I just finished reading Ian Christe’s book Everybody Wants Some, a history of Van Halen. I heard about this on the Talking Metal podcast, which is abuzz with news of this original-lineup reunion, minus Michael Anthony on bass, replaced by Eddie’s 16-year-old kid. Weird. Anyway, Christie wrote one of the 700 “history of metal” books that came out a few years back. When he was writing, he got in touch and wanted to stop over and photocopy all of my old zines, but we never hooked up, and actually I never read the book. So I picked up this one, touted to be the first definitive biography of the band, and got to work.

I’m going to start by saying the book is not that great, but it’s up in the air how much this was the author’s fault, and how much of the blame goes on the subject. The history of Van Halen starts with this whole interesting SoCal garage band culture, and these two Dutch kids teaming up with an outspoken Jewish son of an opthamologist, and then hits this mid-point where they are on top of the world and the whole thing implodes. But then the second half of the book is all of these years of dicking around with Sammy Hagar, and toward the end, it’s Eddie locked in a home studio, with a third of his tongue cut out from cancer, his parents dead, his wife gone, about 800 attempts at rehab, three fired/quit singers, a hip transplant, and a brother with fucked-up, inoperable neck trauma.

So at the end of the book, I’m thinking “where the fuck is the high note here?” I mean, it talked about all of the times the VH brothers broke off and tried to reconcile with Roth, with both sides saying the others were poisoning the well. And yeah, they’re back together now. But there’s a chance they will be broken apart by the time the ink dries in the book, and meanwhile, only about 12 people even care. Meanwhile, Michael Anthony the human alcohol filter is set up as the fallen silent hero or some shit, with his bass tracks mixed down, some studio tracks played by EVH, his bass solo snipped from the live set, and finally being told he had to relinquish all rights to all songs and trademarks and take a huge pay cut if he wanted to tour. And next time around, he’s fired. All of the old metalheads identify with Anthony’s party lifestyle, and who gives a fuck if Eddie can eke out Eruption while he’s sitting on stage in a wheelchair looking like the fucking cryptkeeper.

The book had one fundamental flaw which was also a benefit: it appeared that Christie did not have access to any of the members of the band. Most of the quotes were lifted from interviews with magazines or on tape, and there was no buy-in from any of the major players. (I might be wrong on this, but it sure read that way.) So that means there wasn’t any new dirt I didn’t already know. But it also meant that someone didn’t come in with an agenda and bumrush the book. Anyone in the band’s history (with the exception of Gary Cherone, who isn’t big-headed about it, probably because he was in the band for like three weeks) would completely dominate something like this, and if you only know one side of this story, you don’t know any of the story. Case in point: go pick up a copy of David Lee Roth’s Crazy From The Heat book. Now, I love this book, because it’s Roth the showman and storyteller, laying it down and getting into some really crazy shit about the road, his family, and everything else. But when I read his side of the VH split story, I wondered, “how much of this shit is true?” It wasn’t that his story was unbelievable, but I knew there were two sides, and his was going to be giant and overdramatized. And so by not doing an official Van Halen family biography, he sidesteps that problem, but also misses a lot of juice that would have justified the reading time.

Aside from the subject matter, Christie’s writing tries a little too hard in places, and didn’t hold me. It was competent, but it wasn’t a thickly textured tapestry of incredible stories and details. And why treat a band with such fucked up and incredible history just like you would if you were writing a Jewel biography? There wasn’t enough depth to blow me away, and when you’re writing about a band that (at least back in the day) was supposed to blow you away, it just didn’t mesh.

That said, there was a lot of information about Hagar-era Van Halen, and it made me think back to the years I listened to the band, back in high school. 1984 was my introduction as a junior high kid, when it was all over MTV and pop radio. And then I got into 5150 and OU812, even though everyone else wrote off Van Hagar and went on to other, heavier things. While I was reading this book, I put OU812 on the iPod during my drive to work, and was surprised at how that set of tunes totally set the stage for the summer of 1988 for me. I loved my Metallica and VoiVod and Grim Reaper, but I also had that tape in the player quite a bit, and it still takes me back. Those songs are seared into my brain, and it’s always comforting to give them another listen.

