repeats, or pasted in stories that I didn’t want in the book, or whatever else. By 9:00 or so last night, I had it down to 676 pages. This is still with a third of it still jagged and fucked up, and without even a first pass on actually dropping or combining or editing down some of the entries.

The basic idea though is to keep the book about this long. I don’t intend to chop everything down into a 180-page “best of”. One of the things about my journal is that it’s been around a long time, and there’s a lot of old entries back there. I think there are about a half-million words from 1997 to present, and it’s not all a bunch of timely and now useless info, like memes and political garbage, which would now be completely outdated. One thing that digging through the old entries has made me realize is that a lot of it is still very readable, and very interesting. Well, maybe not everyone would enjoy it, but I still find it entertaining to go back to old entries. And that’s why I want to make the book.

So that’s the current project. It doesn’t have a name, and it needs a lot of editing work, but it’s keeping me busy.

Book meandering

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

It’s Monday, but it’s a bank holiday, and I have the day off, so life is good. And in about two hours, we will get in a car for LGA and fly west to Las Vegas for a week, and I will again celebrate my birthday (Friday, the 20th) in the land of gambling, no open container laws, and all-you-can eat buffets. I actually don’t know where we’re staying, and it is a complete surprise that will be revealed to me when we actually drive up to the hotel for check-in. So that should be interesting.

The second journal book has already lost steam and been but aside for now. I still want to do it eventually, but I’m just not in the mood to slog through it right now. I’m trying instead to get back on another project I’ve been messing with for a year or two, which is basically a heavy metal version of John Sheppard’s book Small Town Punk (which is getting re-released on IG this year.) Maybe that isn’t a good comparison, but I want to write something about growing up in the late-eighties in Elkhart, Indiana, which was such a beat area where people could never escape and everyone was at the mercy of these huge manufacturing plants that paid okay money for menial labor, but basically killed you in the long-term. And because the whole thing revolved around the economy, and the economy was shit back then, you had mass layoffs and strikes and mandatory overtime and cutting corners on safety and everything else.

And as a 17-year-old kid, I didn’t fully appreciate that situation, but what I did see were the side effects. Kids with one parent who worked 60 hours a week at a trailer factory ended up becoming burnouts, and the people who had a daddy that was an executive vice president of some RV place had the rich lifestyle and basically lived like those executives at Enron who fucked everyone over. And the whole city looked like shit, except for the gated communities, and everyone latched onto whatever fad or abusable substance or religion would promise them a moment of feeling appreciated.

Of course, the book is not about that, but mostly about a kid trying to get laid, and listening to every Metallica album constantly. And it’s not autobiographical. I think I always said that Summer Rain was 80% true, and I think this book will be closer to 30-40%. Many of the main characters are composites, and will have to have big parts of their lives altered to fit the timeline and story. Part of that is that the book has to contain a certain amount of sex, drugs, and alcohol, and none of my friends back then were getting much of any of those, and I wasn’t either. Plus I’m finding it impossible to write about real people anymore without pissing someone off because I’m not 100% glowing about them. The characters need to be real people who fuck up and do stupid things, or it won’t be a good book, so I’m diving more into the fictional realm to do this. But the setting of Elkhart will be there, in full hilbilly glory.

Not much else is going on here. I got one of those Newertech drive enclosures for the Mac Mini and it’s pretty awesome. It looks just like the mac case and sits under there, and has Firewire and USB hubs on the back, plus a 160 GB drive inside. I haven’t had time to start filling it, but what’s also neat is that it has some stuff on it already, like shareware and a bunch of Apple commercials and episodes of The ScreenSavers in QuickTime.

I didn’t leave the house all weekend, which was neat. In fact, I don’t even think I put on shoes once, except to go downstairs and pick up laundry one time. We watched a lot of movies and basically sat around, since we’re going to be running around all week and eating too much and spending lots of cash. We watched a lot of movies, mostly. Meet The Fockers was okay, and The Ali G Show was absolutely hilarious. I also got an Amazon gift certificate and plowed through that last night, mostly ordering house books on wind energy and underground houses and stuff like that. I’ll have a whole pile of stuff waiting for me when we get back.

Okay, wish me luck!

Vegas halftime report

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Here’s a quick halftime report of the Vegas trip, thanks to the wonder of in-room ethernet. We’re staying at the Bellagio, which is pretty damn awesome. (See also Ocean’s 11, the remake version with Clooney and Pitt, although we don’t have the ultra-suite shown in the film.) Our suite looks east aka toward the strip, and every time the fountains go off, we see them launch water in the air. Luckily, the room’s got the blackout drapes, and they’re even operated via remote control motors with buttons by the nightstand.

Things have been good and we’ve mostly ate too much and gambled only a touch. We have a car, so we went out to the Liberace museum, which was pretty interesting, especially the cars. Today we went to the Atomic Test museum, which is not a giant hole in the ground, but rather a big new museum a few miles off the strip, which houses a ton of memorabilia about the testing done out at NTS back in the day. Unfortunately, no photography at either, but I have a lot of other good snapshots to upload when I get back.

Food has included the Bouchon, Thomas Keller’s restaurant at the Venetian (pretty damn good, but I’m finding I don’t like French food as much as I probably should); the buffet at the new Wynn casino (pretty much the best you could imagine); the breakfast at Denny’s (I can’t really stomach it anymore); lunch at In-n-Out (one of the best burgers out there, but the fries aren’t a+ material, even if fresh); another lunch at Pink Taco (despite the name, one of my favorite Amerimexican places); a late-night dinner at the Bellagio cafe (excellent); and room service breakfast at the hotel (the best $17 breakfast burrito you can find).

And I finally rode the monorail! Somewhat useless, but very nice. Also drove south to a huge outlet mall in the middle of nowhere, and did a lot of other wandering. None of our other co-vacationers are here until tomorrow night, and then the fun begins. Me and Bill turn 35 on Friday, and there are no plans yet, but we’ll see what happens.

Everything is under construction here, BTW. Every crappy strip mall that sold phone cards and junk t-shirts is getting bulldozed for a new condo development. The look of Vegas will be very weird in a couple of years. For now, it’s all about the home-builder’s convention, and every masonry contractor in middle america is here with their wife and/or girlfriend for the weekend. Nifty.

Still jetlagged, so even though the watch says 11, the mind says 2 AM, and I must collapse.

back from vegas

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I’m back. I was going to write a whole story, but then I remembered what a waste of time that is. And yes, about half of the pictures are blurry - this camera I bought last year is a total piece of shit and simply will not focus correctly when you are in a situation any lower light than, say, the surface of the sun.

There’s not much more of an update than that, especially since we got in late last night and everything is still in a state of confusion and still-packededness. I also have a huge stack of books that arrived while I was gone, and I want to read all of them. I also have two seasons of Seinfeld on DVD that won’t even get their shrinkwrap cracked until mid-June. And dinner’s on the way. So I best get to it…

Loompanics RIP

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

As I’ve said before, if I’m not updating here, it means I’m busy writing on a real project. And I have been picking at something for a little while, and making okay progress. I’m still at the beginning though, and too scared to jinx it to mention anything about it. The best explanation to this phase of the writing would have to do with the metaphor about swimming across a mile-wide lake. If you swim out a hundred feet, it’s pretty easy to turn back and swim another hundred feet and then go home. If you swim out a thousand feet, it takes some work to quit and go home. If you’re out three or four thousand feet, you might as well just finish. I need to get down a solid layer of wordcount on this before I even make any decisions on what stays and what goes and how the plot will unfold. I have become the king of false starts in the last few years, and I really need to stick with this one and keep it going, until it’s to a length where I figure I can’t put it down and quit anymore. When Summer Rain was a bad first draft and I gave it up to work on my second book, I eventually had to come back to it and start the next draft, because I invested 80,000 words into it.

(That’s probably not a great metaphor, because I can’t swim.)

Speaking of Summer Rain, I got the hardcover, and it is pretty amazing. I love that it’s done with a color jacket and the actual book has gold lettering on a cloth binding. Very classy. I know nobody else will give a shit to buy one, but I’m glad to have it on the shelf, with the others.

And speaking of buying books, Loompanics is going out of business! For those not in the know, they are (were) the big one-stop catalog for all of your paranormal, fake ID, lockpicking, drug, sex, and spying book needs, many of which you can’t find in stores. They used to put out a great zine-like catalog, and I could just read the catalog itself for hours, poring over all of the strange books they sold. They were located in the Pacific Northwest (Port Townsend, WA - a bit north of Seattle) and I first got their catalog from a zine show or the book fair or something about ten years ago. They’re the kind of store where I would put in a mega-order for a half-dozen book every once in a while when a bonus or tax check came in. Anyway, they are closing shop, and are running a 50% off all stock sale. I placed my order, and I hope I get at least some of it before everything runs out.

I’m still reading as much as I can, as I work on this new book. John Sheppard’s Small Town Punk is currently going - the original version, not the new-and-(un)improved IG Press version which will come out in the future.

Okay, back to work…

Moving houses

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Damn, my Loompanics order got here fast. I thought the whole going out of business thing meant they would take forever to fill the order, and 87% of the books would be gone already, but everything I ordered showed up in about four days. I was home sick on Friday, and spent the day going in and out of nap-state on the couch while reading a book about a guy who homesteads in the desert in a little house he built for about $300. Pretty crazy, but interesting. (And no, I can’t do this on my land - we actually have zoning that explicitly prohibits this sort of thing.)

Another book I got that I was flipping through last night talks about the ins and outs of buying houses and then moving them. It’s a pretty interesting book, because I’ve always had some fascination with that process. When I was a teenager, the US-20 bypass got built, just a short distance north of our subdivision. Where it crossed, there lay a different, slightly older division of homes, and they were all bought by the government at fair market value and the owners given the boot. Most of these were fairly new ranch-style homes, maybe ten years old or so, and after The Man got the land, they auctioned off the structures for a pittance. In the year or two following, I saw a lot of homes being hoisted onto steel frames and pulled by huge trucks to their new locations. I remember one time, riding my bike to the Concord Mall, I started down a hill on Sunnyside Drive, and as I gained speed and popped over the crest, I saw a giant house blocking the whole road! That’s a pretty unusual sight to behold. They put in the house on that land, and from what I remember, they either added a smaller house to make it an L-shape and grafted the two together, or maybe they just built the new wing from scratch. Anyway, the fact that they bought these houses for hundreds of dollars (if that) and then installed them to make a house costing maybe $50K more is pretty enticing.

The author of this book talks about people bidding on houses that are being struck out to expand airports and ending up with $100K homes for something like $25. Of course, you have to pay to move it, but depending on how far you go, that could cost you only five or ten thousand dollars. You hire a mover, and they pop the house off the foundation with jacks and mount it to steel girder framing to keep it from twisting or buckling. They’re also going to do the other dirty work, like sever that electrical and wiring junk, and deal with any outcroppings, porches, decks, garages, verandas, or other pieces that are going to worm lose during the whole trip. They talk to the local PO about traffic, and maybe work around any power lines or other problems on the route. Then the whole thing goes mobile, and they prop the house up on the new site with a shitload of huge oak timbers.

Depending on if your movers are just taking you point-to-point or if they are a turnkey place, the movers will either take their money and run, or they’ll do the next step for you. The next step involves basically building a foundation under the house that’s now hanging in the air. Maybe you were able to dig a basement and pour footers and walls, in which case you’ve got a nice sill on which to drop the bitch and start wiring and picking paint for the living room. Or maybe not, in which case you do your digging and concrete work while the house sits above you. You then have to go through every system of the house (wiring, HVAC, plumbing) and get it all up to code, which might take some work if you’ve just moved a 200-year-old plantation house or something.

And despite what people thing, moved houses are not fundamentally weaker than new houses. I know that misconception sounds like it would have to be true, but for whatever reason (probably the fact that they have to jack all of the house to the right level and build a new foundation around it), the new houses are often stronger. And they don’t buckle or bend as much as you think, because of that steel below it.

I wish the Alamosa airport got some huge grant to expand and put the nix on a bunch of houses so I could buy one. I’m guessing with all of the crazy homesteaders out there though, it would cost a lot more than it would if I lived in Elkhart. (Not that I’d want to live in Elkhart…)

In unrelated news, I got a Nikon Coolscan V ED film scanner, and I’ve been pulling in a bunch of my 35mm negatives. It works well, although it’s slower than fuck. Also, I cannot find some of my negatives, which I thought were all in one place. I don’t feel like digging around for them though - I have enough to keep me busy until summer. Also, my mom has a warchest of old slides, containing a lot of my baby pictures and other early stuff. She’s going to ship those off so I can restore them and get them onto CD, hopefully.

Still writing. Still not talking about what I’m writing. It’s getting near the 50K word mark though.

Scanning

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I am scanning photos endlessly. I’ve got a lot of 93 and 94 done, and a good deal of my Trip East in 99. I’m mostly scanning with no regard to how I’ll get shit in iPhoto or ordered up yet, but I’ll eventually be adding stuff to my photos page. For now, you can go and look at these pics from my 1994 trip to Knoxville with Larry. I also got a shitload of slides from my mom from 1970-1973, so lots of pictures of me naked in a bathtub. Scanning slides is a major pain in the ass; at least with film, I can load in a strip of 4 and go away for 20 minutes. With slides, I have to constantly reload. I wish this thing would let me load up one of those Kodak carousels and leave it for a day or two.

Not much else to report. Gotta go change slides.

Snowed in

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT

We’re snowed in. I think it snowed like two feet in the last 24 hours, which doesn’t mean much, since I’m sure the subways are running. I haven’t left the house all day, so it’s been nice to watch the total wall of white swirling outside the window. It won’t be as nice tomorrow morning when I need to hike through it to get to work.

I’m still scanning slides, although the worst of it is probably over. I have maybe 60 more to do, but I’ve stopped for now. It’s very strange to take a look back at my very early history. It’s amazing to see all of my relatives who are now gone, and see my other relatives in a much thinner version, with full heads of hair and skin still tightly affixed to body. Seeing my parents in their mid-twenties, dressed in bad 70s fashion, is also a trip. I also enjoy getting a look at the little house in Edwardsburg, Michigan where I spent my early childhood, until 1978. It was a total dump, a cinderblock square with a roof and a very rough interior that my parents managed to buy for something like ten grand. But they spent a lot of time and a lot of spare marked-down, leftover building supplies adding onto it, painting things and enclosing a porch, and putting in new windows. I never thought about any of this as a kid, since I didn’t know any better. I thought everyone had a bathroom vanity made out of spare lumber and a set of living room furniture that came straight from a garage sale. It’s interesting to look back and think about how rough things were when my parents were starting out, and then look at how easy I have it here.

Speaking of old school, I read John McNally’s The Book of Ralph and greatly enjoyed it. It’s yet another one of those coming-of-age, back-in-the-day, I-was-a-childhood-loser sort of books, but it’s done with a real charm and finesse. It’s basically about a kid named Hank who reluctantly hangs out with this guy Ralph, who has flunked two grades and is basically a real version of Nelson from The Simpsons, except with much more hilarious lines. It reminded me a lot of Joe Meno’s Hairstyles of the Damned, and oddly enough, it takes place in about the same neighborhood, so there are some common landmarks. McNally really developed some characters that were the same exact ones you went to school with, or the dad character which is either exactly like your dad, or you had a friend with a dad just like him. But once he got the base of common events and characters, he punched it up with the greatly uncommon and insane that made it a great read.

I’m still chipping away at the next book, which is now above 50,000 words, of mostly just notes and observations, and little finished writing. At the very low end, I’d like to scrape by with 100,000 words and call it a day. An average guess is to have three books of 50,000 words for a total of 150k. The pie-in-the-sky goal is to write another book like Summer Rain, which was just over 220,000 words. Anyway, the book is underway, and is going good.

I forget what else. I should clean up the millions of slides all over my desk.

Knee

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT

For the last week, I’ve been a bit of a cripple. I seem to have injured my right knee in some way, but I don’t really have a good story to go with the injury. Basically, a week ago, I was really asleep, and I somehow flipped onto my side, but my legs did not fully twist around or something, and I slept a couple more hours with the right leg pinned in some odd position. I woke up with a bad pain and a bit of a limp. This progressed through the week, until I ended up on a cane and really fighting to walk. I woke up Saturday morning at about four in the morning, in total pain and unable to find any sleeping position that let my leg go to a neutral and pain-free state, and decided I needed some professional help. I went to a clinic first thing Saturday morning, only to find their x-ray guy was out. A doctor looked at it, said “yeah, it’s messed up” and told me to come back on Tuesday (damn holiday weekend) to see an ortho and get it worked up. The only good news is I got a script for Tylenol-3, and codeine is my pal.

The weekend has been extremely boring, except for the parts when I’m on the T-3 full-force, which is pretty decent. But I’ve done nothing except watch TV and DVDs nonstop. I haven’t been able to read much, and writing is out of the question. I have found a comfortable combination of pillows and supports to keep the leg in a good position, and I’ve found ice packs on a constant basis help a hell of a lot. (Luckily we have a fridge with an ice machine.) I still don’t entirely know what is wrong with the knee, but I’m 90% certain the doctor will waste my day and then say “soft tissue damage. keep icing it.” In a perfect world, the doctor would shoot some kind of steroid into a tendon and all would be well. We’ll see.

Nothing else to report. I think the most interesting thing that has happened to me lately is I caught about half of Back to the Future II this afternoon…

Knee Update 2

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Knee update 2: my knee has been getting better slowly, but has still been pretty dicey, so I skipped work yesterday and went to an orthopedic surgeon. He took some x-rays, which I don’t understand much, because they looked just like white insides of knee, and I couldn’t see tendons, ligaments, or shit. But I realize there is a science to reading the subtle shades and fogging and whatnot, so that’s why he’s the doctor and I’m not.

My knee was pretty swelled up, so he offered to remove some fluid. If you’re eating, stop reading this. Seriously. Okay, he got out this giant thing that looked like one of those Ronco Flavor Infusers they sell on TV, for shooting spices and fat inside a pork chop or chicken cutlet. It looked a couple of inches around, and about six deep, so I’m guessing it could hold a good six ounces of fluid. And the business end of it looked like one of the nails you’d use when framing a house, but hollow. First, I put on some roomy disposable hospital blue shorts, which looked like something Urkel would wear to the beach. Then he hit me up with a spray bottle of some kind of super-refrigerant stuff that froze my knee in about two seconds. Then, the prick.

Now, I’m no stranger to needles. As a kid, I had allergy tests, which involved making my back look like that Pinhead guy in the Hellraiser movies. I also got the shots, sometimes as many as four or six skin injections a week. I’m also a frequent flier at the dentist, who admires my ability to take a gram or two of liquid novacaine without flinching. I’ve also had liquid cortizone injections in my big toes to treat gout. That involved getting a smaller novacaine shot first, and then the big horse needle, which the doctor had to drive INTO THE MIDDLE of the joint of a toe that was so inflamed I could not walk, and then when he got it there, he would WIGGLE IT AROUND to distribute the steroid as he pumped it in. So this should be a walk in the park, right?

Wrong.

The guy jabs in the needle in the side of my kneecap, which is pretty tender from being messed up all week, but is also pretty numb from the spray. I could really feel the needle going in. And staying in. And he pulled back the syringe like he was pulling gravy out of the pan to baste an extra-large turkey, and I’m wondering, “when the fuck is my knee going to stop exuding fluid?” And then he GRABS MY KNEECAP AND STARTS MOVING IT AND FUCKING AROUND WITH IT TO GET MORE FLUID OUT.

And then it’s done. And he shows me this giant baster, which contains about three ounces of fluid that’s roughly the color of a hot and sour soup from a Chinese restaurant. Now, I’ve seen some weird shit in the health arena. I’ve seen a video feed of the inside of my intestine. I’ve seen an x-ray video in real-time of me swallowing. I’ve seen a nail go through my hand. I’ve seen a dentist show me my wisdom tooth pulled out in about four pieces. But seeing a bunch of joint fluid that was just in my knee, well that’s a new one.

The knee felt a lot better, and he gave me a new brace to wear that’s pretty hardcore and much more comfortable than the $10 piece of shit I bought at Rite Aid. But there was no real diagnosis yet, awaiting an MRI, which was my big adventure today.

Okay, so I had a 7:30 AM MRI. Yes, in the morning. It was either that, or hobble around for another week, waiting on this shit, so I woke up early and got it over with. The place was on 42nd and 11th, which is sort of Hell’s Kitchen, or at least far enough from Times Square that it isn’t Times Square, and it’s a bitch to catch a cab. So I got over there 10 minutes early, and it turns out some other fucker is running like 40 minutes late, and he keeps moving during his MRI, and I could have slept another hour. Great.

For those of you not up on your medical imaging technology, and MRI is something that uses colossal amounts of magnetic energy to basically determine the atomic makeup of cells and water in your body, which is fed to a computer that then produces an incredibly detailed image of the target in question. It looks like the dream implant machines in Total Recall, except even more Sci-Fi and Philip Dick-ian. There’s no radiation, but if you have any metal in your body, like a pacemaker or something, it could become a fatal projectile.

The other problem with an MRI is that you have to be completely still, and it can take like 45 minutes to get a scan. I didn’t know this; I thought it was like an x-ray where you got in there, click, and that’s it. Unfortunately, this meant I had to stand in it for 45 minutes, which sucked. It also meant I had to watch 45 minutes of Olympics coverage, and I absolutely hate the Olympics. I hate the trivial bullshit morning coverage even more, the kind of shit where they go to see where the athletes shop and whip up recipies of Italian food, like we give a fuck. Anyway, the machine looked very cool. It was one of the stand-up MRIs, which looks like this. You stand up, and then a tray tilts you back, but it’s more open-air than the old tube style ones. So I sat in that for 45 minutes, wondering if I was moving or not, since my whole leg was stiffening up, and then it was done, and I went to work.

So bottom line is, the knee continues to get better. I can pretty much walk with no cane, but I used it today anyway. I go back tomorrow to find out the news on the MRI, and I’m not saying anything definitive until then, but I think it’s going to be okay in a few more days or a week or something.

Not much else is up. I got a new load of books to read (right after spending four days in bed with nothing to read, of course.) Oh, and John Sheppard has set up Smalltownpunk.com for his upcoming book (re)release, so go check that out.

Knee update #863

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Knee update #863: the MRI preliminary results are back, and it is a sprain of the MCL (the ligament, not the shitty cafeteria restaurant in the mall.) So, no surgery, no cortizone, no complications, and I just need to keep it in the brace for a bit and it will slowly get better. I am pretty much off the cane now, although I used it today. No real pain. There’s still some swelling and fluid buildup, but that will go away. If it doesn’t subside in a week or so, I can go back for another draining. And in a month, maybe some physical therapy to strengthen things back up. Otherwise, no further drama, and it’s pretty much back to business as usual.

I had to make a couple of quick edits in the glossary, and it got me thinking maybe I should do some more, or at least add all of the half-written additions I have in the queue. I also may have some new photos to add. All of this makes me go back to my original, four-year-old plan to wrap it up into a print book. I have another project going now, but it’s slowly stalling and maybe I should go back. I don’t know. I mentioned over in livejournal that the IDS actually quoted me on something in an article recently, which I guess shows that there’s something good going on there. (Or it proves that stuff comes up in google, and someone needed a quick source.) Anyway, something to think about.

I got a new watch, because the Casio one I bought for my birthday in 2004 has been spazzing out. It has a tiny battery to preserve state, and a larger rechargable short-term battery for the watch’s function, which is charged by a solar cell in the battery face. Either I don’t get out enough, or the short-term battery has some kind of nicad memory lapse, or both, but it kept dying on me, and would require 20 hours of “charging” under a lamp to work for 8 hours. It also had some other problems, like this auto-sleep feature that pretty much constantly shut the watch off on me. So I bought a new watch (and of course, the old watch has worked flawlessly since.)

I bought a Timex Ironman DataLink USB. I had an old Ironman DataLink, which I think I got for my birthday in 1998, but the old one used this weird gimmick where the watch had a photo-eye in it, and the software on your PC would make the screen flicker with lines of data, which basically made like a 2 baud modem. The software only worked with a narrow range of Windows PCs, of which I never owned one and had to use a girlfriend’s computer to load up the watch. But it would hold phone numbers and reminders and other random shit. The new watch has the same features, but has a special USB cable that clips to the side of the watch - there is no plug, just four contacts on the watch. The software is much more advanced, and the watch is slimmer. It has one of those metal bands with a clasp that don’t adjust at all, which drove me mad because it didn’t fit my tiny wrist. I eventually figured out you can punch out some of the links on the band with a tiny screwdriver and make it smaller. So I have a new toy, and maybe eventually I will find out how to download new tones or programs to it. I don’t even have phone numbers yet. But it’s still neat.

Food’s here…

Surge, Vault

Sat, 25 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT

One of the 200-some odd reasons my writing throughput and/or quality has dropped considerably in recent years (and I’m talking reasons in my head, not real, quantifiable reasons) is that Coca-Cola stopped bottling Surge soda. For those of you who don’t remember or never experienced it, Surge is/was a citrus soda that originally was called Urge in Norway, and was bottled there to compete with Mountain Dew. (Some Coke bottlers compete with Mountain Dew with Mello Yello, which is available in some markets, but not others.) Anyway, Seattle was a test market for Surge when it showed up in 1997, and once I tried it, I was hooked. Surge basically reminded me of a carbonated version of the Hi-C Ekto-cooler drink. It was more lime than lemon, with an unnatural bright green color, carbonation, and caffeine. It had a very unique taste, and wasn’t anything like its nearest competitor, Mountain Dew. I really liked it.

This was right after the time I quit caffeine entirely, but was going back on it again. I wouldn’t drink any Coke or anything else all day, except maybe the occasional Sprite. But on the weekends, when I was busy slamming away at the text for Rumored to Exist, I would go to Safeway, buy a 2-liter of Surge, and put it in the fridge, as my fuel for the next few days. I drank a lot of the stuff as I worked on the text, and I absolutely loved it.

Of course, when I moved to New York, I couldn’t find the shit anywhere. You already know the rant about how New York grocery stores don’t stock anything of variety, so I won’t repeat it. But I could not find Surge anywhere. Sometimes on a vacation, I’d get a taste. And I think the girl I dated in Cornell back in 2000 found a few bottles at a gas station upstate somewhere once. But after that, it was gone. And that pissed me off, because writers can get really locked into habits or triggers that can set off the hard-to-channel zone of writing. Some people have strange rituals. I used to start writing at the same time every night; others need a certain chair or pillow or snack or drink. Some need certain music; others require quiet. And for whatever reason, I got myself into a situation where I needed a certain type of sugar-water that a corporation test-marketed and then decided not to make anymore.

Well, good news, maybe. Coke has decided to come out with a new drink called Vault. There were a few ads during the superbowl, and they hinted at nationwide distribution in February. Now, I interpreted that as “distribution in every place with real grocery stores that aren’t run by the mafia, so fuck you New York”, and also wondered if the stuff really tasted like Surge, and if I’d get a chance to try it the next time that I went on vacation to a place with real grocery stores. But today, when we were at K-Mart, Sarah found that they actually had the stuff! I bought a couple of 20-ounce bottles, and gave it a try. It’s similar to Surge, although maybe a little more tart, and without as distinct of a green color as the original. The bottle looks different, of course, and you’d be amazed at how much different something appears to taste when it’s in a different bottle. But it’s pretty close. I like it.

I don’t know if I’ll be stocking our fridge with the stuff or not. My writing schedule and situation have been pretty off lately, and I don’t know if the magic elixer will suddenly have me pouring out words or not. I am in that process of thinking about what I will do before I start doing anything, and that’s frustrating and takes time. But it’s getting there.

Okay, I have to figure out a movie and a dinner and make them hobbling distance from each other so it will work out okay…

New York at its finest

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I think the best way I could describe outside right now is “fucked.” It’s 30 and raining, basically, which means sort of snow but sort of not, very dark out, and the ground resembles a spilled Slurpee, but everywhere and not Coke-flavored. The intersection outside of my office is being devastated by a crew of phone company people. They’re jackhammering and scraping out a trench in the middle of the intersection, and it’s filling up with this slush, and traffic in every direction is fucked. The jackhammering and pounding sounds like the block is being shelled. A Verizon truck hit a guy in the face with their rear-view mirror in front of the Wendy’s, so there’s an ambulance blocking even more traffic as he holds a dozen yellow and crimson Wendy’s paper napkins to his face to stop the bleeding. A dozen people try to watch what’s happening, but everyone else pushes past them to go inside and get their Chicken Strips Tenders meals and Biggie sized fries.

This is New York at its finest. Every time someone tells me “I think it would be so neat to move to New York!” I want to make them endure an hour of this, and then send them back to Iowa or whatever.

