I am fifty-four today.

It’s funny, but I am writing this in the Helsinki airport in Finland, the day before my birthday. I’m just passing through, but my third flight of three got cancelled and they threw me on a later one. This resulted in me spending about eight hours in this relatively tiny airport. And what’s funny is that the view outside probably looks a lot like the view in North Dakota where I was born. It’s not as cold; maybe hovering around zero celsius. But the sun set at like 3:40 PM and there’s this eternal gray, with mounds of plowed white tucked away in the corners. It’s a very monochromatic landscape, and looks like the same sort of man-made island of aviation technology plopped in a frigid corner of nowhere, just like Grand Forks AFB. Only difference here is that the tundra’s hosting a bunch of Finnair Airbus planes, and not B-52 nuclear bombers.

54 is a nice, solid, even number. The only mathematical oddity I can think of is that it’s three times eighteen. I very clearly remember when I turned 18; I probably have written about it too many times here. It really throws me to think I’m three times as old as that. When I was 18, I was three times older than I was six. I don’t remember my sixth birthday, but I do remember being that age, and it was lifetimes before I was 18. I sometimes feel like I was an adult when I was 18 and it wasn’t that long ago. But so much has happened in the last 36 years, that obviously isn’t true.

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Many people share my birthday, but the one I loved the most was David Lynch. He was exactly 25 years older than me. And I say “was” because he’s now gone. I don’t get that bent up about celebrity deaths, but this is one that really hit me. I’d always hoped to meet him someday to tell him about how we were in the same secret society. I admit I got into Lynch’s work late, and seeing Eraserhead in college was one of the first stars that moved into alignment for me to start writing Rumored to Exist in 1995. And Twin Peaks was required viewing in college, but the lushness of that world didn’t fully impact me until I moved to Washington and saw Mount Si in the fog and the endless evergreens and felt like I’d crossed over into the scene in his mind. Huge loss, but it’s also a weird one in that I feel like he’ll never be gone and he’s off in the black lodge and will mysteriously show up in 25 years.

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There is so much loss and sadness going on. Maybe it is always going on and it’s confirmation bias or whatever. But I was in JFK airport last night, scrolling through the end of TikTok, and it was so profoundly sad. I never created there, but had a burner account I used to scroll videos after work to calm down and reset my brain. And there were so many people who found community there, found support or solace, and it all completely ended over what is basically a stupid political stunt. Maybe it will come back, but it has me thinking a lot about community and friendship and support, and in many ways I am completely isolated and need to work on this. But how?

And the thought on everyone’s mind is how the regime change happening today will cause more great loss. I don’t write about politics, but I don’t think it’s going to go well. There is a reason I left the country yesterday, and it isn’t because I support any part of this. I can’t change minds and I can’t change policy. All I can do is keep working, keep supporting the people who work for me, and hope the economy isn’t completely destroyed by the time I need to stop.

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I think last year, I talked about how I was just spinning my wheels in year 52 and needed to spend year 53 writing. Good news is that I did this. I published one book and got two others closer to done. All I want to do in my 54th year is keep doing this, so I will.

I did not take many pictures in 2024. 2022 was a year I tried to go whole-hog into photography and I took just over 12,000 pictures. Last year: 3,200. Part of this was less travel; part of it was having two injuries that sidelined me a bit. But also, I didn’t focus on photography as much because I spent a lot more of my energy on writing, which is good.

Anyway, here’s my top ten.

So, five from Vietnam, one from Spain, and four from California. Six were taken with the Canon 6D mkii, two were from an iPhone, one was with a Sony a6400, and one was with a DJI Osmo Pocket3. About 1900 of that 3200 were from an iPhone 14 Pro; about 800 were from the 6D, and most of the rest were the Sony. (The DJI is relatively new.)

I’m not 100% with this WordPress gallery thing, but I’m also not posting giant photo dumps on Flickr or whatever anymore. Does this work? Is it sustainable? Not sure. It seems okay for a small number of photos, though.

