I don’t know why, but I suddenly remembered that random.yahoo.com used to be an obsession of mine.  I mean, this was back when there were only like 800 web sites and 680 of them were under construction and had one of those stupid animated GIFs of a construction worker or bulldozer, but it meant that every reload of that URL brought you to something interesting to read, while now, 9 times out of 10, you get directed to a spam farm that’s full of harvested content someone’s using to game their search rank.  But I was going to write something about that, and it made me think about the Ouija board.  And now I wonder if anyone still plays with these, or if the slow demise of the board game and all things printed is going to make those go away.  I mean, you can’t really do a spirit seance with your Nintendo Wii.  (Or can you?)

I remember when I was 14 I had this babysitting gig for the better part of a summer, where I watched these two boys, went to their house every day while their mom worked, and tried to entertain them for the working day, for something like $45 a week.  I can barely get out of a California Pizza Kitchen for less than that now, but I think my allowance at that point was something like $5 a week, so that was gold rush money.  The two kids were unholy terrors, and in today’s modern world, would probably get drugged out of their minds for ADHD, bipolar disorder, or whatever the hell they diagnose hyperactive kids with these days.  They weren’t bad kids, I guess, but this wasn’t one of those gigs where I could sit around and watch TV all day - I had to actively think of something to do all day every day.

Anyway, their mom had a bunch of board games, and we burned up maybe a week of time playing those.  She had all of the basics: Life, Monopoly, Clue; she also had that game Anti-Monopoly, which was in the news because they got sued by Parker Brothers, but I think it was too complicated or too boring, so we never played that.  But she had a Ouija board, and we spent a lot of time screwing with that, trying to figure out if we could call up any ghosts or dead people.  I think we spent the better part of a summer trying to call up various professional wrestlers, because this was when WWF was really huge and the kids were really into Hulk Hogan and the Iron Sheik and all of that crap.

I just started googling Ouija because I wonder how it works.  I mean, I don’t believe in the paranormal and never believed all of the various Christian fundamentalist types who said I’d go to hell for playing with a board game, or introduce some kind of trapped demon spirits that would somehow channel into this world through a piece of plastic dancing across a board of letters printed and sold in a Kay-Bee toy store.  Wikipedia says something about the ideomotor effect, and I’ll buy that, even though wikipedia is generally full of shit.  Still, it all makes me wonder if there’s some way to write an iPad version.

That whole summer though - it was such a weird little period of time, because it was after junior high, before high school.  I absolutely hated junior high, because things seemed almost normal as a kid in grade school, and I knew my place among the few dozen people in my class, and then all four grade schools got thrown into one big school, and everything changed.  And everyone makes this weird jump from being little kids in an almost socialist situation where everyone is equal to this place of cliques and castes and a social pecking order based on who you know and what you wear and how you look.  And I never got the memo, and spent way too long infatuated with computers and D&D and science fiction and model airplanes, and did not do well on that jump.

So in a sense, that summer was this weird sort of “end of innocence” thing, where I built at least one or two 1/48 scale fighter jets a week, and mowed lawns when I wasn’t babysitting, and pretty much memorized every Rush album to date while pushing a 3.5 HP Briggs and Stratton across a manicured bed of green and getting another five bucks closer to someday buying a drum set and learning every single thing Neil Peart laid down in a recording studio.  That summer, I did buy a drum set, my friend Derik’s old double-bass set - I have no idea how I talked my parents into that one - but I never did learn much, and sold the whole thing a year later to buy a new bike.  I played a lot of D&D when D&D was totally uncool, and spent a lot of time typing in computer games from Compute magazine into my Commodore-64.

I think I also underwent some shift in brain chemistry in that period.  Every psychiatrist I’ve talked to said that’s when things hit, that last spurt of puberty that changes the plasticity of your brain or something, alters the structure in some way.  I never remember ever being depressed before that, and it seems like after that summer, when I grew like a foot in three months, I spent all of my time in some undefined funk.  At the time, it was all situational - it was all a lack of friends or popularity, a lack of whatever clothes or haircut or social placement that made me unsuccessful.  And all of that was true, but there was also this new serotonin imbalance or whatever it was, masking the whole thing.

No real moral to the story here - I just fell into a brief time hole, thinking about this.  I remember watching TV when I was babysitting those kids, there was some morning news program, the last thing they would show before they got into the soap operas, at which time we had to shut it off and go play game #263 of Life that week.  But they were talking about the 40th anniversary of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, showing the grainy newsreel footage of the giant mushroom cloud, and the decimated little paper and kindling wood city after the 18-kiloton blast.  And the 65th anniversary just passed - and that screws with my head, thinking that summer was 25 years ago.

I should wrap this up.  I’ve started googling Hiroshima, and will probably waste the next two hours reading stuff online, and eventually convince myself I need to dig up the Richard Rhodes book, and I have other crap to do instead.

