Categories
general

New Keyboard

I have a new keyboard. I’m not entirely happy about the situation, though. I had one of the older Microsoft Natural keyboards and it worked well for a long time, but last night, after about the 14 millionth space, the spacebar died. I took it all apart, put it back together, and it worked… for about an hour. So maybe I ate one too many meals at the computer.

I went to CompUSA today to find a replacement, and it’s pretty much the story of my life on the keyboard shopping front. There are a few different major features: nice key action, wireless connections, a color other than institutional beige, the natural split ergo layout. I wanted to get a decent-feeling, wired, black, ergo keyboard. You can’t. You can spend five times as much on a complete wireless, bluetooth-enabled, mouse-included, does-everything-but-bakes-bread model. But you can’t get what I want, which means compromise.

I ended up getting a cheapo $20 model that had black keys and a silver case. (The whole color thing is only important because I spent so damn much money on a huge LCD monitor with a black case, and putting a stock white keyboard in front of it is akin to buying a brand new Porsche and putting those stupid blue-LED windshield wipers on it.) So I’m typing all of this as a sort of break-in for the new keyboard, and I don’t like it. My wrists already hurt, but maybe I will get used to it. It feels much sloppier than the old keyboard, like my fingers slip off of each keycap, and I’m typing a lot of the keys next to the key I want to hit. I guess it will just take time. Or I will have to just buy a better keyboard online or something.

Oh, also this keyboard has a cluster of lame “extra” keys, like play an MP3, search the web, take out the dog, etc. in a little group at the top of the keyboard. They are all marked with completely illogical international logos; like one, as far as I can tell, is a button you push to prevent yourself from getting hit by lightning. A few others are used to change the seasons of the year. Maybe it’s some Taiwanese thing I don’t understand. Anyway, none of these work in Linux, and I don’t want to start down the trail of tears to get this stuff to do anything, because I’m certain you have to recompile the kernel or do a complete reinstall to get it to work, and it’s much easier for me to just move my hand one inch and use the damn mouse.

It is hot as hell here, by the way. Between that and the lack of a space bar, I have not done much writing. I have been working on the book of Bloomington short stories, and I am making progress, though. I have mostly been trying to finish first drafts of stories so I can set them aside and then review and edit them later. It’s sort of the “code complete” level of completeness, and then the editing is going to be working out the bugs. I have about 56,000 words of complete stories, and about 35,000 words of partially done stuff. I want to keep the book under 100K, so I am doing fine.

I saw both Manchurian Candidate and Bourne Supremacy this weekend. Bourne was pretty good; Manchurian was a good remake with some clever updates for the modern day, but the original is much better. The big thing I did not like about MC is that even though the politics were kept neutral by not naming the party involved in everything, both sides are going to point fingers and say it was supposed to be the other side. I can certainly see the left saying it was supposed to be a “neocon” conspiracy and the Limbaugh idiots say it was supposed to be Hillary Clinton. Sigh.

I’m sure I have more to write about, but I seriously need to get out of the house or into the bathtub, because it’s a pizza oven in here. I also need to get a USB extension cord for this thing because it came with about a three foot cord on it, and that doesn’t do much good…

—

Postscript: I just ran down to Rat Shack and picked up an adapter to use my old old keyboard, which has been in storage since I upgraded my computer in 2001. It has an AT connector, so I had to buy an AT to PS2 connector. Unfortunately, that blocks the PS2 mouse connector on my machine because it’s a right-angle adapeter, so I had to move the mouse to USB, and that totally destroyed Linux. Now everything is fine, except that my mouse is moving five times as fast as usual, and that will take an evening of grepping to fix.

This keyboard is one I bought in Seattle, when the keyboard I bought back in 94 or so finally died. It’s the keyboard on which I wrote most of Summer Rain and Rumored to Exist. It’s a basic white keyboard, no extra hyper keys, no funky wrist supports, no split or ergo feature. It’s actually not white anymore though; after about seven or eight years, it has faded to a sickly yellow, and there’s a lot of gross dirt stuck everywhere. I would clean it off, but I know the worst thing you can do to a working piece of electronics is clean it. Anyway, it feels weird to be on this one again. The keys are dished a lot more, which is good, but the spring action is a bit stiffer, and my hands spend more time on the wood of the desk. My last desk (actually, a kitchen table) in Seattle had worn all the way through the cheap laminate to the particle board crap, and I did a lot of improvisational placement of pieces of plastic, cardboard, or paper in the zone below the space bar to keep myself from wearing straight through to the floor. Maybe I should do that again.

