Oh yeah, I almost forgot about this thing.

I’ve been pretty off lately. For the first time since I was a kid, I’m getting allergies. I spent all weekend in bed, suffering and taking Benadryl. I went to the doc and got set up with Claritin, and I also got a HEPA air filter. Plus the bit of rain and temp change has calmed things down a bit. So I’m mostly feeling better, but I’m slightly off from all of the rollercoaster ride of Benadryl and Sudafed and everything else. Now that my brain is programmed to completely shut off at night with the Benadryl, I can’t sleep well without it. So, things are weird.

Since I finished the last Summer Rain draft, life has been much more unstructured. I really hate reading stuff for the 19th time, trying to fix “i before e” crap. I wish I could just hire someone to do this for me, but I’m too cheap, and I’m not sure it’s worth it. So I trod along, reading chapters with my red pen.

I’ve reached a point where editing Summer Rain is pretty much the only thing in my life outside of work. That’s okay, but I’ve realized that if I do anything else, it seems unnatural. Last night, I didn’t want to edit after about an hour of work, so I sat down and tried to watch some of The Matrix. It was cool and all - the DVD has so much extra shit - but I felt nervous, like I was trying to get away with something. I stopped, and tried to go to bed early, but I just paced the apartment like there was something wrong. I also feel weird because I’m not reading anything else these days. Reading Summer Rain is pretty much a full-time job, so I can’t sit back with Tolstoy or whatever when I’m not working. It would be counterproductive, and it would make my edits resemble whater I’m reading. So I will look forward to the point when I can stop reading this book and actually start something new.

Of course by then, I’ll be reading Rumored.

I’ve been suffering from allergies all weekend, or a cold, or both. Why aren’t there any non-drowzy antihistimines available over the counter? I heard that in Canada, you can buy Claritin and that stuff without a prescription. Oh well, I’m going to the doctor tomorrow - maybe I can get set up. I also found that antihistimine eyedrops help me out quite a bit.

Sunday night - eating sushi, chipping away at the book. I am surprised by how great a lot of Summer Rain really is, once I read it all straight through instead of reading the problem areas over and over for months at a time. I’m hoping another week or two of careful reading will turn out a good draft that I can send to the printer and get this whole process moving.

I should get back to work…

I should mention that I finished a draft of Summer Rain today. Now it’s time to shake out all of the bugs, and get this piece of shit to the printer.

I’m sick - probably shouldn’t be awake but my sleep schedule’s off due to a day of heavy cold medicine and too many naps. I ate dinner at like 5:30 and now I’m starving, so I woke up in the middle of the night to eat pizza. Make sense? Probably not.

Ten seconds after I convinced Michael that CVS was the greatest thing in the world, it stopped letting me check in files. This is a metaphor for my life.

04/28/00 13:59

I fucking hate being sick. Even though I got a good night’s sleep last night, I absolutely couldn’t get out of bed thismorning. So I called in, hacked (lungs, not code) for 45 minutes, and got back to bed. Had a weird dream that I was at the weird Maryland top-secret camp where they’re holding Elian and his dad. I was hanging out with my old friend Chris Hagen, who was desperately trying to convince me that I should have children as soon as possible. Chris has always been a strange guy, so this wasn’t entirely out of character.

I just got lunch from the Mini Star, a diner a few blocks away. Very cheap, pretty good, and extremely fast. And they let me order anything, no matter how small, with no minimum order. I think I could call and ask for a napkin, and a guy would be here three minutes later. It’s like having a Denny’s on call. Today’s a soup day - hot chicken noodle, perfect for this cold. I also got a $3 cup of fresh-squeezed orange juice that could regenerate the dead, it has so much vitamin C in it.

Otherwise, it’s very much a non-day. I kept drifting back to sleep, half wanting to stay unconscious for three days until this was over, half wanting to get up, take a shower, and get on the computer or clean or go to the corner store or something. I feel so guilty for sitting around all day, but… I’m sick.

It still hasn’t registered that I finished a draft of Summer Rain. It probably won’t; this is common for me. When I think about it, there are probably so many problems - continuity, gaps, grammar, and it’s going to be a huge task to fix all of them. I wish I could print the whole thing, mistakes and all. But it’s somewhat rewarding to find a major fuckup and thing “I’m glad that didn’t make it to print…”

Back to my soup…

Things are, at best, a blur. I think I’m getting a cold, which is a pisser because I’m in the final mile of editing Summer Rain, and I really want to blow through the last of the writing and get it over with. I’m down to five chapters with sizable holes that need to be plugged, and then it gets down to the monotony of spell-checks and passes through printouts with the red pen. I’m almost certain that two weeks into the month I’ve scheduled, I will say ‘fuck it’ and send the thing off to the printers.

I can’t think well at the start of a cold. It seems to cut into my creativity first. I think if I could sleep more, I would get past this. I got about 6 hours last night, which helped. Tonight, I will try for 8. I also want to think about what books to read next. I haven’t been able to read while I edit Summer Rain, and I want to get into stuff that will make me want to work on Rumored to Exist. Maybe some Raymond Federman. Or I could re-read Leyner.

I have an overwhelming urge to get a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator. I’ve decided to wait until the book is done and money settles down, and then I will waste my evenings on learning to fly a Cessna. And waste my paychecks on control yokes, pedals, and more memory.

Okay, back to the book.

I’m still very tired. It’s hard to say whether or not I’m getting work done on Summer Rain. I am filling in a lot of the holes in book three, finishing a lot of small pieces to bridge the gaps and get closer to being done. But I’m also so sick of the third book that all of it looks like shit to me, and I don’t even see the point of the last 15 chapters. I wanted to be close to complete by the end of this month, so I could spent all of next month just editing on paper and going over things carefully. I’m like 8 chapters behind right now. I might be able to finish some of it this week and weekend, but there’s no way I can finish 8 chapters.

As far as my mental state is concerned, I’ve been far too busy to really think about it. I mean, I had a long talk with Ray last night about it, mostly because he’s going through a bunch of weird shit and indecision also, and that’s helpful, but there are so many things that I need to think about. I feel like I need to get a lot of small things done in my life and make a lot of major decisions about what to do, and I really don’t know what direction to go. I do feel better about doing this alone - I don’t feel that I need assistance, but I do wonder what choices I need to make.

I am not saying that I am deciding whether or not to move to Sweden or start podiatry school or shave my head or anything. It’s just that my standard, default action at this point would be to sink into my writing, and buy a lot of DVDs and sink into mediocrity. Then in six months, I would start saying “fuck, I’m really lonely, but I’ve been eating pizza every night for the last six months, and I’m a poor slob with no social skills” and I would go into dramatics about how I needed to retrain myself to interact with humans. Instead of that, I am trying to think of how I can get my life together or keep my life together, but also work on my writing and try to stabilize things enough that I can interact with others. I just need to think about these things a little bit at a time, so I’m not floored when they all hit me at once later.

For example, I need to clean my fucking apartment. I have picture frames I bought four months ago that I still haven’t hung up. And my kitchen is full of boxes. If I ever want friends or people from work or whatever to come over and hang out, I should take the pile of six months’ worth of junk mail and do something with it. And I should buy some silverware. And I need to find a convenience store that’s open past 10. That’s completely unrelated, but I always run out of stuff to drink at like 10:07.