Categories
general

Sadaam’s gun course

This has been the longest week in the god damned world since they switched to the 7-day calendar. I forget when they actually did that, but I remember writing the Gregorian to Julian crap in Pascal about 15 years ago, and I seem to remember something about the Mayans using ten-day weeks, but maybe I just made that up, I’m not sure. Anyway, I’ve been slogging through a cold all week that hasn’t done a lot to my respiratory system, but has made my eyes all runny and gunky and crud-encrusted, and it’s made it impossible to focus on the screen for too long. To add to the mix, I’ve got this differently-resolutioned tablet PC that I use in bed, and today I got a new LCD panel at work, and it supports higher resolution, hence tinier fonts. So my eyes have felt about ready to explode all week, and I think I might just sleep all weekend, except for the thing about wanting to write.

Wanting to write: I am still picking away at this book, or ideas about this book. I hate the story I have written so far, but I read all of my random notes are really incredibly funny. So I need to spend more time on getting that stuff to work out, or drink a bunch of Robitussen, or something. But mostly, I need to get more time into this thing. I wish I could work out some kind of short stories from this material so I could put them up here and get some reaction, but everything’s in too much of a jumble right now.

I had this intensely realistic dream this morning that I was riding in some bike race around the city, and I had it planned that after the first ten miles, I would be right at the front of my apartment and I could stop to get a drink and go to the bathroom. So I chugged this entire 64-ounce glass of cold water, and then I went to the bathroom to pee, and I pissed for a moment and then started urinating pure blood. The dream continued and I was trying to clean up this blood, and then I woke up and it was about six in the morning, and I really had to pee. Let me tell you, that was the scariest piss in my entire life, because I was 100% certain I would start bleeding and need to rush to the ER to get a new set of kidneys installed. But all was well.

A few weeks ago, I had another very vivid dream in which I went to this gun place in Florida  and I was going to take an AK-47 class. When I got to the classroom, there were 4 or 5 other dudes, and… Saddam Hussein! He was secretly being held at a prison outside of Tampa, and through some kind of federal work-release school tuition program, he was allowed to take classes, so he took this gun course. I was really scared to even look at him or say anything, because I was certain if I somehow disrespected him in some subtle way, a couple of Iraqi expatriate goons would jump out of an alley some night and destroy me ten times over. But, surprisingly, he turned out to be a really cool guy. He was cracking a lot of jokes as the instructor taught us how to field-strip the AK-47, and he even gave me his mini-butterfinger bar from his Lunchables when we all stopped for lunch break. At the end of the class, I got him to change my answering machine message to freak people out. It was a pretty abnormal dream.

That said, I’m about ready to hit it. I haven’t been taking any Nyquil lately, but I might just dose up a bit to make sure I sleep in tomorrow morning.

Categories
general

Baby powder air freshener time machine

I went to New Jersey yesterday, in an effort to see something other than my job and my apartment for once. It was okay. I’ve been trying to sleep without Tylenol PM lately, and went through the whole week without taking any. By Friday night at about 11:00, I was pretty much dead, and fell asleep. That meant I woke up way early and spent the morning reading in bed. After that, I went to Neptune for a grilled cheese, then hopped the subway down to 34th street. Then I got a ticket and got on a PATH train to New Jersey for the trip to the Newport Mall.

I know a lot of people go to NJ every day, but it’s still a rare novelty for me to take the PATH. It’s a completely different train system than the MTA, with different cars, different announcements, little paper tickets, and fairly clean train stations that look much more modern than the century-old New York system. I only go to Newport maybe once a year, and it always reminds me of when I first lived in New York and found it a really Big Deal to go out there.

I guess part of it is that I never go to malls anymore unless I’m in another city on vacation, and I have this strange obsession with them. Even when I am not buying stuff, when I’m not shopping, I still used to love to go to malls and just walk around and look at people. I grew up working in the Concord Mall after years of riding my bike there as a kid, and then I spent a lot of college going to the mall in Bloomington to do my laundry, go to Morgenstern’s, shop at Target, and just walk around the place. In Seattle, when I didn’t really have any money to do anything for the first year I was there, I would always drive to different malls, trying to find new ones to check out. I know that all sounds strange and pathetic, and I know a lot of people think the mall is the death of society and the symbol of homogenization of our culture, but I guess I see it differently. A mall is a huge open space that’s always static, the perfect place to go during the winter when you can’t walk around outside, but strolling a mile or two indoors might get things going. The culture of the mall is very relaxing, at least to me, and it always seemed futuristic in the sense that so many different wares are presented in this single modern building, the next step toward just having a teleporter that magically made corn dogs and new CDs for you to consume.

