I should mention this now, because I never update this anymore, and I will simply forget to do so later: as of next Monday, this journal is officially nine years old. Okay, there were a couple of periods when I didn’t journal online. But dig this: 662 entries; 461,837 words. That’s roughly double the size of Summer Rain, and the most-received comment on that book is that it’s way too long.

I’d like to write some huge, introspective thing about what this means to me. But honesly, I’m surprised I’ve lasted this long. I’ve been keeping paper journals since 1993, but I almost never get a chance to write anything in there anymore. It used to be a daily ritual, but I just wrote something in there a few weeks ago, and I noticed I hadn’t updated since we were in Vegas in January. I need to do something about that.

Not much is up otherwise. I am listening to the new Joe Satriani, and it’s good, but I can’t tell yet if it’s great or not. He hasn’t had an album that really grabbed me since Crystal Planet, back in 1997. (When the journal started.) I have the new Queensryche album on the way, and I hope it’s interesting.

This weather is positively dreadful. It went from “almost nice spring day” to “January shitburger rain and cold” in about 24 hours. Even thinking about looking outside makes me feel absolutely morbid. I feel like I need to get a dozen of those lightbox full-UV lamp bulbs and permanently affix them to my head. Maybe I can mount them to a walker and push them around the house with me.

I was sitting in a diner tonight with nothing to read, and I found I had one of those Moleskine journal books that I started to fill last summer, but all of the entries were completely disjointed and made no sense. Like one entry said “write journal entry about guilty pleasure - liking Black Sabbath albums w/o Ozzy on them.” I’m not sure what the fuck to make of that. The next page was a drawing for a mouthguard you wear when you sleep that contains a bunch of sonicare-type toothbrush heads and fluoride injectors, along with a notation of “would cause drowning in sleep?”

I still get, on the average, a million-dollar idea every three or four days, but I never write them down. Some of them are obvious, and some require far too much capitol for me to pull off. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I thought if you had a really high-scale mall, it would make a lot of sense to install a driving range like the one they have out at Chelsea Piers, so the husbands could put a charge card in the wife’s hands and send her to Nordstrom or whatever, and they could get out the 3 iron and hit some balls. And an overpriced pro shop, of course.

Crap. I started reading old journal entries. Now I’m going to spend all week going through them. I should get off of here while I can.

It’s pouring rain outside, and cold. My work computer completely crapped out, and I spent all day on a loaner laptop, doing nothing but reinforcing the already-present idea that my work environment is so specialized and weird, it can’t be replicated easily. And I gave up on roaming profiles in Windows a long time ago, as I realized how stupid an idea they were, so today I had a snapshot of my desktop and favorites circa 2003. It was weird to go to my favorites menu and see all of the sites I used to read on a daily basis, but have long since forgotten. I think I get a new power supply for the old machine tomorrow, but I should probably bring a paperback to read, just in case.

Oh, for whatever reason, I’ve been reading Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby, although it’s really hard to get into, for a person who doesn’t understand American football, let alone the English game of the same name, and all of its various cultural idiosyncrasies. I think I may have to give up on the book after 60 or so pages, but I do get his general message. It’s weird, because I never got into sports, but I got into death metal (to an extent), and I guess that’s close to getting into Arsenal. There was a point in my life when I thought for sure I was going to have an entire room of my house devoted to Motorhead and Entombed CDs, and I’d build some giant custom speaker system that would cost way too much to drive the extreme metal sound. Now I’m listening to the soundtrack to Broken Flowers on the tiny speakers built into my monitor, and couldn’t be happier. Weird how things switch up on you like that.

I saw Broken Flowers I think a week ago. Going into it, I thought it was going to be another Bill Murray doze-fest, like Lost in Translation. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised with the way it worked, and even though Jim J. was minimalist with how the individual scenes unfolded, he had a story that flowed in such a way that you really wanted to know what happened next, how the mystery would unfold, and the tension made some of the scenes intentionally ridiculous. And the whole film was shot in Jersey and New York, but it looked like he was zipping all over the country, which was great. The ending, not so good. I won’t ruin it, but it was unfulfilling for me. But, that’s Jarmusch.