Anyway. Just started reading a Houdini biography, and I’m trying to get off the bio kick to get back to some good fiction…

It’s been a strange summer for baseball for me, and I thought that it was over back on the 19th when we saw the Dodgers. Colorado won, and the Rockies were doing well coming out of that, but my schedule got too weird to get in on any of the other games, and I figured that victory would be a nice high note to end on, and then the team would get blocked by the end of the year by the Padres or something.

And it has been strange being a baseball fan here. First of all, I was not really that much of a baseball fan prior to moving here - I saw a couple of games, it was neat, but I didn’t know the difference between a foul tip and a strike. And when we moved to Colorado, most people asked me if Denver even had a major league team, and I found that among many locals, the Rockies were somewhat of an inside joke, something that took off with a flash about fifteen years ago, and then slowly took its place behind football, hockey, soccer, and basketball. Hell, the rodeo is bigger than football was back in Indiana.

But I had an apartment a block from the stadium, I had a work-at-home/part-time gig that let me skip out for day games, and tickets were usually cheaper than going to a movie in New York. So I went whenever I could. And two things happened. First, I learned to really love baseball. I love the mathematical aspect of it, the statistics and numbers and team records and batting averages. I also love the subtleties behind the game. Football (as far as I see it) is this brute force game of conquest, of pushing and shoving and blocking. (The passing game is another story, though.) Basketball: endurance, and running back and forth; it’s basically a track and field event with a ball added. Hockey: I don’t even understand hockey. But everything in baseball is knowing how to gradually change your stance or your angle or your position in order to exploit a known issue with the other team. The difference between a strikeout and a home run is a millimeter’s difference in how you hold the bat. A split-second decision in fielding is the difference between the other team scoring two or three times in one hit versus turning a triple play. You have to be strong to belt one 500 feet, but a little dude (like Kaz Matsui) can easily dominate the offense based on his ability to read the other team and react. And if a guy like Prince Fielder, who makes me look like a damn anorexic, can dominate the game, it makes me feel closer to the game, even if I could never play at the company softball skill level.

The other thing that happened is that the Rockies got good. They didn’t at first, but right around the time I started going, they started winning more games, and doing more impressive things on the field. They swept the Giants; they won two of three against the Red Sox at Boston. Then after a ton of losses, they swept the Mets. They swept the Yankees. They went into a slump, but swept the Brewers in one of the most lopsided set of games of the year. And as this picked up, I followed more games on the computer. I bought an AM radio to listen when I wasn’t there. I spent a lot of time reading up on players and opponents and history and the game itself. And I loved it even more.

And then it got weird. The Rockies simply could not lose. They lost three pitchers and had to replace them with triple-A transplants or kids right off the boat from the Dominican Republic. Matt Holliday messed up his oblique muscle. Matsui strained a ligament. They brought up a catcher, a replacement for a replacement, that dorked up his leg early in his very first MLB start. But they kept winning. A four-game sweep against the Dodgers. A road trip where they swept the Padres, then swept the Dodgers again. Then two of three against the Diamondbacks. And that meant the Rockies were tied with San Diego for the wildcard. In a 13-inning game at Coors Field, the Rockies just barely squeaked by and got the spot. People were going absolutely apeshit here - some people were actually more interested in the Rockies than the Broncos. And then the Rockies beat Philly twice on the road, (which included a phenomenal grand slam by non-power-hitter Matsui) setting up a huge huge huge Saturday night game, which could advance the Rockies to the next level, where they’ve never been before.

Anyway, I managed to get two tickets to the Saturday game by sheer luck. I bought them online before the wild card was decided, meaning I basically made a $150 bet that they’d finish. But they did, and I went to the box office and picked up my tickets on Friday. They’re different than the regular season tickets, printed on a golden-looking ticket blank. I even managed to get club seats, which meant we got to hang out in the fancy concourse and we had padded seats that were wider than the regular ones. Nice.

The game started at 7:30, so we left at 6:00, and there were already masses of people everywhere. Notably absent were ticket scalpers, since it was a sold out game and nobody was parting with their seats. Everyone got a free Rockies towel to wave around. By the time we got to our seats, it was almost an hour before the game started, and over half of the seats were already full. That’s about how many people show up for the average ho-hum game during the season, and I knew the crowd would double. It was at least as crowded as when we saw the Yankees, an event that brought out droves of no-neck shitheads to boo the home team because their $200 million dollar roster was getting slaughtered by a $50 million dollar team. This time, it was a sea of purple and spinning towels.