New York City doesn’t have malls, of course. You’re supposed to go from store to store in the rain and sleet and shop from an even more limited selection that’s marked up 400% because the place has to pay an insane rent to keep the store going, and you’re supposed to like it. I don’t care about the shopping aspect, seeing as I just buy everything I need online, but the giant open space aspect is something I miss. There are malls within a dozen or two miles of NYC, but without a car, most of them are not reachable. I know that seems silly, seeing as we lived in Elkhart and would drive to South Bend to shop all the time, but a Target store four miles away from me here is practically unreachable because it’s not on a subway line.

I got out to Jersey City, and the first thing I notice off the train is the faint perfumy smell of whatever they use to clean out the stations. It smells almost exactly like some kind of baby powder air freshener that was in my mom’s old station wagon in the summer of ’93, when I had to borrow it every night and drive to my third-shift job. So in addition to memories of the summer of ’99 and when I first explored the PATH, I also have memories of Indiana twelve years ago as I walk up the tile-lined tunnel that empties out to the street level.

The area around the Newport Mall is that sort of generic suburban commercial genre of architecture, with lots of five or ten story office towers covered in mirrored or emerald glass, belonging to anonymous insurance companies. It’s a drastic change from the buildings-everywhere look of Manhattan, where everything is a hundred years old and brick, instead of late Eighties corporate expansion modernism. It reminds me of the east side of Seattle, or the north side of Indy, or any outlying part of a major California city. The transition from Penn Station to the open air surrounding these buildings always astonishes me. It also makes me think that I’m some kind of weirdo, the only person who actually enjoys being around office sprawl architecture instead of the look of New York City.

You have to walk through an office building to get to the mall, and then you’re in a typical Simon mall. Simon owns a bajillion malls in America, including College Mall in Bloomington; Northgate Mall in Seattle; and Newport Centre in Jersey. I can tell I’m in one of their malls the moment I set foot in it, just from the arrangement of the stores and the look of the common areas. It seems like every one of their malls is a wormhole into some other part of my past, which is another reason I like to go there.

I didn’t actually spend a lot of time at the mall once I got there; I was mostly interested in the trip, in killing a few hours to get out of the house and do something different. I made a couple of laps of all of the stores, walking through the three stories and looking at the shops for anything I might need or want to buy. I did spend some time at Sears looking at power tools, but didn’t really think it would be worthwhile to spend a few hundred bucks on a table saw and then haul it home on the PATH. I also went to the pet store and looked at the dogs, wishing I had a big house with a yard so I could get one or two of them. Mostly I just window-shopped, then got bored and headed back to Manhattan, so I could go to Best Buy and blow some money on new DVDs.

I had a state tax check burning a hole in my pocket this weekend too, but I dumped it into E*Trade and bought some stock. Despite the fair amount of stupid discretionary spending I’ve done this year, I’ve actually managed to sock away some cash. I wonder if that trend will continue. (Probably not, especially when I start thinking about vacation again.)

Made tacos tonight, for the first time in a while. Sunday turned into taco night for a while, a worthwhile tradition. I just finished reading a book about the post-Soviet expatriate bubble when capitalism briefly flourished and everyone bought lots of Russian bonds at 220% interest and drank thousand-dollar champagne like it was kool-aid, until the bottom fell out in ’98 or so. I have a stack of other books to read now, I need to find out what is next. It’s good reading weather, dark and cold outside, the perfect conditions for bundling up in bed with a good book…

Categories
general

The death of HST

I just finished snaking out my tub drain with an $8 auger I bought at the National Wholesale Fernandez store next to work. (It is so nicknamed after a coworker who has far too strange of an attraction to the place, buying made-in-China snack food by the cubic ton.) I extracted a good five years’ worth of male pattern baldness in a greasy, black, slimy turd hanging off the end of the corkscrew tip of the low-tech endoscopy tool. I hope this means my shower will drain in under an hour from now on, but I’m expecting many repeat performances, so I’m glad I finally made the investment.

