Okay, it looks like the annual archive-last-year-and-start anew journal maintenance worked, and I’m ready to start 2006. Because I cobbled together this system back in 1997 and slowly added new features to it over the years, I can never remember exactly how to do this big shift at the end of the year, and every year I swear I will rewrite the whole thing to make it easier, but I never do. Maybe before 2007.

We had a pretty quiet but nice new year. We went to Balthazar for an early dinner, and that was pretty damn good. Actually, the problem there is that the same owner or restaurant umbrella or whatever also runs a bar called Schiller’s in our neighborhood, and they have a decent bar food menu with some similar entrees, and they deliver. We’re pretty much on a first-name basis with their delivery guy because they’re now the default delivery choice, and having their entrees constantly sort of ruins going to the restaurant and ordering them. But it was neat to see everything in full swing for the big night. We got out of there by like seven though, and went home to lay in diabetic coma after the big meal and watch TV. Nothing exciting, but it was nice.

In conversation, Sarah asked me what I did last year, and I couldn’t even remember. I probably watched Platoon for the 8000th time and contemplated rigging up tripwires and punji sticks to take out my neighbors. I haven’t done anything for the new year in a while. I know everyone thinks that all New Yorkers stand in Times Square, but I haven’t done that and probably never will, since even if the weather is ultra-nice on the 29th and 30th, it always turns horrible on the day of the 31st and dips below freezing, as if someone out there knows there will be tens of thousands of people standing out there waiting to get frostbite. The flipside of this is that every bar and restaurant in the city suddenly adds an extra zero or two to their rates, and you end up spending a grand to sit in a greasy spoon with a thimble of champagne bought at CostCo, getting loaded with a bunch of strangers. So I’ve always avoided leaving the house.

I think the last time I actually threw a party was when I lived with Simms and Liggett in Bloomington at West Sixth. That was in 94/95, and we had a huge bottle rocket war outside, lots of Simms’ chili, a keg in the kitchen, a ton of people, and Chuck’s nephew Eric made this fortified distilled champagne that was like rocket fuel and gave me a hangover for like a week. But without the huge college house and a bunch of roommates and ultra-cheap Big Red Liquors right down the road, it’s hard to throw a big bash like that. And the whole “too old” thing comes into play, especially since I don’t drink anymore, and it actually took some effort to stay up till midnight last night.

I considered typing up some huge year-in-review meme and decided not to. I really don’t give a shit about what happened this year outside my life, and it seems like most preassembled sets of questions seem to require me giving a shit about the hurricanes or Tom Delay or whatever else, and I honestly don’t. I had a good year in the sense that I met Sarah, and moved out of Astoria, and finally got out of the country on vacation (Canada doesn’t count). I got to Hawaii again, and I got some new states checked off of my list (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island.) I got the next issue of the zine out, which was good. Nobody bought it, which isn’t.

I really don’t feel like I got much done as far as writing this last year. I barely wrote in here (50,000 words compared to 2004’s 80,000), and a lot of that has to do with my own neuroses about what a blog should be and what I should put out there for people to read and all of that shit. Part of it is also just apathy. I didn’t write much in my paper journal, either. And other than the production of the zine, I didn’t really get any work done on any large projects. I think I cycled between six and eight ideas, all somewhat bad, and did little work in any of them. I don’t set new year resolutions, but if I did, it would be to get my shit straight on all of that, pick a project, and get some work done on it. I don’t even give a shit about the whole selling and finding a market and all of the other stuff that other so-called authors get stuck on. I just want to find a project and WRITE and get words on paper and come up with something that rivals the other two books in length, depth, complexity, etc. I have a bunch of ideas for scraping together various crap and stories and journals and photos and putting them into books that nobody will buy, but I’m so tired of the fact that all of those are the equivalent to “greatest hits” packages, and I need to move on to something new.

Add to that the usual resolutions, like getting in shape, paying off debt, etc. I also want to focus a lot more on completely ignoring politics, which will be important with the elections in the coming year. I’m also trying to read more this year, and maybe I should help enforce that by writing more book reviews and stuff. I have a huge stack of books from Christmas that I need to get through, so that should keep me busy.

