Compiling this journal book has been harder than I thought. I have a million journal entries, but they all fall into one of the following categories:

• The weather
• How I’m sick
• What I’m reading
• Music
• Movies
• Long, rambling stories about the past
• Travel diaries
• Bad stuff that happened
• Why I hate New York
• What I miss about Indiana/Seattle
• Unfinished or rejected stories I decided to post to get rid of them

Or a combination of the above.

I’m now trying to categorize things into each of the above and have a section of the book of each, which is similar to that Mikal Gilmore book of old articles, and isn’t as boring as a straight-up chronological thing. The trip essays from when I crossed the country in 1999 will be in there, maybe as an appendix. And I’m trying to dredge up either some paper journal entries, or some of the stuff I write in my not-published journal, so there will be new stuff that isn’t on the web. (Yes, I keep a journal on my computer that isn’t online, mostly for when I’m so disgusted with writing online, but I need to write about something.)

I’ve been taking codeine lately. Not large doses, but in Tylenol-3, for my back. The good thing is, it completely blows out the back pain, and makes me feel all nice and neat. But I can’t take it at work (or maybe I should) and it completely weirds out my dream cycle. I have a lot of really vivid, really abnormal dreams, but within five minutes of waking, I completely forget them, but still remember that I had them. I also wake up in the middle of the night with an incredible thirst for something really sweet. On Friday, I woke up in the middle of the night and drank half a gallon of Tropicana fruit punch without even thinking about it. The back’s just about better, so no more weird dreams.

I went back and re-read The Device, or at least what I had done, and it’s largely unusable. There are line 9 chapters of setup, before the plot starts. Then there’s no plot, no notes on the plot, nothing. I vaguely thought of stealing some of the premise of that book for the second act of the current book (not the journal one, the real one) and there’s no way. I might steal the most basic premise of it, and the title. It will mean this is the third book attempt with the same title, which might be bad. It’s like the car stereo I had that I used in three different cars, all of which ended up totalled. I think that happened with the parts off of James Dean’s car, too. Or maybe that was a Twilight Zone, I’m not sure.

Oh, I got the first Air in the Paragraph Line with a bar code yesterday. Neat.

Still hobbling around with a bad back, but I think it’s making progress. I must have really tore up some muscle. Heating pads and Ben Gay have helped a lot, though. My sister told me about some Amish cream called Unker’s that is supposed to work wonders, if you can find a place to buy it. The web site (unkerssalve.com) is pretty hilarious, because it looks like it was designed in 1996, and is full of Jesus quotes and whatnot. The sidebar says “Listed on FDA Over the Counter Drug Registry. / Listed as OTC Drug Manufacturer by the FDA. / Stays Active for Years / To God be the Glory / No Turpentine Used.” Well, I’m glad they got out the turpentine. Her friend’s mom buys it by the case, because she blew out her knees praying. That’s a pretty good testimonial for atheism, especially to someone that spent about two months of 2006 in bed with a blown out knee.

I’m reading The Good German by Joseph Kanon, and I’ve got to say it’s a pretty damn decent book sofar. Yes, it’s a George Clooney vehicle on the silver screen, but the book is a lot more than that. It’s set in Berlin, the summer of 1945, when the occupation forces are trying to get things cleaned up and un-Nazified. The Russians and Americans are vying for their pieces in what will be a strongly divided pie in the future. The city is absolutely fucked - buildings smashed, no utilities, no coal for the upcoming winter, everyone shifting around the city, looting, cutting down trees in parks and city streets covertly at night for fireplace fuel. Cigarettes have become the new unoffical currency as a black market flourishes around silk, B-rations, smokes, booze, prostitutes, and oil. The Russians were stupidly given a set of plates for the occupation money, and they’ve printed it nonstop, flooding the currency market. And every German that wants a job (street sweeper, guard, pallbearer, whatever) has to be checked out to make sure they weren’t a Nazi, which makes the market for fake reference letters and paperwork lucrative. (i.e. a letter saying “I knew Mr. Falli when we were in Treblinka together, and he’s totally not a Nazi. Signed Rabbi I.M. Fictional”)

Anuway, all of this is a good setting for an excellent page-turner about a reporter finding out a crime that’s hard to unravel. The other reason I like the book so much is that I was just in Berlin, so all of the geographical references are very familar to me: the Ku’Damm, Zoo Station, Brandenburg Tor, and so on. But in the 1945 version, instead of glass malls and new shopping centers, it’s abject destruction, with still-smoldering ruins of houses sliced in half by allied bombs, and the Reichstag half destroyed and covered by Russian graffiti from the troops that overtook the city. Hitler’s bunker is still there (it’s now a parking lot) and the Russians won’t let anyone in, but every Pentagon brass hothead wants a picture there to send back to the kids. It’s interesting to intersect the two Berlins in my head and absorb that story.