There were many changes this evening over all of the regular season games I saw. First, the NLDS logos were everywhere: on the grass, on the signs, on the souvenir cups you get with a Coke, and on many t-shirts, official and bootleg, in and on the audience. The advertisements were different; probably because of some MLB-brokered postseason deal. Some of the ads contradicted other ads in the stadium: a Budweiser next to a Coors; a Pepsi next to a Coke. Some were ads completely new to Coors Field: XM, Nike, TBS. They also showed some between-inning PSAs that we don’t usually get, like one about steroids. Ironically, another was for some “best season ever” thing that spotlighted Barry “will work for HGH” Bonds, which got many boos. The biggest change was the national anthem; a million Marines brought out this football field-sized flag and opened it up. Then there were a few shots of fireworks, and a million purple balloons were released into the sky. There was also a long, protracted introduction of all of the players and staff of each team. There were six umpires instead of four. Also, there was a video of John Elway saying “go Rockies” or some shit, and if Jesus would have showed up and told everyone there were keys under their seats for a free Hummer H1, it would have gotten less applause.

One of the more moving things in the game (as if there was a shortage) was the first pitch. Mike Coolbaugh was a player turned batting coach for one of Colorado’s minor league teams. Last July, he was coaching at first base and was hit in the head with a line drive, which killed him. He left behind a pregnant wife and two young boys, three and five years old. The Rockies have gone the extra mile in helping out the Coolbaugh family, holding charity events, and opening up their own checkbooks. When Matt Holliday won the Clemente award, he basically signed the back of the check and gave it to Amanda Coolbaugh. The team also unanimously voted to give the family a full share of their playoff earnings (not the *team’s* earnings, but the *player’s* earnings, right out of their pockets), and guessing at how the stadium sold out, that should be a decent chunk of change. Anyway, young Josh and Jacob were cute, and got a standing ovation from 51,000 people without a dry eye among them. As I read on a constant basis about what total shitheads most professional athletes are these days, it always amazes me when the Rockies do something like this.

We joked a lot about the plague of locusts or whatever that fucked with the pitchers in the Yankees-Indians game the night before. And a second later, these huge gale-force winds started blowing in, right into home plate. They whipped around a ton of garbage, and pitchers were able to put major heat on the ball, while the offense couldn’t hit anything out. And with the wind, the temp dropped fast. I was wearing a light jacket and thin t-shirt, and suddenly wanted a winter coat and gloves. Sarah went to the gift shop and bought a ton of stuff, and I guess everyone else did too, because the store looked like a grocery store the day before a blizzard. I put on a second shirt and a hooded sweatshirt, and that mostly kept me warm. I felt sorry for all of those Latin American ball players who never saw temps below the mid-80s in their lives.

Then, in the middle of the second inning, all of the lights in all of the light clusters went out, one by one, and in about three seconds, the entire field was dark. I seem to remember this happening at a Cubs game recently, and of course Lou threw a fit, because that is a game-calling event. A minute later, a small subset of the field lights went on, like those emergency lights that go on when the power goes out. All of the other lights were on, though. A quick-thinking PA dude put on the Springsteen song “Dancing in the Dark”. Within 15 minutes, the lights were back on, and the game continued.

And what a weird game. It was one of those pitching battles, where there were no hits or walks, and it just went back and forth, except every time Jimanez threw a pitch, there was a huge cheer. If it was two outs and a 1-1 count, everyone was on their feet like it was the final out of the final game of the World Series. Same goes for balls thrown against Rockies players. But nobody was making any progress, until the 5th inning, when the Rockies got in one. I was pretty sure the entire stadium was going to get rocked off of its foundation after what normally would be a pretty mediocre run. Then the Phillies got a single-shot homer via Victorino in the 7th to tie it up, and I anticipated the game going back and forth for another 19 innings.

In the 8th, Holliday and Helton both flied out, and things started looking very dicey. Then Atkins got a single; Hawpe got a single, and Atkins got to third. The next up was pinch hitter Jeff Baker. Baker hadn’t played much this year, and then in a Cubs series, he got hit in the face by a fast pitch, which gave him a concussion and kept him out for a while. But for whatever reason, Hurdle sent him in, and the crowd went absolutely apeshit. And on the second pitch, Baker singled a grounder to right field, driving in Atkins, and riled up everyone like throwing bloody meat into a shark tank.

