I am fifty-five today.

I feel a strong need to write something here to keep up with tradition, but I’m actually writing this weeks before my actual birthday, because my time management is so horrible, I will otherwise forget to do this and suddenly remember in mid-July. Also, I’ll be in Mexico on the actual day of my birthday, so I should figure this post out now.

55 is the 11th number in the Fibonacci sequence. The previous number was 34, and the year 2005 seems like three lifetimes ago. The next one is 89 and I honestly don’t expect to make it that far. 89 is also the year I graduated high school, so if there’s some miracle in stem cell therapy that keeps me going, expect an oddly nostalgic post 34 years from now.

55 is a nice round number that’s probably the end of middle age and the beginning of the senior years, which really doesn’t sound or feel right. I think about this far too much, the need to divide my life into three clean acts, and that act 3 is probably starting now, if it hasn’t already. I’ve read too many self-help books about midlife crisis and finding your purpose at the end of your life, and the only consensus that I’ve found is “do what makes you happy” or some similar advice I can’t entirely follow.

The IRS has something called the Rule of 55, which I’m now eligible for, I guess. After you turn 55, you can withdraw from the 401K at your current employer without penalty if you leave your job. I don’t plan on retiring this year, but it’s nice to know I won’t take a 10% hit immediately if I had to use this money to survive. The “when do I retire?” question seems to come up more now, and this nice round number presses the issue a bit more. Other magic numbers on the calendar include 59 1/2 (when I can withdraw from any retirement account without penalty), 62 (Social Security early retirement age), and 65 (Medicare eligibility.) I fully expect both Social Security and Medicare to be gone in the next three years, so remove those from the equation. (Actually, I expect it to be fully functional for everyone born before January 20, 1971, and that’s when the retirement age will be changed to 90 or something.)

55 is into this weird bubble with regard to health and death. When I was 34 or whatever and a classmate died, it was either a rare cancer or a spectacular car crash. I think after your young and stupid years are over, you enter a few decades where you’re probably not going to suddenly die, provided you wore a seat belt and didn’t sniff any questionable white powders. Now I’m firmly in the era of people just dying. I wouldn’t say “old age” but now people my age die, and there’s a lot less “too soon” about it.

So lots of famous people lived to the ripe old age of 55 and then didn’t. And some of them aren’t health things: Will Rogers had a plane crash at 55; Kate Spade killed herself at 55. So did Del Shannon. Johnny Ramone had cancer; so did Robert Urich. Woody Guthrie had Huntington’s. Paul Lynde had a heart attack. I think if I was in college and you asked me about Friedrich Nietzsche’s death, my answer would be, “Yeah, he was old.” Well, now I’m the same age as him.

Writing this entry 20 days after writing my end-of-year summary always sort of sabotages things here. I just about all of the quantifiable things of the last year: how much I wrote, walked, published, ate, flew, whatever. I guess I’m supposed to write about what I feel here, in some philosophical sense? All I feel is that I should keep writing. And I am.

My house is currently all half-dismantled because we’re getting it painted next week (or this week, I guess), and all of my paper journals are buried behind six metric tons of books in crates right now, which is great because I won’t go back and read what I wrote on my birthday 22 years ago or whatever (and also have a severe dust mite reaction that will require an Epi-Pen and a Benadryl sandwich). I have many birthday entries here, and I just started reading them, but I need to stop and actually write. So I’ll stop here and do that.

In the mad flurry of book release stuff and end-of-year stuff, I forgot to write down anything about the trip to the Midwest last month, so I’ll jot down a few things in case I need to remember it ten years from now.