As an experiment, I came to work without a cane today. Probably not the best day to do it, but it’s been working out okay. Of course, in about five hours, I will be screaming bloody murder about this brace on my leg, which usually starts constricting me too much after about eight hours. I have been able to find Vault everywhere, luckily, but I have been drinking so much of it that I think the caffeine is freaking me out. I drank 4x20oz bottles yesterday, plus a regular Coke, which is about a months’ worth of caffeine. I should stop that. I’m drinking a Dr. Pepper now, which is my favorite occasional drink. A strange thing is that maybe six years ago, I was taking some medicine for panic attacks, and I only took it for like a week, because it made me really sick to my stomach. But for some reason, it totally fucked up my sense of taste or smell for Dr. Pepper, maybe something about the vanilla taste in it. And I couldn’t even walk by a thing of Dr. Pepper in a grocery store without retching. I stopped taking the medicine, and then I was fine. It was pretty weird. I’m wondering why one of Dr. P’s competitors haven’t isolated this drug and put it in their drinks as a way to cut out the competition.

Lots of things are going on, and it will be very busy for a few days. It was Sarah’s birthday on Monday, which went well. And then her mom is coming in tonight for a long weekend. We are having an Oscars party on Sunday, and I don’t even know what is involved in that as far as planning or whatever, but I’m assuming it is taken care of. We’re also going upstate to Guy and Scott’s place on Saturday, which should be fun, but that’s just for a day. And add in a bunch of other dinners and seeing friends and soforth.

On top of that, we are catsitting for a friend and have her two cats for a week, because her place is being exterminated. The cats are mostly hiding right now. One is extremely skittish and we will probably not even see her for the week, unless treats are involved. The other one is a little more playful and okay with humans, and she was running around a bit. I’m still not sleeping through the night and wake up every few hours, and it was funny to wake up at like 4:30 and see both of them tearing around the house and playing.

I’ve been vaguely thinking about changes to this page, because I’ve been reading a lot of web design propaganda lately. I’m trying to think of some CSS changes to make to the site, which is not a big deal. The one thing I wish I could easily hook up are buttons for Back and Next at the bottom of each entry. There’s no easy way for me to do this. (Yes, I could hard-code the links in each time I update, but life is too short.) I wanted to do some PHP trickery in which each time a page is drawn, it takes a peek at the directory of HTML, and gets the two entries before and after the current one. The problem is knowing in the script what is “the current one,” because each of these pages imports headers and footers and there are symlinks and all other sorts of things that make the usual way of determining the current page to totally fuck up. I think I could do it if I passed the PHP the page’s ID, like I do with haloscan comments. But then I’d have to go back and edit all of my old pages, which might be a huge pain in the ass. I’ll probably do the CSS first.

Google ads are gone. Not really worth it for this kind of site. I think I made less than a dollar a month, and given that I make about a dollar a minute at my day job, it’s hard to get excited about that.

I have been doing a ton of reading, and at some point, you will get to read another huge list of what I’ve been consuming. But now, lunch is over.

Bike junk

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Yesterday, I got an application for Bike New York in the mail. I have no idea how they got my name - maybe from some bike junk I ordered off the web - but it was a strange coincidence, because I would love to get in shape and try the ride, but I’m completely fucked up right now. I sprained the MCL in my right knee about a month ago, and I’m just now at the point where I’m not in agonizing pain on a costant basis. Hobbling around on a cane has caused my other knee to feel a bit wonky, and I have to wear this horrible compressive brace every day, which is like having my leg in a vice while I’m at work. Then when I get home and take out my leg, it’s imprinted in a reverse-mold of the inside of the brace, like some kind of Play-Doh fun factory thing. After extrication, my knee feels really - weird - as it expands and sloshes back into its regular form. I usually take drugs by then, so I can avoid this strange feeling. Despite all of this, I am getting around better, sometimes without the cane, and maybe the brace will go away soon, too.

But I don’t think a 42-mile bike ride is in the cards, at least not on May 6th or whenever it is. I keep trying to do the math on how long it would take me to train for a 42-mile ride, and then also trying to predict how long it would be until I could ride a bike, and then add them together and see if they were less than eight weeks. While I could maybe train more in a given time period, by riding way too much, I can’t speed up the healing of the knee, so that pretty much fucks the whole thing.

Why do I want to do it? I guess just to say I’ve done it. I’ve ridden farther before, and this is not a competitive race-type event, so it isn’t harder in that sense. But the last time I did anything like this, I was 16, and I rode a 100K ride on a POS Huffy 10-speed that you get on sale for $100 at Wards, along with a rack and panniers filled with probably 30 pounds of shit I didn’t need. It poured rain the whole day and it was bone-chilling outside, with plenty of headwinds that made me wonder why the fuck I even did the event, since nobody in my entire school even knew about it and it obviously wasn’t about getting chicks, which was one of only two things I cared about back in 1987. (The other one probably involved listening to every Rush album in a row in one sitting, which I used to think would be the ultimate project, and now I realize will be my own personal hell if there is in fact a god when I die.) The New York ride would also be slightly more interesting than the Indiana one. The New York one goes through all five boroughs, which means a couple of interesting bridges, and a rare chance to ride on closed-off streets of the city. I guess the Indiana one was interesting too, and at least took you through Michigan and across some attempts at hills and twists, but unless you go south of Indy, there isn’t much beyond the one-mile grids of county roads and cornfields.

I haven’t been writing shit lately. Part of it is a lack of a routine to fall into, part of it is a lack of anything to write about. I guess I have two projects that I want to eventually finish. They are both biopic, modernist, whatever; one’s high school, the other is college. Both of them don’t have enough greatness to survive. I wonder how Summer Rain turned out as good as it did, as far as the story and length. Was it just a coincidence that everything happened in such a great story line like that, or was it just a lot of hard work that carved it into a solid line? I don’t know. Sometimes I’d like to think if I kept my nose down enough on this high school one, I’d start to get some bulk, and the pieces would become carvable and eventually fit into each other until it started to look like a book. But I don’t know, there’s a lot of pessimism here on that.

In the reading category, I just finished The Wishbones by Tom Perrotta, which was a decent read. It was close to the style that I wish I could write in, similar to Nick Hornby and High Fidelity, although not as raw or as dense as I’d like. There was also this weird twist at the end that sort of threw me, but I won’t get into it. Anyway, now I’m reading Will Leitch’s Life as a Loser, which I completely spaced and forgot I read half his shit on Blacktable.com years ago. I’m enjoying the book despite the fact that it’s a typographical disaster; it’s a weird size that it too square and too big, and the columns are way too wide with small print, so it’s impossible to track across the page, especially if you’re on a bouncing F train.

My only other complaint about Leitch’s book is that it makes me wish that either I had a better way to chop my own life into zany and compelling bite-sized 2000-word pieces on a weekly basis, or that maybe I should get some kind of life that lends itself to doing that. That Tucker Max book had the same effect on me. I read about all of this crazy shit that he did, all of these good stories, and I thought I needed to live a life like his - not necessarily HIS, but with other activities that were easily shrink-wrapped into entertaining portions. I know the stock answer is “but Jon, you can write observational pieces about ANYTHING,” and my answer is, go ahead and do it, but I need to find what works for me.

Okay, enough babbling for tonight.

Pee-Wee League

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT

John Sheppard posted a nice Little League photo the other day, complete with 70s bright colors and high pants, which made me think a bit about my brief experience in Pee-Wee League back in the day. I forget when this was, but I’m guessing maybe third grade, and it was yet another one of those things where my parents really wanted me to experience different things besides the Apple II and/or determine if I was gay by forcing me to play sports. And given my lack of any hand-eye coordination or motor skills, I’m surprised they didn’t just give up and start buying me Cher albums and teaching me about flower arranging.

Pee Wee League was one of those things that not only made me feel bad about my inability to do something that so many other people could do easily, but I had kids making fun of me well into high school due to my inability to throw a ball long distances when I was a little kid. I know parents think these things will toughen up their kids, and teach them about teamwork and discipline and how to oil a leather glove. I guess one of the other things was that I was supposed to learn all about the national past-time and develop a love for the game. Honestly, I couldn’t name more than five baseball teams back then, and at the time, I was far too preoccupied memorizing random statistics about Star Wars characters than infielders and outfielders. This is probably best proven by the fact that I had about a dozen baseball cards, but I had every single one of the first two series of the Topps Empire Strikes Back Cards. (Insert speech about how I wished I sealed that shit in a vacuum-packed safe so I could put them on eBay and finance the down payment on a beachfront house, instead of randomly losing them all or accidentally covering them with peanut butter.)

Each of our Pee-Wee League teams had a corporate sponsor (if you consider “corporate” to include local car washes and septic system pumping companies) and a name of a real major league team. My assigned team was the AstroBowl Astros, sponsored by a local bowling alley, with a nod to the Houston MLB team, and featured orange hats and t-shirts. We didn’t wear the pants or the cleats or any other gear. I think there was a concerned mother freakout about wearing a cup, which happened when this kid named Skip ended up sliding into home plate ball-first and doing some damage to the yet-functioning family production units. I distinctly remember my mom’s hysterics, leading to a hand-off to my dad, who spent his childhood in the protection-free fifties, when you could still buy Jarts, M-80s, and small-caliber firearms at the local soda stand. The closest thing he knew about protection was when he got a CB radio so he could protect himself from speeding tickets on the highway. My dad grudgingly took me to Sears, where we silently walked to the athletics department and found that all of the various supporters and protectors were, at the smallest range, made for kids roughly twice my age or size. I think I could have used the smallest cup in stock as a batting helmet. Dad basically mumbled, “Son, be careful, and don’t tell your mom,” and that was that.

Somehow, I got put on a team that made the Bad News Bears look like the Yankees with a two billion dollar salary cap. Every kid who could not play was on the Astros. Most of the kids at school got onto cool teams, like the Dodgers, the Yankees, or the Cubs. (Yes, the Cubs were a good team; we were 100 miles from Wrigley Field. Despite the fact that they were a horrible team during that era, at least they were recognizable.) The only things I knew about the real Astros were Nolan Ryan, and the fact that they played in their namesake dome on their namesake artificial turf. That wasn’t much to go by.

I ended up as the catcher. When you have an adult pitching and the catcher doesn’t call pitches, this was where a coach parked their worst player, which happened to be me. I could barely throw the ball back to the pitcher. I could not infield to any extent, but it usually didn’t matter. The best strategy for the opposing team was to hit it anywhere in the outfield, and run in every single person on base while I sat and watched them cross the plate, because it would take about 45 minutes for someone to retrieve the ball and throw it home. I remember one game, against the faux Dodgers team, which had all of the jocko guys in it, when the score ended up being like 78 to 2. It was like a basketball game between the Harlem Globetrotters and a bunch of geriatrics who were off their meds.

I think we did win one game, and it was against one of the best teams, maybe the Yankees. It was on a day of really shitty weather, where the temperature dropped to about 45 or 50, and it was raining on and off, and extremely dark. Because it was on and off, the officials kept deciding the game would go on, and then they would change their mind, and then it would be back. We only wore t-shirts, and maybe half of the team got the idea to put on jackets under their uniform shirts. But wet denim jeans are always horrible, and your hands would be absolutely freezing. The parents on our team were pulling all of this “toughen up!” bullshit, and pretty much every kid on both teams was crying or trying not to cry, but still streaming tears down their rain-soaked faces. The only parents there on average were the mothers, who were trying to act like the fathers and overcompensating with whatever macho bullshit they caught from TV. (This was in an era when the divorce rate was like 100%, and all of the dads were probably off either getting loaded or trying to fuck the non-baseball moms.) So for whatever reason, our team could withstand the pain way more than the fake Yankees could, because we had to put up with so much bullshit under normal operating conditions, we didn’t even care that our hands were turning blue. Even the kids that couldn’t hold a bat were popping off doubles and triples, and we ended up pulling in a 12-4 win over the best team in the league.

One of the big things about Little League is that when you win (and it’s not practically snowing out), you go get ice cream. You’d think that since we had our asses handed to us on a regular basis, we’d never see any dessert action, but our coaches were sympathetic, or maybe in that “nobody’s a loser” parental mindset, so they usually found out where the other team was going, and we’d go to the other place for celebratory losing treats. There were two ice cream places in close proximity: a Dairy Queen, right next to the Taco Bell on 33 where I’d work when I was 16, and a Tastee Freeze, which was right in front of our corporate sponsor, Astrobowl.

I think I liked Dairy Queen better at the time, and we went there more, because the winning team usually went to Tastee Freeze because it was a local institution, and I think we lost almost every single game. Dairy Queen was more of a restaurant, like McDonald’s, and it had a sit-down dining room with a solarium. It didn’t have as many ice cream types, but I always got the peanut buster parfait. Tastee Freeze didn’t have any seats, just a window where you ordered. Maybe it had some picnic benches, but I remember sitting on a curb when eating my ice cream most of the time, and I wasn’t into that as much. Looking back, I probably like the Tastee Freeze better, because the ice cream was a lot more “custom” and they added sprinkles and cremes and sauces and other toppings while you waited, instead of just pulling out plastic-wrapped, pre-extruded things made at the central office in Kansas or whatever. Tastee Freeze is more of a small-town memory to me, something I’ll never see again in the big city.

When I was in the 7th or maybe 8th grade, we had to go to AstroBowl for a couple of class periods of bowling. It was across the street from the Junior High, so this was built into the curriculum, since we all know that bowling is an important skill for finding a job and providing for your future. (It’s important to note that even to this day, you will get your name in the Elkhart newspaper if you roll a perfect 300. Bowling is a big deal in Indiana. Not as big as crystal meth or illegitimate children, but it’s probably in the top ten.) Anyway, when I went over there and made a fool of myself yet again in another sport-like activity, I saw that in the trophy case by the front door, there was a picture of my old Pee Wee League team in a frame, along with a couple of other baseball team pictures that the bowling alley apparently sponsored. I was probably eight or nine, maybe ten when I went through that experience, but even at the age of 13 or 14, it was like looking back into another world to see that picture. I don’t have a copy of said photo anymore, but whenever I think of it, I always wonder if it’s still in the trophy case, gathering dust..

Oddly enough, a quick google shows that AstroBowl is for sale. Take a look at those photos and you see that parts of Elkhart have changed absolutely zero in the 15 years since I have left. The bowling alley looked identical back in the day: 70s futuristic logo, Pepsi sign above the door, big double stripe on the side of the cinderblock building, and cracked up parking lot. I’m honestly surprised that the location hadn’t become a TGI Friday ten years ago. I don’t bowl, but it would be sad if the place got sold and became a Mexican bodega or something. Current price is $450K, if you want to relive that Ed TV show and move back to the small city.

[Note from 2020: the AstroBowl was a Mexican event center for a few years, then sat abandoned for a decade or so, until the city tore it down. It’s now a parking lot for school busses.]

My parents also made me play basketball in the 6th grade, which is an even bigger story. Maybe I’ll type that one up sometime.

Perotta, Leitch

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been trying to read more stuff that’s close to what I want to do for this next book of mine. I keep saying that this book will be the heavy metal Indiana version of John’s Small Town Punk (which was Florida and punk), but I wanted to find some other books that were similar in texture and purpose to inspire me. At some point, I want to make a total list of all of these titles, with reviews or reasons why they fit the bill, but I’ll get to that later.

I wanted to ramble a bit about Tom Perotta a bit, since I read a couple of his books recently. I never heard of him, but after I read John McNally’s The Book of Ralph, Amazon told me I might like him, and since the descriptions sounded interesting, I went ahead and ordered two of his books: The Wishbones, and Joe College. I later found out that he’s most famous for writing the book Election, which was turned into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon, but since I never saw the movie, I never knew about this, and I’m sure everyone else does and I’m just a dumbass. Anyway…

I read both of the books quickly, and had the same reaction to both. (Oh, if you haven’t, I’m going to discuss spoilers, so if you’re the kind of person who gets all freaked out about that, stop reading. I probably don’t need to say that since the only people I know who get freaked out about spoilers don’t read books.) Anyway, here’s the deal: I really liked Perotta’s non-main characters, and I really loved the way he could paint a scene. He did such a great job of laying down the detail of a scene in a way that might make you chuckle because of the small details, and he does it in an extremely efficient manner. His writing flows well, reads fast, and doesn’t contain extras, but there’s still a lot of flair there to make you enjoy everything. In that sense, he’s a lot like McNally; his descriptions of crap Chicago suburbs in the 70s really worked, and I liked that.

What I didn’t like about both of the Perrotta books that I read were that he basically made the main character look like a total moral fuckup, and then had these huge act2/act3 tragedies that he later forgets all about and leaves unsolved. In The Wishbones, the lead character is this past-prime musician in a wedding band, working as a courier and living in Jersey, who one day sees a geezer at a wedding show die and decides he needs to marry his girlfriend of 15 years and move them both out of their respective parents’ houses. But he later has the dude hook up with this Lower East Side/Park Slope hipster poet chick. You’d think this would lead to the fiancee finding out and tragedy ensuing, but that’s not what happens. He uses the setup to tweak out the main character’s emotions a bit, then pretty much leaves her aside to continue on with the main plot. The main character forgets all about it, everyone’s well, a nice fall wedding, end of book.

Now, Tom Perrotta isn’t a slouch when it comes to plot. He’s very meticulous and playing the rules of the Iowa Writers Workshop, carefully weaving the main and secondary threads and giving them a bump in the right places and all of that. But after reading both books, I had such a strong “what the fuck happened to…” feeling, that I didn’t really feel satisfied about it. And yeah, maybe he did that intentionally, to introduce some tension, or make things believable. But I still kept thinking “what happened to that secondary plot?” and it threw me.

I also started reading two Will Leitch books, again based on Amazon, and I didn’t really like either one. He has Life as a Loser, which I already mentioned, and it’s more of a lower-quality Chuck Klosterman imitation, but it doesn’t totally pull through. It was like reading Chuck’s rough drafts, and I gave up halfway through the book. I started Catch, and I don’t know. I don’t have an agent, or a bunch of fans online, but I think I could do better. I’m not trying to pick a fight; I’m just saying, his writing’s a bit wooden. Maybe halfway through the book, it picks up steam, but I don’t know if I’ll make it.

In other news, I think my knees are almost better. I say knees plural because the left one got a little torqued out from limping around on a cane and in a brace and overcompensating. Today was my first real day with no brace, and they don’t feel good now, but I did make it with no real problems. And in an effort to be more human, I actually bought a pair of dress shoes today, since when we go somewhere formal, I usually have to fake it with a pair of tennis shoes or something. I went to Kenneth Cole to invest in something that looked good and didn’t make me feel ready for amputation in 15 minutes, and I ended up spending about twice as much as the most expensive shoes I’ve ever bought. But they’re nice. I hope I don’t accidentally shred them to pieces on a fragmenting New York curbside or something.

Oh, I fixed a bunch of random weird stuff with the site’s RSS feed, but I won’t go into it right now.

2001 on the big screen

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Last night, we went to the Ziegfeld to see 2001: A Space Odyssey on a big screen. I still don’t understand half of it, but it was good to see it on a gigantic screen with a big print and six-track sound and the whole nine yards. The Ziegfeld is one of those old art movie theaters, with only a single screen and a giant auditorium of real movie seats. The whole place, from the hallways to the bathrooms to the snack stands is covered with old trim and looks like real class, not something that was spit out next to a strip mall. (Oddly enough, the current Ziegfeld was built in 1967 a few doors down from the old Broadway theater, which was torn down to put in a skyscraper.)

I hadn’t seen the film in a few years, I think since I got the DVD re-release. And I think I only saw it before that once or twice, on VHS. I do remember, though, as a little kid, my parents had the score on vinyl. I have no idea why, and I couldn’t really see either of my parents watching the movie or feeling a need to buy the album, but it was in the pile of records that I pretty much memorized as a kid. Listening to it was weird and not that interesting, but I loved the gatefold jacket with pictures of the movie in it. This was probably around the time Star Wars kicked in, and those photos of the moon base, and space station, and guys in spacesuits was pretty cool to me back then. I also remember when I was maybe about ten, the film was on TV (probably chopped down to 90 minutes and filled with bad commercials every other minute) and I tried to watch it. I was enthralled by people walking in space and the effects shots, but I didn’t get the last part of the film at all. At that age, there were a lot of things I heard or saw on TV that I didn’t understand at all and my parents would entirely no-sell, and the tiny cultural cracks remained until I was thirty and remembered back to that bad sitcom and thought “oh, that guy was supposed to be on heroin” or whatever. I often wonder if my life would have been radically different if my parents would have just treated me as an adult from the age of three and told me everything that was going on, instead of compartmentalizing things and then never getting around to going back and explaining stuff.

I’m now reading that Legs McNeil book on punk rock, Please Kill Me, and it’s not bad. I’m not into the whole Velvet Underground, David Bowie, New York Dolls thing, and that bores me to tears. I was glad to see some Iggy Pop early on though, because I think he’s hilarious and intriguing. I think this thing will be somewhat boring until it hits the Ramones or so, and then the rest of the book will pretty much explode and be done in a day and a half.

Somewhat related, I was reading somethingawful, and there was a thread where someone found GG Allin’s appearance on Jerry Springer on some web site, and posted it, sort of as a “look how hilarious and cool he is!” The thread devolved into people saying “he’s not punk rock!” and arguing the theory of what is and isn’t punk, which eventually led to anti-corporation rhetoric and explanations as to why it’s inherently evil to go to a restaurant and order breakfast rather than make it yourself. And people ask me why I was never into punk. I sometimes wish the whole pseudo-political movement that attached itself to punk rock had glued onto country music instead, so people on CMT could circle-jerk about Noam Chomsky while discussing what is and isn’t country.

Speaking of GG, his brother Mearle just released a new DVD of three shows from 1993, called Terror in America. It also includes some bonus footage of GG at a family reunion, getting some tattoos, and doing an in-store appearance. From everything I’ve heard, it’s supposed to be a fairly fucked up DVD. But I still remember back in 1994 or 1995 when I bought the “Hated” movie on tape, and me and Larry watched it, and we were sorely disappointed. The video was so lame - it was mostly just GG all strung out back stage, and when he played, there were like 7 people at the show, and the most outrageous thing he did was hit himself in the head with the mic. I guess they re-released it on DVD and put footage of his funeral on there, but still, pretty weak. Even his Springer appearance was better.

Not much else. It’s actually cold here. I wanted to get the bike all cleaned up and see if I can ride with the knee, but it’s in the thirties and windy and I’m not up for some all-weather extreme bullshit when I don’t even know if I can ride or not. So, back to writing.

My grandparents in a Steven Seagal movie

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT

The final lasting image of my grandparents together is a Steven Seagal movie. No, my grandparents were not sixth-degree black belts, and neither of them had the 80s hip-guy ponytail. But Seagal’s first movie, Above the Law was shot in their Chicago neighborhood. So whenever the flick’s on cable TV over the weekend, I usually tune in for a few minutes to catch a look at the old neighborhood where I spent all of my Thanksgivings and Christmases, plus other holidays we loaded up the station wagon and drove two hours west to the big city.

I don’t know Chicago geography well, but the one now-gone landmark that was the nucleus of their old neighborhood was the Ludwig Drum factory. Go to the intersection of Damen and North, and then go up a couple of blocks to St. Paul Ave. That’s where my grandparents’ three-story brownstone sat, the place they bought back in 1940 for about the current cost of a new compact car. Across the street was an old brick warehouse where Ludwig made their drum kits, the kind almost every rock band used back then, or the big marching band bass drums used at football games. My mom told me when she was little, the Beatles came to the drum factory to see where Ringo’s skins were put together, and it turned into a full-scale riot. (Of course, in my mom’s stories, pretty much everything turned into a full-scale riot, so who knows.)

The big plot point in Seagal’s movie was this old church, and that was shot at Saint Mary of the Angels church. (Here it is on google maps.) I used to go to this church all the time with my grandma. She was really serious about the church, and was a Polish Catholic, which was like an order of magnitude more strict than just being a regular Catholic, although I didn’t really know how. Our church back home didn’t use any Latin, though, and this place had all kinds of songs and sayings I didn’t understand. The church got shut down because of structural problems right after the film came out. When my grandma died in 1989, the funeral was at another church; the city had slated Saint Mary for demolition. Some people got together the cash at the eleventh hour, and they rebuilt the place. So both Catholics and martial arts fans can rejoice that the landmark was saved.

The Ludwig plant fell apart, and they moved the drum production to Texas or Japan or something. Another company used the factory for a while, but in the 80s, it was used as a studio space for a few TV and film productions. The Color of Money was shot there, and allegedly, my grandfather ran into Tom Cruise, and said he was a nice guy. (I don’t know if this was before or after he turned to Scientology.) Above the Law shot a lot of indoor scenes in the old factory. Like there’s a scene where they’re going to a police evidence locker to check on some C4 explosives - that’s totally the inside of the Ludwig plant. I’ve never been in there, and I only know the place from sitting across the street and looking inside the mesh gate over the loading dock, watching the forklifts move around. But I could tell at a glance that the scene was shot there.

A lot of Above the Law reminds me of the general feel of the mid-to-late eighties Chicago, a place I just barely knew. All of the cars had those blue and white license plates, and in the background of the chase scenes, you could see the Jewel stores and gritty-looking car repair places, with red brick walls that were turned black from years of soot and pollution. The L-Train ran overhead, making that distinctive sound and looking like nothing we’d ever see back in Elkhart. All of the backgrounds in that movie of the neighborhood remind me so much of what I saw in the back of the station wagon, looking out at this giant city, where every square block housed more people than my entire high school. Watching five minutes of that film reminds me so much of that brief moment in time that it always amazes me.

The one big regret that I have about my grandparents’ old neighborhood was that I never really tried to explore outside of the close domain of their place. My mom was 100% convinced that there were rapists with full-auto machine guns every hundred feet, and if we left the fenced confines of their back yard, we’d be on the back of a milk carton or worse. Now, I don’t think as a four-year-old I should have wandered far, but when I was 14, maybe I could have walked around the block, or down to Wicker Park, or to Osco’s to get a Coke or something. In retrospect, the place was probably as safe as the streets I walk today in New York. I really would like to have more memories of the area around there. I don’t want to live there, and a vacation in Chigago is not high on my list of things to do with limited time and money. But it’s something that interests me in some weird way.

That area is now called Bucktown, and it’s a trendy little place to be, if you’ve got the goatee and the money. The Ludwig factory got broken up into single-serve condos, and the mom-and-pop bodegas and corner bars are probably all cloned Starbucks storefronts. The neighborhood’s probably all filled with hipster doofuses, listening to Coldplay on their iPods and reading J.T. Leroy books. After my grandpa died in 1995, they sold off his building for some obscene amount of money. Looking at the place on Google Maps, I see that they’ve torn out the garden and swingset next to the building and made it into parking spots, which really pisses me off. I’ve always wanted to go back and see the place again, but I’m guessing all of the wood pocket doors and elaborate cabinetwork got kicked to the curb and replaced with Pottery Barn.

I still haven’t watched Above the Law all the way through. But one time my mom rented it, and we found a part in the church where my grandparents were extras. (They probably went because there was a free lunch or something; my grandfather could not pass up anything like that.) You can see them for a split-second on-screen, which is awesome. How many of you can say your grandparents were in a Steven Seagall flick?

Bonus: Coincidentally, Larry Falli now lives about 20 blocks south and four blocks west of where they used to live.

From Sutafed to Seattle

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I got an email the other day from someone in Australia, who was looking for an old Sutafed commercial and happened upon my Trip East travelogue. It’s a strange coincidence, because I’ve been thinking of Seattle lately, for a lot of different reasons. Part of it is that tomorrow will be the 7th anniversary of when I left Jet City and headed out here to New York, and nice round numbers make me think back. And I think part of it is also the weather here, how it’s jumped from a steady 30 to some days when it’s actually light jacket 50s. Hell, I just looked down at my weather widget, and it’s saying 62. That’s almost a solid spring day.

Something about spring always pulls my brain back to Seattle. A lot of natives tell you the winters are mild, but they’re only half right. You won’t see feet of snow, but that persistent darkness and muggy gloom really sits on you after a while. After about 100 days of 40 degrees, rain, and dark, you really start thinking Kurt Cobain had the right idea. I guess when I lived there, I didn’t really have the means to fly down to Vegas for the weekend or otherwise escape the grasp of the PNW. Maybe it would be different with my current worldview. I don’t know. But I do know that once the sun crawled back out and spring hit, I really LOVED Seattle. I loved driving around in my car, going everywhere and nowhere, when the sun was out and it was a crisp fifty degrees, and the air had that fresh smell that everything had been showered down for six months, and in a couple more, it would be summer. Spring anywhere makes me think of Seattle.

Every once in a while, someone will ask me if I miss Seattle, or what I thought about it, or why I left. It’s a hard question to answer. I do miss it a lot sometimes. There are certain albums that instantaneously transfer me back there faster than a Star Trek transporter could. One of them is Queensryche’s 1997 album Hear in the Now Frontier. I listened to these fourteen tracks so many times while driving around the city, they’re inseparable from that year of my life. I first heard the title cut when I was stuck in Longview, Washington on a Monday. This was when I dated Karena and before she moved north, and we used to trade off weekends for who had the 100-mile commute. I was heading back late Sunday night, and got a blowout in my Escort. I only had the baby spare, not rated for 100 miles of highway driving in the rain, so I called off work, borrowed her Saturn, and spent the next day getting a new tire fitted. When I was driving around this tiny town hidden in the evergreens of southwest Washington, the new Queensryche song came on the radio, and I made a mental note: “go buy that album.” A couple days later, I went to Silver Platters, my old CD hangout, and picked up a copy. I made a dup on tape for the car, and played it 200 million times.