I also added a new fan to the family, a 16″ oscillating number on a stand that cost me about $18. I am sure it won’t last more than a summer or two, but it’s sitting next to me by the desk, and it makes a world of difference. I am pretty sure I will trip on it in the middle of the night and kill myself, though.

I haven’t been eating all weekend, either. It’s just too damn hot. I went to McDonald’s after the CompUSA trip and tried their chicken strips, which were marginal. This was the one on 58th and 8th, which is one of the worst franchises in the city. It’s full of the sort of uppity people who always order the most finicky stuff, trying to order a garden salad with no carrots and lactose-free cheese and then 20 minutes into it, they ask if there are gluten-free croutons or not. Get a clue people – McDonald’s isn’t Whole Foods. Pick a number, pay your money, and shut up.

Anyway, I got all of my food and then the guy puts the large Coke on my tray as I was turning to leave, and I’ve got a keyboard in a giant bag in my left hand, and I’m trying to hold the whole tray in my left hand, and someone gets in my way so I turn further to dodge them. And in slow motion, I watched the giant, 200-ounce drink, barely balanced on the tray, as it twisted, and spun, and went airborne, and… BAM. The explosion of Coke and ice was huge, and mostly went behind the counter. They gave me another Coke, but the whole thing was hilarious for some reason (probably heatstroke.)

I think I will take another shower now.

Categories
general

Seattle nostalgia

I think I’m already stuck on this book. Maybe I just don’t feel up to it this weekend, but I can’t even think about it without thinking it isn’t that good. I don’t know, I never had this problem with Summer Rain because the whole plot was there and it was just a matter of doing the work and coming up with the details, and Rumored had its problems and there were many second thoughts, but it eventually pulled through. The problem now is that a lot of the notes I’ve taken in the last few months don’t really fit this book, and it makes me wonder if I should just finish this and start something else with those notes, or just start the something else, or do both, or do neither, or who knows what. So tonight I’m just dicking around, maybe editing the web site, and playing video games.

I was thinking about Seattle today, which is always bad news. I was playing around with traffic cameras on the web, because part of an underpass collapsed here, and I wanted to see if there was a picture of it or anything, and while googling around, I found the WSDOT web page and started checking out their cameras, and it made me miss Seattle so much, it was pathetic. It’s hard to explain, but back when I was there, I always spent my Saturdays driving around. When I first moved there, I was always broke, but I still had the almost-new car and it got great mileage, and I’d spent all of my time driving up I-5 to Northgate mall, or down I-5 to Southcenter, our out on I-90 to Bellevue or across the 520 to Kirkland, or wheverever I needed to go. I drove a lot, because everything had a parking lot, and even though traffic pissed me off, I had a tape player and an air conditioner and the new car smell and I didn’t care.

And looking at the pictures… I mean, check them out sometime. Every road in Puget Sound is perfectly carved into the hills, with grassy meadows and evergreen trees wrapping around every terrace. You can’t drive five miles in Seattle without crossing over a lake or passing by a large body of water. Maybe it’s just something familiar to me about looking at these cameras, all of them positioned right at places I remember, that makes me reminisce. But when I look at that and then I look at what I do on most Saturdays here, it’s depressing. I know I took the scorched earth approach when I burned my bridges leaving Seattle, and I think assistant managing a McDonald’s here probably pays more than doing my current job back there, so I’m not in any rush to leave New York, but I just wish I could hop in my car that I don’t have and drive when I’m sick of staring at the same four walls and I want to get out.

 

Categories
general

The Day After

I went to buy movies yesterday after a haircut, and found out that The Day After just got released on DVD. It wasn’t ever on DVD, and I never thought I’d get to see it again, unless I bought a tenth-generated pirated VCD copy from some guy in Brazil off of eBay, so I was very happy to see a real version of it for only ten bucks, and I grabbed it immediately. I managed to watch it last night, and had a lot of thoughts about it, so here I am.

