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.

I paid off a credit card today. This is sort of my new hobby, and an expensive one, but I’m down to just one credit card that has a balance, and I’m done. (Well, except for my land mortgage, and a student loan that will probably outlive me by 50 years.)

This made me think of a really good idea that either will never get implemented, or that someone else will “think of” years from now, and I will spend a decade saying “I thought of that first!” The idea is a reverse credit card statement. Imagine that every time you buy something on your credit card, the name/date/details are put in a last-in/first-out queue. Each month, when you make a payment, your statement shows that month’s finance charge you paid off, and then shows all of the items at the top of the queue that were “removed” by this payment. So like if you had a Visa that was full of crap from the last ten years, and you were feverishly paying off the balance, you might get a statement that said something like “you paid this month’s 68.11 finance charge, plus you paid off a pair of movie tickets from 1998, and a bunch of books you bought at Barnes and Noble from back then.” (Fractional percentages would be used to remove part of something at the top of the queue if it’s greater in size than the payment. i.e. “you paid off 24% of that stereo you bought in 2000.”) I’m sure there is some way you could implement this with a combination of e-statements and online bill payer, but I think it would be interesting if card companies did this so you could really see what you were “paying off” each month, and just how long crap stays on your card.

I was thinking about this because earlier this year, I paid off (and then cut in half) my Chase card. I got the card in 1992, when I was desperately scrambling to pay for a summer session of classes. It’s actually been paid off and run up again a few times, so the classes I took that inspired stories in Summer Rain wouldn’t be on there, but I was hesitant to shred this card, because it was my oldest one, and it had the “member since” in the bottom corner. Whatever marketer thought of that, it almost worked. But since this was one of those toy credit cards with a low limit, high APR, and no features other than the ability to buy a discounted made in China clock-radio for only $19.99 by collecting a bunch of stamps, I got rid of it. I thought maybe when I called to cancel, the member since date would possibly get me some leverage in the negotiation, but it didn’t. Oh well.

Not much else is going on except I have to find a TV show to watch. I mean, I have to find a TV show that has DVDs on NetFlix. We’ve been on this kick of watching old TV serieses (seriii?) that neither of us really watched back when they were on, that might be interesting now. We started with Northern Exposure, after the Alaska trip, and we also watched the first two seasons of Nip/Tuck (actually, that may have been first.) Now we have three episodes left on Six Feet Under, and I need to find something else, since Sarah picked the last few and now it’s my turn. The concept has worked pretty good; we now watch almost no network TV, just an episode or two off of DVD, with no commercials and no need to schedule your life around a TV show. It’s cheaper than buying a set of DVDs, and it’s also good when you find out the show’s a dud a few episodes in. (We tried the Larry David show, but I couldn’t really get into it.) I should probably also state that we’re into non-genre-specific drama things. The sitcom is dead, and scifi is iffy. I have no real interest in cartoons, and archived reality shows or whatever aren’t that great. So, who knows. I’d step through the second season of Lost, if it wasn’t such a fake-cliffhangery sort of thing with every episode.

OK. Christ, I can’t believe how early it’s getting dark now. Al Gore should do a movie about that next.

It’s largely impossible to eat a triple-decker club sandwich and work on a journal entry at the same time. Usually, it’s impossible for me to eat a triple-decker, period. But I’m trying to do both at the same time, and making a huge mess of it. It’s bachelor night, since Sarah is out of town on business, and I’m sitting here eating a triple-decker club sandwich. I guess I probably would be if she was here, except I’d be in the kitchen and talking to someone, instead of sitting at my computer and listening to iTunes and typing this. Ten years ago, I’d be eating a club sandwich and injecting Jack Daniel’s into my heart. (Okay, maybe not.)