Speaking of roto-rootering, I just ate an immensely hot Indian meal from the local delivery joint. They are pretty bipolar as far as how they spice the food. Sometimes, the vindaloo is about as spicy as a mean cinnamon applesauce, and other times, it’s eternal damnation to a weekend on the throne, after you drink a gallon of milk to kill off the burning in your mouth. I never ate Indian food at all before I got to New York, except for maybe Simms’ experiments from cookbooks. For whatever reason, Bloomington had no Indian restaurants when I was in school, and I don’t even know why I never found any in Seattle. It’s possible that my whole digestive malady during those years, plus my white-bread childhood, made me avoid anything spicy. Now, I actually like the stuff.

I should probably write something about the fact that Hunter S. Thompson killed himself on Sunday. It was weird to hear about that, although I agree with the concensus that he’s probably overdue by about 30 years, with all of the shit he’s pulled in his lifetime. It’s strange, because HST is in many ways a huge influence on the work I’ve done and the path I chose with some of my fiction, but I didn’t choose to do the kind of journalism he did. And while he had a couple of really great books and some pretty good moments in his articles, his body of work is also pretty small when you discount the volumes that are nothing but reprints of his articles and letters. And there’s Rum Diary, which was a great book, but totally not his style. Compare that to someone like Burroughs or Kerouac or Steinbeck, and it makes you wonder what the role of media stuntman really leaves behind. Years from now, only the Johnny Depp caricature of the man will remain, and nobody will remember his interaction with the media regulars, the politicans, or the sport coaches. All that will be left will be a few books that don’t entirely add up to the life he lived.

I’m sad to see him go, but if he had his reasons, it’s his life. I mean, the rumor is that he was having health problems, with a broken leg, some hip and back surgeries, and a lot of time with his ass in a chair. Maybe it got worse, maybe a doctor told him he’d never walk again or he’d need another painful surgery or seven. I don’t know why he put the .45 through his head, but if he felt he didn’t have another ten volumes of investigative journalism ahead of him or twenty years of twilight in a wheelchair and didn’t want to live a life of shitting and pissing into plastic tubes in a hospital bed, well that’s his game.

The livejournal group for HST has other thoughts on the matter, and they’ve spent the last few days whining the most inane babble about Thompson’s death. Most of it goes like this: “D00D, I’VE BEEN READING HUNTER FOREVER, SINCE LIKE 2003 AT LEAST, AND I DID MY SENIOR PAPER ON HIM, AND OH MAN, WHAT A LOSS OF A VOICE FOR OUR GENERATION! I MEAN, FUCK CHIMPY BUSH AND AMERIKKKA AND NOW WE DON’T HAVE DOCTOR GONZO TO HELP US. OH DUDE, PASS THE BONG MAN. HERE’S A 47-PAGE TONE POEM I WROTE THE OTHER NIGHT AT THE SKATE PARK ABOUT HOW I FEEL ABOUT LOSING THE GREATEST MIND SINCE THAT NIRVANA DUDE.” Basically that, about 478 times a day. I should unsubscribe.

I ordered another laptop bag. I think I’ve bought three since Christmas. I can’t find one that fits right and holds the laptop and feels comfortable. I have this Ogio one on the way, and it looks a little bit better. I had a Trager bag that was perfect, but after about a million miles and four years, every strap and zipper and buckle was broken or fucked, and I gave up on it. I think Toshiba makes some “solutions” for carrying the damn computer, but that basically means they got some cheapo company in Korea to make Jansport bag knockups they could price up at four times their value. Meanwhile, my 15-year-old IU backpack is holding up fine. Too bad it doesn’t hold my laptop.

OK, the new Wired is here, so I have to go read that and make fun of every other page.

Categories
general

Bookcases and citrus overload

It’s Friday. Half of my bookcase ordeal is over. I bought two bookcases from Target, and had them delivered to work, since I am 100% certain that any package left outside my apartment during the day would be stolen. Yesterday, I took home the shelves and hardware for one of the bookcases, and today, I slugged home the long side boards. Despite my totally ripped and muscular apperance, I’m not exactly in shape, and after hauling home that shit, I felt like Jesus carrying the cross or something. Okay, Jesus had people throwing shit at him, but he didn’t have any stairs, turnstiles, or New York subway riders to deal with. I got the damn thing home and assembled, and it’s now next to my dresser and full of books. I have pretty much all of my books off the floor now, and have another new bookcase to spare, so I’m pretty happy and ready to rush out and buy a shitload more books.

