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Biological anomaly

I want to talk more about writing, but today’s been weird. Not today, or the events of today, but some biological anomaly. Maybe I’m depressed, or maybe it’s poor diet. It’s one of those weird in-between states where I’m talking to someone about something and it reminds me of a movie, and it takes me 7 years and 3 Leaonard Maltin books to remember that I was thinking of The Godfather. Or whatever. Not the time to start discussing weird literary theory.

I finally found the expansion pak for the Nintendo 64, and also picked up a Rumble Pack. I’m still trying hard to finish level 4 of Star Wars: Rogue Squardon. Last night, I managed to get a tow cable around an AT-AT three times, and the fucking thing stumbled to its well-deserved death. Then I found out that you have to kill two of them and do some other jerking around before you clear the level. I read some FAQs and found that I’m not alone here – it’s one of the hardest levels of the game.

I don’t know who reads this, but I’ll say this in case some people deeply embedded in the journal scene do read this: I am really looking for journals similar to mine, or similar to what I want this journal to be. I have been falling into this rut of “I went to the mall. I bought some new socks. I ate a grape. I looked at the inside of my fridge” sort of journal entries. I wish I knew others who were writing about writing, instead of writing about their lives as writing. If you know of any, let me know.

Writing Rumored has been hard lately. I wrote two pieces last night, both marginal in quality, and finished working in some edits Marie did on the first half back when I was in NY. And it’s hard to procrastinate. I feel so guilty watching TV, and I’m so sick of the shit they have on there. I spent 40 minutes out of the hour watching commercials, and think about Asimov writing a book every 14 minutes during his career. I know that eventually I will get motivated and a long string of writing will suddenly hit the page. Until then, I’m poking away. I am at part #133 of the book, and it would be nice to be at #150 by the end of the month. I really hope to get this fucking thing done by the end of March. That doesn’t mean a final draft, but just something that has parts 0-255 and doesn’t require me to go back and junk 40 or 50 of them because I wrote them all in a night.

I have a dinner getting cold here, and I should probably try to get in the right frame of mind to work. More later.

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persona, content

I’ve been thinking more about content, which I babbled on about yesterday. There are a few conflicts involved in all of this, so bear with me.

Yesterday, I talked about content and method versus character and setting and plot. It might be helpful if you read yesterday’s entry, but for now, I’m going to ignore everything but content. A typical, writing 101 short story or Hollywood screenplay contains content – a protagonist, an antagonist, a dark and stormy night, a football player and the cheerleadr who loves him, and so on. The distinction that I would make between a typical story and something experimental or literary is that the purpose of the content is different, so the content is different. For example, the purpose of Dr. Benway in a William S. Burroughs book is different than the purpose of Dr. Niles Crane on the TV show Frazier. The former can develop in different ways because he’s not supporting this typical entourage of characters in the typical plot A/plot B sitcom script. More focus can be put on the characters (or the settings or objects) because they aren’t simple plug-ins to a prefab storyline. I think that’s the big distinction in literary fiction, and it’s what differentiates something like The Subterraneans and Weekend at Bernie’s.

So where do these heightened characters and places and objects come from? Writers write what they know, for the most part. This has been the major stumbling block for me and my writing career. I’ve read books by Bukowski, about his years of drinking, meeting different women, betting on the horses, living with almost no money and writing for an underground newspaper, living in roominghouses. I’ve read Burroughs, the trips into the jungle to find Yage, the travel all over the world, the Beat Hotel and Tangiers. And I’ve even been jealous of Henry Rollins, sleeping in the back of a U-Haul, a different city every day on the road with Black Flag. All of these people lived adventurous lives, while I haven’t. The closest I’ve been to being on the edge was maybe in college, but that’s nothing like On the Road. So part of my muse has been telling me that I need to go out and live to collect this content – to do like Hemmingway and fight in wars and fight bulls and drink 20 shots of whiskey for breakfast and everything else. And granted, if I could play the guitar or I found some gig that got me out of the house and all around the country, maybe I’d try it. But I’ve thought that the collection of content was a major deterrant in my writing career. I wrote one book called Summer Rain based on a summer in Bloomington, and it was fun to write (well, it’s still not done yet…) but I realized that there would never be a second book after this one, because if I stuck to this genre of autobiographical fiction, every book I wrote would be another Summer Rain.