One more thing before I pass out from the awful enchiladas I just ate. This is under the category of “I remember when this happened, but there’s no god damned record of it online - I thought you could find everything on the internets.” Okay, in like February of 1988, there was some kind of freak windstorm, and the windows at the top of the Sears Tower broke out, raining glass on the downtown Chicago area. I remember this because I saw Rush on 2/26/88 and when we drove up there, we saw this post-apocalyptic vision of this giant skyscraper with a bunch of windows at the top broken out, and it was a pretty freaky vision. And, of course, this is the first thing I thought of when, 13 years later, I was standing a couple blocks from the World Trade Center watching it burn from a bunch of broken out windows. Now, for an event this big, you’d think entering a search term on the level of “sears tower windows fucked up” or “raining glass and shit on wacker drive” would bring me something. NOTHING. So if you remember this or have any leads on a better search term, let me know.

Okay, I think I need to go eat something to counteract this bad Mexican food, like maybe a box of lye…

I got an email the other day from someone in Australia, who was looking for an old Sutafed commercial and happened upon my Trip East travelogue. It’s a strange coincidence, because I’ve been thinking of Seattle lately, for a lot of different reasons. Part of it is that tomorrow will be the 7th anniversary of when I left Jet City and headed out here to New York, and nice round numbers make me think back. And I think part of it is also the weather here, how it’s jumped from a steady 30 to some days when it’s actually light jacket 50s. Hell, I just looked down at my weather widget, and it’s saying 62. That’s almost a solid spring day.

Something about spring always pulls my brain back to Seattle. A lot of natives tell you the winters are mild, but they’re only half right. You won’t see feet of snow, but that persistent darkness and muggy gloom really sits on you after a while. After about 100 days of 40 degrees, rain, and dark, you really start thinking Kurt Cobain had the right idea. I guess when I lived there, I didn’t really have the means to fly down to Vegas for the weekend or otherwise escape the grasp of the PNW. Maybe it would be different with my current worldview. I don’t know. But I do know that once the sun crawled back out and spring hit, I really LOVED Seattle. I loved driving around in my car, going everywhere and nowhere, when the sun was out and it was a crisp fifty degrees, and the air had that fresh smell that everything had been showered down for six months, and in a couple more, it would be summer. Spring anywhere makes me think of Seattle.

Every once in a while, someone will ask me if I miss Seattle, or what I thought about it, or why I left. It’s a hard question to answer. I do miss it a lot sometimes. There are certain albums that instantaneously transfer me back there faster than a Star Trek transporter could. One of them is Queensryche’s 1997 album Hear in the Now Frontier. I listened to these fourteen tracks so many times while driving around the city, they’re inseparable from that year of my life. I first heard the title cut when I was stuck in Longview, Washington on a Monday. This was when I dated Karena and before she moved north, and we used to trade off weekends for who had the 100-mile commute. I was heading back late Sunday night, and got a blowout in my Escort. I only had the baby spare, not rated for 100 miles of highway driving in the rain, so I called off work, borrowed her Saturn, and spent the next day getting a new tire fitted. When I was driving around this tiny town hidden in the evergreens of southwest Washington, the new Queensryche song came on the radio, and I made a mental note: “go buy that album.” A couple days later, I went to Silver Platters, my old CD hangout, and picked up a copy. I made a dup on tape for the car, and played it 200 million times.

When I think of that whole story, there are so many great nostalgic things to pick up on. First, there’s all of these trips to Longview. Now, things with Karena didn’t end on the greatest of terms, and I’m not longing for her or anything. But there was a certain charm to when I went down there. The place was about as big as Goshen, Indiana, for those who know my hometown, and it’s the kind of place where we ended up going to the Red Lobster that shared a parking lot with the Target a lot. The biggest shopping experience in Longview was driving a half hour to go to the mall in Portland. Otherwise, we rented a lot of videos, bought a lot of Papa Murphy’s premade but not baked pizzas, and just hung out. It was nice. And the story makes me think about my old Escort, which I hated so much when I got it, but now I’d pay cash on the barrelhead for a car just like it now. And man I miss going to Silver Platters, going from A to Z through the racks, and dumping a c-note on double coupon Tuesday, because I was totally locked into their little coupon scheme to get free discs, even if it meant I bought way too many CDs I didn’t need.