We have a nice, three-day weekend, so today’s a day for lounging around. We also got started with zipcar, and tomorrow we are taking the afternoon to drive to New Jersey and go to the mall and to Target and just to get the hell out of the city for a day. I know there’s a common perception that Jersey is horrible, but after being cooped up on this little island for the last month or two, going out there is like panacea. So, happy new year and all of that stuff. I’m going to go read for a while.

I stayed home today to try to beat the end of a bad cold that has been going on for almost two weeks. It was made worse by the fact that I had to walk to work the last two days because of the transit strike. The strike is allegedly over now, and the busses and subway system are slowly coming back to life, but I think it’s 50/50 on having my F train operational tomorrow morning for work. A bus runs right outside of our apartment on Grand St, but I haven’t seen one yet. Who knows. I’m sure someone in Chinatown has “I survived the subway strike” t-shirts for sale, though.

I’ve been reading a lot, because I’ve been sick and also have a lot of books coming in as presents. I started reading Neal Cassady’s collected letters, which were interesting, but I stalled about halfway through. Maybe I’ll get back to it later. I still have more astronaut stuff to read, and I’m about halfway through Michael Collins’ autobiography. He was the CSM pilot on Apollo 11, i.e. the one that didn’t walk on the moon. His book is probably one of the best astronaut biographies I’ve read. He was a test pilot, and seems much more “human” than others, in the way he describes things. He’s not writing as a big huge mega-person who is larger than life, or a politician, or someone shilling you a message via the fact that they were spam in a can a few times. He spends a lot more time talking about how they got ready and developed things for these trips, and most of his writing is as a pilot, not a scientist or a spokesman. It’s good stuff. There’s a new Neil Armstrong authorized bio out now, so I will have to order a copy and contrast/compare. I guess Armstrong was on 60 Minutes recently, and they showed him flying his glider. I wish I could track down info on that and find out what he’s flying.

That’s about it here. I think I’m going to go back to bed until dinner.

It has been a long week, and has involved many views of myself I’d normally not see. First, I had an annual physical, and I guess that view involved an EKG, which is always weird, but was, luckily, fine. I am under 40, so I did not get the pleasure of another little test that won’t be discussed. I did get a bunch of blood tests done, so in a few days, I will get to see another view of myself, in the form of little numbers telling me the range of various chemicals in my blood, which is always a little more interesting than just a glance in the mirror. Nothing strange expected there, although I’m sure my cholestorol is high and that’s always a fun bridge to cross with any doctor, especially one who loves writing prescriptions.

On Friday morning, I woke up three hours early to Blizzard 05 (a couple of inches) and trudged my way to another doctor, this time to look at my eyes and see if I can get LASIK. I had a short battery of interesting tests, including a computerized photo-mapping of my eye, which is a new one for me. I got to see a big color digital picture of my ocular devices, which resembled a view of a sun-like star, but crossed with a couple of blood vessels of some sort. I also got some numbing drops, which are not exactly the fun party game you might expect, and the nurse stuck a very sharp, very tiny probe right into my eye to get a depth of my cornea. Unfortunately, after all of this fun, it turns out I can’t get LASIK, or the also-nifty LASEK or PRK surgeries, because my prescription is too high and my cornea is too thin for all of that slicing and dicing. When they do the correction, they carve down the cornea to get the right shape, and in my case, there’s just not enough to carve. There is a procedure that’s brand new where they implant a tiny sliver of a lens underneath there, and you have a permanent contact lens that never needs cleaning. But this is about twice as expensive, and it’s more of a pain in the ass (or eye, rather), and it’s all too many if if ifs.

