Happy New Year. I think I’ve figured out all of the associated issues with knocking the journal over to 2003 without completely mangling access to the old archives. There are still broken bits and pieces, and the UI isn’t wonderful, but it looks like it’s at least mostly functional.

And what did I do to usher in the new year? I was mad at work trying to finish things for my next book. And now, I’m happy to report that Tell Me A Story About The Devil: Selected Journals, 1997-1999 is on its way to the publisher and will hopefully be available in a few months. It’s a collection of old journals from right here, edited and pulled together into a nice, bound copy. I’m very happy about making this a book, and I really do like all of this old writing. Of course you can get all of this stuff for free on this site, but it will be a different experience to be able to sit in bed or on the bus or whatever and read a copy on real paper.

The last few days have been a real bitch, pulling together the manuscript, dealing with the little bits like the back cover text, marketing summary, and all of that, and getting the cover ready. (It’s here if you want to look at it.) Ray did the cover again, and it took some work to find a photo that I liked. But I think it looks good, and I’m happy that after two black book covers, I will have a bright red book to put on the shelf next to it. Anyway, I haven’t slept much, and my food schedule is way off too, so I feel like shit. After finally submitting everything to the publisher at 10:30 this morning, I got a few hours of sleep and went out in the pissing rain to get some Subway for lunch at about 5:00. Now, only a few hours later, I really want to get supper, but I really don’t. And I don’t want to work tomorrow, but I have to go in. At least it will be a nice, short, two-day work week.

Not much else is up. I am not going to ramble on about resolutions or look back at the year in review or anything like that. I do too much of that stuff on a daily basis. Right now, I need to clean the disaster in my house from working at full-bore for the last week or so. I’ve got a bedroom full of photos everywhere, a living room covered in red-penned printouts, and a sink full of dishes. I doubt I will do too much damage to that tonight, but I would like to get things returned to normal so I can get started on the next book.

And yes, there is a next book! I have an idea, but I won’t jinx it. For now, I need to get thinking about the trip to Vegas in about two weeks. I just ordered a new battery for my laptop, and I hope that fixes the problem so I can get mobile and running. If it doesn’t, I think I’m going to buy a used PowerBook and go Mac. But I hope the battery fixes everything. It’s weird to think that I used this laptop for the last 40 or 50 hours almost constantly, scanning photos and plugging away at the manuscript, but it won’t work without a cord.

Okay, time to look at this dinner problem again…

I took my last vacation day for 2002 today, and I’m glad that I did, because I started to come down with a cold, or at least the horrific sore throat part of a cold that usually happens when you live in a dry heat environment and have to run around in the cold and then get on a crowded subway with a bunch of sick people. So I went to bed at about 8:00 last night (not on purpose) and essentially slept until 4:00 this afternoon. I did wake up in the middle of that to eat a can of Dinty Moore stew and watch another episode of Band of Brothers. And after a shower and about a gallon of juice, I finished the last disc, aside from the special features. Overall, I liked the series a lot, although it’s probably going to be like that Moon series that Hanks did for HBO in that I won’t crack the DVDs again for another year.

The book of journal entries is slowly progressing, but it’s at the point now where I really need to worry about the end-game issues, most of all how I’m going to sell the damn thing. Part of me wants to send it to the publisher and then not tell a god damned person about it. Nobody will buy it, but it will be out there. I still need to finish editing, and then get together the cover and marketing crap. Luckily, the editing is going fast, and I’m not finding a lot of corrections. Of course, if I were to rewrite it, there would be lots of work, but I’m just fixing major mistakes. I’m not even fixing the fact that I used to use em-dashes like a motherfucker five years ago.

Not much else. I feel pretty fucking tired for having slept almost 20 hours, though.

Christmas.

I don’t have any giant, special, holiday issue of the journal ready. I didn’t do much for the birth of the baby jesus or baby santa or whatever. I mostly slept, and had some macaroni and cheese for lunch, and then ordered some Indian food for dinner, and fielded a couple of phone calls, and talked to my nephew about nintendo, and that’s about it. It was a nice day off of work, and I couldn’t ask for anything more, really.