But you don’t need to live it to write it, do you? Several of my favorite writers, most notably Mark Leyner, write stuff that never really happened. It’s all based on a mix of research, pop culture, current events, and sheer insanity. Someone like Leyner is pulling his content from the air, and it’s commendable work. When I mess with this, I find that the fictional content you create is only as good as the random junk floating in your head. I took a few weird college courses on music theory, cancer, third world politics, and astronomy, and I have a weird laundry list of interest and topics I like to read about, too. But when I do my best work on Rumored to Exist is when I do my best homework. I pick things up from other people, from newsgroups, from websites, from odd shows on the Discovery channel. And when everything works good, and when I’m saturated with this useless knowledge, the content flows. But other times, it doesn’t. And that’s what I’m trying to improve.

I just got interrupted, so I lost my train of thought. But what I think I was going to say is that I feel a need to research and challenge myself to look at new things and ideas, specifically for Rumored to Exist. I find that I need to look for a starting point for new and weird topics, and once that happens, everything snowballs and I’m doing plenty of good writing. My friend and fellow writer Michael Stutz recommended Robert Anton Wilson’s book Everything is Under Control, so I ran and got a copy of last night. He was 100% right – it’s this encyclopedia of weird conspiracy theories and secret societies that’s somewhat tongue in cheek and probably not even 10% correct, but it’s an excellent read. And now I’m thinking about Freemasons, Men in Black (not Will Smith), word virus theories, germ warfare, and a ton of other cool stuff. I have enough research material to keep me busy for a while.

The application of this material is the second part of what I talked about yesterday, the method. I don’t think I am going to be able to crack out a good explanation of this, since I haven’t even begun to think about it. But that’s a good discussion for later.

As always, I’m really looking for comments about this babble, especially since this self-discussion is becoming somewhat important to me. So please email me if you have any thoughts on the subject.

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persona

I’m at the point in my writing cycle where I’m overanalyzing how writing works. I often need to break apart stories and books and try to find what makes them readable, desirable, and functional. Although I feel that Rumored to Exist is a good book in many places, I don’t know how it will stand as a complete book, and I don’t know how I will come up with the ideas to finish it. Because it is so loose and free-form, there’s no cohesive story to follow, which puts me in the danger of never finishing. I’ve been hacking at Rumored for a little over two years, and I’m barely halfway done. Another round of edits could put me well below the halfway bar, if I start chopping the pieces I absolutely hate.

This means I start thinking about the theory of plot and structure of story. It also means I think about my interests and try to find new topics to research, combine, and twist into new ideas. It’s a nervous prospect, since I have absolutely no attention span right now, and I can never apply myself to projects like this. It’s the reason I could never learn a foreign language, or pull a decent GPA in largely scantron courses like psychology or sociology. So I might be off this kick before too long.

The perfect starting point and example is, of course, William S. Burroughs. He lived a life of ecclectic and bizarre connections: heroin, South America, homosexuality, classical literature, psychology, technology, and travel. He worked jobs just to find out what it was like, as a private detetective or exterminator, and took a strange path, studying at Harvard, going to Vienna for medical school, living in the middle of nowhere in Texas, and then going across the globe: Mexico, South America, Tangiers, Paris, Austria, New York, Kansas. His life provided the raw material to produce his books. He often went on about different topics, such as the Mayans, time travel, scientology, the corruption of a Christian society, drug dealers, and more. But he didn’t write straightforward narratives about his experiences, like Charles Bukowski or Henry Miller or something. It was more veiled in complicated structures; cutups, fragments, dreams and chaos used to frame the pieces of his stories.

