• Been hard to write this week for obvious reasons. I guess I blew that “post every day this year thing” about five days in.
• Started writing a big diatribe about that, but I can’t get into it right now. Maybe later.
• I did not step foot out of the apartment for about nine days. I think I went downstairs to get the mail once. They put a new keyfob on the garage last Monday, and I didn’t know about it until Friday.
• I’m on this new diet or whatever, because of the various cardio stuff last year. I wish I could be eating an entirely plant-based diet, but it’s hard for me. Getting protein but keeping a low-fat diet is the big issue.
• (I know, “eat more good fat.” I can’t. That doesn’t work at all. Fat is fat for me. I know, some Keto magazine says it should, and it works for you. It doesn’t for me. I took a DNA test that proved this, so stop hassling me with the eating sticks of butter thing.)
• I have been getting food delivered from Thistle. It tastes pretty good, and the delivery service is decent. It’s not cheap, but neither is a heart attack. If you’re really interested, here is an affiliate link.
• I am not a Vegan. I’m eating basically 18 or 19 meals a week that would be considered vegan, but cheating on Friday and Saturday night, and maybe Sunday.
• Even if I ate entirely plant-based meals 100% of the time, I would not say I’m a Vegan. This isn’t a political, environmental, or belief-based thing. I don’t give a shit what you do. There’s going to be times when I need to have a pepperoni pizza. Also see the first line above about how well I keep resolutions.
• (I did start the Thistle thing two weeks into December, so it’s not entirely a new year thing.)
• I went to fly the drone today at Treasure Island. First flight this year. It was also the first time I flew over water, which scared me a bit.
• Flying a drone in the Bay Area is problematic. There’s lots of airspace you can’t fly in. You can’t fly in any East Bay, California, or National parks. The Karen situation also makes me want to stay away from people, and there are people everywhere here.
• Treasure Island problems: birds, lots of low power lines, I’m not supposed to fly over the Bay Bridge.
• My drone has ADS-B, which warns me when a manned aircraft is nearby. It’s a great feature, but Treasure Island is peppered with little Cessnas zipping over at low altitude, so lots of alerts. Also, every time a helicopter takes off in SF, I get a warning.
• I don’t know where to post my pictures and videos. Most of them are not that great. I’m still getting used to flying. Also, I’m technically not supposed to post them on YouTube because I don’t have a license.
• I bought a test book for the Part 107 license for flying drones. It’s funny because you need to know so much that is not applicable. Like 30% of the test is answering esoteric weather questions, and the rule for drones is “do not fly in any weather conditions whatsoever.” You also have to know every detail about airport traffic patterns and how to read signs on runways, but you’re not allowed to fly anywhere near an airport.
• I’ve been trying to write random stuff each day. I’ve done this regularly, for the last few years. I sit down and try to automatic write at least 500 words. Then I sift through it later and see what to glue together, what to expand and turn into stories.
• It’s very hard to think of stuff to write for these. It’s even harder to think of new things a million words later. And no, those writing prompt web sites don’t work.
• I think I started doing this 500-word thing with Atmospheres. So that was six or seven years ago, seven books.
• I think this system doesn’t work well anymore. It fulfills the need for creating every day, but it’s harder and harder to think of ideas. And then at some point, I have to stop and somehow collate things together.
• Basically, I need a new system. I don’t know what that is yet.
• I also feel like I need a new hobby. The drone thing isn’t cutting it, because it’s so hard to get out and do regularly.
• My previous hobby I never focused on (no pun intended) was photography. Maybe it is pun intended, because I am losing my eyesight, and I’ll be damned if I can ever manually focus a picture. If I can see the subject, I can’t see the viewfinder, and vice-versa. And I can never see that little screen, especially in daylight.
• I keep thinking about building a PC for some reason. I recently looked up prices, and it’s impossible. Video card speculation is rampant. You can’t buy a $200 card from four years ago that’s completely obsolete for $600 online, never mind a current one.
• (I just checked: a $699 RTX 3080 is going for $1400-1500 on eBay.)
• I wish I could draw, or had the patience to get back into music.
• Maybe I should paint Warhammer figurines. Although I have no interest in fantasy games. And see above about eyesight.
• I collected stamps when I was maybe 10. There probably won’t be a post office for much longer now. I also went through a coin collecting phase maybe twenty years ago, but we’re in a coin shortage right now. And people hoard gold.
• I’ve been watching this Ewan McGregor thing where he’s motorcycling across all of South America on an electric Harley-Davidson with his friend. I also re-read that Neil Peart book where he rode all over the continent on his motorcycle.
• The McGregor thing is very cool because the photography is amazing, seeing Machu Picchu and Chile and Argentina and whatnot. Lots of drone shots, BTW.
• One weird coincidence they did not mention: they spent some time visiting some kids at a UNESCO site or something who Quechua people. In the Star Wars movies, the Huttese language that many on Tatooine spoke, including McGregor’s character, is based on Quechuan.
• I could not get a motorcycle. I would get killed in fifteen minutes flat. I don’t have the balance to ride a regular bicycle. I’ve broken my arm twice on a regular ten-speed.
• I’m still a bit freaked out that I turn 50 in a week and a half. Yes, I’ve priced out new Corvettes. I don’t even know where I would park a Corvette, let alone drive it. It would be a matter of when and not if on it getting stolen.
• Big things happening on my birthday nationally, but once again, not ready to write about that, either.

