Had a bit of free time tonight and wanted to catch up on blogging. Then I realized it’s July 4th, and I have this odd proclivity for writing on the 4th of July, usually something dripping with nostalgia. I just tried to fix the tags so you can find them all here although the two best reads (I think) were 2024 and 1997. I also had this entry in 2003 that was later anthologized in a book and at some point I removed it from the blog. I just looked at the book and it’s a slightly stupid entry because half of it was a review of the book Jarhead, and who cares about my throwaway thoughts about a book from 20 years ago. Anyway.

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Here’s one out of left field I haven’t talked about yet, and an explanation of the picture above. It’s 1991. I’m living in Elkhart, towards the end of a year in exile where I lived at home and went to IUSB, but desperately wanted to get back to the main IU campus in Bloomington. Since Memorial Day weekend, I’d been dating someone down in Bloomington. We talked on the computer almost every night, got a few long distance calls in at ten cents a minute, but otherwise kept this new relationship percolating between visits. She didn’t have a car, but I had this $500 diesel VW Rabbit and every other weekend, I’d leave work at midnight, drive four hours south, spend two days back on campus, then leave Monday morning and drive straight to work. I talked about this in my first book, I think. I used to talk about Bloomington a lot.

I know I’ve told this story before, but the 4th of July plan for that summer was going to be epic. I think it was a four-day weekend, and we planned a big trip to Chicago. This involved me driving four-odd hours to Bloomington straight after work, picking her up, turning back north, and driving another four hours to the windy city. We had a hotel booked somewhere near the O’Hare airport, and we planned to bivouac there, then explore the big town.

Trying to find the hotel with no maps and no information, we cruised around Schaumburg in this little rusty silver four-door diesel with the windows rolled down because it was like 90 out and it didn’t have A/C. And I turned off on a road that was all ground down for repaving, but this manhole cover and the concrete tube underneath it stuck up from the ground-down cement like a chimney. I aimed the little car over it, and that protrusion grabbed the exhaust of the VW and ripped it off entirely from the exhaust manifold. That little 48-horsepower four-banger suddenly sounded like a Panzer tank, and this exhaust system dangled behind the car, clanking on the pavement. I pulled over in a parking lot and wiggled the exhaust system back and forth to break it free of the car so I could drive. (See above).

That weekend’s plans completely changed. We racked our brains for any contingency scenario, and she realized she knew some VAX buddies who lived in Schaumburg. We somehow got ahold of them at a pay phone and they said we were welcome to crash with them for the night while we regrouped. This was a couple, Jeff and Pam, and this was at his parents’ house. I vaguely knew them by username, and maybe I’d casually met them in a computer lab or a VAX lunch, so the whole thing was slightly bizarre. We went to a neighborhood fireworks show; it seemed like this was a well-to-do suburb with several other well-to-do suburbs in the vicinity, so there were two or three different pro-grade fireworks shows on the horizon, too.

I wish I had any archaeology to remember the rest of the weekend, but we found a muffler shop somewhere off Golf Road that could do up the exhaust, and walked to a nearby motel where we crashed for the night. There was also a trip on the CTA from O’Hare to the city, where we went to the Marshall Field to look at that giant retail outfit in its prime. And we (for some reason) triangulated through Elkhart on the way back, and stayed a night at my mom’s. Then I brought her home, then left the next morning for work. For those keeping score, that’s Elkhart -> Bloomington -> Chicago -> Elkhart -> Bloomington -> Elkhart, all in a tiny little can of a German car with no A/C in a Midwestern heatwave.

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I was thinking of this recently, and it’s not because I love the 4th or I miss Bloomington. It’s because I found out she’s dead. I’d recently done my biannual-ish High Fidelity let’s-nose-around-and-look-up-exes thing for whatever damn reason. And when I pulled up her facebook page, the first post was from last December from one of her kids, announcing her funeral arrangements. Turns out she had a massive stroke in the spring of 2025, went in a recovery center, and never made it out.

