I don’t do new year resolutions, but one of my not-a-resolutions has been to write in this thing every day, hell or high water.  And of course, the big catch is what exactly to write.  I would write about life, except life pretty much just involves work, trying to write, and medical appointments.  When I dig to find some piece of life to write about from years ago, I find myself writing about a period of life in which, during that time, I thought things were insanely boring and I looked at some other part of my life as exciting, which is ironic.  And I don’t like to write pieces of what will end up being books here, because I think it’s a ripoff when people read this journal and then buy one of my books and find out they’ve read everything already.

I had this idea, a couple of years ago, for a project that involved an article a day in a giant interconnected wiki, similar to the Necrokonicon, that would tell the non-story of the decade from January 1, 1990 to December 31st, 1999, in thousand-word chunks.  It’s not that my life was incredibly interesting in that period; it’s just that “hey remember the 90s” nostalgia seems to be a thing, and I’m the guy that still uses the term Walkman to refer to a portable music machine, or “tape” to describe how to record a TV show.  I think I wrote maybe two or three of the articles before I lost wind on the thing.  I don’t know if this is a good idea, but it’s ideas like this that propel writing, and a concept like that is infinitely easier to pitch to a potential reader than “a bunch of weird stuff happens, and vomital buttsex with dead people” which is the synopsis of my last three or four books.

(When I said “medical appointments” above, that wasn’t foreshadowing that something horrible is going on, except that I always feel like shit, and it’s nothing that any doctor can explain, other than when a general practitioner says “maybe it’s allergies” and sends me to an allergist, who does $3700 of tests and wastes weeks of my time, only to give me a prescription for Allegra, which my insurance doesn’t cover, and tells me “maybe it’s a sinus thing” and sends me to an ear-nose-throat doctor.  Because no doctor wants to get sued, no doctor wants to be the one holding the bag, and will just send you somewhere else, meaning doctors are essentially worthless.  And yeah, diet and exercise, thanks in advance for telling me that.)

I’ve been stuck on this project, which is “write another Rumored”, i.e. come out with some follow-up to my book Rumored to Exist, which is my favorite of all of my books.  I don’t know how that book ever got done, or what makes it intrinsically better than any of my other books, but it was a bit of a seven-year perfect storm of writing, and up until the type was set, I was convinced it was the worst possible thing ever.  I think it’s how I found my voice, but it’s been very difficult to replicate, at least in long-form.  I think part of the success of it was its structure, because it had a certain “gimmick” to its form, and with that and a theme, it made it easy to glue in bits and pieces of almost any kind to fit into the work.  I don’t know if I should just use the same thing again, or wait until something magically appears, or force it.  I know that sitting around trying to make it happen won’t make it happen, but sitting around watching Pawn Stars marathons won’t make it happen, either.

Okay, speaking of.  I just took a shower (not sure why) and thought of a million ideas for a book outline, which I now need to capture.  I’m not a big outline person, but maybe I should be.  Maybe 2013 should be the year of the outline.  Or maybe I should write 50 shitty outlines and then scribble insane notes in the margins, and then bind all of that up and make it the book.  Stranger things have worked.

So I had to go to storage the other day, to put away the box from my new bass, because if I just threw it in the recycling bin, the truss rod inside the bass neck would have exploded and I would have needed to mail the thing to Germany or Uganda or something for warranty repairs, and I’m pretty sure finding a cardboard box the size of a bass would be a month-long venture.  I didn’t want to dig through the unit, although I think I can now shred any files older than 2007, and there are boxes of tax papers going back to 2000 in there, but they’re in the very back of the unit, and that would involve unpacking everything to pull those boxes, so that can be left for some other time.

What I did find though, is something that I thought was lost: a good chunk of my Star Wars action figures from the late 70s/early 80s.

Check this out:

When I was a kid, Star Wars figures and Legos were the father, son, and holy spirit of my life.  I probably spent an entire year of my life in the toy aisle of K-Mart, memorizing the back cards of every action figure hanging from the displays, digging through every unit hanging from the metal pegs in hopes that some rare figure would be hidden in the very back.  (For example, at one point, the light sabers that extended from the arms of Luke, Obi-Wan, and Darth Vader were two-piece telescoping units; these were later replaced with solid one-piece units that didn’t extend as far.  All of my figures came with the later one-piece light sabers, but I was convinced that if I dug around enough, I would miraculously find a two-piece lightsabered figure at the store, which I of course never did.)

