I bought a full-spectrum light box. It’s actually not a box, but a bunch of weird-colored LED lights in a thing that’s about the size of a portable CD player or alarm clock. It’s used for light therapy, to allegedly curtail seasonal affective disorder and mess around with your sleep cycle in some beneficial way. I probably should have bought one of these when I lived in Seattle, when I was pretty much ready to hang myself by December of each year. I was skeptical, but I’ve read more about it, and a doctor told me to try it. I’m also always keen on spending sums of money on things I will use three or four times and then pack in the closet. Actually, I’m hoping to slowly wake up earlier and sit in front of the light as I’m at my computer, typing away at… well, whatever I should be doing on here.

Next year is the ten-year anniversary of this journal. Sure, there weren’t ten solid years of updates, but 4/10/07 will be ten years from the first update. I’ve thought about doing a ten-year book or zine or collection or something. (Actually, I got the idea because Julie at apeculture.com was talking about doing it for her site.) There are basically three reasons why I’m not sure I would do it. The first is that I did this already for the Seattle years of the journal. Second is that despite it being very readable, it sold almost no copies. And third, I’d have to dig through all of this shit and figure out how to do it in such a way that’s neat or funny or cool or something. Every once in a while, when I’m truly bored, I go back and read a bunch of old entries and find some real gems in there. But I wrote them, so I don’t know if they would be as interesting to others.

Not much else to report. I’m doing christmas cards and still reading the Bunker book, which is still pretty good. It reminds me of Papillion in places, except written a little better and no-bullshit. I’ll have to check out his fiction books sometime soon.

I was digging around old journal entries, and it bothers me that I now write in here once a week, at best, and back in 1997, I wrote longer entries on a daily basis. I’ve been thinking about this because the end of the year is approaching, and I have to do the annual firedrill of moving the old entries and creating a directory and index for the new, and due to the antiquated system I use to do this, it’s always a pain in the ass. (Yes, I know, I should install WordPress. And you should go fuck yourself.)

Anyway, the weekly update bothers me because it emphasizes that from Monday morning to Friday evening, I basically have to write off that time, and that period isn’t part of my life. When I get home from work, I no longer write or do anything or live - I eat a meal, spend an hour or two with Sarah, then go to bed. I can’t write books a day a week, and I don’t want to add some extra activity to my life that will distract me even more and make me feel like my weeks are even shorter than the 48 hours currently alloted. It’s hard enough to not think about work for 48 hours, and maybe get a movie and a single update into this thing during that time. I seriously think I should quit my job with no notice and become a dishwasher, or start heavily drinking, or maybe both. (Especially if the restaurant where I was a dishwasher gave me a discount on liquor.)

I finished reading the Jonathan Ames book I Love You More Than You Know, which wasn’t bad - more articles. The themes start to repeat themselves: the son, the alcoholism, the trannies, the parents, the self-deprecation. I think Marie mentioned in the comments a couple of weeks ago about his lack of shame being a reason not to like him. And I think it’s a double-edged sword - a lack of shame can cause you to confess some really hilarious stuff that works out into a good story. But it can also cause you to be really annoying and redundant. Bukowski had the same lack of shame, and it’s no secret that Ames was a big fan of his work, and largely followed the same formula Buk did in his early days of writing columns for Open City. Or maybe having to write a weekly column leads you into the same trap, I dunno. But Bukowski’s parents were horrible, and beat the shit out of him. He escaped them into a world of alcoholism and skid-row slumhouses, instead of asking dad for a handout every week and an open invitation to move back in his old room when things didn’t work out. I appreciate the brutal honesty schtick, but it might be more interesting if his parents didn’t foster it, but rather turned against him because of it. Ditto for the son. Some of the stories are good, but the extremeness of them is diluted because you know he’s going to escape back to a comfy family life, and there are no real consequences.

That said, I didn’t find out until just last night that Ames was a visiting professor at IU from 2000-2001. That really spent my mind spinning, wondering if he was at Bullwinkle’s a lot, or the main library, or what. That’s about when Summer Rain came out, a time when I had Bloomington on my mind something fierce. Weird.