At the end of the 8th, at least a hundred security people came out to the field, standing at each side three feet apart. In the 9th, Manny Corpas came to the mound, and people were yelling and screaming at each pitch, more than ever. Ryan Howard - strikeout. Aaron Rowand - a dribbled ground ball right at Helton on first base. Victorino, who had the only home run of the game, came to the plate It seems like four hours between each pitch. Strike. Foul. Ball. Then a grounder to Matsui at 2nd, throw to Todd at first - and that’s that.

Everyone was going totally absolutely apeshit. Towels were everywhere. Brooms were all over. A huge barrage of fireworks were shooting out of the scoreboard. All of the Rockies charged the field. At least a dozen police motorcycles drove up onto the warning track, and there was a SWAT team truck below our section. The screen went to the cameras in the clubhouse, and there was an entire boatload of champagne being shot all over. LaTroy Hawkins was dancing like he was auditioning for a part in Breakin’ 3. We went downstairs and I took a lot of video with my camera. I looked out onto Blake street, and there were tens of thousands of people running around, yelling, with purple hair, purple face paint, brooms, signs, and spinning towels. We fought our way back downstairs, and Glen Hurdle was trying to give a speech on the monitors, but he looked like he just jumped into a swimming pool of bubbly. Outside, every car horn in a two mile radius was glued down. Every person we walked past wanted a high-five. Luckily, we were only a block away, and got inside with no worries.

Now that would be a great end to my season, right? Almost - I got us tickets to see the second home game of the NLCS, against the Diamondbacks. Should be fun! (Especially if it snows first.)

Anyway, pix here.

I bought a new car last night. And I don’t mean I bought a replacement for the Subaru - this is a second car. And I don’t mean I bought a new-to-me car off of craigslist with 100K on the odometer. I mean I bought a brand new car off the dealer lot with ten miles on the odometer. It’s both scary and neat.

I got a 2008 Toyota Yaris liftback. It is black sand pearl, 4-speed automatic, AC, power locks/windows/mirrors, the cold-weather package (heavy duty heater, starter, daytime running lights), ABS, side curtain airbags, and the stock AM/FM/CD/MP3 stereo. The Yaris doesn’t have much latitude as far as options on vehicles sitting on lots, and pretty much all of the ones we found in Denver were either this build, or this build minus the power package. The reason for this car is that when I’m commuting in the Subaru, Sarah will be walking to work, but sometimes needs the car for an appointment or a meeting across town, or to get to the airport at 6AM, so a second car makes that much easier. And we don’t need a huge car with every luxury that we could drive across the country every other month and haul 500 miles of lumber and a fridge in the back. We just need an around-the-town deal, and the Yaris is that.

The Yaris is tiny. It is very narrow, very short wheelbase, and very low to the ground. Despite this, the interior is very roomy. I have tons of headroom, even when I am in the rear seat, which is surprising. The car is also set up so the metal is very low around you, and there’s a lot of glass at eye level. The visibility is much better than the Subaru all around. The oddest thing is that the instruments are in a tiny pod in the middle of the dash, so there’s nothing in the dash in front of you. It actually opens up as a glove compartment, and the passenger has two gloveboxes. There are also flip-open drink holders in the dash, plus a center console and holders in the doors. Lots of places to put junk. The bad this is, when you’re driving at night, you instinctively look for the lit dash above the steering wheel, and it isn’t there. Very weird.

There’s a 1.5L engine with 16 valves and some weird proprietary electronic valve breathing monitoring whatchamacallit that promises better performance. It’s not a bad car as far as pep goes, but it gets 44 MPG highway, which is the real benefit. The engine is really crammed into the front, and the hood is like a foot long, so they really shoehorned into there. There are a lot of other engineering feats, like all-electronic steering, and the throttle control is electronic. Looking in the engine bay, which is the size of a glovebox in an SUV, it’s a work of art to see what they crammed in there.