This, of course, blew my fucking mind, on several different levels. I’ve never had an ex-girlfriend die. I have this box of memories of her, and they’re mired through this time distortion field. We probably started talking over email in late 1990 or early 1991, then started dating over Memorial Day. I returned to Bloomington in August. By December, the relationship was effectively over, although she didn’t officially dump me until we returned in January. That split was absolutely ugly, but we somehow started talking again maybe a year later. Bloomington’s a small town, and we had many common friends. We were on and off social until we both left in 1995. On a Boston trip that fall, I met up with her for brunch and an afternoon of wandering around record stores. There may have been a few pings after that, but nothing else.

The last seven months seems like it was a few weeks of time, but that seven months we officially dated seems like it was seven years long. So many things happened in that one semester, in my life, her life, our shared time together. And all of those memories are deeply intertwined with her. When I think about some detail of my computer job or how I was first learning how to program the NeXT or how I spent all my time fighting this 200-level physics class or how I stumbled through a group therapy experience for the first time, every one of those memories is somehow connected to the memories of her.

And to be clear, I’m not pining for her because it was all pleasant and wonderful. I think a hard aspect of this experience is the saying “don’t speak ill of the dead,” because this relationship was, to be as polite as possible about it, very… mercurial. We fought a lot. I’ll avoid details, but it got ugly. And now, I feel like an asshole even thinking about how much we butted heads. To be fair here, I am mentally ill, and I was not in a great place in 1991. But she knew how to push my buttons, and she did.

There was nothing to resolve post-1995, no need for amends or apologies or anything else. But the absolute finality of having someone dead bothers me in such a fundamental way. I always need to apologize, make things right. I’m always trying to think of the thing I can say to fix the situation, keeping arguments ruminating in my head for hours, weeks, months, decades. I frequently have these fantasy conversations with people from my past, thinking of what I’d say to somehow neatly wrap things up in a big bow, or correct the things I left broken years ago. And knowing I absolutely can’t do that now - that’s a new one to me.

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It’s a quiet 4th this year. Sarah went to Davis to help out her dad. I’m just about over a cold I’ve had for a few days. I went for a bit of a drive in Berkeley, and oddly ended up at the same Whole Foods where I was in 2024. I came back home, got out the new bike, and did a big loop, following the shore line down to the Park Street bridge on the east side of Alameda, crossing over, then crossing the island at the Jean Sweeney open space park, where I saw the people picnicking at the park shelter as I zipped past on the bike trail. Up at Alameda Point, I caught a water shuttle, the boat named the Woodstock, and that was my bike’s first water crossing. Lots of headwinds as I made my way west, but it was a good 13.5 mile loop, plus the short water journey.

I woke up horribly depressed for no reason, maybe from being alone on the holiday, or maybe the last residual bits of the head cold putting the zap on me. I hate to be one of those assholes that talks about runner’s high and how exercise helps, but of course riding the bike for 90 minutes did shake things loose. Part of it may have been aerobic exercise or the production of whatever chemical. I think a lot of it has to do with seeing the world at a different speed, looking at the things around me without being confined to a car. I always notice new details I don’t see when I’m driving. I’ve driven from that Park Street bridge over behind the Coast Guard base a million times, and I never noticed the little Hawaiian shack restaurant on Oak and Blanding, or the little Boathouse Tavern, which looks like a bar that’s half Bukowski, half Jimmy Buffett. I saw the sunken boats on the Oakland side of the estuary, and the million-dollar yachts on the Alameda side. It’s great to see the small details, and it’s something I need to do way more in the future.

Anyway, happy 4th.

I was thinking on the 4th of July about how I have this proclivity to write about what happens on the 4th of July, even though it’s not stuff about hot dog eating contents and apple pie and going to fireworks shows and wearing clothes made out of flags and whatever else. I’ve already written about this too much, but I’m bored, so here’s more.

