I wish I could describe the way a VW Rabbit smells. I was thinking about this last night, while writing the book. One time I was watching an episode of Wings (the airplane show, not the sitcom) or some other Discover channel documentary on the B-52 and one of the pilots mentioned that all of the planes had a distinct smell, of old wiring, new electronics, jet fuel, spilled Cokes, and everything else. You’d think any military hardware would be sterile inside, but it’s usually much worse than an old car. My old VW is about the same vintage as a MiG-25, and similar in many ways - the silver color, the boxy construction, the minimalist instruments and controls, and the mix of comfort and discomfort that makes it a unique piece of machinery. You can reach every piece of the engine on a VW and easily strip the whole thing apart with five wrenches, but there’s no good place to rest your left foot when it’s off the clutch. The MiG-25 can fly over Mach 3 and high enough so you can see the curve of the earth, but it uses only vacuum tubes in its circuitry, and it’s far too easy to push an engine to failure.

The smell - I think of this because I spent so much time in my car this weekend, stuck in traffic. It snowed about 4 microns on Saturday, which meant every fucking soccer mom and Microsoft yuppie with a 4x4 SUV ended up in a ditch or shutting down a floating bridge because they thought they paid $60,000 so they could drive and brake at highway speeds on glare ice. Anyway, this meant the car got nice and toasty inside, and while I was strapped into my minimalist little seat in my aluminum-silver cockpit, the odor of a 20 year old VW made me think of my history with these little cars.

First, the West Germans made great little cars that were fun to drive and still got 30 or 40 MPG, but they had horrible wiring systems. My current VW has about 10 wiring problems, ranging from an intermittent rear defogger to no horn or reverse gear lights. For a while, my front turn signals wouldn’t blink when the headlights were on, and then they miraculously healed. Same with the dome light, although it comes and goes. On my last VW, all of the dash warning lights would turn on when it was raining, and on the one before, a buzzer would sound if it got too wet out. The substandard wiring gave the car one of its smells - a mix of old rubber insulation and ozone that increased when the temp went up. This mixed with the paper and cardboard used under the dash, which gives off the aroma of old books - not the paper and dust mite smell, but the thin cardboard cover of a 1960’s owner’s manual. All of this mixes with the smell of a rich gas engine, or the unique odor of the thin, black dust given off by a tiny diesel powerplant. Add the slight smell of oil and an aging plastic dashboard, and you start to get the idea.

It’s odd how unique the VW aroma is, yet how standard it is among the make. A couple of years ago, I was in Snoqualmie at a company picnic and saw two Rabbits that had been tricked out for some kind of racing - they had no doors, one seat, some NASCAR-esque netting, and so forth. I looked at the cars for a while, feeling some nostalgia for my old VW. When I climbed in, it smelled just like the interior of my old VW. And it’s not like what my old Camaro smelled like, the rich smell of 8 cylinders rumbling, with Armor-All, carpet cleaner and Turtle Wax all over the interior.

Maybe I’m nuts - I have a sensitive nose, but I can’t describe smell that good. It reminds me of different times, eras. When I spray Lysol, it reminds me of the summer of 1992, when I used to spray the shit constantly in my tiny roominghouse apartment on Mitchell Street. Every cologne I own is a time machine going back to when I first started using it - same with every shampoo, cleaning product, and candle. If I knew anything at all about differentiating this stuff verbally, I could probably get a job designing perfumes or something. Maybe not…

Speaking of time machines, I am vageuly starting to study them a bit more, so maybe I will go from Summer Rain tight into working on the third book again. I haven’t written in here all weekend, but I spent a lot of time reorganizing and moving around stuff in Summer Rain’s third book so it fell into a logical order. I think I had about 7 or 8 weekends in August, and that didn’t work out. The shuffle went without a major hitch, but now I’m almost out of energy to continue with it. I think I’ll plow away until Marie gets here in 4 days, and then start something else after she leaves - maybe Rumored, maybe the yet-unnamed time travel book.

I better go. It’s snowing again and I’m worried about making it home. The Rabbit drives excellent on the ice - it’s such a light car, and front wheel drive. The Rabbit’s weight is distributed just right so when your wheels don’t let you turn anymore, you can swing the weight of the car around and aim it almost perfectly. But the fucking idiots out there are probably causing 200 car pileups on the freeway, and if my 3000 pound Rabbit got hit by a 9000 pound Suburban that didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, well, you could guess who wouldn’t be updating his journal for a while.

