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v/a

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…

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Hobby shop nostalgia

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.]

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Sleep dep zombie, future of war

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.

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Blitzkrieg

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.

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back

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…

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no sleep before Hawaii

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.

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walking, iPod

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.

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Sleep, sickness, Van Halen

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.

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stuck

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.

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Allergy season and forgetting your own age

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…