The rest of today, tomorrow, and then I leave for Indiana. I’m starting to get a cold, and I’m trying every remedy possible - vitamins, vaporizer, medicines, and soup. I’m not doing too bad, so hopefully the flight won’t be a disaster. I got some special earplugs you wear for flying - they have a weird valve in them which protects your inner ear from the pressure change. Maybe they’ll do the trick.

I think I destroyed a Solaris machine here at work, trying to upgrade it. I needed to install a patch from Sun, and the patch completely flattened the computer. I think I’ll have to install the OS all over again. At least that gives me a nice, mellow task to eat up my afternoon.

Because of the cold, I haven’t been doing much more than resting and packing. I’ve been trying to get past level 20 of tetris plus on the gameboy, but it’s a real ball-breaker. Maybe I will make it on that 4 hour plane ride…

I talked to my mom the other day, and she said she’s keeping the old house, but she’s renting it out now. Some background: the 5 of us moved there in 1978. My parents divorced in 1984, and my mom bought my dad’s share of the house. I moved out in 1989, back in 1990, out in 1991, and back for the summer of 1993. My mom moved in with her new husband in early 1996, and my sisters both left this year.

It’s strange for me to think about that place. I always expect to see my Camaro in the driveway, leaking oil, and my life’s possessions stuffed in my wood-paneled room in the basement, the room I helped build. Now I usually visit in a brand new rental car, and last xmas, my room was a storage space for sewing machines and stuff from my grandpa’s estate. No more iron maiden posters, no more model airplanes, no more netting from the ceiling hiding the joists and air conditining ducts.

The room was 11 by 11, more or less. I built two walls in an L-shape in the corner of the basement, which meant I had two walls of fake paneling, one of poured cement, and one that was half-cement and half-the backside of the livingroom’s walls. There was no ceiling. The carpet varied, because I was always getting leftovers from my mom’s frequent redecorating projects in the rest of the house. I didn’t get a door for about a year. I didn’t even have paneling for a summer - I had to build the place, or share a room with my stepbrother. Easy choice.

During high school, I decorated with stuff I stole from the performing arts center. I had part of a tree from Brigadoon - chickenwire, plywood, and plaster - covering the back of the livingroom wall. Shelves covered two walls, lined with old model airplanes. Iron Maiden’s Aces High poster covered the cement wall. The netting on the ceiling. I rearranged everything when I got a real stereo in my senior year. On one of the walls, I taped up every award, scholarship, and college acceptance during my senior year.

I recently found a videotape that was shot by my old friend Joe Gellert, with me and Derik Rinehart acting like idiots in my house. My room still had the Iron Maiden poster. My Camaro was in the garage. I weighed about 100 pounds. The whole thing freaked me out, like a time machine except I couldn’t grab the camera from Joe and pan around and see all of the little things I wanted to see.

When I left for college, I left behind all of the furniture. Good thing - I was back a year later, with a bunch of new CDs, and a woman who was living with me. The room overflowed with two people’s stuff until she found her own apartment. For a year, it felt like high school again, except I had more porno and Ray Miller’s fender stack was in the middle of my room for a while.

I moved back to IU, took the porno, and left the furniture. (my car broke down on the way there, too). The room stayed in the same condition for my occasional visits back.

The last girlfriend to visit my mom’s house was Johanna, for Thanksgiving 1991. My first four girlfriends all visited my house. One pretty much lived there for six months. I discontinued the visit policy after Johanna.

The xmas of 1991 was my last major holiday stay at the house. I think I was there for almost two weeks, and it drove me fucking insane. I brought with me the earliest permutation of my IBM XT clone, which was just a bunch of parts thrown in a metal case. I spent the whole break writing an adventure game in modula 2 and trying to seduce my backup plan from Johanna. Neither projects were completed.

I moved all of my stuff back in the basement in 1993, in two or three trips. I started buying furniture like mad to fill up my future apartment with Andrew in Colonial Crest. I also ran my zine from the room. I had a giant L-shaped computer desk, 6 floor lamps, about 500 CDs, and two months of unanswered main in that tiny room. I was working two jobs and wishing Tanya was back. And I didn’t have a car. Thank Satan for Ray Miller, my errand-boy of the summer.

I loaded that U-haul full of a lot of stuff when I left, only leaving behind my bed (I bought a new one). Right before I went to pick up the truck, I went to visit my dad, uncle, and grandma. It was the last time I saw my grandma - she had a heart attack a few months later. When I came home for the funeral, my room only had a bed, and a stack of xmas cards I opened 2 years before.