When I think of that whole story, there are so many great nostalgic things to pick up on. First, there’s all of these trips to Longview. Now, things with Karena didn’t end on the greatest of terms, and I’m not longing for her or anything. But there was a certain charm to when I went down there. The place was about as big as Goshen, Indiana, for those who know my hometown, and it’s the kind of place where we ended up going to the Red Lobster that shared a parking lot with the Target a lot. The biggest shopping experience in Longview was driving a half hour to go to the mall in Portland. Otherwise, we rented a lot of videos, bought a lot of Papa Murphy’s premade but not baked pizzas, and just hung out. It was nice. And the story makes me think about my old Escort, which I hated so much when I got it, but now I’d pay cash on the barrelhead for a car just like it now. And man I miss going to Silver Platters, going from A to Z through the racks, and dumping a c-note on double coupon Tuesday, because I was totally locked into their little coupon scheme to get free discs, even if it meant I bought way too many CDs I didn’t need.

That kind of nostalgia kills me. And it makes it hard to answer the simple question: would I go back? I haven’t even visited Seattle since I left in 1999. And I don’t know that I would move back. I mean, I think about when I went back to Bloomington last for more than like a lunch or an evening, which was probably back on that 1999 trip east. I was writing Summer Rain hardcore when I left Seattle. I spent three or four months basically poring into the draft full-time, doing nothing but thinking about Bloomington. Then I drove halfway across the country, opened the car door, and basically stepped into my own book. Yeah, a lot of things changed in the seven years since the book took place. But I remember walking from the Union to my old apartment on Mitchell Street, and probably 95% of everything I saw in the spring air around me was identical to what I saw in 1992. It really freaked me out. But then I got hit with this really heavy “you can’t go back” vibe, when I realized that I didn’t know anyone on campus anymore, and everyone that was there looked like they were about twelve.

So yeah, you can’t go back. And I’ll be honest: I’m not going to stay in New York forever. There will come a time when we will bug out of here and go to the next big stop down the road. And I know my relatives automatically assume the next and last stop for me will be when I “grow up” and decide to move back to Elkhart and buy a house right across from my parents’ house and spit out some kids and come over every Sunday for dinner. And of course, that’s all shit. It’s gotta be something new for me on the next stop; I can’t have a do-over. I’m not saying I want to zip all over the country like I’m following the Dead, but I wouldn’t mind trying something else someday. It would also be nice if they had real grocery stores. But there’s Trader Joe’s now, so that’s huge.

Speaking of, we’ve booked our next vacation, and will be going to Alaska at the end of May/beginning of June. Sofar, we’ve got airfare, a week of hotel in Anchorage, and a rental car. From there, we’ll drive around, see some glaciers, take a lot of pictures, eat some food, and who knows what else. I’m going through Frommer’s now. There will probably not be any above Arctic circle exploration, and given my knee condition, I doubt we’ll be climbing Mount McKinley. But I’m hoping for some flightseeing, and it would be absolutely golden if I could get in a flight lesson while we’re up there.

Alaska also has a weird Seattle connotation, too. Seattle’s always had a tight bond with the 49th state. A lot of people that fly up there end up with a plane change at SeaTac, but even back in the old days, Seattle was the last big outpost before you headed north. Some of the culture of Alaska is second-tiered in Seattle in some weird way; salmon’s big because of the fisherman bringing it down. Lots of commercial boats winter down in Seattle, too. There are a lot of street names and other places and buildings in Seattle that are named after Alaskan cities, features, or explorers. And the whole time I was in Seattle, I thought hard about making the jump up the Alcon to get up there. I’d sit in bed with my Rand-McNally, tallying the miles and trying to find the shortest route, the number of hours and days it would take me. Growing up, you look at the big map at the front of the classroom and it looks like Alaska’s just one state’s worth of Canada up from Washington. Really, you have to drive like 24 hours straight through the mountains of British Columbia to get to the most remote southernmost point on the tail of Alaska. If you wanted to get to a city that was actually in the meat of the state, add another 24 hours of solid driving. It’s basically like driving across the entire United States, but up, and on much worse roads. So I never made it further north than Vancouver, and I’m glad I will be able to do it now.

Not much else. Still working on the book of Bloomington stories. It’s getting there, slowly. I should get on that now, actually.

Awful enchiladas

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT

It’s pouring rain outside, and cold. My work computer completely crapped out, and I spent all day on a loaner laptop, doing nothing but reinforcing the already-present idea that my work environment is so specialized and weird, it can’t be replicated easily. And I gave up on roaming profiles in Windows a long time ago, as I realized how stupid an idea they were, so today I had a snapshot of my desktop and favorites circa 2003. It was weird to go to my favorites menu and see all of the sites I used to read on a daily basis, but have long since forgotten. I think I get a new power supply for the old machine tomorrow, but I should probably bring a paperback to read, just in case.

Oh, for whatever reason, I’ve been reading Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby, although it’s really hard to get into, for a person who doesn’t understand American football, let alone the English game of the same name, and all of its various cultural idiosyncrasies. I think I may have to give up on the book after 60 or so pages, but I do get his general message. It’s weird, because I never got into sports, but I got into death metal (to an extent), and I guess that’s close to getting into Arsenal. There was a point in my life when I thought for sure I was going to have an entire room of my house devoted to Motorhead and Entombed CDs, and I’d build some giant custom speaker system that would cost way too much to drive the extreme metal sound. Now I’m listening to the soundtrack to Broken Flowers on the tiny speakers built into my monitor, and couldn’t be happier. Weird how things switch up on you like that.

I saw Broken Flowers I think a week ago. Going into it, I thought it was going to be another Bill Murray doze-fest, like Lost in Translation. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised with the way it worked, and even though Jim J. was minimalist with how the individual scenes unfolded, he had a story that flowed in such a way that you really wanted to know what happened next, how the mystery would unfold, and the tension made some of the scenes intentionally ridiculous. And the whole film was shot in Jersey and New York, but it looked like he was zipping all over the country, which was great. The ending, not so good. I won’t ruin it, but it was unfulfilling for me. But, that’s Jarmusch.

One more thing before I pass out from the awful enchiladas I just ate. This is under the category of “I remember when this happened, but there’s no god damned record of it online - I thought you could find everything on the internets.” Okay, in like February of 1988, there was some kind of freak windstorm, and the windows at the top of the Sears Tower broke out, raining glass on the downtown Chicago area. I remember this because I saw Rush on 2/26/88 and when we drove up there, we saw this post-apocalyptic vision of this giant skyscraper with a bunch of windows at the top broken out, and it was a pretty freaky vision. And, of course, this is the first thing I thought of when, 13 years later, I was standing a couple blocks from the World Trade Center watching it burn from a bunch of broken out windows. Now, for an event this big, you’d think entering a search term on the level of “sears tower windows fucked up” or “raining glass and shit on wacker drive” would bring me something. NOTHING. So if you remember this or have any leads on a better search term, let me know.

Okay, I think I need to go eat something to counteract this bad Mexican food, like maybe a box of lye…

Nine Years

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I should mention this now, because I never update this anymore, and I will simply forget to do so later: as of next Monday, this journal is officially nine years old. Okay, there were a couple of periods when I didn’t journal online. But dig this: 662 entries; 461,837 words. That’s roughly double the size of Summer Rain, and the most-received comment on that book is that it’s way too long.

I’d like to write some huge, introspective thing about what this means to me. But honesly, I’m surprised I’ve lasted this long. I’ve been keeping paper journals since 1993, but I almost never get a chance to write anything in there anymore. It used to be a daily ritual, but I just wrote something in there a few weeks ago, and I noticed I hadn’t updated since we were in Vegas in January. I need to do something about that.

Not much is up otherwise. I am listening to the new Joe Satriani, and it’s good, but I can’t tell yet if it’s great or not. He hasn’t had an album that really grabbed me since Crystal Planet, back in 1997. (When the journal started.) I have the new Queensryche album on the way, and I hope it’s interesting.

This weather is positively dreadful. It went from “almost nice spring day” to “January shitburger rain and cold” in about 24 hours. Even thinking about looking outside makes me feel absolutely morbid. I feel like I need to get a dozen of those lightbox full-UV lamp bulbs and permanently affix them to my head. Maybe I can mount them to a walker and push them around the house with me.

I was sitting in a diner tonight with nothing to read, and I found I had one of those Moleskine journal books that I started to fill last summer, but all of the entries were completely disjointed and made no sense. Like one entry said “write journal entry about guilty pleasure - liking Black Sabbath albums w/o Ozzy on them.” I’m not sure what the fuck to make of that. The next page was a drawing for a mouthguard you wear when you sleep that contains a bunch of sonicare-type toothbrush heads and fluoride injectors, along with a notation of “would cause drowning in sleep?”

I still get, on the average, a million-dollar idea every three or four days, but I never write them down. Some of them are obvious, and some require far too much capitol for me to pull off. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I thought if you had a really high-scale mall, it would make a lot of sense to install a driving range like the one they have out at Chelsea Piers, so the husbands could put a charge card in the wife’s hands and send her to Nordstrom or whatever, and they could get out the 3 iron and hit some balls. And an overpriced pro shop, of course.

Crap. I started reading old journal entries. Now I’m going to spend all week going through them. I should get off of here while I can.

Thousand Mile War

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been sick all week, with a really light cold. It’s so mild, I have almost no symptoms and it hasn’t been the knock-you-down sort of virus like usual. But even the slightest cold seems to mentally knock me out of orbit and make me feel like the living dead. I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything lately, and that blows away any chance of writing or doing anything creative, hence the lack of updates.

I got a Flickr account, or rather paid them the $25 to become a Pro user. My account is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkonrath/. I am still not sure why I did this. There are a million little bugs that I need to work out to get it integrated into my life, and I’m still not sure I want to ditch the photos hosted on my site. I hate the gallery script I have, but I’m not that fond of how it does things, either. I also know the second I get all of my crap up there, the company will go stupid or raise their rates to an unholy amount. For now, I’m just playing, and it might be a better solution, but who knows. And if you have flickr (or something else), please let me know and maybe I can bounce some of my problems off of you and see if there are obvious solutions I missed.

I just finished reading The Thousand-Mile War by Brian Garfield, and it’s one of the best World War II books I’ve read in a while. It’s about the war fought in Alaska’s Aleutian islands (the westmost tiny pieces of lava on Alaska’s “tail”.) Not many people know the Japanese captured a few of these islands, actually bringing the war home to American soil. The resulting battles were a comedy of tragedies that remind me of a real-life Catch-22 and made this an incredible read.

First of all, the Aleutians are a shithole. There’s this constant low-pressure front that creates basically a permanent hurricane of fog and high winds right over the islands. Planes can’t see anything; weird mineral deposits and iron ore threw off compasses; and radar was so primitive, the 11th Air Force went out the bomb the shit out of Japanese submarines once and after unloading their HE on target, found out they actually cratered a grouping of uncharted islands instead of Jap pigboats. There were no maps of Seward’s Folly, especially the far extremes. The Army was using a Rand-McNally map that you’d find in front of a third-grade classroom to plan their invasions. Radar was primitive and largely unavailable. When planes did have this new feature, they would often do stuff like report a flock of geese as a Japanese naval division. Aside from the wind, there was the fact that this was a place with super-low temperatures, where you had to keep two pairs of boots, one on your feet and one on the stove that you switched out every fifteen minutes. Men were living in tents that knocked over daily in 90 MPH winds, with mud floors. Entire islands were made of mud that sucked in trucks, boots, and airplanes. Airstrips couldn’t be made of concrete, since it would freeze and crack instead of cure, and you couldn’t dig down enough. They used premade steel mesh strips, which worked, but weren’t much fun when wet, which was constantly.

Aside from the environmental problems, there were tactical and governmental issues. Uncle Sam couldn’t decide whether or not there should be any troop strength in the area, since it was tactically useless property. The first round of Navy ships were old mothballed WWI dinosaurs that were brought out of retirement, which led to some extremely lopsided engagements between the US and Japan’s top-notch fleet. Not that many men were sent to Alaska. When they were, they usually got told they were going to the Pacific, and then got piled in windowless trains to Seattle, where they were shipped out and then told their destination. News was heavily censored back then, and very little was said about the Alaskan theater. Troops weren’t rotated out regularly, and supplies were a major issue, both because of the lack of government buy-in, but because of the difficulty in sending stuff up north. This was before the Alcan highway was built, and you couldn’t just pile up a deuce with shipping crates and head north. The territory of Alaska as a whole wasn’t self-sufficient and needed to ship in stuff to live. Result: lots of troops eating C-rations and canned Spam three meals a day, freezing their asses off in tents that collapsed every day, counting off days until never, when they could go home.

Garfield’s book reads like a modern-day Clancy novel, but better. He was a fiction and screenplay writer before he turned to history, actually writing the infamous Death Wish book that became Dirty Harry’s movie vehicle. The whole book flows well, and he has a great talent for making you feel like you’re following the battle from a recon plane, rather than just reading a regurgitation of facts and dates. He also pulls together a lot of the weird coincidences and factoids that make the story funny, either in a ha-ha or dark comedy way. It’s good stuff.

Not much else. I just started reading Kerouac’s new (well, newly compiled and released) book of journal entries. It’s not bad. I actually skipped the stuff from when he was writing his first book and jumped into the writing of On the Road.

I was hoping for a good weekend of great weather after the 70-something weather the other day, but it looks like it’s dipping into shitty and raining all weekend. Maybe it’s a good time to make a drive to the mall…

Zoo, Intrepid, glasses cleaning-related breakdown

Tue, 02 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Long weekend. Sarah’s sister and sister’s boyfriend were in town from Milwaukee, and that was cool but also kept me very busy. On Saturday, we went to the Bronx Zoo. (Pics on flickr here.) The zoo wasn’t bad, although getting to the Bronx was a pain because of the usual MTA weekend issues. The zoo’s big, and I guess I haven’t been to another zoo in recent memory to have a basis of comparison. I think I went to the Seattle zoo about ten years ago, but all of the animals were asleep and the whole place was small, about as big as one of the “worlds” in the Bronx zoo. Everything was cool, though. My personal favorites were the polar bear, the apes, and some of the indoor jungle-looking scenery, which reminded me of the arboretum we saw in Amsterdam, with very high humidity and that jungle smell of very rich soil and plants.

On Sunday, just me and Dan went to see the USS Intrepid museum, while the girls did their own thing. I got a membership, so if anyone’s in town and wants to get in free, I’m your hookup. (Oh, flickr pics here.) The museum was basically the same as last time I went in 2003, except the planes on deck were moved, and they swapped the USS Edson for a big barge containing one of the Concorde SST jets. We walked through the Concorde - there were jetways on either door, so you could walk into the midsection and then walk up to the front and back down. The inside was all blocked with plexiglass to stop dumbasses from tearing out seats or trays, so it looked a bit odd. The cockpit door was open, but there’s such a long stretch between the plexiglass barrier and the actual seats, you could barely see the gauges and dials. The cockpit had a very distinct smell though, and then I realized it smelled like my old tape player in my first car when it was brand new, and the sunlight oven in the passenger compartment activated the new plastic smell of the 80s technology. It was a very distinct smell, and oddly coincidental that all of the electronics in the nose of the plane smelled the same way.

Anyway, the Intrepid was good, although those Navy ship ladder-stairs aren’t made for a gimp with a bad knee. By the time I cleared the gift shop (got a book written by one of the radar operators on the old ship), got a cab, and got us home, I was seriously hobbling. After some sleep and general rest around the house, I’m feeling fine now.

Re the flickr thing, I’m still not sure if I like it or hate it, but it’s easy to do, and I’m lazy, so I’ll keep dumping new pictures there, until I find something better. I ordered a couple of prints from my last Hawaii trip, blown up to 8x10, and they looked pretty good, and for an okay price. I like that aspect of the operation, especially for other people who want to print photos, without me having to set up some giant operation and move the sun over 28 feet to get it all to work.

I’m having a serious glasses cleaning-related breakdown right now. My glasses were very easy to clean when I first got them in December, and now it takes me 278 tries with 22 cleaning solvents and 97 sheets of three different types of cleaning pad or sheet to get them even vaguely translucent. And usually on about the 273rd pass at cleaning (and each pass involves me cleaning the glasses; cleaning my hands; cleaning the glasses; cleaning all surfaces of the room where I’m cleaning; cleaning the glasses; cleaning my hands; then seven passes of successive cleaning with additive and subtractive amounts of solvents and water of different temperatures, and if I mess up any of these parts, the pass doesn’t count and I have to start over) one of the lenses smears about to the same effect as emptying a one-pound tub of Vaseline on a contact lens. I’m very frustrated with cleaning my glasses, especially after 30 years of glasses wearing, and I really wish I could get LASIK, but I can’t.

Okay, I must go clean my glasses.

Writing a book in an empty forest

Sat, 13 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I have put a small news page for info as I get the Necrokonicon ready for print. It’s located here. I have been incredibly depressed as this book nears completion, mostly because I am almost certain in my mind that nobody will buy it, read it, or even understand why I would do it. And a lot of my lack of excitement has to do with the fact that this isn’t my pride and joy baby or whatever, but just something that I have to do so I can get it done and move on. The reason I am doing this is not so I can be the next Dan Brown. I don’t expect every Oprah-watching housewife in middle america to rush out and buy my book. I’m just doing it so I can stop fucking writing about Indiana. Because as long as the glossary is sitting on my site, every time the IU Foundation takes one of my old favorite places to eat and shop and turns it into a new parking lot or Urban Outfitter, I won’t feel the need to break my train of thought and go research it from the piece of shit Bloomington newspapers that don’t publish articles online unless you send them a DNA sample and buy three subscriptions, and update the stupid site, for fear some dumb fucker leaves me a comment telling me I’m an idiot because I don’t know the facts about a store that I’ve never visited, in a state that I largely avoid, that happens to be built on the ground of a 7-Eleven where I bought a Coke once, in 1989.

I watched that movie Art School Confidential last weekend. The bullet review is that it’s okay - too much of an attempt to slap a serious plot on a Clerks-type film, but some good jokes here and there, and Malkovich plays a convincing weirdo, if you can believe that. There was this whole subplot where the main character was doing what art he thought was best, but was running into problems where everyone else was doing really stupid “art” shit that was essentially worthless, but was praised by the teacher and others. And he goes to visit the Malkovich professor to discuss whether he should change styles or work on finding his own voice or whatever, and he realizes that the teacher has been painting giant paintings with just a triangle on them. And the teacher praises his attempts at work and says that maybe someday, after 25 years of hard work, he can find his own voice, like the stupid triangles paintings that he’s turning out.

I guess that sums up about what I’m thinking now. The Indiana thing is dead and gone for me, even if I have an almost-complete book of stories about Indiana, and at least two half-done, all-dead book maunscripts about it. I’m sick of writing neaty-neat prose because people just look for the plot points and the predicable story, of which there are only about 12 possible ones, total, in the world. I know just about everyone hated Rumored to Exist, or didn’t get it, but it’s the closest thing that I’ve wrote to what’s in my mind. Writing soap opera dreck in novel form is bullshit. When people started inventing cameras, painters stopped painting Polaroid-portraits of people. In a world as fucked up as the one we live in, I shouldn’t be forced to say “Oh, it’s The Sound of Music, but with gay cowboys” when I’m thinking of ideas for a book.

I want to write the books that Kilgore Trout was supposed to write in Vonnegut’s books, and I want to get to the point where I can write them just as fast. I want to write stories that Crispin Glover would say are too fucked up to print. I don’t want to have paragraphs and chapters and lines and arcs and subplots and all of that shit - I want to find a way to make a total braindump of sheer anarchy readable somehow. I want to do this, because I can only occasionally find writing that’s like this, that I really like. Mark Leyner’s books were the first that really made me think the revolution had arrived. And his last book was a stupid worthless trivia book. I want more books like this, and I can’t find them, so I will write them.

So fuck all of you for not buying my other books, and I don’t care if you buy any of the new ones. I am writing to fill my bookshelf. If you happen to look at what I put out there and like it, great. If you write similar stuff, or can point me to some similar stuff that I could buy, even great. If you don’t like it, you’re always welcome to to buy the latest plagarized, fictionalized, non-fiction book from Oprah’s list and act like you’re smart.

Fuck, am I ever glad I’m going on vacation. In two weeks, I will be on a plane (first class, no less), going to Alaska. I bought an extra battery for my laptop so I will have enough juice for the flight, and I’m ripping a bunch of movies from DVD so I can pack those on the drive. I still don’t know what the hell we are doing, but I plan to buy another Alaska book or two when we’re out tonight, so we’ll see. Lots of photos, hopefully. And maybe some flying, like a little seaplane or whatever.

Okay, time to go read…

Another book done

Sat, 20 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT

The book is done. Well, maybe. I uploaded the last iteration of the cover and the body, and ordered a copy, and when I get it and look at it and make sure it’s fine, then it’s done. Maybe I’ll get it before I leave next week for vacation, or maybe I won’t. I don’t think a lot of people are at the edge of their seats for this one, except for those couple of people who aren’t going to buy one, but still want to read it just to find my spelling fuckups or whatever. It always amazes me that I ask people to read stuff 28 times before I print it, and the dickheads that take the most pleasure out of finding others’ mistakes always wait until after it goes into print to make a federal case over a transposed period and paren.

This book was worse than the others because I picked this weird 9x7” size. I could not get the PDF to jive with the printer’s auto-PDF-reader-sizer crap. Distiller would either kick out a 9x7 that looked like an 8.5x11 to the world, or it would print a 7x9 landscape instead of a 9x7 portrait, which are the same size and orientation, but not the same thing. All of my other books are 6x9, and I wanted something different in the lineup. I thought about square, but they just started offering this new size, and it worked perfectly with the glossary’s weird size. So it ended up being 200 pages, and $9.99. No barcode, no Amazon, no stores, just ordering from lulu.

I’m glad this fucking book is done so I can forget about Indiana for a while and work on something else. I’m reading a lot of different stuff right now to sort of relax my mind. I should be reading the book about Alaska I bought last week, but I still haven’t. Something to do tomorrow, I guess. It’s too damn big to read on the subway. I’m debating whether or not I should cut the pages out of the spine and only bring the ones for Anchorage.

So it’s a nice day, and we just got a zipcar to go out and go to the mall or something. More news on the book when I get my copy, etc.

The Necrokonicon

Fri, 26 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Okay, the big news first. The Necrokonicon is now available! Go to http://www.lulu.com/content/309317 to check it out. I was a little worried about hot it would look, but now that it’s in my hands, I’m more than happy with it. The cover looks sharp, the photo mosaic is great, and the weird little 9x7” size is very cool. I love the way the inside layout worked, and the fonts and two-column pasteup are perfect. It’s a neat little book. I worry about whether people will want to read a document that lends itself to hypertext in a linear format, but it’s also the kind of thing you flip open to a random page and read. So go steal mom’s credit card, do $10 damage (plus shipping) and let me know what you think.

I’m leaving for Alaska tomorrow. I’m very happy to be getting out, but I still haven’t packed. I have been loading up the laptop with movies, and I have an extra battery to survive the long trip. I haven’t really stocked up on any extra reading material, but I’ll grab some magazines when I get to the airport. I am really psyched about getting up there and taking some great pictures, eating awesome food, and seeing the great outdoors. Okay, Anchorage isn’t the North Pole, but it isn’t Wall Street either.

I got to see my old UCSSC pal Andrea Donderi on Wednesday. She was in town to hang out with her parents and brother, and she crashed with us for a night until everyone else got in town. We went out to eat at Alias, and hung out a bit. It was unfortunately too short of a time, just dinner and bit of walking around the neighborhood, but it was still cool to see her. I think I’ve seen Andrea more than any of my other Indiana friends, not due to any favoritism or anything, but because she’s always catching up to family out here, which is cool.

Last night I started reading Rumored to Exist again, with plans to take it with me, and also to try to get back into that mindset to start work on the next book. I’m surprised at how much I still really like the book. Now that I’ve been away from it for so long, I start to see some of the structure, the lines through the book and the methods I used to piece together narratives. And I thought I would think the book is drivel, but I still really do enjoy reading it. That, to me, is the reason why I write. It’s not a business, or how many I sell, or “how many people I touch” or whatever. It’s whether or not I can come back to something after forgetting it for five years and read it and really, deeply enjoy it. So there you go.

Goodbye, farewell, see you all on 6/6/06. (And of course I know it’s Slayer Day.)

Hello from Alaska

Sun, 28 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Hello from Alaska! Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I am SSHed to my Mac back in New York, and I’m on the 8th floor of the Captain Cook hotel in downtown Anchorage. It’s 9:12 PM and it is broad fucking daylight outside. I think we have another four hours of daylight tonight, and my body thinks it’s 1:12 AM. This could be a major problem.

Today’s 10-odd hours of flying was made much better by flying in first class. We had seats 1A and 1B the whole way; on the first leg of the flight, we were the first on, the first off, and the first served with every round of food and drink. While the poor schmucks in coach got a micro-bag of pretzels and nothing else, we ate a nice lunch off of china with real silverware and drinks in actuall glass glasses. Quite a nice change. This was slightly distracted by a late departure due to fog, and a required spring across O’Hare from gate C567 to gate B1, but once we got there, we got the royal treatment. Plus I had the laptop with two batteries, and watched about three movies, plus played a monster SimCity marathon.

Alaska’s pretty damn nice. It’s nothing like anything I’ve seen before, although there are hints of previous pasts in there that remind me of things. There’s that touch of Seattle, since they are distant cousins on some weird way. They share some similar regional businesses, and the nature is of the same genre, albeit much more pronounced here. There are some excellent mountains on every horizon, which remind me of my land in Colorado, but things are much bigger here. It reminds me a bit of my time own in Southwestern Washington, the smallness and the industry. But it’s more than any of those, and I’ve barely seen the place.

We checked into the Captain Cook, which seems like an okay place. Some of it reminds me a bit of what would have happened if Long John Silver’s every launched a line of upscale restaurants. Lots of dark wood. The rooms themselves are pretty neutral. We’re right on the corner, so we have huge windows facing both north and east, and have a good view of the city. There isn’t a lot of a city here, but we did go for a walk, looking for some food. We’re just over from the city square, which isn’t much. Things are pretty spread out here. It’s nice though, a nice breeze going through the windows and a very laid back feel.

Should I stay up a few more hours and push the internal clock? Or do I crash now and wake up at 4 in the morning? And can I even sleep now? It’s seriously as bright outside as it is at noon back home. I guess I should see what’s on the tube.

P.S. Buy the new book!!

Constant daylight

Mon, 29 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I seriously think there’s more open WiFi in Anchorage than there is in New York City. It’s pretty weird. Anyway, morning of day three here, and I’m debating on whether or not to just keep updating as we go, as opposed to writing a giant travelogue when I get back (that noboy will read.)

The sunlight thing is really fucking weird. On our first night, we went to bed at like 10:30, which was like 2:30 our time, and it was broad daylight out. It was seriously like noon. I woke up to take a leak at like 2 AM and it was just barely dusk. The sun was setting and it was turning red on the horizon, but it was still light enough to read a newspaper outside. Last night, I woke up at about 4:30 AM, and the sun was already coming back up.

The night we got here, there was smoke in the air and it made your eyes tear a bit. It reminded me of when I visited my land in Colorado in the summer of 2002, when half the state was a wildfire. I thought maybe it was a preventative burn, but we saw the Sunday morning paper and it was a forest fire that took out 150 acres. You could still smell the burning wood, although it’s about gone now.

We got an early start yesterday, and drove around a lot. We have a Toyota Matrix, which is pretty much the same as the Zipcars we always get in NY. We went to a Denny’s for breakfast, then went to a Fred Meyer. I’ve forgotten how extensive Fred Meyer is - it’s like the nerve center of all grocery stores. We found more forgotten, new, and jumbo-sized products than I’d ever seen. In New York, you can’t even find corn dogs - they had a whole freezer case of them. They had two-liter bottles of gatorade, which I’d never seen. Lots of other weird stuff. They also have Kroger brand stuff, which was a blast. I found a generic package of Kroger sex lube, which was really hilarious for some reason. I didn’t get that, but we did get a cartful of water, drinks, and other crap, which is much better than paying $3 a bottle downstairs for water, and we have a fridge in the room, too.

We walked to a cafe for lunch - I really wish I remembered names or took notes, and I’m too lazy to search. But after that, we checked out a huge museum of Alaskan history. They had a weird bird exhibit, lots of stuffed falcons eating stuffed and viscerated wombats and whatnot. Lots of Alaskan art, ranging from landscape photos to native stuff made from bones and ivory. The ivory carvings were incredible. The general history part wasn’t bad, with a lot about the Aleutians and Russian Orthodox, and some cool stuff about the pipeline. There was also a smaller Russian Orthodox museum across the street, but it was closing right as we got there.