The above picture is from 2002, when I flew from New York to Las Vegas, stayed at I think three? four? different hotels, and drove to Colorado in the middle of that. On the first night, I stayed at the Hacienda — not the old, classic one, but the hotel in Boulder City that’s now called the Hoover Dam Lodge. Horrible hotel. I got there late at night, and there was zero food to eat at the place. Passed out, woke up, tried to take a shower, and raw sewage started coming out of the drain. Drove to Colorado, got a speeding ticket in Arizona, and saw that giant asteroid hole in the ground. Stayed in Alamosa at a bad motel across the street from an AM radio station, and any time I picked up the phone, I could hear ranchero music on the line. Spent some time at the land, drove back to Vegas early, and ended up at the now-demolished Tropicana. I remember going out to see the fireworks and it was like 107 degrees at night and I stood shoulder-to-shoulder in this crowd in front of the MGM and looked over and saw someone who looked exactly like my ex-girlfriend from 1992. The other memory of that trip is that Rumored to Exist was waiting for final approval for production, and I think I got the email that week while I was gone.

In 2015, I had a solo trip to Vegas, although I was flying back on the actual 4th. It was even more hot on that trip, like 112 degrees out in the day. This was the trip where I put a case of Coke Zero in the trunk of my car at like 10am, and at noon, they all exploded. I got back to the hotel at like 5 and everything had evaporated. I stayed in the Hooters hotel, which was obviously a mistake. Interesting inflection point on a really bad and strange year, though.

I have a bizarre bathroom mirror selfie I won’t post from 7/4/20 where it looks like I haven’t had a haircut all year, which was true. I also for whatever reason went to Stoneridge Mall, probably for the air conditioning. I took a bunch of pictures of the recently closed Nordstrom. I can’t even remember the last time I went to that mall. I don’t even know if it’s still open. I think the last time I set foot in a mall was in Vietnam. (Once again, air conditioning.)

I just realized that next July 4 will mark 30 years since I left Indiana forever. I did the math the other day and next year also makes California the state I’ve lived in longest. I lived in Indiana for a total of 17 years, and I moved here in 2008, so, math.

In 2006, we went to Coney Island, which was probably not the best idea, because it was absolutely slammed with people. I remember hiding out in a McDonald’s watching the Space Shuttle launch, and this guy was filling a gigantic Igloo cooler with ice from the McDonald’s Coke machine, a cup at a time. I also remember meeting Sean Maloney, who was running for New York AG. He shook my hand and I had no idea who he was, except that it was like a hundred degrees out and he was wearing suit pants and an oxford dress shirt rolled up to mid-forearm like he was a tax accountant about to give a speech on fiscal policy.

In 2007, I went to an insane Rockies-Mets game in Denver. Highlights included the game going completely lopsided, like the Rockies were ahead by 167 runs. And also the giant purple dinosaur mascot slingshotted a t-shirt into the stands and it landed right into my fucking knee, which was injured and in a brace. For a long time, the Rockies had this habit of completely blowing out July 4 games, although now they are one of the worst teams in the sport, so I haven’t even paid attention this year.

All the other usuals come back to me. 1992, selling glowsticks, see also Summer Rain. 1991, Chicago with my ex, car broke, etc. It’s in the other story. 1995, move to Seattle, drive a U-Haul nonstop across the country with no sleep. 2004, I wrote a story about walking home from seeing a Terminator movie and said story got published in some anthology, but I can’t understand my own filing system enough to find it without wasting an hour of my time. Speaking of Summer Rain, I sent the masters to the publisher on July 5, 2000.

Anyway, nothing spectacular going on here last Thursday. We went for a walk in the neighborhood in Berkeley by my old allergy clinic and looked at expensive houses, then went to Whole Foods to pick up stuff for dinner. Had to dose both cats because it sounded like Fallujah outside, then I think I fell asleep at like 9:30. A life of excitement for this writer.