The room stayed in minimalist state until 1995, when I moved to Seattle. I showed up with the one way uhaul, and filled it with a bunch of stuff, including the bed, when I left. I came back that xmas and slept in the guest bedroom - same in 1996. The shower felt horrible, and the basement looked alien. Each visit, I’ve picked around, trying to find little things to bring back that I know will get destroyed otherwise. I found my Star Wars figures, some C-64 games, ad a couple of books. But now, it will all be gone.

The house will still be there, which is strange. I don’t know if it will be rented out, or if I’ll be able to pick through the rubble. I’m hoping the latter, just to get a good look at it. I never thought the damn thing would give me such a sense of nostalgia - I worked so long to escape it. Oh well.

I went to the doctor yesterday. He said I have colitis, but I don’t need to take any medicine. If I stick to a high fiber, low fat diet, it will all balance out. So disregard my panic attack a few days ago about all that.

I’m pretty devoid of all thought today - it’s just one of those days. I wish I could be home, half asleep and reading a book. I’m starting to think more about the trip to Indiana. Some of it is excitement, some worry. All of the things like catching the plane, leaving my car in long-term parking, etc. bother me. I’m worried about what I’ll eat when I’m gone, too. I guess I can find something, but I’m worried that everyone will want to eat fast food or in restaurants for the whole trip. I’ll work that out I guess.

I am looking forward to seeing Bloomington, and seeing everything and everyone. I’m worried about where I’ll park if I want to visit campus, and I’m worried about getting kicked out of computer labs because I’m not a student. Elkhart is just Elkhart - I get a strange satisfaction out of driving around there and seeing that things have changed, mostly for the worse. It’s eerie to see places from high school that are now vacant lots or Mexican groceries or Wal Marts. I guess even though I hated high school and the year I was at IUSB, I got comfortable with all of the stores and places and restaurants, and now many of them are gone or changed. The town in general is pretty beat, too. It’s 99% factories and 1% stupid public park projects that will never do any good, and that won’t change. But it looks more well-worn every time I visit. The roads are shittier, and busier. Crime is up, there are more cops, and the cops are even more belligerent. A “will work for food” sign on every corner. It’s weird stuff, but it’s interesting.

I have a vivid memory of driving across the Golden Gate bridge and thinking “I’m supposed to me at work right now”. I did the same thing in Las Vegas, during a plane change. Anyway…

I got a Game Boy last night - it was an early xmas present from Karena, so I’ll have something to do on the plane flight back to Indiana, other than planning the ritual murder of half the people on the plane. I got Tetris Plus and Star Wars, too. I like Tetris a lot, but the Star Wars is hard for me - I am not used to the Mario-type games where you have to jump around on a bunch of floating platforms to get through a maze. I prefer shoot-em-up games, or strategies of some sort. I want to go to this used record store in the U-district and pick up some more games.

I’ve been searching the web for other Game Boy stuff and there’s a lot of it. People are hacking game boys, copying ROMs, writing code, making new hardware, all kinds of stuff. It makes sense - a Game Boy has a 6502 in it - only 8K RAM though. And no keyboard. I guess people are working on that though.

It’s almost down to the line on this trip. I need to start thinking about what I’ll bring. I usually pack a shitload of stuff, and I need to bring less this time. But I also need to bring enough to be self-sufficient, since I won’t be staying in hotels where I can lift stuff from the room. I also want enough extra room in case I find any books or things at my mom’s that I want to bring back. I’m expecting most of my old stuff to be sold off at various garage sales in the past. Maybe there are a few books or Commodore games lying around I can save.

“I wanna feel destruction I wanna feel extinction”

Sorry, listening to Henry Rollins.

I’ve been trying to write a biography of my life for a while. It’s not like a memoirs or anything, just a few dozen pages that tell what happened to me from birth to present. Right now, I’m up to the beginning of 1992, and each year is taking progressively longer to write. It’s essentially a worthless exercise, but it’s keeping me busy. I’d rather be writing on something nobody will see than watching TV.

I read a book called Haunted, a kid’s book from maybe the 4th or 5th grade. It only took me an hour to read the whole thing. I found it at my mom’s house last Xmas, buried with a bunch of my old junk in the basement. I tried to snag all the books I could, including a 1972 encyclopedia I shipped back to Seattle via UPS, because I knew everything would end up at a garage sale or in the trash when my mom tried to sell the place. Anyway, this book was about two boys who had to housesit in the middle of nowhere, at a place where some old German guy shot his wife, the cat, and then himself. Anyway, it turned out that they were Nazis, and the house was in the wife’s name, and willed to some american nazi party, but it turns out she was really adopted and found out her real mom died in the camps, so she wanted to change the will, and Adolf plugged her. I remembered a few of the details in my mind, and wanted to see if I could pick up on anything I was clueless about as a 10 year old. It wasn’t as memorable a book as The Haunted Cove, another book I loved when I was a kid, but it was still fun to read. Maybe someday I’ll write a “young adult” title. Who knows.