I saw The Grand Budapest Hotel, the latest Wes Andserson flick, last night.  I don’t like watching movies like that on opening weekend, because they draw the baby boomer intelligentsia Berkeley crowd, the ones that never see movies and then laugh at the wrong places at the stupid pre-trailer ads that I’ve seen a thousand times and hiss at trailers for blockbuster summer tent-pole movies and generally drive me insane. But, we’re in the dead period of films, post-Oscars, when all of the turds are released until the next holiday weekend, so I’ll go see almost anything that isn’t some Jesus freak epic (which is about everything right now.)

Anyway, just a few short notes on this, not a review.  This film has incredible production design, absolutely flawless stuff.  It was shot in Germany at some abandoned gothic department store, and then supplemented with models — not CGI, not stock footage, but little scale models that have that quirky, awkward look like a bizarre story book.  The whole thing had that Wes Anderson absurdity to its look, like even the warning sign in the back of the decrepit 1920s spa talking about electrical treatments for liver toxins made you laugh out loud.  That was great.

The script had an interesting bookend shell game: a girl goes to a statue in tribute of a famous author; cut to the old author reading from his book; cut to the young author staying at this hotel as it is in decline and talking to the old proprietor, who has dinner with him and tells the tale of his youth and the hotel in its heyday.  I liked that quirky twisting of the plot.

Unfortunately, I thought the actual plot itself was a bit too Wes Anderson, too cookie-cutter.  No strong b-story, and just plodding along on this stock adventure.  There were lots of twists and turns and some good humor.  But the 99 minutes seemed to drag a bit in the middle, and the whole thing was a fluffy cake, pure sugar without a lot of weight at the bottom of it.

Acting was great, an absolutely solid Ralph Fiennes as the lead, with Tony Revolori (relatively unknown?) as the young hotel owner, F. Murray Abraham as the older version. But one of Anderson’s key tropes is to have the usual gang pop in with minor roles.  It always gets a laugh to see Owen Wilson or Bill Murray show up with a single line or two, but the cameos have gotten to the point where they almost annoy me.  Marching on Jason Schwartzman in a funny hat (or whatever) does not make a film.  It’s a chuckle, but it’s getting predictable.

Overall though, a pretty good one, especially if you’re into his stuff.  It’s no Life Aquatic, but the design though, is worth the price of admission.

I wanted to write a big post bitching about the new Facebook design, but it’s hopeless and a waste of time. I’ve wrung hands over the fact that I spend too much time there, and eventually that rug will be yanked from under me and it will become as fruitful as logging on to Friendster in 2014. Truth is, I like having a community online, and never feel like I can find one, and right now, FB is the closest I have to being in one.  But eventually everyone will grow up and drop out and who knows what will happen next.

All I do know is that this thing will be here until I decide it isn’t here, so I should point some more energy at it.  Blogging in 2014 can be a fruitless endeavor, as nobody reads and nobody plugs into a decentralized world of disconnected sites. But I can be guaranteed that my backlog here never goes away, and that any fruity ads that pop up in the sidebars only belong to my own products.

(Oh yeah, BTW, I published a book recently so go buy it.  That’s your ad for today.)

I recently finished filling up a journal.  It’s one of those Moleskine notebooks, a large-sized (digest, really: a hair under 8.5x5.5) with 240 pages.  The first entry is July 4, 2012 and I got it in a greeting card store in the Embarcadero while we were waiting to see the movie Bernie. I haven’t been religious about writing in paper journals every day, although it was a kinda-sorta new year’s resolution, so I’ve been getting better at it - I think the first half of this book was 18 months and the last half was three months.

I dug out the box of journals I’ve kept over the last twenty years, the “journal pit,” to file this one away, and could not resist digging through it.  It’s like a canker sore in the mouth I cannot not poke with my tongue, and I of course had to pop a claritin to fight off the dust mites and start digging into the old entries, just to see where my brain was at various points in time.