If I wanted to rip off Burroughs entirely, the two basic pieces to investigate could then be defined as the content and the method. This sounds pretty arbitrary, but it’s an important distinction, because I think in most of your writing 101 classes, the division of story would be something like plot and character. I don’t think plot is required, because it’s really a part of method. The method of a story, especially something nonlinear, doesn’t have to include plot. It could use any mechanism that would pull the reader through the story. A book like Naked Lunch is not plot-driven. (The well-versed Burroughs scholar could argue that it is, but the first-time reader would disagree, so let’s stick with that.) And character is somewhat of a division of content. Although characters are important in WSB’s work, he doesn’t rely on a top-down cast like a Hollywood movie. And it isn’t a typical first-person narrative like so many literary works.

I don’t know where to start, and I don’t think I can investigate both of these today, but the easiest way for me to begin would be with content. I always try to find new, cool things to discuss in Rumored, be it designer drugs, high-tech weaponry, pop-culture icons, or obscure history references. I’m not always 100% happy with some of these things, and many have been cut or toned down as the editing of Rumored continues. I need to think of new topics, but I need to think about how they are discussed or applied, and that’s where it gets even more complicated.

Back to Burroughs – a lot of his work has a mystical, investigative approach. He talks about the Mayans and Ah Pook the Destroyer and all of that, with a spiritual approach. I don’t mean that he is a religious writer; it’s that the characters and reference – the content – relies on a religious framework to interact through his books. When he talks about heroin, it isn’t a Trainspotting sort of Calvin Klein ad for junk; he talks about it in a spiritual sense. He has created a culture which has its own minor morality plays based on the unique aspects of drug use and addiction. It’s not like a Hollywood movie where the use of drugs pushes one of the characters in the stereotypical inventory of characters through the stock five plot movements, i.e. I’m a high school cheerleader and I have a football player boyfriend; Someone offers me drugs and I try them so I can be pretty/popular/better; antics ensue; I weigh 500 pounds and smoke a pound of hash a day; I learn to love god. moral: don’t do drugs, kids! Burroughs seems to walk far outside of this, because he isn’t pushing a plot like they are. He might have some plot elements to keep the pages turning, but it’s not all designed to be a 2 hour movie of the week.

Although I haven’t read his stuff in years, I was thinking of Asimov as another example. He wrote all of these books about robots, but the books aren’t really about big aluminum men running around killing people or whatever. He took the angle of social commentary and engineered it around the limitations and issues of robotics. Asimov wasn’t a religious guy (If I remember correctly, he’s a Humanist, which is probably my closest fit, religion-wise) and his books aren’t knit together with a spiritual overtone. He takes his unique topics and works together the content with the political or sociological consequenses. Other writers would have a plot-driven theme about robots, but he uses a light plot to drive home the unique circumstanses of man creating artificial “life.”

So my homework for tonight is to come up with a laundry list of topics I could further explore and research for the universe created within Rumored to Exist. There are tons of things there, but many of them are free-floating. Someone might be injecting some cloning serum in his arm, but the purpose and placement of clones in the book is somewhat secondary. I think if I picked apart some of the topics I’ve discussed and brainstormed further mutations of them, there would be more coross-pollination of weird stuff and more ideas for new pieces.

And maybe tomorrow I can talk about method. Or maybe I’ll still be babbling about this.

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It was a dark and cloudy afternoon

It was a dark and cloudy afternoon. Foggy, really – it looks like the mist at the outer boundaries of a Nintendo-64 screen has enveloped all of Seattle. I knew the few days of sunshine were too good to be true – now we go back to six months of shittiness.

