I get into this phase maybe once or twice a year when I simply cannot pick out what food to eat. I mean, the clock strikes noon, I am famished, got plenty of cash on me, and it’s not shitting rain or hot enough to liquify the sidewalk or anything else, but I simply cannot decide on what kind of food I want to eat. I can’t even think of a genre, or a direction to walk. And it goes on like this, meal after meal, until I am continuously more and more fatigued with things because I haven’t had a good meal in days. Yes, I’ve had a meal, and I don’t exactly look like a UNICEF kid, it’s just I can’t find something that makes me happy. And this is probably a bigger metaphor on life, because I also can’t get any writing done, find a book I can really stick with reading, and so on. I’m sure there’s a medication for this. And I’m sure one of it’s 7492 side effects are that it causes loss of appetite.

Anyway, yesterday we went out and went to Flowers Cafe, which is a sort of hippie-esque diner a few blocks over on Grand. It’s not a hippie place in that they serve wheat grass and tofu hot dogs, it’s just a deli, but with lots of retro flower-power type murals on the walls. It’s not too overdone, and they make a good reuben, so we order there a lot. And for whatever reason, we went there for breakfast on Saturday, and I got two eggs on a roll with bacon and cheese, and it completely kicked this food neurosis thing in the ass. It was a really good sandwich, and I loved it, and I wish I could get another one right now, except they’re closed, and I just ate dinner anyway.

After a day of walking around with Sarah and her friend Dre, we ended up seeing The Devil Wears Prada, which was funny, but probably not too relatable to those who don’t live here. We also went to this diner afterward called Big Daddy’s, which was the typical shit-on-the-walls genre, but not corporate, and with the typical menu where, instead of just saying “hamburger,” it says “Daddy-o Burger.” I just wanted a hot dog, and was presented with a giant plate that had pretty much an entire pig’s entrails stuffed and tied off into a hotdog. It was excellent, but it was also like half my body weight in food. Anyway, it’s a good place to crash if you’re just north of union square. I wish it was closer to the office, but then I’d probably need some paramedics to cut me out of my apartment in a few months.

Speaking of, I was on this food nutso thing the other day, and it popped into my head that I really wanted to run for the border and hit a Taco Bell. It usually happens once a year, but there are none by my new digs (there’s actually an old one, boarded up, with the tri-stripe awning still there and the logo spraypainted out) so I did the research and found the closest one was a half mile from the office, over on West 4th. Me and a couple of coworkers planned it out like a jailbreak, since we didn’t want to spend our entire lunch break trying to get over there. And Taco Bell has a very short halflife, before it congeals and turns cold and completely inedible. (And forget about microwaving that shit.) So we decided to cut over on the subway, one stop, hit the KFC/Taco Bell, and put in our giant order for all of the other people who wanted in but were too chickenshit to make the run. We got back in 30 minutes flat, ate, and then spent the afternoon wishing for napdom, hoping the gurgling in our guts wouldn’t go bad. ‘Beller’s regret. But I was happy.

There’s something in the sauce of that Mexican Pizza that reminds me so much of when I used to work there. And when I was thinking about it, I realized - it’s been twenty damn years since the summer I spent working the drive-thru at the ‘Bell, saving up for one of those new-fangled CD players and a dual exhaust for my Camaro. Shit, I remember when I was twenty, so it makes me feel even worse to remember something twenty years ago. It’s so weird though, that tomato sauce always reminds me of buying food when I went off-shift, leaving with a big bag of taco supremes and nachos and riding home on my ten-speed. When I first had my car, I dumped an order of those cinnamon crispas under the front seat, and spent months trying to vacuum up that sugar-cinnamon dust from the crevices of the carpet. Of all of the cooking smells mixed together in the back line of a Taco Bell, the most overpowering one was the crispa smell, maybe because it was the only sweet one. I don’t think they sell those anymore, but if they did, it would be an instant time machine for me.

Crap. It’s pouring rain outside. I have to go to work tomorrow, which sucks. Then I get the 4th off. Then a 3-day week. Whole Foods had nitrite-free uncured hotdogs, and they actually taste pretty much the same, so that’s my little homage to the whole July 4th, picnic, barbeque, drunken fireworks, whatever thing. That’s all.