I’m slightly sick today, in that limbo of almost catching a cold where I want to sleep for days and eat nothing but soup and Gatorade. This is caused by the rapid swing of climate here in New York, and my heater’s lack of reaction to it. This happens so much in the winter that I know a good dose of vitamins, a lot of orange juice, and many naps will make it clear up in a day or two. It’s a good weekend for sleeping and doing nothing, too. I have to go to the dentist tomorrow to get a new crown fitted, but other than that, I’m hoping to sit around and read and play with the new computer and do little else. I’m slowly learning more neat new tips at tricks about the Tablet PC and about OneNote, the Microsoft program that’s designed for free-form notes and scribbles and other organizational doodling. I’m actually trying to figure out a good way to post OneNote pages straight to this journal, so you’ll go here and just see a page of images that look like my notebook page. I don’t really want to do that every single day, but it would be nice to do sometimes, like if I was trying to explain something that begged for a drawing.

I am still thinking about books and book ideas, and I’m back to the concept that I should write a book in Summer Rain‘s style that covers all of my consulting experience back in the golden days of computers, from 1991-1995, basically. Every time I read Bukowski’s Post Office, I think I should do a book exactly like that, but about all of my old days in UCS. Well, I’d change the names, glue together the events a bit, and focus on the funny and ironic events. I need to start taking some notes on this and see if I can do it or not.

Categories
general

Thirst and travel

God damn it, I am thirsty. It’s about 12% humidity in here and way too hot, and no matter how many glasses of water I drink, I’m parched. I just chugged a quart and a half of ice-cold, Britta-fresh water, and a second later, my throat was sandpaper.

I’m still reading this book about the girl who sailed around the world, and I’m almost done with it. It makes me wish I could get a small boat on eBay and pack it full of surplus MREs and powerbars and try to do the same thing. It’s enticing when you think that you aren’t paying for a hotel room to sleep in each night, and the wind is your fuel. But pretty much every thing that could go wrong with a boat is serious money, and I’m pretty sure I would fuck up majorly and hit a reef or flip the thing over or something, and I can barely swim. The idea of being alone for that long of time is appealing to me, though.

I’m always getting caught on these books about long, solitary travel, like motorcycling across Alaska or pedaling through Cuba, or whatever. I think I would enjoy driving across some insanely long journey, like I did back in 1999 when I moved to New York, except some longer, more open-ended journey. One approach would be to get a truck and some kind of camper that fit on the bed, and then equip the whole thing up with supplies and a laptop or two and head out to Alaska or Baja Mexico or whatever. Each night’s stay would be free (aside from camp permits), but I’d have to pay for the gas. Another journey that would be fun is if I get a Light Sport pilot’s license, which would allow me to fly small planes with a bit of gear in them. You have to fly during the day and only in the best of weather, plus you can’t go in the more trafficked airspace, but if you swung around major cities, you could probably go cross-country from small airport to tiny airstrip, and then put up a tent or hitch a ride to town for a Motel 6 at night. That would make a pretty damn fun trip, and an interesting book, too. Maybe someday, when I get the money together.

Not much is going on here otherwise, except I am insanely tired again. Feels like a good time to sit in front of the tube and see what happens on Law and Order.

Categories
general

Rebuying history

Way back in 1997 when I met Nick Hornby at a book reading in Seattle and told him about how High Fidelity possessed me to buy way too many CDs, I made a vow to re-buy all of the old albums from my youth that have stuck in the back of my head. See, I bought a lot of tapes back then instead of CDs, because my car had a tape player and cassettes were noticeably cheaper back in the day. But my car had rust holes in the floorpans, and lots of those tapes got loaned, ruined, melted, lost, or dropped through the carpet onto the pavement below. And now I’m always on a hunt to find those last few albums on disc.

Amazon and GEMM have found many ways for me to empty my wallet in pursuit of older music, as have ebay and google. I went on amazon a few months ago and put every Saxon album I used to have but couldn’t find on my wish list, and I got the album Innocence is No Excuse in the mail today as part of a belated birthday gift. Now, I remember this album in the stores back when I searched Super Sounds and Camelot for any sign of a metal record on Combat Records or with the drippy-blood or Old English font that might indicate heavy metal coolness. And I thought I had this particular 1985 release in my collection at some point, but after putting it in, I realized I’d never heard any of the tracks, except for one or two that made their way onto a live album a decade later. It had the same sound as some of their other old albums, but just different words and songs. So I’m looking forward to many listens of that in the future.

