Why must I live my whole life feeling like I just stayed up all night? I decided to knock my sleep schedule back into the daytime mode with some sleeping pills last night. Instead, I got a truly surreal experience of alternating periods of undead catatonia and extreme awake, paranoid rushes where my senses were supertuned to the rumbling of traffic 7 stories below me. I spent all day in an odd mood, like I’d accidentally breathed a short whiff of nerve gas and was waiting to see if it would cause my insides to boil. I just tried to take a nap as the tail-end of rush hour traffic zipped by on I-5, and I can honestly say I’d feel better if I would’ve forced myself to stay awake.

I have some food burining in the oven…

Very tired. The Rabbit’s plumbing might be fixed, but the battery had no juice and I couldn’t turn it over to tell. I finally made a discovery that would’ve helped my car repair experiences long ago - latex surgical gloves. I slipped some on before monkeying in the deep antifreeze and grease of the engine, and it felt great to just snap them off when done.

Both of my parents called today (separately - not a joint thing. Sort of a flashback of my last ten years of being parented.) I only hear from them every month or two, and I usually have enough experiences queued up to get me through a phone conversation, but today I didn’t. I know that when they talk to me and all I have to say is “I haven’t done anything lately. I’ve been working a lot.” that they interpret it as “I’m getting ready to go off the deep end.” And it seems kindof stupid that if they called and I said “oh, I just went shopping for new cars” or “I’m going to Boston next week” or something idiotic like that, they’d be content.

I need to get off of here and do some work on the book…

I fell asleep after work until after 11pm, so I didn’t really feel like writing in here, or writing at all, really. I did work on my biography a bit, and that kept me up far too late. So today I am the walking dead again, but there’s relief in that I have tomorrow off.

It’s been weird writing about 1993 for this bio project. It feels like that stuff just happened, but it’s already been five years. Five years since I first ran Linux! I’m in the middle of writing about that summer, when Tanya was still a new item, yet she was in Tampa for the break, and I was working at Voyager on the punch press, and going to shows with Ray almost every weekend in Chicago. Ray lived at home then, and was at the height of his anti-female stage, which made it difficult for me. But we had a lot of good times together - we rented every concievable zombie film on the face of the earth that summer.

I talked to Micheal Stutz for the first time on the phone last night. It’s always weird at first to talk to someone from the computer, but we had a lot to talk about. We’re both stuck in the same place writing-wise, and wish there was some sort of “movement” going on, sort of like the Kerouac-Ginsberg-Burroughs alliance. I need to write about this more when I am awake and have some amount of energy. And I need to keep writing on my own, because even if I had a group of people to trade manuscripts with, it doesn’t work if I don’t have manuscripts.

Blah, I’m going to screw around for the rest of lunch, start looking around on the web. Hopefully, I’ll be able to write more tonight.

07/02/98 22

I just woke up, put some french fries in the oven, made some Kool-aid, and nuked some kind of demented aloha chicken meal. If it says 99% fat-free and works in the micro, I’ll try it at least once.

So it’s not a “school night”, and I’m excited about staying up all night, doing some cleaning, writing a bunch, and doing my grocery shopping at 3 in the morning, when there’s no chance at all of Screaming Kid Syndrome. Tomorrow, my pal Jennefer Wagner will be here from Eugene, OR. She’s only in town for a night, and she’s crashing with another friend of hers, but I’ll hopefully get to hang out with her for a bit during the day.

Ford Credit keeps sending me more and more bizarre letters. I think Col. Kurtz works there. The car thing is starting to worry me more and more, especially since the VW doesn’t run. I’m hoping to get that taken care of this weekend.

I found a good web site to waste a lot of time.

Out of it. Nothing to report. More later.

I’m listening to Rush - Power Windows, which is sort of embarassing to admit. This was the tape in my walkman when I mowed lawns to buy model airplane kits. Was it in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle where there was a kid who only built model airplanes and jerked off? Anyway, for a moment that seems generations old to me, this album still sounds pretty fresh to me.

I need to take a rest for a bit. I’ll write more later.

When all of my writing projects are dead or blocked, I have a fallback project that I use to keep the typing going. I don’t remember when I started this, but a few months back I started writing a biography. I started at January 20, 1971, and moved forward, trying to keep a steady pace with all of the essentials, and without getting stuck on some tangent. Late last year and earlier this year, when I was really blocked and unable to work on either book, I belted out a serious amount of writing, and stayed up all night many times taking the story from childhood to gradeschool to high school.

I’m back on the bio. Everything else seems dead, and I’m sick of my own writing style, so it’s time to pound out the facts for a while. I don’t care how glossy or artistic my prose is (kindof like this journal), I just want to get everything down. I’m now up to the fall of 1992, and there are 43,000 words behind me (maybe 100 pages). Each year gets more difficult. 1971 through 1975 are only a couple of paragraphs; 1992 is already close to 10,000 words. I want to keep writing fast, until I get to 1998 (or 1999, or whenever I finish) and then start at the beginning, making a second pass and adding more detail. I keep forgetting things, or start talking about a person without introducing them in the right place, and I’ll have to fix that. I don’t know if anybody will ever read this, or if I will neaten it up for human consumption, but it’s a fun chore. Maybe the next time I date someone, I will just print and bind the whole damn thing, hand it over, and then have no disclaimers. I’m usually pretty honest when I date people, but it would be relaxing to be able to avoid all of the long stories and make them do the work. But, I guess I like the long stories, so maybe it’s a stupid idea.

I started reading Desolation Angels, and I was certain it was going to throw me, but I read 135 pages last night and would’ve kept reading if it weren’t for that sleep thing. It’s sort of like a darker, more serious version of The Dharma Bums, that’s a little less accessible but also much deeper. It’s got a lot more detail about his time as a lookout, and a lot of Washington details, which is a weird clash of two worlds. It’s cool to read about Kerouac on the UW campus, and wandering the Pioneer Square area. I’m looking forward to some more reading tonight.

It’s been a month and a half since I pulled the plug on the TV. I can barely remember when I sat down and watched hours and hours of shows. I don’t have enough time to do anything now, and I’m not getting a lot of writing done, so I don’t know how I could fit in TV too. TV’s like alcohol - you have to enjoy it in moderation. Unless you’re depressed - then it’s nice to drown in it.

My typing is messed up - not sure if it’s the keyboard, the hands, or the slow connection, but I keep dropping letters. I better quit while I’m ahead.

06/30/98 23

Listening to the white album, thinking about the fall of 1992 in order to keep moving on this weird, masturbatory biography. It’s interesting.

I fell asleep for about 4 hours after work, nothing else happened today, and I’m not into whipping up some introspective essay about the past, so I’m going to quit while I’m ahead and get back to writing.