I removed myself from On Display because I’m sick of every other journal except mine. Is that wrong? Maybe I will start a ring for text-only journals written by people who don’t read other journals and don’t care about graphics. If you think your journal fits the bill, email me. Also, it helps if you like Black Sabbath.

I’ve been reading Bukowski’s two books of letters, in an effort to think more like a starving writer. It’s made me realize I need to think more seriously about my books and get stuff done. Today I went to Virginia Lore’s and gave her the first two parts of Summer Rain and a recent draft of Rumored to Exist. She read part of Summer Rain and seemed into it, so hopefully that means another dedicated reader to give me detailed feedback, along with Michael, Andrea, and Marie. BTW, if you are reading this and want to review any of my stuff, it’s on my web site. But you have to email and ask for the password. I’m warning you in advance though that it’s a daunting task - thousands of pages, but maybe you’ll enjoy it.

I’ve been working more on Summer Rain lately, trying to get the third book in shape before I move. It’s at about 62,000 words, and my goal is 85,000. (That’s for the third book - the whole thing is currently like 220,000 words.) I’ve been piddling around with how the ending works. The whole thing needs to come crashing down pretty fast, like within a couple of chapters, and it’s not exactly smooth right now. It happens too fast, and out of nowhere. I’m trying to hid little clues and sort of pull back the duration of this final hammerblow to the chest so it’s not too formulaic or something. Although the word count is getting there, some of the final chapters still look pretty fucked.

In the last day or two, I’ve been looking back at older pieces of Summer Rain and doing some housekeeping. I’ve been working on the book almost constantly for a year now, except for the sporadic vacations I’ve taken with Rumored. So there’s writing I’ve done from like last May or even older that I haven’t looked at or messed with in a while. In fact, there are bits and pieces in book 3 I haven’t touched in months. It’s always nice to go back to something you’ve written and forgotten. When I go back to old parts of SR, I see pieces that make me laugh, prose that I think is strong, and stuff that works. That’s good, because in old drafts of SR, I cringe at the stuff I find. Rumored takes the cake though - after I set it down and let it ferment for a few months, I pick it up and find stuff I forgot I wrote, stuff that usually makes me laugh out loud. I love when that happens.

The big party is tomorrow. I don’t know who will be there, except for the usuals. I hope it’s a lot of people, but even if it’s just me, Ryan, Todd, and Keiko telling old stories about Spry, it’ll be fun. Every time I say I won’t miss Seattle, I think of another person that I will miss. And today, me and Virginia went walking, and went to this park up on Queen Anne hill, where she lives. It overlooked EVERYTHING - all of Puget sound right in front of us, the waters going off to the San Juans on the right, with little tugboats and ferries going back and forth below. And to the left, you could see all of downtown Seattle - Belltown, the Space Needle, the buildings, Alaskan Way, Key Arena, and if it would have been clear, even Mount Rainier. Virginia told me this story about how that spot was her first view of Seattle, how when she was going to school in Olympia, she had a crazy blind date that drove her up there and it was the first time she saw the city. It’s kindof sad to think that it will be one of the last times I get a good look at everything at once.

I videotaped it, of course. Making lots of tapes before I leave. I’m going to bring the thing to the party. Having a bunch of drunk people pass around a camera and make commentary is usually a pretty good view later when you’re sober. I have 3 more two-hour tapes to fill on the way out. I have no idea what I’ll do with them once I finish taping them - I still have about 4 hours of Disneyland circa 1997 that I’ve only watched like twice.

I promised myself I’d write until I was tired, and now I am.

Ryan Grant is having a party/wake for me this Friday. If you’re in Seattle, it would be terrific if you could show. Here’s his message:

Party! Friday the 19th, 8pm. http://www.seanet.com/~rgrant/party.html <— more info, map, directions. Jon Konrath is, as some of you may have heard, leaving the state. In fact, he’s moving to the Other Coast. All of you can do something about this. You can show up at my place Friday and, well, do whatever you want to about it. Most of us will be mingling, eating, drinking (to various degrees), and anticipating the Volkswagon giveaway. The rules are basically: bring yourself, invite friends, and if any self-immolations happen, they have to be out on the deck. - Ryan

That’s all for now. I’m supposed to be working on the book. Maybe I’ll write more in a bit.