Our fourth of July was spent watching the Rockies destroy the Mets, and then a fireworks show. Pictures are here. The summary:

• Our seats were in section 222, 3rd row. That’s just in from first base, on the first deck club level.
• I wore the Brad Hawpe t-shirt I got for free a couple of games ago, not because I am a big fan, but because it was about 100 out, and wearing a black t-shirt didn’t seem like a good idea.
• LOTS of people there. The last two games were sold out, and this looked like it was too.
• It was very nice to go from the outdoors to the air-conditioned concourse behind the club seats. I thought more than once that we should just not sit down and watch the game from the bar.
• I got a Papa John’s prefab rubber pizza, which wasn’t bad. It’s still weird that I remember when there were about four Papa John’s locations in the world, and one was a block from 414 S. Mitchell and I always went there when I had a buck or two for a slice, and now they have kiosks at ball parks and airports everywhere.
• We got to our seats, and not only was the heat unbearable, but the sun was coming right at us as it set. I had no sunglasses, and was wearing jeans, further proving that I am a genius.
• The national anthem was sung by a woman from the Air Force Academy, and was actually not bad. We also got a quartet of F-15s making a high speed pass over the stadium, which I thought was cool.
• First pitch was thrown in by this old WW2 vet, which I thought was nice. He barely got it in from the front of the mound, but he saluted the crowd and waved to everyone, and that was cool.
• The Mets drove in three runs in the first inning. Sarah thought it would go downhill, but I said, “don’t worry, the Rockies will probably score ten runs in the next two innings, like the last two games.”
• I should mention that there aren’t as many Mets fans, but some. They, however, are not total pieces of shit like Yankees fans, and manage to shut up for most of the game.
• At the first Rockies at-bat, Cory Sullivan splinters his bat and a huge chunk flies at the pitcher. I didn’t see if it actually hit or not, but he kept pitching. First time I’ve seen that happen, but I guess it happened at a Brewers-Cubs game recently and the pitcher had to leave the game.
• Second inning: Brad Hawpe hits a home run with Atkins on base, and the crowd goes nuts. I don’t feel as stupid wearing his shirt anymore.
• Third inning: I am completely overheated. Retreat to the AC, drink a gallon of Powerade, I feel much better. Cory Sullivan steals two bases, then gets in on a Todd Helton sacrifice fly.
• I swear, Todd Helton looks more and more like pro wrestler Mick Foley every time I see him. He really needs to shave off that 1997 goatee.
• Fourth inning: three runs. Fifth inning: six runs. I don’t mean the score was six, I mean a home run, a double with bases loaded, and three more in. Oh, the Mets got one in. 12-4. There are two Mets pitcher changes in the fifth.
• Sixth inning: three more for the Rockies, one for the Mets. 15-5. This is ridiculous. If it weren’t for the fireworks, we’d probably leave.
• Someone’s kid right behind me WILL. NOT. SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP! He he doing all of these sound effects and singing the Vonnage theme song over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and if it was souvenir bat night, I would be in jail right now for smashing his fucking skull in, and then beating his dad’s testicles so he could never breed again.
• The sun starts to go down, and we get a bit of a breeze.
• 7th inning: Rockies score two more. I am 50% certain they will win with a 20-point lead.
• They do the kiss-cam, where the jumbo screen camera zooms in on a couple and they are supposed to kiss. This one guy kisses his girlfriend, and then grabs her tit while on camera. They quickly go to the next shot.
• (BTW I always think it would be great if they zoomed in on two guys and they kissed, like maybe during pride week or something. The Jesus folk here could use a good kick in the ass.)
• For the 7th inning stretch, a guy on the trumpet plays God Bless America.
• They got the biggest wave going I’d ever seen. It was HUGE and went around time after time. Each time it was approaching, it sounded like you were on a beach when a Tsunami was coming in.
• A scoreless 8th inning drags on. A massive wind is blowing in, and every hit pops up and behind. The kid behind me is still singing the Vonnage song, and asking his dad 200,000 times what a wave is.
• After the 8th, it starts raining. This makes me wonder if they would call the game, and if they would cancel the fireworks.
• Top of the 9th, 16-6, the Mets need to get in 11 to keep it alive. They get in one. Game over.
• This is the first time a team has swept both the Mets and the Yankees in regular season play. And even if some other team beats that, the Rockies hold some kind of record for sweeping both and for losing 12 games in between.
• This is the 4th time I have seen the Rockies, and the 4th time I’ve seen them win. They’ve lost many games when I wasn’t around, though. Maybe they should slip me some season tickets, right?
• They open up the field so all of the people in the bleachers and facing away from the fireworks can get on the field. They’ve roped off the infield, so you can just go and stand there.
• Some kids run out there and are holding up brooms (i.e. sweep) and running laps around the outfield.
• I’m jealous that we don’t get to go on the field, until I realize that it’s going to be as packed as a Who concert in Cincinnati
• The Barney purple dinosaur and a few others are using a slingshot to throw rolled-up t-shirts into the crowd. The kid behind me is yelling “MEMEMEMEMEMEMEMEHEREHEREHEREHEREHEREHEREHERE” and I seriously want to beat him to death.
• The dinosaur shoots a shirt, and it is going right into our section, and I’m watching it arc, and it goes right toward us, and I watch it go right in and HIT ME IN THE FUCKING KNEE. I wonder if the kid would shut up if I gave him the shirt, and then I keep it.
• It is, BTW, the shittiest shirt ever. I could make a better shirt with a magic marker and a grocery bag.
• The lights go off, and they show one of those “season sofar” highlight videos. It has stopped raining.
• As far as the fireworks go: the fireworks themselves were pretty damn good. We were close, and there were a lot of specialty shells.
• You could see a sea of 10,000 camera phones trying to get pictures, and I knew every single one of them would produce nothing.
• The music really sucked. It was all of this jingoistic country music, and they played the Neil Diamond song “Coming to America”, which I can’t listen to with a straight face because of that Will Ferrell skit where he’s ND and says “I wrote this song because of my extreme hatred for minorities and immigrants…”
• Overall though, the fireworks show was good. Loud, bright, and very good.