• Total trip was a Saturday to Sunday thing, eight nights. But I took a side trip, drove to Indiana on the morning of the 24th and back the night of the 26th.
• There was a lot of stress about getting out of Oakland because it was zero visibility and flights were starting to get delayed or cancelled. We left a half-hour late, but made it up in the air. Had a very brief layover in Denver, then headed out to MKE. The flight felt insanely quick, with two segments that were just over 90 minutes each, and zero hassles on both.
• Hertz is officially on the no list forever. We landed at like 7:00 and when I went to the Hertz counter to get my car, it had closed completely at 5:00, with a phone number that said, “Sorry, closed.” Not sure why they didn’t tell me that when I rented the car. The rental thing said “your name will be on the board and you can take your car and leave.” It wasn’t. We hurried over to National and got set up there. After 20 minutes in the Hertz AI madness phone tree, I talked to a person who was going to charge me $300 for the privilege of not getting a car.
• We stayed at a Marriott Residence Inn in Wauwatosa. It’s in some weird “research park” thing built on top of a former sanitarium or something, and it’s a super-modern road with roundabouts and a bunch of empty buildings. The room was identical to the one I had in El Segundo in 2021. I think it’s the same as what I had in Denver and in Chicago in 2022. That’s always a weird experience.
• It was like 20 degrees the whole time I was there. No real snow. Insanely high winds, like Iceland-rip-your-car-door-off winds. Losing half my body fat made this rough. But the hotel had an incredible warmth to it, which always felt nice.
• There were three days of family stuff with Sarah’s family, but the out-of-town contingent wasn’t there yet, so this was mostly quiet time with her mom or dad. We went to a mall, which was busy, like almost mid-00s busy. I expected it to be quiet, given the economy. Went to Boswell Books, which was pretty packed. Always good to see people buying analog.
• I don’t know why, but any time I stay at a Marriott, anywhere in the world, any time I go to the gym, there’s an older Asian woman on the elliptical for like four hours straight. It doesn’t matter if I’m in Schaumburg or Helsinki or Nuremberg or Orlando. I think they fly them in. It’s almost refreshing in a weird way.
• The drive to South Bend was pretty uneventful, and much faster than I remember. I feel like when me and Ray drove to the Milwaukee Metalfest in 1993, it took like six or seven hours, and this was maybe three hours plus an hour of time shift.
• I stayed at this weird Hilton vacation property that’s off Main Street in Mishawaka, by the UP mall. I think it was built in 1995 and not touched since. It has all of this college football stuff in it and probably makes all of its money on home games. I told my sister it looked like a Notre Dame themed funeral home. She told her friend who works for Hilton and he thought it was hilarious.
• I didn’t pay for the hotel (thanks, Amex) and I’m glad, because it had a million little annoyances: a kitchenette that was a dorm fridge and microwave and nothing more; bad plumbing; lots of noise from the pool below; a completely unusable exercise room containing I think the Sears treadmill my mom threw out in 1997. Good location, except there’s a real Hilton just north of it, and that’s confusing when you give someone directions.
• I went to University Park mall on Christmas Eve. I managed to lose my Pocket 3 camera, which sort of soured the whole trip for me.
• Went to my sister’s twice, had Christmas there. Saw my dad for brunch the next day, then headed out.
• The trip was very odd, because I did not feel like I was in Indiana, at all. Part of this was the short amount of time I had, and I didn’t get to wander. Part of it is things have changed so much. I remember walking the mall (and recording it on video, which of course I lost) and wondering what was still there from when I used to frequent the place in the late 80s/early 90s, and the answer is absolutely nothing. I guess JC Penney still remains, but there’s been 100% turnover, plus a giant food court that’s alien to me, new carpet, new skylights, new parking lot layout, and now the Sears is dead. Most of my time in Indiana was like this, which astounds me, considering how slow-moving things are there, and I used to come back and places would have the same exact signage from when I was a kid in like 1975.
• I think a big part of this is I’ve turned a corner on the Nostalgia Problem. Looking at old journals, I used to ruminate way too much on things like Bloomington or the one weird year I spent working at IUSB or my old haunt, the Concord Mall. Now I don’t care. I don’t think about it. That strong sentimentality is gone. I have a few theories on this, and maybe I worry about it slightly, but I’m glad I have reached this point.
• Quick trip back to Milwaukee. All I will say about the trip around Chicago: you should not be able to legally call something an express lane if the speed limit is 55.
• Because I missed the 24th/25th festivities, I arrived in MKE just in time for the post-holiday wind-down, and basically had a day in which to pack and jettison trash and get ready for the flight home.
• There was something almost Scandinavian about the street at that Discovery Ignition whatever park in Wauwatosa. It reminded me of the layout in Iceland or Oslo or something. Maybe it was an odd sense memory of the temperature and wind outside, but I liked it.
• Also, there is a county park across the way that’s nothing but some slight hills covered in golden grass that’s waiting for the spring showers. I had this ASA drone test book with a picture of someone flying a sUAS standing on a hill like this, and it made me wish I had brought a drone with me, although the winds would have made it tough, plus standing outside in 20 degree weather for an hour or two isn’t ideal. I spent the first half of the trip thinking I should drive to Costco and buy a cheap Potensic Atom 2 to take a few flights there. Then I lost that stupid camera and was out $500 and realized this was a dumb idea.
• Trip back was pretty stress-free. But it’s sad to come home and not have anyone waiting for you. I really miss returning to the cats after having been gone and having both of them be total velcro for a few days.

