I’ve been back from Denver for a week now, sorry about that. We had a good time, and went to two baseball games - won one, lost one. We also took a trip to the Denver Botanic Gardens, which I drove by a million times in 2007 but never visited. And that’s partially a good thing, because if I had, I would’ve spent ten thousand dollars on pieces for a geodesic dome garden for my land in Colorado, or at least spent a month googling plants that survive well in a high mesa desert.

We’re back, and it has been busy, and my arm is almost better, but I got new glasses and they are bugging me. One window closes, another opens. I have also started a new writing project that promises to suck the life out of me, although there isn’t much of it after work and everything else. But it’s good to have something churning that has me awake before 9:00 on a Sunday morning, wanting to get the words into the screen.

I saw the movie Julie and Julia last night. Overall, it was a decent movie - yes, a chick flick, and no explosions or Real American Heroes (TM), but entertaining. The film had two stories going on in it, which means it hit on multiple levels for me. One was the Julia Child story, which has always fascinated me, or at least it has since a few years back when I saw a show on her, maybe an A&E Biography. I also later read a book about her that Sarah had lying around the house. She’s interesting to me because she was nearly 40 and couldn’t boil an egg, and she suddenly started this passion and empire from scratch. That’s appealing to someone who is almost 40 and has sold a grand total of about seven books in their lifetime.

The movie also made me wish I cooked more. Granted, I think we cooked dinner every night last week, and I think only one of those recipes was one of our standards, with everything else being something new. But it makes me wish I could try more new things, and it makes me want to reorganize this kitchen a bit more. Yes, it’s a brand new kitchen, and we just moved in. But we did a lot of “just throw this crap in this drawer, and we’ll figure it out later”, to the point where it took me 45 minutes to find some oatmeal the other morning, and it was exactly where I thought it would be when I started the hunt.

The bigger resonance for me was the fact that the story of the blogger Julie takes place in 2002 in Queens. And for those of you who are new here, I was blogging in Queens in 2002. (Hint: See the link on the left that says 2002 archives.) Of couse, this meant I spent half the movie looking at billboards and subway stops and Queens-style addresses, trying to determine continuity errors. (There were plenty.) But it also greatly reminded me of that era, and what things were like for a struggling writer-type in the general ecosystem of 2002.

First, 2002 was a standout year for me for whatever reason. I published my magnum opus; I travelled more than I ever had before (three trips to Vegas, one including a roadtrip to my land in Colorado; a trip to DC, a trip to Pittsburg, and a return to Indiana.) I struggled in the dating world. I tried to lose weight and I didn’t. I tried to grow a garden and I didn’t. I converted my bike into electric and never rode it. I bought 40 acres of land in Colorado. It was one of those years where a lot happened, and maybe it wasn’t as much as other years, and it was just a nice, round number. And at the time, I certainly didn’t think things were better or worse than other years, but it’s one of those dog-eared eras pf time that my brain easily flops back to without much trouble.

The Julie/Julia project blog brought me back instantly to 2002, because it was a huge meme in New York City for whatever reason, and I think every person I tried to date that year was interested in it. It had huge resonation with the crowd I was on the outside of looking in, the people who think Dave Eggers is ha-ha funny and thought blogs were invented in 2002 by Salon.com. It was the tipping point for blogs in some weird way. I’d been doing it for years at that point, but suddenly, an army of yuppie scum started blogging, and monetizing blogs, and turning blogs into books and movies and careers. I blogged almost 60,000 words in 2002, and looking back at it, it’s not that bad a collection of words. But I felt like a purist acoustic Bon Dylan in a sea of gone-electric, commercially commoditized Bob Dylans. Maybe that frustration turned me to do some good work, but at the time, I felt like I was treading water in an ocean of shit with no land in sight in any direction.

And it feels like 2002 is so god damned long ago, and it feels like yesterday, and I had to subtract 2 from 9 and think about it, and it baffles me for whatever reason. And what happened to all of those people from 2002, all of the wannabe writers and fuck-Bush revolutionaries and artists stuck in secretaries’ cubicles? I can answer my own question - they’re all on Facebook, posting pictures of their kid every god damned minute of the day.

