I’ve been trying to read more stuff that’s close to what I want to do for this next book of mine. I keep saying that this book will be the heavy metal Indiana version of John’s Small Town Punk (which was Florida and punk), but I wanted to find some other books that were similar in texture and purpose to inspire me. At some point, I want to make a total list of all of these titles, with reviews or reasons why they fit the bill, but I’ll get to that later.

I wanted to ramble a bit about Tom Perotta a bit, since I read a couple of his books recently. I never heard of him, but after I read John McNally’s The Book of Ralph, Amazon told me I might like him, and since the descriptions sounded interesting, I went ahead and ordered two of his books: The Wishbones, and Joe College. I later found out that he’s most famous for writing the book Election, which was turned into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon, but since I never saw the movie, I never knew about this, and I’m sure everyone else does and I’m just a dumbass. Anyway…

I read both of the books quickly, and had the same reaction to both. (Oh, if you haven’t, I’m going to discuss spoilers, so if you’re the kind of person who gets all freaked out about that, stop reading. I probably don’t need to say that since the only people I know who get freaked out about spoilers don’t read books.) Anyway, here’s the deal: I really liked Perotta’s non-main characters, and I really loved the way he could paint a scene. He did such a great job of laying down the detail of a scene in a way that might make you chuckle because of the small details, and he does it in an extremely efficient manner. His writing flows well, reads fast, and doesn’t contain extras, but there’s still a lot of flair there to make you enjoy everything. In that sense, he’s a lot like McNally; his descriptions of crap Chicago suburbs in the 70s really worked, and I liked that.

What I didn’t like about both of the Perrotta books that I read were that he basically made the main character look like a total moral fuckup, and then had these huge act2/act3 tragedies that he later forgets all about and leaves unsolved. In The Wishbones, the lead character is this past-prime musician in a wedding band, working as a courier and living in Jersey, who one day sees a geezer at a wedding show die and decides he needs to marry his girlfriend of 15 years and move them both out of their respective parents’ houses. But he later has the dude hook up with this Lower East Side/Park Slope hipster poet chick. You’d think this would lead to the fiancee finding out and tragedy ensuing, but that’s not what happens. He uses the setup to tweak out the main character’s emotions a bit, then pretty much leaves her aside to continue on with the main plot. The main character forgets all about it, everyone’s well, a nice fall wedding, end of book.

Now, Tom Perrotta isn’t a slouch when it comes to plot. He’s very meticulous and playing the rules of the Iowa Writers Workshop, carefully weaving the main and secondary threads and giving them a bump in the right places and all of that. But after reading both books, I had such a strong “what the fuck happened to…” feeling, that I didn’t really feel satisfied about it. And yeah, maybe he did that intentionally, to introduce some tension, or make things believable. But I still kept thinking “what happened to that secondary plot?” and it threw me.

I also started reading two Will Leitch books, again based on Amazon, and I didn’t really like either one. He has Life as a Loser, which I already mentioned, and it’s more of a lower-quality Chuck Klosterman imitation, but it doesn’t totally pull through. It was like reading Chuck’s rough drafts, and I gave up halfway through the book. I started Catch, and I don’t know. I don’t have an agent, or a bunch of fans online, but I think I could do better. I’m not trying to pick a fight; I’m just saying, his writing’s a bit wooden. Maybe halfway through the book, it picks up steam, but I don’t know if I’ll make it.

In other news, I think my knees are almost better. I say knees plural because the left one got a little torqued out from limping around on a cane and in a brace and overcompensating. Today was my first real day with no brace, and they don’t feel good now, but I did make it with no real problems. And in an effort to be more human, I actually bought a pair of dress shoes today, since when we go somewhere formal, I usually have to fake it with a pair of tennis shoes or something. I went to Kenneth Cole to invest in something that looked good and didn’t make me feel ready for amputation in 15 minutes, and I ended up spending about twice as much as the most expensive shoes I’ve ever bought. But they’re nice. I hope I don’t accidentally shred them to pieces on a fragmenting New York curbside or something.