We caught a big mall on the way back, and bummed around more before going on another big drive, checking out more stuff. We found a bunch of houses built in this strange style, with almost flat roofs, a sort of shed-style 80s thing. We also found a lake by the airport that was entirely made of slips for small, one-engine floatplanes. They were all arranged like houseboats on a lake, but the middle part was their virtual runway. The airport itself is a trip too, nothing but huge widebodied jets from the lower 48, or tiny single-props flying to the bush, and nothing in between. We also drove through a huge park that was road going nowhere, maybe a former military base turned public, with a lot of construction but nothing other than this single road. There was a bridge crossing the road at one point, all brand new engineered lumber, but nothing on either side. The road finally emptied out to a big rec area on the shore, with lots of people mountain biking.

Eventually, we ended up eating at a place called Gwennie’s Old Time Alaskan Inn, which was sort of a dive, across the street from a Harley dealer, but it had a lot of charm. They had tons of pretty cool photos on the wall of when Anchorage was nothing more than two general stores and a whorehouse. Their sourdough bread was still being made from a starter they used before the war. And I think my plate of BBQ ribs was pretty much the whole animal with some sauce on it for $12.

I think that was all of yesterday. Today’s Memorial Day, and we’ll see what’s open. It’s my turn in the shower, so that’s all for now.

P.S. I was thinking about this the other day, and realized that Anchorage’s weather is actually better than Elkhart’s in all seasons. Elkhart gets much colder in the winter, and much hotter in the summer. Plus in Elkhart, you pay a lot of tax that goes toward nothing, while here you pay no tax, and the government gives you like a grand a year in oil revenue.

Back from Alaska

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I’m back from Alaska. I actually got back at noon yesterday, but I was up all night on the flight back, and I am taking the day to decompress and relax and stuff. I am loading the pictures to Flickr, but it is taking forever because there are 800 of them.

(Update: Flickr photos are here. Note that Flickr appeared to lose 12 of the photos during the impossible batch upload, and it will take me forever to figure out the 12 missing, and take 754 hours to upload those 12, so try to avoid the Flickr page, and try to avoid them in general, as it appears they have written an entirely impossible to use tool that’s about as reliable as a piece of wet toilet paper as a birth control method.)

The trip report [gone, sorry] is just a bulleted list now, and partially makes no sense, but I will try to expand it at some later time. Sarah actually scheduled and planned the trip at the last minute, and booked reservations and stuff for everything so we didn’t spend the whole vacation at the mall or eating at Arby’s or whatever, which is what would have happened if I went alone. So we got to do a lot of cool stuff. Probably the best thing there, and maybe the best thing I’ve ever done, was a snowmobile tour we took out of Girdwood, south of Anchorage. It was with Glacier City tours, at snowtours.net. They first airlifted us out of Girdwood Airport in a Robinson R-44, which is a tiny little four-seater. We went up and over a mountain, and then at about 6,000 feet up, we were dropped off on a glacier. There, we met our guide Chris at a basecamp, which consisted of nothing more than a tent and a bunch of snowmobiles. There was nothing but white all around us, densely packed snow, with the very occasional bamboo trailpost marking where we got to go. We took off on three polaris snowmobiles, which were an absolute blast to drive. You sit low to the ground, and even though we were surrounded by ice, it wasn’t that cold outside, and I wore a light jacket and gloves. It was a completely surreal experience, being in such cold-looking surroundings, but wearing what you’d normally wear on a May day, plus helmet and gloves. And I have prescription sunglasses, but after a half-hour of wearing them, everything looked normal because it was so bright from the reflection. The trails started simple, and then we gained speed, to where we could drive along at 40 or so miles an hour, which seems catastrophically fast when you’re right off the ground, with an open-visor helmet and no windshield, and you’re trying to hang on to your snowmobile. We stopped in a lot of places, usually where the snow ended and the mountain began, and got to crawl up for many million-dollar views. It was seriously like mountain-climbing in Tibet, but without the pesky climbing. And once we got done snapping a few pictures and admiring the view, we got back on and rode down a ski hill at insane speeds. There was even part that was like a giant natural half-pipe, covered in snow, where we could carve the side of the hill and then turn, reverse, and do the same on the other side. It was absolutely fun, and if you ever go to Alaska, it is a must-do.

There was a lot of white and glaciers and ice for the trip - we also took a cruise down the fjords south of Seward and saw a big glacier there. The big chunks of ice were blue instead of white or clear, which is weird. If I could find a way to make that ice in a bar with a machine, I would be an instant billionaire. We got to sit and watch this huge glacier calf and drop off big pieces of ice, which was pretty awesome. We also chartered a sailplane on our last day and saw two glaciers, one more like a field of ice, and the other more of a cliff. Lots of pics to be seen on my pages, so look for that stuff, even though a snapshot does not do it justice. On the cruise we also saw a lot of wildlife, like bald eagles, orca and humpback whales, sea lions, sea otters, a brown bear, and a million birds I cannot identify. And when we were driving in Girdwood, we saw a female moose standing at the side of the road. I jumped out and got a couple of photos, but was scared (mostly of some weird flea-borne disease) to get too close. She didn’t really care either way, she was just busy eating some bushes.

Speaking of which, lots of lesbians in Alaska. Lots of tough guy types too. Lots of jailbait. Lots of Jesus. It’s a very southern type of atmosphere at first, especially with the biggest economic booms being construction, petroleum, and the military. It isn’t really southern in the typical redneck Alabama way, though, and it’s hard to put your finger on it. There’s the whole outsider, outlaw thing, but there are so many differences. Yes, everyone drives pickups, but everyone needs pickups, because you never know when you’re going to have to drive 100 miles in the dirt and mud. Everyone loves guns, but everyone needs a gun. One of the big stories the day we left was that a dude woke up to breaking glass in his house, got the gun, went downstairs, and was face-to-face with a 400-pound black bear. He unloaded the glock into him at point-blank range, and the bear turned around and said “you got anything else to eat?” (Of course, it says something that this story was front-page news there.)

I always expected Alaska to be the land of frozen everything, but the whole time we were there, I didn’t need a jacket. It was nicer there than it is currently in New York. What was weird was that we could go up into the mountains and see the snow and ice, but then go back down and be in 76 degree weather. One day, we went to the Alyeska ski resort and took their tram up to the top. I figured ski season was long since over, but when we got up there, the mountain was open, and a whole bunch of kids were on snowboards, carving it out on the mountain. It was so abnormal to be up there in jeans and a t-shirt, watching people in their “winter” gear on the slopes. In fact, some people weren’t in winter gear - we saw a lot of dudes with no shirts and sunglasses, riding their boards.

Overall, I liked Alaska a lot. It was very quiet and quaint when I was there, and the people overall (with the exception of the rude blue-hairs in their tour groups) were very nice. Everyone was pretty laid back, and politically, everyone was pretty close to my own views. I want to go back again. Actually, if I could find a way to live there, and then spend the winters in Oahu, I’d be pretty much set.

Still waiting on Flickr. God damn, their upload tool is slow. Anyway, back to work tomorrow (if I can even find the place.)

The Drugstore Habit

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I used to have a bad habit of going to the drugstore on a Sunday evening and dropping a decent sum of money on random stuff that I suddenly realized I needed: razor blades, acne medication that promised to work, cases of RC cola, issues of Lowrider magazine, that new Michael Crichton novel, whatever. And at various points in my geography, the drug store became a Target, which is basically a drug store but they also sell furniture and motor oil and low-end clothes. And I guess for a year, it was a Marsh grocery store, but Marsh pretty much was just a drug store that also sold 36 aisles of food. I think one of the reasons I did this is because in Indiana, everything closes at 5:00 PM on a Sunday, except Osco’s and Walgreens. (And grocery stores and Target…) And in a need to do something on Sundays, I’d go to the only thing open, and it was hypnotic, and I would suddenly realize I’d need dental floss, or beef jerky, and boom… $57.86 of consumer goodness.

And now I realize that I can’t really shop at pharmacies anymore; they have become colluded over the years. I went to a CVS last night (shampoo, glasses cleaner, legal pads, facial cleanser) and it was just impossible to shop. Maybe it was a New York thing, but whatever hypnotic spell the drug stores of 10 or 15 years ago in Indiana had, these ones had the total opposite. The aisles were spaced wrong, the ceiling height was different, everything was laid out in this “get-your-stuff-and-get-the-fuck-out” manner that broke the spell for me. And I had a friend that used to soapbox on this for ages, but drug stores have gradually sunk into this hole. It used to be drug stores had a soda fountain, and ice cream cones and a sandwich bar, and you went there to relax. They were like the Cheers bar, but no alcohol. And if you needed some tincture of iodine too, they had it. And when’s the last time you saw a drug store with a soda bar? You haven’t, because all of those old-timey stores with the hand-painted signs and the zinc ceilings and whatnot got bought out and gutted, and replaced with an exact clone of the CVS store that they have in 5,700 other cities. Has anyone written a book about this? Someone should. (Not me, though!)

I am in the middle of trying to get book 3 going. I know there are really like 9 books or whatever, but there are basically only two (Summer Rain and Rumored to Exist) and all of the other ones are greatest-hits/live at the Budokon sort of things that don’t “count”. So now, book three. And I need another book like Rumored. I need ten like Rumored. So this time, I’m trying to write a full outline, with three acts and all of that shit, for a book, and then I will have a whole plot, and I won’t have to play the “it’s a book about nothing” game that made 98% of the people out there look at me like I was starting a NAMBLA chapter in the back of a day care center. The book will have all of the expected dark zaniness of Rumored, but be a book. I think. I hope. But no word on this until it’s underway, because this is the part I always fuck up.

Not much else. I wish I was back in Alaska now. OK, back to work.

Food indecision

Sun, 02 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I get into this phase maybe once or twice a year when I simply cannot pick out what food to eat. I mean, the clock strikes noon, I am famished, got plenty of cash on me, and it’s not shitting rain or hot enough to liquify the sidewalk or anything else, but I simply cannot decide on what kind of food I want to eat. I can’t even think of a genre, or a direction to walk. And it goes on like this, meal after meal, until I am continuously more and more fatigued with things because I haven’t had a good meal in days. Yes, I’ve had a meal, and I don’t exactly look like a UNICEF kid, it’s just I can’t find something that makes me happy. And this is probably a bigger metaphor on life, because I also can’t get any writing done, find a book I can really stick with reading, and so on. I’m sure there’s a medication for this. And I’m sure one of it’s 7492 side effects are that it causes loss of appetite.

Anyway, yesterday we went out and went to Flowers Cafe, which is a sort of hippie-esque diner a few blocks over on Grand. It’s not a hippie place in that they serve wheat grass and tofu hot dogs, it’s just a deli, but with lots of retro flower-power type murals on the walls. It’s not too overdone, and they make a good reuben, so we order there a lot. And for whatever reason, we went there for breakfast on Saturday, and I got two eggs on a roll with bacon and cheese, and it completely kicked this food neurosis thing in the ass. It was a really good sandwich, and I loved it, and I wish I could get another one right now, except they’re closed, and I just ate dinner anyway.

After a day of walking around with Sarah and her friend Dre, we ended up seeing The Devil Wears Prada, which was funny, but probably not too relatable to those who don’t live here. We also went to this diner afterward called Big Daddy’s, which was the typical shit-on-the-walls genre, but not corporate, and with the typical menu where, instead of just saying “hamburger,” it says “Daddy-o Burger.” I just wanted a hot dog, and was presented with a giant plate that had pretty much an entire pig’s entrails stuffed and tied off into a hotdog. It was excellent, but it was also like half my body weight in food. Anyway, it’s a good place to crash if you’re just north of union square. I wish it was closer to the office, but then I’d probably need some paramedics to cut me out of my apartment in a few months.

Speaking of, I was on this food nutso thing the other day, and it popped into my head that I really wanted to run for the border and hit a Taco Bell. It usually happens once a year, but there are none by my new digs (there’s actually an old one, boarded up, with the tri-stripe awning still there and the logo spraypainted out) so I did the research and found the closest one was a half mile from the office, over on West 4th. Me and a couple of coworkers planned it out like a jailbreak, since we didn’t want to spend our entire lunch break trying to get over there. And Taco Bell has a very short halflife, before it congeals and turns cold and completely inedible. (And forget about microwaving that shit.) So we decided to cut over on the subway, one stop, hit the KFC/Taco Bell, and put in our giant order for all of the other people who wanted in but were too chickenshit to make the run. We got back in 30 minutes flat, ate, and then spent the afternoon wishing for napdom, hoping the gurgling in our guts wouldn’t go bad. ‘Beller’s regret. But I was happy.

There’s something in the sauce of that Mexican Pizza that reminds me so much of when I used to work there. And when I was thinking about it, I realized - it’s been twenty damn years since the summer I spent working the drive-thru at the ‘Bell, saving up for one of those new-fangled CD players and a dual exhaust for my Camaro. Shit, I remember when I was twenty, so it makes me feel even worse to remember something twenty years ago. It’s so weird though, that tomato sauce always reminds me of buying food when I went off-shift, leaving with a big bag of taco supremes and nachos and riding home on my ten-speed. When I first had my car, I dumped an order of those cinnamon crispas under the front seat, and spent months trying to vacuum up that sugar-cinnamon dust from the crevices of the carpet. Of all of the cooking smells mixed together in the back line of a Taco Bell, the most overpowering one was the crispa smell, maybe because it was the only sweet one. I don’t think they sell those anymore, but if they did, it would be an instant time machine for me.

Crap. It’s pouring rain outside. I have to go to work tomorrow, which sucks. Then I get the 4th off. Then a 3-day week. Whole Foods had nitrite-free uncured hotdogs, and they actually taste pretty much the same, so that’s my little homage to the whole July 4th, picnic, barbeque, drunken fireworks, whatever thing. That’s all.

Coney Island

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I just finished watching the fireworks. We have a view here, although it’s not as perfect as when I worked in Seattle right on Lake Union, and we could go on the roof terrace and watch them there. But it seems like fireworks are improving with time. They had some pretty weird shells, with little dots of light that swarmed like alien beings, instead of just falling to earth. Very neat stuff.

We went to Coney Island today, a last-second decision. Turns out I can take the F train right by my house straight there, and it takes less time than from Queens. When we got there, about every person in the history of time was there, so pretty much everywhere you turned was like that ill-fated Who show in Ohio, except much hotter outside. Turns out I haven’t been there in maybe five years, and Sarah hasn’t been there in ten, so the train station was all new to us. The rest of the strip, not so new.

Coney Island is such a strange place. You’d expect, due to the fact that Nathan’s can sell a million hotdogs an hour, that every building in the place would be developed out to hell like Times Square. But more than half of the structures have been sitting boarded up and vacant since the second war. And the places running haven’t seen new paint since Eisenhower was in office. But people come, and people spent money, and it’s still a draw. It’s very strange.

Nathan’s has their big competitive hotdog eating contest on the 4th, and they were setting up for that. Competitive eating is becoming big now. It’s like what professional wrestling was in the eighties. And there were a shitload of people out for that. Plus, if you go to Coney Island, your one I-have-to-go stop is Nathan’s for a hot dog. The place looked like a fallout shelter at the beginning of a nuclear war. There were 20 or 30 lines, each with dozens of people, all trying to get a hotdog. I wanted one, but forget it. I didn’t want the line.

We walked up to the boardwalk and down a few blocks. Sean Maloney, who is running for NY Attorney General, was standing there and came up to me and shook my hand, which was really weird, because he was dressed like he was a tax auditor on vacation, and everyone else around us was completely thugged out. Also, there were at least 23 million people actually on the beach, more than I’ve ever seen in my life, cumulatively.

So, we didn’t do anything. We took a left, walked a few blocks away from the mess and the masses, and went to a nice, air-conditioned McDonald’s, where we got some lunch and watched the Space Shuttle launch. I also watched this guy who looked like that fat fuck on the Sopranos, except two times fatter and in a cut-off shirt, fill a cooler in his car with ice, a cup at a time from the McD’s drink dispenser. He seriously made like 37 trips from car to store, and they were either so busy or so apathetic, they didn’t say shit.

Then home. Then I caught some Twilight Zone marathon, which always reminds me of 6th-ish grade, staying up on vacations until 10:00 so I could watch it on WGN channel 9, before WGN was a big nationwide shitfest. I’ve found that more than 50% of the time, I can name a TZ episode in the first minute. I’m a little rusty right now, though. I have them all on tape, and a bunch on DVD, but I never watch it unless it’s a marathon on SciFi. Always loses something otherwise.

It’s hot as hell, time to go into the other room with the AC, go to bed, and drag my ass to work tomorrow. Anyway, happy 4th.

Little Axl

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I probably mentioned a few times a while ago that I was working on a book called Six Year Plan, that was a bunch of short essays and whatnot about my time in Bloomington - sort of an extension of what I did in Summer Rain. Well, that never went so well, and I’m sitting on about 100,000 words of shit, some of it good, a lot of it not so good. In mucking around, I’ve decided to pull a few pieces and put them here. These are not stories. They aren’t essays. They are just pieces. And they’re rough. Let’s start with one that I call “Little Axl.”

---

In the summer of ‘91, I needed a real job, pronto. My parents were on my ass about bringing in a solid 40 hours a week at a good rate, and my computer job dried up during the summer session. I checked the classifieds and noticed the major triumphant victory in the 17-minute-long Iraq war pushed the economy into a short-term upswing. Everybody in the rich states wanted a new house or a new RV, so every factory in our shit city had a want ad in the paper. Everyone was paying at least twice as much as I made changing laser printer toner cartridges, and some were already running mandatory overtime at time and a half.

The only problem with a factory gig would be going in as a student. Most blue-collar shops didn’t like to hire young peckerwoods who were into the book learnin’, because they’d question the wise ways of those who earned union wages drilling holes in plywood 800 times a day every day. And just when the school boys started to nice and indoctrinated, they’d pick up and leave for campus in August. Most employers preferred someone local, married, with a kid or ten, and a mortgage or two. They could break in a lifer and keep them in the gallows for twenty or thirty years. A few, however, liked to bring in a crop of college kids to enslave for three months, especially if they could do it to skirt some kind of union regulation.

I ended up lucking into a job at a brass plant in Elkhart, on second shift. I worked for the same company at a different factory the year before, with my dad. The brass plant meant no commute, no early morning alarm clock, and no dad. I also somehow managed to take a morning class each summer session at IUSB. And I dated Lauren, this girl in Bloomington, and made the trip down there every other weekend. Basically, the entire summer was a long run of little sleep, lots of trucker speed, and a swimming pool or two of caffeinated beverages.

Most of the people at the plant were typical factory workers: divorced, remarried, with a couple of kids, and never questioned the life laid out in front of them. There were a couple of students my age, also in for the three-month haul between college semesters, and I hung out with them at the lunch table. But one of the best guys I worked with wasn’t a regular friend, just a forklift driver I talked to here and there. I don’t even remember his real name. But in my head I called him Little Axl.

Little Axl had a mane of longish red hair that made him vaguely resemble the lead singer of Guns N’ Roses, and his raspy three-packs-of-Marlboro-Red-a-day voice sounded spot-on like he was going to jump down off of his lift truck, bust into “Sweet Child of Mine” at any moment and do that stupid snakey dance . Actually, maybe he completely wouldn’t remind you of Mr. Rose, but this was 1991, and the band was ramping up to hit ubiquitousity in a few months with the Use Your Illusion albums. The guy did complete his work wardrobe with a few cut-up t-shirts of various metal bands, a red bandana, and ripped-up jeans, so I’m sure he would have appreciated the association if I ever would have told him.

Little Axl was always doing dumb shit, and the other lifers at the job were constantly harping on him about it. He was sort of like the hype man for a rap group, except he wasn’t acting like a dumbass to make Chuck D look more butch or anything; he was just legitimately off-kilter in the head. For example, one day he suddenly decided to quit smoking. A noble gesture, yes, but the main reason he quit is not because of cost (cigs were dirt cheap back then) or health (everyone in Indiana smoked, and didn’t worry much about cancer), but because he used to be on the track team back in high school, and in some Al Bundy-fueled nostalgia fit, he wanted to be able to run the mile in under six minutes or whatever the fuck he ran it a half-dozen years before. Part of his non-smoking regimen was that during lunch and at breaks, he’d run laps around the parking lot in his work clothes and steel-toed boots, trying to magically regenerate all of the lung cells he’d tarred up over the last decade. Calling this “running laps” was slightly misleading, though, because he’d manage to run about 20 yards before he’d double over and hyperventilate for a moment or two, trying to catch his breath for another quick dash, while the rest of us sat at the picnic table next to the front entrance and laughed at him. Within two days, the pack of Reds were rolled back in his shirt sleeve, and the smoking ban was long forgotten.

Here’s another story about Little Axl, although it’s also mostly about me. I was dating Lauren back in Bloomington, after hooking up with her over a Memorial Day visit. And because I racked up a $277 long distance bill one month, my parents disconnected our phone to all but local calls, which made the long distance relationship a bit more difficult. But I could get on the computer via a local dialup and send mail and chat with her when she also got online. I didn’t have a computer back then, but she loaned me her old Mac Plus and 2400 BPS external modem. I’d rush home after my shift ended at midnight, and she’d go to one of the 24-hour labs on campus, and we’d “meet” and type across the 250-mile void through the magic of primitive chat programs like bitnet and VAXPhone.

One Friday night, I ran home after work to got ready for my big VAX session, but when I pulled into the driveway, I noticed the house was dark. I walked inside, and found there was a blackout in the whole neighborhood. I suddenly realized that Lauren was probably in a computer lab, wondering where the fuck I was, and if I didn’t log in soon, she was going to get all pissed off and it would all be my fault. I couldn’t call her in the lab (no long distance, this was before the day of cell phones), and I couldn’t drive to school and sit at a computer, since the IUSB campus was 45 minutes away, and probably all locked up. Then it hit me: go back to work with the computer. I piled up the cords and keyboard in a bag, grabbed the Mac Plus by the carrying handle, and drove back to the brass plant.

I don’t know how I figured this would work, but I assumed that a place like a factory had to have some RJ-45 stapled to a baseboard somewhere with a live signal. I checked the lunch room with no luck, and then found a phone jack and a set of power cords in the long hallway that ran from the front door to the guard station and time clock. It wasn’t exactly the most ergo place in the world, but I plopped down all of my stuff on the concrete floor, ran my wires, and within a few minutes, I had dialtone, then a carrier, and I was trying to explain all of this to Lauren over a 2400 BPS connection.

The weird this is, aside from the security guard dude working at the front desk, my buddy Little Axl was also pacing back and forth by the time clock. Why? It turns out a cop was hiding in the bushes right outside of the parking lot, sniping off cars with a radar detector and hoping to peel off a DUI or two. Now that’s pretty much business as usual with the shithole Elkhart cops, but the problem was that Little Axl drove this fucked up truck that was lifted about nine inches, had no exhaust, no front grill, one headlight missing, another headlight pointed 89 degrees into the air, and probably had expired plates and insurance, not to mention that Little Axl had like 27 points on his license, two DUIs, and maybe a warrant or two. So he was freaking out, waiting for the cop to leave, and trying to get someone else to drive out there to see if the coast was clear.

Meanwhile, he found me on the floor, typing away, and was completely astounded at my piece of shit Mac Plus running the Red Ryder terminal program. I don’t think he’d ever seen a computer before, and he stared at me as if I’d set up a Star Trek teleporter room on the floor and was beaming in long-dead celebrities of the 17th century for a polo game. He looked over my shoulder at my bitnet conversation, wondering what video game I was playing, mesmerized not only that someone could run a computer, but that they could also type words into it. I don’t know if he was more astounded that a person with such scientific prestidigitation skills could work at the same factory as him packing boxes, or if I was more amazed that a person who was about my age could know so little about technology. Either way, it was a strange evening.

It’s also worth mentioning that Little Axl also went to the big Guns N’ Roses and Metallica show in Indianapolis that summer to see his namesake, and I think he vaguely invited me down there if I wanted to catch a ride too, but it seemed too weird and I probably was going down to Bloomington that weekend anyway. In retrospect, I wish I would have scraped up the $40 for tickets and went with him, since it would have been a completely fucked up story culminating with him shooting a syringe of Jim Beam into his neck and then beating his trucker-looking girlfriend with the bottle. And this was also like one or two shows before the real Axl started a riot in St. Louis.

When he came back from the show, Little Axl would not shut up about the greatness of the Guns set, and how they played so many new songs. He also got a shirt that he wore to work the next day, but it said something like GUNS AND FUCKING ROSES WILL FUCK YOU UP on the back, and one of the old guys at work got upset and told him he had to turn it inside out or get another shirt because it had the f-word on it, and this was a family factory. He had it inside out for an hour or two, then he had it back, and I wondered if the ACLU had stepped in that quickly or what, until I saw that he cleverly covered the aforementioned f-bombs with a piece of electrical tape. Sneaky.

Little Axl was one of the most interesting people I worked with, although there were others. I worked at a QA bench for a few weeks with a woman that was my parents’ age who worked with my dad at the other plant and was a recovering alcoholic. She told me all of the usual stories recovering addicts tell you, about taking a bunch of drugs, driving through traffic at 110 while fucked up, almost jumping out of windows, being pronounced dead and then coming back, and all of the others. It made the summer go by a little faster, but it still took way too long to get it done, especially since I’d be back in Bloomington in the fall.

jkonrath@indiana.edu

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I spent all of my school years with the same email address - jkonrath@indiana.edu. I didn’t always get my mail on the same machine, and I had this complex shell game of trying to get accounts on as many machines as possible so I could have all of the quota to store my email and other junk. But I had that general philosophy of having all of my files in a central place. My computer at home was always a piece of garbage, and I was too nomadic to pop all of my mail to one place. So it all lived on various ultrix machines named after metals. When I left, those accounts got tarred and zipped and came with me to Seattle.

When I got to my first job, I hoped to get the address jkonrath@shitburger.com (replace shitburger with the actual company name), but they assigned accounts by first name. In my case, it ended up being jonathan@shitburger.com. This caused great confusion on many fronts. First, everyone wanted to email me at jkonrath@shitburger.com. A lot of people still emailed me at jkonrath@indiana.edu, thinking it would still somehow magically work. I found (well, I already knew) that absolutely nobody can spell the name Jonathan. (Johnathan, Jonathon, Jkofuiw849fthan, whatever.) Also, this caused a lot of people at the new job to think I preferred the long form of my surname, when in fact I hate it. Since only my mom and law enforcement officials actually call me Jonathan, being in an office where every marketing droid called me that made me think I was ten minutes from an FBI bust or something.

I also quickly got sick of my personal and work email coming to the same mailbox. This was long before workplaces got really shitty about how proprietary email was, but it became increasingly difficult to get at my mail from home or away. And it sucked when someone was hovering over my desk and someone non-work-related sent me an email about dressing up a sorority chick in clown makeup and banging her on a pooltable. (I have weird friends.)

After about six months in Seattle, I decided to buck up and pay for a real ISP. At that time, the only place in town that offered a shell account was the Speakeasy Cafe. I think it was like ten bucks a month. Most people would go in there and sit at a computer, sipping their tea and sending emails, but I just wanted a unix machine, centrally located, a place to keep my junk, and run emacs.

Back before Speakeasy became a huge ISP, they were just a cafe. They had a big Solaris box, a bunch of terminals, and an espresso machine. The place was in Belltown, a part of Seattle filled with trendy art galleries, the kind where the walls are covered in dayglo tempra paintings of native american wolves fucking, the kind of stuff you don’t want to look at when you’re on acid. The cafe was all wood and black-spraypainted terminals, like something out of Singles, but with computers. I don’t drink coffee; they didn’t serve Pepsi or Coke, only Afri-Cola, a weird little import in a strange-shaped bottle that tastes like RC Cola at twice the price, but a penny of the cost went to the rainforests or something. They sometimes had food specials, scrawled on a chalkboard menu, free-range wok-seared something-or-other. No burgers. No BLT.

But I got that account, untarred my old bronze archive, changed three or four things, and it was running like I never left. All of my old mail was there. Emacs still ran, with the VM mail program and the BBDB address book. My web page came back to life. There were text files with lists of things I was selling six months ago, right before I left town. It was like taking everything in your house, shrinkwrapping it, and transporting it across the country into another house, so when you woke up in the middle of the night for a glass of water, you’d still find the glass on the counter.

I came to Belltown every month, to pay my tab. This was before the days of Visa-enabled online invoices; you showed up and put your cash on the counter. I think you could prepay a year in advance, but at this point, I was so tapped that all of my grocery shopping consisted of only buying the stuff in the Safeway coupon book. (And those are gone now too, thanks to those stupid cards.) But Belltown was an engram burned into my mind. Every time I came down there, I’d stop at a store filled with antique junk that was pried from houses that were gutted. Clawfoot tubs, ornate molding, wood bannisters sat on the floor, all of the pieces of last century that were yanked when some Microshit Millionaire wanted to redo their colonial house to look “zen.” I dreamed of somehow buying some land in Montana or Idaho or Wyoming or whatever and buying all of this shit and building a haunted mansion.

I never hung out at Speakeasy much, although it was the place to hang out for the hipster set. I tried to go in there once and kill a few hours on a Friday night, to see if anyone cool would be wandering around, but it was either people who already knew each other, or strangers who wanted to tunnel into their account and read the web with the lynx web browser. It wasn’t a swinging scene by any means. Later they started showing movies, having bands, but really eclectic stuff. I met Trent Harris there, when he was screening The Orkly Kid movie. And for a while, I was trying to do some kind of collaboration with a cartoonist named Daniel, and we’d meet there and then go elsewhere, where they had greasy food or cheaper drinks. (I was trying to get him onboard about filming a movie that parodied Apocalypse Now but was about trying to find a parking spot in Seattle, called A Parking Spot Now. Never happened, of course. I still have notes somewhere, though.)

