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.

It’s winter, sort of. The temperature has been consistently under 60 for about a week, aside from a weird day where it was 70. The 50-ish temps mean I switch coats to my leather jacket, which is always exciting to me, for like a day. I’ve written about this before, but I’m too lazy to look up the old posts. It’s always interesting to me, because after months of no jacket or a light jacket, the leather jacket feels like home to me. It’s so heavy, it feels like putting on armor. And the smell of the leather always brings back the memories of all these other points in my history, back to when I first bought my first leather jacket in 1993. (I’m now on my third.) So I like that, but in a few weeks, I’m going to wish I could trade the thing in for one of those Arctic parka things.

It’s really odd that New York has the most people wearing black leather motorcycle jackets compared to anywhere else I’ve lived, but I’m also given the most unending shit about my jacket, especially from people I work with. If you think it’s odd that a person would wear a black leather jacket, you’ve spent too long in the fucking Hamptons. Seriously, check out the other 40-some states some time. And yesterday, I was at a health food store (believe it or not, I take a shitload of vitamins and supplements these days, for fear that my immune system will slow down more and I will be exposed to all of the viruses and parasites in this city) and I completely forgot that I was wearing the hide of a dead cow in a place full of level 7 vegans.

And it’s weird that I even give a shit about that, and I think that the fact that I do is one of my biggest weaknesses as a human, because I care far too much what people think of me or my writing, and almost none of those people really give a shit about me at all. Like I spend a lot of time trying to contact authors of books I have read and enjoyed because I think that they would care about the opinion of a reader, and almost 99% of the time, they don’t even answer their mail. And I do that because I would hope someday that people would write me letting me know if they enjoyed my books, and that also seldom happens. There are times I believe in karma, mostly when a bunch of bad shit happens to me in one day, and I’m convinced that it’s all because I cheated on a precalculus test in 1989 or something. But then I think about the above construct, and realize that karma can probably be safely shelved away with all of the other religious theories in which I don’t believe.

I read a Jonathan Ames memoir called What’s Not To Love?, which was pretty hilarious and also made me think that maybe someday I’d like to write a straight-up memoir (as opposed to the Summer Rain-type autobiographical fiction thing.) And then we went to see the movie Running with Scissors last night, and that 90% unconvinced me. The movie was not bad, but it wasn’t really that funny to me. There were a couple of good lines, but all of them were in the trailer. It was an interesting movie, and some of the acting was great, but it just didn’t blow me away or anything.

This convinces me that I really don’t get the entire memoir genre that’s so popular, with Augustin Burroughs and David Sedaris and so on. I’ve tried to read their books, and they sort of drone on to me like a shopping list, but whenever I see a video or hear a reading of them, people laugh at all of these points that are supposed to be funny, and I don’t get it. I mean, the funny parts are amusing, and some might make me chuckle, but it’s not ha-ha funny to me. I’m sure it’s some sort of demographics thing, like the same reason that I find almost all of NPR completely unlistenable, but tons of intellectual types enjoy it 24/7. And the flipside is true - I don’t think it’s technically possible to be a fan of both this memoir genre and, say, Andrew Dice Clay. I absolutely fucking loved Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but I know a lot of people who thought it was about as compelling as films of botched colon surgery.

And I don’t give a shit in the sense that I bear no hostility towards that genre, and I can keep reading my stuff and ignoring their stuff, just like I do with country music, Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings films, and whatever Disney/Pixar animated film of the month has talking fish, toys, cars, or whatever. But the problem to me is that I really do want to write a memoir in some sense, and just by picking that type of document, I’m instantly compared to these writers. And I simply don’t know how to write stuff that would appeal to that audience. I seriously think it would be easier for me to lay down a dance single in a studio, or maybe paint a modern art masterpiece than it would be for me to pen a memoir that was compatible with those standards in any way.

There’s also the issue that I’ve never been beaten, in rehab, on the streets, or sold to my mother’s shrink. I grew up in a tri-level house in a sea of tri-level and ranch houses, all with identical aluminum siding. There’s a part of me that thinks that because I haven’t lived a really out-there life, I couldn’t write a book about my life that would be interesting. But another part of me thinks it’s not the events, but how you frame them and write about them that makes it interesting. So who knows.

