It’s bachelor’s weekend here in Astoria - Sarah’s visiting her family in Milwaukee for a few days, and I’ve been here on my own. That doesn’t mean scores of Mexican hookers having sex with mules and snorting coke off my bathroom floor or anything; it mostly means I’m sitting around getting over this death-cold-flu I’ve had all week, and a lot of PlayStation. It has been incredibly boring, and after five months of having someone to share my weekends with, I’m surprised I was able to do this every weekend without Cobaining myself years ago. I’m so bored, I even went to K-mart and bought a Stephen King book.

In my last post, I talked about getting the glossary ready for a print book. I decided not to do that. It’s a long story, but I basically don’t think there’s any demand, and it isn’t worth the time. I need to work on a “real” book, and it isn’t one. I still have this book of short stories about Bloomington, but I’m not sure that’s going to make it either. I’m picking at some ideas that might make a new novel, a few really vague themes that didn’t make it in Summer Rain, but that if given a new place and a new look, would make for an interesting story. Maybe. I’m still having a lot of trouble figuring out what’s next, because the only advice I get on what to do next is extremely conflicting. All I know is I need the challenge and the pace of writing another book like Summer Rain (except maybe half as long) but some distance from my own life, a completely fictional story. So, we’ll see.

It’s been a great morning, very cool in the apartment and quiet. I still love how my living room is completely silent now, thanks to the Mac Mini. I’ve got it plugged into my stereo so iTunes can serve up all of my music. With my old setup, to update the iPod, I had to boot to windows, then run MusicMatch and this horrible bag-on-the-side solution that totally sucked. Now I just plug in the iPod and it works. And as bad as this sounds, I used to have a copy of the music in Linux and a copy in Windows, and use xmms, which sucked, and it made the whole operation very kludgey. Now I just use iTunes and that’s it. So I’m enjoying the Mac thing a lot.

Sarah’s back tonight and I get Monday off, which is nice. I think I’m going to go for a long walk, think about this book, and get some lunch.

Have you seen the glossary? Also known as The NecroKonicon, but I think I’m changing the name soon. I am saying this because if you haven’t seen it in a while, it has changed a lot. I’ve been adding a lot more entries, the layout is changing, there are a lot of new pictures, and it continues to grow. I don’t know how many people read it like 2 or 3 years ago and said “oh, ok” and then forgot about it, but I’ve added a lot of stuff since then, so maybe you should check it out.

Also, I am kind of hoping those people who are sort of involved (lived in Bloomington, worked for UCS, whatever) would please leave some comments, or at the very least, email me and tell me some of your stories. I am planning on making this thing into a book sooner or later, and I want to include stories from other people, like in little boxes in the side heads or whatever. I am really trying to finish things up and get this book out - I realize I have said in the past I wanted to do this, and I stalled, but this time I really am trying to remove as many of the obstacles as I can so I can get this book done. I don’t expect to sell one god damned copy of it, but my rationale is that once it is done and published, I will have it out of my way and I can start working on something else.

Not much is going on here. I have a sore throat and have been congested and sneezy all day, plus I am completely brain-dead, which means another cold, which sucks because I just got over one. I don’t know if I get 24 colds a year because I have a weak immune system, or if it’s the fact that I live in a city where people literally shit in the street, but I wish I had something else wrong with me, like say a brain tumor or something, that clearly showed up on an x-ray that a doctor could just easily cut out and then charge me $60,000, because I would rather have to deal with that than having half of my life essentially stolen from me.

Oh, I did get some dental work done on Saturday, so maybe that’s why I got sick. I actually got a chipped tooth fixed, and I realized that it was about twenty years ago that I chipped it, and that suddenly made me freak out that something I remember so clearly was two full decades ago. Of course, you tend not forget things like getting hit in the face with a wrench, but still.

Okay, my soup and applesauce are about done, so I think I’m going to go read for a while. If I was clear-headed, I’d work on the glossary, but I’m not.

It’s hotter than living hell out. It’s been an entire weekend of unrelenting weather, but this afternoon we got a wicked thunderstorm and some rain, so it felt good for a few hours. Now it’s getting hot again and the apartment is returning to swamp-like consistency. I should probably stop bitching about the weather, but the problem is that when the weather is like this, I have nothing else to write about, because my brain pretty much shuts down and all I can think about is moving to Antarctica, or how I can somehow take all of the computer parts in my house and build a bootleg air conditioner that will work better than the stupid portable one I have in my bedroom.

I finished reading this biography of Lester Bangs - I don’t remember the author [Jim DeRogatis], but the title is Let it Blurt and the author is/was this fat kid who went to visit Lester for his high school writing project, and met him at his apartment, and Lester was incredibly nice to him and talked to him for hours, and then like two weeks later he was dead. The book is the best one out there, but it was still a little weird or lacking, and I don’t know if it’s the writer (although he put a lot of effort into it) or just the arc of Bangs’ life. I mean, it seems like he was just gaining steam, and then BAM, and it wasn’t like Johnny Chapman jumped out with a revolver yelling “death to music critics” or something - he just died, and it’s still disputed if it was a drug overdose or a bad case of the flu or some mystery disease or what.