So today I went to LensCrafters and ran through another set of tests, this time for plain old glasses. I got more pictures of myself in the form of eye shots, and did a bunch of “this or this.” The doctor, it turns out, is also a graduate of IU, and we roamed the Bloomington campus at the same time. Small world. Big prescription though, and even bigger bill by the time they got those high-index lenses all figured out. Hey, more views of myself, with new frames! I won’t get to see them for a few more weeks, while they hunt down the vintage Coke bottles on e-bay to make my lenses. And then I got a haircut, and I can see my ears!

And that’s about it. I need to go shop for a few more presents online, and spend the last few dollars I have on that. And I’m reading the new David Foster Wallace already, thanks to Marie, who was also thanked inside. So, off to that.

The last of the Astoria move-out was completed on Saturday. Now all I need to do is send my keys to my landlord and get ripped off for my entire security deposit. Saturday’s work involved a last trip to the Neptune Diner, and then about three or four hours of clearing out every remaining item in the place. I had some grand scheme of donating things to some charity, selling stuff off on craigslist, listing stuff on freecycle, or whatever else. But when it came down to it, I simply couldn’t deal with waiting on other people and whatever else, so it all went to the curb or in the garbage cans. And as quickly as we could put stuff out there, it vanished. It was like christmas for some poor bastards that hauled that stuff out of there.

The worst of the last stuff were the loveseat and single chair that I bought back in 2000. Because of the weird s-curve layout of my front door, it was like a very bad 3-D tetris game trying to get the couch out of there. It was too wide and too deep, and the depth of the curve made it impossible to take it out long-ways at an angle. I can’t even really describe it, but it was a horror to get that thing out. After clearing everything, we did a real quick sweep of the place with broom and swifter, just to get the big chunks up. Like I said, the landlord’s going to fuck me on the deposit anyway, so there’s no reason for me to get out a toothbrush and go OCD on the place.

As we left, it hit me that I’d never see the place again, and despite all of the horrific problems with it, I’m sort of sad to see it go. I lived in the place for six years, which is longer than I’ve ever lived in any place since my parents’ house. A lot’s gone on there. Every book I’ve published was cranked out while I lived there. (Some of them were started before then, but the ISBNs hit the jackets while I was living in Astoria.) I crossed the millenium there. It was a good run, I guess. I didn’t like the place as much as, say, the 600 7th Ave place in Seattle, but I’m glad to move on, but shit, that’s a sixth of my life. Leaving didn’t blow me away as much as it did to leave the Mitchell Street House in ‘93, or leaving Seattle in ‘99, but still. End of an era.

We had a good Thanksgiving, too. We went up to Guy and Scott’s, Sarah’s friends, up in upstate New York again. Sarah went up on Tuesday night to help with the shopping and the preparation, and I worked on Wednesday and then took the bus up. The Port Authority looked like some kind of apocalypse disaster movie on Wednesday afternoon, but once I got on a bus and headed north, it wasn’t a bad run. I think I made it to Rosendale in under two hours, door to door, and was greeted at the bus stop by Guy and Sarah, who then took us to a shopping center where we got Chinese and pizza from two different places, and I headed into a Dunkin’ Donuts for a dozen of those, just in case.

Guy and Scott’s friend Beth was there with her two-and-a-half year old son Ian and her dog Gus. Guy already started the dinner preparation, and we all ate and hung out that night, knowing the oven would get fired up in the morning for the big bird. We crashed somewhat early, and in the morning woke to find a couple of inches of fresh powder covering everything outside. Given that this is in the middle of nowhere, it meant there was virgin white snow all over everything. When you live in the city, where snow is immediately smooshed by busses and trucks and turned horrid colors of black and grey by pollution, you really appreciate the pure white of a real snowfall. Gus, a collie/alaskan husky mix, enjoyed it too. He spent a lot of the day outside, running through the drifts, trying to chase the wild turkeys and deer that cross through the yard. He was so happy, he would roll around on his back in the snow and jump around like a kid on Christmas morning.