I just got distracted by reading old journal entries from 2002, and I need to get my day started, and I need to make a grocery list for all of these giant cooking project disasters I won’t do this week, and I need to work on the aforementioned secret writing project, so I better get to it.

Hello from Denver. It’s a cool 66 degrees at a one-mile altitude, but it’s expected to jump to 90 by lunch. But right now, I’m at the pool on the roof of the Warwick hotel, looking out at the skyscrapers of downtown, and suffering from a very severe case of Deja Vu, and a minor case of altitude reacclimation.

Our trip went fine, with the only minor hitches being that Sarah’s ATM card got locked yet again by an overzealous Bank of America anti-fraud robot, and a 45-minute delay in the air due to some stupendous thunderstorms around Denver. The weather cleared by the time we touched down, and my suitcase was already on the conveyor by the time we took the little train to the baggage area. We also got stuck with a little Kia with power nothing, but it also has XM radio, which is a new itch that’s developing in the consumer area of my brain. (There is an endless array of metal programming, and maybe that would be a good way to eat up my two hours a day in the car.)

It is weird to be here. WEIRD. We went to the Rocky Mountain Diner last night for dinner, and it felt exactly like it was the summer of 2007 again. The place hadn’t changed at all, aside from the fact that our favorite waiter (the guy that looks like a young Ed Harris) was not there. We drove around last night, looking at our old neighborhood and our favorite haunts, and everything was the same. The two big changes we noticed: one, our old Safeway (The “unsafeway” on Clarkson) got completely facelifted, and looks like every modern Safeway now, not the early 90s ghetto look it once had. And the vacant lot caddycorner to our old place on 22nd and Market is now a super-huge townhome/loft place, much like the place we lived in. It’s freaky to see that vacant lot transformed into a giant community.

Probably the biggest weird thing is that after we finished our dinner, we had tons of time to do anything, and we realized that in our year here, we went to a lot of baseball games and movies, and ate a lot of food, and that’s it. We don’t really have any friends here that we wanted to visit, and we had no real hangouts, aside from the Target store at the Stepleton mall. We have an afternoon to kill today, and don’t know exactly what we want to do. I feel sad about this, but it also makes me realize that when we get back home, I need to get off my ass and make sure we don’t do the same thing in Oakland. I don’t know what we need to do, but we need to explore more.

It is nice to be here, though. I think we need to take more of these mini-vacations. And I am really looking forward to tonight’s game. Wearing my Brad Hawpe t-shirt today, and one person already came up and asked if I was going to the game tonight. I am hoping to hook up with a couple of people from high school that will be at the game too, and I plan to do some serious damage at the clubhouse store.

It’s getting hot here, and I didn’t fly out here to sit on the computer, so I better get to it.

I’m going to Denver this week. We booked a four-day weekend - flying in on Thursday morning and back on Sunday, although I won’t actually believe that we’re going until we step on the plane, given our insane work schedules and demands as of late. I’m always worried that days off and trips won’t happen, because of some last-second work screwup. I had Friday off, in exchange for working a Sunday a couple of weeks ago, and up until I left the office on Thursday, I was fully expecting to come in.

It was nice to have a Friday off, too. I spent the day running errands, getting my oil changed and going to the eye doctor. It reminded me of last summer in LA, how relaxed things are during the day, when I’m not working. It was one of those days that made me mentally tally up the 401Ks and wonder how possible it’ll be to cut out early and do something other than fill out TPS reports for twelve hours a day. There was this discussion at work, because something like ten years ago, the company had such a good year that in Korea, they paid out the typical mid-year bonus (which can be roughly a month of pay) and then because there was a record year, they additionally paid out another THIRTEEN months of pay to everyone working there. The discussion among coworkers was pretty much about what car people would buy with that kind of cash. But I was thinking about how much closer that would get me to quitting the rat race and buying a sailboat to live on forever.