I am going back to school.  Sort of.  I’m taking one class, online, about TV comedy writing.  This will probably elicit a number of questions, like “why school?” and “why TV?” and “what about these government agents in black helicopters that sit with sniper rifles and thermal scopes a mile away from my armed compound?”  (Okay not all of you may have that last question.)

First, school: I need to get off my ass and do something.  I need some deadlines, and I need to have some people look at my stuff.  And I don’t know if I could hack an MFA program, and I definitely am not quitting my day job.  But I would like to challenge myself a little, and take something.  And it’s a little daunting, because aside from training classes at work, I have not been in a classroom since 1995, which is 15 years ago, which is downright scary.

Why TV?  I am getting to the point where chasing the long-form novel or the Raymond Carver sculpted story just isn’t me.  I mean, I am beating myself up learning this crap, trying to follow it, and maybe I could, but it’s just not my skillset.  I need to find some other form that’s closer to what I do.  Maybe that’s writing TV comedy.  Or maybe it’s punching up jokes for sketch comedy.  Or maybe it’s writing a regular column, or writing for something like the Onion.  All I know is I come up with a lot of way-out ideas, and I punch them together fast, but then get bored of them fast.  I need a format that fits that well.  I have been reluctant to even think this, because it is some form of defeat in a sense.  But it isn’t.  I mean, Picasso was a good painter, but I bet he’d struggle painting department store shelves for a summer.  And I did that with no problem - I’d kick his ass, given a skid of 36x18s with no metal prep and a couple of gallons of semi-gloss oil.

I really have no idea how the comedy writing world works, or where to go to find out.  I have this sneaking suspicion that the two cities you want to be in for this are NY or LA, and of course I didn’t do shit when I lived in either one.  But at least I’m not in Possum Pouch, Arkansas.  One thing that is possibly limiting is I have no interest in performing.  If I did, I would go to whatever UCB-type sketch comedy place and max out as much as possible, since it seems like that’s the way to cover all of your bases.  But I have zero interest in stage time.  I mean, I took my college speech class at 8

AM in a summer session specifically because I hate talking in groups.

Okay, I need to go log into this course site and figure it out.  The last time I had a class discussion online, it used VAXNotes, if that dates me at all.

For only $159,000, you can buy the last place I lived in Bloomington:

http://www.homefinder.org/public/buy-details.asp?sTransactionNumber=20101620&sCRecord=147

This is the 1005 W. 6th house, where I lived from 1994-1995.  I lived here with Simms and Matt Liggett, and it’s a weird little place.  It’s five bedrooms, but they’re odd-sized little rooms, so you can only really get three people in there.  We each had a tiny upstairs room, with a computer room up front and the Simms music studio in another room.  It had 1.5 baths, but in a weird configuration; there was a room with a toilet, sink, and non-functional tub; the other one had a shower, sink, and no toilet.  I bought a sign that said NO DUMPING and put it on the toilet-less room.  This also became a metaphor for distributed computing in a long and somewhat irrelevant story that I’ll skip.

The place also had a giant kitchen, big enough for a drum set and full band without compromising on keg location or chili distribution.  I have a lot of strange memories of that place, like when I tried to grow tomatoes in one corner with a bunch of grow lights, or the birthday when me and Larry went to K-Mart, bought two copies of this board game where you built castles out of bricks and then launched marbles from catapults siege-style to try to level your opponent, and then played on the kitchen floor, proceeding to lose little marbles all over the place.

I really did like my room there, too.  It was a cape cod, and my room was upstairs, so I had a low ceiling with weird angles on it, and bookshelves built into two walls.  I spent many late nights on my mattress on the floor, reading Henry Miller and scribbling in notebooks, listening to rain on the rooftop or running the little electric heater in the cold.  I loved living in this little closet-sized womb of a room, books on three walls, journals all over the creaky wooden floors, a busted-up PS/2 386SX computer I borrowed from work and only used to play solitaire in Windows 3.1.  (It was a literal doorstop; it was not networked and I had some crazy idea that I’d type away on it in Notepad and write down thoughts and turn them into books, and of course that didn’t happen.)

Anyway - I’m not in the market for a second house these days.  And if you really want some Konrath history for about $158,985 cheaper, you could go buy a copy of Summer Rain.  (And that book was based on a different house - the one at 414 Mitchell - but I did start writing SR at the 6th Street house, so there is a connection.)  But I’ve been thinking of B-town a lot lately, and it seems five forevers ago since I was there.  So it gave be a chuckle and a brief trip through time when I saw this.

Before I forget. John Sheppard has a new book out called Loner, which is a collection of short stories originally published in Air in the Paragraph Line, plus a new one that’s absolutely incredible.  It’s on lulu.com here: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/loner/11784165.  They’re also having a summer sale with free postage for orders over twenty bucks, so do yourself a big favor and pick that up along with his other books In Between Days and Tales of the Peacetime Army.  Or check out any of my other books at http://stores.lulu.com/jkonrath, as long as the shipping’s cheap/free.