The Day After was a two-hour disaster movie about nuclear war shot for TV and aired on ABC, and it was a really big deal when it was aired in November of 1983. This was at the height of Reaganism and when the Soviet Union and the US were standing toe to toe on the brink of atomic war, and the idea of a movie that showed all of this in great detail created a groundswell of controversy and interest. This was around the time of movies like Red Dawn and Wargames, when movies about nuclear apocalypse were in vogue. Also, at a time when few people had cable or satellite dishes and all of the minor TV networks and cable outlets hadn’t bled away the focus of the big three networks, it was much easier to get people to crowd a TV premiere and make an event into an Event.

I remember watching the first half of The Day After as a twelve-year-old kid. They divided the movie into hour-long pieces, with the nuclear blast happening after the first hour. They also went commercial-free for the last hour. Since they publicized many warnings about how traumatizing the post-apocalypse scenes might be, my parents would not let me watch the last hour, and I was pretty pissed. I mean, at this point, I’d already seen Freddy and Jason slice open a million people, and I think Salem’s Lot was more scary than watching a bunch of people with bad rubber makeup of flash burns on their faces. What was even stupider was that my bedroom was right next to the family room where my parents continued to watch the show, so I HEARD the whole thing. Well, looks like all of that cautious parenting turned me into a well-adjusted normal person, right?

Anyway, I watched the DVD last night, and it’s always amazing to see something you haven’t seen for twenty years and add a fresh layer of detail to the distant memories you have in the back of your head about it. The movie takes place in Lawrence, Kansas, a place I saw a few years ago. Lawrence and the nearby Kansas City are about as Midwestern as any part of Indiana was back in 1983. The movie opens with panning aerial shots of farmers working in fields, kids playing football, the stadiums for the Kansas City Royals, the college campus at Kansas University, and the people walking through town. It all had that late 70s/early 80s feel to it, like Breaking Away did – the signs are all different, less corporate; the stores look friendlier, more like that old IGA instead of the big mega-grocery; the people wore earth-tone colors and big collars and dorky hairstyles like those old grade-school photos you try to hide in the rest of your picture collection. Despite what MTV might tell you, the 80s weren’t all like Miami Vice and Joan Jet and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. To a lot of us who did not live on a coast, the 80s were a gradual extension of everything bad about the 70s, except we got personal computers with 64K of memory.

The movie starts out by building up a troop of characters and families. Jason Robards plays a doctor working at the college medical center; John Lithgow is a scientist also at the school; a whole family, including a daughter about to be married, is headed up by John Cullum (who most recently played Mark Greene’s dying father on the TV show ER); Steve Guttenberg is a wandering college student; there’s also an Air Force airman and his family, and a few other people. It’s a nice little cross-slice of America, and makes you think you’re about to step into some sort of sappy situation-comedy as you get to know each group.

Just as you see these people introduced into their daily routines, the shit hits the fan. There’s a lot of vague pieces of news thrown at you about the fall of Berlin, different countries being taken over by tanks, and Russians moving ground against Europe. This is all in the form of TV bulletins and stuff on the radio, shown in snippets. You never get a clear idea of all of the politics behind it, but that’s the intention; they aren’t going to sit back and explain World War III at a later point, like they did in Red Dawn. You just get the shots of people freaking out, hording food at the grocery store, boarding up windows, or standing there paralyzed with fear. This is mixed with stock footage of Strategic Air Command putting people in missile silos and communicating with their airborne command center, which holds all of the codes needed for an all-out nuclear war.

Finally, it all falls apart. Lawrence used to be home to SAC and had tons of missile silos scattered around farmland. So people are sitting on their back porch of their farm house, and all of a sudden, giant columns of white smoke erupt from the ground as Minuteman missiles leap out of their silos and head off to Russia. Then the everyone-running-down-the-street footage starts, mixed with the all-out military footage of guys running to B-52s, pulling the safeties out of ALCMs, getting on the horn with Looking Glass for confirmation codes, and all of the cool stuff that you never ever see except for about 18 minutes before the end of the entire world. There’s also a great quote in which Lithgow and a few other science students are standing outside watching the missiles launch and this girl says “What is it? Is it some kind of test?” To which he replies, “no you bitch, there’s an alien on the wing of the plane!” (Oh wait, wrong movie.)