I watched too much TV last night, and didn’t get any work done. There was a show on about the Air Force One, another one of those Discovery Channel “Inside Story” things. I actually went on the first jet-powered Air Force One, a Boeing 707, tail number 26000. It’s at the Boeing museum in Seattle – you can walk through it and see various replica seats and desks and fake radio gear behind plexiglass. Actually, I don’t remember if the museum had plane 26000 or 27000, or if it was all fake. But one one of the two was where they swore in LBJ while JFK’s corpse was stowed away in the passenger compartment. Another weird thing on that show – Air Force One is the FAA callsign for the plane only when the president was on board. When Nixon resigned, he was president when he left DC on his way home, but Ford was signed in at noon, when he was midway to California. So the plane had to change callsigns to 27000 while in midair.

The Museum of Flight has so many cool planes there, each with a weird story. Their B-17 was in the film Memphis Belle; their FG-1D Corsair spent 33 years at the bottom of Lake Washington before being restored; they have an A-4F that used to be a Blue Angels plane. I already mentioned Air Force One; their SR-71 Blackbird and D-21 drone is also a one-of-a-kind. Their F-4 Phantom really scored 3 MiG kills in 1967; their P-12 biplane once flew from LA to San Diego, inverted. One of their biggest planes is the prototype 747; one of the smallest is the Aerocar III, a fiat-sized car that can bolt on a pair of wings and a prop for air travel. The Aerocar is pretty kick-ass; you can convert it in only ten minutes. Although it can go about 100 miles an hour in the air, it can only drive at about 65.

I’m bored, and I have a meeting in a bit, so I better cut this short.

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it happened ten years ago

I’ve been obsessively eating those little, red, cinnamon candies, and watching a special about nuclear submarines that sank. So it’s been a productive evening. I also got a bunch of CDs in the mail, but I fell asleep after Marie called, and I didn’t get a chance to listen to anything. Now, in a fit of “it happened ten years ago” nostalgia, I’m listening to a Lizzy Borden album. It’s Master of Disguise, probably the best one. It’s somewhat of a concept album, and really reminds me of my first semester in college. I recently found another copy, and it’s one of those albums that can really transport me back to a very specific time and era. I love music like that, even if it is somewhat dated.

I should get back to writing. Rumored to Exist is going slow, but I have a pile of edited stuff to reconcile that I’ve been putting off. And Letterman is on.

01/05/99 15:05

The government is burning tons of napalm that has been sitting around since the end of the Vietnam war. Why can’t they have some kind of lottery for it? Or sell it by the barrel at the army-navy store? I don’t know about you, but I could really use a 55 gallon drum of napalm.

It’s a slow day – I want to write more, but I can’t. Maybe later.

01/05/99 15:42

I need to do some research and find all of the nuclear subs that are still on the ocean floor. I think there are at least 4 or 5 of them. After I make my first billion dollars, I’m going to rent that Hughes explorer ship and try to find one of those subs. That Hughes boat has this gigantic hole in the middle of it, where they can lift an entire submarine with a giant claw-like thing, close the doors behind it, and dismantle it with Navy frogmen in nuclear protection gear. I guess when they salvaged that Soviet sub in ’74, it was completely hot from the nuclear missiles. They also found 9 bodies, and gave them a traditional Russian burial at sea, while they rolled a few movie cameras. They showed part of the burial on the Discorvery channel special last night – it was very bizarre, James Bond sort of stuff.

I still hear what sounds like sea otters across the street. I’ve been listening to White Zombie all morning. I’ve started cleaning my office in anticipation of my move to the other building. I only have one or two boxes of stuff – some of the people I work with have a dozen boxes of stuff. I wish I had a camera I could mount anywhere and transmit the video signal several miles away. I’d use it for lots of things, like proving that my fucking landlord is only in his office an hour a day.

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lunch, year

I actually brought my lunch today. I’ve been going to the deli downstairs every day, but that costs money and I’m gaining weight because of it. Plus, I’m moving offices at the end of the week, and the new place doesn’t have a deli downstairs. So, I need to get used to lunchmeat and snak-paks again.

