The new Peter Gabiel album, Up is pretty damn good. The music behind it has progressed greatly over the last ten years, although in a strange way, this is not as pop-accessible to me. It reminds me much more of one of his first three self-titled albums, but if they were recorded with incredibly advanced and modern digital equipment. There’s still the world music-oriented influences on there, although in a different direction than Us. But the thing above all of it is that his signature voice is still as pronounced as ever. It’s a very strange experience, and I think it will grow on me even more after I get it on a MiniDisc and listen to it with headphones on the train for a week straight.

I can’t believe it has been ten years since the last Peter Gabriel album. I don’t remember exactly when I bought Us, but I do remember spending a hell of a lot of time listening to it in the 1992-1993 school year. It’s one of those pieces of hyper-nostalgia that ties me into that timeframe. I really remember listening to it a lot when I was briefly dating this girl Kim in January of 1993, because the song “Secret World” really reminded me of her. I also remember a night where I listened to the whole tape three or four times, when I was dragging my laundry from my house on Mitchell Street in Bloomington to the laundromat in Eastgate Plaza. It made me remember the whole routine; I’d drag the clothes there and practically explode the tendons in my wrists from the laundry baskets. Everything went in, then I would walk down the plaza. This was, of course, on a Saturday night, because I had no life. I would go to Morgenstern’s and look at some books or the magazine rack, and pick up some obscure magazine that looked cool. Then I’d go to the cheap Chinese place - was it called Grasshopper? - and order some very Americanized sweet and sour pork, and read my magazine. I guess the Peter Gabriel fit this well; Us was such an introspective and dark album, following Gabriel’s divorce and really picking at various parts of the same problems I was facing. It was such a soundtrack to the strange ups and downs of my life at that point, unlike the steady stream of Death Metal that also shared the CD player around the same time. Death Metal marked the peaks, the energy and anger of being 21 and being in college and everything else, but after that all faded and I found myself sitting alone in an apartment as a 31-year old writer, the Peter Gabriel stood the test of time.

Speaking about thinking about the past too much, I’ve been getting some letters about the NecroKonicon, the glossary about my life. I guess I’m not the only one plugging their past into Google and hoping for an answer. I wish I could do more with this thing, either expand it more or do something fancy with the layout. I also wish I knew of a better way to send this out to more people, or somehow market it or put the right spin on it. I have a hard time even describing it to people. Most of its readership is from Google. If you have any bright ideas, let me know.

I had to move all of my logs off of 34.216.9.77/ today, so I did a quick report with analog to see how things stood. The directory currently getting the most hits is the Vegas directory, and I suspect that most of the hits are from people googling on stuff like “cheap vegas hotel.” And a ton of them are from google’s image search. I have very mixed feelings about this. For one, I’m running out of space posting photos, and I get no feedback whatsoever from them, they seem like such a waste of time to me sometimes. But, if I had nothing but text, my site would be incredibly boring. So, I don’t know.

I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto 3 too damn much. The problem is I don’t want to write, or can’t write, and that game is the most perfect way to waste time since the invention of SimCity. I don’t even play the missions or attempt to advance through the strategy part of the game; most of my time is spent stealing cop cars and then destroying them in extravagant stunts that usually involve total destruction of the vehicle. I’ve been trying to make some of the crazier jumps with more and more stupid vehicles. There’s a jump over an elevated train platform that’s in all of the commercials, and last night, I made it with a stolen ambulance. I didn’t make it with a flatbed truck - it got stuck on the platform and I had to abandon it. I also got a tank to jump over the water between two piers by rotating the cannon backwards and firing shells to increase my acceleration. It’s a very addicting game, very realistic in some ways, and yet the over-the-top satire in the general theme makes it hilarious to me.

I have way too many things to do, but all of them are drudge-work, fixing stupid design stuff on web pages and finishing this giant trip report from last July in Vegas. I also need to figure out what to do do for this October trip. I wish I knew some people that lived in Vegas that I could hang out with, but I haven’t had much luck googling around on it.

Okay, I should get back to writing this thing…

Things have been slow. And once again, hot. It’s almost October, but I think I’m going to have to run the AC tonight.

I’ve been spending many of my free cycles trying to write a trip report for last July, when I went to Vegas and Colorado. I’m about 5/8ths of the way through it, and it’s about 8,000 words. So I might have to do some sort of design to split up the days or whatever, maybe put some photos into the body of the text to break it up a bit more. I really don’t like writing stuff like this after the fact, but even with the laptop, I’ve become so apathetic about keeping track of things during the trip. I think part of it is that I’ve been to Vegas enough times now that the novelty is not there, and I can’t do a story like the one I wrote for my 30th birthday, where everything is new and wonderful to the reader. It’s become repetitive, although I do find new things to do each time. But there’s a different between introducing the concept of the Vegas buffet and finding a buffet that is a dollar less or has a make-your-own taco station. I don’t dislike going to Vegas at all, it’s just the writing part, at least without a mission, has become tedious. But I feel that if I don’t write about it, ten years from now I will be working on some project and be furious that I didn’t. At least that’s the way I feel now about a lot of things that happened ten years ago.