Speakeasy became big and somewhat dumb, nationwide, and with DSL and wireless and whatever else. It was nice when I moved to New York, and I could keep the same service. But eventually, things got stupid, and they kept fucking up their shell accounts. Finally, I gave up, pointed my mail to my home machine, and turned on ssh so I could get to it anywhere. And the cafe, sadly, burned down. I think it’s condos now. They never reopened, and maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t think people can really wrap their heads around the idea of going somewhere to use the internet, unless they’re using their laptop and stealing someone else’s WiFi. Even the idea of a shell account is alien to pretty much anyone.

Bleah. Time to go read.

Pocket books

Sun, 16 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Splitting headache. I think it’s from the heat, but it could be something else. I’m about to take some Tylenol PM, crank up the AC, and try to sleep it off. It’s been a slow weekend, which is good. I have a new dentist, and I think I can see his office from my window, so the commute isn’t a problem. He is also pretty laid-back and not all about the lectures, or the insistence that I need to cash out my entire 401K and spend it on veneers, braces, and who knows what else. I do have to go back next month for some work, but just fillings. No titanium post insertions or root canals or anything.

Lulu has a new book size, the “pocket” size, which is something like 4.25x6.875” or something like that. I was thinking that I would love to make my own version of the pocket ref, which is my absolute favorite book ever, and I think pretty much anyone with a spare twelve bucks should buy it. It contains pretty much every reference table and material stuffed into 768 pages that fit in your pocket. I love to read it when I’m bored, and it’s always good to take on travel. Anyway, I thought it would be fun to glean together all of my most-used useless info and cram it into a little book, and others could buy one too. Like, what to do for a hangover or food poisoning, what presidents have been shot and where, the addresses of Denny’s in many major cities, a list of daily excuses to have a party, whatever. Anyway, it’s a thought.

I’ve been reading Amy Hempel’s Reasons to Live. No, it isn’t a new-age bullshit book, she’s a writer, very minimalist stuff, very good. All of her stories are told in as few sentences as possible, very tight, very deadly. It’s good stuff, except when I read it, I simultaneously want to rewrite everything I’ve ever written so it works like that, and I also just want to give up, because there’s no way I could. But I still read it. She has a hardcover story collection from this spring, I hope it’s not repeats from the book I have.

Nothing else. No writing, it’s been too hot, and my computer room has no AC. I have the laptop, but usually I spend half my time fucking with the WiFi to get it working or not working, and it won’t let me write.

Anyway…

The Fuck Up

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT

A side note: When I wrote about Seattle a couple of entries ago, that wasn’t any kind of cryptic clue that I was moving to Seattle, that I missed Seattle, or that I was visiting or anything else. I write about random nostalgia like that entirely because I can’t think of anything better to write. Also, I feel some need to cement my random memories in amber for later preservation. Don’t read too much into it. In fact, the topic came up when I was in Alaska recently, because there are so many regional chains up there that reminded me so much of Seattle. And when we were vaguely, theoretically talking about if I would ever want to move back, the answer was a pretty easy no, because you can’t go back. There are times I miss when I lived in Seattle and was a 25-year-old writer, eating tuna salad and cup-a-soup every night to survive on $7 a week, writing furiously every night because I had no TV, no playstation, no DVD collection or player, and no long distance because I never paid my bill. But if I went back to Seattle, replace all that with worrying about my 401K and bitching about taxes and traffic and whatever else. And there are too many ghosts in Seattle for me. I haven’t even visited since I left. I probably won’t for a while. You can’t go back. But I do write about it a lot. Don’t confuse the two.

I’ve been trying to step up the reading a bit. Finished that Amy Hempel book, got her new one, and the first hundred pages are some (but not all) of the stories in Reasons to Live. So about 100 pages out of 400 are things I already read. At least I grabbed the new one off of Amazon in hardcover when it was still in the “new hardcover - slashed price” state, so I paid like $14 instead of $21. That book is in the queue, but a couple of others jumped in front of it while I was waiting for it to show up in the mail.

I re-read Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck-Up again, which has become one of my “friends,” the books I can read and re-read on an annual basis without boredom. It’s about a kid in New York in the mid-Eighties who is hopping from couch to floor to lover and from job to job to lack of job, mostly on the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. There’s some other story arc in there, but aside from Nersesian’s fluid writing, the main character is this old New York that is now gone. Most of the novel takes place in a ten-block radius from where I work. But all of the porn theaters and slum apartments described are now yuppie condos and fast food restaurants and Gap stores. (I think Marie told me though that he has a few fuckups, like saying a certain movie theater became a Gap store, when it didn’t, etc.) Anyway, it’s a good read, interesting.

One of the things that stuck with me this time I read was that the protagonist has a friend Helmsley that was one of these uber-intellect types. His parents died in a plane crash, and he invested all of the money and lived like a pauper on the interest. All he did was read, and write. That made me really wish I could strip away all of the distractions of my life and get to the point where the two main consumers of time would be reading books, and writing books. Now, I don’t even know what the fuck I’m doing with my time, because I never write, and I never read. I don’t have a subway commute anymore - it’s like three stops, and I usually walk home after work to clear my head, so that hour or whatever is now gone. I’ve been trying to read more at night though. The writing, well, I’ll talk about that later.

Current book is the new Anthony Bourdain, called The Nasty Bits. It’s a collection of various newspaper and magazine pieces he’s done over the last few years, cleaned up a bit and pressed into a nice little 288-page hardcover. (I guess it isn’t that new - mid-May.) Some of the themes are repeated from his last two books, and if you’ve watched his TV show, some of the essays are longer versions of the different trips he’s taken. I like Bourdain a lot, and not for the macho pseudo-elitish chef shit that makes him a star. I seriously like his writing. He’s got the chops, and he’s read enough George Orwell and Hunter S. Thompson to keep alive that tradition of sharp observation mixed with entertaining craziness. Every good writer knows the best way to lure in somebody is to talk about work. And the best way to talk about work is to take some kind of work that is truly fucked up or boring or demeaning, and add some kind of element that makes it seem like a secret society to people. That’s why that bad jobs show on cable is such a hit. Nobody’s really interested in becoming a sewer cleaner; but when it’s presented in such a way that it makes people think (or think they’re thinking), it becomes gold. Bourdain does a lot of that. I’m not going to run out and eat whatever assholes and elbows make French culinary tradition great, and I don’t want a career in cooking, or even to learn how to cook. But his descriptions make it interesting, and I like that. The book is also much better than the TV show, which is glossied and cut up and pasted together in such a way that it loses part of the element. They’re entertaining, but the essays do a much better job. I’m only halfway through this book, but I have a feeling it will be done by tomorrow.

And I haven’t been doing that much writing, but I’m finding myself picking at these Bloomington stories again, like a scab that I will never let heal. These may or may not become a book called Six Year Plan, or maybe it needs a new title. No real news or agenda here - I’m just reading stuff that has sat for a while, taking out words, tightening lines, but not really doing much. Maybe I will get more productive with it, but it’s mostly something I do when I can’t figure out what the next project will really be. I think even if I made these stories as tight as possible and then put them in a book, it would only sell two copies, and that makes it difficult to jump into the thing with great gusto. I wonder if I ever would have written Summer Rain if I ever knew how many (few) copies it would eventually sell.

Time for lunch. I think we’re walking to this new farmer’s market on Orchard, then to a restaurant around here for some kind of brunch. It’s 70 and cloudy, very cool and maybe not bad weather for walking around for a bit.

Raymond Carver rut

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT

A quick update after lunch. I know I haven’t been writing in here at all, and there’s a reason for that, and it’s that I’ve been busy working on my next book. And when I have writing to do there, it’s hard to write here, because every word here is a word that could be there. Or something.

I’ve been stuck reading Raymond Carver lately, although I haven’t been reading at all, because I’ve been walking to work, and I can’t walk and read. I can walk and listen to music, but I’m sick of everything on my iPod, and I don’t want to buy any more music, because everything sucks, and I don’t really know what I like anymore. And I think I have been cured of collecting music, so I no longer have the need to keep buying shit just to buy shit.

Back to Carver, I read his collection The Cathedral, and about the title story, I swear I’ve read it somewhere else. Actually, I swear someone verbally read it to me. Maybe it was in a writing class back at IU. Maybe it was in a movie that I’m forgetting. I’m sure the story was anthologized everywhere, as it’s a popular one, but I don’t remember where I first saw it. Oh well.

If you read the drama on my livejournal about the bad review, I’ve almost completely forgotten about it. The reviewer was an idiot. That said, I wish more people would review my stuff. But who cares. All I know is I have to keep going on the current book. It’s my first book not based on my life, and the first with a real plot. Those are two points of contention, because the two most-asked questions of me are “why do you only write about Indiana” and “why don’t your books have plots like Stephen King”. The answer, by the way, to both of those questions is “go fuck yourself.” Equally annoying are the people who tell me “just write whatever, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t have a plot or structure”, because those people have obviously never written a book. There has to be some structure or it won’t work. Captain Beefheart is a novel gimmick for about five minutes, but you can’t make a career out of it. I think he’s living in a van in New Mexico, trying to sell shitty paintings to tourists.

The weather is very nice here now. It’s good weather to walk home in at night, which I have been. I’m going to Wisconsin next weekend, so lots of cheese.

The TSA and medical conditions

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Bags are packed and at my desk, and I’m ready to leave for Milwaukee in a few hours. Sarah is in Philadelphia on business, so she will get back, get a taxi, and then come to my work and pick me up. Then, off to the airport and the hideous security crap. Wish me luck.

You know, I never had a problem with the TSA, until maybe a year ago. Before that, I always got through, no problems. Now, for some reason, they constantly fuck with me. The worst of it was when I was in California earlier this year, and I still had my knee brace. The brace has hinged metal pieces on either side, and sets off a metal detector more than a handgun would. And I can’t take off the brace without completely taking off my pants. Now, if you go to the TSA web site, there’s a lot of nice wording about how to treat a person with a medical issue: they can’t touch the brace, they can’t take off the brace, they can’t ask me to take it off, and so on. Well, on my return trip, they made me go into a little room, undress, and take off the brace so they could test it for explosives. I’m sitting in a back room with no pants on while some dumb fuck is asking me if I follow hockey or not, seeing as I live in New York. WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!

So, yeah, I don’t like the TSA. We’ll see how it goes tonight.

Speaking of travel, I’ve been reading this Henry Rollins book that’s a travel journal over a couple of years, both from spoken word tours and from an effort to burn off a ton of frequent flier miles and go to weird places. He goes to Kenya, and then to Madagascar, sleeping in tents and seeing the wilderness. The sights and animals and native people all sound interesting. It must be something to sit on the shores of the Indian Ocean on an island that is almost untouched by man, with no pollution and nothing but green around you. On the other hand, he also did the tour group thing with a bunch of insufferable people, usually old, just wanting to take pictures of stuff they’d seen on TV, not really getting the context.

Rollins is a capable writer, and his life is interesting. This is where the whole “It’s not about what you write, but who you are” thing comes into play. People buy his books because he has this sort of cult of personality surrounding him. People want to be his friend, or be him, and because he’s been in bands and movies and whatever, he has that infamy. He could sell a hundred times as many books as I’d ever sell in my lifetime, even if he wrote a ten-word poem and repeated it for 200 pages. He doesn’t need to write anything marketable, because there are enough frentic completist record collectors who absolutely have to have one of everything he produces. People worship him, but they don’t give a shit about how his writing stands up against David Foster Wallace or Raymond Carver. He’s a celebrity, and people like that.

And Rollins is interesting, but he’s also a bit of a prick sometimes. (To be fair, this is sort of fading with age, though.) And he goes on and on about his need to be alone, how he wishes he could vanish in the woods or whatever, and while I find his life or his lifestyle or his travels interesting, I think a lot of this philosophy of his is bullshit. And I wonder if that’s what he truly feels, or if fame has made him feel this, or if it’s all an act. Maybe he’s a cool guy if you know him, but the closest I ever would be to knowing him would be getting him to sign my napkin and shake my hand after a show.

I think that’s the thing that bugs me about signing books. The people who most want me to sign something are the ones that least know me. How is a squiggle of ink on a page going to change things? Who’s going to rush home with an autographed copy of Rumored to Exist and wrap it up in 10-mil plastic? Maybe people want me to sign books because they think they will go up in value, or someday I’ll be famous, but the truth is, even if I went on a ten-state killing spree and got caught by the feds tomorrow, that book wouldn’t fetch more than $50 on eBay. (All of this is also rather stupid in that if I could sign every book and zine I’ve ever published in about an afternoon.)

Crap. Lunch is over and I need to go work. I’ll be back Monday (although who am I kidding, I never update this thing…)

Back from Milwaukee

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT

[Before I begin, does anyone know anything about WiFi? I have a router next to my Mac, and when I’m in the next room on my laptop, I’m lucky to have it work for five minutes before the signal drops. When I have a signal, it’s 100% excellent, no problem, but then BAM it’s gone. This happens even if the laptop is physically touching the router. There are a lot of other routers in the building, and I’ve tried fucking with the channel settings a bit, but to no avail. This is extremely frustrating, because every page I’ve found on google says “well, have you tried moving into a cabin in the woods with no walls?” as like step one. I also don’t want to dump a lot of cash into repeaters or antennae just to find out it’s a fundamental problem of living in NYC with too many hotspots. Oh, and I mention all of this because I already wrote this entire entry, and on like the last word, the connection dropped, and then when I went to the other computer to fix it, it overwrote the backup file with a blank file. I was seriously on the verge of smashing my laptop into little tiny pieces with a hammer. I still might. Anyway.]

So I’m back from Milwaukee, and the trip went well. We spent a lot of time with Sarah’s family, and that was all good. We also went to the art museum (where Sarah’s dad works), Irish Fest, the public museum, a Brewers game, and did a lot of driving around and seeing all of the places where Sarah grew up. We also drove down to Kenosha to meet up with John Sheppard and his better half. It was a pretty packed 4-day weekend.

Milwaukee, to me, seems like a Chicago-lite. It’s smaller, and doesn’t have as many of the big things, but it’s also easier to get around, it’s cleaner, maybe a bit quieter, and more relaxed. But a lot of things remind me of the Chicago I knew as the kid, like the little corner bars with the giant Old Style signs out front, the giant, old brick factories and chimneys from the breweries, and the general feel of the place, the way houses are built and how stores are laid out. It really made me think back to my grandparents’ old neighborhood (which is Larry’s current neighborhood.)

The only time I’ve been to Milwaukee was for the metalfest, in ‘93. We drove by the big Eagles lodge that was the venue for that show, and I saw the only things I experienced on that trip: the hall, the street where Ray parked and we tried to sleep, the McDonald’s next door, and the quick pick minimart across the street. The other indelible event that I associate with Milwaukee is Jeffrey Dahmer’s capture. I remember in 1991, reading all of the news magazines in the Osco drug at Concord Mall, going over all of the facts of the butchery that he ran in his apartment. Turns out his lair at the Oxford Apartments on 25th and Kilborn was maybe three blocks from the metalfest. Oddly enough, when Sarah was born, her parents lived in a house just a couple of blocks down Kilborn. When we were driving around one night, we tried to locate the spot of his old apartment, but they tore it down years ago, and now it’s just a vacant lot with some old chainlink around it. Driving in the neighborhood was weird though, because I always pictured the area as an ultra-urban slum, like maybe where I lived in Washington Heights. But the neighborhood looked more like the rougher parts of Elkhart, by the projects.

The other big surprise was that I really enjoyed the Brewers game. I haven’t followed baseball since I was a kid, and even then it was only half-heartedly. I’ve never seen a professional game before, and this was my first. It was against the Astros, which is funny because my peewee league team was the Astrobowl Astros, and because of that, I was vaguely an Astros fan when they had the stupid-looking bright orange jerseys, the AstroDome (with AstroTurf), and Nolan Ryan on the mound. Now that all of that has changed, not really a fan, for whatever stupid reason.

We went with Sarah’s sister, and her boyfriend and group of friends that all had season tickets. We first went to their place and did some indoor tailgating, and they had some bratwurst grilling away in a soup of onions and peppers. Those were pretty much the best damn brats I’ve ever had, especially with some sauerkraut and a good bun. We ended up eating and listening to everyone’s bitchfest about the Brewers, and before long, we were into the first inning, but not yet at the stadium. We took off in different cars, and we paid the $12 for “preferred” parking. Dan and the others parked illegally at the back of the VA hospital for free, and we ended up walking up to the gate at the same exact time.

Miller Park is a pretty decent place to see a game. It has a retractable roof, modern seats and shops and all of that (no pee trough in the bathroom), and they have a lot of new LCD screens and score things everywhere, so you can always see all of the stats, and also keep up on other MLB games in progress. Lots of people were there. Lots of mullets. Lots of beer. I think I was the only sober person there, but that only added to the energy. I was surprised at how close we were for $38 seats, and watching a game in person is nothing like TV. In fact, watching on TV really sucks in comparison.

The game itself was sedate - it got tied at 2 by the second inning, and went on scoreless until the bottom of the 9th, when the Brewers got one in. But all of the little stuff made it interesting. Bernie Brewer, the mascot, slides down this huge slide whenever there’s a run. He used to slide into a giant beer mug, but I’m sure some parental nazi group got that taken out. There’s also the sausage race, where a group of people dressed as various kinds of sausages race across the field. (Italian sausage won.) The place went nuts when the first home run went over the wall. And at the very end, when they were getting everyone really riled up, they did this whole “more cowbell” thing on the video screen, playing the SNL sketch intercut with various home runs hit during the season, which was pretty hilarious. There were only 30,000 there, with a lot of empty seats at the top, but the crowd had a lot of energy (and a lot of beer), so it was a lot of fun.

Coincidentally, we were shopping at Target (so good to be out of NYC…) and I found a “more cowbell” CD, which has a dozen or so tracks featuring cowbell. It was a good buy at $8.99, although I’m a little don’t-fear-the-reapered-out for now.

Irishfest was also a blast. It’s the biggest one in the country, and it’s held at these fest grounds that are used for a lot of other festivals. So there were the same food courts and concert venues and all, but also a ton of tents selling Irish crafts and shirts and whatnot. I’d like to say I got some incredible food, but the lines were so long, I used the shortest-wait approach and grabbed a hotdog and fries. We saw two musical groups, one that was more drum-oriented, and we had a front-row seat for the Billy Mitchell Scottish group. They were bagpipes and drums, plus some dancing too. The whole thing reminded me of Simms and all of the times we watched So I Married an Axe Murderer. This alumnus of the group, who was 150% Scottish, was sitting behind us and making comments to a friend in his thick-as-hell accent, and it greatly tempted me to ask him to call Simms on the phone and leave a message on his machine, like “if it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!”

In Kenosha, we met with John and Helen at The Brat Stop, which was also had a pretty good bratwurst. I also had some fried cheese curds, and I’m glad they aren’t available here, or I’d be pricing out bypass surgery by now. It was good to see John again, and also good to see tons of cheese and Green Bay Packers stuff available. We also stopped at the Mars Cheese Castle. Unfortunately, this was not a castle made out of cheese, but rather a store that sells a ton of cheese. Fortunately, there were free samples. We also stopped at the largest grocery store I’ve ever seen in my life. It had a beverage section bigger than most groceries in New York. And if you have been to a super-huge Kroger in the Midwest, well this place’s freezer section was bigger than this. It was truly awesome, except I couldn’t bring any of it back on the plane, so it wasn’t.

And that’s all. Well, we went to the museums, and the art museum has a pretty funky building, with these big spines that open and close, and no right angles in sight. And we had a lot of food, which was good. And now I’m back to the daily grind. And no, we’re not moving to Wisconsin. (I still can’t believe I can’t write about anything without someone mis-reading an ulterior motive into it.)

Anyway, pictures on flickr. Back to work.

Pom nastygram

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Just got back from the dentist. I’ve been having some fillings redone, and today was stuff on the back side of my top teeth. I’m totally numbed out, and can’t feel my top lip or the bottom of my nose. It’s very weird. This is a new dentist, which is actually in the building next to ours, which saves a lot of time. He’s also a pretty nice guy, and best of all, he’s in-network for my insurance, so everything is cheaper. While I do not love dentists, this one has been pretty good. My last dentist was a total shithole, and cost me a lot of time and money. Then when I moved and changed dentists, he still called me every day for a month trying to get me to come in for an appointment.

So here I am, a dreary Saturday afternoon, where the sky can’t decide on whether or not to start pouring. I haven’t eaten all day, and I’d love to now, but I’m afraid of chewing off my upper lip and not realizing it. Both Sarah and I have been low-level sick since we got back, probably a cold that was recycled in the plane’s air system, via the 28 unruly toddlers on the flight. I think I’m pulling out of it, though. Maybe I’d drink another orange juice if I wasn’t afraid of spilling it all over my shirt from the lack of drinking skills the novocaine brought on.

Oh yeah, and last night, I woke up at like four in the morning to get a drink. And we have one of those huge family-size jugs of PoM juice, the pomegrante juice that is supposed to miraculously cure your heart, and is overpriced accordingly. So I decide to drink a glass of that in my half-asleep state. And when I try to turn off the factory-sealed cap, my thumb goes through the outside of the shitty plastic jug, and bright red-purple juice explodes everywhere. And my first reaction was ‘duct tape’, but I couldn’t find any, and I also worried that the adhesive would contaminate the juice. So I got a giant glass and poured off the remaining stuff, so the liquid level was below the hole, and then I spent forever wiping up juice from everywhere in the kitchen. So the PoM corporation is getting a nastygram, when I get around to it. I hope at the very least they will send me a coupon, because that shit is expensive. I think it costs ten times as much as gasoline in Manhattan.

I have tickets to two baseball games in the near future. One is the Yankees-Twins game next weekend, and the other is a Mets game about two weeks later, and I forget who they are playing. (Wait, I just looked it up, and it’s the DC Nationals, aka the Montreal Expos revisited.) I don’t know why I’m suddenly so interested in baseball, other than that I enjoyed going to the game last week. I guess I also want to see a game in both stadiums before they get imploded and turned into parking lots for the new billion-dollar stadiums. It’s on the ever-growing-but-it-should-be-shrinking master list of shit we want to do in this city that we never do, even though we’ve lived here howevermany years. Yes, New Yorkers gag and retch at the idea of seeing the statue of liberty, but I don’t want to move away from here someday and never have seen it. There are a lot of things I wish I would have seen in Seattle before I left: a Mariners game in the Kingdome (RIP), the underground tour, about a million restaurants, the Boeing junkyard, and a bunch of other stuff. I can go back to do that, but why didn’t I do it when I lived there, and save me a thousand-dollar trip? So, it’s up to the Bronx to see the bombers, and out to Shea to see the blue, orange, and black.

(BTW, Jesus Christ, tickets are expensive, especially for the Yankees games. You can’t even get seats to the upcoming Red Sox series, unless you want to pay like a grand. The Twins tickets are in the second-to-top tier, and cost $126 for 2, courtesy of an online scalper. I’m fully expecting ten dollar cokes and 12.50 hotdogs when we get there.)

Okay, I need to look into some applesauce or something I can eat, because I’m starving.

Obsessed with shuffle

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I have become obsessed with shuffle. Let me explain.

I have a lot of music, or at least I think I do. I know people with 10,000 CDs and I know people with three. Anyway, this adds up to a bunch of songs, and I have ended up with something like 6000 in my iTunes library. (Actually, 6143 - I had to check.) So that’s the kind of music collection that some people would say “I have more than that in my Q section”, and other people might say “you really need to get a hobby.” But it is what it is, I have 6143 songs. And for what it’s worth, I’ve pretty much stopped buying music, so it’s not going to be 12,000 songs by December.

[2020 update: it’s now just a few shy of 20,000 songs.]

Typically, I leave the house with my iPod, and on my way out the door, decide “I’m listening to x.” Then I select an album, go to track 1, and start listening. This is analogous to the old tape walkman days, when I’d decide on a band and title, put it in the tape player, and listen to it. Except instead of three or four tapes in my backpack, I have 6143 songs. This means two things, first that I only listen to a handful of music that I actually carry around with me. The other is that I sometimes become paralyzed with choice, totally freeze up, and go back to Rush - Moving Pictures or whatever. (Actually, thanks to iTunes, I can tell you that the most-played album, probably due to my indecision, is Guns N’ Roses - Use Your Illusion 2. Sometimes I think it was better when I didn’t have the technology to figure that out so exactly, and I had to resort to examination of tape case wear.)

To further complicate this, my current commute lets me listen to about 15 minutes of music if I take the train, and maybe 30 minutes if I walk. I used to get in a whole CD or more during the train ride, but switching islands has changed that. I also don’t get to read as much, but that’s another conversation.

I never used to listen to music at work. I’m not sure why, especially since everyone else does, and I’m in cubeland, so there are plenty of distractions and conversations I’d rather not hear. But last week, I gave up and decided to get out the iPod and create my own background noise. And for what it’s worth, I got a lot more work done, and time passed much faster. Plus I got to listen to music, which is good, because I was seriously worried that I was becoming one of those people who only own three CDs and when asked about their favorite music, they usually say “whatever’s on the radio,” or, even worse “Oh, I listen to everything!” In both cases, this means the person only listens to the two dozen songs that ClearChannel wants them to hear, and the latter is more annoying, because last time I checked, “everything” was the definition of a set containing all things, including Cannibal Corpse, skinhead hatecore, and Japanese experimental jazz, all of which would freak the fuck out of these people. (These are also the same kind of people who would pay $180 for tickets to a Rolling Stones concert, even though they own none of their albums and can’t name more than three of their songs, and when asked for their rationale, all they can say is “WOOOOO! ROLLING STONES!”)

Music at work is great. I remember working in factories or taking drafting classes in high school, where we had the radio tuned to WAOR constantly, and even though they played “We Built This City” every fucking hour, there was still a chance they would break out some old Van Halen or slip in a number from the first Boston album. My problem, however, was that I still had that deer-in-headlights panic about what the fuck to put on the player. Back in the tape era, or even in my MiniDisc days, you were forced to listen to whatever you carried, and usually a series of coin tosses could determine that. But that didn’t work when you have all of this fucking music. So I broke down. I shuffled.

I have hated shuffle mode on the iPod. I hated it even more when Apple came out with the Shuffle, a player the size of a pack of gum with no screen, no software, no features, and almost no memory. To me, it was the stupidest thing since IBM tried to sell OS/2 as an alternative to Windows. It was stupider than BetaMax. It was stupider than the Yugo. And they sold like hotcakes, and that really pissed me off. Why? It was basically saying that millions of people wanted to load exactly seven songs, all from the “Hey, Remember the 80s?” genre, and didn’t give a damn about substance or features or expandability, they just wanted to listen to Cyndi Lauper sing “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” on repeat while jogging.

It’s no secret that I like a lot of music that could be categorized as “album-oriented.” What that means is the experience is better if you listen from track one to track twelve, and there aren’t any hits that can be cherry-picked out and listened without the context of the rest of the album. Bands like Yes or Rush don’t put out hits; they put out albums. If you loaded an iPod Shuffle with old Yes albums and put it on blend, you’d have an aneurysm. You’d seriously shit blood for a week. And it doesn’t help much that most of their songs are 27 minutes long. You could jog the Boston marathon and only be three songs into their 70s backcatalog. But I’ve always thought of the world as people who like listening to albums, and people who listen to songs randomly. And the former usually hate radio, because it neglected whatever prog/experimental/death/thrash/obscure rock movement to which they subscribe, while the latter love radio, so maybe that’s why. I don’t know, but I always thought album/shuffle was like oil/water, Bush/Kerry, or Roth-era Van Halen/Hagar-era Van Halen.

A few days ago, I was listening to aforementioned Rush album for the 8th time, and I broke down and said “fuck it, fuck it, fuck it” and put my iPod on shuffle. And at first, it wasn’t entirely bad. For every song I liked, I had to click Next four or five times to get another one that was okay. But sometimes it would pick two or three songs in a row that I liked, and sometimes they strangely fit together. That made me wonder, “how does it shuffle the songs?” And that was pretty much my last free thought before this consumed me.

Why? I don’t know. The iPod’s shuffle settings are buried in the firmware, unlike iTunes, which has them on a preferences page. But that still didn’t tell me anything. Did it use rating tags? Genre? Artist or album? Songs listened to all the way through? If I listen to “Iron Man” on a Sabbath record, is it going to throw “Crazy Train” from an Ozzy solo record on the pile? Does it like recently-added songs more? HOW DOES IT WORK? I’m the kind of person that, at a very early age, took apart absolutely everything to find out what made it work. (This was before the era of Torx fasteners, when a #1 Phillips would undo anything.) And I’m still that way about computers and software. But maybe because I listened to the iPod ten hours a day, I needed to know more.