I used to have a bad habit of going to the drugstore on a Sunday evening and dropping a decent sum of money on random stuff that I suddenly realized I needed: razor blades, acne medication that promised to work, cases of RC cola, issues of Lowrider magazine, that new Michael Crichton novel, whatever. And at various points in my geography, the drug store became a Target, which is basically a drug store but they also sell furniture and motor oil and low-end clothes. And I guess for a year, it was a Marsh grocery store, but Marsh pretty much was just a drug store that also sold 36 aisles of food. I think one of the reasons I did this is because in Indiana, everything closes at 5:00 PM on a Sunday, except Osco’s and Walgreens. (And grocery stores and Target…) And in a need to do something on Sundays, I’d go to the only thing open, and it was hypnotic, and I would suddenly realize I’d need dental floss, or beef jerky, and boom… $57.86 of consumer goodness.

And now I realize that I can’t really shop at pharmacies anymore; they have become colluded over the years. I went to a CVS last night (shampoo, glasses cleaner, legal pads, facial cleanser) and it was just impossible to shop. Maybe it was a New York thing, but whatever hypnotic spell the drug stores of 10 or 15 years ago in Indiana had, these ones had the total opposite. The aisles were spaced wrong, the ceiling height was different, everything was laid out in this “get-your-stuff-and-get-the-fuck-out” manner that broke the spell for me. And I had a friend that used to soapbox on this for ages, but drug stores have gradually sunk into this hole. It used to be drug stores had a soda fountain, and ice cream cones and a sandwich bar, and you went there to relax. They were like the Cheers bar, but no alcohol. And if you needed some tincture of iodine too, they had it. And when’s the last time you saw a drug store with a soda bar? You haven’t, because all of those old-timey stores with the hand-painted signs and the zinc ceilings and whatnot got bought out and gutted, and replaced with an exact clone of the CVS store that they have in 5,700 other cities. Has anyone written a book about this? Someone should. (Not me, though!)

I am in the middle of trying to get book 3 going. I know there are really like 9 books or whatever, but there are basically only two (Summer Rain and Rumored to Exist) and all of the other ones are greatest-hits/live at the Budokon sort of things that don’t “count”. So now, book three. And I need another book like Rumored. I need ten like Rumored. So this time, I’m trying to write a full outline, with three acts and all of that shit, for a book, and then I will have a whole plot, and I won’t have to play the “it’s a book about nothing” game that made 98% of the people out there look at me like I was starting a NAMBLA chapter in the back of a day care center. The book will have all of the expected dark zaniness of Rumored, but be a book. I think. I hope. But no word on this until it’s underway, because this is the part I always fuck up.

Not much else. I wish I was back in Alaska now. OK, back to work.

I’m back from Alaska. I actually got back at noon yesterday, but I was up all night on the flight back, and I am taking the day to decompress and relax and stuff. I am loading the pictures to Flickr, but it is taking forever because there are 800 of them.

(Update: Flickr photos are here. Note that Flickr appeared to lose 12 of the photos during the impossible batch upload, and it will take me forever to figure out the 12 missing, and take 754 hours to upload those 12, so try to avoid the Flickr page, and try to avoid them in general, as it appears they have written an entirely impossible to use tool that’s about as reliable as a piece of wet toilet paper as a birth control method.)

The trip report [gone, sorry] is just a bulleted list now, and partially makes no sense, but I will try to expand it at some later time. Sarah actually scheduled and planned the trip at the last minute, and booked reservations and stuff for everything so we didn’t spend the whole vacation at the mall or eating at Arby’s or whatever, which is what would have happened if I went alone. So we got to do a lot of cool stuff. Probably the best thing there, and maybe the best thing I’ve ever done, was a snowmobile tour we took out of Girdwood, south of Anchorage. It was with Glacier City tours, at snowtours.net. They first airlifted us out of Girdwood Airport in a Robinson R-44, which is a tiny little four-seater. We went up and over a mountain, and then at about 6,000 feet up, we were dropped off on a glacier. There, we met our guide Chris at a basecamp, which consisted of nothing more than a tent and a bunch of snowmobiles. There was nothing but white all around us, densely packed snow, with the very occasional bamboo trailpost marking where we got to go. We took off on three polaris snowmobiles, which were an absolute blast to drive. You sit low to the ground, and even though we were surrounded by ice, it wasn’t that cold outside, and I wore a light jacket and gloves. It was a completely surreal experience, being in such cold-looking surroundings, but wearing what you’d normally wear on a May day, plus helmet and gloves. And I have prescription sunglasses, but after a half-hour of wearing them, everything looked normal because it was so bright from the reflection. The trails started simple, and then we gained speed, to where we could drive along at 40 or so miles an hour, which seems catastrophically fast when you’re right off the ground, with an open-visor helmet and no windshield, and you’re trying to hang on to your snowmobile. We stopped in a lot of places, usually where the snow ended and the mountain began, and got to crawl up for many million-dollar views. It was seriously like mountain-climbing in Tibet, but without the pesky climbing. And once we got done snapping a few pictures and admiring the view, we got back on and rode down a ski hill at insane speeds. There was even part that was like a giant natural half-pipe, covered in snow, where we could carve the side of the hill and then turn, reverse, and do the same on the other side. It was absolutely fun, and if you ever go to Alaska, it is a must-do.

