I’ve spent all morning picking away at some automatic writing that has to do with 2008, which is always weird.  I mean, it’s weird to write nostalgic writing about a period that’s two years ago, and it’s more weird to talk about it here, when you can just click on a link about three inches below this and simply read what I actually wrote in 2008.  But I have the advantage of distance in that my 2008 was about 350 miles south of here, and the general feeling of LA is markedly different than that of San Francisco.

Here’s the thing: I have been listening to the BT album This Binary Universe. In many ways, this is an absolutely perfect album; it’s very technical, a total departure from BT’s typical techno roots, and extremely, extremely expressive.  It’s so heavily textured, with so much going on in each track, that it’s entirely enjoyable for me to listen to.  And it’s the perfect balance between music I can completely background and think about something else and something I can dive right into and just be consumed by the thoughts that come from the music.

But the big reason I like the album so much is that it’s a total time machine for me.  I got this album in 2007, the summer of 2007, when I worked from home in Denver, and spent most of my free time either hobbling to various foot doctors to find out what the hell was wrong with my ankle, and going to every Rockies game I could afford, since they were about a hundred feet from my front door.  And a lot went on that summer emotionally - the big break from New York, I was going to get married, I was trying to define myself - was I a writer?  A programmer?  Could I find another tech writing job?  I was very lost, and lost in a new city, but so excited by this huge turn in my life, this new place, the ability to get in a car and drive to random new locations like mountains and barrios and abandoned air force bases and giant book stores.

And there’s a weird ripple effect, because in 2008, that album was such a time machine back to 2007, I would listen to it when I was struggling in LA and wanted nothing but to be back to that same place in Denver.  And it always hurt me so much, caused so much strange emotional pain, but it would consume me so much I had to do it and had to feel all of it and go through the entire album from start to finish and just absorb that 74

of extreme emotion and go on with my new life in LA.

I remember the end of LA, one of my trips up to SF, either for a job interview or apartment hunting or to drop off a Yaris full of stuff, and I got on the I-5 to head north through the giant desolation of our state’s food basket or whatever the hell they call that no-man’s-land through the central state that’s nothing but farms.  I tried to find something to listen to, and decided that I would go through the entire album, listen to it from start to finish as I was stuck in the cabin of the tiny car, driving north through nowhere and nothingness.  I would absorb the entire performance and transform myself, like a shaman going into a sweat lodge to absorb a lifetime of memories and problems and touchpoints in one concentrated, hallucinogenic dose.  And I did, and it absolutely etched another destination for this time machine device.

Anyway, I chipped away this morning at more writing, stuff that probably will never see the light of day, but I gave the entire album a listen again, and the thing still floors me.  I can’t say much more than that, but just that this album is one of my absolute favorites.  I sometimes wish I had the space and place to just listen to it every day, and pour out the writing that came from it, until I had a book’s worth of words captured.  Maybe I will.

Hello from Denver. It’s a cool 66 degrees at a one-mile altitude, but it’s expected to jump to 90 by lunch. But right now, I’m at the pool on the roof of the Warwick hotel, looking out at the skyscrapers of downtown, and suffering from a very severe case of Deja Vu, and a minor case of altitude reacclimation.

Our trip went fine, with the only minor hitches being that Sarah’s ATM card got locked yet again by an overzealous Bank of America anti-fraud robot, and a 45-minute delay in the air due to some stupendous thunderstorms around Denver. The weather cleared by the time we touched down, and my suitcase was already on the conveyor by the time we took the little train to the baggage area. We also got stuck with a little Kia with power nothing, but it also has XM radio, which is a new itch that’s developing in the consumer area of my brain. (There is an endless array of metal programming, and maybe that would be a good way to eat up my two hours a day in the car.)

It is weird to be here. WEIRD. We went to the Rocky Mountain Diner last night for dinner, and it felt exactly like it was the summer of 2007 again. The place hadn’t changed at all, aside from the fact that our favorite waiter (the guy that looks like a young Ed Harris) was not there. We drove around last night, looking at our old neighborhood and our favorite haunts, and everything was the same. The two big changes we noticed: one, our old Safeway (The “unsafeway” on Clarkson) got completely facelifted, and looks like every modern Safeway now, not the early 90s ghetto look it once had. And the vacant lot caddycorner to our old place on 22nd and Market is now a super-huge townhome/loft place, much like the place we lived in. It’s freaky to see that vacant lot transformed into a giant community.

Probably the biggest weird thing is that after we finished our dinner, we had tons of time to do anything, and we realized that in our year here, we went to a lot of baseball games and movies, and ate a lot of food, and that’s it. We don’t really have any friends here that we wanted to visit, and we had no real hangouts, aside from the Target store at the Stepleton mall. We have an afternoon to kill today, and don’t know exactly what we want to do. I feel sad about this, but it also makes me realize that when we get back home, I need to get off my ass and make sure we don’t do the same thing in Oakland. I don’t know what we need to do, but we need to explore more.