One thing that depresses me is that I fell out of the nightly habit of journaling for a long time, when my schedule changed away from that of a hardcore insomniac and the chronic depression backed off a notch or two.  I never, ever missed a day of writing in paper journals, and then my last 180-page spiral notebook goes from the end of 2006 to the beginning of 2011 or so.  Like the entire period of 2007-2008 when I worked my job in Denver, there were zero entries.  I have what I now call “the lost decade” which pretty much spans from when Rumored to Exist was published in 2002 up until Fistful of Pizza was published in 2011.  In that time, I published some half-ass projects, and had many false starts and failed attempts at big books, but in many ways, I have almost nothing to show for those years.  2011-2014, five books published; but that period was a long stretch of not knowing what the fuck I wanted to do.  The first half of it, I did pretty good in getting the pen to paper for personal journals.  The second half, not so much.

I don’t write in paper journals as an early step in my “real” writing, like as some hipster way of unplugging or whatever.  It’s just personal observations and current events and leg-stretching.  It’s not designed for anyone else to see, so that anonymity offers me the ability to do what I want and capture the things I might self-censor here or in my books.  I sometimes think it might be worthwhile to scan them or scoop out pieces, but that’s too much work.  For now, they sit in a box.

One of the things I noticed when I looked back at the old, old notebooks the other day is the crazy amount I experimented with writing when I was trying to figure it out in the early 90s.  Flipping through some entries from 93, 94, there were little bits like the things that ended up in (or not in) Rumored.  There was a lot of poetry, little phrases that grabbed me, and a lot of bleakness captured in the writing.  All of it is painfully bad, or at least most of it, but some of it is hilarious and interesting to me.

The other thing that got me was the massive time warp I’m in now, the speed of things.  When I don’t think about it, Christmas was last week; I just bought a car ten seconds ago, but it was like two months ago today.  I was just in Germany a few months ago, but I guess that was in 2012.  Time is flipping past at this incredible rate, which is one of the reasons I get so freaked out about not being on a writing project right now, a couple of weeks after a book got released.  If I blink, I’ll have another lost decade and it will be 2023 and I won’t have anything done.  Not to get grim about it, but I don’t have forever to let this stuff sit.

In contrast, I was looking at a journal from 1995 where I was talking about all of the stuff that happened “way back” in 1993.  Here is a timeline for you, with names replaced by letters like a 19th-century British novel:

• I got dumped by someone (A) I vaguely dated a couple of weeks, although it was one of those stupid holding deals where she dumped me, went to Florida with her ex-boyfriend, and then expected me to pine for her for a couple of weeks and then run back to her after the next semester started.  I didn’t, but I was depressed about it the entire break and wanted to jump off a bridge, and when she got back, we had these weird meta-arguments that nobody could win, like some kind of deranged 1970s Soviet arms conference.
• Over the break, this girl I had a weekender with back in 1991 (B) came into town, and we went out to the lake, sat around, and then made out for a while.  She then dropped me off at Lindley Hall and I agreed to myself to never acknowledge that this ever happened because I was so infatuated with (A) and things would work out.  Last I heard, (B) is now a lesbian and just got married to her long-time partner, which is now legal for them, so good for her, but the memory of the various stuff that happened during that 1991 weekend that I did with a lesbian is a bit of a mindfuck.
• Despite the (A) saga, I was emailing with (C) and that became an out-at-second date thing for me.  (C) ended up dating a friend of mine who also coincidentally messed around with (B) for a minute after I did.
• I met (D) and cooked dinner for her and had another date or two and envisioned this happily-ever-after life with her and then it became this long string of broken dates and I got incredibly depressed about it and started slashing my arms with a razor, which I now recognize isn’t the best plan for coping with your feelings.  Until I wrote about it in a short story decades later, the only person I admitted this to was (A) who was then briefly sympathetic to me for about ten seconds.
• In my book Summer Rain, I mentioned this girl I briefly dated (fictionally) named Jenn.  (See chapter 16.)  She (E) had just fallen out of some abusive relationship, but was also an unmedicated manic-depressive on a major manic cycle, and I was a hopeless insomniac, and we started hanging out again.  I’d go to her dorm late at night and we’d sit around and talk and sometimes sleep together - not sex, just sleep in the same bed.  But like I said, she was seriously manic, and I recognized that this could get ugly fast and somehow magically didn’t let my dick do all of the thinking on this one and sort of took a big step back from it.
• Then I met on the computer with (F) and we hung out and messed around and flirted and did everything-but for a bit, before that sort of randomly ended (although we’re still friends to this day.)
• And then I met (G) and we hit it off and ended up dating for about six months and then she dumped me and it completely fucking gutted me and I didn’t date again until like a year after leaving college.  (Not for a lack of trying.)