Speaking of Bukowski, I started reading Edward Bunker’s Education of a Felon. It’s interesting sofar - Bunker was a career criminal in California, from his youth, up until his twenties, when he did a stretch in San Quentin. (He’s actually the youngest prisoner that ever did time there.) He was smart but uneducated, and slowly started reading books and writing letters and articles, and got to the point where he sold a book while in prison. He went straight then, and focused on writing. EoaF is a biography, a story of his youth. It reminds me a lot of Bukowski’s Ham on Rye. Bunker was 13 years his junior, but the stories of the pre-fake-Hollywood tinseltown, the streetcars and farm fields where there are now condos, all tie in with Bukowski’s imagery of his hometown. Of course, Bunker’s stories descended into youth wards, county jails, hard time, heavy crime, drug dealing, and bank robberies. Some of the machismo is similar, and it made me wonder if Bukowsi ever ran into him in later years.

A better comparison is the Jack Black book You Can’t Win. No, it isn’t the Jack Black that was in King Kong and Nacho Libre. It was a penname for a criminal turned writer in the 1920s, the same conversion as Bunker’s, but a decade before he was born. Black’s book showed the childhood swindling, and on to the criminal arts. With a bit of humor and a good sense of detail, he shows you the crime, then shows you why it’s impossible to pull it off without someone snitching and getting your ass thrown behind bars. It reminded me in some ways to Neal Cassidy’s The First Third, which is coincidental, in that William S. Burroughs loved You Can’t Win, and if you’re a fan of WSB, you’ll see where he gets some of his dry wit.

The one bad thing about this Edward Bunker book is that it’s very small type, set in very narrow rows, and the book is wide. With his long sentences, I’m constantly finding my eyes get to the end of the line, return to the left, and then wander up or down a line or six, making it impossible to read at speed. I really hate when books are laid out like this. I’d seriously pay the extra dollar if a bit more margin or spacing added an extra 50 pages to the length.

Something something something else here, I can’t think of how to end this, so something something something.

Note: This is a post from 2006. For whatever reason, this post gets more traffic than the rest of my site. And pretty much everyone misses the point and gets in arguments with me about this.

A few points of clarification, which nobody will read:

• One of the points of this post was about how urban legends are pervasive, and in writing about an obvious one that can easily be disproven with numbers, people still got pissed off and said I was wrong, refuting it with… urban legends.
• Another point was that crime is “worse” in big cities. I lived in New York at the time; I live in Oakland now. I’ve given up on arguing this because it’s useless. There are some 2006 numbers in this post, which are way out of date. I’ve completed an MBA since I wrote this, and would probably rewrite it with orders of magnitude more facts and figures, but it’s pointless to try to argue it. Believe what you want to believe.
• I made some snarky comments implying the Elkhart police were ineffective or corrupt. I think if I rewrote this, I would have been more polite about it. But since 2006, numerous national stories have come up about the corruption and violence of the Elkhart Police Department. I won’t summarize, but if you want to read about it, look here, here, here, or here.
• I’ve redacted the names of every victim or suspect in this post. I’d say you could figure this out by searching the news, but the only newspapers in the area have closed off their archives, and I’m sure if you search for this now, Google will give you a bunch of ads for probiotics to help you lose weight. So, good luck.

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I got an email from someone yesterday with regard to The Necrokonicon, specifically my reference to the unsolved murder rate thing.

I frequently get asked about this, maybe more than any other thing in the glossary. Half of the people want to know the source because they think it’s very indicative of life in Elkhart, and the other half call bullshit on me because they think Elkhart is the greatest place in the world and I’m a horrible person for inventing such a legend. Now I feel a need to break this down and/or do some actual research to get people off my back about this.

(And before I begin, I should probably state for the millionth time that the Necrokonicon is not a reference book, or a citeable, peer-reviewed research journal. It’s my ramblings and observations, with the occasional fact thrown in. Almost all of it is my opinion, and my biggest regret to ever doing the project is that some dumb-ass mails me every other week saying “No, Concord mall is at 60% occupancy and you said it was less than 50%!” So take all of this with a grain of salt.)

First of all, the unsolved murder thing isn’t true. Elkhart isn’t the unsolved murder capitol and never has been. Statistically, it’s always going to be a large city like New York or LA. But when you talk about per-capita rate, it’s a different matter. Many people don’t realize that Elkhart has statistically higher crime rates per capita than places that are perceived as being much more dangerous or evil.