A similar thing happens to me when reading fiction set in New York. I bought American Psycho I think when I was in Seattle (maybe Indiana) and I couldn’t get three pages into it. After I moved here and got the general gist of the city in my head, I read the book and loved it. Same goes for Catcher in the Rye; I read it when I was in high school and just thought it was about a snotty kid. But when I was able to overlay my knowledge of where the streets and subways were, it made it come alive in a totally different way.

I got Guitar Hero 2, and I’ve wasted some time in the last two nights with that. It has a new feature where if you play at a certain level through a group of songs, you’re asked to do an encore, and it picks a new song that isn’t on the list, and is generally cooler. The first three encores were Spinal Tap - Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You, Kansas - Carry on My Wayward Son; and Black Sabbath - War Pigs. So that’s fun.

Time to get ready for work. I wish I had a little more time in the morning, so I could get working on this journal book, but I’d rather sleep. At least this is a short week - TGIT.

I seem to have rung in the new year by somehow wringing out my back. Something in my lower back is fucked, in an entirely different way than usual. I think it’s just tight muscles, and not some greater damage, but it always drives me nuts when this happens. Typically, in three days, it’s all over, but I spend the whole three days wondering if it’s something horribly worse and I need to see a doctor or a chiropractor. It would be helpful if I owned an MRI, or I had some kind of table or contraption that I could strap into that would mechanically snap my spine into correct position.

A lot is going on with the zine. The first thing is that issue #11 now has an ISBN: 978-1-4303-0628-3. It will be available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders in a matter of weeks. The price at everywhere but lulu’s store is now $14.95; it’s still $10.95 at lulu. So if you’re morbidly afraid of their store, or hate their shipping options, or are very locked into Amazon’s wishlists and address book and all of that, you can now buy it. You pay $4 more on Amazon, and I make 50 cents less, plus I had to shell out a hundred bucks for the setup, but so many people think something isn’t real unless it’s on Amazon, that I felt I had to do it. So there.

The zine now has its own myspace page: myspace.com/aitpl. Feel free to add it to your friends and get… well, whatever you get out of MySpace. I haven’t really figured it out. It’s interesting because when I created the profile, I said the zine was female and slim/slender, and got a deluge of friend requests from dudes who are functionally illiterate but search solely on those two criteria. I changed it to male and then got a bunch of friend requests from strippers and whorey types that are probably just dudes. Some sociology grad student looking for ideas on research should probably get on this.

I’m also creating a soundtrack for the zine. It should be interesting, since three people have responded, and their songs are punk, country, and A3 (which is both and neither, I think.) More on that when I get more songs.

I also have the themes for the next two zines picked, and I’ve mentioned them to everyone who contributed to #11. I’ll talk about that more later - I’m more concerned with pushing this issue before I get rolling on the next one. If you’re really itching to write something for the next issue, email and I’ll tell you more.

I finished reading all of my journal entries from 2000 and 2002-2006. (I did not write during 2001, and I will probably write an essay explaining why.) I don’t know the exact division, but a bunch of entries talk about weather and my bitching about it; a bunch talk about how I’m sick; and a bunch talk about how I can’t write. I don’t know if those are interesting to anyone else, although sometimes the weather entries get pretty insane and hilarious when I’m dealing with the New York summers with no AC. What doesn’t fall into any of those categories gets into my longer essays, which I really do like. And a lot of those are reactions to some kind of media: book, movie, music, or whatever. Some are strictly reviews, but some are more interesting stories relating to some part of my past versus said media. I’m not sure why I’m explaining all of this, since there are a couple of links to the left that will show you everything, but the summary of all of it is interesting to me. Taking ten years of your life, cutting it in half, and looking at the layers like the rings in a tree trunk is always an interesting exercise.

Speaking of bitching about health, I’m going to take an hour-long shower to see if the hot water shakes out this spinal kink.

It’s a New Year. It’s hard to believe it’s 2007, after spending forever in the 80s and 90s. It’s even weirder to think I retire in 2041, which sounds like a hugely futuristic year where we all have jetpacks and clones and bionic arms, although we will just have computers 50 times as fast and a version of Windows that runs 50 times slower, so it’s basically the same shit.

It was impossible to get out of bed and come in here to sit under the blue light for a while. There’s Seattle weather outside, 54 and everything covered in rain. We went to dinner last night, then came home and watched Dr. Strangelove for some reason. We watched about 8 minutes of the various Times Square crap to see the ball drop, and then went to bed. I’m getting old - I remember when midnight meant the start of the party, and now I’m pretty much dead by then. The neighborhood was pretty sedate, aside from some stupid fuck with what sounded like a bird call that wouldn’t shut up. There are many moments when I wish I had a sniper rifle and diplomatic immunity. Instead I had sleeping pills, so it all worked out well.