Saxon’s a strange band. I got into them initially because Vyvvyan, the red-haired punk with metal spikes in his forehead on the British cult classic show The Young Ones wore a Saxon shirt. He also wore Mot

Categories
general

Shelves and boats

I need more damn space. I spent a good chunk of today shuffling around things, walking around with a tape measure, and trying to find some way to squeeze in a new big bookcase, or possibly a few smaller ones. There’s no hope in getting a larger one, unless I can sell my bike, throw out one of my chairs, or otherwise displace some big piece of furniture. I did find two or three places that I could fit a smaller set of shelves, like one of those deals that’s a foot wide. I had one of those I bought back in Bloomington that was all black enamel, very modern looking. It became the home for all of my favorite books, all of the Bukowski and Kerouac and Burroughs and other things I cherished most in my collection. Unfortunately, it got left behind in Seattle, and now I can’t find a place that sells the same model anymore, or I’d order three or four of them and cram them in every odd corner where there’s a fractional amount of floor space.

I did buy some shelves online at Target, though. I bought two bookcases that are 16″ wide and have five shelves, with the lower ones being almost square and the top ones being half that size. I then spent an hour cleaning out behind a dresser and the bed in my room, vaccumming out dust and picking up change and forever lost CD cases and stray socks and whatever else migrated back there. An even bigger project will involve moving over my three big bookcases in the room, pushing them nine inches to the left. Yeah, that sounds stupid, but I want to put one of the new shelves next to the old ones. I wouldn’t mind getting one of these that’s about twice as wide, to fit in the area between my door and closet door. I like the idea of having a room that almost completely surrounds me with books. I also like the thought of getting all of the piles of books on my bedroom floor into some shelves. And maybe someday having a filing system for everything would help.

As far as reading, I started on Tania Aebi’s book Maiden Voyage. When she was a teenager, her dad made her a deal that instead of paying for her college tuition, he would buy a boat and let her use it to take an around-the-world sailing cruise, solo. She would write articles on the go and sell them to a sailing magazine for money, and spend two years seeing the world, learning to solve problems, and getting more education than she’d find in a dull classroom. With almost no sailing experience, a pile of textbooks, and a 26-foot sailboat, she headed out of New York City on her grand journey.

The book’s one of those things that makes me wish I could do the same thing. The idea of spending that much time alone, seeing the ocean, and experiencing the voyage the way people did hundreds of years before – that just sounds incredible. I have spent a lot of time driving in a car, looking through the glass as the country rolls past me, but spending the time in the open air of a boat, with little technology other than ropes and cloth and a sextant sounds like it would be a completely different experience, like the difference between riding Amtrak and pedaling your ten-speed across the country. Of course, she ran into just about every imaginable problem when she got out of port, from engine trouble to contaminated water tanks to endless leaks to a dud sextant that threw off her navigation. But still, it’s an interesting read sofar.

It was fifty degrees out today. I went for a walk for a bit, mostly to see if the cheap store on 30th had any sort of plastic magazine holders, the kind where you put a bunch in a vertical sort of thing and then put it all on a shelf. I figure if I bought about a dozen of those, I could get all of the damn magazines off my floor. I think I now subscribe to about a dozen things, and I never seem to read half of them. Anyway, they had no plastic things like I wanted, although they had a pre-built ship model that looked like the one in Napoleon Dynamite. It was like thirty bucks, and I have too much other junk around, so I didn’t buy one.

I want to buy a real sailboat, though. I also want to buy a bunch of space-saving technology. And some sound-absorbing curtains or panels or something so I don’t have to hear my neighbors yelling.

OK, I should go write, but I probably won’t.

Categories
general

34

So I turned 34 recently. I didn’t write an official story about the whole trip, but it seems like every January when I go to Las Vegas, something weird gets thrown in the mix, and the trip mutates just a little bit from the original plan. There, of course, is no real plan to start with, just the idea that I’d bring a bunch of my friends to Las Vegas in January, hopefully armed with a bunch of year-end bonus money, and then act like an idiot in some new and exciting way. This usually goes wrong in that all of my friends are cheap fucking bastards who cannot comprehend going on a plane to a place where 1) drinks are usually free 2) the hottest women in the world degrade themselves in the sluttiest outfits possible and then walk around in public and 3) hotel rooms are always under $50, and if you know me, you know how I always get a big stiffie about hotel rooms. But no, that’s horrible, I can see why you’d want to sit in the -50 degree weather and not miss the latest episode of Joey or whatever.