It is nice to be here, though. I think we need to take more of these mini-vacations. And I am really looking forward to tonight’s game. Wearing my Brad Hawpe t-shirt today, and one person already came up and asked if I was going to the game tonight. I am hoping to hook up with a couple of people from high school that will be at the game too, and I plan to do some serious damage at the clubhouse store.

It’s getting hot here, and I didn’t fly out here to sit on the computer, so I better get to it.

I’ve been meaning to update for a while, but everything other than my stuff has taken over lately. Hopefully, I will just work on my book and catch up today. I also get to drive to Torrance today, which sounds like a pain in the ass, and I guess it is, but I very rarely drive my car these days. Most days, I either eat lunch and dinner from the fridge, or walk, mostly to Subway, but there’s another sandwich shop (Hogan’s Heroes), that I hit when I can’t do the Jared thing anymore. (Oddly enough, my favorite sub is now the Veggie Max. I still love the BMT, but my old holdout, a 6-inch BMT with cheese, bacon, and mayo, is about a weeks’ worth of fat.) Anyway, I don’t drive my car that much, and I do love driving my car, so it’s always good to take a run down PCH, even at $4.45 a gallon.

My car still reminds me a lot of Denver, and I have enough distance from Denver that I have odd nostalgia about it. I guess this came up, because last night I was listening to BT’s This Binary Universe, which is a very ethereal and emotional album, and deeply reminds me of the end of summer/start of fall last year. It’s the kind of album that will always remind me of that point in my life, of that year, and for whatever reason, when it came up in shuffle last night, it deeply hit me. I don’t want to live in Denver, and I don’t want to be in last year anymore, and I realize it’s stupid to look back and say “hey, remember 12 months ago?” but maybe not being there makes it more nostalgic to think of there again, if that makes any sense. And in a strange irony, I have to go to Denver next week. But I won’t be in our apartment, and I won’t have the Yaris there, and Sarah won’t be there, and I will spend all of my time in a hotel down in Lone Tree, except for one brief outing to go see the Rockies lose to the Dodgers.

The gas book - it goes. It’s 150 pages, but I have a lot of holes to fill. I’m starting to worry about all of the post-writing things, like the fact that I don’t have a cover, and don’t know how I will sell it. I also need a web site, and a way to convince people that I’m somehow an authority on this stuff.

I am doing a lot with Paragraph Line Books, too. I’m in the process of getting set up to print books directly with Ingram, and bypass the lulu.com process, hopefully at a savings. I’m also moving paragraphline.com to dreamhost, and that will let me add some new features. I’m also supposedly working on #13 of the zine, and I’m supposed to be writing my story for it, but I haven’t had time to even look at it. Maybe later today.

As of Sunday, I have lost 28.6 pounds in 12 weeks. That puts me at 186.2. Using a BMI calculator (which may or may not be bullshit), 185 and above is overweight, starting at 184 is the normal range. WW says my ideal range is 147-177. I think getting to 175 would be reasonable, and 170 would be work, but I have no idea how I could maintain below 170, let along 147.

Okay, work.

This is all very weird. I’m sitting in a hotel room about a mile west of our apartment in Denver, after a long day of, well, weirdness. I left LAX with a temp of 75 out, flew over the ocean and saw my apartment before we did the big arc to the east and headed into the mountains. We landed two hours later, I got a Chevy HHR, basically a ripoff of the PT Cruiser but shittier. Then the long drive to I-70 and into town and back to the place at 2200 Market.

I can’t emphasize enough how strange it was to pull into our building and go up to our place on the third floor. In some sense, it was like being dead, gone for a week and suddenly being back to normal. Or maybe like all of LA was a detailed dream, and then I woke up and there was Denver again. And the feeling of opening the apartment and being there myself, everything shut down, everything silent - it felt like opening up an Egyptian tomb and looking at all of the gold and food they buried with the king’s corpse. I ate some Taco Bell and watched part of a DVD, but most of my night was spent throwing things out, hauling junk to the trash room, and wondering why the fuck it was so quiet. (Answer: I’m already used to the distant plane sounds from LAX.)

I thought this all was a freak occurrence, but it happened once before. In spring of 1993, the second year of my two years at the Mitchell House in Bloomington, I went back home for the summer. This involved taking a station wagon full of stuff up north in May, and leaving everything else behind until later in the summer. I returned over the 4th of July holiday to trash or haul back the remainder, and staying in the room was also a bizarre headtrip. I didn’t have half my stuff - like I slept on a mattress with an open sleeping bag and no sheets because all the bedding was gone. But it was also that return to a tiny space full of so many memories that screwed with my head. And now, I’ve only been in Denver a year, and my capacity for generating highly nostalgic memories is probably much more limited. But the whole thing did fuck with me.

I woke up early today, and the packing crew showed up at 8

and started wrapping, boxing, and tagging. I did up two suitcases that will go back with me on the plane, and got a lot more garbage out of the place. When that got old, I got a few hours of work done on some contract tech writing I needed to finish. By 3, they finished up, and I had the place to myself, aside from the strange ghosts in the air.

