No, a piece of rogue malware did not hit my site. I finally threw in the towel and switched to WordPress as the back-end of this site. I got sick of all of the duct tape maintenance keeping this thing going, and I wanted it to not look like it was created in 1997 (which it was). So here we are. This is still in shakedown mode, so there will be lots of bugs and omissions and other errata. Please leave comments and let me know if this works for you and if it’s more or less readable than the previous version.

I have not imported over any archives prior to this year, and it looks like this will be a monumental cut-and-paste task. I will (famous last words) get to it eventually.

No real news to report right now, and I am in a hurry to finish lunch and get out the door to the grocery store.  I have been busy writing something, although I don’t know what it is.  I’ve also got a “must read immediately” queue of at least four books that are burning a hole in my pocket (mixed metaphor, sorry.)

OK, more later - hopefully this will be more conducive to shorter “blogging” posts mixed within the other longer bits.  I know I hate “blogging”, but I always have quick thoughts or riffs that are too long for twitter and will go stale before I get a spare hour to mess around on here.

BTW create yourself an account and log in - anyone with an email address can comment, but I’ll be going password-only for some rants that fall into the blood and money genres.  (No, not Wall Street vampires.)

It’s a rainy morning here, maybe the first big storm since we moved in here. It was nice to sit in bed and hear the rain bounce off the skylight above. There was a decent amount of lightning and thunder, which I almost slept through. There were, however, two cats with large tails sprinting around the house to get away from this large cousin of the feared vacuum cleaner monster that was booming through the skies.

I saw a guy get killed on a motorcycle yesterday. I mean, I didn’t see the actual accident; I sat in traffic forever, and when I finally got to the epicenter of sirens and emergency vehicles, I saw a debris trail of the remainder of a BMW bike smashed into a thousand pieces. Then I saw a yellow plastic sheet over a body, with one hand sticking out. That really freaked me out. If I just saw the twisted metal machinery, it would bother me a bit, but actually seeing the casualty made me start thinking about a family member somewhere getting a phone call. And what a day to get a phone call too - on the anniversary of 9/11.

I’ve been ruminating on that one a bit too. Now that I’ve been out of New York for a few years, it seems to be just a distant memory. I was just looking for the scans of the pictures I took on that morning, and ended up spending a few minutes looking at all of the other pictures I took around that period, like a whole series of shots of my old place in Astoria, and the batch of pictures on a rainy September night that eventually yielded the cover of Rumored to Exist. There’s so much distance now, I look at the pictures and try to pick out the little details that I forgot. When the towers were on fire, and before they collapsed, I walked south on Broadway, toward the World Trade Center, taking pictures. I don’t know why I did this, as pretty much everyone was headed in the opposite direction. I remember thinking that if a tower collapsed, what if it fell over onto its side, like a tree falling - how many blocks down would it fall?

I think I got down to West Broadway and Varick before the police had the area completely sealed off. That’s maybe ten blocks north of the plaza. By then, both towers had collapsed, and everyone was then trying to figure out how to get home with no transit running. A common thought is that all of lower Manhattan looked like that ashy Mount St. Helens nuclear holocaust you saw on the news over and over; it didn’t. I do remember seeing an unmarked police car tearing up Broadway the wrong way, sirens on, with a foot of ashes sitting on its hood and roof. And we all ended up breathing the dust for weeks. But that particular misconception got to me, mostly because everyone in the Midwest who watched the news all day and then called me expected my apartment eight miles away to be a virtual Pompeii, and my neighborhood was pretty much untouched.

It still amazes me that there isn’t a new building yet. I look at these pictures from the summer of 2001, of Times Square, and every single sign and storefront has changed three times since then. I look at pictures of the block where my old office was, and almost every small store went bankrupt and was then replaced with a Best Buy or Rite Aid or Bank of America or Nike store. This isn’t unique to post-2001 New York; it happens pretty much on an annual basis there. Manhattan sheds restaurants and stores like humans shed molecules of skin. They die, are brushed away, and are quickly replaced by new ones. Having a digital camera for almost a decade of this is a strange testament to this.

Went kayaking last week. I want to go again today or tomorrow, but given the weather, I don’t know. I need to practice before we go on vacation, because I want to take this kayak tour, and currently, I can barely get a straight line going with it. But it looks more like an indoor sort of weekend.

I’m trying to come out of a horrible Benadryl hangover today. I hate when I take this stuff at night and wake back up, but am so tired, I can’t go back to sleep. It’s a weird drunken feeling, that I can’t fully explain, but I hate it. I can’t believe I used to be practically addicted to this stuff, in the form of Tylenol PM. I’m currently trying to stitch together a travel story about my trip to Treasure Island, Florida in 2001, and one recurring theme is that I’d stay up until 3 or 4 every night and then bomb out with the Tylenol PM and wake up all screwed up at noon the next day.