I should mention that my friend Bill wimped out on us for the first time in like three or four years, and that kindof sucked, but he had like two other back-to-back vacations with just a few days between them. I guess Bill is mellowing with age a bit, and he’s stuck commuting between Seattle and Indiana, so maybe fitting his six foot eight frame into a plane seat designed for a midget for six hours is something he wants to minimize. At least he had the balls to come out several other times, unlike others.

Okay, so before I left, I bought a Tablet PC. Actually, I bought two. First, I bought the one I really wanted from HP, along with some memory and an extended warranty, through their online store. There was a snowball’s chance in hell I would get the unit before I left town, but I resigned to the fact that I’d probably just get it while I was gone and have a new toy to play with when I returned. I then checked the HP web site about four times a day and called them daily to try to get a tracking number or updated shipping info, or whatever other info I could score on my far too expensive new toy.

Of course, I got fucked. They kept back-ordering the computer, and the day before I was due to go to Vegas, they updated my order to an estimated ship date of the end of February or something. I called HP, told them to lick my balls, and give me my damn money back. One small issue was that I already got a 512 Meg memory expansion in the mail, and they also charged my credit card for that extended warranty. I still haven’t seen the refund on the warranty, even though I’ve called them like 19 times and told them to just take the cock out of their mouth and press the three buttons on their terminal that will debit the $200-some bucks back on my card, but that never seems to work. Oh, by the way, fuck HP. Don’t buy a computer from them.

I went to CompUSA and immediately bought a Toshiba Portege (there are gay accent marks on them, but I’m not going to go all stupid and try to find out how to put them on there) and it ended up being cheaper and with more stuff. It’s a convertible laptop, meaning the top screen swivels and then closes on top of the keyboard, so it looks like a writing tablet or one of those weird computers that UPS dudes have, except bigger and not brown. The 12″ screen (1400×1050 native) has a writing digitizer built in, which is basically one of those Wacom tablets but see-through, embedded in the screen. So you can write and draw and use the special pen like a mouse. It’s very nifty.

I am still getting used to the whole idea of a Tablet PC, but it’s a cool concept. I can sit on the couch with the wireless connection and a good battery and browse the web or take notes or look shit up on IMDB or whatever else. It’s excellent for sitting in bed. The writing uses a very good handwriting recognition thing for input into any program, or you can use programs like OneNote to sketch away any old crap in the ink format, which is nice for brainstorming or sketches or whatever. I have some other specialized programs that I downloaded, like a version of the New York Times crossword puzzle that you can fill in with the pen. It’s very cool. I also got an external DVD player and CD burner, which is a bit more awkward than having a built-in, but then the whole computer only weighs like 4 pounds.

I don’t really feel like mentioning a whole blow-by-blow of the trip, because it’s not like we did tons of action-packed stuff every day. It started as me and Lon (a friend I met from Bill on previous trips) and then the next day, Jaime (a friend of Lon’s) met up with us. For the weekend, an old female friend of Lon and Jaime’s came out for the weekend. This was a bit odd for me in that I’m not super-duper best buddies with any of these people. I mean, I don’t dislike any of them, but I’ve known Bill for like 15 years or something. I was in his wedding (okay, I got his wedding crashed by the cops for being a drunken idiot, drinking tap beer out of giant iced tea pitchers, and running around building like a crazed Viking on a pillaging conquest, inviting everyone who even walked by to come in with me and get fucked up) and he got me a job in Seattle and everything. I’ve spent very limited time with Lon and even less with Jaime, so I vaguely feared that at some point, there would be some kind of long, uncomfortable silence that passes without event when you’re around people you’ve known for decades, but hangs in the air like a soggy discount beer fart when you’ve only known someone through a dozen emails and a trip or two.

