I think one of the fundamental problems when I read too much is that I find out facts that make me essentially think that my worldview is completely fucked, and I am the only person alive who is not a robot, or possibly I am really in a coma or a heavy dream after taking too much Tylenol PM and Robitussen and I’m just imagining everything around me, like some kind of Twilight Zone episode, and I’ll suddenly be awakened by space alien people with pig faces.

For example, did you know who, by publication volume, is the most popular published poet of the entire 20th century? Put down your drink before you read any further. It is JEWEL. No shit. Not Robert Frost. Not Ezra Pound. Not William Carlos Williams. JEWEL. Jewel Kilcher, the Alaskan elf folk singer. SHE SPELLED BUKOWSKI’S NAME WRONG IN THE GOD DAMNED BOOK AND SHE SOLD MORE COPIES THAN HE DID OF ALL OF HIS STUFF COMBINED.

That is all.

I’m getting so restless around the house, I actually cleaned. I really want to go out and do something, but it’s freezing again, and I don’t really want to blow any money, either. So I’m watching Die Hard with a Vengence on TV, although I missed the part where they digitally edited McClane’s sign that says “I hate n-words” to “I hate everyone”. I did just catch the part where the 7 train is at the fake 2-3 Wall Street station and blew up in a way that completely defies physics. Despite about 20,000 goofs, this is still a good movie. If I ever see it in the $7 bin, I’ll have to pick up the DVD.

One fun thing about watching the Sunday afternoon movie is you see the most pathetic, low-budget infomercials for junk As Seen on TV products. There was just one for the Eggstractor or something like that. It starts out with black and white footage of a woman with really crappy, frizzed out hair and no makeup, trying to peel eggs in the most pathetic way possible. Then they switch to full color and show the woman with totally Jenny Jones makeover hair, full makeup, and happily plugging eggs into this device that looks like a plastic squeze tube and another piece of plastic that extrudes off the egg shell. She’s happily de-shelling eggs like the thing’s giving her ten orgasms per egg. Then it shows the kids using it, and it’s the greatest thing since GI Joe with the Kung Fu grip. They also use the phrase “high protein” about 80 times in 30 seconds to placate the Atkins freaks. I never knew peeling eggs was such a god damned problem.

Anyway, I finished reading Snow Crash, and I was really happy with it. It’s probably one of the best books I’ve read in a while, and something so completely different. I’ve always wanted to like cyberpunk, but the Gibsonesque stuff wasn’t that great too me. It was good, passable, but too much like the crappy SciFi shows that they make to fill up time on the WB network on Saturday afternoons, and not enough like the very first time I saw Star Wars or something like that. But this book really blew me away, because it was like one part Mark Leyner’s humor with one part Kurt Vonnegut’s ability to take a couple of disparate stories and slowly weave them together by the end of the book. It’s also got all of this weird religious theory in it that almost threw me, but was still very interesting, and I wish I could learn more about that without tackling some giant, 1200-page theory/reference book I will never read.

Nothing else going on here…

I found out something interesting today: the Monroe County Public Library in Bloomington has ordered a copy of Summer Rain! This is, as far as I know, my first library sale. It’s very strange that ten years ago, I was picking through their used book sale books trying to find something to write about, and now they have one of my books. So if you go to their site, do a search on “Konrath”, and there it is.

Two copies of the annotated Rumored just went to Djibouti. Try to find that one on your globe. Hopefully, I will get some good photos to add to my collection.

Not much else is going on. I got a metric assload of new CDs this weekend, and got the new Simpsons game. Plus I had a ton of books show up today, so I’ve got a lot of media to consume. But now, I need to shut down this machine to put in a hard drive switch, so I can boot from Windows or Linux without having to swap cables each time.

GOD DAMN IT I hate upgrading linux. Well, I hate it mostly because the easiest way to upgrade it is to throw your fucking computer out of the window and then hit your testicles about five or six times with the sharp end of a claw hammer and then pour everclear in the wound and spend about 200 hours trying to download a brand new distribution at teletype speeds just so you can get a system that allegedly works better than Windows. As a side note, I plugged in my new DVD burner and TV tuner card and fired up Win2000 just for shits and giggles, and in about four minutes, I was watching TV and recording video and burning DVDs and having fun. Tonight, I have invested about the last five hours into installing Debian, and I just decided to fuck that and turn around and install Red Hat 9, despite everything that everyone tells me about the big evil corporation called Red Hat. I’m sorry, but I don’t like the ass-backwards bullshit factor in Debian, and I really don’t like the fact that it has an interface that only a sysadmin would love. I don’t really like to write a sixty page paper about the internal workings of my machine every time I upgrade, and I don’t want to have to write down the numbers of every chip of every board of my computer so I can search them all on google and find out what kind of obscure module needs to be added to my kernel on its 863rd recompilation. Fuck all of that.

I got the skydiving video today, and it’s pretty cool. I’ll try to tear a few images out of it and put them on the web when I do up the Vegas trip page. I haven’t had time to write anything about it given the machine situation, but it will happen.

It is once again so god damned cold that I probably won’t leave the house for the weekend. I am reading that Po Bronson book on what to do with your life, I forget the exact title. I enjoyed his book Nudist on the Late Shift, and a few people have evangelically mentioned this new book, so I bought a copy while waiting for a plane in Houston. I haven’t thought it was anything spectacular, but I’m still reading it. I think I like the way he has interviewed a bunch of people about their lives and how he strung this stuff together. I like the journalistic sense of it, mostly because I wish I could write a book like that. But as far as being motivational or telling me how to change my life, it’s mostly dreck. But like I said, I keep turning the pages.

It’s going to take another two hours to download Red Hat 9, so I guess I’m going to bed.

OK, I’m back. I had a hell of a travel day today, but everything seemed to go my way, which I guess means a grand piano is going to fall from orbit and hit me tomorrow, so maybe I shouldn’t have said that. I had to get up at FOUR AM this morning to make my flight, so I went to bed at ten and loaded up on Tylenol PM. For whatever reason, I couldn’t sleep though, and I ended up waking up at about two and watching the clock for a while. Then I spent the rest of the day flying or hanging out in the Houston airport (oh sorry, the GEORGE BUSH airport) or trying to sleep on planes. I got back to 25-81 around 7

PM EST, and now I’m waiting on my sushi and listening to Spock’s Beard and bitching that my CD-R is not ripping CDs correctly. Business as usual.

Yes, I survived skydiving. It was an interesting experience, but I wouldn’t highly advise it for everyone. There’s something about looking down at the ground from three miles up through an open door and having any reaction other than wanting to secure yourself to the nearest bulkhead, let alone letting someone else push you out of the door.

Anyway, I am writing the story. There weren’t many pictures for the trip, mostly because there aren’t many things I haven’t already photographed. I will also have a DVD of the jump, but they will send that to me in about ten days.

OK, I am a year older. And I have a lot of crap to do, including the ripping of about 20 new CDs, and that whole eating thing.