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 4:30. 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.

I’m back. Pictures are on flickr (although I’m liking that site less and less the more I use it.) Not everything is captioned, and yes there are a lot of pictures that are blurry and fucked up. Museums with low light, no flash allowed, glass cases, and my piece of shit camera will do that.

I enjoyed the trip and seeing new things, but I’m so glad to be back. My main two problems were food and drink. I thought I liked German food, but it turns out that I like German food made with American ingredients. There are some real differences in the quality of food in Europe. The meat is much tougher, and the pork products are cured way more, so they have this horrid taste, like if you’ve ever had shelf-stabilized bacon in a can from a camping trip or an MRE. Vegetables are all non-GMO, non-big agra, and not that incredible. I’m sure the eurotrash contingent would disagree, but I like tomatoes that are bigger than a golf ball. What was frustrating was that there are many American chain places that use German ingredients. I went to a McDonald’s hoping for the same burger and fries I’d get back home, but the meat was tough and gamey, and the potatoes in the fries didn’t have the same magical starch composition as Idaho spuds back home, making them taste odd. If I lived in Germany, I would lose 50 pounds in the first three months, because I simply wouldn’t be able to eat fast food anymore. (In fact, I lost about five pounds since we left, but I’m sure most of that is dehydration from the plane ride.)

And not all food was horrible. On our last night, we went to a more traditional German restaurant, and I had the best damn potato soup I’ve eaten in a long time. We also went to the fancy-schmancy restaurant in the hotel one night, and I got an eight-course dinner that was pretty incredible, if not a bit weird. The best dish was a cajun scampi that was lightly fried in spices, but was as tender as baby food inside, and served with a wasabi sorbet, which sounded odd, but was incredible. The main dish was three types of ox: tongue, shoulder, and breast, done up with some kind of reduction and cooked to the point where they were almost jelly. I also tried a lot of stuff I’d normally never eat, like duck liver, caviar, mackerel, and a few others. It was a strange meal, but very memorable.

Oh, the drink part - I think Germans don’t consume as much liquid as Americans. That eight glasses of water a day thing didn’t make it over there. I can understand the lack of fascination with large soda sizes; I went to a Burger King and got a super maxi size, and the soda was like 16 ounces, which is the child-size at an American fast food place. It’s hard to even find a 12-ounce Coke, let alone the 16 or 20-ounce big plastic bottles. The most popular size was a .2 liter or .33 liter. And that’s fine, but the water sizes are even more scant. Go to an American Safeway or Kroger, and you will find a million bottles of water that are a liter, if not more. (“Sport” sized.) I never, ever saw that. They don’t serve water with meals, they don’t have drinking fountains, and the water they do have is some kind of carbonated mineral water. No Dasani, no Evian, just the stuff that tastes like it will give you lead poisoning. And I drink like ten glasses of water a day, plus three or four American-sized Cokes. After a day or two of begging and pleading at restaurants to get a second four-ounce glass of water, things got old fast.

Nice things: the mass transit. There are two types of subway (S-bahn and U-bahn), plus streetcars, busses, light rail, longer rail, and the Eurail. The subway was a bit daunting at first, but it was also odd because there are no turnstiles to stop you from entering any station. There are just little paper tickets - you buy one, then stamp it in a validator machine to show you’re riding the train now. If you get caught without a validated ticket, there’s a fine, but nobody ever checked ours. If they did this in New York, there would be 40,000 people living in each station in a matter of seconds. The stations were clean, maybe as clean as a PATH train, so not sterile, but decent. Each station has digital signs telling you where the trains are going, and when the next train will arrive. (Same with bus stops.) Let me repeat that: THERE ARE SIGNS THAT TELL YOU WHEN THE NEXT TRAIN IS ARRIVING! Not “eventually,” not “at some point”, but “in two minutes.” They could never, ever, fucking ever do this in New York. And before you ask, yes the times were accurate. Trains regularly showed up a minute before the time. I never saw one run late. Another odd thing is that subway doors don’t open or close at each stop - you press a green button on the inside or the outside to open the door, and they close automatically as the train leaves. What’s weird is you can open a door as the train is slowing down for a stop. In New York, that feature would kill about 9 people a day. The trains were very nice; the S-bahn is more long-haul, above-ground stuff, while the U-bahn is underground, but more transfers to get from point to point than a NY train. But figure in that New York City hasn’t been divided and reunited and leveled by bombs over the course of the last 50 years, so their routes can be a bit more static.