I’ve been having a minor freakout about the year. It isn’t because Prince sang about it in that stupid song, but because 1989 was ten years ago. So many key things happened in that year, from college to women to psychiatry to everything else. It was when I left for school, learned to play piano, bought my first bass, got my first real credit card, and started taking Prozac. And the fact that I can now say “Ten years ago, I…” is making my usual nostalgia trips even more chaotic.

On a similar topic, I was flipping through channels last night, and saw a “Hey, remember the 90’s?” CD for sale. I almost called the 800 number to yell “Hey, IT IS THE FUCKING NINETIES!!!!” at somebody. Remember you read it here first – this is going to collapse on itself so much, that by 2015, you will see ads for “Hey, remember 2:45 this afternoon?” CDs.

I have a lunch to finish. Catch you later.

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new driver’s license

The midwest is buried under 16 feet of snow, and the sun was out here today. Vindication.

I got a new driver’s license today. I tried to look as scary as possible for the photo, but it’s not great. I didn’t shave for a week, and wore a Cianide shirt. Unlike Indiana, they let me keep the old license (after they punched a hole in it.)

My friend Suzanne was here today. She’s been in Olympia since xmas, but her and her guy-friend Matt came up here tonight. We went to Denny’s, did a bunch of driving around, and stopped by my work for the tour. I’ve known Suzanne since 1994. She’s a manager at the Borders in Bloomington and I usually see her when I’m in town, and hassle her about stuff in the store or whatever. The first time I visited Bton after my departure, she went with me to White Castle. I went to the counter and told the girl “I came all the way from Seattle to eat here.” She said “I’m sorry.”

I wanted to write more, but I’m so tired. I read through all of Rumored to Exist tonight, and made some comments. I also read through all of my notes, and got all ready to start writing new stuff. But I’m not awake enough to do any work. (I am listening to the Dream Theater album entitled Awake, though.) My mom called me at 9:30 this morning, and I was dumb enough to pick up. And no naps, either. Maybe I will write more tomorrow.

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Welcome to the new year

Welcome to the new year. I need to write something here, and then go back and see if it breaks my indexing program. I’ll write more in a bit.

01/01/99 05:31

That took major brain surgery, but my war-torn indexing program now works for more than two years, and might even be a step closer to being Y2K compliant. I have no respect for people who meticulously hand-code pretty calenders for their journal pages. If you think you’re hot shit, try automating everything with a nice, messy C program. Machine-generated HTML is where it’s at, and I’m not talking FrontPage.

I wanted to write a bunch on Rumored tonight, but ended up playing the Star Wars game on the Nintendo. I found cheat codes that let you fly a TIE interceptor, or the Millenium Falcon. The TIE kicks ass – you can really weave around, and it’s great to be able to follow other TIE fighters through tight manuvers. There are many times in this one level where I am 3:1 against TIEs in an A-wing and during a quick approach, I’m lucky to randomly pick off one. In the TIE, I can stay on them like stink on shit and quickly destroy all three without thinking. The only bad thing is that the TIE has no shields, and no missiles. It’s a poor weapon for attack runs on ground equipment. The Falcon, on the other hand, kicks complete ass. It manuvers tight, turning on its side in corners. It has some heavy shields, and can take some serious fire. And, it’s weapons systems aren’t aimed with the craft – the guns swivel on turrets, and there are proton torpedos that home in automatically – you just get the target in your sights for a second, and a targeting circle will follow the ship while you move off in a different direction. I’ve been stuck on a level all week, and with the Falcon, I was able to completely pummel everything and finish. Unfortunately, you can’t use it on all of the levels – I’m now stuck on a level where you have to use the snowspeeder. The snowspeeder is really odd to fly – the weapons suck, and you can’t loop or dive too much, because it hovers. You can slam on either brake and turn on a dime, which is cool, but it usually runs me into a building. On this level, you are in these shitty little hovercraft, trying to down TIE bombers, which is like fighting an M1 abrams tank with a Schwinn bike and a ball-peen hammer. And at the end of the level, you have to do the little harpoon-cable-on-the-AT-AT’s-legs trick, which I’ve found impossible with the Nintendo controller. Oh well, maybe I’ll find another cheat.

So yeah, no writing. A little, but not much. I flipped through the channels a bit at 12, and luckily haven’t heard that fucking Prince song. Leno was pre-empted, which meant Conan was either late or gone, since Leno was in his spot.

Not much else. I should get back to work.

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War Pigs weather, New Years past

When I was driving to work this morning, the Black Sabbath song War Pigs was on the radio, and it summarized the emotions of the current weather in Seattle almost perfectly. I think I’m suffering from seasonal disorder. Or maybe it’s normal to never want to leave your house and sleep 10 hours a day and still be tired. It’s not like I’m ready to go shoot a bus driver or anything like that, but I really do miss those long July nights. Even if my apartment was 110 degrees and I had to sleep naked in the bathtub with the cold water running.

Today has been a real seige with my account on speakeasy. They changed to a new server, and it’s faster, but everything is broken. I couldn’t use my mail program at all – and still can’t. Ok, after 15 minutes of mid-journal-entry screwing with it, I can read my email. But it will take some time to get everything going to 100% again. I guess I have something to do on my day off tomorrow.

And it’s the new year. Since I haven’t taken any extra time off (except for one day that I got to spend with Marie, this Monday), I haven’t been thinking in terms of holidays like I did when I was a little kid. I don’t have a three week break anymore, and I don’t sleep an hour on the night of the 24th because I know cool stuff is waiting under the tree. Things have become pretty lax, which is both good and bad. I feel like having a full-time job kills a lot of the seasonal aspect of life. When you’re in school, you know what time of year it is because you get breaks and you are working to finish the semester or the summer session or whatever. It makes you more closely grounded to the calendar. Now that I work, I tend to forget what season it is. I think that’s why people have kids and take up seasonal hobbies – it reminds them that summer is summer and winter is winter.

I don’t have new year’s plans tonight, except that I’ll finish the pizza in the fridge, go to the corner store for some junk food, watch Conan, and try to stay up late and get some writing finished. I don’t like to go out for the new year, because it’s always a bunch of amateurs getting drunk as fast as possible – it’s the same reason I don’t pull pranks on people on April 1. Let the amateurs have their day. I’ll be inside, enjoying the three-day weekend without the hangover and massive cash outlay.

I used to celebrate New Year’s with my friend Tom Sample, back when we were in high school and college and had nothing better to do. It was one of our rituals, and must’ve started in my sophomore year of high school. Tom and I didn’t drink back then, so we made the small parties a complete orgy of junk food and horror movies. We’d go to the grocery store and spend 40, 60 bucks on frozen pizzas, candy bars, popcorn, chips, sodas, punch, and other sinful garbage. This was back when I had an ultra-high metabolism – I was six feet tall and weighed about 110 pounds. I could eat two Pizza Hut pizzas and still lose weight. Anyway, the shopping trips were the most fun of the whole evening. For the longest time, I saved one of the receipts in my wallet – it was a foot long and read like the inventory of a convenience store. After that, we’d go to the video place and try to find the worst B-movies imaginable. It usually meant stuff like the Faces of Death series, but we also got some music stuff like Decline of Western Civilization or Rock and Roll High school or whatever.

The parties were always at my mom’s house, and were pretty informal. Sometimes a few other friends would be there – Derik Rinehart, Matt Wanke, Joe Gellert, Larry Falli – and we’d watch movies and eat like Atilla the Hun. Sometimes we’d flip the channel at 12 to watch Dick Clark and the ball, but sometimes we’d say ‘fuck it’ and keep watching Hellraiser.

I remember bits and pieces of each year that made it unique. One year, our mutual sometimes-friend Roger Eppich was on leave from a psychiatric hospital and invited himself to the party. Roger was locked up for trying to blow up Tom’s house, so Tom wasn’t exactly nice to him, making covert references to Roger’s insanity every 2 minutes. Another year, Tom and Matt both spent the night. The three of us sat on the couches down in the family room, rating every single girl in our high school from 1 to 10, and getting into these long discussions about our ratings. (I wish I would’ve recorded that). In 1988, our band Nuclear Winter had a New Year’s day gig at this battle of the bands, so most of the people in the band were also at the party. In 1989, I was home from college and my girlfriend came to visit on a Greyhound bus. We fought most of the time, but me and Tom bought a bunch of mixed drink stuff and put together rasberry margarita mix with Hi-C and rootbeer and whatever else was around, making vile concoctions for everyone. He also hooked up with one of my sister’s friends, something that lasted for another five months. I don’t remember much of 1990 or 1991, although we were there for both years and probably cleaned out the snack food aisle of the local Martin’s supermarket both years.

1992 was the first year that the tradition stopped. I was in Bloomington, and Tom was in Elkhart. Since it was dead week and absolutely nobody was around, I didn’t have anything to do. I spent a lot of that break in seclusion – I was still getting over this woman named Cheryl who was very sexy yet very psychotic. And I wasn’t exactly calm and stable either. That day, my friend Cayte Huesman came into Bloomington and hauled me around town for a bit, because I was in the dumps, without a car, and hadn’t talked to another human in almost a week. We ate Chinese food, and I bought a bunch of stuff: a bookcase from Target, CDs from Pungent Stench and Entombed, and the Flight of the Intruder video game. Cayte went back to Indianapolis, and I built the bookcase. I listened to Entombed – Left Hand Path – over and over, while I tried to learn all of the controls of the F-4 and A-6 Navy planes. I had this big map of Vietnam and I was going on all of these missions, dive bombing bridges and fighting MiGs and getting killed every other minute. The CD was on repeat, and was incredible. Before I knew it, I looked at my watch, and it was about 20 after midnight. I missed the whole thing – the song, the kissing, the resolutions, the big ball, Dick Clark counting down… It was surreal, but it didn’t bother me much, and I went back to the game.

So I’ve had a couple of good new year’s parties since then, and I’ve spent a couple doing nothing more than watching the countdown. It doesn’t bother me much, but like everything else, it makes me think of the past.

Anyway, I’ve rambled on enough. Have a good New Year’s, and please don’t play that Prince song.

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not awake today

I’m really not awake today. I had to drop off Marie at the airport for a 7:20 flight, which involved waking up at 5:30, which is about 5 hours earlier than my typical schedule. She also had to deal with a bunch of shit from Continental, which has this problem with forgetting about e-ticket bookings. I just spent too much of my time writing them a pissy email, and now I need to stop thinking about it.

It was nice to have Marie here, although it wasn’t nearly enough time, and it was hellish here during her whole stay. Now she knows I’m not kidding about the permanently gray skies, pissing rain, and high winds that pummel the building. Seattle is a very beautiful city, for about 15 minutes a year. Anyway, we didn’t do much of interest or get out too much, based on the traffic and weather. I wanted to go to a movie, but there’s such a poor crop of films out there this holiday. If I had free passes to go to a movie, I don’t think I could pick one. We rented a few movies though, and I got to see Fear and Loathing again. I might watch it again – I have the tapes until Friday. It’s a great film, and usually gets me going about writing and living. In a world where all of the inspirational films are about sports and overcoming odds and whatever, it’s nice to see something new.

Now that the holidays are over, I need to get back to writing as much as possible. I’m still trying to figure out which book to work on, and I don’t think I’ll know, even when I’ve got pieces and chapters on the screen in front of me. I might end up going back and forth a bit. I think that the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron game for the Nintendo might slow down my writing output, at least until I finish all of the levels.

Lunch is over. More later.