Oh, I fixed a bunch of random weird stuff with the site’s RSS feed, but I won’t go into it right now.

John Sheppard posted a nice Little League photo the other day, complete with 70s bright colors and high pants, which made me think a bit about my brief experience in Pee-Wee League back in the day. I forget when this was, but I’m guessing maybe third grade, and it was yet another one of those things where my parents really wanted me to experience different things besides the Apple II and/or determine if I was gay by forcing me to play sports. And given my lack of any hand-eye coordination or motor skills, I’m surprised they didn’t just give up and start buying me Cher albums and teaching me about flower arranging.

Pee Wee League was one of those things that not only made me feel bad about my inability to do something that so many other people could do easily, but I had kids making fun of me well into high school due to my inability to throw a ball long distances when I was a little kid. I know parents think these things will toughen up their kids, and teach them about teamwork and discipline and how to oil a leather glove. I guess one of the other things was that I was supposed to learn all about the national past-time and develop a love for the game. Honestly, I couldn’t name more than five baseball teams back then, and at the time, I was far too preoccupied memorizing random statistics about Star Wars characters than infielders and outfielders. This is probably best proven by the fact that I had about a dozen baseball cards, but I had every single one of the first two series of the Topps Empire Strikes Back Cards. (Insert speech about how I wished I sealed that shit in a vacuum-packed safe so I could put them on eBay and finance the down payment on a beachfront house, instead of randomly losing them all or accidentally covering them with peanut butter.)

Each of our Pee-Wee League teams had a corporate sponsor (if you consider “corporate” to include local car washes and septic system pumping companies) and a name of a real major league team. My assigned team was the AstroBowl Astros, sponsored by a local bowling alley, with a nod to the Houston MLB team, and featured orange hats and t-shirts. We didn’t wear the pants or the cleats or any other gear. I think there was a concerned mother freakout about wearing a cup, which happened when this kid named Skip ended up sliding into home plate ball-first and doing some damage to the yet-functioning family production units. I distinctly remember my mom’s hysterics, leading to a hand-off to my dad, who spent his childhood in the protection-free fifties, when you could still buy Jarts, M-80s, and small-caliber firearms at the local soda stand. The closest thing he knew about protection was when he got a CB radio so he could protect himself from speeding tickets on the highway. My dad grudgingly took me to Sears, where we silently walked to the athletics department and found that all of the various supporters and protectors were, at the smallest range, made for kids roughly twice my age or size. I think I could have used the smallest cup in stock as a batting helmet. Dad basically mumbled, “Son, be careful, and don’t tell your mom,” and that was that.

Somehow, I got put on a team that made the Bad News Bears look like the Yankees with a two billion dollar salary cap. Every kid who could not play was on the Astros. Most of the kids at school got onto cool teams, like the Dodgers, the Yankees, or the Cubs. (Yes, the Cubs were a good team; we were 100 miles from Wrigley Field. Despite the fact that they were a horrible team during that era, at least they were recognizable.) The only things I knew about the real Astros were Nolan Ryan, and the fact that they played in their namesake dome on their namesake artificial turf. That wasn’t much to go by.

I ended up as the catcher. When you have an adult pitching and the catcher doesn’t call pitches, this was where a coach parked their worst player, which happened to be me. I could barely throw the ball back to the pitcher. I could not infield to any extent, but it usually didn’t matter. The best strategy for the opposing team was to hit it anywhere in the outfield, and run in every single person on base while I sat and watched them cross the plate, because it would take about 45 minutes for someone to retrieve the ball and throw it home. I remember one game, against the faux Dodgers team, which had all of the jocko guys in it, when the score ended up being like 78 to 2. It was like a basketball game between the Harlem Globetrotters and a bunch of geriatrics who were off their meds.