Took 100-some photos at the Alviso salt ponds yesterday, and it was good to get out and do that. I don’t know if this is just New Year/New Me nonsense or if I can build up some inertia, but we’ll see.

Okay, last day of the year, so as I did in 2023 and 2022, time to bang out a summary:

• Started off the year with my very first case of COVID. I was pissed I made it almost four whole years without catching it, and then the Denver airport Centurion lounge did me in. I was lucky to get on Paxlovid immediately, and spent basically two weeks asleep on an air mattress in my home office, watching the movie Moneyball over and over for some reason. I’d planned to go to Vegas for my birthday, but nope.
• Thanks to the time stuck in bed, I released my first album, 0. It’s an ambient synth album and pretty much nobody heard it, but it was fun to do. I recorded the whole thing in Logic Pro, mostly by cutting and pasting notes in the editor and using virtual synths.
• I got Invisalign, which was a huge waste of money and I wish I had not done it. Had to fire a dentist over this.
• I went to Anaheim for work and stayed at Disneyland. It was almost entirely a work thing, but there were some brief reverberations with previous visits, which I wrote about in the link.
• I went to Vietnam. This trip was amazing and difficult and shocking and incredible. I think more than any other trip I’ve taken, it’s had the biggest impact in disrupting my preconceptions about a country.
• I went to Barcelona on a work trip. This was almost entirely work and I only had a brief bit of time to see Spain, but what I saw was interesting.
• I broke my right arm in a stupid fall. I think this threw me off for about a month. No, I didn’t get painkillers.
• I was supposed to go to New Orleans in August, but Sarah caught covid right before we left, so I cancelled.
• In September, I threw out my back in a major way and spent a week on the couch, unable to move.
• In October, based on the above, I made the decision to enter food jail and completely locked down my diet. I’ve lost about 30 pounds since then, but probably have another 30 to go.
• I still walk every day, but thanks to the collapse of FitBit and the stupidity of Apple Health, I have no idea how many steps or miles I walked. It’s probably about the same as last year or a little less.
• I had both an aunt and an uncle die this year. Both were siblings on my mom’s side. The aunt was my favorite aunt and that affected me, but I did not write about it because the whole thing was non-public and weird.
• My 2014 Prius C was traded in for a 2024 Prius Limited.
• I published my 18th book, Decision Paralysis. It’s my second-longest book (100,000 words), and I’m happy I’m finally writing.
• I re-published Vol. 13.
• I wrote maybe 100,000 words between another large book and other random stuff.
• I only published 20 entries here, down from 25 last year, and way down from when I used to post daily. I briefly tried a Substack, but that’s stupid and just another distraction.
• I spent a lot of time, money, and effort working on my mental health. I won’t get into details, but I feel a lot better now than I did 365 days ago. This is my most important and challenging project, although writing every day is a big help with this.

I don’t have any resolutions for 2025. Keep writing. Get everything else out of the way. That’s enough.

I’m very happy to announce my 18th book, Decision Paralysis, is out now.

TL;DR: Amazon print and Amazon kindle links.

I did not think I was ever going to write another book. I quit writing completely in 2021, and spent at least a year 100% away from it, not even calling myself a writer, not sure what to do with my life except work, eat, and sleep. But I’ll always be a writer. I could not quit. And I needed to tell myself that I had to write the next book, even if nobody read it, even if the market had completely vanished and would be replaced with dumb AI-generated murder mysteries that end on a cliffhanger with a link to buy the next of 29 books in the series. The algorithm has killed everything, but it has not killed me.

I spent the first few months of 2024 knocking around a few other projects before I got to this. On 5/27/24, I started this book in earnest, with only a title and about 8,000 words of scraps. By the end of July, I had the idea that this book would be the spiritual successor to The Failure Cascade, which I’d re-released a few months prior. I wanted longer stories, more bleak, more introspective, and with a thickness and depth I wasn’t getting in the short micro-fiction or flash I’d been doing in the last decade.