Downsides - well, there’s no trunk. There is a hatch, but seriously, the Fiero has as much cargo space. The Subaru has a lot of power and convenience things that this car doesn’t (keyless entry, trip computer, tachometer, etc.) but you can’t expect that for the price point. The car drives well, but it’s small - it’s a lot ‘quicker’ as far as steering response and handling, so it’s different. It’s not as quiet on the highway, either. But for the around-the-town puttering, it’s excellent.

The paperwork and finance side of things really had/has me nervous. We seriously talked about going to buy a car at noon yesterday, and I had the keys and was pulling off the dealer lot at 9

. Part of that is that we just wanted something simple and cheap, and didn’t feel a need to test drive 400 cars and search the country for the exact trim level we wanted. Part is it was that you can very easily research this crap online. And part of it was that the Toyota internet sales people were very helpful and to the point, and it was a very no-bullshit experience. We narrowed it down to one dealer with two cars, identical except in color, we drove it around the block, and the paperwork started.

Because Sarah financed the Subaru, the decision was that I’d finance this one. As a point of reference, the last car I owned was a 1978 VW Rabbit with a dented in side, covered in rust, and I dumped it for $100 when I moved in 1999. I did lease a two-year-old car (no thanks to Evergreen Ford in Issaquah), but I’ve never bought a new car. But the guy plugged in my numbers, and my credit score stunned me. I went through college dealing with creditors and going into credit card debt, and then spent years after trying to pull together my debt. Prior to the car purchase, I had $12 in total debt on my report, and a credit score in the highest tier, which meant I could have picked any car off the lot if I wanted to. But I took the cheapest one, and after saying no a thousand times to the finance person, I got out of there for about $15,000 damage.

The Toyota guys were very nice though, and it was almost an in-and-out deal, with no real hitch. But seriously, buying something that big and then taking out a brand new car with almost nothing on the odometer was very daunting. I still can’t believe I did. The rub though is that I’m not the one driving it - I will be putting the miles on the Outback starting Monday. But the Subaru gets 30 MPG highway, so that isn’t a huge punch to the nuts.

As an aside, with this Yaris, why would anyone buy a hybrid? This seriously has as much space as a Prius, but costs half as much. It gets about 5 MPG less, but is also classified as an ultra-low emission vehicle. It doesn’t have a hybrid badge on the side, so you can’t brag to people about how you’re saving the universe. But it also doesn’t have eleventy-million parts and pieces and components and batteries and everything else that will break, and that cost both money and environmental erosion to produce. I should make some “My car was cheaper than your Prius (and gets close to the same mileage)” stickers, and start selling them on the Yaris message boards.

OK, gotta add a car to the insurance, get a spot in the parking garage, then go for a nice drive. Did I mention this has an Aux jack for your MP3 player? That’s basically the only feature I really need.

The zine is out, and available at lulu. You probably already know the details and are sick of hearing about it, but here’s more: This issue’s theme is “Weird, Paranoid, Insane”, and features 23 stories by 15 writers. I am very excited, because #12 has more published authors than ever; I also have a lot of solid work from some newcomers. And don’t worry, there’s plenty of writing from the usual gang of slobs that have contributed in previous issues. Authors include Grant Bailie, Keith Buckley, Tony Byrer, Joshua Citrak, Kurt Eisenlohr, Rebel Star Hobson, Stephen Huffman, Jon Konrath, R. Lee, Erin O’Brien, John Sheppard, Joseph Suglia, Todd Taylor, and Richard K. Weems. The stories range from tales of deranged relatives to secret coalitions to battle-maddened ‘Nam vets who can’t shop in Kroger without seeing VC behind every freezer cabinet, to a still-alive Richard Nixon snorting coke and listening to Dokken. Something for everyone. We created two video trailers for the book. (Yes, apparently books can now have trailers.) The first is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w83ZgawVDF4 and the second one is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWEoSBZVBHUb - The second trailer was done by Matthew Pazzol, who also did the cover and interior art for the book. The book is now available at lulu.com (http://www.lulu.com/content/1151437) and will be available in about six weeks at Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, and other fine online booksellers. It’s $14.95 + s/h. The book is 236 pages, and is 6x9” with a very cool color glossy cover. The isbn is 978-0-6151-6314-7. Lulu has a free preview containing the first 20 or so pages that you can read online. Also check out http://ParagraphLine.com, where you can download e-books of all previous issues for free, get information on submitting your work, and read news on Paragraph Line Books, the publishing company that I started with fellow author John Sheppard to put out AITPL and other books. As always, any links or mentions to the new issue out on the internets would be greatly appreciated. Since we’re not affiliated with any academic or corporate system, word of mouth is a godsend.