My sister and brother-in-law’s gift to me was the Band of Brothers DVD set, which includes 6 DVDs inside a cool metal box, for a total of about 863 hours of viewing. It’s a Spielberg-produced HBO miniseries about the 101st Airborne in World War II, akin to Saving Private Ryan, but a different story. I also got the special edition of Platoon the other day, and spent all of Christmas Eve watching that with the commentary.

It’s snowing out, one of those winter white christmas wonderland snows. It was just raining with cold temps, then it started hailing, then slush, and now it’s white enough for Bing Crosby to start singing about it. I went out earlier today to go to the drug store (and the god damned pharmacy was closed even though they said they would be open) and I had to battle through some impressive downfall to get there. The wind is the worst - it cuts through everything when it hits. 25 mph gusts. Not fun.

I’ve been editing and slowly working on the book of journal entries, and it’s getting there. I think I will try to get it to the printer by the end of the year, and then it will take them a couple of months to figure it out.

So that’s Christmas. Back to work tomorrow, then a three-day weekend. Hope your holiday worked out.

I had another weekend of doing almost nothing, and then I decided to go out today and spend a few bucks on DVDs. I went down to J&R’s, and for some insane reason, decided that I really needed to go see ground zero. I’d previously said that I would never go down there and be one of those stupid tourists looking at a hole in the ground like it was the largest ball of twine on display in the middle of South Dakota at a roadside marker or whatever. But I did decide go to once I was down at City Hall, so I walked over there.

I don’t think the site would be that impressive to someone who hadn’t been down there before, when the towers were standing. Aside from the banners and displays and signs hanging on a fence, the place doesn’t look much different than any other construction site. And I didn’t spend a lot of time down there before, but I did have a mental image in my head of the pre-9/11 layout. So when I started walking down Vesey and got my first clear shot of the area, it was like being hit in the chest with a lead plate. It was so dramatic, seeing that big piece of the landscape plucked clean and replaced by a giant pit of nothing. I really wasn’t even thinking that much about the people who died there or the greater symbolism. I just looked at the surrounding buildings, the things that were made famous by the videos and the news stories; the giant pit of the WTC 7 foundation, the fucked-up Verizon building, and all of the surrounding structures that are now pretty much back to normal. There are still a lot of fences and opened-up manholes and torn-apart sidewalks and stuff like that, and that’s the biggest indicator of the area to people walking by. You can’t really see into the bathtub from the street, and you can’t see the same shot that every aerial photo on the news shows. It doesn’t look that impressive or huge when you are standing in front of it - the whole area is only 17 acres. But it was there. And it was pretty weird.

That was the only noteworthy part of the weekend. Other than that, I sat around, edited this journal book, watched a lot of dumb movies, and that’s about it. I have to work this week, but only Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. No holiday plans, just editing and Grand Theft Auto, which isn’t too bad. Our Xmas weather is going to be in the 40s and raining. I can deal with that.

Watching Platoon. It’s on TNN and is “uncut”, which means they can say “shit”, but they still bleep out “fuck”. I haven’t watched this movie in a long time, and I forgot how many now-famous people are in it. It’s quasi-realistic and okay looking, but it also suffers from the Vietnam Cliche Syndrome like most other movies of its genre. They all have the same soundtrack, the poor black guys that don’t want to fight, the obligatory drug scenes, the out-of-nowhere VC ambush, the My Lai analog, and so on. Still, it’s an interesting waste of a few hours, at least for free.

I haven’t been writing much lately, haven’t been doing much of anything. Last night, I played Sim City for like 6 hours. I tried to build an entire city supported by nothing but rail, but then I gave in and had to build some roads. I got up to about 60,000 people, and then the fucking program crashed, and didn’t save anything. I haven’t played it since, mostly because I have to reboot my computer to Windows, and that’s a huge pain in the ass because I can’t get the stupid GRUB bootloader for Linux to work, so I have to open the BIOS and set a different drive, and that’s about a step away from opening the case and soldering a jumper or something.

Nothing else. No transit strike, BTW. Now I just need to brave the cold every day to get to the damn train.