Anyway, Denver. It will be weird to vacation in a place where I’ve previously lived. I don’t think I’ve done that before, unless you consider going back to Indiana a vacation. I haven’t been back to Seattle or New York since I left. I did go back to LA for work, and Denver for work a couple of times, and those were all pretty weird. We’re going to two baseball games, and I think the rest of the time will be spent going to restaurants we miss, which pathetically sums up our time in the city. Most of our year there was spent going to the Target at Stepleton mall. I always wonder if we both had better job situations going on back then, and if we would’ve met more people, if Denver would have worked out in the long run. I always kick myself for being reluctant to take a job in Boulder because of the driving distance, given that my current drive is roughly double the commute. But I do like seeing water.

I’ve been tearing up 34.216.9.77/ for the last few days. I’m in the process of moving all of my pictures to gallery2, and it has temporarily broken a lot of images across the site. I’m also trying to tear up old pages and make them somewhat more XHTML-compliant, so there will be broken stuff everywhere for a while. I also recently bought a 1-TB NAS drive, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to set that up and back up my machine remotely, so I’ve had a lot of screwing around with config files in the last week.

Otherwise, a quiet Sunday morning here. We have a catsitter coming over, and I need to start cleaning soon. I had high hopes to write something more interesting here, but I keep wanting to get back to the monotonous fixing of every image on the site, so I will get back to it.

(A side note: my elbow is rapidly healing. I still have a fiberglass cast, but the doctor has me spending less time in it, and I anticipate being back to my two-handed typing and right-handed mousing within a week or so. I’m enjoying such an input method as we speak, but I don’t think I’d make it through an entire business day like this.)

My high school had its 20th reunion last weekend. I didn’t go, mostly because if I had the money and vacation days to travel during the heatwave season, it probably would not be to Indiana. But part of me regrets not going, and looking at the pictures and various reports on Facebook and whatnot make me feel somewhat bittersweet about not going. I generally don’t think about high school that much, at least not in an Al Bundy “those were the greatest years ever” way, mostly because they weren’t. And aside from Larry, I don’t keep in touch with many people from high school. Turns out that “friends forever” slogan people used to write in your yearbook isn’t legally binding or anything. Pretty much everyone I knew in high school vanished after May of 1989, and that reflects more my lack of social skills during my pre-18 years than anything else.

One of the emotions that’s dredged up by the necessity to look back at this era due to the passing of a big fat even number is that of jealousy. Am I jealous that I’m not raising three kids with no spouse on the salary of a forklift driver? No. But for whatever reason, I’m somewhat jealous of the people who were able to forge long-lasting relationships from this era in their life, because I wasn’t able to do that. At the time, I suffered from all kinds of depression and confusion based on my inability to run with the A-list crowd, even if that group was doing nothing of any intrinic value by going to football games and homecoming dances. It’s a grass-is-always-greener thing, and after high school passed, I was able to beat down these feelings by replacing them with something better, by actually doing okay on a college campus, and putting it all behind me. But the reunion somehow touched on these unhealed scars, in a very subtle way. It made me wish I would have done more socially in the late 80s.

The other weird side effect of this is that I wished I would have done something more extraordinary in the last 20 years, so I could have gone and “shown them” somehow, in a keeping-ahead-of-the-Joneses way. I guess a lot of people wish they could go to their reunion with a supermodel on their arm and seven or eight figures in the bank. A sort of “I was a geek you treated like shit back then, but I flew here from my bungalow in France on a Lear jet, and you’re still on the dirt farm” moment. But I have done a lot of stuff in the last 20 years - I’ve lived in many cool places, I’ve written books, I’ve traveled to almost every state, I’ve made some money, gotten married, bought a house, and managed to do a lot more than punch a clock at an RV factory 5200 times in a row. Maybe some people from my class would look at my list of achievements and say “shit, he’s done a lot more than work as an assistant manager at the Concord Mall Jamba Juice and spit out a half-dozen kids.” But then I also think that if I told most people I graduated with that I climbed K2 with no supplemental oxygen and donated the proceeds to landmine victims in Cambodia, they would be more proud of the four or six rugrats they sired, and what I did would be insignificant. Maybe this is a conversation I’m having with myself, but it’s the way I felt 20 years ago, and people don’t change.