Today was my first day of freedom, job-wise. Too bad I spent the whole day dragging hundreds of pounds of books down to my car and over to UPS. I dropped about $250 on shipping today, but now my apartment looks amazingly more barren. I started to pack more books tonight, but I’m down to one more box, and then I need to buy more.

It always feels odd to be hanging out on a day when the rest of the world is working. It’s like seeing a world you never knew existed. When I went to college and I skipped classes or otherwise found a way to screw around for an afternoon, I never felt the same sensation - college towns have their busy times, but so many people are vaguely employed or full-time students. I saw the same thing in Elkhart, though. I’d work at Monkey Ward’s during the day some summers, and when I went to get some lunch at the hot dog stand in the mall, the concourses would be completely barren, save a few senior citizens. During my first trip to UPS, Seattle felt like that - fewer cars on the road, the yuppie contingent was absent, and it just had a strange feeling, like you could tell at a glance that the majority of the city was behind a desk or at a factory.

During my second trip, around 3:30, traffic was already nearing a peak. I don’t know what the hell’s up with this city. They should’ve spent half a billion on a monorail, not on two stadiums.

I’m supposed to be working on Summer Rain, so I’m going to get back to it.

The cycling has begun. I’m talking about temperature cycling, a feature of my wonderful apartment. Here’s how it works. It’s colder than hell out, or at least cold enough that being indoors is a better option than being outside. But it’s not snowing or anything - we’re talking maybe 47 and pissing rain. Normally, I’d run my heater a little and keep my room at a nice, cozy temp. The problem is that I live on the top floor of the building. And the assholes below me have their heat on the “solder” setting. And heat rises. So without my heat on, my apartment is about 115 degrees. This means I need to open all of my windows and let my apartment cool down to 47 degrees. And when I close them up again, my apartment is at an ideal temperature for about 3 minutes. Repeat this over and over and over until you feel a great need to buy a firearm and hunt down other people in the building like wild game in the forest.

I spent some time with my friend Virginia, at her incredible top of Queen Anne house, talking about some short stories of her. For a long period of time, she swore she would not be a writer anymore, and stayed heads-down at her day job. It’s good to see her mad at work on a bunch of stories and sending them out. I wish I would’ve brought bits of Summer Rain for her to read. And I wish I could spend more time talking shop with her or talking about anything, really. I think I can count the people in Seattle I’ll miss on one hand, and she’s probably the first on the list.

My day otherwise has been so off-center and odd. Not sleeping (due to the temp. cycling, mostly) threw me off majorly. But I saw the new taco (“El Taco”) at 7-11, which was not exactly as memorable as hearing about JFK or the space shuttle, but now Ray has another reason to drag me there at 3 in the morning. In a city as dead as Elkhart, 7-11 is the nocturnal person’s mecca.

I packed a bunch of stuff tonight. After my Monday drop-off(s) at UPS, the apartment will really start looking bare. Many books are now gone - most bookcases are in the trash, and about 7 big boxes are stacked against that half-wall. Plus, I got rid of another little shelf, and my last two bookcases are down to about 70% capacity. A few more boxes, and all of my books will be on the way. I’m also working on clearing out closets, and that’s more done than not. My next big, messy project will be sorting through CDs and tapes. I want to ship ahead anything I won’t need, and drive with about half of my discs in the trunk. I also need to get stuff recorded onto MD. I have a 45-cassette holder which I will fill with longer stuff, spoken word and whatnot, and that will be the backup to the 80-some MDs I will have pre-recorded. I’m glad I’ll be home all day during the week to figure this shit out.

It’s two and I feel like I’ve been running all day. I’m going to finish recording an MD and then get some shuteye.

It’s my last day at this job. Since this is the end of an era, I guess I have a lot of ground to cover.