So the timeline for all of the above was between Christmas 1992 and spring break, or March, of 1993.  TEN WEEKS.

In the last ten weeks, I’ve… read a couple of books, and worked out twice.

And reading these journals is very dangerous for me, because I fall down this horrible rabbit hole of nostalgia.  I’m in that dangerous state where I’m trying to think of ideas for the next book, and it’s very easy to think I should just Bukowski it and take all of these old journals and twist together some kind of coming-of-age story set in the 90s blah blah blah basically what I did in Summer Rain, but again.  And I tried to do that with this book I was writing during the Lost Decade, which is this 120,000-word pile of suck sitting on my hard drive, with no plot and no flow, just fifty or so pieces of memory that are divided into “stories” that aren’t.  It’s so painful to think of all the times I’ve looked at that folder and though, “with a little elbow grease, I could…” and then I need to go slam my dick in the door and prevent myself from even going down that road.  There’s nothing more painful than writing a book about your life and then having it not sell.

Anyway, not sure where I was going with this, except to say I need to write in these little paper journals more, and of course I need to be writing on here more.  And you need to be reading it more, so maybe I should be making it better.  Let’s see what happens.

Enter the standard disclaimer here about never posting and needing to post something more often and how I’m going to be pissed ten years from now when I go back to find out what I was doing in 2014 and find out that entire months went by with no updates.

I’ve actually done well with writing in my paper journal, and force myself to write a page or so before work every day.  I used to write in a paper journal every night, for decades, and that slowly fell off after getting married (not to blame the institution or the partner, just the change in evening routine, or something) and now I’ve been burning through pages at a steady rate, which is nice.  I did switch from the standard spiral notebook to a leather bound book, a larger digest-sized Moleskine, because spiral notebooks tend to disintegrate at the edge of the page where the wire goes through the punched holes, and the processed paper attracts dust mites a bit more during long-term storage.  I also like the feel of the leather books, even if they are half the page size and cost five times as much.

I just published a book, and am now quickly entering the post-partum depression that comes with it.  I now come to expect this to happen, and there’s no easy way around it, although it feels like taking time off makes things worse.  I don’t have a next project at this point, just some vague ideas and a new unnamed manuscript that’s got about 14,000 words of wandering in it, maybe pieces that will end up as flash or short stories or will get folded into something longer.  And I have over 60,000 words that were cut or left over from Atmospheres, and no idea what will happen to those.  This tends to happen on each of the books, and it’s sort of like making yogurt, where a bit of the leftover ends up starting the next batch, although yogurt is much easier to make.

I’m having this great internal struggle about what to write next.  I feel like the current style of writing, the stuff in the last few books, has run its course or started to blur together from book to book, and there needs to be a giant leap-frogging into something radically different, but I’ve been ho-hum about everything I’ve read and seen lately.  I want to write a novel, something that can’t be confused for a bunch of short stories or look like a patchwork of leftover crap bound together in a single volume.  But I don’t know what that is, and I can’t force it.  I hope I can figure it out soon.

What else… I have been taking bass lessons from a guy here in Oakland.  It’s good, but it’s work.  I’ve had a lot to learn, with music theory and all of that, but I also have a lot of bad habits to break and new technique stuff to take into consideration, and that can be overwhelming.  But it’s good, and I feel like I’m slowly progressing.  We also work on stuff where he’s playing drums and I’m playing along, and that’s a lot of fun.  I still suck, but it’s better than sitting around watching TV.