Aside from telling myself “just write,” the biggest change in my work habits was moving my writing time to mornings. Waking up at 3:45 and sitting in my office in darkness for a few hours listening to weird ambient music put me in a different headspace and made the words start to add up. I think in early August, I crossed the 50,000 word mark, and that was the original intention. I’d originally had these short flash interstitials between stories, and at some point, I pulled all of them out and focused just on the stories. I also started footnoting things, which may be devisive, but I had fun with it.

A bit of an easter egg and a change is that the titles of each story are latitute/longitude coordinates. They have meaning; that’s all I’ll say. I’ve had a very specific format for titles that I think were funny, but as I am battling this persona problem, I think I got backed in a corner with them. I found that the people who thought the goofy titles were haw-haw funny were also the ones who basically didn’t get what I’m trying to do with my writing. So, clean break from that.

It’s also always bugged me when my stuff was too short, or perceived as such. I mean, some of the books are; The Failure Cascade is 37,565 words. Any time someone told me, “It was so great because I could sit down and read it in one sitting” it was a bit of an insult, especially when that was basically my annual output of 2020. So I purposely went maximalist on some of the stories here. The best/worst example is the titular story of the book, which is 16,000 words. For comparison, 2017’s Help Me Find My Car Keys And We Can Drive Out! — the entire book — is 30 stories that total 15,848 words. That story is like “The Aristocrats” in that it was long and essentially useless (at it’s core, it’s about someone trying to buy lunch who can’t find anything to eat) and at like 3,000 words, I thought it was getting excessive; at about 5,000 I thought “I should just make the whole book this story” and it quickly shot up to 10,000 words. It took another 6,000 to finish the thing, and it’s about everything but ordering food now.

This book was therapeutic to me. I think I was able to explore a lot about why I’m here and what I’m doing. I’ve struggled a lot in recent years with the big dillema of what I am and how I’m supposed to finish the rest of my years. I have no children and no legacy, and there’s honestly no hope that any of this writing exists beyond me. I could write a lot more about this, but the TL;DR is that I covered some of it here, and I probably need to do more.

Final tally: 20 stories; 412 pages; 101,834 words; 249 footnotes.

The description from the back cover:

Euthanasia drug MLMs. Deep-fried lard rumored to have mystical healing properties sold at pirate-themed restaurants. Existential crises about dollar-menu tacos and light therapy. Is this your average terror nightmare, or just another Thursday where mind-reading dolphins are dialing 1-900 numbers to spill secrets about how DARPA taught them to master Minesweeper?

Decision Paralysis by Jon Konrath is a surreal and darkly comedic exploration of absurdity and modern disconnection. The book plunges into a fragmented narrative where dystopian satire meets introspective nihilism. Inside, you’ll find twenty deranged tales of John Denver Illuminati theories, Taco Bell stealth tanks, Cambodian pizza chains that secretly sell time machines, and bitter online arguments about whether Norwegian timber tariffs of the 1800s ruined Chicago deep dish forever. The chaotic tales, blending dystopia and the grotesque, offer sharp humor and biting commentary, leaving readers grappling with questions of meaning, choice, and the absurdity of existence.

A biting critique of consumer culture, decision fatigue, and the search for identity in a fractured world, Decision Paralysis is both a satire and a deep dive into the human psyche. Fans of sardonic humor, speculative fiction, and offbeat storytelling will find much to enjoy in Konrath’s latest offering, which deftly combines outrageous comedy with an undercurrent of raw, philosophical truth. This is a book that will leave readers laughing, thinking, and questioning their own paths through the maze of modern existence.

The cover: it’s from Van Damme Beach just south of Mendocino. Failure Cascade’s cover was shot on the same 2017 trip, about three miles north. It was a color image that was filtered down to black and white; this image is color, but looks almost monochromatic. I love when a photo ends up like that.

Anyway, that’s that. I hope you check it out. I am not sure what’s next, but I have a list of stuff to do, and two big books past the first draft stage, so we’ll see what 2025 brings.