When I got to Vegas and met up with Lon, we got to the cab stand and found a beautiful seventy-degree Las Vegas around us. SEVENTY. It was about -9 when I left New York. Aside from deploying to Vietnam from Alaska or something, you don’t get much more change in climate. Our cab driver was a retired rancher who knew tons of stuff about horses and guns and cowboys and everything else that makes you want to talk to Las Vegas cab drivers constantly and maybe covertly videotape it for some kind of TV show or book project. And when we got to the Tropicana (we originally had the Boardwalk all settled in, but at the last second Lon saw some kind of deal and jumped on it), we had the best set of rooms in the tower at the front of the hotel. The last two times I stayed there, they gave me shitty rooms in the towers on the back stretch, about a twenty mile walk from the strip, with a scenic view of the trash compacting facilities. This time, our windows looked out onto the strip, we didn’t have mirrors on the ceiling, blood stains on the carpet, or vibrating beds, but we did score our own fridges and a room safe that didn’t involve stuffing a dollar of quarters in a slot before you locked it.

I think you could sum up the trip by saying we ate, we drank, we went to comedy clubs, and Lon tried on 863 pairs of shoes. I got all of my hair cut off for about three times what I usually pay, but the stylist was pretty cool and told me a lot of crazy stories about people that got kicked out of casinos and ran to the beauty salon to get a haircut and disguise their shit. We went to the Apple store to harass the help, and ran into this Mac evangelist with one eye. I almost understand one mouse button, but the one eye thing sort of freaked me out, especially as he’s rambling on about how the new iPod is so damn great and the glass eye is wandering over to the left or whatever.

Jaime got a rental car from Hertz because his company has some kind of gold card where he can always get one for like $30 a day or something, no matter what. While Lon and Jaime went to the airport to get the car and then find a liquor store, I sat around and watched the highly viral “I love the 90s” TV show on VH1. Okay, normally I would make fun of this shit to no end, and I will – I mean, these people are doing a tribute to the long-lost years of like 20 minutes ago. But they’re really funny, and it’s weird how much of the stuff I remember, and scary how much I forgot. I mean, the early 90s I remember some things, but I didn’t have a TV in college and I didn’t tune in to 90210 or Melrose or whatever. And as far as the late 90s, that’s the stuff that depresses me. Because I remember very vividly years like 1996 and 1997 like they were yesterday, because in my mind, THEY WERE YESTERDAY. It was only a little bit ago that I was in Seattle and dating that-Seattle-chick and driving around that Ford Escort from Evergreen Ford and everything else. And looking back, that was a nice, comfortable, post-college, corporate, I-almost-had-my-shit-together era. And in some ways, I really miss it. And to think that it’s such ancient history that a TV show is being made about it as if it was the 14th century or something is really creepy. But I watched all of them, for hours, like I was watching a video of a BASE jumper slamming his nuts into a wall, over and over and over.

I gambled a dollar while waiting for a show, and ended up winning five dollars. So by percentages, I ruled. Otherwise, I didn’t feel like gambling. I did drink a fair amount, although Lon ended up buying Jack Daniels and some kind of fruity raspberry Bacardi, which are two things I can’t really stomach. I didn’t entirely lose my shit at any point like I did in 2003, although I got close a few times. At one point, I was so pissed off at everyone that I got up out of the restaurant, went to an ATM, took out $500, and vowed to drink all of it and then go on a complete fucking rampage, but by the time I got back to the table, our food had arrived, and I forgot all about it.

The only other thing of humor was that Lon and Jaime got talked into going to a timeshare presentation when we were shopping at the Venetian. I mean, they got a ton of coupons and swag and crap and everyone was really nice to them when they had to sit through the three-hour, high-pressure sales thing, but I thought it was sort of amateur-league. I mean, I ignore people like that as if they didn’t even exist. I’ve got the Greenpeace idiots and the children’s fund people and the moonies and the Scientologists and the copy shops with their color printing price fliers, and I can pass through them like a gallon of orange juice goes through an empty stomach. So I got a chuckle when they actually stopped to listen to them.

Anyway, four days of wonderful weather and good food and no fucking ingrates laying on their car horn like it was directly hooked up to their prostate, and not a single person telling me how Bush’s inaugaration had to do with Hitler or something, and then I return to spend two hours stuck on the runway, an hour waiting on my bags, and an hour and a half in subzero weather waiting for a god damned cab home with no gloves or hat. By the time I got home to my shithole apartment, I almost felt grateful, except for the part about having to be at work in like seven hours.