---

It’s been a busy week. On Tuesday morning, I woke up early, packed the car, and drove south on I-25, to my land. I hit the morning rush hour, but found it wasn’t terrible - it was possible to keep a good 50 or 60 going without touching the brakes. This will be my new morning commute, so it was good to time things. It was also nice to try out this whole podcast thing, by listening to Talking Metal, probably my favorite podcast as of late. I’ve got a fantasy baseball podcast on the iPod that’s okay, considering I just want news and not fantasy baseball stuff. Anyway, it passes the time, and within a half hour, I hit the big open mesa south of town, and got it up past 75 and on cruise.

This trip was more than just a look-see - I had in the back of the Subaru a set of three Colorado Blue Pine trees, each about a foot tall, in plastic pots. I also had a 50-pound bag of peat/manure mixture, some organic pesticide stuff, a shovel, and every large plastic container I could find, filled with about five gallons of water. i know three trees is not some huge undertaking, but the journey was more about timing the drive, and timing how long it would take me to haul out all of this shit and dig the holes in the ground. I also needed to do something to cap the end of my summer, before I got back to driving a desk for a living. And seeing something other than the parking lot across the street would be good for the soul.

I drove past the Air Force academy and saw a pair of Schweizer 2-33 gliders, one making his approach, and the other under tow, trying to get as much altitude as possible. (I have no idea how they fly at this altitude, with the thin air.) Then I cruised past Colorado City and its religious freakies, and Pueblo, and it’s beaten old factories. By 10

, I got to Walsenberg, a tiny little town that sat at the intersection of 160. The biggest thing around was a gas station/truck stop, which happens to be the first place we ever filled up the Subaru. I took on a full tank of gas, then bought three gallons of water, and got a cheeseburger combo at the built-in micro-A&W. It was only ten and I wasn’t in the mood for burgers, but this would be the last stop before my land, and I’m a dozen miles from San Luis; their biggest eatery is a Checker station with a candybar shelf. Burgers it is.

The 160 drive is the roughest part of the trip, because the roads wind around tight mountain curves, and also raise and then drop about a half-mile above the mile-high altitudes. It’s all dual-lane stuff, and you’re always battling to pass a big rig hauling something that looks like a John Deere farm implement invented to mine the surface of Mars. Most of the terrain is reddish-brown, and you can occasionally see a bit of barbed wire surrounding a hundred acres and a hundred cattle, but a lot of it is overgrown scrub. The western haul is 47 miles according to the map, and you’re actually covering half that, because of the curves. Add in a transmission that keeps trying to jump down a gear because of the hills, and it took me about an hour until the speed limit dropped, and I hit the next town.

Fort Garland isn’t much, maybe the size of a couple of city blocks, and a diner or two, along with a museum and some gas stations. But it was also the intersection of 159 and 160, and 159 south was the home stretch. I drove south of town, and into the strange area where half of the land was scrub brush and desert, the place where the Air Force would drop bombs in mock combat drills. The other half was irrigated, green and glistening with huge agrarian machinery that pumped water through crops. Actually, a lot of the green had been mowed down by huge International Harvesters and baled into stacks of bright yellow hay. But it always strikes me as odd to look to the left and see nothing but loamy dirt, but to the right is this bright chlorophyll paradise. And don’t forget that the Sangre De Christo mountains are on either side of the valley.

After a dozen miles, I hit San Luis, the oldest city in Colorado. San Luis is pretty beat - most shopping malls are bigger, and even during the day, have larger populations. There are a few token attempts at being pretty for the tourists, the “come again” signs, the signs of the cross display and the old mission-style church high on a hill. By the time you slow down to 25 to match the speed limit, it’s time to get back to speed again, and the town’s done.