When the nukes hit, it’s an eerie and paralyzing feeling, even though the special effects look like something my 7-year-old nephew could do in Microsoft Paint. They do a lot of the thing where the bodies get zapped and you can see the skeletons inside for a second, which is pretty spooky. However, the whole thing is marred by the fact that if Lawrence, Kansas got hit by a Soviet attack in 1983, not one god damned person would live to tell about it. And they’re showing people that are like ten miles away from the air blast of a 500 Megaton bomb ducking down in their car and putting an arm over their eyes, and then getting up a second later and saying “what was that?”

A lot of people do die, but many of our main characters are around. Cullum (who, by the way, would be my first choice if I was casting a movie about Richard Speck in his later years. He doesn’t wear a shirt in one scene where he’s digging with a shovel, and THAT was more traumatizing than seeing two billion people die.) and his family are boarded up in a basement that is sealed with a radiation-stopping inch of dirt over the windows, and they all live. His son looked right at the blast, and has bandages over his eyes for the rest of the movie, although he has some hope that he will regain his vision, despite the fact that his retinas were deep-fried and there is absolutely no medical technology on the planet anymore. Also, his mom and daughter are going increasingly nutso, and Steve Guttenberg’s character drops in and becomes sort of an adopted son to them. It’s strange to see Guttenberg so early in his career, because you expect him to break into some kind of Police Academy shtick at any moment. The airman spends his whole time wandering around the countryside, which is pretty stupid, but there you go. The doctor played by Robards basically spends 24 hours a day dealing with severe radiation burn victims with no power, lights, fresh water, sterile conditions, or medical equipment. Lithgow spends his whole time fucking around with a shortwave radio and a Geiger counter.

A lot of the movie plays like a bad filmstrip teaching facts about nuclear annihilation, in a way that makes the actors look like they are reading straight off of cue cards. A girl runs outside and Guttenberg runs after her and the exchange is like this:

Him: “Come back inside. There’s, um, radiation out here.”

Her: “What’s, um, that?”

Him: “Radiation is all around. us. It’s, going through. us. now. Like. An x-ray.”

Most of the post-war world is nowhere near as bad as it really would be. In fact, at the end of the movie, they ran a disclaimer, that basically said “Know how bad it looked in this movie? Well, it’s going to be a hundred times worse in real life, so kiss your ass goodbye.” They did a reasonable job of trying to show radiation sickness, given 1983 makeup technology and the masses of people that had to be shown. There were ruins everywhere, and everyone was losing hair in weird, funky patches, and had fake burns on their faces and all kinds of dermatological nightmares on their skin. But in reality, that entire area would be a crater. And while some nuclear winter effects were shown, they neglected to mention that the ash thrown skyward from the bombs would create a cloud of darkness that would last decades. I guess that darkness interfered with their film cameras, so they had to work around it.

The movie has no real ending, no “we’ll get through this together” or “we will persevere” or anything else, and I think that’s good. If they made this into a miniseries, I wouldn’t have minded seeing more of what happened around the world, or what became of the rest of the country. But I think the idea was to show that Lawrence, pretty much in the middle of the country, would have taken the least of the damage, so New York or LA would have been completely fucked compared to Kansas.

Despite the goofy special effects and the fact that you had to ignore reality a bit, I actually enjoyed seeing this movie again. The first half of the movie, like I mentioned, was a time capsule to that period right before I started Junior High, the wood-paneled living rooms and giant console TVs and portable radios as big as ten iPods. The second half was a time capsule into the fears and politics of the era. I remember around the time of this movie thinking about what would happen if there was a nuclear war, how we’d probably be fucked because we lived just east of Chicago and just north of Grissom AFB. I can’t say that I missed a lot of sleep over it, but the thought was there in my head for my whole childhood. I wonder if kids now worry about terrorists the way we used to worry about Soviet nukes. Probably not. It’s not like it was a great thing, but it was part of my culture as a kid, and now that’s gone, so it’s always interesting to take a peek back at it and see how much the world has changed.

Okay, time to go get some work done.

Categories
general

war zone

I finally finished my trip report from Florida. Go here to read it. [deleted, sorry…]Warning: it’s not terribly exciting, but at least it’s done.