First of all, I work for WRQ, Inc. It’s a software company that’s best known for Reflection, a line of terminal emulation products. I’ve worked here since June of 1996, when my job at Spry/Compuserve basically fell apart from under me. I started work here on the Macintosh version of Reflection, writing balloon help and other online help. In January of 1997, the Mac team was used as the basis for a Java team, and we started work on what became EnterView, a Java-based terminal emulation program. I was on the team for the first two releases - the second release just went out the door on Monday.

Why am I telling you this? Because if you search my journal archive, you’ll find no direct reference to where I work. I’ve always had a fear that if I offhandedly said something bad or top-secret in my journal about my job, that I’d show up for work the next day and get handed a pink slip. And I don’t really consider this job to be part of my identity or a part of me. I have no need to tell the world about what I do here or my office politics. When I leave this building, I leave behind my job. I never work on weekends. I never spend all evening talking about what I need to do at work. I try not to talk about my job when I’m at parties or other social functions. I work when I’m at work, and I spend my paycheck. As a human being, that’s how I think it should be. I could see why companies would want to brainwash their employees into thinking about their job 24 hours a day - it allegedly keeps them focused, makes them work harder. But my #1 priority is my fiction, and I’ve tried hard to make sure my technical writing does not contaminate it.

This hasn’t been a horrible place to work. It’s right on lake union, in two of the nicest buildings I’ve ever worked in. (Although the Musical Arts Center in Bloomington probably takes the cake.) I made good money, I got good benefits, and the company really took care of me. I got offices with doors, nice computers, free soft drinks, good dental insurance, garage parking, paid vacations, and lots of other stuff I never even had a chance to use. The people here are professional and treated me decently and I have no horror stories about the management or other coworkers, other than tiny pet peeves and boring meetings. No real complaints there.

This is the paragraph where I’m supposed to start the downslide, the one that starts with “But…” I can’t think of many problems with this job that weren’t my fault. Not that there’s any fault or blame, but I never felt like I fit in. I mostly work with people about ten years older than me who are interested in rock climbing and bicycling and saving the environment and doing Bob Vila stuff to their houses and going to little league games with their kids. If you know anything about me, that isn’t me. And I’m not saying that stuff is wrong, if that’s what you want to do. If you are a family person and interested in your community and everything else, that’s fine. But I’m not, and I’ve been afraid that if I didn’t conform to that, and think about my job 24 hours a day and make it the focal point of my life, that things would never work out here. And I was afraid that if I stayed here long enough, I’d wake up one day and have two kids, a minivan, and a Volvo stationwagon. So it’s not the job or the employer or anything like that. I think that most companies this size in Seattle have a similar demographic. And it required a drastic change for me to escape that. So here I am, packing up my shit and moving to New York.

My office is almost empty. It’s pretty new to me - I think I moved in this January. There’s an older building at 1500 Dexter that is very huge, very beautiful, with terrace decks overlooking the lake and a ten story tall atrium in the middle. I was over there until this recent move. My last office was on the tenth floor, and I could see the space needle. But the office pick situation got very screwed up this time, and now my office in the newer 1100 building is in the center of the floorplan, with no windows and no light except for the fluorescents. It’s a bummer, but since I’ve basically been hiding out and counting days since the move, it’s a good place to be. It’s not on an arterial hallway, and it’s rare that you see anybody walking past. It’s been a convenient location for being a short-timer.

When we moved in January, I hadn’t given notice, but I knew I was leaving. So I packed up almost all of my personal stuff and took it home, under the guise of streamlining my move. So my books, coffee mugs, Internet Bowl trophies, photos and everything else I accumulated over the last couple years are at home, waiting to get UPSed to New York. Actually, the trophies are already there. And last night, I brought everything home except my page of phone numbers. The place is now pretty bare.

It’s the end of a long era, and I feel that I should be saying more. The summer of 1996 seems like a hundred years ago. But, I’m excited to get out of here, pack up my shit and hit the road. I guess that’s all I’ve got to say about it. Maybe I’ll add more after I go home. For now, I’ve got to make some phone calls and get ready to leave.