Various thoughts about these figures, in no particular order:

• This isn’t my entire collection; I don’t know what happened to all of the rest of them.  Notably missing are my original R2-D2, Yoda, and Boba Fett.  Also missing are all of the guns and accessories, which are supposed to go in that little compartment with a door.
• I also used to have a set of accessories that you got for mailing in a bunch of proofs of purchase, which included vinyl plastic astronaut-type life support backpacks, gas masks, and a backpack that would hold Yoda on Luke’s back.
• I found this, coincidentally, on the same day I read in David S. Atkinson’s book Bones Buried in the Dirt about a similar Darth Vader case.
• All of the figures I have with capes (Lando, Obi-wan, Vader) all have plastic capes.  Some of the first-generation characters had cloth capes, which I believe are much more rare.
• The most predictable comment one would make while looking at this would be “oh man, imagine how much those would be worth in their packages.”
• I had at least two Boba Fett figures.  They were also a mail-away, and I had enough points to get more than one.  The Boba Fett is best known for having a fixed missile on his back, which was supposed to be a spring-loaded firing missile, but some kid, who may or may not have been Mikey from the Life cereal commercial and/or eating Pop Rocks at the same time, fired the missile down his throat and died.  (That’s not what happened.)  Almost everyone I know who collected Star Wars figures as a kid claims they had one of the rocket-firing Boba Fetts.  They are all liars.  They never released one, although in 2010 they finally did.  (I guess kids are too obese to choke on rockets now.)
• The original Han Solo figure I have has lost most of his hair-paint.  That’s because after Empire, I used to freeze him.  Lacking a carbonite chamber, I’d put him in a glass of water and put that in the freezer.  This would result in a Han Solo frozen in a round chunk of clear ice, but whatever.  This was before the internet, so my entertainment options were limited.
• One of my Hoth Rebel soldiers has a weird looking head.  That’s because someone in my school broke the original head off.  My dad tapped a set of threads in the head and neck, and sunk a small allen-head bolt in there so the original head screwed back on.  This made the figure much cooler, as I could unscrew the head, leaving a bolt sticking out of the neck like a robotic spine.
• My Chewbacca had a weird divot missing from the top of his head, right at the seam.  It looks like he was into self-trepannation.
• The R5-D4 figure has only white, worn-off remnants of its original sticker.  After this happened, when I got the R2-D2 figure, I painted over the sticker with clear nail polish of my mom’s.  This preserved the label, but now it’s got this weird yellowish sheen to it.
• Speaking of discoloration, my Hoth Han Solo appears to have jaundice from a bad case of hepatitis.
• My favorite figures include the Hoth Luke Skywaker, the R2D2 with the extending antenna in his head, and the missing Boba Fett.
• The figures that now seem stupid include Bossk and Lobot (who had a combined total of about 3 seconds of screen time), the Bespin Guard (who looks like a creepy guy with a waxed mustache and beret you’d find hanging out at a leather bar) and the FX-7 robot (which did not have moving legs, could not sit and therefore didn’t fit in any vehicles, and came with no guns or accessories.)

Amazingly, all of these survived.  My GI Joes did not - for whatever reason, they were much more susceptible to damage.  One of them lost both of his thumbs because he had this bazooka that essentially worked as a large lever to fatigue and break the little plastic digits.  So I chopped off his hands, touched up the stumps with red paint, and he became “Can’t Read Text on a Claymore Mine Joe.”  When that got boring, I hit him with some aqua-net and a cig lighter, and he briefly became “Victim of a Friendly Fire Napalm Incident Joe” and then “Cannot Identify Remains Joe.”