So that’s that. How are you?

Categories
general

Single serving

I’m a big fan of the single serving size. I know it’s the big imperial evil American way, but I love it when I can make a meal without having 3/4 of it left after I’m done, and I’m not really into the whole leftovers thing. If I have spaghetti on Monday, I’m damn sure I won’t want it on Tuesday. So things like Lunchables and snak-paks and tiny jars are my friend, and I hate that the grocery store down the street only sells spaghetti sauce in the making-dinner-for-18 size. One of my favorite meals ever is the Dinty Moore beef and potatoes microwave bowl, which is served in a vacuum-sealed package that doesn’t need to be stored in hot or cold, and can be nuked in two minutes. Ten years ago when I worked at Wrubel’s machine room on Sunday nights, I used to hike across campus with one of these in my pack, plus a shitload of CDs to keep me busy. And now I found that the Rite-Aid drug store carries them, so I always buy all of them they have in stock when I’m there. And I just read about a new kind of coffee in a can that’s coming out that has a chemical heater in the can. You just bust open a seal, shake it up a bit, and in a couple of minutes, there’s hot coffee. It’s only a matter of time before someone puts one of those bitches in a soup can, and I’ll buy them by the case.

It suddenly turned winter last night. When I went to bed, the wind was tearing through the windows, and I got a good night of sleep in the cold. But when I woke, the weather page said it was -3 out with the windchill. (That’s Fahrenheit; I’m not a metric geek.) It took a lot of work to stumble to the train station; even with a thick hooded sweatshirt on under my leather jacket, it felt like the wind was knocking straight through my skin and splitting apart my DNA. There’s some snow on the ground here and there, but it’s mostly just little patches of glare ice here and there that threaten to knock you on your ass when you’re trying to run at top speed toward a heated building. And just yesterday, I was wondering why the hell it was so warm in December. I guessed I cursed it for everyone.

I wanted to get some more writing done, but my head is pounding, and I mostly want to lay in bed and do nothing. This is why I need a tablet PC, although I have a feeling I’d spend three grand on one and it would get about as much use as my laptop, or my Pocket PC, or any other gadget I’ve bought. Maybe I should throw $2998 in the house-building account and buy a good pad of paper at the drug store and write in there.

OK, Tylenol, TV…

Categories
general

Dead arm

I fell asleep for a couple of hours and woke up to find my left arm all fucked up, slept on and twisted around the wrong way. It feels like if I could contort it in just the right way, it will pop back into place and stop hurting, but nothing has worked yet. So I thought I’d start by bitching about that a bit.

I actually got out of the house today, to drop off laundry, pick up a prescription, and go buy books. Barnes and Noble was pretty nutso today, with lines out the door and lots of people running around with stacks of books. I got this new collection of Kerouac’s journals edited by Douglas Brinkley, which I was actually a bit reluctant to buy. It’s weird, because a few years ago, I would have dropped twenty or thirty bucks on any Kerouac stuff I didn’t already have. But the cottage industry has grown so much, and there are so many players that are seeking to twist things around to fit their own agenda. Kerouac’s family (really his wife’s family) has supressed so much of his writing and tried to mask any work that might suggest that Jack occasionally messed around with men or took drugs or whatever. And then the hippy crowd on the far left wants to comb over the fact that Kerouac was a Catholic, supported the war in Vietnam, and didn’t really care for the whole political thing that Ginsberg was into. So now all of these books are coming out, and you don’t know who to trust. It’s too bad, since Kerouac was such a working-man writer, someone with many sides but who came from a solid background and loved America as a whole, not just the two coasts but the whole country in between.

I got that book, and also some other random book from the sailing section, containing a score of tales about people dealing with extreme emergencies out on the seas. It’s basically Perfect Storm sorts of things, but a wider variety and not as dumb. I like reading it, because there’s this whole new vocabulary of different equipment and parts and pieces and knots and terms. And I like stories that are told on the road, even if the road is a shipping lane cutting across the Pacific. So I hope that turns out to be a good read. And I hope I don’t end up wanting to buy a boat by the end of it.

Not much else to report, other than that I’m enjoying having all of my MP3s on shuffle and feeding through the stereo. I found a plugin to take care of the volume normalization problem that works fairly well. There’s another method that puts some kind of gain number in the ID3 tags, but I haven’t fucked with that yet.

OK, on to writing.