Overall, it was a pretty quick and uneventful trip, but I’ll take it. I was happy to see everyone and we had some quality time in there, but it was almost strange how it went down. And miracle of miracles: I came back with no flu, no Covid, not even a cold. That’s a good start to 2026.

I’m happy to announce that my new book Statue of Limitations is out now!

TL;DR:

• Kindle
• Print
• It’s 978-1-942086-23-9 if you want to order it from anywhere that does Ingram

This book is a collection of 30 stories, flash fiction, and other fragments and zine articles and stuff. It’s similar in theme to my 2019 book Ranch: The Musical, and a bit more lightweight than last year’s Decision Paralysis. I’m happy I was able to get this one in right under the wire in the last few hours of 2025, so I can clear the deck and start working on something new.

I spent most of 2025 trying to land a sequel to Atmospheres and got pretty close, but life sort of fell apart for a minute back in September, and I probably lost a good month there. I can’t remember when I wrote down this title, but I started throwing various zine articles that were never published, dream journals, listicles, and parts of stories into a draft towards the end of October, with a goal of getting a 20,000-word quickie done in 2025.

This is the third time I’ve done this, and it’s sort of akin to the Agile development process. Ship early, ship often; I do these much more lightweight books that are cheap and can be written fast, read fast, published fast. I hate to use the term “punk rock” to describe anything, but the idea here is that instead of spending years chipping away at an 800-page tome that eventually nobody will read, I’d rather push out these quick DIY dispatches and keep the river flowing. Maybe they aren’t perfect; maybe they’re filled with typos or dead ends. But the goal is to keep them going and constantly improve, get the next one slightly better than the last.

On October 19 (my anniversary), I had a new project with 14 documents, 11,000 words and a potential title but no story for it. I think by Thanksgiving, I’d broken 25,000 words, and it got up to 30K shortly after that. The word count is deceptive, because maximalist writers like David Foster Wallace will have sentences that long, but this writing is so dense and concentrated, a 500-word story can have a ton of work in it.

I took two weeks off in December, and hoped I could catch up a bit. November was rough because of the death of Loca, but I kept at it, chipping away. My hope dwindled on getting it done by the 31st, but I trudged on, thinking at least I could wrap it up by the end of January. I got almost no work done on the trip to Wisconsin and Indiana, and when I got back, I opened the manuscript and just stared at it, thinking it would take me a week or two to get moving from a dead stop.

I don’t know what happened, but I woke up at five in the morning on the 31st and thought, “I have to finish this today.” I spent the next twelve hours at full combat speed, rushing through each piece, writing what needed to be finished, junking a couple of stories and rounding as many corners as possible. I had to do the Kindle layout, which required a Scrivener upgrade that I thought for sure was going to doom me. I decided to defer the print version and my usual “long last look” pass just to get the Kindle draft out, knowing I could do another editing pass and get the wraparound cover and print layout done on the first. At 0500 I didn’t even have the titular story started. By dinner time, the book was submitted.

Another quick announcement I’ll get into later: this is the first book on a new imprint called Rumored Books. I’ll use it going forward for my stuff. I don’t know what else I will do with it or how I’ll market it. You’re looking at the URL for it (rumored.com) although I’ve got rumoredbooks.com registered and it’s pointed here for now. Maybe I will spin up a fancy site nobody will read for the imprint. Maybe it will become a different blog. Maybe I will publish other stuff. More on this later I guess.

What I do know is I have to keep going. This is my 19th book, and I have at least two dozen ideas, half-done manuscripts, and other things up on blocks right now, so I have to keep the river flowing. Stay tuned.

It’s the end of the year, so like I’ve done previously, it’s time for the big dumb summary of the last 365 days. I’m actually doing this a day early, but I don’t expect much to happen in the next 24 hours. Anyway:

• In January, I went to Norway for my birthday. I liked the city, but January isn’t the best time to go, obviously. Had a really good dinner at Mikael Svensson’s two-Michelin-star Kontrast; met a former employee from India I’d never met face-to-face, and wandered the snow a bit in the short winter days. Oslo was a wonderful city, but you might want to go in like July.
• In April, I went to Cambodia. This trip was an extreme mixture of awesome, traumatic, confusing, and amazing sights, all juxtaposed in the most random way.
• In June, I went to Cleveland for a quick weekend and a book reading. I read from a book I still haven’t finished, which I was supposed to finish in 2025, but here we are.[
• In August, I went to Mongolia. I also tacked on a few hours in Hong Kong on the way back. Ulaanbaatar and the nature around it was interesting and strange and a mix of central Asian remote nothingness with a very Soviet-looking city. Had a couple of long trips to the middle of nowhere, and unfortunately got sick halfway through. This was probably one of the most out-of-comfort-zone trips I’ve taken.
• In September, Squeak died. We had her for almost 18 years, and she’d been in a slow decline for a while. This was the first time I’d gone through this experience, and it was incredibly hard.
• Then in November, Loca died. Her decline was rapid and painful to watch, and she was “my” cat, so this one really hurt.  Also having no cats anymore is a huge emptiness for me.
• I also lost my oldest aunt and a second cousin this year. It’s amazing to me that I had 13 aunts and uncles, and now I’m down to three.
• I got my Part 107 drone license. I also got a second drone, a DJI Mavic Air 3s. Of course, now the government has banned new DJI drones from coming in the country, and I’m very paranoid about crashing one of my drones and not being able to get a replacement.
• In December, I went to Wisconsin and Indiana. Pretty uneventful and painless trip, except I lost my DJI Osmo Pocket 3 camera at the University Park Mall and am still pissed about that. (I bought a replacement. I now need to use it more.)
• I started the year working on a sequel to Rumored to Exist, and added this subplot that got far too plotty, so I removed it and set it aside to make another book out of it. I ended up finishing neither of those.
• I shifted to a sequel of Atmospheres I’ve been trying to land for ten years now. Every month, I thought it was close to finishing by the next month. In about September, a confluence of bad things completely shut down my writing, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to escape that.
• I started working on a short book, built around some already-published stories from zines. This was intended to be a quickie thing I could publish by the end of the year. That didn’t happen, but I did keep writing all year.
• All in, my net new total writing in Scrivener this year was 154,288 words.
• I kept up the weight loss. When I started this round in October of 2024, I weighed about 230 pounds. By December of 2025, I was 162. My body fat went from like 35% to 19%. I found that this makes winter somewhat excruciating now, even when “winter” in SF is like 47 degrees.
• I still don’t know how to get any quantifiable data out of Apple Health to say how many steps I took or whatever. I did walk or work out every day. I didn’t regularly meditate. I know my numbers are down, but maybe I should stop tracking this entirely.
• I flew 38,876 miles, 7 countries, a total of 3d 13h in the air. (My record is 2023: 9 countries, 69,316 miles.)
• I took 9,019 pictures, which honestly is way more than I thought. I only took 3,384 in 2024. My high is 2022 at 12,604.
• I had no resolutions last year, so 100% there.

I don’t know what resolutions I have and I sort of don’t believe in the pressure of that, but maybe it’s time. Here are some vague things I want to work on in 2026:

• Finish this “quick” book and get another big book out. And more writing in general.
• I either need to cancel subscriptions or start using them. I have a bad habit of subscribing to self-improvement things and then never actually doing anything.
• I say this every year, but I seriously need to throw out, donate, or sell like half the stuff I own. I’ve slowly been working on it, but I need to make more progress on this. And it would probably help if I got rid of stuff faster than I bought it, so maybe I should slow my roll there.
• Take more pictures. More film. I bought something like 20 rolls of 35mm film for Mongolia and ended up not taking a film camera, so that stuff is just sitting here.
• Fly more. I only flew a few times in March, then did as much as I could in spite of weather in November/December, and that was something like 22 total hours of total flight time. So, more.

I recently moved this site. It’s still at rumored dot com, of course. And it’s hopefully somewhat of an invisible transition. But it was pulling teeth there for a bit. Let me explain.

I first registered this domain on November 16, 1998. Prior to that, this blog (which wasn’t called a blog yet, because that term barely existed) lived over at Speakeasy, the hosting provider that was previously an internet cafe in Seattle. In 1998, I registered for a hosting account at Pair dot com, probably because Michael was using them for his site. I also registered the domain rumored dot com. The site went through various iterations of a static site, eventually using a static site generator I wrote before static site generators were A Big Thing, and then eventually it ended up in self-hosted WordPress.

That was going okay for decades I guess. I’d get a big bill every November, I’d pay it, and I’d have somewhat average service for the next 12 months. Pair was never blindingly fast or very leading-edge on their offering, but it worked reliably, and there was little fuss. Using some new wiz-bang hosting thing like Vercel or whatever would give me one-click whatever and the latest stacks and toys and apps and whatnot. But for just straight-up Apache/PHP/MySQL and no complications, Pair worked.