Guy’s dinner was perfect. I’d put Guy up against anybody’s pefect grandmother’s cooking dinners anyday. He’s totally into cooking way too much food and making all of it great, so you don’t want to get in his way when he’s cooking, but you totally want to be there for the product. Guy’s pre-dinner dinner is better than most dinners, and it’s just a long onslaught of food. It’s like the iron man triathalon of food. I had to pace myself and quit early, before the handmade pies happened. We stayed Thursday night again, and then I had bacon and eggs before Beth drove us back to the city. We got back before 2

, which meant we had the rest of Friday plus the whole weekend to chill out and do nothing, which we did.

I should throw out a few book reviews for good measure, since I’ve been reading a lot. First, Andrew Smith’s Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth. I’ve been reading a lot of space stuff lately, but this really put a new twist on things, by trying to catch up with the nine remaining Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon. Smith chases after the elusive lunar explorers, trying to bring out more than just the stock NASA facts, but to really determine what happened to these men who had the great apex of their life happen at a young age, and then had the entire country’s interest in space exploration collapse after the moon walks. Some guys are still trying to champion space missions, like Buzz Aldrin, while others turned to religion, philosophy, art, or private industry ranging from beer bottling to football team management. Many divorced and had family problems, many felt betrayed by their country for dropping the ball on the space program. Overall, the backstory is excellent and a great page-turner.

An impulse purchase I greatly enjoyed was Sam Posey’s Playing with Trains. Posey, a former Grand Prix race car driver and long-time race commentator, also spends a lot of time playing with HO trains down in his basement, something that goes back to his childhood and a Lionel train set around the Christmas tree. The first half of the book goes through the fifteen-year saga of Posey restarting his hobby as an adult when he has a baby boy, going through the construction of a massive layout in his basement. During the steps of this journal, we learn a bit about the industry behind the hobby, and the various steps you need to go from a little loop of track to a full-blown system. In the second part, he gets his journalistic background fired up and starts to go out and meet the other people with his obsession, as well as the major suppliers and magazines covering the hobby. He also goes out and tries a 1

scale steam locomotive, and makes a few field trips to the crumbling remains of the once-mighty rail system in this country. While I never re-started the hobby (no basement, no attention span), I had the Tyco starter set and a bunch of Life-Like buildings nailed to a piece of plywood when I was a kid, and always dreamed of a giant 1 reproduction of some Santa Fe freight line rumbling through a scale city. The book reminded me of all of that, and I’m sure if I did have a basement, I’d be down there right now with $700 of new HO-scale equipment.

Another great one was Michael Harris - The Atomic Times: My H-Bomb Year at the Pacific Proving Ground. Harris was drafted back in the fifties, and spent a year of his two-year commitment at the Eniwetok Atoll. He was there in 1955 for Operation: Redwing, a series of some of the biggest H-bomb explosions ever. He spent the first part of his stay editing The Atomic Times, a little mimeo base newspaper, which reminded me a bit of John Sheppard’s stories of Army journalism. He later spent time typing requisition forms and destroying carbons for top-secret shipments of nuts and bolts. On the day of the tests, with no morning, the enlisted would get pulled out of bed and ordered to stand at attention, facing away from the blast, while 20 megatons of test-device vaporized islands and ocean water. Much of his story deals with being stuck on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere (a lot like Lost, but no hot chicks) and dealing with the stupidity and pranks of various draftee-quality Army privates removed from their small towns for the first time. A minor caveat on this one is that Harris tends to be a little choppy and informal in his writing, and loves to use incomplete sentences. But the subject matter is great, and it’s a unique look at the history behind the H-bomb.

I also bought the new Vonnegut book, A Man Without A Country. Vonnegut said he’d stop after his last one, Timequake, but he came back to cash in a bit with a thin little volume of retread material. If you’ve seen Vonnegut speak in the last 10 or 15 years, take that stock speech and add in a bit of whining about George Bush, and there you go. Vonnegut’s always been a favorite writer to me, and I love all of his novels and books, but there wasn’t much to this collection except maybe a sly way to get the Air America crowd to rush out and buy it and say “best book ever!” because he compares Bush to Hitler. There’s a really funny example (or 40) of this on the Amazon reviews for the books; all of these people’s reviews are like “Hi, I’m 23 and a college graduate and I’ve never heard of Kurt Vonnegut, but I saw him on the Daily Show, which I think is a real news program, and rushed out to buy his book.” It’s also somewhat sad to see that Vonnegut has been preaching this “the world is ending tomorrow” luddite viewpoint, but he’s been doing it for 40 years now, and the world hasn’t ended. Oh well. Three out of four ain’t bad.