That kind of nostalgia kills me. And it makes it hard to answer the simple question: would I go back? I haven’t even visited Seattle since I left in 1999. And I don’t know that I would move back. I mean, I think about when I went back to Bloomington last for more than like a lunch or an evening, which was probably back on that 1999 trip east. I was writing Summer Rain hardcore when I left Seattle. I spent three or four months basically poring into the draft full-time, doing nothing but thinking about Bloomington. Then I drove halfway across the country, opened the car door, and basically stepped into my own book. Yeah, a lot of things changed in the seven years since the book took place. But I remember walking from the Union to my old apartment on Mitchell Street, and probably 95% of everything I saw in the spring air around me was identical to what I saw in 1992. It really freaked me out. But then I got hit with this really heavy “you can’t go back” vibe, when I realized that I didn’t know anyone on campus anymore, and everyone that was there looked like they were about twelve.

So yeah, you can’t go back. And I’ll be honest: I’m not going to stay in New York forever. There will come a time when we will bug out of here and go to the next big stop down the road. And I know my relatives automatically assume the next and last stop for me will be when I “grow up” and decide to move back to Elkhart and buy a house right across from my parents’ house and spit out some kids and come over every Sunday for dinner. And of course, that’s all shit. It’s gotta be something new for me on the next stop; I can’t have a do-over. I’m not saying I want to zip all over the country like I’m following the Dead, but I wouldn’t mind trying something else someday. It would also be nice if they had real grocery stores. But there’s Trader Joe’s now, so that’s huge.

Speaking of, we’ve booked our next vacation, and will be going to Alaska at the end of May/beginning of June. Sofar, we’ve got airfare, a week of hotel in Anchorage, and a rental car. From there, we’ll drive around, see some glaciers, take a lot of pictures, eat some food, and who knows what else. I’m going through Frommer’s now. There will probably not be any above Arctic circle exploration, and given my knee condition, I doubt we’ll be climbing Mount McKinley. But I’m hoping for some flightseeing, and it would be absolutely golden if I could get in a flight lesson while we’re up there.

Alaska also has a weird Seattle connotation, too. Seattle’s always had a tight bond with the 49th state. A lot of people that fly up there end up with a plane change at SeaTac, but even back in the old days, Seattle was the last big outpost before you headed north. Some of the culture of Alaska is second-tiered in Seattle in some weird way; salmon’s big because of the fisherman bringing it down. Lots of commercial boats winter down in Seattle, too. There are a lot of street names and other places and buildings in Seattle that are named after Alaskan cities, features, or explorers. And the whole time I was in Seattle, I thought hard about making the jump up the Alcon to get up there. I’d sit in bed with my Rand-McNally, tallying the miles and trying to find the shortest route, the number of hours and days it would take me. Growing up, you look at the big map at the front of the classroom and it looks like Alaska’s just one state’s worth of Canada up from Washington. Really, you have to drive like 24 hours straight through the mountains of British Columbia to get to the most remote southernmost point on the tail of Alaska. If you wanted to get to a city that was actually in the meat of the state, add another 24 hours of solid driving. It’s basically like driving across the entire United States, but up, and on much worse roads. So I never made it further north than Vancouver, and I’m glad I will be able to do it now.

Not much else. Still working on the book of Bloomington stories. It’s getting there, slowly. I should get on that now, actually.

The final lasting image of my grandparents together is a Steven Seagal movie. No, my grandparents were not sixth-degree black belts, and neither of them had the 80s hip-guy ponytail. But Seagal’s first movie, Above the Law was shot in their Chicago neighborhood. So whenever the flick’s on cable TV over the weekend, I usually tune in for a few minutes to catch a look at the old neighborhood where I spent all of my Thanksgivings and Christmases, plus other holidays we loaded up the station wagon and drove two hours west to the big city.