I think to continue my current cleaning binge, I will be removing names from the right of journals I read, and removing friends from my LiveJournal, in order to pare down the amount of stuff I read. I found that after my return, there’s a lot of stuff I simply don’t want to read anymore, because life’s too short. There’s also the issue that I seldom click on the links to the right; I just go to my friends list on LJ and read all of the posts. Unfortunately, it is impossible to remove someone from your LJ friends list without causing high drama, like I didn’t pick you for my 4th grade kickball team or something. Seriously, just because I met you at a party 10 years ago, I am not obligated to read your reposted memes and drama for the rest of my life.

My old pal Derik Rinehart has a band called Speechless that just came out with a CD. You can preorder it now, although I think it comes out in February. They also posted four songs on MySpace in that little media player that’s typically annoying, but works well in this case. It’s hard to describe the band, maybe prog-rock except with more of a metal edge and some slight jam band aspects, but not in a crappy way. Anyway, go to their myspace page to check it out.

Another CD I just ordered is the new Stuck Mojo album, available at their site. I never got into Stuck Mojo when they first came out, as I dismissed the idea of a metal/rap fusion as stupid. Since then, I’ve enjoyed Rich Ward’s work in Fozzy, Sick Speed, Cafu, and his solo album, so when Stuck Mojo came back around, I found it a lot more interesting. They are releasing their own CD now, trying to avoid the problems with record companies, which have repeatedly ripped them off. So you can get the tracks for free on MySpace, YouTube, and the web site, but you can also send them the ten bucks if you find it worthwhile. The new disc, called Southern Born Killers has a couple of weird, anti-terrorist songs that have been generating a buzz because of the politics, which I guess is a good way to sell some albums. Either way, it’s interesting.

I also got a gift card for iTunes that I’ve entered into the system, and I’m now looking for worthwhile songs to add to my collection. It’s weird, because I will suddenly think, “I don’t have a copy of Ziggy Stardust anywhere”, and three clicks later, I do. I guess a lot of people deride the iTunes model because you don’t really “own” your music, as in you don’t have a piece of plastic and aluminum you can drag from computer to computer for the rest of your life. But face it, you don’t really own anything in this life. I have a deed to 40 acres of property, which you’d think is the ultimate in ownership, but every time I think about building or drilling holes in the ground, I realize I don’t really “own” the property - I just have the ability to permanently use it as the county sees fit, provided I pay taxes every year. I’m at the point in my life where I really don’t give a shit if I really own that copy of Eye of the Tiger as much as I care about listening to it when I feel like it.

Speaking of Ziggy Stardust, we re-watched The Life Aquatic the other night, and it’s still really hilarious as a repeat viewing. It’s very much a Bill Murray vehicle, but it’s got that Wes Anderson absurdity to the max, and everyone else in the cast gives an excellent performance.

Okay, I’m very curious to see if this new entry for 2007 will completely topple my new indexing changes. I also need to get back to reading through 700+ journal entries to separate the wheat from the chaff. Christ, I bitch about the weather a lot - that’s like half the entries.

Like I said before, I have a moratorium on “here is what I did last year”/“here is what I want to do last year”/“here’s how horrible the year was politically, even though I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about” posts. I’m pretty sure you can read that at any other blog or site on the web. The one bit of politics I have is to mention that Hussein hanging. One, it sure hasn’t had as much coverage on the web. I thought for sure there would be a million weepy posts about how this won’t help anything blah blah blah and/or “ding dong, the witch is dead”, but it’s been very quiet.

The whole thing pisses me off because I am 36,000 words into this book, and there is a small sub-plot involving Saddam, and now I’m forced to either change it, remove it, or maybe add in a “no, that hanging was staged bullshit, he’s still around” or something. I seriously thought he’d be around for thirty years amidst a clusterfuck of appeals and technicalities. Hell, Charlie Manson’s still dining at the Corcorcan Hilton on the government dime, and his little helter skelter attempt was almost 40 years ago. But I suppose someone writing a fictional absurdist book about Elvis back in ‘77 wouldn’t need to change much after he keeled over on the shitter, right? Maybe I should add that Sadaam and Elvis are hanging around somewhere in a Tijuana bar, trading stories and shots of codeine. Stranger things have happened.