In general, people in Berlin seem to be more trusting and self-policing than what I’m used to in New York. There were many times when I saw something and wondered “why doesn’t someone just steal that shit?” Like eating at a buffet restaurant, the German approach might be “just take some food, then tell us what you ate and pay for it,” where the New York version would be “Pay for the shit before you even touch it, then go through the metal detector, pick up the food, and get the fuck out of here because we’re not running a hotel.” There were many coin-op public toilets on the street (like the kind that clean themselves between uses) and it made me wonder if they could ever do that in NYC, or if people would just put in the 75 cents and move into the bathroom and never leave.

People were largely nice, and I never got called out for being an American, and didn’t have to pretend to be a Canadian or whatever. Not everyone speaks English well, but a lot do. The main problem is that we both look German enough that people assumed we were German and would start babbling away rapid-fire into conversations with us. The other problem is that German is alien enough to me that I can’t tell if a person talking in my peripheral vision is talking to a friend, talking on a cell phone, trying to get my attention, or frantically trying to tell me to stop what I’m doing because I’m about to massively fuck something up. I can tell people are talking, but I can’t tell if they are talking to me, or what the tone is. I don’t understand much Spanish, but I know enough that I can figure that out when I’m here. But it really started to make me paranoid, because I was always worried there was some small social thing that I was fucking up, like if I didn’t take off my jacket when I sat at a table, I was disgracing the owner of the restaurant and he would have to challenge me to a duel. Or whatever.

The big thing about Berlin is the wall, even though it’s largely gone. Every gift shop sells little pieces of the wall, which are probably just cinderblocks smashed up into little pieces, just like the Mt. St. Helens ashes you used to be able to buy in Washington. A lot of the former lines of the wall are now outlined by twin brick lines embedded in pavement and sidewalks. Most people envision a single, long wall, like a castle wall, but it’s a lot more complicated than that. The wall zig-zagged all over the place, and it was actually two walls: a taller one on the east side, a smaller one on the West, and a DMZ between the two. We went to the Checkpoint Charlie site, which is now a Disneyland for hucksters selling cheap shit to tourists. Want a picture with a fake army guard at the checkpoint? A bath towel? Snow globe with a piece of the wall in it? Former commie t-shirts and hats? Come on down, bring your Euros. We went to the museum there, and it was the most tacky and ghetto (no pun intended) museum I’ve seen since me and Larry went to that John Dillenger museum in Brown County a decade or so ago. So yeah, the wall is a big cottage industry. And I bought a fridge magnet, so I guess I’m just contributing to it.

I can’t even begin to describe the museums we went to, although I took some photos. The German historical museum was my favorite, and did a good job of describing German history from before christ up to present. The up-to-WWI collection was an excellent primer on the early days of Romans and Huns and Emporers and Napoleon and everything else. The 20th century part was Nazi central, with a lot more than I’d expected. They had a lot of original third reich stuff, which was interesting for a bit, but after a few rows of it, it was like watching the History Channel’s WW2 marathon on repeat for days on end. It was odd that the Treaty of Versailles was called the “treaty of shame” in all of the exhibits. It was also eerie to see a display of an engine from a British bomber that was shot down over Berlin. I’m desensitized to seeing these “spoils of war” displays in museums; it was weird to see one from the other side.

We also went to a couple of art museums, which were interesting. I don’t know a lot about art or modern art, so when I see something I think is neat, I’m not thinking “wow, what does this represent?” but rather “wow, how did he do that?” I’m more interested in large-scale modern art from the welding/carpentry/stoneworking point of view than the actual art, so maybe that doesn’t make me the best critic. But the museums were great. I saw a lot of Andy Warhol at one, Picasso at the other, and Felix Gonzales-Torres had a huge showcase at one place. I also saw a Damien Hirst in there, “The Void,” the one with all the pills. That museum also had a huge display of video-based pieces, all of them incredibly odd and interesting. Like one guy was showing the movie Psycho over a 24-hour period. Maybe I should get a video projector and start filling out grant forms.

Oh, I also saw the world’s largest model train layout. There are a bunch of blurry pictures of that in there, too.

I am sure there’s more to talk about, but I need to either take a nap or try to get started on the day…

It’s fall. The weather’s cool, I’m wearing my leather jacket every day, and I’m listening to Type O Negative’s October Rust album a lot more. That album, and Metallica’s Master of Puppets always remind me of the fall, like listening to Pink Floyd reminds me of being depressed in high school. I used to say fall was my favorite season, and it mostly still is, except I hate it in New York. There are no trees, it’s when everyone gets sick and inevitably I get sick, and I hate dressing for the cold, then boiling in the subway, then going back to the cold, and eventually making the cold even worse. The one thing I like about the fall is that I usually leave town for a week. And one of the best parts of New York is that it’s very easy to leave, with three major airports right in my back yard.