My latest project is the aforementioned travelogue. Michael wrote a giant 175,000 word account of his story when he went to TI a few months before me, and that inspired me to do the same. I wrote one entry, on the plane ride down, and then lost the motivation. Now, I’m trying to reverse-engineer all of the pieces of my trip so I can write about it. I’ve got all of my sent email; paper journals; the dated photos I took; some comments I made in Michael’s story; and a couple of other scraps of notes I took at the time. That’s enough for me to get started. The account of my 2004 trip was about 14,000 words. I have about 6000 words into this story sofar.

I keep thinking about all of the dead projects I have floating around and wish there was a way I could pull them together or finish them. I doubt it would be that entertaining to put out a book with the first half-chapter of 20 books that I never wrote. The problem is that every new project steals just a touch of stuff from the last dead project, so those 20 chapters are really like about three chapters rewritten in different ways.

The Bay Bridge is closed for the weekend - they are tearing out a football field-sized double decker section and putting in another temporary one, to make room for the replacement bridge they are building next to it. It’s a monumental piece of engineering, and it’s taking place on our horizon. We’re at the wrong angle to see the big switcheroo, but we can see the giant crane they have assembled at the port of Oakland, which I think is the biggest maritime crane in history, and will be used to sling around steel for the new bridge. I don’t know why I’m obsessed with this, but I am. Maybe because I helped pay for it, or because it’s all happening in our front yard.

I’ve also been trying to get my ass in gear with investing. Now that the house purchase is done, the next big milestone will be saving money for retirement. We already max out our 401Ks, and that is under control, but we’re also trying to save every penny to make pull retirement from 72 to 59.5 years, and earlier. So I’m shopping for good places to park money and make it work.

But now, a three day weekend is afoot. Speaking of saving money, I think we will start by trying out the West Oakland library. Maybe it would be prudent to start checking out books and videos, instead of hitting Amazon every other hour.

It’s been one of those weeks, where I perpetually feel like I am two hours behind on sleep, and doing anything, even something as simple as pulling a book off a shelf, takes two or three tries. I’ve had allergies pretty much since we moved to the bay area, really weird ones that predominantly have to do with a sore throat, and I think I do more harm than good with allergy medication. I think Zyrtek-D works best, but it is as 12-hour medicine, and if I take it, at exactly 12:01 in, I completely shut down. So I just stumble through the week, and then the weekend comes, and I sit down here to write about the week, and the most interesting thing I can write about is… um…

We finally booked a vacation. We have not been on a “real” vacation since we went to the Bahamas for our honeymoon in 2007. There have been a couple of trips to see the family, a weekend in Denver, another in Vegas, and various tag-a-long trips I took when Sarah was going somewhere for business. So over the week of thanksgiving, we will be going to Ixtapa, Mexico. We’re staying for eight nights in a resort where we have our own private terrace that faces the Pacific ocean. No cell phone coverage. No ideas on what we will do, other than eat, sleep, and not work. Like, I haven’t figured out if I should start a book-on-tape crash-course in Spanish, or if we have to deal with pesos or just spend greenbacks everywhere, or what to do to avoid the “don’t drink the water” issues. (I’ve heard that a month of heavy acidophilus supplements will skirt this issue.)

This wiki writing project has fallen flat. I feel like the amount of time I’ve taken since I’ve written anything of substance has put me back to zero, that if I wanted to write something like Summer Rain again, I’d have to start from a dead stop and re-do all of the years I put in back in the early 90s to get to the point where I finished that book. And for the record, I think I started considering myself a writer back in the end of 93; started SR in 95, published it in 2000. Anyway, I’m back to trying to figure out what I’m supposed to be working on, and trying to find time to work on it. Part of me thinks I should try to get figured out on travel writing, if only so I can properly document the trip to Mexico. But I haven’t done any proper writing-up of a trip since, when? Florida in 2004? I should know this, because my migration of the photos pages on rumored have broken every travel page on the site, and fixing them all by hand has been a painful process.

Also, I made an appearance last week on the Nightcap podcast, run by J and B. It is an hour fifteen and I am probably rambling, but it was a fun experience, and great to talk to those guys again. So check it out.

Yesterday marks the 20th anniversary of when I packed up my dad’s truck and left Elkhart for Bloomington to start my freshman year at IU. Twenty years. Two decades. It’s a hard number for me to wrap my mind around. And this is the part where I’m supposed to say it just feels like yesterday, but truthfully, it feels like it wasn’t even my life, it was so long ago. And there have been so many stops between then and now, I don’t get as nostalgic about Bloomington. But it still pops in my head every now and then, especially when a nice round number comes up in the anniversary column.