I checked in to the hotel, but it got bored fast - lots of Brett Favre retirement crap on ESPN, not much happening online. So I got some dinner and headed back to the house to finish up a few more things. It’s still dead quiet, and filled with boxes from wall to wall. Still, lots of memories, looking out at the parking lot across the street that I watched every day as I worked on the computer. I kept thinking how I’d watch the crowd that shuffled in on game days last summer, trying to measure how good or bad the game would be based on the traffic (and the price they charged for parking.) Maybe working from home fucked with my head, like maybe I have twice as many hours in the apartment, so twice as much nostalgia. Who knows.

I thought about taking a drive to see what I would see. But here’s the thing: there’s not as much in the way of cool hangouts or neato routes I would take that deserved one last visit. I remember the night before I left Bloomington, I put on the walkman and took this insanely long walk around campus. Every little bit I passed, I would think “here’s where I met so-and-so” or “here’s where me and so-and-so bought sandwiches from Dagwoods and ate on the lawn” or “here’s where this-and-that car died” or whatever. But in Denver, there’s a McDonald’s, a Walgreens, a Target, and Coors Field. It’s not to say I won’t miss Denver, and it’s not to say that Denver’s a shithole town that should be avoided at all costs. It is what it is.

Now I’m in this shithole La Quinta, right by a railroad switching yard, with the typical snuff film decor. Our bed and all of the bedding are packed up, and so are the bath towels. So, I bunk here, drive back tomorrow (all of like a mile), then watch the next crew fill up a truck with our junk. I hopefully then get the fuck out of there by 3

and dump this garbage rental car and get on a plane to LA with two suitcases full of kitchen gadgets and washrags and whatever other odd crap we forgot to pack in the first two carloads.

And remember how I said it was 75 back in LA when I left? Current temp here: 30. Overnight low: 15. With windchill: -4938.

The ocean isn’t two miles away, as I previously thought. I went for a walk yesterday, heading west, and up this huge hill. At the top of it were all strangely shaped houses of the sort you’d only see on a shoreline, with impossibly-sized windows and turrets and none of the right angles you find on a straight-up ranch house in the suburbs. And just past that, the ocean. And it’s the full-on ocean, not a canal connected to a sound connected to an inlet that eventually dumps into a sea. I walked around a bit, trudged through the sand, watched the sailboats in the distance and the huge planes jetting off from LAX to all points west (i.e. Asia) It’s not a bad walk at all, although the hill part really taxes out my fucked up knee, but maybe doing it more will help.

In a couple of hours, I get into one of those big tin cans at LAX and head east, back to Denver, to rescue the furniture. This will be a weird trip - in today, back Wednesday night. The weird stuff has to do with driving a rental car into the space where I’d normally park a car; having to stay in a hotel for a night because all of my stuff will be boxed or shrinkwrapped; said hotel is less than a mile from my old place, and I used to pass it every day on my way to work. Basically all of the tourist in my own town stuff will be in effect. Not to mention that I will have but a few hours to somehow condense down my Denver experience and eat my last three or four meals at places I will probably never see again. (And in reality, all of those will probably end up at McDonald’s.)

I think the one thing that I will truly, truly miss is Coors Field and the Rockies. I was thinking about this last night, about how I am not one who has ever had some great belonging, especially one full of rituals. Some people have religion, and I tried that and it didn’t work out. But the closest I came to religion was getting to Coors Field an hour and a half before a game, watching the opposing team take batting practice, getting a hot dog, looking out at the field in front of me and the mountains in the distance, hearing the same soundtrack of crappy music they play before every game, hearing Reed Saunders read off the same safety information and where you can buy food and all of that other crap the PA announcers read before the game. I guess having Coors Field right next door was like having a major league ball park in my family room, where I could go down there any time I wanted and catch a game. So I’ll miss that, a lot. I can get stuck in traffic for two hours and go to a Dodgers game, but it won’t be the same. No matter how much you hate some place, there’s always one thing you miss. Seattle: mountains. New York: best subways ever. Elkhart: you always have a new car stereo, because yours gets stolen every month.

I went to a movie at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood on Saturday. We went out with four of Sarah’s old friends, and it’s really damn nice to finally have friends to go out with. (And one was a baseball guy who said we have to go to a game in Anaheim, so there you go.) We saw Jumper, which was forgettable, but it was hilarious to be down in Hollywood on a Saturday night. There was some kind of cheerleading contest that night, so there were all of these 14-year-old girls in cheerleader costumes running around, which was a pedo’s wet dream. There was also a very large hoochie mama contingent bussed in from Orange County or something, and all of the clubber types going to clubs in that area. And Grauman’s is completely over the top, with all of the handprints in concrete out front, and all of the hollywood stars in the sidewalk, and the people dressed up as various famous iconic stars. The vibe of the place was very Times Square, which means don’t act like a fucking tourist, but it was pretty overwhelming.

I finished the last episode of The Sopranos, and that has to be the stupidest ending ever for a TV series, aside from making the whole thing a dream of an autistic kid in a coma or whatever the hell. Bleh.

Gotta shower, eat lunch, pack, get to the airport. This will be a fun one.