• Four posts into this “post every day” nonsense and I’m back on the dumb list kick.
• That mall post yesterday broke me. It’s by far the longest thing I’ve written on here. I think it’s twice as long as my 9/11 post.
• I briefly fell down a k-hole reading about pneumatic mail tubes. Paris created a system in 1866 when their telegraph circuits were overloaded, and it still ran up to 1984. I remember reading about the New York system, but it was scrapped much earlier.
• I had an infatuation with these tubes from drive-through bank visits as a child. The tellers would always put Dum-Dums lollipops in the tube when they returned my mom’s money.
• (Best Dum-Dums flavor: root beer, hands down. Worst was probably cream soda or pineapple, both of which tasted like liquid fluoride the dentist gave us.)
• I get pulled into the New York pneumatic thing occasionally for two reasons: one is Alfred Ely Beach constructing his pneumatic train tube clandestinely. The other is that every time I saw an open trench in Manhattan, I was astounded by the maze of layer after layer of pipe and tunnel and conduit and fiber and wire, and I’ve read that Verizon sometimes ends up having to go to City Hall and pull planning books from the 19th century to figure out that puzzle.
• Reminds me of the time in Astoria - maybe 02 or 04 - when RCN cut up our entire street to lay down a line of fiber and then seal it back up. They forgot where it was or got bought out or merged or something and ended up having to re-trench and lay another set of fiber.
• Speaking of obscure data transmission, when I was in Frankfurt a few years ago, we went to the Museum für Kommunikation. It’s interesting how Germany had the Deutsche Bundespost which ran not only mail service, but a postal bank, and telecommunications services, such as computer access.
• Germany had a service called Bildschirmtext, or BTX. This was a videotex system, basically like an extremely primitive CompuServe-like directory service, with phone directories, shopping, message boards, games, and so on. Starting in 1981, you would rent a BTX dumb terminal that was either freestanding or connected to a TV, and it hooked up to a phone line with a modem. It displayed 480x250 color graphics on screen, and you were charged per page of info. You could also find coin-op terminals at the post office in little booths like pay phones. The museum was filled with bizarre-looking special-purpose terminals, keyboards full of special keys I’d never seen before.
• What also freaked me out was seeing the Bundespost symbol, the post horn, on these terminals and all over the museum. If you ever read Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
• I was just watching astronaut.io and saw someone playing a Japanese rail simulator while listening to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You.”
• I am glad none of my 6th grade basketball career was video-recorded and posted on YouTube, or someone on the other end of astronaut.io would probably be watching me blowing free-throws.

I had this recurring dream that I somehow inherited an old Corvette (mid-70s, the bad years) and was trying to rewire the stereo because it worked when the car was running, but not when it was shut off or in accessory mode. I seem to remember having to fix the same thing in my first car a million years ago. (Chilton’s guide is your friend.) This got me thinking about the whole culture of aftermarket car stereos in the 80s and 90s that is largely gone now. Every car had an identical hole for the radio (two knobs, unless you sawed that out and made a square hole for an Alpine) and every factory radio was a piece of shit, usually without a tape player. My first car had a mono AM radio stock, with a single paper speaker under the dash. I fell down long k-holes paging through the JC Whitney catalog, looking at no-name stereos with suspiciously high wattage and ending up with the cheapest amp available at the local Radio Shack.