My new car is still very nice.  It still smells like a new car. I’ve only put gas in it once since I’ve bought it, and managed to get about 375 miles on 8.1 gallons of gas, which is lower than I think I should be getting, but I’m still getting used to how to drive a hybrid.  There’s a trick with getting the EV system to work and the gas engine to shut off while at cruising speed, and once you change driving style to get that happening, your mileage improves.

I’ve been reading a lot of Jonathan Lethem lately, trying to get down all of his stuff.  I’ve hit all of the first-tier books, and now I’m going through the novels that are less critically-acclaimed, although I seem to like all of them.  Nothing so far tops Chronic City, which is still one of my favorite books ever, and I will probably end up reading it for the fourth time soon.  I’m also thinking about an Infinite Jest re-read over the summer, but who knows.  Gravity’s Rainbow and Ulysses are both sitting on the shelf with a bookmark on page 12, staring at me.  Someday.

I just found myself re-reading old blog entries here, and I am dumbfounded by how much I updated this thing two or three years ago.  I should spend more time on here.  And I sometimes think about pulling together some of those old posts and putting them into a book, although I guess if you wanted to read them, you would have already read them.

Allergy season is starting.  Not looking forward to that.  At least the Benadryl will help me with the weird dreams.

I was going through old mail and found this letter I wrote to Mark Cuban at some point last year. I never got a response. I think my goal was to keep writing mail to him until I got a response or was told to stop, but like most projects, I lost interest.  Here it is:

Mr. Cuban:

Thanks for reading my email.  I am a big fan and am also an Indiana University alum (‘95) so I’m excited to write you!

Is it true that OJ Mayo declined the player option on his contract and became a free agent because he had an argument with you about which Strawberry Shortcake character from the original 1979-1985 Kenner Strawberry Shortcake toys was the best one?

I read in an article (I think in Wired, or the New Yorker) that you are an avid Strawberry Shortcake collector and  often run up bidding on Strawberry Shortcake collectibles on eBay during the NBA off-season.  It also mentioned that The Purple Pie Man of Porcupine Peak was your favorite character because he often talks about himself in the third person and has the flock of Berry Birds which keep him informed on the goings-on of the Strawberry Shortcake World.

If this is true, I could see why this would be a conflict with Mayo.  He’s mentioned several times on SportsCenter that he’s a fan of Sour Grapes and her pet snake, Dregs.  I remember one interview he gave in 2007 or 2008 (I can’t find the clip online) where he called Purple Pie Man a “punk-ass bitch” and said “I don’t care if she didn’t appear until the third special (1982’s _Strawberry Shortcake: Pets on Parade_) - Sour Grapes is the bomb!”

Do you disagree with his assessment?  Do you think the use of performance-enhancing drugs could have clouded his judgment on which character is truly the best?

Thanks and keep up the good work!

-Jon

I bought a new car yesterday.  I didn’t plan on it, but I walked away with a 2014 Prius C Two, with 12 miles on the odometer. I’d originally planned on getting my old car fixed so it would pass emissions, because the wiring was messed up after my 2009 wreck. But when the service center quoted me a high price for the repair, I went to another dealer’s trade-in counter and waded through three hours of paperwork.

This is all very bittersweet, because I loved my last car. It was a 2008 Yaris, the base model with almost no options, just a little three-door hatchback with a tiny engine. But the car meant a lot to me for whatever odd reason, and I spent a lot of time cooped up in its little cockpit.  It symbolized a few different eras of my life, and was one of my last strong ties to my life in Denver.

I bought the car in 2007, a month before getting married, and the weekend before I started my new job at MX Logic.  We had one car, the Subaru, and Sarah worked right across the street, so the original plan was for me to drive down to the Denver Tech Center every day in the Outback. But she always had off-site meetings, trips to the airport, doctor appointments, and other things that would require a car.  So the plan was to buy the cheapest new car we could as a backup, and we looked at the lowest-end Toyotas and Hondas before ending up test-driving the Yaris, and deciding to go with that.  Sarah had financed the Subaru, so I financed this car.  And then I started driving the Toyota to work every day, and although in finance it was already my car, it became “my” car.