There are a number of crime statistic comparison calculator things on the internet, mostly for people shopping for new homes, and they all largely draw on the same FBI crime statistics. I used http://www.homefair.com/calc/citysnap.html, which provides an index on statistics, meaning that the national average is 100, with higher than that meaning a higher crime rate, and lower meaning a below national average number. (This isn’t as compelling or interesting as an actual number-of-incident report, but if you know the population of the US, have a calculator, and passed 9th grade math, you can figure it out. Of course, if you went to an Indiana public school, statistically you probably can’t do simple math.)

In Elkhart, zip code 46516, personal crime risk is 129, and property crime risk is 190. In comparison, my neighborhood in New York city (zip=10002), personal is 214 and property is 105. What’s what? Bear with me because I’m too lazy to make a table, and the following numbers are Elkhart/NYC. Personal crime includes murder (162/141), rape (147/85), robbery(138/361), and assault(150/175). Property crime includes burglary(193/84), larceny(246/94), and motor vehicle theft(109/112).

This really pisses me off. Why? Because every born-and-died-in-Elkhart person pisses on me about how safe and happy Elkhart is, how you never need to lock your doors, how you can leave a hundred dollars on the table and come back and there’s two hundred, and then goes into the tirade about how horrible New York is, with all of the robberies and rapes and crack cocaine and hookers and guns and blah blah blah. Now look at those numbers. You are TWICE AS LIKELY to be raped in Elkhart as you are in New York. It’s more than twice as likely your house will be burglarized. Larceny, 250% higher in Elkhart. And aside from the New York comparison, EVERY SINGLE ONE of those statistics are higher than average in Elkhart; every one except murder risk is LOWER in the state of Indiana as a whole. Per capita, Elkhart is a pretty damn unsafe place to live, at least according to the FBI.

The next logical question is “how do the unsolved murders match up to the rest of the country?” And that’s where the trail ends. There are no unified cold-case statistics, and any agency that does broadcast their numbers is probably tallying them in a different way. You could speculate that if x percent of murders go unsolved, Elkhart’s per-capita unsolved murder rate is y, based on either FBI crime statistics, or actual tallies of the dead in Elkhart. But there’s no universal unsolved murder stat, and it would vary depending on the police department. In New York City, there are millions of taxpayers, which means the NYPD gets a lot more neat toys to go all CSI on murder cases. Elkhart has, what, 10 or 20,000 taxpayers? By virtue of scale, their police force isn’t going to be as equipped to deal with murders, and their rate is going to be higher. But you can only speculate on that rate. Speculation on that trend, though, is more valid.

The next thing to factor in are the known high-profile murder cases that have gone unsolved. First is (redacted), who was killed on Jan 1, 1988. Her murderer, (redacted), was charged at the end of 2004 for the crime. This was probably a driving force for the urban legend about the unsolved murder rate, because her parents were very critical of the police about the fact that the murder never got solved. There was also some vague urban legend that the two were at a party with a bunch of people, and got in a fight, and he said something like “if you ever break up with me, I’ll kill you,” and then she broke up with him, and her body was found and he split town. That rumor sounds similar to the “so-and-so cheerleader is pregnant” thing, but it gave the legend some substance. There’s also some conflict based on the fact that Elkhart County’s lead detective was fired for pursuing a suspect even after he was told not to. The county also never pursued DNA testing, which wasn’t done until the case eventually went to the state police. The DNA testing was also a no-brainer because (redacted) was already in prison for a different attempted murder.

The other high profile one was (redacted), who was killed in January of 1991. After 14 years, there was a conviction, once again because the case got bounced to the state police. And a more recent one was (redacted), who was killed in May of 1995; (redacted) was charged nine years later. I can’t find any cases other than that, and that doesn’t back up my once-per-year allegation, but it adds a bit of fuel to the fire.