This entry is far too long. Sorry.

I’m back from Amsterdam, and we had a good time there. Part of me wants to write a big trip report, but part of me wants to do a rm -rf ~/www/journal on a fairly constant basis, (and that might be coming soon), so no report. The basic synopsis is that the jetlag really fucked me, I got a bad cold and was not able to buy any medicine to get better, but we still got a lot in, and the trip was more than worth it. Pictures are posted, but I’m too lazy to add a link, so figure it out.

Although I’ve been to most of the 50 states, and I’ve been to Canada a half-dozen times, I’ve never left the country otherwise, so this was a cool trip. Ever since the first time I went to Canada in high school, bought a Coke can from a machine, and felt the slight difference, I have been fascinated by finding out the differences in places based on their consumer goods. I don’t land in Utah and seek out the Mormon people or find out why it’s called the Beehive state; I immediately find out if they have a Denny’s, an IHOP, a 7-Eleven, or where people go to buy their records. I enjoy travel to states that are test markets for new soft drinks, or that have odd hamburger chains I can’t find anywhere else. I know I should care more about the history or culture or climate or something else, but seriously, fuck that. I want to know about the things I consume, that I use.

In that sense, The Netherlands were very interesting, because EVERYTHING was different. Okay, this wasn’t like going to some third-world former Soviet shithole where people drink chlorinated rainwater and eat gamey horsemeat on important holidays. The Dutch speak English and enjoy many of the same foods as Americans. But the differences I look for were there in spades: .33L bottles of Coke; Fanta everywhere; bottled water in those plastic-impregnated cardboard boxes like soy milk; automats; coin-op bathrooms that were cleaner than hospital operating rooms; weird soaps; weird cell phones; weird cars. Everything was interesting. I wanted to buy one of everything just to open it, taste it, smell it, and decide if it was better or worse than what I’d become used to over the last 34 years. Even the money was weird; it took some time to get used to having a fistful of coins that was worth like forty bucks.

Everyone in Amsterdam speaks English. I read that before I left, but I was very surprised at how well most people did. And I’m not talking “your total is ten Euros” sort of proficiency; I mean, I had conversations with people who spoke such unbroken English that I could have sworn they grew up back in the states. The bad news is that everything is in Dutch, with occasional English subtitles. Shopping in a grocery store was a little difficult; I almost walked out with a large bottle of drinking water that was in reality vinegar. The most odd aspect of the whole English-Dutch thing was the number of times a cashier started talking to me in Dutch instead of English. You’d think I would have a giant “American” sign above me, but I guess not.

I mentioned elsewhere that things were completely politically neutral, which was nice. I was at the very least expecting a huge fuck-george-bush display in a city square, or some hippies hassling the American tourists over their fascist leader. But nobody said shit, and furthermore, there was no real display of political strife or issue locally. I was very pleased to find a place to go where I didn’t have to hear someone drone on and on about it.

I think my favorite thing was the botanical garden, which had three different big greenhouse climates with different temperatures and humidities, plus some smaller rooms and a lot of excellent landscaping and scenery. It was maybe in the fifties when we were there, but one of the big rooms was a jungle climate and so humid that my glasses and camera fogged over. They had some huge trees in there, and of course, this immediately made me wish I had a similar setup out on my Colorado land.

Anyway, that’s the basic story. Now I have to get over this cold, and start on my next project, which is learning Apple Pages, the new word processor/page layout program that’s part of iWork. It’s basically an Apple version of something like Adobe InDesign, and I think it might enable me to drop FrameMaker when I design my next book. I have only played with it for a few minutes, but it’s very fun.

But first, the evening’s Nyquil…