159 dumps out of San Luis going west, and then curves back south again, making its final run into New Mexico. My land is three miles south of there, and I always forget that they put in this recreation center since I bought the place, this pond about a quarter-mile square, where people fly fish. It’s so odd to see a body of water there, but nice. I start scanning for the county roads, and fall back to my training as a bicyclist in the Indiana cornfields, counting a mile per road on the grid. A big farm’s on the right, all green, maybe parsley. Then some busted-up house and barn buildings that are vacant, that look like they burned down. A mile south, I recognize the turn-off, County Road K. (For Konrath.) I hang a left, stop the car, and get out for pictures.

There are two roads from the highway to get to my property. First is CR. K, which is two dirt strips through a bunch of weeds, heading west. I get in the Subaru and drive west on that. It’s not a hard drive, but little weeds ping and snap on the undercarriage. Then, a quarter mile up, is the access road that goes in another quarter mile to a cul-de-sac. First, I drive west a mile, to the next big road on the grid. There’s an unnamed dirt road, but just past it is an eroded river bank, or maybe a farmer’s irrigation ditch. There’s only a tenth as much water as the banks would suggest, but it’s water! It’s like hiking Mt. Everest and finding a Ramada Inn halfway up, very unbelievable to me.

I back up, go down to the access road, and it is almost completely covered in flowers and weeds, so much that I could barely see it until I spied the ditches on either side. They dug out that road in late 2001 maybe, and I don’t think it’s been touched since. So I drove to the cul-de-sac and did a few donuts in the Subaru, to etch out some of the dirt underneath all of the tumbleweed.

Everything was the same as it was in March. I started this pile of stones then, anything bigger than a pack of matches I found while walking around the place. And the surveyor’s plastic stakes were still in. Most importantly, there wasn’t a ton of dumped trash. And no rabbits, deer, or horses. I started unloading the car, and looked for a place to start. There’s a 30-foot easement on each side, for the power company and whatnot. And I will eventually have my own little driveway coming out 45 degrees or whatever from the circle. And the best place to block with a treeline is north. So a pace is three feet, and I started making my marks.

Planting trees is a pain in the ass, but it’s also cathartic. I had to dig holes, water, put in peat, water, put in trees, put in driwater, put in peat, water, cover with dirt, water, spray with the pesticide. The ground was very clay-y, heavy with a recent rain, and I had trouble hiking around, because I’ve got this busted knee, and every surface is uneven from the ground and plants. But I finished in no time, and once the plants were in, I realized I had about an hour invested in the project.

(For those of you unfamiliar with DriWater, it’s like 99% water and 1% some inert ingredient that makes it a consistency of thick jello. When exposed to soil and the soil gets dry, the DriWater starts to melt and waters the soil. When the soil is wet or when the DriWater freezes, it stops melting. It comes in a biodegradable carton, like a carton of milk. You cut off the bottom, bury the carton against the root, and it melts and keeps things watered for up to three months. Very handy for when you’re planting trees in the middle of nowhere.)

I collected more stones - I have this dream that by the time I get the property cleared up, I will have a pile of stones big enough to make a driveway, although I realize that may take 500 years. I also watered the trees and sprayed on more of the bug stuff. And then I noticed a pain in my wrists, and realized that the bug stuff, or maybe some weed I touched, had caused my inner arms to burst out in red welts. My scalp and neck were also itchy, like I was being attacked by tiny bugs. So I packed up, doused the affected areas with water and then with purell, and decided that maybe it was time to get the fuck out of there.

The arm thing went away, and I have no idea what it was. Maybe heat rash. The pesticide only contained egg whites, cayenne pepper, and some other minor stuff. The neck/scalp thing - sunburn. I was very, very red by the time I got home. Much solarcaine was applied.

I’m back. Got the car washed in and out yesterday, then went to my last baseball game of the year - the Dodgers. It was a real nail-biter, too - went back and forth many times, then Brad Hawpe got a 2-run homer at the last minute to put over the Rockies. I forgot my radio, didn’t bring my binocs, and only took a few pictures. But it was awesome. I also like that pitcher Josh Fogg has a Foghat song for his walkup song. As we speak, the day game is 6-0 rockies in the 4th, so I expect good things to happen there. I will miss going to games. Maybe I could catch one more, and there’s a small chance that they will make playoffs, but then the tickets will be too expensive.

OK, gotta go get shit done.