I think I spent a good part of high school wishing for some kind of mulligan to let me start over socially, and hoped that college would be a clean break for me, to leave behind the people I’d known since grade school and junior high. I mean, it’s not like I killed a hooker and needed to start over with a new name and identity, or even that I did something horrible like shit my pants during speech class or date someone who later became a female to male transsexual. But I always felt like I needed to get out of Elkhart and around a different crowd of people. Even when I hung out with people not from my high school when I worked at Wards, I felt like I did better than I did at Concord.

And college was that clean break. I mean, I still had most of the same problems, the same social awkwardness and depression and other inner torture, and I didn’t suddenly transform into Brad Pitt (or whoever women like now - that dude from Twilight, whatever.) But it was a huge change of scenery for me, and the beginning of my first time away from home, my first time on my own, and the very beginning of the end of Indiana in my life.

I also broke up with someone, or rather they broke up with me, the night before I left for college. It was my first ‘real’ relationship, and although looking back, it was in general a pretty stupid situation, I seriously thought it would go on for longer than the summer. In reality, it couldn’t have been written more exactly as an only-for-a-summer type of fling, even if it was a script for an 80s movie. And it was one of those things where it was the end of the universe for me, but in retrospect, you don’t get much cleaner of a breakup than this one, unless you’re dating someone on a space station and they accidentally get sucked out of a broken airlock ten seconds after you split. I would never run into her again at the mall or at work or in the halls of school, because we were 250 miles apart. And I entered a much larger pool of potential dating scenarios, with thousands and thousands of other people away from home and their crappy small towns for the first time.

But yeah, 20 years ago. And I feel like I should have some heavy insight on the whole situation, but when I try to dig for any specific burst of memory about that era, I get a couple of things:

• The smell of the powdered laundry detergent I used during my freshman year.
• The smell of Collins when I first got there. I spent most of my life living in a prefab tri-level that was maybe five years old when we moved in, and this was a 65-year-old museum of a residence hall, with all wood everything. Like, when I wanted to make a private phone call, I would go to these wooden phone booths built into the wall of the downstairs lobby. They were little booths with heavy wood doors that looked like the confessional in a Catholic church, but instead of the little screen window and kneeler, they had a tiny bench and a pay phone. Anyway, the place was loaded with plenty of ornate darkwood trim, and the first time I went in, all I could smell was this wood smell. Same thing when I moved out and came back to visit the next year.
• Some girl called my room in like the first week of classes trying to remember some dude’s number, and I ended up talking to her for like three hours, and after like 20 conversations, I hung out with her and her roommate at McNutt, and then kept running into her on campus for the next year. It was not a romantic thing - she was from South Bend, and for whatever reason, we became friends and used to talk a lot, although I have no idea what about, or even what her name was. But now I find it so random that a wrong number would turn into a marathon phone conversation about nothing.
• One of the first times I went to the main library, I got overwhelmed with all of the books there, because in high school, I basically found a spot in nonfiction and one in fiction, and spent most of my study halls reading every book outward from those two positions that made any sense or was at all interesting to me. And I realized that with a ten-floor undergraduate stack, it would take me four years to even find anything, let alone read a tenth of the books on a single floor. So I randomly decided to read Slaughterhouse Five, because my school never had any Vonnegut and I was too cheap to buy any, and I heard he was from Indiana. And I stayed up almost all night reading it cover to cover, and loving it so much, that a couple of night later, I stayed up almost all night, writing (by hand), this giant science fiction story, because it somehow got stuck in my head, and I thought it would be great to be a writer like him. And then I promptly forgot the writing and the Vonnegut, until maybe four years later, when I became once again obsessed with both.
• I used to take this bass guitar class that met at night in the basement of Read hall, and I would get there early and sit around one of the TV lounges until class started. Anyway, this was the tail of baseball season, and there was this kid in a wheelchair who was an obsessive Cubs fan and I always remember him planted in front of the big-screen TV, watching every Cubs game. I always perceived the Cubs as being a really bad team back then, but I knew nothing about baseball, and other than the Yankees, Dodgers, Cubs, White Sox, and Astros, probably could not have named any other baseball team. And that year the Cubs won the NL East by like six games, before losing the NLCS to the Cardinals. So maybe that’s why I half-remember watching the games.

Not much else. A lot of time is going into this new wiki, but it’s nowhere near enough started to open it up to the public yet. Soon…