Google returned a million sites in Eastern Europe or Indonesia that are giving away free iPod Shuffles if you send them your credit card numbers and signature, but nothing conclusive about the shuffle algorithm. To further confuse things, iTunes has a thing called “Party Shuffle”†, which can use ratings to pick songs. Some sites said it was totally random, some said there must be something more. But after thinking about it, I realized my next little obsession: Smart Playlists.

iPods and iTunes have playlists, where you create a list in iTunes, add a shitload of songs (in some order, if you’re not a shuffler), and then the list gets zapped to the iPod. It’s the 21st century equivalent to the mix tape, except if you send your playlist to a friend, they also need all of the song files, too. A Smart Playlist is a like that, except you don’t add songs; you add parameters that determine what songs will be played. For example, you’ve got a bunch of Weird Al albums. You create a Weird Al Smart Playlist, that selects every song in your library where Artist=Weird Al. Sync the iPod, select that list, and you’ve got “Eat It” and “Like a Surgeon” playing away. When you buy a new Weird Al album and add it to the library, those tracks magically appear on your new list. Want it to play Weird Al and Dr. Demento? Add a second thing on the list for Artist=Dr. D and you have both of them on the list.

This immediately stuck me as a great way to limit what came on the headphones during the work day. Like, one problem is that I have a lot of comedy albums, and when I’m jamming away to some tunes, I don’t want a seven-second Bill Hicks joke to break in. So I made a “no talk” Smart Playlist, and said “don’t play anything that’s in the Comedy, Spoken Word, or Speech genre.” Worked perfect.

The other thing is the rating deal. Songs can be rated from one to five stars, or not at all. You can now update these on the iPod, too. I don’t know if the shuffle looks at this or not, but I do know you can play or not play stuff based on ratings in a Smart Playlist. So I started added ratings as I listened to stuff. One star is “I don’t want to ever hear this when I’m shuffling.” Three stars is the average. Two is a little less; four is a little more. Five stars is one of my absolute favorite songs. I immediately rated anything under about 20 seconds as a one, because I hate it when just the intro sample, talking part, or weird gothic keyboard shit plays and then that’s it. (This always reminds me of a time in high school I was at Pizza Hut with a couple of friends, and I went to the jukebox and wanted to hear a song by Van Halen, so I picked “1984.” Well, that’s the stupid keyboard intro to “Jump,” so that played for ten seconds and not the song, and I was out 25 cents.)

Last night, I got into iTunes and started mass-rating stuff. It’s a pain in the ass to stay consistent, and I got so locked into it, that I forgot about the outside world, and then suddenly it was like two hours later, and I was midway through the D bands. I think it will take me about six years to rate everything, if I quit my job and never sleep.

So yeah, that’s why I haven’t been writing much lately. I had more to say about this, but iTunes is in the other window, and I keep clicking at ratings as songs scroll down the list. Very addicting.

Work (or lack thereof), social strata of New York

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

First things first: there will be a new issue of Air in the Paragraph Line soon, and I’m looking for contributors. The theme of the next issue will be Work (or lack thereof.) So if you have any fucked up tales of corrupt employers or savage burns you’ve pulled on The Man while at a place of business, send them my way. Click on the link above for more info.

I read Toby Young’s How to Lose Friends and Alienate People yesterday. There were several forces that prevented this from happening earlier; the biggest was that when I started working on an anti-self-help book in the fall of 2001, I decided that this would be the perfect title. I worked on the book for a couple of weeks, then sort of wandered writing-wise, and then this smart-ass writes a book with the same fucking title! So that pissed me off for several years. Then, for some reason, I read half of a blurb on a subway over someone’s shoulder or something, and somehow got the idea that Young was working in the fashion industry. I assumed that his memoir was some sort of Devil Wears Prada thing, and wrote it off. But a few people told me I should read it, and I also found a used copy on Amazon for ONE CENT, plus shipping. And no, the shipping wasn’t $28, it was like $2.

Anyway, I liked the book very much. His writing reminds me of Chuck Klosterman in some ways, although where Chuck might go off on obscure KISS trivia, Young goes off on obscure pseudo-academic history, which had the eyes glazing over. But the other stuff was great, because there’s something that I have in common with him, and it’s not as obvious to most people, which is that we’re both outsiders to New York, and the ludicrosness of the situation in Manhattan that would normally be endured by the fashionistas and aristocrats is something that we both notice, in an Emperor Wears No Clothes sort of way.

You’re probably wondering what the fuck I mean, so I’ll break it down for you. I grew up in an essentially classless environment in Indiana. Yes, there were cliques, and maybe some legitimate racial segregation, but the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor shopped at the same mall. The best golf course in Elkhart in 1987 was only marginally better than playing in a gravel driveway. People didn’t ‘summer’ or spend time in Europe. I don’t know who the richest kid in my graduating class was, but there’s a pretty good chance his or her house had aluminum siding just like mine. I’m not saying that the cruelness of children didn’t create great social divides among us; but I’m saying the income of the rich and the income of the poor was probably close to the amount I currently have in my checking account.

I showed up in New York in 1999, and it was a totally different world. The richest of the poor and the poorest of the rich were set apart by seven or eight digits of salary per year. Something that Young explained was that he came from this strict social class system in England, where you never moved above or below a certain level, based pretty much on who your parents were. And if you were stuck in the middle, why should you work hard to become the next Bill Gates? You never could, so keep slumming. Contrast that with New York, where everyone says there are no social classes, and the poorest guy can become the richest person in the world if he just pulls himself together and gets out there. Americans love to think this country is a meritocracy, and in some ways it is, but in New York, there’s this artifical aristrocracy, and it’s something I never really could digest properly.

A lot of people in New York do stuff not to do stuff, but because they think if they do it, that moves them a little closer to the top. The biggest example I can think of is summering in the Hamptons. The other example is how people don’t actually process movies or books, but usually only memorize that one catch phrase that coincidentally is also the first sentence of the New Yorker’s review. (Cases in point: Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential - every single person who said they read that book and didn’t said it was “the don’t eat fish on Monday” book, and that has so little to do with the actually the book, it’s stupid. It’s like saying the bible was the “how to build an ark” book. The other example is Bowling for Columbine, where EVERYONE I knew said “oh yeah, that movie’s about how horrible guns are,” even though it was about how horrible the news media is. Same goes for Fast Food Nation and the fact that everyone says the book talks about how horrible McDonald’s was, when it was actually pretty neutral about MCD and spent a lot more time picking at Jack in the Box and the cattle industry.)

There is such a strong groupthink in this city, it’s impossible to deal with. And the reason this makes this faux-meritocracy so hard to deal with is that the upper-upper-class believe both that “anyone can make it to the top,” even though they are probably at the top because of their parents’ money and influence, but they also simultaneously think that because they are at the top, they are there to stay and they can piss on everyone below them. That’s what makes Enrons happen, not Republicans or Democrats; it’s people so out of touch with reality that doing such horrible things seems normal. And that thought pattern trickles down through the tree until you have people in the upper-middle-class that think it’s okay to spend $800 on a purse because Carrie Bradshaw had one.

Toby Young also really had his finger on the dating situation here in New York. He said most women, knowingly or unknowingly, are just looking for the proper attributes that will produce a man that is marriage material, much like how you shop for a new car or hire someone for an office position. In the people that I met here during the fivish years I was single, almost all of them were looking at what I was, not who I was. And that sort of feeds into the above, in that a woman would rather date a bland guy who had a nice summer house than an interesting guy that her coworkers might think isn’t a good long-term investment. I’m just glad I somehow beat the million-in-one odds and found someone who wasn’t like that.

Anyway, book was good. I’ll pick up his next one now, although it just came out, so I’m sure it will cost more than a penny…

King of Scotland

Sun, 01 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I can never justify writing in here anymore, because if I had the time to write an update, I would have the time to work on the zine, or finish the story I’m trying to write for it. There are five stories now locked in for the next issue, two from old regulars, and three from new people. I am hoping for more stuff this issue, maybe to press out the length a bit. Last time I think it was 168 pages. I could go up to about 200 pages and keep the cost under $9.99. I think I could push 300 pages and keep the price around $11.99. I’m still making absolutely nothing on that, but I’d rather make nothing and have a great read versus make money and have a piece of shit. Anyway, I’m still taking submissions for another month, so if you had something in mind, get cracking.

We went to see The Last King of Scotland last night. Very fucked up movie. It was well done, and I’m almost certain the story was fictitious in the sense that it was maybe biopic and the doctor character may have been largely invented to carry the narrative. But the Idi Amin stuff was real, and it’s one of those things that was largely ignored by the press here in the US while people made fun of Jimmy Carter or wringed hands over the hostage situation. Meanwhile, he kills 300,000 people, and it’s mostly brushed over in the history books. It makes me wonder what is happening now in some of these shithole dictatorship countries that is largely ignored by the media while they quibble over what the president ate for lunch. The other thing that surprised me about the movie (other than the gore) was that they shot in the capitol of Kampala, and it looked surprisingly urban. The film starts out in the sticks, where there’s nothing but dirt farmers and lean-tos, but the city of Kampala was bigger than pretty much every city in Indiana. (Shit, I just looked it up, and Kampala is almost twice as big as Indianapolis!) Anyway, I thought the whole movie would be in mud huts and straw roofs, but it’s a real shock to see such a big city with modern buildings and cosmopolitan looks. Sure, you’ll see the occasional Range Rover with a dead elk strapped to the hood, but it’s still a strange contrast to what you’d expect. It’s also a good example of how the wealth is concentrated, and the people that farm and live out in the rural areas are truly fucked over by those in power.

Not much else. It’s pouring rain outside, so maybe I will sit here and get some work done later. Most of my work lately has been focused on cleaning off my damn desk, going through bills and papers and filing them away, and throwing out or recycling what I don’t need. It sounds easy, but it isn’t. Maybe I should take a picture some time. Anyway, time for lunch soon.

Journey of major dental restoration

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I had some dental work done yesterday. Nothing serious, just two fillings, one that was very minor, both were re-dos of older fillings. I started this journey of major dental restoration ten years ago, almost to the day, and I’m now finding that some of those fillings are at the end of their lifespan. I always thought of fillings and crowns as permanent, but now I’m seeing it’s more like working on your house, and having to repaint or reside or replumb every decade or two. At least my new dentist is okay, and cheap. He’s also about 100 yards from our apartment, which helps.

BUT… last night I had an extremely horrific dental trauma nightmare. I dreamed that some of my front teeth were fucked up, and I didn’t have the money/time/gumption to go to the dentist. So I took some of those gold-colored helical roofing nails, and nailed them into my mouth, so the rounded heads of the nails would look like a gold tooth, ala Flavor Flav or whatever. Then I got really nervous that I did permanent damage (no shit, I had nails going into the roof of my mouth) and was freaking out trying to find a dentist before some bacterial plague would set in. Then I woke up and ran to the bathroom faster than a Taco Bell-induced colon explosion, so I could look in the mirror and see if all of my fucking teeth were intact. I hate that feeling, but also love it - the feeling that you’ve dodged a major bullet, missed getting killed in a major accident. I’ve heard that it’s similar to doing cocaine, which is why I’m glad I don’t, or I would have cashed out my 401K long ago and bought stock in a Columbian processing plant so I could buy direct.

Speaking of unending nervousness, I am still working on the zine, trying to get the next issue squared away. I have some very good stories in the can, and I’m trying to finish my own story, which might be pretty good. (It might be horrible, nobody’s seen it yet, so who knows.) I am nervous about pagecount, though. It was about 57,000 words last time, which is about 170 pages. I wanted it closer to 200, maybe more. I have 10 stories, 35,000 words now, which is about 100 pages, plus another 7500 words in my story. I guess I want like 20 stories, and I need some killers as far as length, because I have some shorter pieces, and only a couple of longer ones. I realize all of this nervousness is completely masturbatory right now, but I’m always nervous about this shit right down to the point where I send in the PDFs.

I bought this pencam thing for like $30. It’s about as big as a snickers bar, maybe a little smaller, and takes 1.3MP pictures, albeit with a shitty plastic lens. I bought it thinking maybe I could hide it in my bag and easily get it places my current huge camera wouldn’t go, like in museums or something. Or just so I could walk around with the big tourist cam out. But I’ve found that the pictures are mostly awful, unless you’re outside in broad daylight. They do have a sort of artsy-fartsy lo-fi thing, though, like an old 110 camera. The other problem is that it beeps incessantly and loudly, when you turn it on, off, take a picture, low light, etc etc. I wish I could crack it open and cut the speaker out of it. Maybe I will.

Going to brunch in an hour. I should probably work on my story more and then find some shoes and socks.

Psychosomatic water consumption, journals

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I think I’m sick. Either that or I’m drinking ten glasses of water an hour because of some psychosomatic disorder, but I’ll probably stick with sick. It will be a nice weekend to do little, though. Too bad I have four new books that will get here after the weekend. I should time the Amazon purchases a bit better.

So I’ve been keeping a paper journal since 1993, and after a few odd-sized books, I finally settled on the Mead 120-page college rule 3-subject spiral notebook. I have about twenty of them filled with scribbling from years ago. I have been working on one at a slower rate, since life has changed and my routine has changed and I spend more of my time recapping my day and my thoughts with a person rather than with a page. My current one was started in January of 2005, and it’s just finishing. In comparison, I have one from June to December of 1996, same number of pages, all written front to back. Okay, I was more depressed then, but I’m also depressed at not writing that much.

So, I’m down to the last two pages in the 2005-2006 model, and it’s time to buy a new one. I went to the drug store next to work, and… they don’t have them. I went to two more stores, plus an Office Depot - no dice. They have heavy-duty, dayglo color, 18-pocket, super laminated, dinosaur and robot-themed, extra pages in the front and back with maps of the US and multiplication table notebooks. Not the regular, two-armed two-legged ones I have been able to find at every damn drug store from sea to shining sea over the last decade and a half. I looked on Amazon, and found that I could order them in cases of 24, or just one for $2.99 plus $5.99 shipping and it would take two weeks. And oh, every notebook on the market now has microperforated pages. Easy to tear out when you hand in your algebra homework. Easy to tear out on accident when you’re in bed writing. Easy to tear out when you even look at it on the shelf ten years from now. I’m certain the microperforation was pushed through by some legislative act of a California-based concerned parent group that are worried that children are going to tear out nonperforated sprial notebook pages and tear off the perforated edges and use it to choke themselves or possibly manufacture methamphetamines. I JUST WANT A GOD DAMNED NOTEBOOK, NOT A FASHION ACCESSORY!!!!

(I just found them tonight at the Rite-Aid by our house, though. $1.99 each. Only red or green, though. I bought three. That should last me until 2021 at my current rate of decay.)

I did a bunch of the zine layout tonight, while a marathon of “That 70s Show” ran in the background. Sarah is on her way home from a meeting in Chicago. I guess there were delays involving O’Hare, if you can believe that. I think I laid out 110 pages, and I have maybe 30 or so more in the hopper. I think my email and posting a week ago asking for more stuff actually just pulled in a lot of shorter bits. I really need some quality, 5000-word stories. I was thinking about posting to the Bukowski group on LiveJournal, but that would get me inundated with horrible poetry. If all else fails, I will just pad the thing with a bunch of my own short stories, and it will be a Jon Konrath reader that happens to have a couple of other stories in it.

I’m reading the Neil Peart (Rush drummer) book about when he went on a bike tour in Africa in 1988. It’s an interesting description of the people and problems, but it’s also a lot about his own problems with the people he toured with. I wouldn’t mind seeing a country like that, although I don’t know if I could ride my bike down the road and back these days with this knee. I’d also be afraid of eating pretty much everything one could find in Cameroon, unless I packed about five pounds of Immodium tablets in my saddlebags. Still, it would be pretty damn interesting, especially with a digital camera, and a couple of the aforementioned notebooks. His book is also interesting because he talks about how you see a country so much more on a bike. It’s funny to me, because when I was a kid and riding all the time, I was listening to his music, and seeing Indiana in a much different sense than I would in a car.

OK, too tired to keep messing with this…

Winter, sort of

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

It’s winter, sort of. The temperature has been consistently under 60 for about a week, aside from a weird day where it was 70. The 50-ish temps mean I switch coats to my leather jacket, which is always exciting to me, for like a day. I’ve written about this before, but I’m too lazy to look up the old posts. It’s always interesting to me, because after months of no jacket or a light jacket, the leather jacket feels like home to me. It’s so heavy, it feels like putting on armor. And the smell of the leather always brings back the memories of all these other points in my history, back to when I first bought my first leather jacket in 1993. (I’m now on my third.) So I like that, but in a few weeks, I’m going to wish I could trade the thing in for one of those Arctic parka things.

It’s really odd that New York has the most people wearing black leather motorcycle jackets compared to anywhere else I’ve lived, but I’m also given the most unending shit about my jacket, especially from people I work with. If you think it’s odd that a person would wear a black leather jacket, you’ve spent too long in the fucking Hamptons. Seriously, check out the other 40-some states some time. And yesterday, I was at a health food store (believe it or not, I take a shitload of vitamins and supplements these days, for fear that my immune system will slow down more and I will be exposed to all of the viruses and parasites in this city) and I completely forgot that I was wearing the hide of a dead cow in a place full of level 7 vegans.

And it’s weird that I even give a shit about that, and I think that the fact that I do is one of my biggest weaknesses as a human, because I care far too much what people think of me or my writing, and almost none of those people really give a shit about me at all. Like I spend a lot of time trying to contact authors of books I have read and enjoyed because I think that they would care about the opinion of a reader, and almost 99% of the time, they don’t even answer their mail. And I do that because I would hope someday that people would write me letting me know if they enjoyed my books, and that also seldom happens. There are times I believe in karma, mostly when a bunch of bad shit happens to me in one day, and I’m convinced that it’s all because I cheated on a precalculus test in 1989 or something. But then I think about the above construct, and realize that karma can probably be safely shelved away with all of the other religious theories in which I don’t believe.

I read a Jonathan Ames memoir called What’s Not To Love?, which was pretty hilarious and also made me think that maybe someday I’d like to write a straight-up memoir (as opposed to the Summer Rain-type autobiographical fiction thing.) And then we went to see the movie Running with Scissors last night, and that 90% unconvinced me. The movie was not bad, but it wasn’t really that funny to me. There were a couple of good lines, but all of them were in the trailer. It was an interesting movie, and some of the acting was great, but it just didn’t blow me away or anything.

This convinces me that I really don’t get the entire memoir genre that’s so popular, with Augustin Burroughs and David Sedaris and so on. I’ve tried to read their books, and they sort of drone on to me like a shopping list, but whenever I see a video or hear a reading of them, people laugh at all of these points that are supposed to be funny, and I don’t get it. I mean, the funny parts are amusing, and some might make me chuckle, but it’s not ha-ha funny to me. I’m sure it’s some sort of demographics thing, like the same reason that I find almost all of NPR completely unlistenable, but tons of intellectual types enjoy it 24/7. And the flipside is true - I don’t think it’s technically possible to be a fan of both this memoir genre and, say, Andrew Dice Clay. I absolutely fucking loved Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but I know a lot of people who thought it was about as compelling as films of botched colon surgery.

And I don’t give a shit in the sense that I bear no hostility towards that genre, and I can keep reading my stuff and ignoring their stuff, just like I do with country music, Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings films, and whatever Disney/Pixar animated film of the month has talking fish, toys, cars, or whatever. But the problem to me is that I really do want to write a memoir in some sense, and just by picking that type of document, I’m instantly compared to these writers. And I simply don’t know how to write stuff that would appeal to that audience. I seriously think it would be easier for me to lay down a dance single in a studio, or maybe paint a modern art masterpiece than it would be for me to pen a memoir that was compatible with those standards in any way.

There’s also the issue that I’ve never been beaten, in rehab, on the streets, or sold to my mother’s shrink. I grew up in a tri-level house in a sea of tri-level and ranch houses, all with identical aluminum siding. There’s a part of me that thinks that because I haven’t lived a really out-there life, I couldn’t write a book about my life that would be interesting. But another part of me thinks it’s not the events, but how you frame them and write about them that makes it interesting. So who knows.

The zine is almost done, sort of. I have enough submissions to equal 170 pages, which was the length of #10. I have a few pending submissions that will maybe bring it up to 200. The cover’s not done or even thought about (I have the idea, just haven’t done it yet) but each story is already laid out in FrameMaker, so I don’t have a huge project ahead of me. I got a couple of last-second stories that were absolute fucking genius, so I’m happy with what’s going into this one. I am still nervous that I’m going to have to mail out more free copies than I will actually sell, and that’s a pretty legitimate fear, since it always happens. I want it to sell a lot of copies, and not because I make like 34 cents a copy, but because I want a lot of people to read some of the good stuff in it. And I want all of the authors in it to get some more exposure. My hope has always been that Y number of writers comes to the zine with their own audience of size X (the people who buy their shit no matter what), and so Y times X buys the thing, but some of the fans of one writer say “hey, that other writer is pretty cool too” and they go out and buy their books or read their web site or whatever. Last time, a couple of people posted links to the zine on their blog, and one person actually went out and pasted the press release into a jillion discussion boards and web sites. But yeah, not as much synergy as I’d hoped for. We’ll see how it goes this time.

(I’ve vaguely thought about writing a press release for the zine, mentioning that this guy used to write for my last zine, just so it shows in a million web searches. I’ve wasted a ton of time talking to the press about the guy, which converted to about zero book sales. If some idiot can get a book deal because they’re a 17-year-old blogger from Harvard, it seems like the distant zine buddy of the FBI’s most wanted might at least get me a column in Salon. But, I know I mentioned above that I didn’t believe in karma, but I think trying to huckster the terrorism angle would probably be a bad idea in general.)

I’m leaving for Berlin on Saturday. I have not done a single bit of preparation. Sarah picked out a bunch of restaurants. I bought a book, but read like a page of it. Time to get busy on that, although I’m now reading a bio of a Vietnam helicopter pilot, which is a bit more interesting…

Not home for Halloween

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

It’s fall. The weather’s cool, I’m wearing my leather jacket every day, and I’m listening to Type O Negative’s October Rust album a lot more. That album, and Metallica’s Master of Puppets always remind me of the fall, like listening to Pink Floyd reminds me of being depressed in high school. I used to say fall was my favorite season, and it mostly still is, except I hate it in New York. There are no trees, it’s when everyone gets sick and inevitably I get sick, and I hate dressing for the cold, then boiling in the subway, then going back to the cold, and eventually making the cold even worse. The one thing I like about the fall is that I usually leave town for a week. And one of the best parts of New York is that it’s very easy to leave, with three major airports right in my back yard.

Earlier this week, it came up that I’d be in Germany for Halloween. When I thought about it, I couldn’t remember the last time I was home for Halloween. Turns out it was in 1996. For prosperity’s sake, here’s a list of where I was for all of the rest of the 10/31s.

1995: Boston. I went for a trade show, maybe Internet World. I was there for a whole week, staying in Cambridge, and pretty much every night was a blackout-level drunken rampage. By about the 30th, I was sick as fuck, and we had a big party on the 31st. I bought a bunch of dayquil and took way too many of them, and thought they weren’t working enough, so I took double that, and by the time we left for the party, I could pretty much see through walls. A woman was dressed as Catwoman in the whole leather costume (before the Halle Berry box-office bomb) and every guy in the place was hitting on her with the same typical pick-up lines (“I’m batman”, etc.) Someone dared me to try something fucked up, so I went up to her and told her that I had all of the Batman toys from McDonald’s and the batwoman one worked the best in the bathrub. She sort of freaked the fuck out. We then went to a gay bar, possibly called the Ram Rod, and checked out the most bizarre Halloween costumes you could possibly imagine. Like, I saw a dude dressed up as a nun in a mini-skirt. Then we flew home a day or two later, and I found that you should never, ever fly with a head cold.

1996: Seattle. I was home. I was also horribly depressed, and did nothing.

1997: Elkhart. I went home for xmas the year before, and it was a total waste of time and money to pay highway robbery rates for mid-December flights. So I made a pre-emptive holiday visit. This was the first time I ever saw my nephew Phillip, and it was the last time I ever saw the inside of my old house in River Manor.

1998: New York. I still lived in Seattle, but I visited Marie in Washington Heights. Went to tapings of Conan (back when it was still funny) and the Daily Show (also when it was still funny.) We watched the parade live on NY1, and it was funny because this guy was with someone dressed as Mickey Mouse, and when the reporter asked where Minnie Mouse was, the dude said “Oh, she’s fucking Goofy” on live TV.

1999: Bloomington/Cincinnati. My uncle died, and I decided to go to the funeral, which involved renting a car and driving about 13 hours to Ohio. I drove all day on Friday, and then the funeral was very early Saturday morning. They blew through the viewing, mass, and burial, had a meal, and all of my relatives scattered, leaving me there at about noon, with nothing to do. I called A and she told me Bloomington wasn’t that far of a drive, so I headed west. I caught up with Bill Perry for a bit, then found A. The plan was to go to a party where a bunch of former UCS geeks would be. But first, I bought one of those rubber halloween masks with a wig glued to it, so nobody could figure out who I was. Had a great time.

2000: Ithaca. I dated this girl from Cornell for a bit, and took the train up to spend a week with her. The train was slow, uncomfortable, boring, and while I was in the bathroom taking a piss, the door flew open, and the entire car saw my junk. I stayed at a Best Western or Motel 6 or something, next to a Wegman’s. Every day, she went to classes, and I said I was going to be editing my book. Instead, I wandered around on foot, spending as much time in the grocery store as a homeless guy looking for warmth. I broke up with her shortly after that, but not because of the Wegmans, the hotel, or the train; it was just a bad idea for a 29-year-old on the verge of a midlife-crisis to date a 21-year-old who is going through all of these “what am I going to do when I graduate” issues.

2001: Las Vegas. This was the weird, post-9/11 trip where nobody was in town, I rented an Audi TT and got a speeding ticket, and not much else.

2002: Las Vegas. On this trip, I was a little bit sick, had this huge money snafu because the Stardust took a huge deposit out of my debit card, and I went for one of the longest walks in my life. And crap, I just realized I got home on the night of the 30th, so I guess I was in New York.

2003: Las Vegas. I was wrong again - I actually got back on the 29th for this trip, so I guess this whole theory is fucked up.

2004: Indiana. I was the only person in New York City that didn’t believe that John Kerry was going to sweep the election with 100% of the votes, and I decided to leave town and avoid the shitstorm. This was also another pre-emptive holiday strike.

2005: Amsterdam - Once again, my memory has failed me on this, because we actually took this trip on the 9th. On Halloween itself, I was in the middle of moving.

And that’s it. Time to go watch Six Feet Under.

Back from Germany

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I’m back. Pictures are on flickr (although I’m liking that site less and less the more I use it.) Not everything is captioned, and yes there are a lot of pictures that are blurry and fucked up. Museums with low light, no flash allowed, glass cases, and my piece of shit camera will do that.

I enjoyed the trip and seeing new things, but I’m so glad to be back. My main two problems were food and drink. I thought I liked German food, but it turns out that I like German food made with American ingredients. There are some real differences in the quality of food in Europe. The meat is much tougher, and the pork products are cured way more, so they have this horrid taste, like if you’ve ever had shelf-stabilized bacon in a can from a camping trip or an MRE. Vegetables are all non-GMO, non-big agra, and not that incredible. I’m sure the eurotrash contingent would disagree, but I like tomatoes that are bigger than a golf ball. What was frustrating was that there are many American chain places that use German ingredients. I went to a McDonald’s hoping for the same burger and fries I’d get back home, but the meat was tough and gamey, and the potatoes in the fries didn’t have the same magical starch composition as Idaho spuds back home, making them taste odd. If I lived in Germany, I would lose 50 pounds in the first three months, because I simply wouldn’t be able to eat fast food anymore. (In fact, I lost about five pounds since we left, but I’m sure most of that is dehydration from the plane ride.)

And not all food was horrible. On our last night, we went to a more traditional German restaurant, and I had the best damn potato soup I’ve eaten in a long time. We also went to the fancy-schmancy restaurant in the hotel one night, and I got an eight-course dinner that was pretty incredible, if not a bit weird. The best dish was a cajun scampi that was lightly fried in spices, but was as tender as baby food inside, and served with a wasabi sorbet, which sounded odd, but was incredible. The main dish was three types of ox: tongue, shoulder, and breast, done up with some kind of reduction and cooked to the point where they were almost jelly. I also tried a lot of stuff I’d normally never eat, like duck liver, caviar, mackerel, and a few others. It was a strange meal, but very memorable.

Oh, the drink part - I think Germans don’t consume as much liquid as Americans. That eight glasses of water a day thing didn’t make it over there. I can understand the lack of fascination with large soda sizes; I went to a Burger King and got a super maxi size, and the soda was like 16 ounces, which is the child-size at an American fast food place. It’s hard to even find a 12-ounce Coke, let alone the 16 or 20-ounce big plastic bottles. The most popular size was a .2 liter or .33 liter. And that’s fine, but the water sizes are even more scant. Go to an American Safeway or Kroger, and you will find a million bottles of water that are a liter, if not more. (“Sport” sized.) I never, ever saw that. They don’t serve water with meals, they don’t have drinking fountains, and the water they do have is some kind of carbonated mineral water. No Dasani, no Evian, just the stuff that tastes like it will give you lead poisoning. And I drink like ten glasses of water a day, plus three or four American-sized Cokes. After a day or two of begging and pleading at restaurants to get a second four-ounce glass of water, things got old fast.