The zine is almost done, sort of. I have enough submissions to equal 170 pages, which was the length of #10. I have a few pending submissions that will maybe bring it up to 200. The cover’s not done or even thought about (I have the idea, just haven’t done it yet) but each story is already laid out in FrameMaker, so I don’t have a huge project ahead of me. I got a couple of last-second stories that were absolute fucking genius, so I’m happy with what’s going into this one. I am still nervous that I’m going to have to mail out more free copies than I will actually sell, and that’s a pretty legitimate fear, since it always happens. I want it to sell a lot of copies, and not because I make like 34 cents a copy, but because I want a lot of people to read some of the good stuff in it. And I want all of the authors in it to get some more exposure. My hope has always been that Y number of writers comes to the zine with their own audience of size X (the people who buy their shit no matter what), and so Y times X buys the thing, but some of the fans of one writer say “hey, that other writer is pretty cool too” and they go out and buy their books or read their web site or whatever. Last time, a couple of people posted links to the zine on their blog, and one person actually went out and pasted the press release into a jillion discussion boards and web sites. But yeah, not as much synergy as I’d hoped for. We’ll see how it goes this time.

(I’ve vaguely thought about writing a press release for the zine, mentioning that this guy used to write for my last zine, just so it shows in a million web searches. I’ve wasted a ton of time talking to the press about the guy, which converted to about zero book sales. If some idiot can get a book deal because they’re a 17-year-old blogger from Harvard, it seems like the distant zine buddy of the FBI’s most wanted might at least get me a column in Salon. But, I know I mentioned above that I didn’t believe in karma, but I think trying to huckster the terrorism angle would probably be a bad idea in general.)

I’m leaving for Berlin on Saturday. I have not done a single bit of preparation. Sarah picked out a bunch of restaurants. I bought a book, but read like a page of it. Time to get busy on that, although I’m now reading a bio of a Vietnam helicopter pilot, which is a bit more interesting…

I think I’m sick. Either that or I’m drinking ten glasses of water an hour because of some psychosomatic disorder, but I’ll probably stick with sick. It will be a nice weekend to do little, though. Too bad I have four new books that will get here after the weekend. I should time the Amazon purchases a bit better.

So I’ve been keeping a paper journal since 1993, and after a few odd-sized books, I finally settled on the Mead 120-page college rule 3-subject spiral notebook. I have about twenty of them filled with scribbling from years ago. I have been working on one at a slower rate, since life has changed and my routine has changed and I spend more of my time recapping my day and my thoughts with a person rather than with a page. My current one was started in January of 2005, and it’s just finishing. In comparison, I have one from June to December of 1996, same number of pages, all written front to back. Okay, I was more depressed then, but I’m also depressed at not writing that much.

So, I’m down to the last two pages in the 2005-2006 model, and it’s time to buy a new one. I went to the drug store next to work, and… they don’t have them. I went to two more stores, plus an Office Depot - no dice. They have heavy-duty, dayglo color, 18-pocket, super laminated, dinosaur and robot-themed, extra pages in the front and back with maps of the US and multiplication table notebooks. Not the regular, two-armed two-legged ones I have been able to find at every damn drug store from sea to shining sea over the last decade and a half. I looked on Amazon, and found that I could order them in cases of 24, or just one for $2.99 plus $5.99 shipping and it would take two weeks. And oh, every notebook on the market now has microperforated pages. Easy to tear out when you hand in your algebra homework. Easy to tear out on accident when you’re in bed writing. Easy to tear out when you even look at it on the shelf ten years from now. I’m certain the microperforation was pushed through by some legislative act of a California-based concerned parent group that are worried that children are going to tear out nonperforated sprial notebook pages and tear off the perforated edges and use it to choke themselves or possibly manufacture methamphetamines. I JUST WANT A GOD DAMNED NOTEBOOK, NOT A FASHION ACCESSORY!!!!

(I just found them tonight at the Rite-Aid by our house, though. $1.99 each. Only red or green, though. I bought three. That should last me until 2021 at my current rate of decay.)

