More rain, and I’m really tired. Not tired, but compressed and dehydrated from too much caffeine at a late hour. I’ve been drinking 7-UP in an effort to recover. I’m still pretty jumpy.

I signed up for a cellular phone, mostly as a precaution to my next inevitable automotive disaster. It’s through some freaky corporate plan, so it might be an invitation to something awful happening later. But there was no activation or monthly charge, so my only investment is $60 for a phone, plus .36 a minute if I use it. I’ll just throw it in the glove compartment and never use it until I need to.

The ACLU annual meeting was last night, and I worked at it, helping people with nametags and setting up food for the reception. The topic was the drug war, which is a pretty ambivalent topic for me. I don’t support civil rights violations, but I’m not a stoner, either, and I don’t really agree with people who waste their lives abusing substances. And I know that people claim to be casual drug users, but in my experience, the worst alcoholics I knew all claimed to be casual drinkers. So who knows. Someday I’ll sort out my political differences, but I don’t think it will be on a usenet newsgroup or with the help of a glossy book from a newsstand.

It suddenly got really dark outside, it looks like something out of a Danzig video. Maybe the AM and PM are reversed on my watch.

Rain. Despair. Bleakness. Running through the twilight.

Sorry, just trying to sound all gothic. It really is raining though. It’s almost May and Seattle thinks it’s only February.

Things are somewhat confusing here, but not things I’d talk about in a journal. It’s hard for me to censor myself about things, since I’m so used to writing everything in my paper journals. But my paper journals are not readable by 50 million people, so I limit myself. Sorry.

I finished reading that Rupert Thomson book last night. It felt great to finish it with the windows open, the dark horizon of west seattle glowing through the rain. The book itself felt like it took place in the same atmosphere, the same bleakness. I wish the guy had more similar books, but I think he got into historical fiction or something…

Anyway, I should end the lunch and start the work. Cheers.

I was going to write last night, but by the time I remembered, it was today. The trip back felt like a daydream, the darkness around me. I drove from Longview to Seattle in about an hour 45, pretty good for the slight drizzle that dewed the hills of asphalt under me.

It was a daydream because it was so hypnotizing. The music and the solitude removed the thoughts from my head, let me relax. I got into a rhythm with the spinning tires, the squeaking wipers, and the passing reflectors marking the road I ventured.

When I got to Seattle, the tranquility was broken as I checked my mail and removed a pile of bills. My financial situation is so fucked right now - I spent the rest of the night restless, thinking of the things I’d have to give up to keep afloat for the next few months. I figured a schedule that would involve some heavy payments in the next couple of paychecks, and would involve me eating soup and cooking at home pretty much all of the time. I guess it isn’t too horrible - I spent a lot of time last spring doing the same thing while paying off my Visa card. I think I can pay off my debts by the end of the year, and start figuring out what I really want to do with my money and my future.

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Every night I eat 99 cent pot pies for dinner, I am dollars closer to financial independence. Maybe.

I’m listening to Rush - Counterparts. It reminds me of a strange time - my entrance into exile. Every song tells a story, but “Cold Fire” tells the strongest. It’s juvenile of me to spend an evening listening to songs that remind me of people from the past, but it’s either that or spend the evening thinking about money.

I should get back to reading…

This is my first journal from Longview - I drove down last night. The trip isn’t too bad, but getting out of Seattle was a real bitch. I spent an hour going about 20 miles and then the next two hours going about 100. It’s nice that the trip is all in the daylight now. I really hate the drive south of Olympia when it’s raining and pitch black. It gets so dark out there in the middle of nowhere that you can’t even tell what direction is up - it’s like you’re in a tunnel or something. That’s the area where I had a blowout last month. It was PITCH black, pouring rain, and a narrow, two-lane section of I-5 where everybody is going 80. It took me a few hours to get that little baby spare onto the car, because I’d have to time it with the traffic. I’d wait for a break, run out, loosen one lug nut, and then dive behind the car as a herd of semis drove by, creating hurricane-like winds that would rock my poor little car, almost off the toy jack that comes in the back of Ford Escorts.

So that was all cool. I saw the show Sliders last night, and had the chance to see where they filmed it last week (okay, I just saw it from the outside). I always thought they filmed that whole show on location somewhere, but if you watch it, you can sort of tell that 90% of it is filmed in a sound stage. We also rented the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High since I saw the commercials for it and realized I haven’t seen the non-tv version in quite a while. I had a carbon copy of Mr. Hand for US History when I was in high school, although we had no Pat Benetar lookalikes. Many of the girls in my high school did look alike, or at least had the same hairstyle, but I don’t know what they were trying to copy.

I should get out of here. This keyboard won’t let me use the backspace key as a delete - it keeps opening up the emacs online help.

I can’t wait to get all of my journals into HTML, so I can change the font so they all look like Motorhead album covers.

Last night, I taped about an hour of my rambling about Summer Rain. I set up the camera and taped it on the VCR using a VHS tape running on the slow speed. I don’t care about the picture too much, I just needed the audio. So this way, I can put 6 hours of discussion on each tape. And after an hour, I realized it will take a lot of fucking discussion to get this thing rolling. I am hoping that by the end of May, I will have enough notes to start an outline and a completely new draft of the book.

I brought Bill home last night and hung out at his place a bit, caught up with Jen and saw Liam. He was running all over, and talking about steamshovels. I guess he read this book, which I sort of remember from my childhood, about this steamshovel that digs this basement for a building and gets stuck at the bottom, so he becomes a furnace. Oddly enough, I had a dream last night where Liam kept saying “Boba Fett” over and over.

I started re-reading this Rupert Thomas book, to get an idea of what I want to do with SR. There are a lot of fine details about his writing that make it memorable. I think it’s because he never directly builds up his characters - they are built through strong incidentals. Instead of saying his characters’ age or height or looks, he’ll talk about the cigarette they smoke or their mannerisms in such a way that you build up the character based on your expectations of a person that would drink that kind of drink or whatever. And the characters really build in your head, come back to haunt you long after you set down the book. I like that.

I’m hoping to re-read about 5-10 books that contain pieces of SR that I like, and take a lot of notes on them. I also hope to collect together a bunch of music that will help me to write. I want to make tapes containing songs that I listened to in those periods, or songs that remind me of then. That’ll help me write a bit more. It’s too easy to listen to music that distracts me, or puts me to sleep.