I think we did win one game, and it was against one of the best teams, maybe the Yankees. It was on a day of really shitty weather, where the temperature dropped to about 45 or 50, and it was raining on and off, and extremely dark. Because it was on and off, the officials kept deciding the game would go on, and then they would change their mind, and then it would be back. We only wore t-shirts, and maybe half of the team got the idea to put on jackets under their uniform shirts. But wet denim jeans are always horrible, and your hands would be absolutely freezing. The parents on our team were pulling all of this “toughen up!” bullshit, and pretty much every kid on both teams was crying or trying not to cry, but still streaming tears down their rain-soaked faces. The only parents there on average were the mothers, who were trying to act like the fathers and overcompensating with whatever macho bullshit they caught from TV. (This was in an era when the divorce rate was like 100%, and all of the dads were probably off either getting loaded or trying to fuck the non-baseball moms.) So for whatever reason, our team could withstand the pain way more than the fake Yankees could, because we had to put up with so much bullshit under normal operating conditions, we didn’t even care that our hands were turning blue. Even the kids that couldn’t hold a bat were popping off doubles and triples, and we ended up pulling in a 12-4 win over the best team in the league.

One of the big things about Little League is that when you win (and it’s not practically snowing out), you go get ice cream. You’d think that since we had our asses handed to us on a regular basis, we’d never see any dessert action, but our coaches were sympathetic, or maybe in that “nobody’s a loser” parental mindset, so they usually found out where the other team was going, and we’d go to the other place for celebratory losing treats. There were two ice cream places in close proximity: a Dairy Queen, right next to the Taco Bell on 33 where I’d work when I was 16, and a Tastee Freeze, which was right in front of our corporate sponsor, Astrobowl.

I think I liked Dairy Queen better at the time, and we went there more, because the winning team usually went to Tastee Freeze because it was a local institution, and I think we lost almost every single game. Dairy Queen was more of a restaurant, like McDonald’s, and it had a sit-down dining room with a solarium. It didn’t have as many ice cream types, but I always got the peanut buster parfait. Tastee Freeze didn’t have any seats, just a window where you ordered. Maybe it had some picnic benches, but I remember sitting on a curb when eating my ice cream most of the time, and I wasn’t into that as much. Looking back, I probably like the Tastee Freeze better, because the ice cream was a lot more “custom” and they added sprinkles and cremes and sauces and other toppings while you waited, instead of just pulling out plastic-wrapped, pre-extruded things made at the central office in Kansas or whatever. Tastee Freeze is more of a small-town memory to me, something I’ll never see again in the big city.

When I was in the 7th or maybe 8th grade, we had to go to AstroBowl for a couple of class periods of bowling. It was across the street from the Junior High, so this was built into the curriculum, since we all know that bowling is an important skill for finding a job and providing for your future. (It’s important to note that even to this day, you will get your name in the Elkhart newspaper if you roll a perfect 300. Bowling is a big deal in Indiana. Not as big as crystal meth or illegitimate children, but it’s probably in the top ten.) Anyway, when I went over there and made a fool of myself yet again in another sport-like activity, I saw that in the trophy case by the front door, there was a picture of my old Pee Wee League team in a frame, along with a couple of other baseball team pictures that the bowling alley apparently sponsored. I was probably eight or nine, maybe ten when I went through that experience, but even at the age of 13 or 14, it was like looking back into another world to see that picture. I don’t have a copy of said photo anymore, but whenever I think of it, I always wonder if it’s still in the trophy case, gathering dust..

Oddly enough, a quick google shows that AstroBowl is for sale. Take a look at those photos and you see that parts of Elkhart have changed absolutely zero in the 15 years since I have left. The bowling alley looked identical back in the day: 70s futuristic logo, Pepsi sign above the door, big double stripe on the side of the cinderblock building, and cracked up parking lot. I’m honestly surprised that the location hadn’t become a TGI Friday ten years ago. I don’t bowl, but it would be sad if the place got sold and became a Mexican bodega or something. Current price is $450K, if you want to relive that Ed TV show and move back to the small city.