I did a bunch of the zine layout tonight, while a marathon of “That 70s Show” ran in the background. Sarah is on her way home from a meeting in Chicago. I guess there were delays involving O’Hare, if you can believe that. I think I laid out 110 pages, and I have maybe 30 or so more in the hopper. I think my email and posting a week ago asking for more stuff actually just pulled in a lot of shorter bits. I really need some quality, 5000-word stories. I was thinking about posting to the Bukowski group on LiveJournal, but that would get me inundated with horrible poetry. If all else fails, I will just pad the thing with a bunch of my own short stories, and it will be a Jon Konrath reader that happens to have a couple of other stories in it.

I’m reading the Neil Peart (Rush drummer) book about when he went on a bike tour in Africa in 1988. It’s an interesting description of the people and problems, but it’s also a lot about his own problems with the people he toured with. I wouldn’t mind seeing a country like that, although I don’t know if I could ride my bike down the road and back these days with this knee. I’d also be afraid of eating pretty much everything one could find in Cameroon, unless I packed about five pounds of Immodium tablets in my saddlebags. Still, it would be pretty damn interesting, especially with a digital camera, and a couple of the aforementioned notebooks. His book is also interesting because he talks about how you see a country so much more on a bike. It’s funny to me, because when I was a kid and riding all the time, I was listening to his music, and seeing Indiana in a much different sense than I would in a car.

OK, too tired to keep messing with this…

I had some dental work done yesterday. Nothing serious, just two fillings, one that was very minor, both were re-dos of older fillings. I started this journey of major dental restoration ten years ago, almost to the day, and I’m now finding that some of those fillings are at the end of their lifespan. I always thought of fillings and crowns as permanent, but now I’m seeing it’s more like working on your house, and having to repaint or reside or replumb every decade or two. At least my new dentist is okay, and cheap. He’s also about 100 yards from our apartment, which helps.

BUT… last night I had an extremely horrific dental trauma nightmare. I dreamed that some of my front teeth were fucked up, and I didn’t have the money/time/gumption to go to the dentist. So I took some of those gold-colored helical roofing nails, and nailed them into my mouth, so the rounded heads of the nails would look like a gold tooth, ala Flavor Flav or whatever. Then I got really nervous that I did permanent damage (no shit, I had nails going into the roof of my mouth) and was freaking out trying to find a dentist before some bacterial plague would set in. Then I woke up and ran to the bathroom faster than a Taco Bell-induced colon explosion, so I could look in the mirror and see if all of my fucking teeth were intact. I hate that feeling, but also love it - the feeling that you’ve dodged a major bullet, missed getting killed in a major accident. I’ve heard that it’s similar to doing cocaine, which is why I’m glad I don’t, or I would have cashed out my 401K long ago and bought stock in a Columbian processing plant so I could buy direct.

Speaking of unending nervousness, I am still working on the zine, trying to get the next issue squared away. I have some very good stories in the can, and I’m trying to finish my own story, which might be pretty good. (It might be horrible, nobody’s seen it yet, so who knows.) I am nervous about pagecount, though. It was about 57,000 words last time, which is about 170 pages. I wanted it closer to 200, maybe more. I have 10 stories, 35,000 words now, which is about 100 pages, plus another 7500 words in my story. I guess I want like 20 stories, and I need some killers as far as length, because I have some shorter pieces, and only a couple of longer ones. I realize all of this nervousness is completely masturbatory right now, but I’m always nervous about this shit right down to the point where I send in the PDFs.

I bought this pencam thing for like $30. It’s about as big as a snickers bar, maybe a little smaller, and takes 1.3MP pictures, albeit with a shitty plastic lens. I bought it thinking maybe I could hide it in my bag and easily get it places my current huge camera wouldn’t go, like in museums or something. Or just so I could walk around with the big tourist cam out. But I’ve found that the pictures are mostly awful, unless you’re outside in broad daylight. They do have a sort of artsy-fartsy lo-fi thing, though, like an old 110 camera. The other problem is that it beeps incessantly and loudly, when you turn it on, off, take a picture, low light, etc etc. I wish I could crack it open and cut the speaker out of it. Maybe I will.

Going to brunch in an hour. I should probably work on my story more and then find some shoes and socks.