I have these frequent recurring dreams of living temporarily, squatting in hidden areas of public places, like crashing for a month in a forgotten storage area of a Vegas hotel, or a never used classroom in an old academic building.  The dreams are so vivid and frequent that I usually wake and think they’re based on some event that actually happened, which makes me cycle through every possible place I have lived to match up the psychological trope with the actual experience, and this exercise takes me twenty minutes, especially after just waking, and it’s maddening, because I don’t know what my brain is basing this on.  I can think of a few vague experiences that almost line up with this, but they’re so forgotten, it’s amazing my brain can pick them out and form dreams from them, especially the same brain that makes me forget something I just did two seconds ago.

In my freshman year of college, the dorms closed on a Friday, but you had until Sunday to move out. This makes no sense, because if you had the key, you could still get into your room, and they didn’t lock down the front doors or pump knockout gas into the vents, so for all intents and purposes, you could still stay there.  Yeah, your meal card ran out, and it turns out they shut off the heating system, and of course this was the one time that the first week of May saw the Indiana temperature drop to 39 or something.  They also posted all of these signs warning that the dorm was closed, like anyone ever reads signs.  I stayed anyway, along with my then-girlfriend, and no harm done.

The next night, after some shitty looks from the custodial staff and/or guilt on my part, we decided to stay with some friend of the girlfriend’s.  I forget the friend’s name, something generic like Michelle or Jenny, since every other girl I knew on that campus in the early 90s was named Michelle or Jenny or Jennifer or Jen or Jenn.  (I’m not saying that in a bad way.  All of the various Jen.*s I knew were great and interesting people.  I just find fascination in the phenomenon where everyone watches some TV show, and 18 years later, you know two dozen Phoebes or Brittanies or whatever.)  Anyway, she moved into a summer sublet with a bunch of dudes from Lebanon, and offered to let us sleep on her floor for a night.  So we went to this student ghetto house south of campus, and the whole time this girl Michelle was talking about how these Middle Eastern roommates were constantly trying to bone her, and she told them she was a virgin.  This was somewhat hilarious and ironic, because the first time I met her, she was going A-Z through her address book on a Friday night and leaving messages on every dude’s machine telling them she wanted to fuck them.  We slept on the floor while trying to tune out Lebanese TV and guys yelling half-English indecent proposals at this girl.  This was just hours before I was walking into a five-hour parental lecture on my failures as a human being on the long drive home, so I wasn’t entirely focused on the scenario at hand.

Four years and a half-dozen girlfriends later, I stayed in town for a summer and then moved into a new place in the fall.  This was always a problem in a college town like Bloomington, because there was a two-week dead zone between when leases in town ended and every lease started.  There were basically three ways around this problem:  sign an extension to an existing lease, fuck someone that just signed an extension to an existing lease, or put everything you own in your car and sleep in the main library on a study table and shower in the sink of a gas station restroom for two weeks.  I guess you could also buy a house or move all of your shit to a parent’s house and then move it back 14 days later.  There were also oddball edge cases of people renting houses from some random dude instead of from a subsidiary or branch of the two companies that ran 94% of the rental properties in the city.

This time around, one of my future roommates lived in a house with an extended lease and a couple of roommates bugging out, and we arranged it so I’d move out of my old apartment, put all of my furniture and crap in a single bedroom at his old place, and then move straight into our new house two weeks later.  This meant I spent half a month in this weird limbo scenario, with four rooms of furniture stacked like a demented 3-D tetris game, surrounding a mattress on the floor, where I’d sleep.

This may be the prototype for all of my future recurring dreams, because not only were all of my possessions in a transitional state, but my entire life was, too.  I remember reading East of Eden the whole time I was there; this was in my first year of “being a writer” and was madly trying to read all of the books a writer was “supposed to” read. I don’t remember much of the Steinbeck book, but I remember reading the book, and it affecting my perception of what a book should be.  Maybe that’s the repressed memory, the thoughts about what I should be writing triggering the false memory of living where I shouldn’t live.