Earlier this week, it came up that I’d be in Germany for Halloween. When I thought about it, I couldn’t remember the last time I was home for Halloween. Turns out it was in 1996. For prosperity’s sake, here’s a list of where I was for all of the rest of the 10/31s.

1995: Boston. I went for a trade show, maybe Internet World. I was there for a whole week, staying in Cambridge, and pretty much every night was a blackout-level drunken rampage. By about the 30th, I was sick as fuck, and we had a big party on the 31st. I bought a bunch of dayquil and took way too many of them, and thought they weren’t working enough, so I took double that, and by the time we left for the party, I could pretty much see through walls. A woman was dressed as Catwoman in the whole leather costume (before the Halle Berry box-office bomb) and every guy in the place was hitting on her with the same typical pick-up lines (“I’m batman”, etc.) Someone dared me to try something fucked up, so I went up to her and told her that I had all of the Batman toys from McDonald’s and the batwoman one worked the best in the bathrub. She sort of freaked the fuck out. We then went to a gay bar, possibly called the Ram Rod, and checked out the most bizarre Halloween costumes you could possibly imagine. Like, I saw a dude dressed up as a nun in a mini-skirt. Then we flew home a day or two later, and I found that you should never, ever fly with a head cold.

1996: Seattle. I was home. I was also horribly depressed, and did nothing.

1997: Elkhart. I went home for xmas the year before, and it was a total waste of time and money to pay highway robbery rates for mid-December flights. So I made a pre-emptive holiday visit. This was the first time I ever saw my nephew Phillip, and it was the last time I ever saw the inside of my old house in River Manor.

1998: New York. I still lived in Seattle, but I visited Marie in Washington Heights. Went to tapings of Conan (back when it was still funny) and the Daily Show (also when it was still funny.) We watched the parade live on NY1, and it was funny because this guy was with someone dressed as Mickey Mouse, and when the reporter asked where Minnie Mouse was, the dude said “Oh, she’s fucking Goofy” on live TV.

1999: Bloomington/Cincinnati. My uncle died, and I decided to go to the funeral, which involved renting a car and driving about 13 hours to Ohio. I drove all day on Friday, and then the funeral was very early Saturday morning. They blew through the viewing, mass, and burial, had a meal, and all of my relatives scattered, leaving me there at about noon, with nothing to do. I called A and she told me Bloomington wasn’t that far of a drive, so I headed west. I caught up with Bill Perry for a bit, then found A. The plan was to go to a party where a bunch of former UCS geeks would be. But first, I bought one of those rubber halloween masks with a wig glued to it, so nobody could figure out who I was. Had a great time.

2000: Ithaca. I dated this girl from Cornell for a bit, and took the train up to spend a week with her. The train was slow, uncomfortable, boring, and while I was in the bathroom taking a piss, the door flew open, and the entire car saw my junk. I stayed at a Best Western or Motel 6 or something, next to a Wegman’s. Every day, she went to classes, and I said I was going to be editing my book. Instead, I wandered around on foot, spending as much time in the grocery store as a homeless guy looking for warmth. I broke up with her shortly after that, but not because of the Wegmans, the hotel, or the train; it was just a bad idea for a 29-year-old on the verge of a midlife-crisis to date a 21-year-old who is going through all of these “what am I going to do when I graduate” issues.

2001: Las Vegas. This was the weird, post-9/11 trip where nobody was in town, I rented an Audi TT and got a speeding ticket, and not much else.

2002: Las Vegas. On this trip, I was a little bit sick, had this huge money snafu because the Stardust took a huge deposit out of my debit card, and I went for one of the longest walks in my life. And crap, I just realized I got home on the night of the 30th, so I guess I was in New York.

2003: Las Vegas. I was wrong again - I actually got back on the 29th for this trip, so I guess this whole theory is fucked up.

2004: Indiana. I was the only person in New York City that didn’t believe that John Kerry was going to sweep the election with 100% of the votes, and I decided to leave town and avoid the shitstorm. This was also another pre-emptive holiday strike.

2005: Amsterdam - Once again, my memory has failed me on this, because we actually took this trip on the 9th. On Halloween itself, I was in the middle of moving.

And that’s it. Time to go watch Six Feet Under.