A quick update… I stayed home from work today (Tues) and slept, to try and beat this cold or whatever it is. I feel pretty decent now, but still disoriented. I also threw out my back a bit, although after lying on the floor for a few hours, it feels much better. Bad things always happen in threes right before trips, so I’m expecting my car to get firebombed tonight.

I’m almost entirely packed for this trip. I’ll be in New York until Sunday night, so there won’t be any more updates. This will be my last trip to New York as a visitor, so it’s pretty weird. I still remember the same type of trip in Bloomington. It was the summer of 1991, when I was dating the astrology chick and visiting every couple of weeks. I drove down about two weeks before my final move-in, with a carload of stuff and a bunch of appointments at the bursar, registrar, psychiatrist, landlord, etc etc. This move was a return to Bloomington after spending a year living with my parents in Elkhart and going to IUSB. Usually when you transfer back to a regional campus, you never make it back to Bloomington. You fall into a rut of a class a semester and an all-encompassing day job, until you stop taking classes. Everybody told me I’d never make it back. And then, on that August day, I was walking through the arboretum, on my way to the shrink, looking at the sky and the trees and the people and thinking that I was back - after two more weeks of work, I’d have Bloomington as my playground again. I guess I feel the same way about New York. Once I return, I think I have four weeks of work, two weeks of time to myself in Seattle to pack and say goodbyes, and then my two week roadtrip. Then New York is my playground.

Okay, time to finish packing and maybe watch Conan. It’s a 1pm flight, but I’ve been sleeping all day for the last few days.

I’m still sick today. I spent all of yesterday sleeping, and bought about $40 of various cold remedies and vitamins. I feel somewhat better today, but I hope for more improvement before Wednesday. There’s nothing worse than flying with a head cold.

I got my GPS today. It’s a Garmin GPS-12, and I haven’t had much of a chance to play with it yet. It’s very small, almost as small as my cell phone, and has a very cool-looking display. On my way to work, I got it to lock onto 4 GPS satellites, which gave me my location and altitude. It also read my speed as I drove into town, which was cool. I need to read the instructions and start making a bunch of waypoints, for the hell of it.

I have a dozen other things to do, plus I’m sick, so I better scoot.

I feel a need for an update, but I’m sick today. It hit all of a sudden, and it’s more fatigue than the scratchy throat/raspiness thing. Some hot soup at Denny’s helped some; a four hour nap was even better. I wanted to get so much shit done today, but now the day’s pretty much over. I hope that massive doses of vitamins and rest will get me back to semi-normal status by Wednesday, so my trip to New York will be uneventful. (I mean btw of problems. It should be a very cool trip, although short. Marie said that next week, we are going to a party in the apartment (it’s now a condo) where Burroughs lived when Lucien Carr showed up to tell him he killed David Kammerer. That’s kindof cool.)

I bought a bunch of boxes, and I’ve been trying to pack. It’s a slow process, and incredibly nostalgic, which makes it go even slower. Every single thing I pull off the shelves to put in a box reminds me of a ton of stories and other mental baggage. It’s always great to live in the past for a moment and explore the stream of memories, but it makes me take hours to pack each box. I bought ten boxes today, and when those are packed and on a UPS truck for New York, my apartment will look threadbare. I’m also hoping to get as much of the breakables and invaluable items to New York on my trip. I’m packing as little as possible for the three days, and filling the rest of my luggage allowance with journals, photos, video masters, my whole Nintendo setup, and as much as I can get into the 3 bags/70 lbs each limit.

You’d be suprised how much broccoli seems to help a cold. Most be the vitamin A. Anyway, I can barely think, so I better quit for today.

I’m building an arc. Math majors and/or biblical scholars, please tell me how long a cubit is. I will not be bringing any animals, except for Marie’s two cats. They are both males and fixed, so it’s not part of a plan to populate the world with cats. That would, however be a good scifi movie - Planet of the Cats. Charlton Heston yelling “get your paws off of me you damn furry kittens!” It would sell to the SciFi crowd and folks who think cats are really cute.

It’s still raining, which makes the days go by faster. When I can’t leave the house and I spend all of my time eating, sleeping, or watching TV, it only takes about 6 or 7 hours for a day to pass. I’m not writing right now - I have completely run out of steam on Rumored to Exist. I think I will go back to Summer Rain this weekend, and maybe get the last third close to done by the time I leave for NY for good in March. The difference between the rain in that book and the rain here is that in Indiana, it would pour rain, and then instantly become sunny. I’m pretty sick of the rain now, but if the sun came out in a split-second, I would run around on the wet pavement and smell the earthworms and thunderstorm ozone, and enjoy it more than this 40 days/40 nights shit.

Although I get more positive comments about Rumored, working on Summer Rain is ultimately more satisfying. I can write more per night on SR, especially when I get caught up in dialogue that works well. I can take things slow, and carve out scenes with a lot more visual impact. I also like to build up the characters more. Rumored is fun, but it’s very hit or miss, like writing copy for a newspaper instead of actual prose. But, more people enjoy reading it, and I enjoy reading it, and it will probably manage to sell someday, while Summer Rain will never really be finished. The only distribution methods I see are printing a hundred copies and giving them to my friends, or someone finding the ms long after I’m dead, and publishing it posthumously. Oh well, it’s fun anyway.

