I forgot to mention that the damage to that woman’s car last week was $506, which means my insurance will go up. I got that news on Friday, and it sucked. Oh well, with any luck, I will be able to dump my current car and get something cheaper.

This morning, I ate breakfast. It was a rare thing - I made oatmeal. I wasn’t starving for lunch by 11

, which was a nice change. I went grocery shopping last night and have cabinets full of food now. I’m looking forward to going home tonight and eating a real dinner.

I read Howard Stern - _Private Parts_ this weekend. Good book, but I could only find a softcover copy. It’s 10,000 pages thick, so by the time I was done, it was all twisted and mutated and no longer book-like and flat. Oh well. I have been obsessively reading this book about the history of plastic. It’s well-written and simple to figure out but still contains good historical information and a little more than the basic science behind the formation and discovery of plastic, bakelite, celluloid, and so forth.

I took some sleeping pills last night to avoid another up-all-night event like Tuesday. They really knocked me out, and I woke up very late for work today. I could barely function, nothing made sense and I’m surprised I managed to take a shower and drive to work. Then I got violently ill at lunch, and then stuck in traffic for an hour. So it’s been a memorable Friday the 13th so far. I’m thinking about hiding under my desk for the next 10 hours until it is over.

My mind’s been wandering, and it’s hard to think of some other topic to write about. Not much is going on that I want to talk about. I keep ending my sentences with the word about. I used the word ‘was’ 589 times in the latest rumored to exist draft. I use ‘really’ 38 times. I use fuck 205 times. Actually, that includes fucked, fucking, fucker, etc.

I hit someone’s car today. It was stupid, more of a low-speed tapping that messed up the little trim piece on their door. I think it might be like $200 of damage, so it probably won’t fuck up my insurance or anything. But it was a pain in the ass, very nervewracking, and I spent 20 minutes on my cellular phone in this parking lot, shouting above the traffic to my insurance agent. What a fucking nightmare.

I wasn’t at work yesterday - bad insomnia problems and the start of what felt like a cold made me stay home and sleep all day. I did get some editing done on the book though - all of the drafts are now in one draft. Now I can print it out and start with the red pen.

I’ve been reading a lot lately. I finished the Howard Stern book, read Microserfs, and started re-reading Mark Leyner’s Et Tu, Babe. I love Leyner’s work, but it’s very addictive…

I think I’ve left Rumored to Exist alone for long enough to ferment properly (that didn’t make sense). Anyway, I read the May 15 draft (I think it was all of the corrections I did while I was in California, with no new material) and I laughed my ass off again. I think if my 3 or 4 months of editing after that point didn’t totally fuck it up, I might just do some light touch-ups and finish the damn thing.

I hated some of the randomness in the first and second draft, even though the book was about randomness. I also thought that it was too personal and I’d “out” some people in some way. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Howard Stern, it’s that you can’t out people who have fucked you over. So I’ll change the names, but everything stays. I think if I keep the dropped bits and put in the added ones, it could be 300 pages of pure bullshit. I like that.

But then I worry about really finishing a book. I mean, it’s like if you were thinking about killing someone and then you WENT OUT AND DID IT and you had blood on you and this dead fucking body and you didn’t know what to do next. I don’t know what to do next. Publishers? Agents? Editors? What? I haven’t played the ass-eating game of going to the dinners and the readings and talking to the people at the signings. When I go to book signings, I am always convinced that the authors think I am a CRAZED HOMICIDAL ON PAINT THINNER. When I met Kay Redfield Jamison, I really wanted to tell her that her writing about the manic depressive illness helped me out, but I think she thought I was some kind of JOHN WAYNE GACY ready to jump over the table and fuck her with my arm before vomiting in her eyes or something. I just have that aura about me, especially when I walk 20 blocks to the book store where everyone reads, and I’m smelling like someone who ran an iron man competition in a vinyl bondage suit.

Fuck, where was I?