I keep looking out the window at the train yard that’s a few hundred yards away, across the highway.  You can’t tell it’s a train yard, because you just see the profile of it, and the occasional diesel locomotive tooling back and forth on the horizon.  I just looked at google maps, and it’s not really a train yard, maybe six tracks in parallel.  There’s a set of through tracks that belong to the Amtrak, the Capital Corridor line, the train that goes from Jack London square and points south, like San Jose, and connects to Emeryville and points north-northeast, like if you took the train on to Sacramento.  I think that freight trains switch off of this main thoroughfare and are broken apart, or maybe put together.  I don’t know any of the language or nomenclature involved; I’m sure there’s a railfan site that explains all of this in more detail.

I thought of this because as a little kid, I was infatuated with trains, and growing up in Elkhart, you always got stuck waiting for a hundred-car train to go by.  This became much less interesting when I actually got a driver’s license and had places to be, and a few hundred Conrail cars meant the difference between arriving before first bell or getting a tardy.  Elkhart has one of the largest freight yards in the world, although I didn’t know this at the time.  It’s dozens and dozens of tracks wide, something like 675 acres of switches and rail cars.  It’s a classification yard, which means trains are broken down into different types of cars and reassembled for long hauls across the country.  I’d heard that at one point, every rail car that went from east to west across the country or vice-versa would go through this station, which explains why we had to wait for trains so much.

You couldn’t tell this was a busy rail yard from a distance.  It ran along a highway, Lincolnway, and from the side, it looked like just a single track.  There were a few derricks or fuel hoses or whatnot, but without the magic of google maps or some info from a friend’s dad that worked there, you really couldn’t tell how big this was.  The one time I could tell something was up was during the first Gulf War, 1990, when I’d drive on that highway every day to get to classes at IUSB.  The AM General plant in Mishawaka was turning out Hummer jeeps at breakneck speeds to get out to the big war about to go down, and they’d drive them from the plant to the rail yard, to be shipped off by train to some big coastal cargo center, where they’d get put on ships or whatever and hauled out to the desert.  Every day, as I’d drive west to class, I’d see a long column of the boxy new vehicles, painted in tan camouflage, equipped with full military gear, driving East to the train station.  It looked like a scene from some Reagan-era “The Commies Have Invaded” urban combat movie.

Conrail, who once operated all of those blue and white trains, is no more.  Split in half, Norfolk Southern now operates the Elkhart yard.  The one lasting legacy is in the Elkhart water table; over the years, Conrail accidents spilled millions of gallons of toxins into the tracks, seeping into the water below.  Many houses in Elkhart still use well water, which means a series of high-profile EPA superfund shitstorms happened in the area in the 90s.  Huge plumes of trichloroethylene (TCE) and carbon tetachloride (CCl4) infected the water table, and hundreds of houses were forced to connect to the city water system.  It’s a common trope in the area: damn the regulations, damn the government oversight, get big brother out of our way so we can make money… oops.  See also the PCB-happy companies in Bloomington that all split for Mexico, taking the only high-paying, low-skill jobs in town and leaving behind toxins in the watershed.

It’s still interesting to me though, to see those boxy locomotives pushing around flatbeds.  It’s such a familiar shape, even in different colors and livery, like the toy trains I played with as a kid and the real-sized versions that blocked traffic every day in my old town.  It’s almost hypnotizing to watch them across the highway, wondering if any of the same boxcars rolled through that freightyard so far east.

One of the favorite parts of my recent vacation, aside from the 47 pounds of chocolate I ate, was watching Louie.  I’ve already seen all of them, but my brother-in-law hadn’t, and somehow stumbled upon them on the Roku box.  Part of the enjoyment of this was simply that we watched them after everyone else went to bed, and instead of hearing “The Wheels on the Bus” or “Itsy, Bitsy Spider” for the 4,000th time like some kind of psyops torture normally reserved for Gitmo detainees, we got to watch an Adult Show.  But part of it is that my brother-in-law M is an English professor, and we spent a lot of late night rambling poking at the edges of what the show Louie really meant.