Nice things: the mass transit. There are two types of subway (S-bahn and U-bahn), plus streetcars, busses, light rail, longer rail, and the Eurail. The subway was a bit daunting at first, but it was also odd because there are no turnstiles to stop you from entering any station. There are just little paper tickets - you buy one, then stamp it in a validator machine to show you’re riding the train now. If you get caught without a validated ticket, there’s a fine, but nobody ever checked ours. If they did this in New York, there would be 40,000 people living in each station in a matter of seconds. The stations were clean, maybe as clean as a PATH train, so not sterile, but decent. Each station has digital signs telling you where the trains are going, and when the next train will arrive. (Same with bus stops.) Let me repeat that: THERE ARE SIGNS THAT TELL YOU WHEN THE NEXT TRAIN IS ARRIVING! Not “eventually,” not “at some point”, but “in two minutes.” They could never, ever, fucking ever do this in New York. And before you ask, yes the times were accurate. Trains regularly showed up a minute before the time. I never saw one run late. Another odd thing is that subway doors don’t open or close at each stop - you press a green button on the inside or the outside to open the door, and they close automatically as the train leaves. What’s weird is you can open a door as the train is slowing down for a stop. In New York, that feature would kill about 9 people a day. The trains were very nice; the S-bahn is more long-haul, above-ground stuff, while the U-bahn is underground, but more transfers to get from point to point than a NY train. But figure in that New York City hasn’t been divided and reunited and leveled by bombs over the course of the last 50 years, so their routes can be a bit more static.

In general, people in Berlin seem to be more trusting and self-policing than what I’m used to in New York. There were many times when I saw something and wondered “why doesn’t someone just steal that shit?” Like eating at a buffet restaurant, the German approach might be “just take some food, then tell us what you ate and pay for it,” where the New York version would be “Pay for the shit before you even touch it, then go through the metal detector, pick up the food, and get the fuck out of here because we’re not running a hotel.” There were many coin-op public toilets on the street (like the kind that clean themselves between uses) and it made me wonder if they could ever do that in NYC, or if people would just put in the 75 cents and move into the bathroom and never leave.

People were largely nice, and I never got called out for being an American, and didn’t have to pretend to be a Canadian or whatever. Not everyone speaks English well, but a lot do. The main problem is that we both look German enough that people assumed we were German and would start babbling away rapid-fire into conversations with us. The other problem is that German is alien enough to me that I can’t tell if a person talking in my peripheral vision is talking to a friend, talking on a cell phone, trying to get my attention, or frantically trying to tell me to stop what I’m doing because I’m about to massively fuck something up. I can tell people are talking, but I can’t tell if they are talking to me, or what the tone is. I don’t understand much Spanish, but I know enough that I can figure that out when I’m here. But it really started to make me paranoid, because I was always worried there was some small social thing that I was fucking up, like if I didn’t take off my jacket when I sat at a table, I was disgracing the owner of the restaurant and he would have to challenge me to a duel. Or whatever.

The big thing about Berlin is the wall, even though it’s largely gone. Every gift shop sells little pieces of the wall, which are probably just cinderblocks smashed up into little pieces, just like the Mt. St. Helens ashes you used to be able to buy in Washington. A lot of the former lines of the wall are now outlined by twin brick lines embedded in pavement and sidewalks. Most people envision a single, long wall, like a castle wall, but it’s a lot more complicated than that. The wall zig-zagged all over the place, and it was actually two walls: a taller one on the east side, a smaller one on the West, and a DMZ between the two. We went to the Checkpoint Charlie site, which is now a Disneyland for hucksters selling cheap shit to tourists. Want a picture with a fake army guard at the checkpoint? A bath towel? Snow globe with a piece of the wall in it? Former commie t-shirts and hats? Come on down, bring your Euros. We went to the museum there, and it was the most tacky and ghetto (no pun intended) museum I’ve seen since me and Larry went to that John Dillenger museum in Brown County a decade or so ago. So yeah, the wall is a big cottage industry. And I bought a fridge magnet, so I guess I’m just contributing to it.

I can’t even begin to describe the museums we went to, although I took some photos. The German historical museum was my favorite, and did a good job of describing German history from before christ up to present. The up-to-WWI collection was an excellent primer on the early days of Romans and Huns and Emporers and Napoleon and everything else. The 20th century part was Nazi central, with a lot more than I’d expected. They had a lot of original third reich stuff, which was interesting for a bit, but after a few rows of it, it was like watching the History Channel’s WW2 marathon on repeat for days on end. It was odd that the Treaty of Versailles was called the “treaty of shame” in all of the exhibits. It was also eerie to see a display of an engine from a British bomber that was shot down over Berlin. I’m desensitized to seeing these “spoils of war” displays in museums; it was weird to see one from the other side.

We also went to a couple of art museums, which were interesting. I don’t know a lot about art or modern art, so when I see something I think is neat, I’m not thinking “wow, what does this represent?” but rather “wow, how did he do that?” I’m more interested in large-scale modern art from the welding/carpentry/stoneworking point of view than the actual art, so maybe that doesn’t make me the best critic. But the museums were great. I saw a lot of Andy Warhol at one, Picasso at the other, and Felix Gonzales-Torres had a huge showcase at one place. I also saw a Damien Hirst in there, “The Void,” the one with all the pills. That museum also had a huge display of video-based pieces, all of them incredibly odd and interesting. Like one guy was showing the movie Psycho over a 24-hour period. Maybe I should get a video projector and start filling out grant forms.

Oh, I also saw the world’s largest model train layout. There are a bunch of blurry pictures of that in there, too.

I am sure there’s more to talk about, but I need to either take a nap or try to get started on the day…

Underwater slate thing shopping

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I think one of the occupational hazards of only updating this thing every week or two is that I tend to forget what happened over the last however many days, and it causes me to sit down and think “well, nothing’s happening.” The same tends to happen when I update every day, though, especially because I don’t like to simply write about day-to-day crap or work politics or whatever. Sometimes I get ideas for a journal entry, but I don’t have a fixed time to write anymore, and the ideas come and go. I should be writing them down, but I never do. And most of my ideas happen in the shower, so even if I had a special pad of paper or something, it wouldn’t work in there. I think I saw an underwater slate type thing that scuba divers use, but I’d probably spend $40 on it and never use it.

The zine is done, I think. The cover and PDF are uploaded, and I ordered the proof, and if that’s OK, then it goes live, and can be ordered by all three of you that actually buy this stuff. Actually, I ordered two proofs, because I fucked up and uploaded a PDF I made from a week-old directory, and didn’t catch it until after I placed the order and got past the no-cancel point of no return. I am sure I will keep this one on the shelf as a “rarity”, just like the messed up proofs of various other books of mine. I say rarity because technically all of my books are rarities, since they sell so few copies. And I doubt there will ever be a point where I become famous and they go onto eBay for thousands of dollars. But Jack Kerouac never kept drafts of his books, and they would now be worth millions, so my impulse is to keep them.

Anyway, the zine is done, except for the part where I pony up some insane amount of money to buy a bunch of copies and then send them to each contributor. I am happy to send copies to people, especially if this makes them happy or they are impressed with seeing their words in print. I am not happy to have to order them, wait, get a bunch of envelopes, then drag a hundred pounds of books to the post office and give them a ton of money. And please don’t tell me some shipping shortcut that is supposed to save me time and money. New York post offices are all equally horrible, and are never open, and I have no car, so I can’t drive to the suburbs. I used to think the post office in Bloomington was bad, but it’s seriously like the Millenium Hotel compared to the places here. I just have no choice, and I have to suck it up and pay the price.

I don’t know how to feel about finishing an issue of the zine. It is exhilarating to get it all finished. It’s a small amount less than when I do my own books, because I always have a fear that I’ve fucked up something in someone’s story, and they will get pissed about it. It’s another half-inch of shelf space taken on the Konrath shelf of my home library (actually 1” here, because of the dud proof) and I am always happy to get more volume there. This book is blue, a very deep cobalt blue, and it is my first blue book (black, black, red, black, black, green, grey, red) and I am happy to get something that really stands out but is also unused. I will be happy to hear from people who were contributors and write to tell me they liked the zine, or even better, liked a story by another contributor. Believe it or not, I actually pay for the costs and typically lose money, and I have people that send in stories and never write back to acknowledge that they ever got their zine, let alone that they liked it or thought that sucked. And with 18 other people in this one, at least one of them will do this, and it always pisses me off, even though it probably shouldn’t.

There are two things I don’t like about finishing the zine. One is that it will go out and become available, and nobody will buy it. It’s very hard to sell an anthology, and I never expect to get many orders, and I never do. I plan these things by trying to pick people who have their own little bit of fame, be it a book or band or blog or something, so their completist fans will buy a zine, maybe find another writer they like, and start writing to them or reading their web site or book or whatever. I don’t know if this really happens - probably not, or I’d sell many more copies. But that’s the intent, and like I said, there’s no way I could recoup my costs unless each writer got like 15 or 20 people to buy it, and I think the average is closer to 1 or 2. So all of that hanging over my head sucks.

The other big problem is that the project is done, and it’s time for me to move to something else. And I don’t know what that is at this point. I have all of these other ideas that are half-dead, and I think I need something totally new to waste my time. Who knows what, but that’s going to keep me neurotic for a while.

I’ve been reading a lot more than writing lately. I’m working on the Jonathan Ames book My Less Than Secret Life, which is pretty decent. I really liked his book What’s Not to Love?, and I really wish I could write something like this, except I don’t have that many embarrassing episodes compared to him. Scratch that - I don’t have that many that I’m willing to write about. Maybe the statute of limitations on some of the older episodes has expired. I don’t want to write about Bloomington for the sake of Bloomington, or Elkhart for the sake of an entirely complete historical whatever. (Like the Necrokonicon, which seriously has sold exactly two copies at this point.) I think there’s some inner issue I have to get through to do this, though. I can’t write funny stuff about all of the other crazy individuals in my life, because even though I can tell these stories to other people, I can’t tell them to said individual’s face, and I think you need to have that ability to proceed. If you’re going to talk about your crazy uncle Freddy, you have to be prepared for the consequences if he reads it. (And if those consequences include a lawsuit, you have to deal with that too.) The other problem is that I feel there was a great deal of stupidity and awkwardness in my life - I’ve done a lot of dumb shit, and I’ve never been able to come to terms with that. I have a horrible shame issue to deal with. And I guess if you can’t tell any of your friends about that time you shit your pants in France, you can’t write a book about it. (The pant-shitting thing is a Jonathan Ames story, not mine, btw.)

And it’s winter, which sucks. It isn’t even real winter - it’s 50 and pouring rain winter, with sundown at like 4:30. I’m back in Seattle, I guess. Except in Seattle, I had a car and there were covered garages everywhere. Now, it’s a jacket and the wind cutting through your clothes. I’ll probably like the first snow, but other than that, I’m waiting for spring. The only good thing about winter is avoiding it - sitting inside, under a blanket, reading, watching everyone freeze their balls off outside. I guess that’s okay, but I like fall much better.

Oh, and we saw the Borat movie yesterday, and it was so totally fucking funny, it was unbelievable. If you haven’t seen it, go do so.

On eating a triple decker

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

It’s largely impossible to eat a triple-decker club sandwich and work on a journal entry at the same time. Usually, it’s impossible for me to eat a triple-decker, period. But I’m trying to do both at the same time, and making a huge mess of it. It’s bachelor night, since Sarah is out of town on business, and I’m sitting here eating a triple-decker club sandwich. I guess I probably would be if she was here, except I’d be in the kitchen and talking to someone, instead of sitting at my computer and listening to iTunes and typing this. Ten years ago, I’d be eating a club sandwich and injecting Jack Daniel’s into my heart. (Okay, maybe not.)

It’s actually very weird to think that next April, this thing will be ten years old. I know I haven’t updated every single day of all ten years, but I very distinctly remember starting this journal, and I also very distinctly remember when I was ten years old, and you put those two facts together, and it’s pretty fucked up. I just thought of this because I was listening to a Pat Metheny song that reminded me of 1997 or 1998, the salad years of this thing. And also, I finished reading that second Jonathan Ames book, and it contains a lot of columns with dates on them, and when I read that sort of thing, I try to remember what I was doing then, or if eBay existed then, or whatever. If I’m reading some old Bukowski journal, I can’t do that, because the dates are like a decade before I was born. But now my Seattle years are ancient enough history that I can look back at them and have enough space to really think about things.

The other thing that came up like that was the fact that my youngest sister turns 30 next month, and I very distinctly remember when she was born. I think I vaguely remember one moment when Monica was born. My mom had to stay in the hospital for like a week, because that’s what they did back then, and at that point, I don’t really know if I’d been away from her for more than a few hours, let alone a week. When we were in front of the hospital, (my dad, my cousin/foster sister Linda, and I), my dad pointed out where my mom was in the large sea of windows that made up the side of the hospital. This hospital is probably smaller than the parking garage in my current complex, and I have no idea if my dad knew where my mom’s window would be, but it was a nice gesture. As far as my sister Angie, I remember my mom having a packed suitcase in the kitchen, ready to go for the labor trip. When it started, my mom and dad dropped me and Monica at a friend of theirs that lived a block or two away. I sat in their double-trailer, bored, until we got the call that it was a girl.

And Angie was the Polaroid child. Back before everyone had three camcorders in their back pocket and/or cell phone, about the best you could do was the Instamatic, which my parents bought right before her birth. All of her good and bad moments got captured to little square images bordered with that trademark frame of thick white cardboard. The photos stopped after a year or two (those film packs were expensive), but the images lived on in albums, until they rapidly aged into nothing but cyan and amber tones. Monica was the 135-film child, which had a delay while you dropped off the rolls at the pharmacy. But I was the film slide child, and all of my photos were locked in that unviewable format until I got a scanner and digitized them this year. Anyway, Angie’s birth seemed like a few weeks ago, and it was 30 years, and that really makes me feel old. I’m sure I’ll blink twice and it will be 50 years. What the hell happened to those three-month summer breaks that lasted forever?

Well, as much fun as I’m having in bachelor mode, I’ve got to take my vitamins and then think about going to bed soon.

One down, one to go

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I paid off a credit card today. This is sort of my new hobby, and an expensive one, but I’m down to just one credit card that has a balance, and I’m done. (Well, except for my land mortgage, and a student loan that will probably outlive me by 50 years.)

This made me think of a really good idea that either will never get implemented, or that someone else will “think of” years from now, and I will spend a decade saying “I thought of that first!” The idea is a reverse credit card statement. Imagine that every time you buy something on your credit card, the name/date/details are put in a last-in/first-out queue. Each month, when you make a payment, your statement shows that month’s finance charge you paid off, and then shows all of the items at the top of the queue that were “removed” by this payment. So like if you had a Visa that was full of crap from the last ten years, and you were feverishly paying off the balance, you might get a statement that said something like “you paid this month’s 68.11 finance charge, plus you paid off a pair of movie tickets from 1998, and a bunch of books you bought at Barnes and Noble from back then.” (Fractional percentages would be used to remove part of something at the top of the queue if it’s greater in size than the payment. i.e. “you paid off 24% of that stereo you bought in 2000.”) I’m sure there is some way you could implement this with a combination of e-statements and online bill payer, but I think it would be interesting if card companies did this so you could really see what you were “paying off” each month, and just how long crap stays on your card.

I was thinking about this because earlier this year, I paid off (and then cut in half) my Chase card. I got the card in 1992, when I was desperately scrambling to pay for a summer session of classes. It’s actually been paid off and run up again a few times, so the classes I took that inspired stories in Summer Rain wouldn’t be on there, but I was hesitant to shred this card, because it was my oldest one, and it had the “member since” in the bottom corner. Whatever marketer thought of that, it almost worked. But since this was one of those toy credit cards with a low limit, high APR, and no features other than the ability to buy a discounted made in China clock-radio for only $19.99 by collecting a bunch of stamps, I got rid of it. I thought maybe when I called to cancel, the member since date would possibly get me some leverage in the negotiation, but it didn’t. Oh well.

Not much else is going on except I have to find a TV show to watch. I mean, I have to find a TV show that has DVDs on NetFlix. We’ve been on this kick of watching old TV serieses (seriii?) that neither of us really watched back when they were on, that might be interesting now. We started with Northern Exposure, after the Alaska trip, and we also watched the first two seasons of Nip/Tuck (actually, that may have been first.) Now we have three episodes left on Six Feet Under, and I need to find something else, since Sarah picked the last few and now it’s my turn. The concept has worked pretty good; we now watch almost no network TV, just an episode or two off of DVD, with no commercials and no need to schedule your life around a TV show. It’s cheaper than buying a set of DVDs, and it’s also good when you find out the show’s a dud a few episodes in. (We tried the Larry David show, but I couldn’t really get into it.) I should probably also state that we’re into non-genre-specific drama things. The sitcom is dead, and scifi is iffy. I have no real interest in cartoons, and archived reality shows or whatever aren’t that great. So, who knows. I’d step through the second season of Lost, if it wasn’t such a fake-cliffhangery sort of thing with every episode.

OK. Christ, I can’t believe how early it’s getting dark now. Al Gore should do a movie about that next.

AITPL #11

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

OK, it’s done. Go here to preview and order the new issue of Air in the Paragraph Line. 21 stories by 19 authors about the fun, atrocity, and torture of work, in a nice, 284-page, perfect-bound, glossy cover book. Yours for only $10.99 cheap (plus s/h.) There are many very good stories in here, and a couple that are absolutely great. Makes a great gift. Buy 8 for Hanukkah and light one on fire each day.

I would write more of a blurb or work on the web site, but I am blurbed out. I think I have the flu, or maybe it’s just that I need to do nothing for a couple of days, which I am about to do. It doesn’t help that I had to type all of these addresses in and send off 18 copies of the book to everyone. And I will probably end up sitting in bed, re-reading a couple of the stories, now that they are on paper.

Four days off

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Ah, four days off. Bliss. And no real plans at all, except that we’re going to an Indian restaurant for lunch, and making pizza at some point. I gave up on trying to do anything more complex on Thanksgiving years ago. The first issue is the difficulty in traveling anywhere further than down the block - airlines are fucked up, ticket prices are double, and people are sleeping in airports. Get in a car and point it in any direction in or out of any city, and it’s a parking lot. There’s also the issue that I’m not a to-capacity eater, and I’m not that into turkey. A piece is fine, but I couldn’t eat a pound of it over a six-year period. So I give thanks that my last big Thanksgiving was a million years ago.

The zine is done. Makes a great holiday gift. Just putting that out there.

I haven’t thought about what’s next writing-wise, and I’ve been wasting most of my time playing Flight Simulator on my laptop. I have the 2004 version, but they just came out with Flight Simulator X, the new one. I downloaded the demo of it, and it barely ran on my computer. It likes a machine that’s twice as everything as my current one, so I won’t be upgrading soon. It’s too bad, because they have a neat ultralight to fly, and they did a ton of stuff to juice up the terrain. The stills on the MS site look incredible. Of course, they were probably done on a $15,000 machine.

My ability to fly in FS2004 is getting better. Landings are problematic, although I can usually make the landing once I get the approach, which is almost never. I’ve learned a lot more about navigation and air traffic control, though. I’ve made hops across Florida, from Oahu to Maui, from Indianapolis to South Bend, and from Chicago to Elkhart, without hitting another plane or pissing off ATC too much. I imagine this kick will grow old in another weekend or so, and I’ll be torturing myself over what I should be doing, writing-wise.

The QWERTY keyboard was invented in Milwaukee. I never knew that, but I’m looking at a bunch of newspaper articles and unopened bills on my desk, and I just read that. Weird. Christopher Sholes patented the typewriter (with two others) in 1868 and later sold the rights to Remington for $12,000.

Not a lot of reading lately. I read through a lot of the zine, then picked up a WWI book, but it turns out it’s written by a British guy, and 30 or so years ago, and it’s in microscopic print, so it’s impossible to read. Today I started the Albert Goldman bio on John Lennon, not because I’m that enamored by Lennon, but because Goldman was slagged and discredited for his bio, which showed a lot of negative shit about Lennon that people didn’t really want to hear. For whatever reason, if you’re going to write a bio and you want me to read it, that’s the thing to do.

OK, time for bed.

Elkhart and the unsolved murder rate

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Note: This is a post from 2006. For whatever reason, this post gets more traffic than the rest of my site. And pretty much everyone misses the point and gets in arguments with me about this.

A few points of clarification, which nobody will read:

One of the points of this post was about how urban legends are pervasive, and in writing about an obvious one that can easily be disproven with numbers, people still got pissed off and said I was wrong, refuting it with… urban legends.
Another point was that crime is “worse” in big cities. I lived in New York at the time; I live in Oakland now. I’ve given up on arguing this because it’s useless. There are some 2006 numbers in this post, which are way out of date. I’ve completed an MBA since I wrote this, and would probably rewrite it with orders of magnitude more facts and figures, but it’s pointless to try to argue it. Believe what you want to believe.
I made some snarky comments implying the Elkhart police were ineffective or corrupt. I think if I rewrote this, I would have been more polite about it. But since 2006, numerous national stories have come up about the corruption and violence of the Elkhart Police Department. I won’t summarize, but if you want to read about it, look here, here, here, or here.
I’ve redacted the names of every victim or suspect in this post. I’d say you could figure this out by searching the news, but the only newspapers in the area have closed off their archives, and I’m sure if you search for this now, Google will give you a bunch of ads for probiotics to help you lose weight. So, good luck.

I got an email from someone yesterday with regard to The Necrokonicon, specifically my reference to the unsolved murder rate thing.

I frequently get asked about this, maybe more than any other thing in the glossary. Half of the people want to know the source because they think it’s very indicative of life in Elkhart, and the other half call bullshit on me because they think Elkhart is the greatest place in the world and I’m a horrible person for inventing such a legend. Now I feel a need to break this down and/or do some actual research to get people off my back about this.

(And before I begin, I should probably state for the millionth time that the Necrokonicon is not a reference book, or a citeable, peer-reviewed research journal. It’s my ramblings and observations, with the occasional fact thrown in. Almost all of it is my opinion, and my biggest regret to ever doing the project is that some dumb-ass mails me every other week saying “No, Concord mall is at 60% occupancy and you said it was less than 50%!” So take all of this with a grain of salt.)

First of all, the unsolved murder thing isn’t true. Elkhart isn’t the unsolved murder capitol and never has been. Statistically, it’s always going to be a large city like New York or LA. But when you talk about per-capita rate, it’s a different matter. Many people don’t realize that Elkhart has statistically higher crime rates per capita than places that are perceived as being much more dangerous or evil.

There are a number of crime statistic comparison calculator things on the internet, mostly for people shopping for new homes, and they all largely draw on the same FBI crime statistics. I used http://www.homefair.com/calc/citysnap.html, which provides an index on statistics, meaning that the national average is 100, with higher than that meaning a higher crime rate, and lower meaning a below national average number. (This isn’t as compelling or interesting as an actual number-of-incident report, but if you know the population of the US, have a calculator, and passed 9th grade math, you can figure it out. Of course, if you went to an Indiana public school, statistically you probably can’t do simple math.)

In Elkhart, zip code 46516, personal crime risk is 129, and property crime risk is 190. In comparison, my neighborhood in New York city (zip=10002), personal is 214 and property is 105. What’s what? Bear with me because I’m too lazy to make a table, and the following numbers are Elkhart/NYC. Personal crime includes murder (162/141), rape (147/85), robbery(138/361), and assault(150/175). Property crime includes burglary(193/84), larceny(246/94), and motor vehicle theft(109/112).

This really pisses me off. Why? Because every born-and-died-in-Elkhart person pisses on me about how safe and happy Elkhart is, how you never need to lock your doors, how you can leave a hundred dollars on the table and come back and there’s two hundred, and then goes into the tirade about how horrible New York is, with all of the robberies and rapes and crack cocaine and hookers and guns and blah blah blah. Now look at those numbers. You are TWICE AS LIKELY to be raped in Elkhart as you are in New York. It’s more than twice as likely your house will be burglarized. Larceny, 250% higher in Elkhart. And aside from the New York comparison, EVERY SINGLE ONE of those statistics are higher than average in Elkhart; every one except murder risk is LOWER in the state of Indiana as a whole. Per capita, Elkhart is a pretty damn unsafe place to live, at least according to the FBI.

The next logical question is “how do the unsolved murders match up to the rest of the country?” And that’s where the trail ends. There are no unified cold-case statistics, and any agency that does broadcast their numbers is probably tallying them in a different way. You could speculate that if x percent of murders go unsolved, Elkhart’s per-capita unsolved murder rate is y, based on either FBI crime statistics, or actual tallies of the dead in Elkhart. But there’s no universal unsolved murder stat, and it would vary depending on the police department. In New York City, there are millions of taxpayers, which means the NYPD gets a lot more neat toys to go all CSI on murder cases. Elkhart has, what, 10 or 20,000 taxpayers? By virtue of scale, their police force isn’t going to be as equipped to deal with murders, and their rate is going to be higher. But you can only speculate on that rate. Speculation on that trend, though, is more valid.

The next thing to factor in are the known high-profile murder cases that have gone unsolved. First is (redacted), who was killed on Jan 1, 1988. Her murderer, (redacted), was charged at the end of 2004 for the crime. This was probably a driving force for the urban legend about the unsolved murder rate, because her parents were very critical of the police about the fact that the murder never got solved. There was also some vague urban legend that the two were at a party with a bunch of people, and got in a fight, and he said something like “if you ever break up with me, I’ll kill you,” and then she broke up with him, and her body was found and he split town. That rumor sounds similar to the “so-and-so cheerleader is pregnant” thing, but it gave the legend some substance. There’s also some conflict based on the fact that Elkhart County’s lead detective was fired for pursuing a suspect even after he was told not to. The county also never pursued DNA testing, which wasn’t done until the case eventually went to the state police. The DNA testing was also a no-brainer because (redacted) was already in prison for a different attempted murder.

The other high profile one was (redacted), who was killed in January of 1991. After 14 years, there was a conviction, once again because the case got bounced to the state police. And a more recent one was (redacted), who was killed in May of 1995; (redacted) was charged nine years later. I can’t find any cases other than that, and that doesn’t back up my once-per-year allegation, but it adds a bit of fuel to the fire.

The last thing I add to the mess is this: I heard this urban legend constantly in high school, which was before two of those murders. Everyone accepted it at face value. It mutated, as people claimed to have seen it on Geraldo or Johnny Carson (much like people in that era also claimed to have seen the president of Procter and Gamble on a talk show, confessing that he was a satanist.) I also heard people state that Elkhart had the highest per-capita income (which makes no sense whatsoever), or had the highest interracial dating percentage. And how do these legends happen? Even if they aren’t true, peoples’ fears, doubts, and prejudices cause them to happen and to gain momentum. Everyone in high school hated the Elkhart cops, because most of them were pricks. (I’m assuming they were because the pay was bad, and the only people who signed up were power-hungry control freaks who liked to put on a uniform and act like a dick.) When a legend came about that exposed the inadequacy of the police, of course everyone believed it. Even when urban legends are not true, the legends expose either the environment in which they were created, or the people that perpetuated them.

And add to all of the above the fact that the Elkhart Truth, the South Bend Tribune, the Goshen News, and Elkhart’s public records department are still in the 19th century, and it’s impossible to tear through all of their stuff with a search engine and read results. If I wanted to seriously research this more, I’d have to fly to Elkhart and spend a few weeks at a microfiche reader, which isn’t happening any time soon. It’s no wonder almost all of my google searches on this material returned my own pages at the top result. That’s fucked up.

The pain of weekly updates

Sat, 02 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I was digging around old journal entries, and it bothers me that I now write in here once a week, at best, and back in 1997, I wrote longer entries on a daily basis. I’ve been thinking about this because the end of the year is approaching, and I have to do the annual firedrill of moving the old entries and creating a directory and index for the new, and due to the antiquated system I use to do this, it’s always a pain in the ass. (Yes, I know, I should install WordPress. And you should go fuck yourself.)

Anyway, the weekly update bothers me because it emphasizes that from Monday morning to Friday evening, I basically have to write off that time, and that period isn’t part of my life. When I get home from work, I no longer write or do anything or live - I eat a meal, spend an hour or two with Sarah, then go to bed. I can’t write books a day a week, and I don’t want to add some extra activity to my life that will distract me even more and make me feel like my weeks are even shorter than the 48 hours currently alloted. It’s hard enough to not think about work for 48 hours, and maybe get a movie and a single update into this thing during that time. I seriously think I should quit my job with no notice and become a dishwasher, or start heavily drinking, or maybe both. (Especially if the restaurant where I was a dishwasher gave me a discount on liquor.)