There was a lot of white and glaciers and ice for the trip - we also took a cruise down the fjords south of Seward and saw a big glacier there. The big chunks of ice were blue instead of white or clear, which is weird. If I could find a way to make that ice in a bar with a machine, I would be an instant billionaire. We got to sit and watch this huge glacier calf and drop off big pieces of ice, which was pretty awesome. We also chartered a sailplane on our last day and saw two glaciers, one more like a field of ice, and the other more of a cliff. Lots of pics to be seen on my pages, so look for that stuff, even though a snapshot does not do it justice. On the cruise we also saw a lot of wildlife, like bald eagles, orca and humpback whales, sea lions, sea otters, a brown bear, and a million birds I cannot identify. And when we were driving in Girdwood, we saw a female moose standing at the side of the road. I jumped out and got a couple of photos, but was scared (mostly of some weird flea-borne disease) to get too close. She didn’t really care either way, she was just busy eating some bushes.

Speaking of which, lots of lesbians in Alaska. Lots of tough guy types too. Lots of jailbait. Lots of Jesus. It’s a very southern type of atmosphere at first, especially with the biggest economic booms being construction, petroleum, and the military. It isn’t really southern in the typical redneck Alabama way, though, and it’s hard to put your finger on it. There’s the whole outsider, outlaw thing, but there are so many differences. Yes, everyone drives pickups, but everyone needs pickups, because you never know when you’re going to have to drive 100 miles in the dirt and mud. Everyone loves guns, but everyone needs a gun. One of the big stories the day we left was that a dude woke up to breaking glass in his house, got the gun, went downstairs, and was face-to-face with a 400-pound black bear. He unloaded the glock into him at point-blank range, and the bear turned around and said “you got anything else to eat?” (Of course, it says something that this story was front-page news there.)

I always expected Alaska to be the land of frozen everything, but the whole time we were there, I didn’t need a jacket. It was nicer there than it is currently in New York. What was weird was that we could go up into the mountains and see the snow and ice, but then go back down and be in 76 degree weather. One day, we went to the Alyeska ski resort and took their tram up to the top. I figured ski season was long since over, but when we got up there, the mountain was open, and a whole bunch of kids were on snowboards, carving it out on the mountain. It was so abnormal to be up there in jeans and a t-shirt, watching people in their “winter” gear on the slopes. In fact, some people weren’t in winter gear - we saw a lot of dudes with no shirts and sunglasses, riding their boards.

Overall, I liked Alaska a lot. It was very quiet and quaint when I was there, and the people overall (with the exception of the rude blue-hairs in their tour groups) were very nice. Everyone was pretty laid back, and politically, everyone was pretty close to my own views. I want to go back again. Actually, if I could find a way to live there, and then spend the winters in Oahu, I’d be pretty much set.

Still waiting on Flickr. God damn, their upload tool is slow. Anyway, back to work tomorrow (if I can even find the place.)

I seriously think there’s more open WiFi in Anchorage than there is in New York City. It’s pretty weird. Anyway, morning of day three here, and I’m debating on whether or not to just keep updating as we go, as opposed to writing a giant travelogue when I get back (that noboy will read.)

The sunlight thing is really fucking weird. On our first night, we went to bed at like 10:30, which was like 2:30 our time, and it was broad daylight out. It was seriously like noon. I woke up to take a leak at like 2 AM and it was just barely dusk. The sun was setting and it was turning red on the horizon, but it was still light enough to read a newspaper outside. Last night, I woke up at about 4:30 AM, and the sun was already coming back up.

The night we got here, there was smoke in the air and it made your eyes tear a bit. It reminded me of when I visited my land in Colorado in the summer of 2002, when half the state was a wildfire. I thought maybe it was a preventative burn, but we saw the Sunday morning paper and it was a forest fire that took out 150 acres. You could still smell the burning wood, although it’s about gone now.

We got an early start yesterday, and drove around a lot. We have a Toyota Matrix, which is pretty much the same as the Zipcars we always get in NY. We went to a Denny’s for breakfast, then went to a Fred Meyer. I’ve forgotten how extensive Fred Meyer is - it’s like the nerve center of all grocery stores. We found more forgotten, new, and jumbo-sized products than I’d ever seen. In New York, you can’t even find corn dogs - they had a whole freezer case of them. They had two-liter bottles of gatorade, which I’d never seen. Lots of other weird stuff. They also have Kroger brand stuff, which was a blast. I found a generic package of Kroger sex lube, which was really hilarious for some reason. I didn’t get that, but we did get a cartful of water, drinks, and other crap, which is much better than paying $3 a bottle downstairs for water, and we have a fridge in the room, too.