Last night I unofficially hit the 500 CD mark. I say unofficially because I have two pending orders on the way (now 3) and they will put me over the mark. Last night was a huge shopping night, and I got some great stuff. I finished my collection of easily-attainable Dream Theater albums, meaning I have to start hitting the bootleggers and/or track down all of their various import singles.

Side note: Dream Theater’s drummer collects bootlegs - of his own band. And when you’re talking about a progrock band so exact with their sound, and a listening demographic of a bunch of people with cool toys like portable DAT players, that means a lot of bootlegs.

I need to cut this short today, because I have a meeting right after lunch, and I need to get about a million other things done first.

I’ve been listening to this new live Dream Theater CD so much, I want to go out and buy a guitar or a drum set or something. But I know I’ll end up spending $400 on a guitar and within a week I’ll realize I don’t have the persistence to learn how to play the damn thing, and then I’ll sell it for $200. So I’d rather just cut to the chase and spend the $200 on CDs tonight.

(BTW, after two orders show up on my doorstep, I will only be 9 CDs away from 500. And I have enough silver certificates to get a free one tonight. And if I shop around, that could be a free double album. So I might sneak in by my self-imposed 12/31 deadline.)

I should mention that there is a new Andrew Dice Clay website at www.dicemanrules.com. Not much there yet, but you can order his latest 2-CD set and get a bonus CD. I think it is a mail-order only thing - he probably lost his record deal when American went under and got bought out by Sony. Clay was on Politically Incorrect the other night, and made me realize two things: he is a genius and Kennedy is an idiot.

Yesterday was a wash for any productive work. I tried to stay awake long enough to get some writing done, but I fell asleep for a couple of hours and awoke to find that my heater had been on full blast the whole time, and the apartment felt like a pottery kiln. I had to open all the windows to get it back to a reasonable temperature, and I spent the rest of the evening babbling in a half-daze.

I did do some reading - I’m trying to get through this Thomas Pynchon book of short stories. He’s very critical of his early work, and that helps me - it’s cool to see the mistakes that a good writer did early in their career. I’m on this big kick about trying to reinvent my writing style. I know that’a big cop-out, but I have some ideas floating around and once I get my shit together, I’ll start with some smaller practice stories or something.

I have to go eat now.

I’m tired today. And I’m trying to stay off caffeine, which is a bad combination. Last night, when I was falling asleep, I came up with an entirely new idea for a book, and even outlined most of it in my head. I barely remember it - it’s like a strange dream sequence, with events spinning and changing in my head for no reason. I’d like to write a whole book like that, progressing like a dream instead of a linear story. I’ll add it to my list of stuff I want to do when I get the time.

It rained continually this weekend, like I was in some kind of southeast asian monsoon or something. Even worse, it was cold, and the rain was heavy. This whole description sounds very cliche, but the whole thing was demoralizing. Today, the sun is almost out and it looks okay, but it will be darker than midnight by four o’clock, and it will probably start raining before I drive home. Driving is the worst - it took me an hour to make the ten minute drive home from the mall on Saturday. When it rains, the roads fill with people and then slow to a crawl. I-5 becomes a parking lot of people, and there are never any good, alternate routes. Staying inside all weekend is the only option.

Despite the fact that I only left the house three times all weekend, I didn’t get a lot done writing-wise. I did put in more than a few hours of work, but I’m starting to get bored of Summer Rain. I don’t want to keep plodding through chapters like I do now, but I don’t have the focus or attention span to start working on Rumored again. I figure if I continue at my current rate, I will be more or less done with this draft by the end of January.

I got the new Dream Theater live album. It’s 2 CDs and both of them are completely full of stuff, which is cool. I’m sick of buying a 2 CD set and the second one has like 20 minutes of stuff on it. I saw Dream Theater on this tour, although I didn’t have their newest album with I saw them, so I didn’t know what to expect of the new stuff. I’ve since bought Falling Into Infinity and I love it, so hearing the stuff live is incredible. I’ve been a Dream Theater fan since before their first album - a guy at a record store in Elkhart gave me the advance tape, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

I’ve got a sandwich to eat, so I better split.