I finished reading the Jonathan Ames book I Love You More Than You Know, which wasn’t bad - more articles. The themes start to repeat themselves: the son, the alcoholism, the trannies, the parents, the self-deprecation. I think Marie mentioned in the comments a couple of weeks ago about his lack of shame being a reason not to like him. And I think it’s a double-edged sword - a lack of shame can cause you to confess some really hilarious stuff that works out into a good story. But it can also cause you to be really annoying and redundant. Bukowski had the same lack of shame, and it’s no secret that Ames was a big fan of his work, and largely followed the same formula Buk did in his early days of writing columns for Open City. Or maybe having to write a weekly column leads you into the same trap, I dunno. But Bukowski’s parents were horrible, and beat the shit out of him. He escaped them into a world of alcoholism and skid-row slumhouses, instead of asking dad for a handout every week and an open invitation to move back in his old room when things didn’t work out. I appreciate the brutal honesty schtick, but it might be more interesting if his parents didn’t foster it, but rather turned against him because of it. Ditto for the son. Some of the stories are good, but the extremeness of them is diluted because you know he’s going to escape back to a comfy family life, and there are no real consequences.

That said, I didn’t find out until just last night that Ames was a visiting professor at IU from 2000-2001. That really spent my mind spinning, wondering if he was at Bullwinkle’s a lot, or the main library, or what. That’s about when Summer Rain came out, a time when I had Bloomington on my mind something fierce. Weird.

Speaking of Bukowski, I started reading Edward Bunker’s Education of a Felon. It’s interesting sofar - Bunker was a career criminal in California, from his youth, up until his twenties, when he did a stretch in San Quentin. (He’s actually the youngest prisoner that ever did time there.) He was smart but uneducated, and slowly started reading books and writing letters and articles, and got to the point where he sold a book while in prison. He went straight then, and focused on writing. EoaF is a biography, a story of his youth. It reminds me a lot of Bukowski’s Ham on Rye. Bunker was 13 years his junior, but the stories of the pre-fake-Hollywood tinseltown, the streetcars and farm fields where there are now condos, all tie in with Bukowski’s imagery of his hometown. Of course, Bunker’s stories descended into youth wards, county jails, hard time, heavy crime, drug dealing, and bank robberies. Some of the machismo is similar, and it made me wonder if Bukowsi ever ran into him in later years.

A better comparison is the Jack Black book You Can’t Win. No, it isn’t the Jack Black that was in King Kong and Nacho Libre. It was a penname for a criminal turned writer in the 1920s, the same conversion as Bunker’s, but a decade before he was born. Black’s book showed the childhood swindling, and on to the criminal arts. With a bit of humor and a good sense of detail, he shows you the crime, then shows you why it’s impossible to pull it off without someone snitching and getting your ass thrown behind bars. It reminded me in some ways to Neal Cassidy’s The First Third, which is coincidental, in that William S. Burroughs loved You Can’t Win, and if you’re a fan of WSB, you’ll see where he gets some of his dry wit.

The one bad thing about this Edward Bunker book is that it’s very small type, set in very narrow rows, and the book is wide. With his long sentences, I’m constantly finding my eyes get to the end of the line, return to the left, and then wander up or down a line or six, making it impossible to read at speed. I really hate when books are laid out like this. I’d seriously pay the extra dollar if a bit more margin or spacing added an extra 50 pages to the length.

Something something something else here, I can’t think of how to end this, so something something something.

Full spectrum

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I bought a full-spectrum light box. It’s actually not a box, but a bunch of weird-colored LED lights in a thing that’s about the size of a portable CD player or alarm clock. It’s used for light therapy, to allegedly curtail seasonal affective disorder and mess around with your sleep cycle in some beneficial way. I probably should have bought one of these when I lived in Seattle, when I was pretty much ready to hang myself by December of each year. I was skeptical, but I’ve read more about it, and a doctor told me to try it. I’m also always keen on spending sums of money on things I will use three or four times and then pack in the closet. Actually, I’m hoping to slowly wake up earlier and sit in front of the light as I’m at my computer, typing away at… well, whatever I should be doing on here.

Next year is the ten-year anniversary of this journal. Sure, there weren’t ten solid years of updates, but 4/10/07 will be ten years from the first update. I’ve thought about doing a ten-year book or zine or collection or something. (Actually, I got the idea because Julie at apeculture.com was talking about doing it for her site.) There are basically three reasons why I’m not sure I would do it. The first is that I did this already for the Seattle years of the journal. Second is that despite it being very readable, it sold almost no copies. And third, I’d have to dig through all of this shit and figure out how to do it in such a way that’s neat or funny or cool or something. Every once in a while, when I’m truly bored, I go back and read a bunch of old entries and find some real gems in there. But I wrote them, so I don’t know if they would be as interesting to others.

Not much else to report. I’m doing christmas cards and still reading the Bunker book, which is still pretty good. It reminds me of Papillion in places, except written a little better and no-bullshit. I’ll have to check out his fiction books sometime soon.

Light box thing

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

As of yesterday, issue #11 of Air in the Paragraph Line outsold issue #10. It’s also the best-selling of my lulu books, except for the annotated version of Rumored to Exist. I still wish I could find some scheme to move more copies. I’ve been hearing good things from the first copies that went to contributors, too. I’m still only about 25% on my way to breaking even, but I’m just glad it’s selling copies. (I also doubled the number of copies sold of The Necrokonicon, which isn’t that big of a deal, because it went from 2 to 4.)

I am still working on this getting up earlier thing, with this light box thing, but I’ve still been very out of sync. I have slept maybe two hours a night less, plus woke about an hour earlier, which normally would be pure chaos. With a half-hour of the light at 50%, it makes it somewhat bearable, but by the time I get home at night, I’m demolished. I think a lot of it has to do with breakfast, which I never eat. When I get to work at ten, it’s not hard to coast to lunch at noon. When I wake up six hours before lunch, it’s a catastrophe. So maybe I need to invest in some Count Chocula and a gallon of milk.

The other thing I’ve noticed sofar is that I can’t really focus on writing in the morning yet. It’s a good time to catch up on the web and my email, but I’ve been meaning to start writing journal entries in the morning, and I have been a total blank. I also have Christmas cards to send out, and I haven’t even started on that. Writing from 9 to midnight back in the day was much easier than writing from 6 to 9 in the morning.

And in slightly related news, I think my knee is fucked up again. I don’t know what I did, but it went out in the same way as last spring, starting maybe last night, and has been getting progressively worse. I’m not back on a cane yet, and I only briefly went back to my brace, but it keeps getting worse, so I think I might be full-on crippled by Monday. I bought one of those self-contained, gel-inside icepack things that velcro around your leg, so maybe that helps. Oh, and Tylenol-3 is always good. It’s extremely depressing to be back in this state, though. And putting on ice is much less pleasing when it’s 32 outside instead of 87.

Okay, I need to start on these fucking greeting cards.

Another book idea

Sun, 10 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Okay, I have decided (until I possibly flip-flop a month from now) that I will be doing a ten-year anniversary book for this journal. I’ll start on it after the new year. I don’t think I want to do it in a chronological order, though. I’m thinking about grouping things vaguely by topic or something. And I’ll add in a few “why I did this” essays to break up the monotony. It will be on lulu, and I will try to make it as cheap as possible, although I don’t forsee selling more than like five copies. Anyway, if you have any favorite entries from over the years, or have any other ideas on what I should include, let me know.

An excellent review of Air in the Paragraph Line is located at http://www.anus.com/zine/books/. Don’t worry about the URL, it is not a porn site or anything. The disclaimer I will add is that it was written by a contributor. But I agree with what he says, and I’ll take any publicity I can get.

Speaking of which, this journal anniversary reminded me that this year is the decade anniversary of Air in the Paragraph Line. I wish I would have thought of this earlier and somehow hyped this up. Most blogs and web sites are old geezers when they reach the one year mark, but I’ve been doing the zine since before a lot of people even knew there was an internet. Maybe I will send out a press release or something. And an email from John Sheppard had me thinking about the next themed issue. Maybe it will be another component of life, like death, love, hate, sex, food, something. I’m not sure at this point. I am also vaguely wishing I would have gone ISBN/Barcode/distro with this one. It’s a lot like wondering what you’re going to bet on the superbowl before the season begins.

The all-consuming thing for this week has been Blurb, a service where you can put together glossy color books. I guess lulu lets you do this too, but Blurb has a wizard program you download that has templates you stuff with photos to make very pro looking books. So I’m messing with a travel book. It will be prohibitively expensive, maybe $30-40 hardcover, but I plan on just printing one or two for myself, and then putting it out there in case anyone else wants one. I wish I would have thought of this a month ago; I would have used it to make xmas gifts.

Okay, time for lunch.

South Bend Indiana in works of great literature

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been sick since about Friday or so. It’s the usual December 0% humidity, everyone else is sick sort of thing that gets me every year. Vitamins have kept it semi-controllable, but I wish I could sleep 20 hours a night until it went away. And that doesn’t jive with getting any work done, or with my whole blue light/wake earlier plan, which is largely derailed now. (Although I’m trying to get a little artificial sun in as we speak.)

I did finish reading that Edward Bunker book Education of a Felon. I liked it a lot, aside from the fact that there’s an abrupt ending, and the two halves of the book are very lopsided. I was at the 50% mark, thinking the book was about over, and then the second half went by much faster. It’s one of those “why won’t he learn his lesson” things, and it’s not the typical two strikes and then a home run that you see in almost all formulaic writing. While the book started with this Bukowski-like description of old timey Los Angeles, he ended up in this fierce depiction of prison life and violence. And in the late 60s/early 70s, the shit really hit the fan as race relations became a full-on war within the walls of San Quentin and other big prisons. Part of this pissed me off, the whole black panthers/Angela Davis agenda, which was basically to kill whitey. Anyway, showing another point of view for that made it interesting.

And the weirdest coincidence was when he was on the lam and left California in an old car, intending to drive to New York and check out some jazz clubs or whatever. On his way in the freezing winter, his car died in… South Bend, Indiana. This is like in Kerouac’s On the Road there’s a reference in there somewhere that he was on a Greyhound bus and they stopped in South Bend. Every time I re-read that book (which is maybe once a year), I always stop and laugh at that point.

I’m reading Mikal Gilmore’s rock essay book Night Beat now. What’s weird is that I totally don’t remember buying it. I have an old copy (it may be out of print) and it has no jacket, so it anonymously hid on my shelves for maybe a year or so. Or maybe someone gave it to me, I don’t know. I was looking for another book the other day and flipped it open and read a page and thought it looked pretty damn cool, so I’m on that. And what’s weirder is that I didn’t realize until halfway through the introduction (and weirder still, I never read introductions, because after you write a few, you realize they are bullshit) I found out that his older brother was Gary Gilmore, aka the guy executed by firing squad in Utah in 1976. I guess he (Mikal) wrote a book about that (there’s also Norman Mailer’s hugely successful The Executioner’s Song) so I’ll have to check that out.

Reading a book of essays is a good warmup for thinking about taking ten years of journal and compressing it into a couple hundred pages of book. The first question: sequential, or by topic? Maybe I will read everything and the only topics will be “out of town” and “the weather today”. Maybe it’s better to have things date-ordered because of references and whatnot. The next obvious question: do you edit the entries? When I did the annotated Rumored to Exist, I did not remove a single typo - I just annotated the mistakes. A certain zine editor I know (think small fonts) was absolutely flabbergasted that I would not make the changes. But to me, that was the past, and I could make a second edition with the corrections, but the purpose was to annotate the first edition. The Dead Sea Scrolls have not been copyedited or spellchecked for the same reason. On the other hand, the second edition of Summer Rain did have mistakes fixed. I didn’t do much more than minor copyedit changes, because I was happy with the story and I was mostly just re-setting the book into a new format at a different printer.

What’s between the two? Gilmore took a bunch of old essays he wrote for Rolling Stone and a scad of other papers and magazines, and basically re-poured them, thinking about them more, adding strength, adding content that makes it more purposeful. It’s like restoring a ‘47 Chevy to look just like a ‘47 Chevy, but maybe it’s got an electronic ignition not invented until the 70s, and there’s resin glue or fiberglass or whatever in the structure that wasn’t around, either. This thought makes me want to cut apart all of the entries, try to take the ones that worked best or mattered the most to me, and then edit or extend them until they are great. And yeah, that isn’t a compilation, like a greatest hits album, so maybe it goes against the spirit, but it’s also a hell of a lot better of a product.

Or I won’t do shit and just fester about this for months. Who knows. I do know I have finished all of my xmas shopping except Sarah. I keep threatening to get her either a Fry Daddy or a Playstation 3, but in reality, I need to think of something better.

Okay, time to sudafed up and read this book.

Current projects I will never finish

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I put Past Masters Vol 2 on shuffle yesterday and now I have “Hey Jude” stuck in my head. I also listened to the song “Rain” 58 times, and I am convinced that the Beatles were real, real, real, real high.

There is a good article about John Sheppard in Time Out Chicago. Go read it.

I was talking to Vijay Prozac the other night and he asked about what my current projects were. And it’s a hard question to answer, because I have like 20 things up on blocks and half assembled, like Trans Ams in a redneck’s front yard. So I thought it would be fun to make a list:

Untitled photo book (Temporarily titled “Places I’ve Been”) - a maybe 100 page glossy coffeetable book that is tons of photos from various trips I’ve taken in the last six years. It has taken forever because a) the BookSmart software is painfully slow on my Mac and b) it’s very hard to look at a thousand photos and find the best six. This book will be publically available from blurb.com, but it will be like $40-$50 so I expect nobody to buy it. But if I owe you a birthday gift over the next year or two, this is what you might get.
Book #3 (at one time titled “Zombie Fever!”) - This was an absurdist book about a zombie epidemic, written at a time when I thought it was funny to write a zombie book. The zombie thing has been so thoroughly driven into the ground in the last couple of years (spearheaded by that total piece of shit Romero film last year) that I took out all of the zombie stuff and started over. It’s now a very Apocalypse Now-oriented (which of my books isn’t) story about a guy trying to assassinate a Columbian drug kingpin in Las Vegas who is obsessed with Scarface and Carl’s Jr. and stockpiling plutonium, but meanwhile an alien invasion is about to happen, and a bunch of other stuff. There are one or two little pieces of The Device, a book that was part of Rumored to Exist, and there are some pieces of Rumored that didn’t make it into the final draft. I am almost a third done with it, but it’s going slow.
Tenth Anniversary book of this journal - I’ve been thinking about it a lot. On 1/1/07 I will start throwing crap against a wall to see what sticks. Then I’ll start going through the journal and see what I want to keep. (The crap part is just a side hobby of mine.)
Memoir Book - I have a bunch of notes on a memoir book I want to write. I bet David Sedaris is really shitting himself about now, right?
Six Year Plan - I still have this pile of stories about Bloomington I want to somehow shore up into a readable book. It probably won’t happen anytime soon, even though I have 100,000 words invested into it.
Air in the Paragraph Line #12 - Yes, that will happen sometime in 07.
Fake self-help book - I have like two or three perfect chapters, and someday I will finish it. Maybe I will do a glossy color book in one of those odd pocket sizes with glossy pictures of business people shaking hands or whatever. I also have this vague idea to do one of those half-size books in calendar form, with 365 days of negative and pessimistic thoughts on it, i.e. “December 15 - Remember that for every project that you worked on that failed, the common denominator was that you were somehow involved.”
Nonfiction book containing Larry Falli’s theories on earwax and clown makeup - Someday this masterwork will be completed.

Okay, my half-hour of UV light is done. Time to take a shower and go off to the slaughterhouse.

Places I've Been

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

My book is done! Check it out here: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/31228.

It is called Places I’ve Been: From Amsterdam to Alaska in Pictures. (Yeah, I know, lame title.) It’s a 10x8 book, hardcover or softcover, 94 pages, and it’s all color heavyweight coated stock. I threw in a lot of photos from Amsterdam and Alaska, plus Hawaii, Las Vegas, Berlin, New York, the deserts of Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico, and a few other odds and ends. There’s also a bit of text here and there under or next to photos, but nothing major. It’s extremely expensive at $29.99 softcover or $37.50 hardcover, but I don’t expect many people to buy this one. But check out the preview, and let me know what you think.

Creating the book on blurb.com was a lot of fun, although it ran slower than hell on my Mac Mini. The program has some fancy templates, and you drag in your stuff and make a book. It’s more advanced than what I do on lulu, but the same basic concept. I’m excited to see the final product, although it will probably get here after the holidays.

I was thinking of doing my big year-end, weird crap I read that you should check out list, maybe before the holiday so you can burn off those stray Amazon gift certificates that seem to collect over xmas. I will of course mention things out in 2007 you should preorder and things out now you might enjoy (oh wait, that one isn’t on Amazon.) Sort of a ghost of Christmas past/future thing. I’ll work on that when I have time to dig through the list of what I’ve read in 2006.

Oh, and I got some steaks from my mom yesterday via UPS, which meant dry ice. FUN!

End of year shuffle

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Jesus Christ. If you dig around in the archives, you will find mention of the fact that every year, because of a design decision made back in 1997, I have to do this whole firedrill of moving all of last year’s entries into another directory, starting a new one, and of course, fucking it all up because I forget where everything goes because I only do this once a year. And yes, all of you fucks can start with the BUT WHY DONT YOU JUST SWITCH TO WORDPRESS shit, and I will write the clue on the end of a baseball bat and swing it into your eye: this was around before the term “blog” was even invented, let alone blog software. Also, it all sucks. So today, I started hacking away on a new scheme to put all of the entries in one big directory and somehow link it all together without fucking everything up. I think I have accomplished that now, although the archives pages are slightly fucked up at the moment. And I am sure it will all be broken on your browser, or if you type the entire swahili alphabet on the end of the URL, or whatever. But it’s largely functional, and I won’t be worrying about this as the ball drops.

Anyway, I am back from Christmas in Milwaukee. I did not announce it on this site (or did I?) largely because of the amount of unending shit I get whenever I mention even the slightest shred of truth on here. But we took off for about a week, and I had a lot of fun with Sarah’s family. I went to a Marquette basketball game, which was my first non-high school basketball game I’ve ever seen. (Okay, technically I saw a lot of elementary school ones when I played in the 6th grade.) The game was interesting because we had very good seats - Sarah’s grandfather taught law there decades ago, which means he has good season tickets. They played another team that may or may not have been a high school or maybe Ivy Tech campus, because they played like shit. I think our average 9th grade PE class teams could have beat them. But it was still fun to watch.

I also went to a hockey game the other night, Milwaukee’s AHL team against Chicago’s. I have no idea at all how hockey is played, aside from the fact that you get a puck in a goal, and it involves skating. Watching the game confused me even more. I don’t think any goal could have been anything other than an accident, because it took so much effort to get the puck across the ice, and then someone else would inevitably knock it back. I found it weird too that players go in and out of the game while game play is in motion, and when they are taken out for a penalty, they aren’t replaced, meaning lopsided teams. I was also amazed at the amount of general violence that is tolerated by the refs, and the fact that the AHL all but guarantees a fight per game. We had two fights, and they were all-out slugfests, while the refs stood an arm’s length away and basically watched. The violence and general fan atmosphere was very cool, but the fact that one of the guys I went with had been to a dozen games that year and still hadn’t seen the Admirals win was a big turn-off.

Christmas was good - I got a million books and some DVDs, including the Beatles Anthology set. I ate way too much, both in restaurants and at two family-cooked dinners. We went with Sarah’s dad’s family to a Serbian restaurant, which was way too much food, but a good house band and hilarious Serbian waitress. I ate at a diner where Clinton and Helmut Kohl ate in 1996, which was weird. I also had a pre-bball Friday fish fry, which is somewhat of a tradition in Milwaukee. We went to an IHOP twice, both times good, except that they make me miss having one just down the street, like in Seattle. My only bratwurst was at the hockey game, and it was fairly bad. Everything else was excellent, albeit too excellent, and I’m glad to get back on a boring and regular diet here.

The one other thing is that Sarah’s sister’s boyfriend had an ‘84 Plymouth Turismo almost identical to the one I had that blew up. It was reddish instead of grey on the outside, but the interior was the same burgandy. His car had all of the same problems mine did: sticky doors, fucked up locks, shitty shifter linkage, messed up heater, busted dash lights, noisy CV, the whole thing. I should have told him to keep a fire extinguisher and/or a disposable camera in there, although he says he’s dumping it soon for something else.

Another thing to mention is that I have been wasting a lot of time playing Guitar Hero for the PS2. It is a game that comes with a plastic toy guitar that has five buttons on the neck, a switch where you’d pick, and a whammy bar. You plug it in the PlayStation, and then have to play various songs. It’s a lot like the dance-oriented things with the floor mats, where you step on different colors at different times, but instead, you’re pressing buttons on the guitar neck and strumming the fake pick switch thing. It has a lot of metal-oriented songs, and starts easy, then gets very hard. Anyway, lots of fun.

Okay, time to not think about this PHP crap and think about dinner.

Year in review blues

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

It seems like every blog and news site out there is currently stuck in the “year in review” and “new year’s resolution” modes. First, I have to say that being away from your usual routine of reading crap on the web has done wonders for showing me what bullshit some of my regular reads are. But the typical year-end dreck does the same. And it knocks away any desire to write similar stuff here. It would take me far too much work to dredge up a list of what I read in 2006, and a) nobody really gives a shit and b) you could go back and read the old entries and find out yourself what I read.

That said, I now have about 20 or 30 new books to read, and had to ship most of them back here, then had to carry them home on the subway today. In addition to having two wrenched-out arms and a neck injury from the strap of my overloaded messenger bag, I now have enough reading to last me a little while. I read Terry Southern’s collection, Now Dig This, which started with some very hilarious, Hunter Thompson-style stories, then slowly descended into overblown glossy mag pieces and overworded reviews of stuff I don’t give a shit about. Still, I should dig into his other stuff, when I need to buy more books. Right now, I need to find space for books. I hope when John is here for the start of his book tour, I can unload a dozen or two copies of the annotated Rumored on him as freebie giveaways, and I’ve probably got some reorganizing and skimming of old/redundant crap for the library donation pile.

Speaking of crap, I got the blurb.com book back from the printer, and it’s okay, but not for the price. The hardcover was $40, and the paper is not as thick as I would have liked. It had the sort of “ripple” effect in places that you’d see if you did a lot of color printing on standard photocopier paper. It’s not bad, but it’s not incredible either. Seeing it in actual dimensions and thickness (or thinness, rather) made me not love it. If it was half that price, I would totally be gung-ho about it, but I guess I’ll stick to text books from now on.

I’ve had a little more time to watch DVDs lately, for some reason. I really, really liked Talladega Nights, and now I have my own copy of the DVD, so I’m sure I will watch it a million times more. I never saw Canadian Bacon until the other night - first it was in only three theaters and/or I was too busy repeatedly watching Seven or whatever, and then later I was reluctant to see it because it was directed by Michael Moore. It was pretty damn funny, especially with all of the anti-Canada stuff, although toward the end it borrowed a bit too much from Doctor Strangelove. And I just watched the Tom Green Subway Monkey Hour (or whatever it is called), which is a one-hour special of his old show in Tokyo. Combining an abnormally polite society with Tom Green is not a good mixture, but it was hilarious. My favorite segment was when he went to a sushi restaurant with the rotating conveyor belt of sushi, and put a running vibrator and a digital camcorder on there, hilarity ensues. I still have the Beatles anthology unopened on my desk. And Guitar Hero awaits.

Time for supper. BTW, no I am not going to Times Square for New Year’s Eve. Nobody really does that - it’s an elaborate plot to get you to buy shit.

I hate it when the government kills the main characters in my books

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Like I said before, I have a moratorium on “here is what I did last year”/“here is what I want to do last year”/“here’s how horrible the year was politically, even though I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about” posts. I’m pretty sure you can read that at any other blog or site on the web. The one bit of politics I have is to mention that Hussein hanging. One, it sure hasn’t had as much coverage on the web. I thought for sure there would be a million weepy posts about how this won’t help anything blah blah blah and/or “ding dong, the witch is dead”, but it’s been very quiet.

The whole thing pisses me off because I am 36,000 words into this book, and there is a small sub-plot involving Saddam, and now I’m forced to either change it, remove it, or maybe add in a “no, that hanging was staged bullshit, he’s still around” or something. I seriously thought he’d be around for thirty years amidst a clusterfuck of appeals and technicalities. Hell, Charlie Manson’s still dining at the Corcorcan Hilton on the government dime, and his little helter skelter attempt was almost 40 years ago. But I suppose someone writing a fictional absurdist book about Elvis back in ‘77 wouldn’t need to change much after he keeled over on the shitter, right? Maybe I should add that Sadaam and Elvis are hanging around somewhere in a Tijuana bar, trading stories and shots of codeine. Stranger things have happened.

As an aside, I was never any huge fan of Gerald Ford’s, but I do feel bad about what’s happening with his funeral. Because of the timing, pretty much everybody is out of town and they’re probably going to have to hire some homeless people to be his pallbearers. Nixon had five presidents to carry his casket; everyone’s too busy watching football to haul away Ford. I think the next Pauly Shore comedy show will have a higher attendance than Ford’s funeral. I always felt bad for Ford because he not only inherited all of Nixon’s shit, but he was the only person appointed the presidency, and I always thought that maybe he didn’t entirely want it. As a person who often gets appointed shit jobs that nobody else will take in my career, I can sympathize.

I now have so many books to read, I can’t really decide on any single book to read. In addition to the armful of Christmas gifts, I also decided as part of a solution to the population control problem on my shelves, I would pull all of the books I have never read, and that I want to either read, or maybe dump in the future. I have a lot of books I bought in the last year or two that I shelved but never read and then forgot, and I have other books that have been following me for over fifteen years that I have never read and might never read at all, which need to be dealt with at some point. So I now have this “to be read or eventually ditched” queue now. I also have a pile of books that are the “dead and gone” pile. I know at least one of you regular readers will mention the greatness of dumping this shit on eBay or Amazon used or whatever, but I’ve found it’s much easier to drag them to the library a block away, donate them, and make up a bunch of semi-inflated prices per book and take it as a tax writeoff. (I am now in the income bracket where I am forced to file long-form and take deductions, and since I don’t have a house, kids, a religion, any political party I’d give one fucking red cent to, or anything else, deductions are more than welcome at this point.)

The one thing I am reading now is the Portable Henry Rollins, a gift from Sarah’s brother-in-law Matthew. The book isn’t part of the Viking portable series (I wish it was so it would match my other ones) but it’s a similar concept - take the best of a dozen books and put them in one place. I think I own about 80% of the books anthologized in this tome, but it’s nice to see them all in one place. It also really reminds me of how I got started on this whole writing thing, almost 15 years ago, which was the Rollins spoken word tapes. Those escalated to his books, and the desire for me to start keeping a journal, and eventually trying to write my own stories and books. Some of the stories in the anthology are ones from his tapes, and that brings me back to that period when I was trying to define myself as a writer, or at least capture something on paper. The book is also printed with the ragged right paper (I don’t know the technical term, that shit they use in arty books and wedding invitations), which typically drives me apeshit, but it reminds me of some of the artsy paper and notebooks I tried to use when I was first starting out. For a little while, I thought the type of paper and type of notebook and type of pen would radically change my ability to keep a journal. Later I realized that Mead college-rule and a ball-point stolen from any bank or hotel would work just fine, and all of the “special” journaling stuff was just bullshit.

The Rollins stuff is interesting in a few different ways, once you strip away the typical egomaniacal layer that usually obstructs people. Below that, there’s this part that originally caught me, this thought that loneliness and despair are not only a pure form of pain, but they are also essential to the human condition. He always talks about the need to be alone, the times when he grew up in DC and worked at the ice cream store, how he didn’t drive or take the bus, because he needed to walk across the city in the night alone, to have the pain and pleasure of not being around any other humans. He would walk and relive the horrors that happened to him in the city, the times he got mugged or saw a dog in the street get nailed by a bus, the pieces he could not erase. I identified with that to an extent, because I would walk across campus alone at three in the morning, and would see the million layers and landmarks of what happened to me over the years, and that time at night was when I was most alive, and most depressed. But I also thought Rollins was full of shit, that he was a millionaire that could get any chick he wanted, and he was obviously crazy because he wanted to go back to that period when he was a lonely, confused little punk living in a shithole apartment and living on nothing. But now, 15 years later, my memory always pulls back to those times, and I realize that even though I’ve gained so much, I have also lost that overwhelming pain that defined me back then.

Anyway, this is starting to sound like some kind of new year’s bullshit, so I’ll leave it there. I am actually going out to dinner tonight at Alias. I could pretty much live on their BBQ ribs and onion rings (at least until I keeled over from a heart blockage.) Until then, I need to keep working on the still-unnamed next book. I think until it has a name, I will simply call it Book Three from now on. Anyway, Book Three is going good, and I hope to at least get the first third done in the next month or two so I can let some other people read it and see if I’m crazy or not.

(BTW, still thinking about that ten-year journal book. I’m thinking a good title would be “This is not a Blog”. From 4/10/97 to today, I have 702 entries and about 496,000 words. I think War and Peace is about 550,000 words, to give you an idea of magnitude. Of course, once I edit out all of the stupid shit, it’s like 32,000 words. I’m also thinking of pulling in some bits from my paper journals, and there will be a certain amount of new content, essays explaining things and why the hell I did this anyway. But I need to work on the aforementioned Book Three first, so this is a side project, as if I have time for side projects.)