I don’t know Chicago geography well, but the one now-gone landmark that was the nucleus of their old neighborhood was the Ludwig Drum factory. Go to the intersection of Damen and North, and then go up a couple of blocks to St. Paul Ave. That’s where my grandparents’ three-story brownstone sat, the place they bought back in 1940 for about the current cost of a new compact car. Across the street was an old brick warehouse where Ludwig made their drum kits, the kind almost every rock band used back then, or the big marching band bass drums used at football games. My mom told me when she was little, the Beatles came to the drum factory to see where Ringo’s skins were put together, and it turned into a full-scale riot. (Of course, in my mom’s stories, pretty much everything turned into a full-scale riot, so who knows.)

The big plot point in Seagal’s movie was this old church, and that was shot at Saint Mary of the Angels church. (Here it is on google maps.) I used to go to this church all the time with my grandma. She was really serious about the church, and was a Polish Catholic, which was like an order of magnitude more strict than just being a regular Catholic, although I didn’t really know how. Our church back home didn’t use any Latin, though, and this place had all kinds of songs and sayings I didn’t understand. The church got shut down because of structural problems right after the film came out. When my grandma died in 1989, the funeral was at another church; the city had slated Saint Mary for demolition. Some people got together the cash at the eleventh hour, and they rebuilt the place. So both Catholics and martial arts fans can rejoice that the landmark was saved.

The Ludwig plant fell apart, and they moved the drum production to Texas or Japan or something. Another company used the factory for a while, but in the 80s, it was used as a studio space for a few TV and film productions. The Color of Money was shot there, and allegedly, my grandfather ran into Tom Cruise, and said he was a nice guy. (I don’t know if this was before or after he turned to Scientology.) Above the Law shot a lot of indoor scenes in the old factory. Like there’s a scene where they’re going to a police evidence locker to check on some C4 explosives - that’s totally the inside of the Ludwig plant. I’ve never been in there, and I only know the place from sitting across the street and looking inside the mesh gate over the loading dock, watching the forklifts move around. But I could tell at a glance that the scene was shot there.

A lot of Above the Law reminds me of the general feel of the mid-to-late eighties Chicago, a place I just barely knew. All of the cars had those blue and white license plates, and in the background of the chase scenes, you could see the Jewel stores and gritty-looking car repair places, with red brick walls that were turned black from years of soot and pollution. The L-Train ran overhead, making that distinctive sound and looking like nothing we’d ever see back in Elkhart. All of the backgrounds in that movie of the neighborhood remind me so much of what I saw in the back of the station wagon, looking out at this giant city, where every square block housed more people than my entire high school. Watching five minutes of that film reminds me so much of that brief moment in time that it always amazes me.

The one big regret that I have about my grandparents’ old neighborhood was that I never really tried to explore outside of the close domain of their place. My mom was 100% convinced that there were rapists with full-auto machine guns every hundred feet, and if we left the fenced confines of their back yard, we’d be on the back of a milk carton or worse. Now, I don’t think as a four-year-old I should have wandered far, but when I was 14, maybe I could have walked around the block, or down to Wicker Park, or to Osco’s to get a Coke or something. In retrospect, the place was probably as safe as the streets I walk today in New York. I really would like to have more memories of the area around there. I don’t want to live there, and a vacation in Chigago is not high on my list of things to do with limited time and money. But it’s something that interests me in some weird way.

That area is now called Bucktown, and it’s a trendy little place to be, if you’ve got the goatee and the money. The Ludwig factory got broken up into single-serve condos, and the mom-and-pop bodegas and corner bars are probably all cloned Starbucks storefronts. The neighborhood’s probably all filled with hipster doofuses, listening to Coldplay on their iPods and reading J.T. Leroy books. After my grandpa died in 1995, they sold off his building for some obscene amount of money. Looking at the place on Google Maps, I see that they’ve torn out the garden and swingset next to the building and made it into parking spots, which really pisses me off. I’ve always wanted to go back and see the place again, but I’m guessing all of the wood pocket doors and elaborate cabinetwork got kicked to the curb and replaced with Pottery Barn.