First of all, I’ll get all of the zine stuff out of the way:

• Press release is at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/09/prweb553756.htm
• The first trailer (yes, books have trailers now, I guess) is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w83ZgawVDF4. (This is the one I made, which is why it sucks more.)
• Second trailer, by AITPL#12 artist Matthew Pazzol: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWEoSBZVBHU.

I am waiting for a proof to arrive (early next week?) and then it will be live and you will be seeing much more spamification here telling you why you’re an idiot if you don’t buy a copy. I have the first proof (no ISBN) sitting on my desk and it is easily the best issue yet. It looks incredible, and has more good stuff from more new people and more published writers. Anyway, go here for more info.

---

The weather’s shifting fast, and it’s doing weird things to my head. First, it’s literally doing weird things, because I have some allergy or allergy-like headaches and congestion. I took an Allegra today, which means I trade the headaches for this feverish, mindless jittery feeling all day. But the weather’s been odd; it was cracking the 90s one day, and the next is was barely at 50. It’s been hot for a while, so the sudden warp in the weather is pretty weird. And I swear there is some correlation in these pressure changes or temp snaps that force my brain to dial up memories from some point in the past when the same thing happened. And it’s not memories, like I’m reminiscing about a long-lost restaurant or a girlfriend that never was. It’s like I just feel the essence of that time, and then in order to somehow quantify that, a few brief memories slip in.

Case in point: on Friday, it was lunchtime, and Sarah had the car, and all of the lunchmeat in the house was green. I hit F12 to see the weather on my Mac Dashboard, and it was 59, so I grabbed a light jacket, an iPod, and started walking south. For whatever reason, the temperature or change in barometic pressure or something reminded me of the band Anacrusis, so I dialed up their album Screams and Whispers on my little white music box.

Anacrusis is either a minor historical footnote or an inside joke to most of the metal community. And I don’t even consider myself a member of the metal community anymore. But back in the early 90s, as thrash metal gave way to Death Metal and then the industry or the bands or the fans (or all three, since usually the same people had bands, zines, and basement record labels) suddenly realized that every band out there continuing to release the same exact Sepultura record was not a sustainable plan, so labels tried to branch out with all of these fusion ideas: death/industrial, death/hardcore, rap/metal, thrash/gothic, whatever. And Anacrusis fell into that slot on the Metal Blade lineup for two albums. The St. Louis-based four-piece took a thrash approach and tried to mix in some prog-rock influence, like Fate’s Warning or Queensryche or whatever. The good news is that all of the fans into this album thought it was completely over-the-top. The bad news was that there were about eight fans of the album, and after their 1993 album, they fell off the face of the earth.

Now back when I was doing Xenocide, I was getting a lot of record label demos and advance copies. (I was also getting record reviews from a future Al-Quaeda member, but that’s another story.) Marco at Metal Blade fed me a lot of tapes, and for whatever reason, this tape ended up in the walkman quite a bit. In the spring of ‘93, I was carless, and walked everywhere. And for whatever reason, I have this really distinct fragment of a memory of walking to the grocery store or mall or laundromat, and I was listening to this tape. Every day, I walked at least a mile to work, to shop, to get out of my tiny cell and clear my head. And that album, that music brings me right back there. The album itself is not that memorable; I couldn’t name a single song on it, and there were no big breakthrough hits or whatever. It’s not the kind of album that you buy because it’s got that “Hm Hm Hiiim” song on it. It’s very ambient in that aspect, very background to me. Maybe that’s why it stuck with me.

And what’s weird is that when this happens, I don’t think about the girl I was dating then, or my job that I was working day-and-night, or the classes I skipped, or anything else. It’s just that walk, just south of 3rd Street, cutting through the yards and church parking lot to get to the Eastgate Plaza.

Anyway. My typing ability is rapidly declining. I was going to mention that I took a tour of Coors field last Wednesday. I was the only one there, so my $7 got me a personal tour. Photos are here. It was interesting, especially when I actually got to walk across the field on the warning track, a dozen feet from home plate, and then into the dugout. It’s a lot less glamorous than I’d thought; I mean, every single one of these guys make at least five times as much as I do, a few of them a hundred times as much, and they’ve got a wooden bench to sit on that’s about as nice as one a bum sleeps on in a public park. I don’t know why, but I thought they’d at least get some kind of Herman Miller shit in there, or air-conditioned ass pads. Still, very interesting.

OK, time for lunch.