I did absolutely nothing this weekend except spend money that I didn’t want to spend, and mess up my nutritional situation. I’ve been getting incredibly picky about what I eat, and the thought of pretty much any genre of food disgusts me. And without the Star Trek replicator in the kitchen, I’m limited as to what I can order. And of course I could buy a ton of crap and try to cook the food myself, but that takes planning, and this whole downward spiral of bad food planning is because I don’t think about this shit ahead of time, and it’s 9

at night and the only thing to eat in the house is a Lean Cuisine dinner that has been in the freezer since 1963. So things have been off, which puts me in a bad mood and prevents me from doing stuff like writing books or going out or whatever.

I did manage today to go to Best Buy to replace the battery on my piece of shit cordless phone, and I picked up the boxed set for The Young Ones, the old BBC comedy that was on MTV late Sunday nights back when MTV was almost cool. I used to love that show, and then it was impossible to find, and then some crappy VHS tapes came out. Now they are on DVD, and they are great. I watched the first six of them in one go this afternoon, and they are funnier than what I remember. I did not watch the one with Mot

Questions

• When people talk about “hate literature”, how much of the hate literature out there is done via limerick? Is this a lost art form, at least in the genre of racist literature? I think the government should fund more hate limerics so they will have more of them to ban.
• Can you go to school for arbitrage? Is that like a degree program, or just a certificate?
• If this is such a violent country, why aren’t more people killed at sporting events? I would think arenas would encourange the occasional beating death to help stimulate TV ratings.
• How many of those solar-powered calculators would it take to power my house?
• Did I read this wrong, or is the woman that ate the apple in Genesis 3 a different person from the woman that Adam called his wife in Genesis 4? She isn’t called Eve until after they left the garden.
• Dave Mustain of Megadeth broke up their band because he can’t play guitar. Metallica can’t play because their bass player quit. So why don’t they get the bass, drums, and other guitar from Megadeth and they could join Metallica? They would have 2 drums (like old Genesis), 3 guitars, and a bass. And they could call it Metallicadeth. Or Megatallica.
• Would it be illegal to print all of the spam I recieve as a book? I would also include pornography so it is interesting.
• If Jews atone their sins on the holy day of Yom Kippur from dawn to dusk, would a Jew travelling east in a plane be more atoned? Would a Jew who crossed the international date line be less atoned?
• (Oh wait, I guess they aren’t supposed to fly planes then. Never mind.)
• If we ever go to Mars, do you think the makers of Mars bars will have some special candy out? Or will it become the standard candy of Mars? I don’t really like Mars bars, but I would like to go to Mars, and don’t want to rock the boat or anything.
• If a person with no hands used a Palm Pilot, what would it be called?

Okay, I’m bored of this.

I can’t believe it - Ozzy is going to be in Las Vegas the day I get there. Unfortunately, tickets are going for $100 to $250, at the Palms casino. Either that is a really small place, or Sharon is really screwing people over, or both. For that price, he damn well better bite the head off of something. Paul McCartney is at the MGM Grand the next night, but it’s $150-$300. I guess I like the Beatles sort of, but not that much. I think you can get the entire Beatles discography on CD for that much.

Today seems to be one of those days. I tripped over everything in the house on the way out, and then found out my headphones are shorted out or something. So I need to go buy another pair after work. I also brought a bunch of coins so I could buy some Cokes today and it turns out that one of them is actually a French Franc. I don’t even think they use those anymore, so I guess it just becomes another coin-related keepsake to throw on the shelf with my obsolete Vegas tokens, Susan B’s, and gold dollars. (And I just got a shitload of gold dollars, because the LIRR ticket machine gave me back $10.50 in change, all in coins.)

I’ve been trying to write each night, but it’s hard, with no concrete direction for this book. I had a lot of thoughts about it this morning as I was half-asleep, so I need to think about it more, develop a plan. I spent most of last night dicking around with my Korg M1 and the MIDI hookup to my computer. I found a DOS program that shows a staff of music and reads in a MIDI file and displays it. Then it plays the song and shows you what keys to play on your keyboard; a tutor of sorts. But it wouldn’t recognize my workstation, so I gave up on it and tried to get Cakewalk reinstalled correctly. It worked, but the patches were all messed up by default, and I didn’t have a spare ten weeks to sit around and rename all of the shit to work right. So you would pick Xylophone on the program, and the workstation would change to the drum patch. Or whatever. I also downloaded the free version of PowerTools and completely crashed my machine three times before I gave up on it and put everything away. I didn’t really practice or anything either. I am thinking of getting one of those $60 piano tutor packages, but I’d probably only use it twice.

My Sick Speed CD finally showed up in the mail. I should be listening to some Zappa before I go to this Project/Object tribute show tomorrow, but I’m too lazy. I think I’m going to go review some more concerts.