We walked to a cafe for lunch - I really wish I remembered names or took notes, and I’m too lazy to search. But after that, we checked out a huge museum of Alaskan history. They had a weird bird exhibit, lots of stuffed falcons eating stuffed and viscerated wombats and whatnot. Lots of Alaskan art, ranging from landscape photos to native stuff made from bones and ivory. The ivory carvings were incredible. The general history part wasn’t bad, with a lot about the Aleutians and Russian Orthodox, and some cool stuff about the pipeline. There was also a smaller Russian Orthodox museum across the street, but it was closing right as we got there.

We caught a big mall on the way back, and bummed around more before going on another big drive, checking out more stuff. We found a bunch of houses built in this strange style, with almost flat roofs, a sort of shed-style 80s thing. We also found a lake by the airport that was entirely made of slips for small, one-engine floatplanes. They were all arranged like houseboats on a lake, but the middle part was their virtual runway. The airport itself is a trip too, nothing but huge widebodied jets from the lower 48, or tiny single-props flying to the bush, and nothing in between. We also drove through a huge park that was road going nowhere, maybe a former military base turned public, with a lot of construction but nothing other than this single road. There was a bridge crossing the road at one point, all brand new engineered lumber, but nothing on either side. The road finally emptied out to a big rec area on the shore, with lots of people mountain biking.

Eventually, we ended up eating at a place called Gwennie’s Old Time Alaskan Inn, which was sort of a dive, across the street from a Harley dealer, but it had a lot of charm. They had tons of pretty cool photos on the wall of when Anchorage was nothing more than two general stores and a whorehouse. Their sourdough bread was still being made from a starter they used before the war. And I think my plate of BBQ ribs was pretty much the whole animal with some sauce on it for $12.

I think that was all of yesterday. Today’s Memorial Day, and we’ll see what’s open. It’s my turn in the shower, so that’s all for now.

P.S. I was thinking about this the other day, and realized that Anchorage’s weather is actually better than Elkhart’s in all seasons. Elkhart gets much colder in the winter, and much hotter in the summer. Plus in Elkhart, you pay a lot of tax that goes toward nothing, while here you pay no tax, and the government gives you like a grand a year in oil revenue.

Hello from Alaska! Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I am SSHed to my Mac back in New York, and I’m on the 8th floor of the Captain Cook hotel in downtown Anchorage. It’s 9:12 PM and it is broad fucking daylight outside. I think we have another four hours of daylight tonight, and my body thinks it’s 1:12 AM. This could be a major problem.

Today’s 10-odd hours of flying was made much better by flying in first class. We had seats 1A and 1B the whole way; on the first leg of the flight, we were the first on, the first off, and the first served with every round of food and drink. While the poor schmucks in coach got a micro-bag of pretzels and nothing else, we ate a nice lunch off of china with real silverware and drinks in actuall glass glasses. Quite a nice change. This was slightly distracted by a late departure due to fog, and a required spring across O’Hare from gate C567 to gate B1, but once we got there, we got the royal treatment. Plus I had the laptop with two batteries, and watched about three movies, plus played a monster SimCity marathon.

Alaska’s pretty damn nice. It’s nothing like anything I’ve seen before, although there are hints of previous pasts in there that remind me of things. There’s that touch of Seattle, since they are distant cousins on some weird way. They share some similar regional businesses, and the nature is of the same genre, albeit much more pronounced here. There are some excellent mountains on every horizon, which remind me of my land in Colorado, but things are much bigger here. It reminds me a bit of my time own in Southwestern Washington, the smallness and the industry. But it’s more than any of those, and I’ve barely seen the place.

We checked into the Captain Cook, which seems like an okay place. Some of it reminds me a bit of what would have happened if Long John Silver’s every launched a line of upscale restaurants. Lots of dark wood. The rooms themselves are pretty neutral. We’re right on the corner, so we have huge windows facing both north and east, and have a good view of the city. There isn’t a lot of a city here, but we did go for a walk, looking for some food. We’re just over from the city square, which isn’t much. Things are pretty spread out here. It’s nice though, a nice breeze going through the windows and a very laid back feel.

Should I stay up a few more hours and push the internal clock? Or do I crash now and wake up at 4 in the morning? And can I even sleep now? It’s seriously as bright outside as it is at noon back home. I guess I should see what’s on the tube.

P.S. Buy the new book!!