I’ve been listening to the G3 live album all day, and I’ve realized that I really need to see Steve Vai live again. His albums are incredible, but his live guitar is mind-boggling. Everything is twice as complex and four times as fast. And it’s all incredibly exact. He only has three tracks on the CD, but the stuff he did at G3 really blew me away. I went on November 8, 1996 at sat in about the 10th row. I think his sound is perfectly engineered for people in the first few rows who are wearing earplugs. The low end bass sounded completely alien - it was totally undistorted, but felt like it was ripping through my chest and rumbling my bones. And he was all over the place, holding his guitar to the side, high, low, above his head, not even looking at it and playing things inhumanly fast yet hitting every note perfectly. The way he bent notes, wrapped them up and down and used the whammy at the same time, it felt like he was talking to me telepathically, through his guitar. His face would like like he was in a conversation, but the sound wasn’t coming from his mouth. Sure, Satriani was good both times I saw him, but Vai - it must’ve felt like this when people saw Hendrix for the first time 30 years ago. I wish he’d come out with a 3-CD live album for his last tour. He’s allegedly working on some huge 8-CD boxed set, so maybe it will have some cool stuff.

I got a bunch of CDs yesterday. Well, 7 - new CD club. I’m trying to clear out their AC/DC and Ozzy back-catalog. I’m about 18 CDs short of 500, which was my goal for the year. My next goal is to find a place to put all of them, since they are currently stacked on top of every piece of A/V gear I own.

I’m not in the journaling mood today. I’m going to go eat my sandwich.

12/11/98 20:45

I guess it’s a day to talk about what’s in the CD player. Now it’s Rush again, and I’m listening to all of these old Rush songs that remind me of spending an entire summer on a ten-speed bike, or in the basement putting together model airplanes. It’s really amazing how much scope my career with Rush really covers. One summer, I’m listening to the brand-spanking-new Grace Under Pressure and mowing lawns to save up for a drum set, and only a couple albums later, I’m listening to Presto in my walkman as I trod around the Indiana University campus. It’s pretty eerie when you think about it.

For the longest time, I thought that the last line of Rush’s song “The Trees” was “And the trees were all kept equal by magic acts and song.” It’s really “hatchet, axe, and saw.” And there’s still this Dokken song where I swear the guy is saying “your cufflinks are gold” but I know it has to be something else. Speaking of Dokken, I watched almost all of one of those greatest hits of the 80’s infomercials and almost ordered all 125 dollars’ worth of CDs. Several observations: First, the girl doing the commercial is the model who was in the Cherry Pie video. She is allegedly two years older than me, which is about right. So, while I was mixing paint at Monkey Wards for $3.50 an hour, she was only two years older and probably driving a pink Ferrari or something. Also, have you noticed the large number of vaguely metal-based songs that were popular back then? I don’t even remember that much of a bias, even from the middle of Indiana, but I guess it was true. About every third time I talk to Ray, we have a huge disussion about this. Right now, part of the country’s default musical taste is R&B-type stuff, and the rest is “alternative”, meaning almost nobody listens to metal anymore. Ray wouldn’t listen to Poison if they were the equivalent of, say, Green Day, but it would mean a lot of people would be willing to make the transition from Poison to Motley Crue to Metallica to Motorhead to Rotting Christ. Somebody listening to the Backstreet Boys isn’t going to follow the same path.

I don’t care too much, since I don’t listen to the radio much, and selling metal CDs is not my livelihood. But I’ve noticed that I don’t have a default preference for music anymore. I liked it back in high school when I was into bands like Anthrax and Megadeth, and there were tons of other similar bands. I’d buy a tape or two every week, and when I got to the store, the people there would point me to new stuff or cool bands. I didn’t make much money back then and couldn’t afford CD binges like now, so my biggest problem was that there were hundreds of new things I wanted, and I could only buy a few a month. Now I seem to drift, and I buy a lot of old stuff. I feel somewhat cheated when buying something old - it’s like watching an old Seinfeld rerun vs. going to see a new, really good movie. The Seinfeld rerun is great, but there’s a certain something in seeing something new. Sometimes I wish I was into rap or techno or jazz or punk or industrial just so I could go to the store and say “I’m into this scene” and have the guy behind the counter hand me some new stuff that I’d like. But now I pick through the racks and come up with some really disjointed selections.

I have almost 500 CDs, but sometimes spend 15 minutes trying to find something to listen to. Is that pathetic?