I’m listening to MP3s on random shuffle on my PC, which is new to me. I know, this is something I was supposed to start doing five years ago, which is also when I was supposed to chuck my CD player and receiver and start stealing all of my music. I used to listen to a lot more music in Seattle, when everything was in one room and my bed also served as my couch, my kitchen table, and the place where I read, wrote, watched videos, and played music. Now I never seem to want to find a CD I like, and except for the times when I’m writing and I listen to the same handful of discs, I usually turn on the tube when I need background noise. I need to stop doing that.

I have been interested in some kind of master convergence solution that would somehow solve all of my media woes and not cost a fortune. I was just having this discussion with Ray last night, although his idea is more like a credit card-sized drive that holds fifty gazillion terabytes and can wirelessly communicate with every type of electronics in his house or anywhere else. He’ll never find this, and with about 20,000 CDs in his house, he’s never going to find any kind of mobile drive to hold all of that. I have less of a problem, as I don’t need a car unit, and my iPod takes care of most of the mobile issues. Also, if my stereo is up loud enough, you can hear it in any room, so that solves the multiple-speaker/multiple-zone problem.

I saw a writeup on a new system by Sonos which is promising. You hook up your computer to their box, and then you have a ~$500 unit per zone. Each unit talks to the PC wirelessly, and has a built-in amp and inputs for other audio components (turntable, CD, iPod). Each one operates on its own; you can be listening to something downstairs while someone upstairs has another song going. The whole thing is controlled with a very slick handheld remote that has a color screen driving a good navigation system, and touch controls that look easy to use. I like the controller a lot, but I already have a good receiver and don’t like the idea of paying for another one and then somehow wiring it in tandem with my DVD sound setup. I also like its general looks, but I don’t like that it probably requires me to run in Windows all the time.

My predicament now is that I dual-boot into Windows to use my iPod software, so all of my MP3s have been stranded on a different hard drive. I just got NTFS mounting to work in linux though, so now I can just fire up xmms and point it at that directory and it works. But I am playing through the tiny speakers built into my LCD, which are about as big as the one in the back of my watch. I need to figure out a way to string some cables across the room and get the signal to my receiver. Then I need to figure out how to get XMMS to run so it isn’t microscopic. Also, it would be cool to do some kind of web-based control for it so I could fire up a browser on my laptop in the next room and change songs. Or maybe I should do something useful, like clean my bathtub.

I’m now listening to an Asia song from the Over the Top soundtrack that rhymes fire with desire. I think all of the songs on this soundtrack do, though. Anyway, I think I’m going to either write or play videogames.

When I lived in Seattle, my studio was on the top floor of the building. Okay, there were only five floors, but with the couple of levels of parking lots underneath there, it gave me a bit of altitude over Pill Hill. Seattle winters aren’t too brutal, and I probably could have survived the whole season without a winter coat, especially given that I drove everywhere. My apartment had a single baseboard heater next to my bed, about four feet of inductive coil inside a metal case, maybe something you could buy for $30 at your local hardware store. I seldom ran the heater, though, because everyone below me ran theirs. I’d often get home from work and find my apartment about the temperature of a bread oven, because the jerkoff below me left his heat on full and then went to work all day or all week. That meant, I opened the window or the patio door, and let the cold and usually rainy Seattle winter battle the apartment until it got comfortable.

I don’t have control of my heat system here either - most apartments in New York have steam radiators that are centrally controlled by who knows what kind of mechanical or manual algorithm. This usually means in mild weather like today - mid-40s or so - my apartment also approaches the temperature resembling a kiln. Unfortunately, the opening the window approach isn’t as pleasant. For one, my crap windows are very difficult to open, and are more binary than linear; you apply way too much pressure to a non-ergonomic handle like you’re trying to open a can of pickles, and after too much time - CREEAK - the window opens about as far as you’ll be able to correct it. Compare this to my Seattle digs, which were only a few years old and had all-new, tight-sealing, perfectly-balanced Andersen windows. And in Seattle, the distant rain and hum of traffic (with no horns or car alarms - I think most people in Western Washington aren’t even aware their cars HAVE horns) sounded so much better than the too-present sound of jocko-homo-italiano guys beating their wives or whatever else I hear outside my window on a regular basis.