As an aside, people do change, at least physically. One thing I was astonished by when looking at the pictures of the reunion was how some people have radically changed, and others look identical. Many guys got bald and fat, many of the cheerleader types look a bit more haggard. Years and kids and tanning booths have taken their toll. And some people that were pretty much below the radar back in school have really broken out, and look 100% better. I don’t know where I fall into that spectrum. I feel a lot better these days since I lost weight, but then I remember that I weighed even less in 1989. But I had those glasses. Either way, I’m sure a majority of people from my graduating class would not recognize me.

Another emotion stirred by the past is shame. I never even thought about this until a therapist brought it up a few years ago, but I feel pretty stupid about 95% of the stuff I did back in high school. When I think about that era, it makes me wish I had a time machine and an endless bucket of mulligans to correct a lot of the stupid shit I did back then. And yes, life would be different if I would have stopped playing D&D and started lifting weights Rollins-style and focused on getting laid or getting into MIT or whatever else, instead of focusing on trying to find the newest Metallica import cassette single or more chrome for my Camaro’s engine or whatever else consumed the most of my energy back in 1988. And when I think about catching up with people I only casually knew two decades ago, the thought of every girl I obsessed about and asked out and got turned down creeps into my mind, and it’s a pretty self-defeating mental pattern. The counter to this is I did a lot of stupid stuff when I was a kid, because I didn’t know any better.

Also, I have some kind of resentment about the fact that pretty much everything I did as a kid that made me an outcast is now somehow hip and trendy and cool now. I got my balls busted on a constant basis for being into science fiction and computers and being a geek in general, and now all of that is somehow cool. Christ. I spent a fair amount of energy trying to de-emphasize how much I was into this shit, and I should have spent the 80s going balls-deep and spending every waking hour studying assembly language and sealing unopened Star Wars toys that I bought wholesale in a vault somewhere, anticipating the eventual arrival of eBay. I would be a millionaire.

Had to work last weekend (yes, even with a broken god damned arm) and I don’t work this weekend. I allegedly have a three-day weekend coming up next weekend, and a four-day weekend after that. And now I have a large black cat standing in front of my monitor, lobbying for a second breakfast, so I better get out of here while I can.

So last Sunday, I broke my right arm. And I am right handed. Expect a giant drop-off in my updates until I can type again.

The summary: I was riding my bike a few blocks from home. It’s all old warehouses in the neighborhood, and there are a lot of railroad side spurs that are abandoned, like with a set of rails half-buried in asphalt crossing the streets at funny angles. I remember riding next to one thinking “it would suck if my wheel fell into that groove.” Next thing I know, the bike falls out from under me, I fall to my right, I stick out my right arm, and pow. Had to ride home with a broken arm and a fucked up left knee, although I think the knee is structurally OK, just rubbed raw with the gentle touch of asphalt.

Went to the Oakland ER, which was an adventure. 7 hours of jonesing addicts thinking that if they screamed at the doctors enough, they’d get a taste. Also a Hispanic kid was in for a heart murmur or something, and his entire extended family of 768 were all in the waiting room, eating candybars and talking on cell phones right under the “no food/no cell phones” sign, as the movie Mama’s House 2 played on a TV with no channel or volume controls.

X-Rays were murder. Turns out I chipped the elbow end of the radius. Not much of a structural issue - you can’t set it or put screws or a plate in it, it pretty much fixes itself. But in the meantime, lots of swelling, lots of nerves focused in that area, and the arm doesn’t want to bend, and the wrist can’t turn. I got this space-age fiberglass instant-mold splint that I ace bandage on, and can take off to shower (thank you - heat waves and plaster casts don’t mix.) Also got some vicodin and a sling. I missed a day of work - I can drive now, and my left handed typing and mousing slowly improves. I have to slowly wean out the splint over the next few weeks - should be AOK in a month or so.

I did this same thing in 1992 on my left arm. No space age cast then, though. And I only had codeine syrup for pain. But that was my left hand. And computers didn’t involve as much mouse work then. I don’t know how you one-armed people deal with Windows on a daily basis.