So, a good 4th. Next game is against the Brewers, I will be at the day game for that one.

My computer just shipped from China. Apple, can’t you get a warehouse in Reno or something? Christ. And now, I must pack up a million things for eBay.

I just finished watching the fireworks. We have a view here, although it’s not as perfect as when I worked in Seattle right on Lake Union, and we could go on the roof terrace and watch them there. But it seems like fireworks are improving with time. They had some pretty weird shells, with little dots of light that swarmed like alien beings, instead of just falling to earth. Very neat stuff.

We went to Coney Island today, a last-second decision. Turns out I can take the F train right by my house straight there, and it takes less time than from Queens. When we got there, about every person in the history of time was there, so pretty much everywhere you turned was like that ill-fated Who show in Ohio, except much hotter outside. Turns out I haven’t been there in maybe five years, and Sarah hasn’t been there in ten, so the train station was all new to us. The rest of the strip, not so new.

Coney Island is such a strange place. You’d expect, due to the fact that Nathan’s can sell a million hotdogs an hour, that every building in the place would be developed out to hell like Times Square. But more than half of the structures have been sitting boarded up and vacant since the second war. And the places running haven’t seen new paint since Eisenhower was in office. But people come, and people spent money, and it’s still a draw. It’s very strange.

Nathan’s has their big competitive hotdog eating contest on the 4th, and they were setting up for that. Competitive eating is becoming big now. It’s like what professional wrestling was in the eighties. And there were a shitload of people out for that. Plus, if you go to Coney Island, your one I-have-to-go stop is Nathan’s for a hot dog. The place looked like a fallout shelter at the beginning of a nuclear war. There were 20 or 30 lines, each with dozens of people, all trying to get a hotdog. I wanted one, but forget it. I didn’t want the line.