[Note from 2020: the AstroBowl was a Mexican event center for a few years, then sat abandoned for a decade or so, until the city tore it down. It’s now a parking lot for school busses.]

My parents also made me play basketball in the 6th grade, which is an even bigger story. Maybe I’ll type that one up sometime.

Yesterday, I got an application for Bike New York in the mail. I have no idea how they got my name - maybe from some bike junk I ordered off the web - but it was a strange coincidence, because I would love to get in shape and try the ride, but I’m completely fucked up right now. I sprained the MCL in my right knee about a month ago, and I’m just now at the point where I’m not in agonizing pain on a costant basis. Hobbling around on a cane has caused my other knee to feel a bit wonky, and I have to wear this horrible compressive brace every day, which is like having my leg in a vice while I’m at work. Then when I get home and take out my leg, it’s imprinted in a reverse-mold of the inside of the brace, like some kind of Play-Doh fun factory thing. After extrication, my knee feels really - weird - as it expands and sloshes back into its regular form. I usually take drugs by then, so I can avoid this strange feeling. Despite all of this, I am getting around better, sometimes without the cane, and maybe the brace will go away soon, too.

But I don’t think a 42-mile bike ride is in the cards, at least not on May 6th or whenever it is. I keep trying to do the math on how long it would take me to train for a 42-mile ride, and then also trying to predict how long it would be until I could ride a bike, and then add them together and see if they were less than eight weeks. While I could maybe train more in a given time period, by riding way too much, I can’t speed up the healing of the knee, so that pretty much fucks the whole thing.

Why do I want to do it? I guess just to say I’ve done it. I’ve ridden farther before, and this is not a competitive race-type event, so it isn’t harder in that sense. But the last time I did anything like this, I was 16, and I rode a 100K ride on a POS Huffy 10-speed that you get on sale for $100 at Wards, along with a rack and panniers filled with probably 30 pounds of shit I didn’t need. It poured rain the whole day and it was bone-chilling outside, with plenty of headwinds that made me wonder why the fuck I even did the event, since nobody in my entire school even knew about it and it obviously wasn’t about getting chicks, which was one of only two things I cared about back in 1987. (The other one probably involved listening to every Rush album in a row in one sitting, which I used to think would be the ultimate project, and now I realize will be my own personal hell if there is in fact a god when I die.) The New York ride would also be slightly more interesting than the Indiana one. The New York one goes through all five boroughs, which means a couple of interesting bridges, and a rare chance to ride on closed-off streets of the city. I guess the Indiana one was interesting too, and at least took you through Michigan and across some attempts at hills and twists, but unless you go south of Indy, there isn’t much beyond the one-mile grids of county roads and cornfields.

I haven’t been writing shit lately. Part of it is a lack of a routine to fall into, part of it is a lack of anything to write about. I guess I have two projects that I want to eventually finish. They are both biopic, modernist, whatever; one’s high school, the other is college. Both of them don’t have enough greatness to survive. I wonder how Summer Rain turned out as good as it did, as far as the story and length. Was it just a coincidence that everything happened in such a great story line like that, or was it just a lot of hard work that carved it into a solid line? I don’t know. Sometimes I’d like to think if I kept my nose down enough on this high school one, I’d start to get some bulk, and the pieces would become carvable and eventually fit into each other until it started to look like a book. But I don’t know, there’s a lot of pessimism here on that.

In the reading category, I just finished The Wishbones by Tom Perrotta, which was a decent read. It was close to the style that I wish I could write in, similar to Nick Hornby and High Fidelity, although not as raw or as dense as I’d like. There was also this weird twist at the end that sort of threw me, but I won’t get into it. Anyway, now I’m reading Will Leitch’s Life as a Loser, which I completely spaced and forgot I read half his shit on Blacktable.com years ago. I’m enjoying the book despite the fact that it’s a typographical disaster; it’s a weird size that it too square and too big, and the columns are way too wide with small print, so it’s impossible to track across the page, especially if you’re on a bouncing F train.