As an aside, I was never any huge fan of Gerald Ford’s, but I do feel bad about what’s happening with his funeral. Because of the timing, pretty much everybody is out of town and they’re probably going to have to hire some homeless people to be his pallbearers. Nixon had five presidents to carry his casket; everyone’s too busy watching football to haul away Ford. I think the next Pauly Shore comedy show will have a higher attendance than Ford’s funeral. I always felt bad for Ford because he not only inherited all of Nixon’s shit, but he was the only person appointed the presidency, and I always thought that maybe he didn’t entirely want it. As a person who often gets appointed shit jobs that nobody else will take in my career, I can sympathize.

I now have so many books to read, I can’t really decide on any single book to read. In addition to the armful of Christmas gifts, I also decided as part of a solution to the population control problem on my shelves, I would pull all of the books I have never read, and that I want to either read, or maybe dump in the future. I have a lot of books I bought in the last year or two that I shelved but never read and then forgot, and I have other books that have been following me for over fifteen years that I have never read and might never read at all, which need to be dealt with at some point. So I now have this “to be read or eventually ditched” queue now. I also have a pile of books that are the “dead and gone” pile. I know at least one of you regular readers will mention the greatness of dumping this shit on eBay or Amazon used or whatever, but I’ve found it’s much easier to drag them to the library a block away, donate them, and make up a bunch of semi-inflated prices per book and take it as a tax writeoff. (I am now in the income bracket where I am forced to file long-form and take deductions, and since I don’t have a house, kids, a religion, any political party I’d give one fucking red cent to, or anything else, deductions are more than welcome at this point.)

The one thing I am reading now is the Portable Henry Rollins, a gift from Sarah’s brother-in-law Matthew. The book isn’t part of the Viking portable series (I wish it was so it would match my other ones) but it’s a similar concept - take the best of a dozen books and put them in one place. I think I own about 80% of the books anthologized in this tome, but it’s nice to see them all in one place. It also really reminds me of how I got started on this whole writing thing, almost 15 years ago, which was the Rollins spoken word tapes. Those escalated to his books, and the desire for me to start keeping a journal, and eventually trying to write my own stories and books. Some of the stories in the anthology are ones from his tapes, and that brings me back to that period when I was trying to define myself as a writer, or at least capture something on paper. The book is also printed with the ragged right paper (I don’t know the technical term, that shit they use in arty books and wedding invitations), which typically drives me apeshit, but it reminds me of some of the artsy paper and notebooks I tried to use when I was first starting out. For a little while, I thought the type of paper and type of notebook and type of pen would radically change my ability to keep a journal. Later I realized that Mead college-rule and a ball-point stolen from any bank or hotel would work just fine, and all of the “special” journaling stuff was just bullshit.

The Rollins stuff is interesting in a few different ways, once you strip away the typical egomaniacal layer that usually obstructs people. Below that, there’s this part that originally caught me, this thought that loneliness and despair are not only a pure form of pain, but they are also essential to the human condition. He always talks about the need to be alone, the times when he grew up in DC and worked at the ice cream store, how he didn’t drive or take the bus, because he needed to walk across the city in the night alone, to have the pain and pleasure of not being around any other humans. He would walk and relive the horrors that happened to him in the city, the times he got mugged or saw a dog in the street get nailed by a bus, the pieces he could not erase. I identified with that to an extent, because I would walk across campus alone at three in the morning, and would see the million layers and landmarks of what happened to me over the years, and that time at night was when I was most alive, and most depressed. But I also thought Rollins was full of shit, that he was a millionaire that could get any chick he wanted, and he was obviously crazy because he wanted to go back to that period when he was a lonely, confused little punk living in a shithole apartment and living on nothing. But now, 15 years later, my memory always pulls back to those times, and I realize that even though I’ve gained so much, I have also lost that overwhelming pain that defined me back then.

Anyway, this is starting to sound like some kind of new year’s bullshit, so I’ll leave it there. I am actually going out to dinner tonight at Alias. I could pretty much live on their BBQ ribs and onion rings (at least until I keeled over from a heart blockage.) Until then, I need to keep working on the still-unnamed next book. I think until it has a name, I will simply call it Book Three from now on. Anyway, Book Three is going good, and I hope to at least get the first third done in the next month or two so I can let some other people read it and see if I’m crazy or not.

(BTW, still thinking about that ten-year journal book. I’m thinking a good title would be “This is not a Blog”. From 4/10/97 to today, I have 702 entries and about 496,000 words. I think War and Peace is about 550,000 words, to give you an idea of magnitude. Of course, once I edit out all of the stupid shit, it’s like 32,000 words. I’m also thinking of pulling in some bits from my paper journals, and there will be a certain amount of new content, essays explaining things and why the hell I did this anyway. But I need to work on the aforementioned Book Three first, so this is a side project, as if I have time for side projects.)