It’s actually very weird to think that next April, this thing will be ten years old. I know I haven’t updated every single day of all ten years, but I very distinctly remember starting this journal, and I also very distinctly remember when I was ten years old, and you put those two facts together, and it’s pretty fucked up. I just thought of this because I was listening to a Pat Metheny song that reminded me of 1997 or 1998, the salad years of this thing. And also, I finished reading that second Jonathan Ames book, and it contains a lot of columns with dates on them, and when I read that sort of thing, I try to remember what I was doing then, or if eBay existed then, or whatever. If I’m reading some old Bukowski journal, I can’t do that, because the dates are like a decade before I was born. But now my Seattle years are ancient enough history that I can look back at them and have enough space to really think about things.

The other thing that came up like that was the fact that my youngest sister turns 30 next month, and I very distinctly remember when she was born. I think I vaguely remember one moment when Monica was born. My mom had to stay in the hospital for like a week, because that’s what they did back then, and at that point, I don’t really know if I’d been away from her for more than a few hours, let alone a week. When we were in front of the hospital, (my dad, my cousin/foster sister Linda, and I), my dad pointed out where my mom was in the large sea of windows that made up the side of the hospital. This hospital is probably smaller than the parking garage in my current complex, and I have no idea if my dad knew where my mom’s window would be, but it was a nice gesture. As far as my sister Angie, I remember my mom having a packed suitcase in the kitchen, ready to go for the labor trip. When it started, my mom and dad dropped me and Monica at a friend of theirs that lived a block or two away. I sat in their double-trailer, bored, until we got the call that it was a girl.

And Angie was the Polaroid child. Back before everyone had three camcorders in their back pocket and/or cell phone, about the best you could do was the Instamatic, which my parents bought right before her birth. All of her good and bad moments got captured to little square images bordered with that trademark frame of thick white cardboard. The photos stopped after a year or two (those film packs were expensive), but the images lived on in albums, until they rapidly aged into nothing but cyan and amber tones. Monica was the 135-film child, which had a delay while you dropped off the rolls at the pharmacy. But I was the film slide child, and all of my photos were locked in that unviewable format until I got a scanner and digitized them this year. Anyway, Angie’s birth seemed like a few weeks ago, and it was 30 years, and that really makes me feel old. I’m sure I’ll blink twice and it will be 50 years. What the hell happened to those three-month summer breaks that lasted forever?

Well, as much fun as I’m having in bachelor mode, I’ve got to take my vitamins and then think about going to bed soon.

I think one of the occupational hazards of only updating this thing every week or two is that I tend to forget what happened over the last however many days, and it causes me to sit down and think “well, nothing’s happening.” The same tends to happen when I update every day, though, especially because I don’t like to simply write about day-to-day crap or work politics or whatever. Sometimes I get ideas for a journal entry, but I don’t have a fixed time to write anymore, and the ideas come and go. I should be writing them down, but I never do. And most of my ideas happen in the shower, so even if I had a special pad of paper or something, it wouldn’t work in there. I think I saw an underwater slate type thing that scuba divers use, but I’d probably spend $40 on it and never use it.

The zine is done, I think. The cover and PDF are uploaded, and I ordered the proof, and if that’s OK, then it goes live, and can be ordered by all three of you that actually buy this stuff. Actually, I ordered two proofs, because I fucked up and uploaded a PDF I made from a week-old directory, and didn’t catch it until after I placed the order and got past the no-cancel point of no return. I am sure I will keep this one on the shelf as a “rarity”, just like the messed up proofs of various other books of mine. I say rarity because technically all of my books are rarities, since they sell so few copies. And I doubt there will ever be a point where I become famous and they go onto eBay for thousands of dollars. But Jack Kerouac never kept drafts of his books, and they would now be worth millions, so my impulse is to keep them.

Anyway, the zine is done, except for the part where I pony up some insane amount of money to buy a bunch of copies and then send them to each contributor. I am happy to send copies to people, especially if this makes them happy or they are impressed with seeing their words in print. I am not happy to have to order them, wait, get a bunch of envelopes, then drag a hundred pounds of books to the post office and give them a ton of money. And please don’t tell me some shipping shortcut that is supposed to save me time and money. New York post offices are all equally horrible, and are never open, and I have no car, so I can’t drive to the suburbs. I used to think the post office in Bloomington was bad, but it’s seriously like the Millenium Hotel compared to the places here. I just have no choice, and I have to suck it up and pay the price.