Oh yeah. So I don’t know any publishers. And I have no friends in high places. And the book market, to quote Joe Pesci, FUCKS YOU. Unless you were somehow related to the OJ trial or you got your DICK cut off recently, you can’t get a book deal. 450 million manuscripts are written a year, and the 150 that are published have to do with Marcia Clark’s hair. I could print on a vanity press, which I have considered. I thought about printing like 500 books, selling a few through zines and the internet, and just giving the rest away. I’d lose money, but it would be fun to have a book and to show it to people. WHo knows.

Finger indp0100@copper.ucs.indiana.edu if you are at indiana. It’s funny.

I walked to work today. It was sort of surreal, listening to Biohazard and twisting through all the skyscrapers and highway overpasses and crap to get here. It took about 45 minutes. I made it but my walkman didn’t - it is a real piece of shit, and maybe the batteries are dead or the tape is all tensioned weird and running slow, but it is fucked. Anyway, it was a decent walk and very strange, because I used to walk so much when I was in school and didn’t have a car. I walked an hour and 15 minutes each way to work on Sunday night, and almost every day walked an hour from campus to my apartment, sometimes each way. I spent a lot of fucking time walking, listening to a walkman, watching the terrain move at one or two miles an hour, wishing it was a hundred. But I walked so damn much that I could eat anything and never gain weight. At the time, I thought I was a little heavy, and lifted weights, ate salad, did sit ups, walked more on my days off, all of that stuff. I think I was about 25 lbs lighter than I am now, which is about right. In high school and my first year of college, I probably weighed about 50 lbs less than I do now. I hated it back then, because I was a major geek and wanted to put on 40 lbs of muscle or something. I was a walking fucking skeleton, and I ate Chips Ahoy by the bagful. I think I had a tapeworm. Anyway, all of this lithium and prozac and everything else has fucked my metabolism, plus I never exercise. I drive everywhere. I am nowhere near being the size of the average Jerry Springer audience member, but I wish I had the metabolism I used to have.

And I usually don’t work out. But sometimes I get on a kick. There’s a gym in my apartment building, and I convince myself - “All I have to do is get on the treadmill, at 3 in the morning when I have the place to myself, and run while I listen to the first Black Sabbath album, and do that 3 times a week and I’m set.” I go up there, and run for 40 minutes or an hour or whatever and come back and drink a gallon of water and take a shower and think “fuck! That was great. All I need to do is keep this up and eat better and I’ll be able to wear all of my clothes from high school.”

Of course, three days later, I will be in bed watching some assinine documentary about Nazi hot air balloons from World War II and eating Doritos. I can’t stick to a regimen like that, because it’s useless. It’s useless to sit on a piece of machinery and run for an hour and waste an hour of my time, just so the little readout tells me that I almost burned off the calories from one of the 16 Cokes I drank today. If I had to run for an hour to win some cash prize, or if I was at the Miss Nude Everything World adult theme park and I had to walk 16 miles over the course of the day to see all of the exhibits, I would do it. If my car broke down and I had the choice between the Metro and walking to work, I’d walk. If the walking is mixed with doing something, seeing something more than a rubber belt spinning around two rollers, than I would do it. But right now, I don’t have anything like that in my life. I don’t walk to classes, or to work, or to whatever. I sit in a chair and write. So maybe if I had something creative to do, I might be in better shape.

And before anyone says anything about hiking, climbing, rollerblading, distance cycling, or any of the other hip and trendy thirtysomething hobbies of the Pacific Northwest: NO. I am not going to participate in any sport where step one is buying five grand in equipment. Also, in all of these sports, there are people who would make me look like a complete idiot. I know fifty year old men that could kick my ass in mountain climbing. I couldn’t climb the rope in gym class in 9th grade. That was about 50 pounds ago, I know I couldn’t now. The reason I write and work with computers is because that is my gift and I was given that gift in lieu of any physical ability. It’s no secret that I’m no good at sports. Shawn Kemp can’t write WinHelp. Michael Jordan can’t program in C. I can’t run a single lap around a gym without getting shin splints. It’s something I’ve learned to accept.