I had another round with the dentist today, the last for the year. He finished up a root canal, put in another titanium post, and sealed it all up in temporary crud to await a real crown next year. I’ve burned up all of my insurance for 2004, so I will come back right before my Vegas trip for the porcelain replacement. And I’m doing the flex-spend thing so I will save a little bit of cash and not pay as much in taxes. I am all for any way to pay less tax, although I wouldn’t want to go through all the hoops of considering my writing a “business” so I could write off my computer and stamps and pencils and whatnot. It’s too much work, and I haven’t even bought a new computer in a while. Maybe I should, and deduct the whole deal. Those Tablet PCs look nice…

I finished reading the stock market book I was talking about, and I guess it is good, in the sense that the guy lost like a million dollars and was a total dumbass and admitted it at the end. The whole thing makes me NOT want to invest, to just shovel cash into some kind of blind trust and not look at it, and not buy anything and just read and write and let the money quietly accumulate. I guess that’s what the 401K is for. I have like a dozen choices in the thing, in contrast to old jobs that used Fidelity and offered a bazillion options. All I know is that I max out the thing every year, and I actually made a decent amount of money from my picks last quarter. So that will be there, and if Social Security survives, maybe I can use that money for books each month.

I came to the realization that my biggest fear about retirement now is not getting the money to stop working, but actually living long enough to spend the money. I know that sounds nuts, but 67 is a long way off. I mean, all of my grandparents died at just a few years older than that. Okay, I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, and I don’t sit around eating giant blocks of organ meat doused in lard like my grandfather. But when I get out of bed in the morning, my 33-year-old ass doesn’t exactly feel young. What will it be like when it’s twice as old. Maybe I need to get my ass off the couch and run around the block a few times. I mean, having five million in the bank doesn’t do much if my arteries are 99% clogged and my bad cholesterol is a four-digit number. Of course, maybe in 30 years, I will take a roto-rooter nanotech pill and have my circa 1985 heart back again.

After spending the whole day veering in and out of sleep and hoping the dull pain of the new metal in my mouth would go away, I’m now far too awake, and I don’t feel like writing on this new book. I need to dig through my pile of unread books and find something new…

Thanksgiving’s always weird. I’m not one of those people that ironically scoff about how the pilgrims raped the indians, and I’m not the kind that gets all weepy and talks about being thankful for the baby jesus or whatever the hell else. I have problems eating large amounts of food, so eating 8000 calories of turkey and then passing out isn’t my style. Both parades with floats and football bore me.

To the introvert like me, Thanksgiving is a nice day to not have to be around people. I woke up at the usual 7:30 or so today, but then went back to bed and enjoyed drifting in and out of sleep, feeling the cold outside and hearing the rain and wind, and being nice and comfy inside my fortress of blankets and pillows. I did get up to drink juice, take medicine, use the restroom, then go back to bed. I kept repeating the cycle until about two in the afternoon.

On a work day, I rush through the whole teeth-shave-shower cycle as quickly as possible. But on days off, I almost savor it, and spend a lot of time on small details. I spend forever going over my teeth with floss, inspecting each gap and gumline. I usuaully clean the bathroom as I clean myself, spraying the scrubbing bubble stuff and rearranging the things in the cabinet to find some optimum order maximizing storage space and access to frequently-used medical products. I spend too much time with q-tips and peroxide, dousing out my ears. And then, once in the shower, I spend forever under the hot water, never wanting to get out again.

I got dressed and considered going out for lunch, but it looked like hell out: thunderstorms dumped rain from the dark sky, and cold winds tore across the streets, blowing the rain almost sideways. I didn’t need to be anywhere, so I watched a show on PBS about old railroads and played Ace Combat 5 for a while. Finally, at about 4:00, I got the wise idea that maybe I wanted to cook dinner. I figured the stores would probably close at 5:00 (city that never sleeps, my ass - crap closes here like a small church town with blue laws, and meanwhile in Goshen, Indiana, you can go to Meijer and shop for groceries at three in the morning if you want) so I bundled up and headed out.