I just got back from the movies and returned to a war zone. Greece won the world cup or whatever big soccer tournament is going on right now, and my predominantly Greek neighborhood currently looks like the Tet Offensive or something. Pretty much everyone with a last name ending in -opalus is driving around drunk with their car horn welded permanently on and 17 Greek flags hanging off of every side, along with a half-dozen screaming people, yelling phrases I don’t quite understand. The main drag on 30th Avenue looked pretty much like New Year’s, with people throwing paper and bottles and cops in riot gear and a median BAC of about .27 for the entire crowd. Call me a hick, but I really don’t understand the allure of soccer at all. Aside from my complete hatred of all sporting events, the game is about as exciting as watching someone repair the drain to a sink. Hopefully everyone will lapse into alcohol poisoning in the next few hours and I’ll be able to sleep in peace.

I’ve watched lots of movies this weekend. Last night, I went to see Dodgeball, and found it to be very funny, considering the fact that it has Ben Stiller in it, and I consider him to be the kiss of death as far as comedy is concerned. (You know how everyone said that if Adam Sandler didn’t do the potty humor and dumb voices, he wouldn’t be funny at all? Well, Ben Stiller is Adam Sandler minus the poo jokes and characters.) I’ve come to the conclusion that with Rip Torn, you can’t go wrong. Vince Vaughn’s also pretty good, especially when playing a jerk. And even Stiller’s stuff wasn’t bad. The film was mostly a remake of the slightly funnier Basketball, but it’s still worth seeing.

And then Spiderman 2 was tonight. I actually liked the film a lot. It didn’t have the comic book geek baggage that the first one did, in which you have to basically pause everything and take a bunch of time to explain all of the superpowers and storyline and the entire universe of the comic before you start in with the action. They did pretty good with the script, the action is very immense, and the special effects are so complex and detailed, you can’t even imagine how they did any of these shots except to totally immerse yourself into the film and imagine it is a giant comic come to life. It’s great and I hope it does well this weekend.

I added another shelf yesterday, a duplicate of the one I got a few weeks ago that has pegs and holes so it stacks on top. Now I really have extra shelf space, although I expect it to be filled in no time. I moved some of the DVDs over there for the time being. The next goal is to redo some of the CD and DVD storage, and maybe get some new floor-to-ceiling unit to eke a bit more space out of it.

That’s about it. I think I’m going to flip in a DVD (maybe part of the Simpsons season 4 set that arrived this week) and get a late snack. Happy 4th to everyone.

Categories
general

almost out

I’m almost out of here – I have to finish packing, then get to the airport for a flight to Tampa. I will be back in a week. I’ll have a full report then…

Categories
general

new bookshelf

I have a new bookshelf! It is one of those folding 3-shelf wooden things, and I put it in the alcove by my front door, one of the only spots where there was actual floor room for it. I threw all of the books on the floor and some that were balanced in front of other books on shelves or laying on couches or whatever, and I actually have a slight amount of extra room on one shelf. Empty book storage space is a rarity, but I do have a small pile of books on the to-read queue sitting next to my bed, so it will fill up again. This shelf is equipped with pegs and holes enabling another unit to stack on top of it, so I’ll probably buy a second one when I get back from vacation, which should last me until xmas or so. I bought this thing at a local furniture store down the street for $50, so it worked out pretty good. I wanted to get a similar one at Bed Bath & Beyond, but then I’d have to drag it onto the subway, and that would be a huge mess. Anyway, I am very happy about it, and it looks weird in my room now that I got all of the piles of books off the floor.

It’s been a blah weekend sofar. We got out of work a bit early for Reagan day, and I came home and completely blacked out for 4 or 5 hours, just enough to catch the end of his funeral on TV and order some Chinese food. I ended up staying awake until daylight because of that extra sleep, which meant I didn’t get awake and get lunch until like 4:30 today. I watched Escape from New York with the commentary, and eventually headed into the city to buy more movies or maybe go see a movie. But there was nothing in the theater worth seeing, and even after browsing a dozen times in Virgin, I didn’t find anything I wanted to buy, so I turned around and headed home.