I worked way the hell south, just past the county line, near Parker, which took about a half hour to drive in.  The Yaris had a line-in aux jack, still somewhat of a novelty in those days, so I could listen to my iPod on the commute to work, and maybe catch the latest Rockies gossip on 850 KOA on the drive home.  This was when Rocktober was starting up, the big push towards the postseason and the World Series, and I was hooked, listening to any pre-game, post-game trash talk I could catch on the airwaves.  Fall turned to winter; the car’s little electric heater kept me warm, and the ABS brakes became a godsend on the icy pavement.  Even though the car didn’t have all of the luxury items, I felt comfortable in the tiny bubble of an interior, driving to and from work every day.

My job was oddly solitary. As a tech writer, I was thrown into a QA group for lack of a better home, and they were tightly-knit, always running in emergency mode, so I didn’t make many friends or lunch buddies. Instead, I’d get in my car and drive to one of the nearby fast food places, and eat in the car while listening to AM sports radio or a podcast. This was before my weight loss, so I’d go to Taco Bell or Sonic or McDonald’s, and sit in the Yaris with the little heater running and some music on the player, eating my fries and maybe scribbling in a notebook or reading a novel. Even after spending an hour or more in the car round trip, I took some strange solace in spending another hour in there with my fast food.

Within six months, Sarah’s job fell apart, and we set our sights on Los Angeles.  I quit my job, and while she worked, I drove ahead to LA to scout for apartments and haul out a small load of essential things we could have while our house was in transit with the movers.  The solo drive halfway across the country took some work, because that tiny engine really struggled going over the Rockies.  But I had my new TomTom GPS on the dash, my tunes in that AUX jack, and six cup holders, no waiting.  The car got covered in salt and dirt, after crossing the snowy mountains and then the desert, spending a night in Las Vegas, and then hitting the streets of Culver City as I apartment hunted.  I drove all over the City of Angels looking for a place for us to live, and then picked up Sarah at LAX so we could sign the papers at our new home in Playa Del Rey and then go back to Denver to pack.  I left the Yaris there at the new apartment, filled with dishes and housewares, to wait a few weeks until we’d come back.

We spent about six months in LA in 2008, me without work (other than some part-time consulting) and Sarah with a job she hated, always traveling up to SF and elsewhere.  I drove around LA a lot and really loved it, the strange little areas like El Segundo and Santa Monica and Marina Del Rey and Culver City.  I had a few friends there, and I seemed to have a lot of doctor’s appointments, too.  But LA is very much a car city, and that melded me to the Yaris.  Gas prices shot way up, and I wrote (but never published) a book on saving gas, which involved installing a ScanTron II in the car and messing around with all sorts of experiments to drive up my MPGs.  And for whatever reason, I washed that car an ungodly amount of times in LA.

The LA experiment ended, and we both got jobs up north.  This involved a few solo drives from LA to SF and back, during the moving and job interview process, and I have a lot of memories of cruising through the central valley, listening to comedy podcasts in the middle of the night during that long haul. We moved to an apartment in South San Francisco, so Sarah could commute to the city, and I could drive down to San Jose every day.  This drive was hell.  It was about 40 miles each way, which took me at least an hour every day.  This really Stockholm Syndromed my love for the Yaris, as I spent all of my time in that damn car, shuffling up and down the peninsula.  Gas was at an all time high, well above $4.50 a gallon, but I’d get close to 40 MPG on the highway.  I can still close my eyes and envision every exit and every turn between SSF and San Jose on the 101, so firmly burned into my brain from that commute.