I think the thing with Lester Bangs is that describing him or what his deal was is a lot like trying to explain Devo to your mom, and you can’t really describe it, and it’s the kind of thing you just have to get right in the middle of and dive in without looking how deep the water is. And I’ve read a couple of the Lester Bangs books, and they kick total ass, and you realize how incredible this guy must have been. But all of his books were postmortem anthologies, and the little bits and pieces are good and bad and glued together at the whim of a third-person editor, and every time you read anything, you wish there was MORE somewhere. I mean, imagine Hendrix never released those first few albums while he was alive, and his entire discography was just these fucked-up, spliced together CDs that Steve Ballmer or whoever puts together. You’d get bits and pieces of the same riffs and jams, but would always walk away thinking “fuck, I wish he had some ALBUMS out!” And now, you put in Are You Experienced, and every song fits together perfectly, and every time you listen, you find some little sound that’s new, and I just wish Lester had put together some damn books in his lifetime so we all had that same experience.

The other thing about Lester Bangs is that in reading this biography, he really reminded me of my old roommate Simms, and I don’t know if Simms would take that as an insult or a compliment. I guess they, at least to me, have/had a similar persona, and Simms is totally this kind of guy that you could have a four-hour conversation about everything and nothing and that was a big Lester Bangs trademark, to the point that he had his phone cut off half the time because of huge bills to the phone co. And Lester Bangs sounds like the kind of guy who would go out and buy every Criterion Collection DVD and totally get on top of all of them as far as what was phenomenal and what was shit and somehow relate all of it to Frank Zappa. And I’m sitting here in iDVD, rendering an old video to disc, and the “burn” button is a spinning radiation-type symbol, like a six-piece circle with half yellow and half black, and it totally looks like this button Simms gave me of The Who that I still have in a box somewhere. So Lester Bangs reminded me of Simms, who I have not heard from in forever, but I just called his voice mail, so we’ll see.

It is POURING out. The top foot of my bed is drenched in water from the wind tearing the drops into my apartment. I hope that will dry off in the next hour or two. I also have about 20 CDs I bought in the last week, and I don’t want to listen to any of them. I am listening to Gordian Knot, this prog-rock project thing that is one of the guys from Cynic, along with a bunch of other prog-rock favorites like Bill Bruford and Steve Hackett, and it’s good. But I bought a bunch of stuff to fill holes in the collection, and I was bored of them before I got them out of the bag.

Okay, time to pay my bills and listen to the rain.

This is my first entry from my new machine, which is a Mac Mini. I already wrote about the big switch over on LiveJournal, so read there for the political puling. I’m mostly concerned with getting everything over to the new machine and working. I think web updates are fine, I’m reading mail here, and I’ve got the music collection into iTunes, so that’s good. I still have a lot of adjusting to my workflow, but it’s working well so far. For example, instead of having a bunch of directories with photos flung into them and some half-ass scripts generating galleries, I’m moving everything over to iPhoto. That will make things prettier and easier to deal with, but it’s still a lot of work.

I think the next project might be a print book of the glossary. I am reading this book on the history of Apple computer, and it’s similar in a folklore sense, plus it’s that 8-inch square format that lulu just added to their roster, and I’d really like to do a book like that. I know absolutely nobody will buy a copy, but I mostly want one for myself. So I’ve been picking at the entries a bit. Some will go away - Ray is still convinced I wrote the entire project just to spite him, and so I will have to trim a few things. I also have a lot of ideas for new entries, and those are percolating. I now generally dislike the ones about people and like the ones more about concepts, or old stores or restaurants or whatever that have vanished. Lots of work ahead, I guess. Take a look at the site - I am making edits and syncing them to the head, so to speak, so they are all viewable. I’m also nervous I horridly fucked some pages when I moved the computer, so if you see anything weird, let me know.

OK, back to playing with iPhoto…

Air in the Paragraph Line #10 is now available! Go to http://www.rumored.com/aitpl/ for more info on it. I got the proof today, and it looks awesome. It has 14 stories, 170 pages, and looks like a real book and everything. It’s weird to see the photocopied, black-and-white issue #9 from way back in 1998 sitting next to the glossy, perfect-bound issue #10 from the present. I almost want to bind up the first nine in a little book and make it look official, but it would be easier to keep looking for good writing and put out #11 with even more stuff, so I’ll do that instead. Anyway, there’s a free PDF preview, and for ten bucks, you can’t go wrong, so please check it out.

Not much else is up. It’s hot, I’m tired, and I’ve been spending time working on the web site and doing other zine-related hustling. Aside from reading the zine, I started working on that new Douglas Coupland book Hey Nostradamus!. Well, I guess it isn’t that new - new to paperback. I like it, the writing at least, although the whole Columbine setting wouldn’t be my first choice. His writing, no matter the bad plot, always slides like butter though. I’ll probably finish it in two more subway rides.

Hot. Hot. Hot. And it’s actually pretty nice outside, it’s just this god damned heatsink of an apartment is like the center of hell. Time for another shower.