It’s been a slow weekend, and I didn’t get out much. But today I got the bike out for a ride, and had a decent time with it. I have an e-bike - it is a retrofitted Heinzmann kit that I installed on a Mongoose mountain bike. There’s a motor built into the hub of the rear wheel, and then a self-contained battery/electronics kit rides in a modular pack that fits on a rear rack. Using a thumb-controlled throttle on the handlebars, I can get going from a dead stop up to 15 MPH or so. It also enables me to pedal normally, either alone or with the motor. The motor cuts out at 18 MPH, because that’s the limit for motor-assisted bikes as opposed to mopeds or scooters, which require a license. The battery, which weighs about 20 pounds, takes an hour or so to recharge, a bit more to get a good charge, and it lasts for about 10 miles of unassisted power on a flat surface.

So I got all charged up and headed east, trying to hit a bike lane on 34th Ave that cuts across Queens. The city has started painting these bike lanes on a few streets, and you can get maps of where to bike in local shops or online. But no drivers know what the hell a bike lane is, so you have to keep your eyes out. It’s always strange for me to ride away from my own neighborhood, into the areas that aren’t near subways or main roads. Queens rapidly becomes a car-centric area as you go east, so the landscape changes to more stores with parking lots, strip malls, and bigger areas that only cars would go.

I live on 36th Street and I watched the numbers go up slowly. The bike lane helped, but I could only hit a few lights and then I’d have to stop. Finally, I got into the hundreds, and reached the area by Shea Stadium and Flushing Meadows. I cut down 114th and ended up in the roughest neighborhood you could possibly imagine outside of a RoboCop film. The only cars I saw on the street were 100% stripped out and burned down, just the frames left. Luckily, I cut over a block and then down, and got to the park entrance.

Flushing Meadows is a strange little place. It’s a park where the old World’s Fair lived back in the 1960s. Now, all of the exhibits are gone, and there are neatly cut lanes that spoke outward, with trees and park benches. Some stuff is still there - I managed to get there on a big day for the US Open, and there were cops and limos and busses all over the place. I could hear the roar of the crowd in the tennis pavillion, probably watching the men’s singles matches. There’s also the hall of science, and those two big towers that were in that Men in Black movie.

So I rode around a bit, and went to the big fountain with the globe, which was empty. What was weird though is there were two blimps overhead, and there were these planes skywriting. But it wasn’t one plane, it looked like five planes in a line, so it worked like a dot-matrix printer. I think they may have been models of some sort, maybe flown from the blimp. But it was weird because they were skywriting these perfectly linear dot-matrix letters in a perfect circle around the fountain. I wish I would’ve brought my camera because it was a truly strange sight.

I also watched some kids with remote-control cars, in an area where they had an oval set up. These aren’t the cheap cars you get at Toys-R-Us and fill up with AA batteries. They had the variety that cost several hundred dollars, and had model airplane-type radios and chargable battery packs, with gearing that made them drive at scale speeds. It was cool watching it, because the tires must have been a “real” ply - every time they braked to go into a corner and then took off again, they would leave tread and smoke a bit. I saw a pretty incredible collision between two cars where one car lost traction and went sideways in a curve, then another t-boned him at full speed. It looked like a lot of fun, and I bet you could make tons of money sitting out there and renting out some cars and fresh batteries.

I rode around a bit, and headed back without too much incident. I hoped to save enough batteries to just coast back with the motor doing all of the work, but I lost a lot of juice and ended up only using the assist on start-up. I could get it up to about 18 with a bit of effort and then cruise through three or four lights before a red. The gearing really sucks on that bike, and there’s no high-end to really let me get going on flat spots. It’s also hard to get going from a dead stop because the battery and motor probably add 30 pounds to the 20 pound bike. It rides like a fully-loaded touring bike when I’m only hauling me, a bottle, and a small kit with a couple of tools.

So that was decent, except getting the bike in and out of the house. Other than that, I am fuming and fretting about this embryonic book, and in a strangely nostalgic mode. I could go on about this forever, but instead I want to get out of here and think about it for a while. So there.

I’m trying to remember what year Coke introduced Cherry Coke. I could do a web search but that would be too easy. Coke was always available as Cherry Coke back in the day of soda fountains, but they didn’t start putting it in a can until about 1985 or so. There used to be a pretzel shop in the mall where I grew up, and they would make a Cherry Coke for you - they had a pump full of the cherry syrup, and they’d add it to the fountain Coke. I think that approximates the taste of the original soda fountain drink, and it’s very cherry-flavored. The stuff in a can is barely any different than regular Coke, and I remember first trying it at the Elkhart county fair, when I was there with Tom G. and his folks. I think his dad was the kind of guy that had a stockpile of 200,000 cases of “old” Coke when they switched to “new” Coke, and he didnt’ like the Cherry Coke. I didn’t really like it either, but it was one of those things where I was glad I tried it, just so I had a conversation item for future use.