Point one: stand-up comedians have a shelf life.  When you hit it big, you have a certain hang time, usually a couple of years, and then you have to either reinvent yourself or do something different or hope for a second wind, or spend the rest of your life scraping together a career out of appearances with your most loyal fans.  (I would call that the “CMC syndrome”, after the record label that pulled a bunch of big has-ran bands from the 80s and resurrected their careers in the 90s with records that almost nobody bought and appearances at county fairs, ala Styx, Journey, Loverboy, etc.)  If you’re someone like Dane Cook, you have this peak where you’re selling out stadiums, and then when your single male fans get married and have kids, that goes away.  And maybe you start doing material about wives and kids, or maybe you do smaller shows, or maybe you get into movies or you get a talk show or a sitcom.  And the sitcom is the gold standard; it’s the big go-to for comedians who want to take it to the next level.

What’s interesting about Louie is how it isn’t a formulaic sitcom, because it’s not entirely a grab for career leveling.  CK took much more creative control of the show in exchange for much less pay and a spot at a less prestigious network.  This may be partially based on his previous experience with HBO’s short-lived Lucky Louie, which was much more of a prototypical sitcom.  But it seems to be a move in doing something beyond stand-up and yet not the typical “crazy guy with the too-hot, too-young wife, couple of young kids, and the goofy neighbor” show that pretty much every other stand-up would have churned out.

CK is much more of a comedian’s comedian, the kind of person who does comedy that’s not swinging for the fences of general appeal, but is aimed more at the craft of the art form.  It’s like the prose of a Raymond Carver versus the volume sales of an EL James.  And the edge of a comedian’s art is always what gets lost in translation to a typical sitcom.  If you look at Tim Allen, George Lopez, or even the short-lived Andrew (not-)Dice Clay sitcom, it’s as if the edginess that makes their stand-up shine is what’s trimmed away to make a typical formulaic TV show that appeals to the Nielsen numbers.  Part of what Louie’s charm is, is that he manages to keep the quirkiness of his stand-up in the show, and doesn’t compromise the humor in a need to cookie-cutter the writing for a test audience.

One of the things that M and I discussed is how CK often takes the same tropes that Seinfeld often used to form his episodes, but instead of polishing them into finely structured two-act plus closer, A/B-plot, 23-minute gems, he sometimes goes off into nothingness, not using conventional endings or structures.  Although Seinfeld is remembered as a show “about nothing”, look at any of the episodes and they are all highly structured.  Louie borrows some of the stock structure, like beginning and ending with a piece of standup in a club, but sometimes there’s not a B story; sometimes there’s no ending.  And I think this is very off-putting to some people who expect a specific structure to a TV show.  (My wife hates Louie, for example.)

This is analogous to my own inner conflict over plot in fiction.  If you go to any genre writing site, they beat to death the need to follow the three acts and 12 steps of the journey and five types of plots and two threads and rising and falling and all of that other shit that’s “required” to make a book work.  And a lot of people will freak the fuck out if you write a book that doesn’t do that, and that’s why “plotless” is seen as an insult and not a genre.  But take something like Infinite Jest - it breaks so many of the rules that you’d find in a typical Writer’s Digest “how to write a novel” book.  I don’t think fiction needs endings or plot structure, just like Louie doesn’t need the same structure as an episode of Matlock.  My hope is that the popularity of Louie would primer an audience for cutting-edge prose that also doesn’t need to follow the same convention as the same generic short stories everyone’s been writing for fifty years.  I wish I knew exactly what that would be, and that’s my struggle.

My other observation is how Louie seems to relish discomfort, and a theory of mine is that each episode of the show isn’t what is happening to CK, but rather is his inner monologue, or what he wishes was happening to him.  This was an observation that Richard Linklater made about his movie Slacker: that the structure allowed each character to essentially externalize their inner monologue, talking aloud about the thoughts that normally they would only think.  For example, in episode 7, “Double Date/Mom”, CK has lunch with his mother, and lashes out at her with an extended diatribe about how he doesn’t really love her, and just endures her.  Many of us might feel the same way during a parental visit, and would internally fantasize about going on a tear like CK does, but instead just sit silently and endure the visit.  And maybe CK would too, but what we see is actually his inner fantasy, of telling his mom what he really feels.

So yeah, Louie. I still haven’t seen season 3.  Maybe I need to pull the trigger and spend the $20 to get them on instant.  That will have to tide me over until 2014 when season 4 starts.