I haven’t been writing much, just taking notes for this next book and thinking about it. I think I might just continue with the notes all through my vacation. That’s easier than trying to work on something with no network connection to check stuff online and no emacs to write with on my Windows laptop. I’ll just take a legal pad or two and a handful of pens, and sketch out some ideas while I’m at the pool or whatever. I’ll also have a week of cable TV, so that will be good for ideas.

Okay, back to work…

Categories
general

Meeting with Fox News

Just woke up from a post-work nap, and now I’m pretty groggy and don’t feel like doing anything, but don’t exactly feel like going back to bed, either.

I met with the Fox News people today, which was a pretty weird situation. It was a cameraman guy and a woman producer. They showed up at about noon, and I quickly shuffled them into one of our nice meeting rooms, which is a fringe benefit of working in a SoHo dotcom lair. I had two letters from Gadahn, plus a bunch of assorted fliers and artwork, and the copy of Xenocide in which his stuff appeared. The camera guy had one of those huge TV camera rigs and tripod, so he set stuff up so he could tape stuff to a black piece of posterboard sitting on the whiteboard’s marker tray, and take shots of the stuff. I don’t entirely know what he was doing, but it took a while for each shot. Maybe he was zooming in and out, I don’t know. I also don’t know the specs of the camera, but it was digital and video and obviously not just a little DV toy you pick up at Best Buy to tape your kids’ birthday parties. She said they would dump the tape to some direct satellite system that would zap it to the LA office, where the guy primarily writing the article was located.

While the cameraman did his thing, I talked to the producer, mostly just more repeating of the stories and little details. She seemed younger than me, red hair and very cute, more like the English major type than some kind of TV anchorwoman you’d see on the news. I felt really nervous about the whole thing and wished I had more to chat about, especially because I didn’t want to seem like some bizarro Satanist metal dude or whatever. After they got the paper stuff pulled in, we both sat down and she asked me a handful of questions on video, just the basic stuff like how I started the zine, how I met Adam, and so on. I had to wear a wireless mic, which was odd, and I also spent the whole thing oddly uncomfortable, knowing that I’d look like a dork on video. I also had a vague fear in the back of my mind that if my likeness ever showed up on TV, I’d end up with molotov cocktails thrown through my apartment window from nutbag jihad fundamentalists, or angry heavy metal fans. Finally, they taped a b-roll image of me sitting at the desk, shuffling through the papers, which seemed kind of silly. The whole thing took about an hour, and the people were very nice. She told me she’d get in touch when anything became of the report, but I’m also hoping the reel gets shelved away in a vault somewhere and forgotten.

I’ve been very vaguely thinking about trips west again, to see the property and maybe get some work done. I get two or three emails a year from people who have also bought land out in the San Luis Valley, and when I do, it rekindles the thoughts of getting some money together to get a well dug, maybe set up a wind-powered water pump and a shitload of garden hose and sprinklers, and plant a few dozen saplings so there are more real trees there by the time I get around to building a place. I have no idea how much getting a well drilled costs, probably thousands of dollars, and I don’t know how they will ever get a drilling rig out there, since the access road is dirt and is about as soft and fluffy as a good angelfood cake, which isn’t conducive to heavy trucks. Speaking of, I was just digging around (pun intended) ebay motors and saw an old D6 cat dozer with a busted block but still running for a grand. It would probably cost more like five grand once you got one in good shape and hauled it out to the property, but that would make one hell of a toy. I’d have a 40-acre sandbox with a really nice shovel. I could improve the hell out of that road, and then dig some kind of giant underground catacomb.

Or maybe not. Anyway, I heard about a place in Albuquerque that rents out VW campers, the newer Westfalia Vanagon ones. It would be a lot of fun to rent one out, drive up to the property, hang out there for a week, and maybe plant some trees or do some other digging around. I could also maybe buy one of those little metal sheds at the WalMart in Alamosa, drag it out there, and have a building to hide my ammunition cachegardening tools.

Man, this Indian food TV dinner I made tastes like garbage. I need to go find something else to eat.

Categories
general

orange county

I think all of the FBI business calmed down by Friday or so, and I spent most of the weekend moping around, trying to make some progress on things, but mostly just passing the hours from when I got out of bed to when I got into bed, and then making sure that I was sufficiently passed out for the in-bed hours, which always seems to be a trick, except when I take a mid-day nap that demolishes my sleep cycle. I didn’t have any grand Memorial Day plans, other than to not do anything. That always seems to be the plan on most weekends, and it never really seems like it happens.