I almost forgot why I started talking about Cherry Coke, and that’s because they changed the can, I guess to be more inline with the new Vanilla Coke, which I still haven’t tried, and probably won’t, because I hate the taste of vanilla. I liked the previous cans better, and it’s weird that I can’t even describe what they’re like. It’s always weird how Coke and Pepsi cans morph over time and you barely notice it. I have pictures from ten years ago and Coke cans look completely fucked up. And they were even more strange in older movies, like when they had the old-school pull-off poptops. Does anyone even remember those anymore? I was collecting them, because I wanted to make a suit of chain-mail armor out of them. I think I got like one line about a foot long. Oh well.

Five new copies of Rumored are on my desk. I’m not sure where they will go, but I need to send out more review copies or something.

Slow afternoon. I need to get back to it…

Very little is going on here, just picking at these journal entries that will become a book, and trying to figure out at what point I should consider them done. They actually don’t have a lot of issues, it’s just a matter of space and size and whatnot. I also need to write some kind of introduction and figure all of that stuff out.

I’m vaguely planning what I will do in November for the next Nanowrimo contest. I am going to write a book, but I want to make sure it’s something that I will be able to iUniverse after some rudimentary cleanup. I have some thoughts on it, but it’s basically going to be like rumored but with a bit more structure and it will be much more violent, demented, obscene, and humorous in general.

Starting to plan the next Vegas trip in January - Bill wrote today to ask about it. Duffin and his chick just had a kid, so he’s probably out. If you’re interested in heading out to Vegas around January 17-22 next year, drop me a line - I’d like to get a few more people onboard.

Back to writing…

It’s been an odd little three-day weekend, although absolutely nothing noteworthy has happened. It rained, poured all weekend and I barely left the house. I was in a weird, low-level, melancholy depression that is almost enjoyable if you have no obligations or other social requirements. But the fact that holiday weekends are rare and I felt like I was on the spot to do something wonderful and exciting, I spent most of the time feeling weird.

Sometimes I think if I had absolutely nothing to do, if I had all the time in the world and no work or other obligations, this kind of depression would gradually mold itself into a creative passion. I think about the times when I’m away from work and people for long enough that I get into my own natural cycle, and don’t worry about the value of time. At the end of 2000, I took about three weeks off of work, and did absolutely, positively nothing. I was also sick during that period, and didn’t want to do anything except sleep and play Nintendo. But after a certain period of time, it all fell in place and I managed to stop thinking about what I should be doing and instead thought about what I was doing.

I guess in 2001, my time like that was in Florida, although when I was there, I felt a strong urge to be doing something touristy or whatever, and every day I would wake up and think about driving to Cape Canaveral, and every day I would chicken out. I didn’t get a lot of writing done down there, and I didn’t write a story about my trip, although sometimes I wish I would. The problem about writing travel journals, at least for me, is that after writing three or four of them, you realize that the travel changes but you don’t, and the journals are all the same. Despite where you go or what you do, you look for the same things, or look at things through the same lenses. Maybe I’m nuts in thinking this, but it’s why I’m not a travel writer.

Not much else here. Spent the day watching a so-so TV movie about the Unabomber starring Dean Stockwell as the postal inspector. I’ve been putting in a lot of time on editing the journals for the next book. And I went to the street fair on 30th Ave today for a minute, in the drizzling rain. No luck on the bamboo plants, and everything else looked pretty sub-par.

Back to editing…

I’ve been editing down this bunch of journals from 1997-1999 to make it into a book, and it’s harder than you’d think. The first thing is that it’s difficult to throw away pieces of it to get the size of the book down. I’m currently at about 140,000 words, and I want it below 100K. The other thing is that it’s so difficult to look back into time and relive that era. Nostalgia is a curse for me, and I always look back instead of forward, so doing a project that explicitly requires me to look back can be a bit pained.

The strangest part is reading about how, back then, I wasn’t interested in my life and I wanted to go back five years and live in Bloomington. Now, five years later, I wish I was in Seattle. And I bitched constantly about never writing, but I produced an incredible amount of stuff in that era. And I wished I archived more stuff, took more pictures in Indiana, so I’d have them for Summer Rain research. Now, I’m digging through photos from Seattle, and I realize I don’t have much useful stuff at all.

I do want to look forward. The more I think about it, the more I look outside of my life for validation on Rumored, the more I realize the next book should be twice as experimental, twice as dense, twice as violent, twice as detailed. I think Rumored was in 100% the right direction. And I don’t think it’s an inferior work. I think it’s a good first step. And I think there should be more.

A lot of stuff fell into place today. The landlord’s son came over and fixed my kitchen light. I have a new fixture and a new switch, and the new switch has a much “softer” feel to it, so it’s easier to flip on when you have both hands full and you jab at it with an elbow. For some reason, my cable TV mysteriously started working again, so I will be able to watch ER again. I got tickets for Quiet Riot, and I got the Pollock soundtrack. That CD is truly incredible, a very motivating 18 tracks of sound. It’s going to be up there with the Naked Lunch soundtrack as far as CDs to listen to while writing. I also got a Motorhead DVD-Audio. It’s interesting, but not entirely worth the $25 (except I will be able to lord it over Ray that I have a Motorhead thing that he doesn’t, and he’ll bitch endlessly.)

The shitty cafe around the corner from me closed. When they were getting ready to open that place, I gave it a year. If you could bet on this like this, I’d be so rich, I’d pay someone to write these entries for me.