The rain stopped, and the sky looked dark, but it was that kind of perfect bad weather, the eye of the tornado kind of stuff. Once again, another reason introverts like me love Thanksgiving is because I get the city all to myself. Everyone else is passed out in front of the tube or has a day off, which means nobody is on the streets and I can roam around without running into the usual assortment of derelicts, idiots, yentas, bad drivers, and everyone else that make this neighborhood a pain in the ass. It was absolutely quiet and still. I loved it.

Even the normally idiotic Key Food store wasn’t that bad at all. A few stragglers were in there, buying last minute stuff or stopping in on their way home, probably. But I got to wander the store with no screaming kids, no people leaving their carts blocking the whole damn aisle, none of the usual madness. I didn’t even have to wait in line.

I spent the evening alternating between watching the tube and doing various household crap like washing dishes and working on organizing my CD collection. It feels nice to spend the evening getting stuff done, relaxing, and eating a bunch of food I just cooked. It’s also nice to know there will be three more days of this ahead.

I guess when I spend Thanksgiving doing nothing, I feel slightly guilty in some weird way, that some relative or person will get all weepy about “oh my god he’s all by himself and he’s building a gallows in his bedroom” or whatever. But the truth of it is that I’ve always been alone on holidays like this. At any family gathering, there’s always the group of men, who want to eat their weight in turkey and drink a bunch of beer and watch football and pass out, and then there’s the group of women, who want to talk shit about all of the members of the extended family that aren’t there and exchange their voodoo/gossip, and there’s the group of kids running around like tasmanian devils. That always left me in the middle with nothing to do, and I learned from an early age that the best way to deal with family dinners was to bring a book. (This was long before the days of the GameBoy or portable DVD player.) So even though I had a dozen people around, I was essentially alone. Actually, I was alone but wanted to really be alone, but instead I was in a basement sitting at a card table or whatever, reading my Fiend Folio or something, wishing I could be away from the people passed out or catting out upstairs, except my parents usually drove. And okay, my maternal grandmother was an excellent cook, and I had enough cousins on my mom’s side that I could find someone to hang out with. But we didn’t go to Chicago that much, so Thanksgiving and many Christmases were spent at my stepdad’s folks’ house. And his mom could not cook. Imagine the mom from Better Off Dead and her grotesque cooking, and that was it. So sitting at home, cooking my own food that I chose, changing the channels on my own TV, and enjoying myself, that’s cool. What I did today made for a good day.

Okay, this Seinfeld thing is on TV, so I am going to watch that.

I did nothing this weekend. NOTHING. It was both depressing and liberating. I really do enjoy being in my apartment when it starts to get cold out, when it’s chilly outside and the thoughts about holidays and winter first fill my head, and long before I realize how shitty the insulation and heating in this place really is, when the January wind pounds through the windows at eighty miles an hour. But for a short period, there’s that warm feeling of being inside with a crisp and cozy amount of heat in the place, and the feeling of cold outside, and a good video to watch and maybe a nice drink and something to eat and an afternoon on the couch thinking good thoughts. I don’t know, I think growing up with a woodburning stove changed my internal wiring somehow. My parents got this giant cast-iron Fischer stove and had an installer build a little “stage” for it in the family room, along with a wall of bricks and a big chimney. And since I was a kid, there’s some kind of social aspect to being warm. You come home to a cold house, and someone starts the fire, and it heats up the whole room, the whole house, and that feeling, that dry heat in the air while you sit on the couch with everyone else, watching TV and waiting for supper, it somehow sticks with you. It seems so much more human, or communal, than just pressing a button or setting a thermostat. And I guess now, even when the impersonal steam heat kicks through the radiators, it reminds me of that comfort.

So yeah, no going out this weekend. I’m also taking it easy on the wallet and preparing for another round with the dentist tomorrow. This will be for another post insertion, another piece of titanium that will be with me forever, or until I do a Bruce Willis-12 Monkeys and tear it out so the men from the future can’t track me anymore.