I don’t know. I watched the movie Orange County this weekend. It’s not that incredible or mind-blowing of a flick, although Jack Black’s character is pretty good in it. It’s mostly the sort of build-up-tension-with-fakeouts sort of plot that would make a Julia Roberts movie look sophisticated. But the one thing is that it’s got a main character, a kid who wants to become a writer, and becomes obsessed with writing almost constantly. It’s similar to one of the things I took from the movie Almost Famous, the Lester Bangs character that talked about how on some nights, he just sat at the typewriter and wrote and wrote for hours. And both of those made me wish I was spending all of my free time writing for hours, just scribbling in notebooks until every blank page turned filled, or chipping away at some mystic novel and before I turn back to look, I’ve got a quarter-million words behind me.

But I don’t do those things, and I almost never write anymore, and that depresses me. And part of it is the lack of projects on my horizon, the lack of any concrete thing that I should be filling with words. And part of it is this general apathy because so many things around me are eating away at me, each one taking a tiny part of my energy. When it comes down to it, I sometimes have the hours to write, but I simply don’t have the motivation to sit in the chair and put my hands on the keyboard and make the cursor spit out words as it coasts from left to right in my document buffer.

I spent part of the weekend trying to think about reorganizing media in my apartment, trying to find places to put new shelves, trying to find new ways to stack books or hide boxes of magazines under other furniture or whatever else. I’m not saying I DID any of these things, I just thought about it, and then I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond to look at shelves and other storage solutions meant to provide my life with more completeness. I didn’t find anything that worked that I wanted to buy that second, but I did see many things that I would buy at some point if I had money burning a hole in my pocket and wasn’t going on vacation in 19 days. Instead, I spent twenty bucks on a zen rock garden fountain for my desk, and rearranged the piles of bills and papers and other crap to get the thing assembled. It looks nice sitting next to the black-framed ViewSonic flatscreen LCD, since the bigger slate pieces are also black, and although the most frequent complaint about these things is the sound of the pump, it’s more quiet than the Athlon power supply under the desk, so no worries there.

Actually, I’ve always wondered about combining the two technologies: a water-cooled manifold on a CPU, with hoses that run out of a case and are connected to a display fountain up on the desk. The fountain would cool down the water, and it would cycle back into the case. Has anyone done this? It’s a thought.

Okay, awaiting food so I can eat so I can write…

Categories
general

Fun and profit when one of your zine writers joins Al-Quaeda

Okay, things have been weird here lately. Let me explain, although this story doesn’t have much of an ending.

I got home from work on Wednesday and had a message on my machine, which was from a reporter at Knight-Ridder. He wanted to ask me how I felt about “having one of my writers be a member of a known terror group”. My initial reaction to this was “what the fuck is he talking about?” Then he mentioned the name Adam Gadahn, and I hit the computer, firing up google in one browser window, CNN in the other.

John Ashcroft and crew had released a new terror warning that afternoon, and that included a list of seven people wanted or wanted for questioning, along with a group of seven headshots that were immediately glued all over the usual news sites. I didn’t recognize any of them, but the newest addition to the list was a US citizen by the name of Adam Gadahn, and I knew where the reporter’s call came from, and why I was associated with the guy. I immediately checked to see how bad the damage would be and exactly where I might have mentioned his name.

Here’s the deal: I used to run a music fanzine called Xenocide. It was a photocopied pile of pages stapled together, filled with music reviews, interviews, and other news about underground heavy metal bands, particularly Death Metal bands, which were big at that time. In addition to trading and selling these zines through the mail, I also posted ASCII copies to various heavy metal newsgroups on the internet, in hopes of meeting new people, and mostly to get more free stuff from bands are record labels.

Back in 1993, as I was preparing for the fifth issue of the zine, I started to get mail from this guy named Adam. I don’t remember much of the exchanges, and I don’t have copies of anything but two paper letters, but he did send me some record reviews for some of his favorite stuff, and I folded them into the rest of my other writing. He seemed like a cool enough guy, not overtly into the whole campy Satanism thing, not too weird, and he always sent me artwork, like little scribbled or doodled zombies or demons or whatnot.