In 2009, on Good Friday, I was driving in stop-and-go traffic in the rain on 237, and at about 35 miles an hour, I glanced in my blind spot to change lanes.  When I looked back up, the car in front of me was at a dead stop, and it was too late for me to do anything but lock the brakes.  My car hit a truck, at an angle, the nose diving just under his bumper.  The airbags did not deploy and I hit the steering wheel hard enough to not know what happened for the next minute or so.  The car wouldn’t start, and when I got out, the front end was fucked.  I got a truck to push the car off the road, and after an hour or so, got flat-bedded to a body shop.  I did not know the fate of the car for a weekend, and became insanely depressed over the outcome.  It was a coin toss as to whether or not the car would be totaled, and I felt so close to the vehicle, I was really sad to let go of it. They came back and said they’d repair the damage, and within a few weeks, I had the car back, good as new.  (Or so I thought.)  It took a while, but I got my old friend back, looking as good as new, with a new paint job and Toyota-certified sheet metal and plastic pieces bolted onto the front end.  I was very happy to have her back, and it made that insufferable commute to San Jose almost bearable, at least until that novelty wore off.

I kept driving the car, and by 2010, I’d started working from home, which meant no more commuting.  I still used the car for trips to the store or to run errands or whatever else, but went from driving a hundred miles a day to maybe 50 miles a week, sometimes less.  But every time I drove the little car, it was like a home away from home.  I’d listen to Rockies games on my iPhone, and imagine I was back on I-25, listening to the AM radio broadcast back in Colorado.  I’d drive past a line of palm trees in Berkeley and remember driving past the same kind of foliage on Sepulveda or near LAX.  And sometimes I’d have to make the trip in to Palo Alto and remember the daily ordeal of doing the same run up and down the peninsula.  The car would make me homesick for homes I used to have, and became this strange nostalgia well for the recent past.  Just the feel of its controls, the look of its dashboard, would remind me of these places and times in a deep and painful yet nostalgic way.

That wreck came back to haunt me.  There was wiring damage to the car, which would cause the check engine light to go off.  I’d tried at two different dealerships to get this straightened out, with no luck except advice to get the wiring completely torn apart.  You don’t have to emissions test a new car in California, but after so many years, you’re no longer exempt, and it requires a test.  And this year, I did, and could not pass.  When I went to the dealer again to try to get this straightened out, I was told the car would need a $500 diagnostic, and probably $2000 or $3000 of labor to unfuck the wiring issues.  The blue book value of the car is probably $5000 to $7000.  So, I reluctantly traded it in.  I looked at maybe getting another Yaris, but the Prius C is the same platform, but a hybrid, and it was only a few thousand dollars more.  I did the paperwork, handed over the keys, and now I’m in a new car.

I had to clean out the old car before I left it with the dealer, and it was profoundly sad.  The trunk was full of cleaning products and junk from Auto Zone that I’d purchased in a proud new car frenzy, various polishes and waxes, some still from Denver. There was my Colorado snow brush, which doesn’t get much use anymore.  And the glove box contained receipts and paperwork down to the original window sticker from when it came off the lot in 2007.  I put everything in plastic bags, and sat in the car one last time and said goodbye.  It probably saved my life, or at least saved me from much worse injury, when it crushed apart in that stupid wreck.  And it was a big part of my life for the last six and a half years.  It looked so sad, cleaned out and empty, sitting next to all of the new Priuses, waiting to get wheeled back to service and repaired and prepped for the auction house.  I really do miss it.

The new car is nice.  It has more auto-everything stuff and a complicated computer I will never figure out, plus the new car smell, the better gas mileage, and a bluetooth setup to connect to my phone and all that jazz.  It’s a little roomier, but physically feels similar to the old Yaris, a similar ride and turning radius.  Some of the parts inside of it are the same, the same font on the same electronic mirror control; the identical pieces to the inside hatch cover and back seat headrests.  I don’t know what the soul of the car will be like, if cars do have soul.  Every car has its mojo, or doesn’t, and this one has a different one than the Yaris did.  I’m sure in time it will become as familiar.  But it’ll take time.

I know it sounds stupid to mourn the passing of a $14,000 pile of nuts and bolts and plastic.  But, I do.  I’m hoping that when I go back to the dealership next week to drop off some paperwork, I don’t see it there, because I’ve already spent enough time thinking about this and need to move on.  It’s just a damn car, but it was my car. It was a constant in my life for a long time, and I’ll miss it.