The Wrath of Kon

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.

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…

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…

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…