We walked up to the boardwalk and down a few blocks. Sean Maloney, who is running for NY Attorney General, was standing there and came up to me and shook my hand, which was really weird, because he was dressed like he was a tax auditor on vacation, and everyone else around us was completely thugged out. Also, there were at least 23 million people actually on the beach, more than I’ve ever seen in my life, cumulatively.

So, we didn’t do anything. We took a left, walked a few blocks away from the mess and the masses, and went to a nice, air-conditioned McDonald’s, where we got some lunch and watched the Space Shuttle launch. I also watched this guy who looked like that fat fuck on the Sopranos, except two times fatter and in a cut-off shirt, fill a cooler in his car with ice, a cup at a time from the McD’s drink dispenser. He seriously made like 37 trips from car to store, and they were either so busy or so apathetic, they didn’t say shit.

Then home. Then I caught some Twilight Zone marathon, which always reminds me of 6th-ish grade, staying up on vacations until 10:00 so I could watch it on WGN channel 9, before WGN was a big nationwide shitfest. I’ve found that more than 50% of the time, I can name a TZ episode in the first minute. I’m a little rusty right now, though. I have them all on tape, and a bunch on DVD, but I never watch it unless it’s a marathon on SciFi. Always loses something otherwise.

It’s hot as hell, time to go into the other room with the AC, go to bed, and drag my ass to work tomorrow. Anyway, happy 4th.

I was just thinking about this the other day, and I realized this weekend marks the ten year anniversary of when I packed up and shipped out of Indiana for Seattle. It’s a nice round number, which is the only reason I thought about it, but it is pretty weird. I guess ten years seems like an eternity to me, and it doesn’t seem like that long ago that I left. On the other hand, living in Seattle does seem like forever ago to me, and my whole time at 600 7th Ave and working at Spry seems like another lifetime.

Lots of other little flashbacks remind me of things, but it’s more about Seattle than Bloomington. We went to Newport mall out in Jersey city yesterday, and that little area right around the PATH train station looks so damn much like Bellvue or Redmond, the east side of Seattle. It’s all of those office commercial buildings with mirrored glass outsides that look like airport motels, plus the subtle roads and open skies. It looks just like the area surrounding the Bellvue Mall, the building I used to work at in Factoria, and all of the other stuff around I-405 in Seattleland. And sitting here in Sarah’s apartment, looking out toward the skyline from a few floors up with lots of sunlight from a couple of big windows, it almost reminds me of the time in my place in Seattle, except it’s not raining and there’s no Kingdome anymore. But sometimes the weather’s just right and it makes me think for a half second that I should go down to that ‘94 Ford Escort and take a drive up I-5, and then I remember I made my last lease payment on that thing 7 years ago, and all I’m driving is a MetroCard these days.

Ten years… I still haven’t written up a suitable story for that cross-country drive. I wrote a story for this Bloomington short-story book that probably will never see the light of day, but it covers all of the events up to me leaving, and not the actual trip. I drove nonstop, by myself. I went through so fast, there was no real vision of a trip, as much as there was a huge blur. It rained a lot in part of Montana; I blew through all of South Dakota in the darkness. I stopped at Devil’s Tower at about 2AM, technically on the 4th of July. I don’t remember Wall Drugs, but I do remember a few other gas stations with slot machines and nothing else. I listened to every tape I packed at least five times. For every meal, I stopped at McDonald’s, because I didn’t want to hunt around for some other alternative 19 miles off of the off ramp. Montana was really shitty, 12 hours of uphill and curves, almost no roadstops, the few around were no more than barns with a single gas pump that was overpriced and so low-octane, you could safely drink it. Then I crossed into Idaho, and it was all downhill, all beautiful. I regret not taking the trip slower, spending some time and money exploring the nature, taking a few more pictures, relaxing for a couple of days before I reported for duty for my first real job. But I regret a lot of things, and I made it here, so who cares.