I don’t usually talk about works in progress, but just a quick accountability note here to mention that I finished the first draft of my 18th book. This is more or less a spiritual continuation of The Failure Cascade, and is 20 stories, but almost three times longer. I’m moving past flash fiction and micro-fiction, maybe. I mean, there’s one story that’s roughly half the length of Failure Cascade. I don’t have any distance from the thing to say whether I like it or not, but John read a draft and he did. Completely unmarketable, but I’ll keep going on it after I catch a breath and see when I can publish it. It already has a title and a cover image. ChatGPT can write the book description and marketing crap better than I can. Those three things are always the biggest blockers on getting a book out the door.

I just realized that if I get this book out this year (and I’m not worried if I don’t) it will be four years since my last book. The longest gap before this was about 20 months between Summer Rain and Rumored to Exist. When I really got on the horse and changed around my writing schedule and cadence and work ethic in 2010, I had it in my head that I needed to publish at least a book a year because of the algorithm (or whatever) and I did that from 2010 to 2020, with two years that had two books. Now, whatever. I have been writing more and changed around my schedule to make that happen. But I’m writing for me, not for a calendar or an algorithm. I’d like to get the long list of half-done projects out the door, but I don’t care how they sell.

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I also don’t talk about future travel plans, but it’s time to get out of the country again, and time to renew my passport, while I still can. I was trying to book something this morning and realized this one’s expiring less than six months from when I’m leaving. Pretty much every country has a requirement that you have six months on your passport in case you end up in a coma in a hospital or whatever. Five and a half months left is not close enough according to an airline computer, so it’s time to figure this out.

It’s always oddly bittersweet when I do this. First, this will be the last passport when I have hair. Second, there was a six-year gap from the first stamp to the second. Lots of blank pages I wish I would have filled. This one has stamps from 20 countries, which is way more than the last one. (I think that had four or five.) This one also has three visas, including a work visa, which is new to me.

I honestly don’t know how much I will travel in the future. I think it’s going to become a lot more difficult, impractical, and expensive to travel internationally. And I’m not exactly enthused about spending my tourist dollars in a large chunk of the country. I really should spend more time in California, because there’s a lot of it I haven’t seen. There are nine national parks in California, and I’ve hiked exactly zero of them. Time to look into that.

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I don’t talk about politics here, and it’s hard not to. There’s a lot of dismay and there’s a lot I can’t do about the situation. For my own mental health, I feel a great need to distance myself from it and focus on what I can do. I also don’t talk about work here, but I think the best I can do is to continue to manage and mentor people, try to grow my company and my little corner of Silicon Valley, and continue to support who I can. I grew up working retail and dumb jobs in the middle of the country, and was lucky to find a way out and get a real job and benefits and live in a beautiful place. I’ll stay here while I can. When I can’t, I’ll leave. I’m fortunate enough to have options, but I love it in California.

I think one other thing is I need to take a big step back from the news/terror cycle and redouble my efforts on writing. I’ve already had serious questions about my social media use, and this pretty much sealed the deal for me. I spent far too much time doom-scrolling in Reddit, and I can’t anymore. My last news source was the New York Times, and I cancelled my subscription (even though I get it free through Amex) because of obvious reasons a few months ago. Twitter got nuked a year ago, not that I ever used it.

I’ve given up on Substack. It’s become a political doom and gloom circle-jerk, but more than that, I don’t know what to post there. I feel like any writing I’m not doing for a book or for work should be here. I thought about having some system where I blogged here and mirrored it there, but it was too much work and I don’t really see the benefit. A lot of the writing content on Substack is either of the “look at me” or “make money fast” variety, and I care about neither.

At this point, my two biggest social media vices are Tik-Tok and Tumblr. I don’t do much content creation on Tik-Tok, and I have only two or three friends on there, but it’s fairly easy to push the algorithm away from the bad and just waste time watching people pressure-wash driveways or travel in weird places. I also don’t do much creation and have no friends on Tumblr, but I like it because I don’t even think the people working at Tumblr are aware it’s still operational. Because I don’t create and I don’t use my real name, I don’t chase likes and follows or look at numbers. That’s what’s good for me.

Same goes here. I have no idea how many people read this, and I have no need to “grow” things here. I’ll just keep on keeping on.