Not much else. I think I’m going to read some Lester Bangs before bed.

It seems that my most common recurring dream/nightmare has to do with me working at Wards, or rather not working there. There’s usually some part of the dream in which I am not working there and I’m probably on the schedule, but I haven’t quit or anything, and I’m too embarrassed to go back in and tell them I’m not working there anymore. There’s also usually some component in where they still owe me a paycheck or two, and I’m not sure whether or not I should go ask for it or if they will eventually mail it to me. There are a lot of other side plots and situations to the dream, but that’s the basic deal.

This is the part where some wise ass says “have you ever had that dream where you’re in college, and you find out you have a class you didn’t know about?” Let me tell you something: that really happened to me, on a pretty regular basis. Okay, maybe it didn’t happen every semester, but I skipped a lot of class in college (because I was an idiot) and there were many times I had like a Calculus 5 class that I had only gone to the first class and I was somehow planning to go in and take the midterm cold and somehow get enough points for a half a semester of missed quizzes and homework. I have that dream regularly, to the point where I wake up and I have to verbally tell myself over and over “I’m not in school anymore. I graduated. I’m not in school. Go back to bed.”

Anyway, I always wondered if there were other people out there that worked at Wards on the web, like an alumni association. I mean, this place was around for a hundred years, with a lot of people that worked there for their entire lives, starting out in the shoe department and working up to be store managers, in charge of hundreds of employees. Some stores were the only thing in their communities, the equivalent of Wal-Mart these days, except even bigger because there was no Target or Meijer or Best Buy to go against them. I wish I could remember or write down a tenth of the stories I heard with people as I watched the clock and dealt with customers on the watch at that store. Everyone that worked there had a story, from the giant pro wrestler-looking receiving manager who still lived with his mom to the ex-schoolteacher who lived in the UK for ten years in the Air Force and now sold NAPA parts at the auto counter, to the janitor who seriously won like $2.6 million in the state lottery, yet loved working so much that he still kept his $5.15/hr job mopping up puke in the restrooms. (He did, however, buy a house on a golf course, a Lotus, and entire dispensers of those scratch-off lottery tickets from 7-Eleven, because he had a severe gambling habit and was convinced lightning would strike twice.)

So there’s never been much out there. But now, it seems someone has re-bought the Wards brand. I knew they were trying to sell everything but the fillings out of the employees’ teeth when they got down to the last days in 2001. GE credit bought them during their earlier chapter 11, and I’m sure they counted on salvaging out every sign and shelf when they tore out the stores. Now it appears the domain name and trademarks went too, because wards.com is now an online store with the same logo and look, selling housewares and other junk to web surfers. I couldn’t find any more information about how it happened, who is running it, what kind of PR went out, etc etc. You’d think there would be a picture of the president or a letter from the CEO or some sort of news item that said “we’re back!”, but I can’t find anything. It appears to be some kind of shithole, cookiecutter business-in-a-box that was incorporated by a paralegal in a strip mall and run out of someone’s basement. Too bad, because part of me would almost be interested in seeing Wards come back. I didn’t drink all of the Kool-Aid they fed us back then, but I took a few sips, and I really did believe in the place, as much as a kid in high school could.

What’s funny is that this is the second time this has happened to me. My first job out of college, spry.com, is now running as a pseudo-bizarro phantom business, this time an ISP. I don’t know if it has any relation to the original company - maybe someone bought their network infrastructure and name and tried to run with it - but it also has a fake-ass web site that doesn’t list who works there or what their deal is. I care less about Spry, but it was still an interesting place to be for a year.

Not much else is going on here. I am barely scraping at the next book, maybe writing 40 words a day, just trying to write down ideas and not much else. I have lots of scraps and pieces, and the eventual goal will be to melt all of that down into a real book, but the theme isn’t there at all. The pieces, though, are great. I haven’t named it yet, but it goes through title changes weekly like a bad heavy metal band. It was Zombie Fever!, then Toast Fucker, then Anal Sushi, and there were a few others.

OK, I fell asleep this afternoon, so it should be a long night.