My only other complaint about Leitch’s book is that it makes me wish that either I had a better way to chop my own life into zany and compelling bite-sized 2000-word pieces on a weekly basis, or that maybe I should get some kind of life that lends itself to doing that. That Tucker Max book had the same effect on me. I read about all of this crazy shit that he did, all of these good stories, and I thought I needed to live a life like his - not necessarily HIS, but with other activities that were easily shrink-wrapped into entertaining portions. I know the stock answer is “but Jon, you can write observational pieces about ANYTHING,” and my answer is, go ahead and do it, but I need to find what works for me.

Okay, enough babbling for tonight.

I think the best way I could describe outside right now is “fucked.” It’s 30 and raining, basically, which means sort of snow but sort of not, very dark out, and the ground resembles a spilled Slurpee, but everywhere and not Coke-flavored. The intersection outside of my office is being devastated by a crew of phone company people. They’re jackhammering and scraping out a trench in the middle of the intersection, and it’s filling up with this slush, and traffic in every direction is fucked. The jackhammering and pounding sounds like the block is being shelled. A Verizon truck hit a guy in the face with their rear-view mirror in front of the Wendy’s, so there’s an ambulance blocking even more traffic as he holds a dozen yellow and crimson Wendy’s paper napkins to his face to stop the bleeding. A dozen people try to watch what’s happening, but everyone else pushes past them to go inside and get their Chicken Strips Tenders meals and Biggie sized fries.

This is New York at its finest. Every time someone tells me “I think it would be so neat to move to New York!” I want to make them endure an hour of this, and then send them back to Iowa or whatever.

As an experiment, I came to work without a cane today. Probably not the best day to do it, but it’s been working out okay. Of course, in about five hours, I will be screaming bloody murder about this brace on my leg, which usually starts constricting me too much after about eight hours. I have been able to find Vault everywhere, luckily, but I have been drinking so much of it that I think the caffeine is freaking me out. I drank 4x20oz bottles yesterday, plus a regular Coke, which is about a months’ worth of caffeine. I should stop that. I’m drinking a Dr. Pepper now, which is my favorite occasional drink. A strange thing is that maybe six years ago, I was taking some medicine for panic attacks, and I only took it for like a week, because it made me really sick to my stomach. But for some reason, it totally fucked up my sense of taste or smell for Dr. Pepper, maybe something about the vanilla taste in it. And I couldn’t even walk by a thing of Dr. Pepper in a grocery store without retching. I stopped taking the medicine, and then I was fine. It was pretty weird. I’m wondering why one of Dr. P’s competitors haven’t isolated this drug and put it in their drinks as a way to cut out the competition.

Lots of things are going on, and it will be very busy for a few days. It was Sarah’s birthday on Monday, which went well. And then her mom is coming in tonight for a long weekend. We are having an Oscars party on Sunday, and I don’t even know what is involved in that as far as planning or whatever, but I’m assuming it is taken care of. We’re also going upstate to Guy and Scott’s place on Saturday, which should be fun, but that’s just for a day. And add in a bunch of other dinners and seeing friends and soforth.

On top of that, we are catsitting for a friend and have her two cats for a week, because her place is being exterminated. The cats are mostly hiding right now. One is extremely skittish and we will probably not even see her for the week, unless treats are involved. The other one is a little more playful and okay with humans, and she was running around a bit. I’m still not sleeping through the night and wake up every few hours, and it was funny to wake up at like 4:30 and see both of them tearing around the house and playing.

