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general

Ramones

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.

Categories
general reviews

Saxon

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.

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general

birthday, AC/DC day

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.

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general

28

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.

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general

late, NYC, dreams

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.

Categories
general

unproductive weekend

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.

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general

Snap Judgment

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.

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general

BL Sandwiches, taxes

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.

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general

Dream theories

(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):

  1. This really isn’t a dream, there is a nuclear holocaust, and I’m experiencing the last five seconds of my life.
  2. A lucid dream where I’m able to take control.
  3. I’m back in Elkhart, Indiana, and going through the same problems I did ten years ago
  4. “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.
  5. 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.

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general

dreams and writing

(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.