We traded mails a few times, and I printed about six of his reviews in Xenocide 5. I also mentioned his name there, and used some of his artwork. The copy went out to usenet (but not the art), and I didn’t hear much more from him. I never did another issue of the zine, out of general lack of momentum, and two years later I graduated and moved to Seattle. I actually heard from Adam again in November of 1995 at my new job and new email address, except he was calling himself Yahiye then. (He’d always signed his artwork “yagadahn”, but I figured he had dumb hippy parents that named him “Yellowsun” or something, so he just went by Adam.) I exchanged a couple of emails with him then, mostly on the “hey, what’s been up” level, but they didn’t mention terror camps or Islam conversion.

And that’s it. He didn’t seem like a nutjob, he didn’t send me a giant diatribe on the teachings of Muhammed, and I never met him in person or talked to him. But, that issue of Xenocide lingered in Google, and when the story broke on Wednesday, I was the only search result in Google that wasn’t some Islam web resource.

So, in the last few days, I’ve heard from Time, Fox News, AP, and a couple of independent reporters. I also got a call from the FBI, following up on the whole thing. There’s not much to say about it though: we traded some mails, he wrote some reviews, but I could not vouch for his personality, explain his motives, or give any details on his whereabouts.

Normally, I’d be much more sarcastic about this, or try to twist the story a bit to get a laugh or two, but it’s hard to be anything but serious when you come home from work and you have a message from the FBI on your answering machine. Do I think Adam is a terrorist? I don’t know. Do I think that the evils of heavy metal caused him to pick up an AK-47 and praise Allah? Probably not. Most people who fall out of heavy metal when they end their teen rebellion years usually cut their hair and go back to a Christian lifestyle, so it’s weird to hear of someone who turned to Islam, especially since most headbangers are white and conservative and would probably just call Muslims towelheads or worse.

If anything, I am relieved that the FBI did call. That means at least they are checking leads and doing work and not just sitting around with their thumbs up their butts, which is what most people think they do. It shows that federal law enforcement is trying to do something to find out more about these seven, and stop them if they are involved in criminal activities.

Okay, I am at work and get out of here early today, and I will hopefull get in a weekend of no distractions, other than the DVD-related ones I create for myself…

Categories
general

busch gardens

I just tried to clean off my desk in some fit of productivity, and threw out a metric assload of paper. It’s amazing that one of the big sells of the whole online billpay thing is a lack of paper, but all of my billers still send me a paper duplicate, and of course for every paper of important information, there are about five pages of crap about credit card insurance, discount travel offers that are more expensive than just going to the airline and buying the ticket, and offers for free magazine subscriptions (postage and handling not included, $20 per issue.) I have some paranoia for keeping old statements, so I went through and excised them from all of the other paperwork and threw that shit out. Yeah, it’s been an exciting Saturday.

I’m still working on short stories for this next Bloomington book, and I posted the rough start of one in my livejournal (look below and to the left for the link.) I don’t usually post to livejournal, but I know that absolutely nobody reads this journal, so whatever. Anyway, the stories are going okay, but it’s the kind of thing where I am pretty much sure nobody will ever read them, and I am simply writing them for the sake of writing them, and I hope that the work will eventually get me in the right mood to do something else.

I’m still excited about going on vacation next month, and slowly picking at google to figure out what to do when I have the time, which is almost never. I am vaguely thinking about taking another glider lesson when I’m down there, because there’s a gliderport around Orlando and they have reasonable prices, but it all depends on time and money. The last time I was there for two weeks and with more money in my pocket, I vowed to drive to the Space Coast or at least to Orlando to check everything out over there, but every day I slept in or decided to do something else. Maybe some other time I might go out there exclusively, although I wonder how morose all of the tours of the space facilities are since the Columbia accident.

Another vague thought of mine was whether or not to go to Busch Gardens. I went as a kid, but I wonder if now it’s tiny and busted compared to my memories of it. I know there are a few rollercoasters, and I’m always a big fan of those, but I’m wondering if $50 and the drive to Tampa is worth it or not.

Food’s here. I haven’t ordered delivery for a while, but I was bored so I called up the Thai place. Now I need to find a movie to watch and eat.