I don’t know how to feel about finishing an issue of the zine. It is exhilarating to get it all finished. It’s a small amount less than when I do my own books, because I always have a fear that I’ve fucked up something in someone’s story, and they will get pissed about it. It’s another half-inch of shelf space taken on the Konrath shelf of my home library (actually 1” here, because of the dud proof) and I am always happy to get more volume there. This book is blue, a very deep cobalt blue, and it is my first blue book (black, black, red, black, black, green, grey, red) and I am happy to get something that really stands out but is also unused. I will be happy to hear from people who were contributors and write to tell me they liked the zine, or even better, liked a story by another contributor. Believe it or not, I actually pay for the costs and typically lose money, and I have people that send in stories and never write back to acknowledge that they ever got their zine, let alone that they liked it or thought that sucked. And with 18 other people in this one, at least one of them will do this, and it always pisses me off, even though it probably shouldn’t.

There are two things I don’t like about finishing the zine. One is that it will go out and become available, and nobody will buy it. It’s very hard to sell an anthology, and I never expect to get many orders, and I never do. I plan these things by trying to pick people who have their own little bit of fame, be it a book or band or blog or something, so their completist fans will buy a zine, maybe find another writer they like, and start writing to them or reading their web site or book or whatever. I don’t know if this really happens - probably not, or I’d sell many more copies. But that’s the intent, and like I said, there’s no way I could recoup my costs unless each writer got like 15 or 20 people to buy it, and I think the average is closer to 1 or 2. So all of that hanging over my head sucks.

The other big problem is that the project is done, and it’s time for me to move to something else. And I don’t know what that is at this point. I have all of these other ideas that are half-dead, and I think I need something totally new to waste my time. Who knows what, but that’s going to keep me neurotic for a while.

I’ve been reading a lot more than writing lately. I’m working on the Jonathan Ames book My Less Than Secret Life, which is pretty decent. I really liked his book What’s Not to Love?, and I really wish I could write something like this, except I don’t have that many embarrassing episodes compared to him. Scratch that - I don’t have that many that I’m willing to write about. Maybe the statute of limitations on some of the older episodes has expired. I don’t want to write about Bloomington for the sake of Bloomington, or Elkhart for the sake of an entirely complete historical whatever. (Like the Necrokonicon, which seriously has sold exactly two copies at this point.) I think there’s some inner issue I have to get through to do this, though. I can’t write funny stuff about all of the other crazy individuals in my life, because even though I can tell these stories to other people, I can’t tell them to said individual’s face, and I think you need to have that ability to proceed. If you’re going to talk about your crazy uncle Freddy, you have to be prepared for the consequences if he reads it. (And if those consequences include a lawsuit, you have to deal with that too.) The other problem is that I feel there was a great deal of stupidity and awkwardness in my life - I’ve done a lot of dumb shit, and I’ve never been able to come to terms with that. I have a horrible shame issue to deal with. And I guess if you can’t tell any of your friends about that time you shit your pants in France, you can’t write a book about it. (The pant-shitting thing is a Jonathan Ames story, not mine, btw.)

And it’s winter, which sucks. It isn’t even real winter - it’s 50 and pouring rain winter, with sundown at like 4

. I’m back in Seattle, I guess. Except in Seattle, I had a car and there were covered garages everywhere. Now, it’s a jacket and the wind cutting through your clothes. I’ll probably like the first snow, but other than that, I’m waiting for spring. The only good thing about winter is avoiding it - sitting inside, under a blanket, reading, watching everyone freeze their balls off outside. I guess that’s okay, but I like fall much better.

Oh, and we saw the Borat movie yesterday, and it was so totally fucking funny, it was unbelievable. If you haven’t seen it, go do so.