I still haven’t watched Above the Law all the way through. But one time my mom rented it, and we found a part in the church where my grandparents were extras. (They probably went because there was a free lunch or something; my grandfather could not pass up anything like that.) You can see them for a split-second on-screen, which is awesome. How many of you can say your grandparents were in a Steven Seagall flick?

Bonus: Coincidentally, Larry Falli now lives about 20 blocks south and four blocks west of where they used to live.

Last night, we went to the Ziegfeld to see 2001: A Space Odyssey on a big screen. I still don’t understand half of it, but it was good to see it on a gigantic screen with a big print and six-track sound and the whole nine yards. The Ziegfeld is one of those old art movie theaters, with only a single screen and a giant auditorium of real movie seats. The whole place, from the hallways to the bathrooms to the snack stands is covered with old trim and looks like real class, not something that was spit out next to a strip mall. (Oddly enough, the current Ziegfeld was built in 1967 a few doors down from the old Broadway theater, which was torn down to put in a skyscraper.)

I hadn’t seen the film in a few years, I think since I got the DVD re-release. And I think I only saw it before that once or twice, on VHS. I do remember, though, as a little kid, my parents had the score on vinyl. I have no idea why, and I couldn’t really see either of my parents watching the movie or feeling a need to buy the album, but it was in the pile of records that I pretty much memorized as a kid. Listening to it was weird and not that interesting, but I loved the gatefold jacket with pictures of the movie in it. This was probably around the time Star Wars kicked in, and those photos of the moon base, and space station, and guys in spacesuits was pretty cool to me back then. I also remember when I was maybe about ten, the film was on TV (probably chopped down to 90 minutes and filled with bad commercials every other minute) and I tried to watch it. I was enthralled by people walking in space and the effects shots, but I didn’t get the last part of the film at all. At that age, there were a lot of things I heard or saw on TV that I didn’t understand at all and my parents would entirely no-sell, and the tiny cultural cracks remained until I was thirty and remembered back to that bad sitcom and thought “oh, that guy was supposed to be on heroin” or whatever. I often wonder if my life would have been radically different if my parents would have just treated me as an adult from the age of three and told me everything that was going on, instead of compartmentalizing things and then never getting around to going back and explaining stuff.

I’m now reading that Legs McNeil book on punk rock, Please Kill Me, and it’s not bad. I’m not into the whole Velvet Underground, David Bowie, New York Dolls thing, and that bores me to tears. I was glad to see some Iggy Pop early on though, because I think he’s hilarious and intriguing. I think this thing will be somewhat boring until it hits the Ramones or so, and then the rest of the book will pretty much explode and be done in a day and a half.

Somewhat related, I was reading somethingawful, and there was a thread where someone found GG Allin’s appearance on Jerry Springer on some web site, and posted it, sort of as a “look how hilarious and cool he is!” The thread devolved into people saying “he’s not punk rock!” and arguing the theory of what is and isn’t punk, which eventually led to anti-corporation rhetoric and explanations as to why it’s inherently evil to go to a restaurant and order breakfast rather than make it yourself. And people ask me why I was never into punk. I sometimes wish the whole pseudo-political movement that attached itself to punk rock had glued onto country music instead, so people on CMT could circle-jerk about Noam Chomsky while discussing what is and isn’t country.

Speaking of GG, his brother Mearle just released a new DVD of three shows from 1993, called Terror in America. It also includes some bonus footage of GG at a family reunion, getting some tattoos, and doing an in-store appearance. From everything I’ve heard, it’s supposed to be a fairly fucked up DVD. But I still remember back in 1994 or 1995 when I bought the “Hated” movie on tape, and me and Larry watched it, and we were sorely disappointed. The video was so lame - it was mostly just GG all strung out back stage, and when he played, there were like 7 people at the show, and the most outrageous thing he did was hit himself in the head with the mic. I guess they re-released it on DVD and put footage of his funeral on there, but still, pretty weak. Even his Springer appearance was better.

Not much else. It’s actually cold here. I wanted to get the bike all cleaned up and see if I can ride with the knee, but it’s in the thirties and windy and I’m not up for some all-weather extreme bullshit when I don’t even know if I can ride or not. So, back to writing.