I’ve been vaguely thinking about changes to this page, because I’ve been reading a lot of web design propaganda lately. I’m trying to think of some CSS changes to make to the site, which is not a big deal. The one thing I wish I could easily hook up are buttons for Back and Next at the bottom of each entry. There’s no easy way for me to do this. (Yes, I could hard-code the links in each time I update, but life is too short.) I wanted to do some PHP trickery in which each time a page is drawn, it takes a peek at the directory of HTML, and gets the two entries before and after the current one. The problem is knowing in the script what is “the current one,” because each of these pages imports headers and footers and there are symlinks and all other sorts of things that make the usual way of determining the current page to totally fuck up. I think I could do it if I passed the PHP the page’s ID, like I do with haloscan comments. But then I’d have to go back and edit all of my old pages, which might be a huge pain in the ass. I’ll probably do the CSS first.

Google ads are gone. Not really worth it for this kind of site. I think I made less than a dollar a month, and given that I make about a dollar a minute at my day job, it’s hard to get excited about that.

I have been doing a ton of reading, and at some point, you will get to read another huge list of what I’ve been consuming. But now, lunch is over.

One of the 200-some odd reasons my writing throughput and/or quality has dropped considerably in recent years (and I’m talking reasons in my head, not real, quantifiable reasons) is that Coca-Cola stopped bottling Surge soda. For those of you who don’t remember or never experienced it, Surge is/was a citrus soda that originally was called Urge in Norway, and was bottled there to compete with Mountain Dew. (Some Coke bottlers compete with Mountain Dew with Mello Yello, which is available in some markets, but not others.) Anyway, Seattle was a test market for Surge when it showed up in 1997, and once I tried it, I was hooked. Surge basically reminded me of a carbonated version of the Hi-C Ekto-cooler drink. It was more lime than lemon, with an unnatural bright green color, carbonation, and caffeine. It had a very unique taste, and wasn’t anything like its nearest competitor, Mountain Dew. I really liked it.

This was right after the time I quit caffeine entirely, but was going back on it again. I wouldn’t drink any Coke or anything else all day, except maybe the occasional Sprite. But on the weekends, when I was busy slamming away at the text for Rumored to Exist, I would go to Safeway, buy a 2-liter of Surge, and put it in the fridge, as my fuel for the next few days. I drank a lot of the stuff as I worked on the text, and I absolutely loved it.

Of course, when I moved to New York, I couldn’t find the shit anywhere. You already know the rant about how New York grocery stores don’t stock anything of variety, so I won’t repeat it. But I could not find Surge anywhere. Sometimes on a vacation, I’d get a taste. And I think the girl I dated in Cornell back in 2000 found a few bottles at a gas station upstate somewhere once. But after that, it was gone. And that pissed me off, because writers can get really locked into habits or triggers that can set off the hard-to-channel zone of writing. Some people have strange rituals. I used to start writing at the same time every night; others need a certain chair or pillow or snack or drink. Some need certain music; others require quiet. And for whatever reason, I got myself into a situation where I needed a certain type of sugar-water that a corporation test-marketed and then decided not to make anymore.

Well, good news, maybe. Coke has decided to come out with a new drink called Vault. There were a few ads during the superbowl, and they hinted at nationwide distribution in February. Now, I interpreted that as “distribution in every place with real grocery stores that aren’t run by the mafia, so fuck you New York”, and also wondered if the stuff really tasted like Surge, and if I’d get a chance to try it the next time that I went on vacation to a place with real grocery stores. But today, when we were at K-Mart, Sarah found that they actually had the stuff! I bought a couple of 20-ounce bottles, and gave it a try. It’s similar to Surge, although maybe a little more tart, and without as distinct of a green color as the original. The bottle looks different, of course, and you’d be amazed at how much different something appears to taste when it’s in a different bottle. But it’s pretty close. I like it.

I don’t know if I’ll be stocking our fridge with the stuff or not. My writing schedule and situation have been pretty off lately, and I don’t know if the magic elixer will suddenly have me pouring out words or not. I am in that process of thinking about what I will do before I start doing anything, and that’s frustrating and takes time. But it’s getting there.

Okay, I have to figure out a movie and a dinner and make them hobbling distance from each other so it will work out okay…