I thought about describing this company meeting I attended yesterday, but then I realized there there wasn’t much going on there. It was at the Moore Theatre, where me and Bill Perry saw Henry Rollins perform spoken word on his birthday, 2-13-96. Rollins spoke for so fucking long - it was great, but my bladder was exploding during the third hour. I ran to the bathroom, and it was the worst torture of North American plumbing - the trough. Luckily, this time there was no trough - they removed it and installed a bunch of stalls. After the meeting, there was a bunch of beer and food, and the line for food was very long while the line for beer was negligible. So, I started drinking right away on an empty stomach - hey, it’s free. I didn’t do anything stupid, except not cash in on the free food, and after they bussed us back to the office, I had to sit around for a few hours playing on the web and sobering up.

I’m more into this reuben sandwich than writing, so I better split.

More rain. I’m listening to Lizzy Borden - Master of Disguise, which is a very good album to have in the player on a dark and dreary day like today. It also reminds me a lot of my first semester of college for some reason, probably because I listened to it so much back then. The fall of 89 is on the very short list of semesters when the most change happened.

Before I get into this, I need to launch into an aside: Have you seen the show on UPN called Seven Days? The basic plot: the government has a time machine that can send a single person back seven days (called “backstepping”). So let’s say Sadaam gets a nuclear bomb and U-Hauls it to the superbowl and kills a few million people (which really isn’t a bad plan). So this secret division of the NSA would stap this guy in a giant machine, shoot him back a week, and now he has to go find Sadaam and distract him with some Asian hookers while he dismantles the nuke with a Bic pen and a book of matches, ala MacGyver. The special effects are on the moderate to shitty side of the scale, and sometimes the writing is a little too oversimplified for the scifi crowd - dumbed down for the action/adventure types. But it’s an interesting idea - sort of like Quantum Leap but grounded in reality a bit more. I’m not saying the technology is real, but they make this more like the government sending in the ATF or the Navy Seals, as opposed to a guy leaping all over the place and becoming different people. (But I liked that show, too.)

I have been studying a lot of scifi shows and movies about time travel, because I’m writing a book about it. So, I have some observations about the plot. I doubt anybody who reads this has seen the show, but maybe someone looking for Seven Days sites who is a big fan can answer my questions about the technical aspects or “time model” used by the show. I just did a search on UPN.com and found that the 7 is not spelled out in the title, and the main dude’s name is Frank Parker. It looks like it will be impossible to do web searches on “7 days” though because I will get hits on every calendar-type page on the way. On to my observations…

Okay, the first thing I can’t figure out: when Frank Parker goes back seven days, are there two Frank Parkers, or does he replace the old one? It appears from the one show I saw that they can also travel distance a bit with their machine. So, let’s say I am Frank, and I go back 7 days to the top of the Sears tower, but seven days ago, I was at a strip club. Does the me at the strip club vanish, or coexist? Doesn’t mean there are n+1 Frank Parkers, where n=the number of times he’s backstepped? If he replaces the old version of him, that would be a very interesting time model. It also eliminates gaffs like going back in time, robbing banks, fucking shit up, etc. because he is basically him. If I went back to 1947, I would not be me - the police wouldn’t be able to look me up and find me anywhere. If I go back to last Thursday, I’m still Jon Konrath - same fingerprints, same vehicle registration, same apartment, etc. If I knew I was backstepping in an hour, I could do a bunch of stuff that maybe wouldn’t happen, but I’m not sure - see next observation.

It appears that 7 days follows a destiny-based model, because (at least last night) some events happened exactly the same in both timelines. For example, the chief-type guy accidentally broke a tooth, which became a key plot point. Now, if it was a pure chaos-theory model, a butterfly in Nebraska could’ve completely thrown things off and the second time, his tooth wouldn’t break. But, if things always happen, how can a meddling time traveller do anything to throw off the process? In a 100% destiny model, no matter what he did, he wouldn’t be able to stop anything from happening. In fact, he might even cause them to happen. Imagine him backstepping to prevent the assassination of the president, and when he shows up, he tries to shoot the gunman, but instead accidentally shoots the president! So there’s some mix of destiny and freewill - maybe events are fixed by destiny, but an entity that goes through time has the ability to stop or supplement destiny and do their own thing.

When Frank Parker backsteps and then shows up at his office, everyone knows it’s him and that he has moved back to do some important work. They immediately listen to him and fall in line. Now they know that they put him back seven days, and they know all about his missions and whatever. This is a pretty smart way to do it. In most Terminator-type movies, they spend the first hour fucking with “oh my god! you can’t be from the future! you need to prove it!” crap. Of course, we’re not taking about 60 or 260 years of travel - they know the dude, and they paid to zap him back a week.

Also, their time machine is a huge basketball-arena sized thing with nuclear reactors and a few dozen operators, not a pocket-sized device that lets you zap all over. That means that time travel is pretty regulated to real missions, and you don’t have Biff going back in time to give himself a sports almanac or whatever. It’s not as cool looking as a DeLorean, though.

If I had time, I would start talking about all of the different, evil things I would do with a time machine. But I’ve gotta split - you’ll have to wait for the book.