For a while, this was slightly frustrating because I was working with Ruby on Rails, then learning way more PHP, and I had grandiose ideas of doing the Next Big Multimedia Thing somehow, writing a database-backed CMS that had some weird image component or collaborative wiki something-or-other. And I’d write Rails stuff on my home machine and then not really have a way to deploy it to Pair. Or I’d come up with some PHP behemoth and then copy it over, and it would constantly time out on their machines. I gave up on that eventually. Wordpress more or less worked. I thought about moving to Ghost or some real CCMS system, but once you get well past a thousand entries into a WordPress blog, moving it elsewhere is like moving houses when you have more than 20,000 books. You can’t do it on a whim.

So life went on. And then this year, my annual bill went up like 75%, to $455, and was promptly autocharged to my card without me thinking about it. My fault for not paying attention, I guess. But then I went to dig into exactly which plan I had, and it turns out I was grandfathered into an ancient plan that didn’t exist anymore, and was stuck on some old hosting system or something. Like I was paying something like $42 a month, and a $5.99 a month plan on their pricing page touted like ten times the disk space and bandwidth I was throttled down to. Also, $42 a month isn’t your annual bill. These are GrubHub prices; order a $5 hamburger and a $5 drink, and your total after all the chickenshit fees is $47.

Pair used to be a great independent company, and they got bought and then sold and bought again, and they’re now owned by some Dutch company who has an About Us page that looks like it was written by ChatGPT. My billing inquiry was answered accordingly, and instead of any attempt to work with me or give me a slight discount, I got a big cut and paste of a press release or something, and was informed I could move my stuff to another hosting system, which see above about moving a giant site. And why should I reward this place with my business for running in this fashion?

I told S about this and she mentioned working on a marketing project for a large bank who shall go unnamed (they have “of America” in there somewhere) and when she asked why people would stay even thought they planned on screwing up rates and terms, the bank’s one-word answer was “inertia.” I felt the same way when a savings account I had for twenty years was suddenly paying a fifth the interest as an account that any new customer would get. In that case, I just opened a second account and moved my money over. But that didn’t involve a maze of redirected URLs, byzantine scripts I wrote ten years ago and have completely forgotten about, and a gigantic MySQL database.

Anyway. I looked at my options, and chose the path of least resistance. I went over to AWS and spun up a Lightsail Wordpress instance with something like 40x as much disk space and who knows how much faster for $7 a month, and the first three months were free. I exported the old WP instance, imported it to the new one, and after maybe a few hours of futzing, I had it more or less working the same. So I pointed the domain to the new one, and that’s that.

There are a few things that did not make the move, which is fine. I had a bunch of loose pages outside of WordPress for books that aren’t even published anymore, and those are gone. The old Paragraph Line web site that has zero traffic is dust. I think there are some little theme-based things that may be off, but it’s all mostly fine. HTTPS was a brief bump in the road, but it’s now working. The Lighthouse score is about 5 higher, and the rest of that is the fault of WordPress. And if I ever decide I need another site or a CDN or any of the other 863 things AWS does, it’s a click or three away.

A side note I almost forgot about: email. Pair has a system for putting a bunch of email addresses on the domain. There’s a largely useless webmail page and a completely useless spam filtering system, so I was just routing all of it to a free gmail account. Setting up an mx rule at the domain level to send all of the email to Google was a problem (I forget why) and shopping for some other place to handle my email was a nightmare. I could definitely throw fifty bucks a month at some SaaS Solution For Your Enterprise Email Needs. It was far easier to hold my nose and sign up for a Google Workspace account and point Rumored at that. I ran into some circular argument auth crap when I set this up, trying to keep jkonrath@gmail alive and point jkonrath@rumored at it, but I eventually got that figured out. This $7 a month is $7 more than 0, but it increased my disk space from 15 to 60GB and added a whole suite of Google apps I will probably never use.

There is some nostalgic thing about walking away from something you’ve used daily for 27 years. The Pair account reminds me of the start of my writing in Seattle, and all the years I blogged in New York, and the various book sites and other schemes I ran from that host. It makes me reminisce about the era when PHP was king and I was struggling to learn more about it. It was a constant through many moves and cities and eras and lifetimes. But, it’s just a host, I guess. I’m still sitting at a Bash prompt when I ssh to the new place. I’m still typing into the same WordPress editor as I write this. Everything’s changed, but nothing’s changed.

Anyway. I’m out that $455, which is stupid. If I get time, I’ll start doing more new stuff with the new hosting, maybe. Or maybe I’ll start actually posting here more next year.