As long as I’m pimping stuff, I should mention that I dumped a bunch of my old books on scribd.com.  So now you can go read or download stuff like Summer Rain, Rumored to Exist, Air in the Paragraph Line #12, and a bunch of other old AITPL issues.  Check em out, and if you like them, please do me a favor and throw a link up on your facebook or whatever else you’re using these days using the handy buttons on scribd.

It’s always good to see John’s work, although it also makes me start thinking about putting out another POD book, or getting some of the old stuff on Kindle, or who knows what.  I am starting to accumulate a lot of short stories from AITPL and other places, and maybe there are enough to put out a volume of them, but I don’t know how it would sell or how I would market it.  I would also like to have a bunch of new stuff to go along with the reprints, and I’m not churning out a lot of writing at this second.

I also keep thinking about what to do next with AITPL.  I was looking at hooking up the submishmash submission manager thing, which looks like a good idea, but then I was reading this big essay on their site about why it was so great, and it said some stuff about the current climate, about how everyone’s a writer and nobody’s a reader, and that really stuck in my craw.  I mean, the worst part of that statement is that it’s true.  I wish I had a hundred good writers giving me stuff that I publish to a million eager readers, but it seems like those numbers are the other way around right now, and it makes me wonder why I should do more issues, or why I should publish my own stuff, and it gets depressing fast.  I swing between maybe moving AITPL to a model where I publish stories regularly online, maybe even daily flash fiction and the weekly roundup of longer fiction, and then do a quarterly print version of the best of that stuff.  Maybe that’s a good idea, but I don’t have time to write now, let alone sift through submissions.  I think if I had five dedicated readers willing to help me with the slush pile, I’d do this.  But right now, I’ve gotta write.

For some reason last weekend, I read some thing about GTD and thought maybe I should do some GST (Getting my Shit Together) and maybe try to organize things a bit.  So I looked at this list of how to do these things, and step one is “empty your inbox”.  Well here’s the deal: I forward my 34.216.9.77/ email to a gmail account, and then read that with IMAP from my home computer and iPhone, and also use the web interface during the day at work. And since I started doing this in 2008, I have not filed away a single message, so my inbox has maybe 5000 messages in it.  But I also realized that now that I’m 100% using IMAP, I can now keep my folders on gmail and file things away there.

My big problem with that before: I used a Windows Mobile phone, and it could only POP mail reliably, even though its exchange support is supposed to be hot shit.  Using IMAP caused some weird problems, so I would pop my mail.  That led to this huge rat’s nest email configuration with multiple gmail accounts and ISP redirection and all of this garbage.  Now with the iPhone’s great IMAP support, all of that is gone.  And also, my Windows Mobile phone is gone - I actually sold it last week for $26 online.  Felt a little sad packing it up, because it reminded me of fall of 2008 and how ideal things seemed moving to the bay and getting a new job in Silicon Valley and how proud I was to be working for the company that made my phone, and to be working on software for that phone.  Then I actually had to use Windows Mobile.  That lasted about six months, before I finally gave up and paid full, unsubsidized price for an iPhone and threw my BlackJack II in a desk drawer, only to come out when I had to work at a trade show and was not allowed to use my iPhone in public.

Anyway, I started hacking away at the email situation last weekend.  First, I had to move stuff from one gmail account to another. You can just drag and drop messages between two IMAP accounts in Mail.app and it works well, except for some hidden mystery transfer quota in gmail that kills your connection for 24 hours if you move more than about 500 messages.  Then I had to actually sort through my old mail.  I could prune out a lot of obvious stuff: Amazon ship notifications, AT&T junk mail, alarm notifications to myself, and newsletters I never read.  And then I could file away the obvious one-to-one things, the frequent correspondence that could easily be tucked away in a folder with the person’s username.  But there’s still thousands of messages to go, and I think it will take me maybe a month to get to step 2 of GTD.

Actually, I have been writing down more stuff, ideas and thoughts and parts of stories, in a moleskine notebook, which is filling fast.  I think a big part of GTD is just capturing this stuff that would normally fall out of your head.  I don’t know what the next step is, but it feels good to get some record of this stuff.

Not much else.  Listening to Sabbath, plotting the weekend with a cat sleeping on my feet and “Hand of Doom” going through the headphones.  I’m finishing up hour four on the laptop and the battery says I still have another 1

, which isn’t bad considering all of the churning Mail.app is doing with the IMAP transfers.  But it’s time to hang it up and go get some lunch.

The kindle is good, but I found a key problem the other day. It pissed me off because I was in a doctor’s office and had to revert to reading a year-old Sports Illustrated.  Glad it wasn’t on a flight to Tokyo: