The Wrath of Kon

Late start today, so this will be short. Not much is going on, except that I haven’t slept much lately. I remember looking at my watch during every hour from 2 to 9am, which made it seem like I was up all night, but then I remembered a snippet of a dream and I knew I must have fallen asleep somewhere in there. I’m now prepared for a day of aphasia, peripheral hallucinations, and extreme typing mistakes. Maybe I should drink a Coke or ten first.

I think I’ve decided I’m going to buy a new car in like a year, after I move to a new apartment and go through another tax season. Although I haven’t ditched the Escort yet, I think I’m already sick of problems with this Rabbit. I wish it would stabilize a bit, like my other one did. My old Rabbit had problems, but I drove it for months and months with almost no further investment. I’m whining, so I’ll stop.

I’m re-reading Leyner’s The Tetherballs of Bougainville and enjoying it. The only thing I hate about his writing is that it gives me so many good ideas, and I can’t just rip them off.

Okay, lunch is over…

Why must I live my whole life feeling like I just stayed up all night? I decided to knock my sleep schedule back into the daytime mode with some sleeping pills last night. Instead, I got a truly surreal experience of alternating periods of undead catatonia and extreme awake, paranoid rushes where my senses were supertuned to the rumbling of traffic 7 stories below me. I spent all day in an odd mood, like I’d accidentally breathed a short whiff of nerve gas and was waiting to see if it would cause my insides to boil. I just tried to take a nap as the tail-end of rush hour traffic zipped by on I-5, and I can honestly say I’d feel better if I would’ve forced myself to stay awake.

I have some food burining in the oven…

Very tired. The Rabbit’s plumbing might be fixed, but the battery had no juice and I couldn’t turn it over to tell. I finally made a discovery that would’ve helped my car repair experiences long ago – latex surgical gloves. I slipped some on before monkeying in the deep antifreeze and grease of the engine, and it felt great to just snap them off when done.

Both of my parents called today (separately – not a joint thing. Sort of a flashback of my last ten years of being parented.) I only hear from them every month or two, and I usually have enough experiences queued up to get me through a phone conversation, but today I didn’t. I know that when they talk to me and all I have to say is “I haven’t done anything lately. I’ve been working a lot.” that they interpret it as “I’m getting ready to go off the deep end.” And it seems kindof stupid that if they called and I said “oh, I just went shopping for new cars” or “I’m going to Boston next week” or something idiotic like that, they’d be content.

I need to get off of here and do some work on the book…

I fell asleep after work until after 11pm, so I didn’t really feel like writing in here, or writing at all, really. I did work on my biography a bit, and that kept me up far too late. So today I am the walking dead again, but there’s relief in that I have tomorrow off.

It’s been weird writing about 1993 for this bio project. It feels like that stuff just happened, but it’s already been five years. Five years since I first ran Linux! I’m in the middle of writing about that summer, when Tanya was still a new item, yet she was in Tampa for the break, and I was working at Voyager on the punch press, and going to shows with Ray almost every weekend in Chicago. Ray lived at home then, and was at the height of his anti-female stage, which made it difficult for me. But we had a lot of good times together – we rented every concievable zombie film on the face of the earth that summer.

I talked to Micheal Stutz for the first time on the phone last night. It’s always weird at first to talk to someone from the computer, but we had a lot to talk about. We’re both stuck in the same place writing-wise, and wish there was some sort of “movement” going on, sort of like the Kerouac-Ginsberg-Burroughs alliance. I need to write about this more when I am awake and have some amount of energy. And I need to keep writing on my own, because even if I had a group of people to trade manuscripts with, it doesn’t work if I don’t have manuscripts.

Blah, I’m going to screw around for the rest of lunch, start looking around on the web. Hopefully, I’ll be able to write more tonight.

07/02/98 22:03

I just woke up, put some french fries in the oven, made some Kool-aid, and nuked some kind of demented aloha chicken meal. If it says 99% fat-free and works in the micro, I’ll try it at least once.

So it’s not a “school night”, and I’m excited about staying up all night, doing some cleaning, writing a bunch, and doing my grocery shopping at 3 in the morning, when there’s no chance at all of Screaming Kid Syndrome. Tomorrow, my pal Jennefer Wagner will be here from Eugene, OR. She’s only in town for a night, and she’s crashing with another friend of hers, but I’ll hopefully get to hang out with her for a bit during the day.

Ford Credit keeps sending me more and more bizarre letters. I think Col. Kurtz works there. The car thing is starting to worry me more and more, especially since the VW doesn’t run. I’m hoping to get that taken care of this weekend.

I found a good web site to waste a lot of time.

Out of it. Nothing to report. More later.

I’m listening to Rush – Power Windows, which is sort of embarassing to admit. This was the tape in my walkman when I mowed lawns to buy model airplane kits. Was it in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle where there was a kid who only built model airplanes and jerked off? Anyway, for a moment that seems generations old to me, this album still sounds pretty fresh to me.

I need to take a rest for a bit. I’ll write more later.

When all of my writing projects are dead or blocked, I have a fallback project that I use to keep the typing going. I don’t remember when I started this, but a few months back I started writing a biography. I started at January 20, 1971, and moved forward, trying to keep a steady pace with all of the essentials, and without getting stuck on some tangent. Late last year and earlier this year, when I was really blocked and unable to work on either book, I belted out a serious amount of writing, and stayed up all night many times taking the story from childhood to gradeschool to high school.

I’m back on the bio. Everything else seems dead, and I’m sick of my own writing style, so it’s time to pound out the facts for a while. I don’t care how glossy or artistic my prose is (kindof like this journal), I just want to get everything down. I’m now up to the fall of 1992, and there are 43,000 words behind me (maybe 100 pages). Each year gets more difficult. 1971 through 1975 are only a couple of paragraphs; 1992 is already close to 10,000 words. I want to keep writing fast, until I get to 1998 (or 1999, or whenever I finish) and then start at the beginning, making a second pass and adding more detail. I keep forgetting things, or start talking about a person without introducing them in the right place, and I’ll have to fix that. I don’t know if anybody will ever read this, or if I will neaten it up for human consumption, but it’s a fun chore. Maybe the next time I date someone, I will just print and bind the whole damn thing, hand it over, and then have no disclaimers. I’m usually pretty honest when I date people, but it would be relaxing to be able to avoid all of the long stories and make them do the work. But, I guess I like the long stories, so maybe it’s a stupid idea.

I started reading Desolation Angels, and I was certain it was going to throw me, but I read 135 pages last night and would’ve kept reading if it weren’t for that sleep thing. It’s sort of like a darker, more serious version of The Dharma Bums, that’s a little less accessible but also much deeper. It’s got a lot more detail about his time as a lookout, and a lot of Washington details, which is a weird clash of two worlds. It’s cool to read about Kerouac on the UW campus, and wandering the Pioneer Square area. I’m looking forward to some more reading tonight.

It’s been a month and a half since I pulled the plug on the TV. I can barely remember when I sat down and watched hours and hours of shows. I don’t have enough time to do anything now, and I’m not getting a lot of writing done, so I don’t know how I could fit in TV too. TV’s like alcohol – you have to enjoy it in moderation. Unless you’re depressed – then it’s nice to drown in it.

My typing is messed up – not sure if it’s the keyboard, the hands, or the slow connection, but I keep dropping letters. I better quit while I’m ahead.

06/30/98 23:48

Listening to the white album, thinking about the fall of 1992 in order to keep moving on this weird, masturbatory biography. It’s interesting.

I fell asleep for about 4 hours after work, nothing else happened today, and I’m not into whipping up some introspective essay about the past, so I’m going to quit while I’m ahead and get back to writing.

I finished reading On the Road last night, after ditching any attempt at writing and plowing through the pages like Dean’s Hudson across the country. Each time I read the book, there are parts that hold my interest more than other times, and other attributes or pieces that I skim over with little interest. This time, I was most interested in the routes of the roads – I followed along with my atlas, and tried to find the paths taken. I was also into the Burroughs stories, since I’d just read a snippet of a Burroughs bio last week, and it happened to be the same piece that was described in OTR. This time, I wasn’t into the music descriptions – Kerouac goes into these long, drawn out monologues about the bop joints and clubs full of musicians and everything, and it’s cool and all, but I didn’t feel like it this time around. Maybe I should re-read it this week and see if my interests transform into something else. Actually, I think the next read will be Desolation Angels, although I got stalled on that when I read it 2 or 3 years ago.

Three years ago today, my Mustang’s engine blew up, and I was in a mad dash to sell it’s smouldering carcass, sell all of my furniture, and get enough cash together to rent a U-Haul and leave Indiana in 2 days. I made it too – on July 1, 1995, I locked the door of the ten-foot moving truck and headed toward Elkhart, where I’d spend the night, loot my mom’s house for anything I’d need to set up shop in Seattle, and beg a few bucks off of my parents. On the way up, the trusty Konrath Sound System ™, a pair of battery-powered speakers I bought in 1991 when my Rabbit was sans stereo, finally died. I stopped at the Kokomo mall, and got a new pair of Koss speakers at Target. Those speakers are on my desk here at work, as I speak. When I got to Elkhart, I pitched the old speakers into a trash at the Concord Mall Montgomery Wards, with great sadness. When me and Ray piled into his Buick – FM radio only – and drove to Chicago to see a show, the Konrath Sound System always saved the day. With that, a walkman, and maybe even a discman, we had demos, new music, and death metal, instead of the boring and static-bombed radio stations of northern Indiana.

I talked to a window washer today, one of the guys that rappels down the side of big glass buildings with a bucket and a squeegee. I always wondered how one got started on a job like that, and he said he worked with an older guy, a sort of apprenticeship. I didn’t know if they went to a trade school, started washing cars first, spent a lot of time mountain climbing, or what. So there’s your useful/useless factoid of the day.

06/29/98 20:50

Just woke up from a short nap with the windows open and a nice breeze whipping through the apartment. I love it in the summer, when a post-work nap doesn’t mean waking up in the dark.

I spent all afternoon moving and reconfiguring a SparcStation and a JavaStation, so they’d work in the conference room in the other building. (We have the original building at 1500 Dexter, and the new building at 1100 dexter. This was moving from old to new, but just ’til tuesday.) It took a lot longer than expected to get the Sparc acclimated to its new gateway and IP number, and a lot longer to get all of the associated baggage involved with the JavaStation to work. The JavaStation boots from the Sparc – it has no disc drive, so it pulls an OS and its associated Java applets from the Sparc to boot, a neat but messy approach. It was fun in an odd sort of way – it presented a bunch of problems and involved a lot of thinking and logical analysis. About three hours into it, both mchines worked fine, and we got the product running on both of them, more than I’d ever seen before. By the time I thought about looking at my watch, it was already 5. I had an absolutely beautiful walk back to the other building, and tried to get as much work-work done as possible before I split.

The second shoe will hit the floor a week from Wednesday at Evergreen Ford in Issaquah. That’s when I go there with the Escort for the estimate on damages and soforth. I thought about telling them I’m thinking about leasing a brand new car as they are writing out my estimate, and then when I return the car and pay their written estimate, I’d say I decided to buy a new Beetle or something.

I started reading Desolation Angels tonight, and I can see why it threw me last time. It’s nowhere near as accessible as On the Road. I’ll have to dig in to keep on this one. Among the many books I want to get but can’t afford right now is the book of Kerouac letters. I wish I knew the whole story behind the Ann Charters vs. Gerald Nicosia vs. Jan Kerouac or whatever. I read the Nicosia biography and found it to be the best. Charters seems to presumptuous, and when I leafed through her bio, it seemed watered down – like if you bought a Sylvester Stallone biography and it had no mention whatsoever of his years in Sweden making porn films. Why would you read a history book with no history. Interested viewers are encouraged to mail me with text files or URLs providing more details about the whole argument.

I have an overwhelming urge to go to Barnes and Noble, but it’s time to work on the book.

It’s been a quiet day. I slept and/or sat in bed until almost 3, and then headed out to the bookstore, where I read books on day trips in Washington State, and thought about going into the mountains to write, ala Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. But would I be able to strip my routine down to the bare minimum to spend time in a fire lookout station? You can rent them for cheap – $20,$30 a night, but no electricity, running water, etc. Maybe I could make a weekend of it, I’ll have to do more research.

Other than that, I’ve been reading On the Road. I zipped through maybe a hundred pages, magically transporting me to New Orleans, New York, Bakersville, San Fran, and every point in between. It also makes me think of back in 92 when I started the book, 95 when I read it during my beat lit class, 96 on a long weekend trip back to Indiana, and 97, on my way to LA. I should get a new copy someday – mine is falling apart, yellowed pages, but maybe it’s betterthat way.

I don’t feel like I can write on the book now. Maybe I’ll get back to reading.

After 5:00 on a Friday. I should be tearing down a road at 80 miles an hour, a bottle of liquor in one hand, the other flipping off a state trooper, a woman in the car, some loud music, all that jazz. Instead, I’m waiting for the traffic to die, so I can drive home in under an hour.

I had a glass of champagne a little while ago, and that’s probably what’s bothering me. I’ve been in a bad mood all week, but right now it feels the worst. Fridays should be a cause for celebration, but I feel like my weekend is already shot. Either I’ll spend the whole weekend writing on this book, or I’ll fail. That’s what it’s come down to. All week, I blow off a day and say I’ll make it up in some 18 hour Saturday writing session. And I wish the weekend could consist of wandering, shopping, exploring, meeting new people and doing new things, but with $13 in my wallet and not much more in the bank, I’ll probably be watching old videos I’ve seen a hundred times, and trying to get on that novel.

I started to read On the Road agains last night. Like I possibly mentioned once before, I’ve read it every year for the last few years. Oddly enough, I originally bought my copy, this 25th anniv. issue paperback, in 1992. There was this huge used bookstore right around the corner from my place – some crazy old Russian lady ran it, mostly old, moldy books and nothing of value, but sometimes I’d scour the place and shake down something good. I think I picked up my copy of ‘Road for less than a dollar. I read the first dozen pages, but got disinterested. At the time, I was already living my own beat paradise and I didn’t know it yet. So now I’m back on it again – I figure some good vicarious adventures will help me while I’m starving away with all of my own troubles here in Seattle. Maybe I will take some better notes this time on all of the journeys, cities, roads, and highways. Then when I have a few bucks, I can hit the road and follow Dean’s footsteps.

I’m listening to Queensryche – Empire, which is like a time machine to me. I listened to this album every day, twice a day, for months, almost a semester. That was 1990, when I drove my gray 5-speed Turismo from Elkhart to South Bend and back every day. I’d blaze down US 20 into Osceola and Mishawaka listening to all of these songs while eating my breakfast, either bagels or pop-tarts, and watching the morning Michiana roll by me. It all seemed so hip at the time, getting out of the house, living in the computer labs, learning pascal and writing computer games, eating lunch with Ray every day in the cafeteria. This album reeks of trips to the Miami street comic shop, the quarter pounder value meal, no pickels, from the McKinley st. McDonalds, trips down Logan to the Scottsdale mall, before it got semi-cool, and runs to the Hooks drug store or 7-11 for junk food. I think I’ve described this before (I know I have, I just don’t remember if it was here). It’s now July, almost 8 years later, but it’s cold enough to feel like an October day in Indiana.

What the hell am I doing here? I better go home, at least.