The last thing I add to the mess is this: I heard this urban legend constantly in high school, which was before two of those murders. Everyone accepted it at face value. It mutated, as people claimed to have seen it on Geraldo or Johnny Carson (much like people in that era also claimed to have seen the president of Procter and Gamble on a talk show, confessing that he was a satanist.) I also heard people state that Elkhart had the highest per-capita income (which makes no sense whatsoever), or had the highest interracial dating percentage. And how do these legends happen? Even if they aren’t true, peoples’ fears, doubts, and prejudices cause them to happen and to gain momentum. Everyone in high school hated the Elkhart cops, because most of them were pricks. (I’m assuming they were because the pay was bad, and the only people who signed up were power-hungry control freaks who liked to put on a uniform and act like a dick.) When a legend came about that exposed the inadequacy of the police, of course everyone believed it. Even when urban legends are not true, the legends expose either the environment in which they were created, or the people that perpetuated them.

And add to all of the above the fact that the Elkhart Truth, the South Bend Tribune, the Goshen News, and Elkhart’s public records department are still in the 19th century, and it’s impossible to tear through all of their stuff with a search engine and read results. If I wanted to seriously research this more, I’d have to fly to Elkhart and spend a few weeks at a microfiche reader, which isn’t happening any time soon. It’s no wonder almost all of my google searches on this material returned my own pages at the top result. That’s fucked up.

Ah, four days off. Bliss. And no real plans at all, except that we’re going to an Indian restaurant for lunch, and making pizza at some point. I gave up on trying to do anything more complex on Thanksgiving years ago. The first issue is the difficulty in traveling anywhere further than down the block - airlines are fucked up, ticket prices are double, and people are sleeping in airports. Get in a car and point it in any direction in or out of any city, and it’s a parking lot. There’s also the issue that I’m not a to-capacity eater, and I’m not that into turkey. A piece is fine, but I couldn’t eat a pound of it over a six-year period. So I give thanks that my last big Thanksgiving was a million years ago.

The zine is done. Makes a great holiday gift. Just putting that out there.

I haven’t thought about what’s next writing-wise, and I’ve been wasting most of my time playing Flight Simulator on my laptop. I have the 2004 version, but they just came out with Flight Simulator X, the new one. I downloaded the demo of it, and it barely ran on my computer. It likes a machine that’s twice as everything as my current one, so I won’t be upgrading soon. It’s too bad, because they have a neat ultralight to fly, and they did a ton of stuff to juice up the terrain. The stills on the MS site look incredible. Of course, they were probably done on a $15,000 machine.

My ability to fly in FS2004 is getting better. Landings are problematic, although I can usually make the landing once I get the approach, which is almost never. I’ve learned a lot more about navigation and air traffic control, though. I’ve made hops across Florida, from Oahu to Maui, from Indianapolis to South Bend, and from Chicago to Elkhart, without hitting another plane or pissing off ATC too much. I imagine this kick will grow old in another weekend or so, and I’ll be torturing myself over what I should be doing, writing-wise.

The QWERTY keyboard was invented in Milwaukee. I never knew that, but I’m looking at a bunch of newspaper articles and unopened bills on my desk, and I just read that. Weird. Christopher Sholes patented the typewriter (with two others) in 1868 and later sold the rights to Remington for $12,000.

Not a lot of reading lately. I read through a lot of the zine, then picked up a WWI book, but it turns out it’s written by a British guy, and 30 or so years ago, and it’s in microscopic print, so it’s impossible to read. Today I started the Albert Goldman bio on John Lennon, not because I’m that enamored by Lennon, but because Goldman was slagged and discredited for his bio, which showed a lot of negative shit about Lennon that people didn’t really want to hear. For whatever reason, if you’re going to write a bio and you want me to read it, that’s the thing to do.

OK, time for bed.

OK, it’s done. Go here to preview and order the new issue of Air in the Paragraph Line. 21 stories by 19 authors about the fun, atrocity, and torture of work, in a nice, 284-page, perfect-bound, glossy cover book. Yours for only $10.99 cheap (plus s/h.) There are many very good stories in here, and a couple that are absolutely great. Makes a great gift. Buy 8 for Hanukkah and light one on fire each day.

I would write more of a blurb or work on the web site, but I am blurbed out. I think I have the flu, or maybe it’s just that I need to do nothing for a couple of days, which I am about to do. It doesn’t help that I had to type all of these addresses in and send off 18 copies of the book to everyone. And I will probably end up sitting in bed, re-reading a couple of the stories, now that they are on paper.