• I have been wasting a lot of time watching car restoration videos on YouTube, maybe because they are good background noise, and maybe because I wish I was restoring a car, even though I don’t have the time, space, money, or patience to do this. My favorite channel is a very well-done set of videos from a guy named Ronald Finger who is restoring an old Fiero. I’ve always been obsessed with the Fiero (see here) even though I’ve never even ridden in one, and stock, most of them drive and feel about like a vintage Pontiac Sunbird, although they do look better, and can be hot-rodded up to be a formidable performer. But that’s a formidable performer with no airbags, antilock brakes, navigation system, or any other new safety or creature comfort features, so maybe not.
• I also recently watched the ZZ Top documentary on Netflix (too lazy to find a link.) It was pretty good, although it pretty much ended when they got to Eliminator, and didn’t go into any details on that album except how MTV blew them up with their videos. They didn’t touch the fact that the writing credits were slightly disputed, or that it’s essentially a self-produced Billy Gibbons solo album (with help from sound engineer Linden Hudson) and almost all of the drums and bass using drum machines and synth. There’s also a story of Hudson researching every popular song on the radio to determine their speed and deciding that the album should all be recorded at 120 bpm.
• That said, I would say Eliminator is definitely in my top five all-time list, because the production and songwriting is so impeccable and a perfect mix of blues, pop, dance, and country music. I listened to the album a few times yesterday, and although people generally think of the big hits, the deep cuts on the album are amazing. Songs like “I Need You Tonight,” “Thug,” and even “TV Dinners” are so amazing, even though they usually aren’t discussed by the “hey remember the 80s” crowd.
• Speaking of Houston… I was thinking the other night about how I used to see a disproportionate number of Astros games back when they were a National League team. The first MLB game I ever saw was Astros @ Brewers, and the first Rockies home game I saw was against Houston. It was also a strange coincidence, because in my horrible pee-wee league experience, I played for a team named after the Astros. Our uniforms were bright orange, like the tequila sunrise jersey Houston used to have. Prior to the throwback thing taking off, Houston in the 00s had boring red uniforms, so no joy there.
• I have been thinking about New York a lot for some reason. The thing I think about most is how in the early 00s when I was single I had this dumb weekend routine that usually involved staying up late on Fridays and playing PlayStation 2 until three in the morning. Then I’d oversleep, walk to the subway, stop and get a bagel at this hole-in-the-wall place on 30th Ave where I was in love with the cashier and never talked to her other than asking for an everything with a smear and a can of Coke. Then I’d go into Manhattan and waste the afternoon walking between book stores and record stores and video places, buying various media that I’d then consume for the rest of the weekend while ordering delivery from one of the same three places. There was a diner where the guy on the phone knew who I was the second I called and asked me if I wanted the usual. And then Sunday was grocery store, laundry, and more nothing. Writing was always anticipated and never happened.
• It’s now bugging me that I can’t remember what “the usual” was. I think it was a greek omelette. I also used to get a side of cereal, which is the laziest damn thing imaginable, paying three bucks for a little box of corn flakes and a coffee cup of milk. I remember one time misplacing the cup of milk in the fridge and wondering where it went, and then finding out a week later that it dumped into the little tray underneath the crispers and was now a biological warfare weapon.
• I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I looked up that old Astoria apartment, and it has not been upgraded whatsoever, but costs more than twice as much to rent. I think I was paying around 800 back in the early 00s, and it’s now about two grand. And the neighborhood - the bones are still there, but it’s obviously had a lot of gentrification in the last 15 years. Lots of small family houses ripped out and replaced with 12-unit mini “luxury” apartment buildings. They have a Chipotle now. I don’t know if they have a grocery store that isn’t a disaster, but I guess you just order online?
• I had a weird dream the other night that this guy Rob who lived by me in Astoria sent out a mass email saying he was retiring from his job, and quitting technology entirely, and that this was the last email he was ever going to send. I’ve probably watched too many Unabomber documentaries lately.
• Falling down a huge ADX Florence k-hole. I’ll probably spend the rest of the day looking that stuff up, unless I fall sideways into some other wiki-hole, like I did the other day when I spent two hours reading about nuclear-powered rocket plans of the fifties and sixties.

I have been binge-watching the show West Wing lately, because S has never seen it, and I watched a lot of the first few seasons until it got stupid, back when I was supposed to be writing the follow-up for Rumored to Exist, which never happened. So I remember bits and pieces of the show, and then hit a long patch when I was out of town in 2002 or whatever and didn’t see those episodes.

What’s odd is that the show doesn’t remind me of the early 00s when it aired, but instead gives me strange nostalgia for the mid/late 90s.  I guess it’s supposed to be an idealized version of the Clinton presidency, spun up with some of the torn-from-headlines scenarios taken out of the W years.  It hasn’t aged well, and it’s humorous to see someone whip out a giant cell phone you could beat someone to death with in less than three blows.  And Sorkin’s choir-preaching sermons get a little wooden at times.  But, it’s more entertaining than watching some limey chef scream at interns or a dozen sluts fighting over a dork with money, or whatever the hell else is on the tube these days.

(Side note: there’s this Slavoj Zizek theory I ran into the other night that might or might not encapsulate the zeitgeist of West Wing’s popularity with the left in those Dubya years.  His essay Denial: the Liberal Utopia talks about the left’s need to look at or analyze only failed leftist regimes in order to dismiss those in progress, because you can fetishize the failed regime/government/plan/whatever as being utopian and perfect, if it had only worked.  (It’s possible I linked to the wrong essay here; I read this right before falling asleep, and the book’s upstairs and I’m too lazy to double-check it.)  Basically WW was popular because Al Gore lost and the Clinton era crashed to a halt and W fucked everything up and 9/11 happened and the left could wring their hands and reminisce about how if those chads hadn’t hung in Florida, the whole world would be a utopia and perfect.  That Michael Moore movie F911 even begins this way more or less.  I’m not making this point to defend W, because I think he was more than harmful; I’m just saying I don’t think Gore would have cured cancer and gave us jetpacks in his first 90 days, and I found the Zizek thing to be an odd coincidence for me.)

OK, so I was thinking about it, and here’s a partial list of a bunch of stupid nostalgia touchstones that keep coming up in my brain during k-hole falling:

• Everyone’s forgotten those giant CRT monitors by companies like ViewSonic that were like three feet deep and could heat an entire office, and they did that degaussing wavy lines effect when you powered them on, and it took like three seconds for the screen to flicker on.
• The Mac OS was horrible, and even though it was probably better than the clunkiness of Windows, it didn’t multitask well and always hung up when one program crapped out.  And the hardware was much worse, and you’d pay like $5000 for a decked-out Centris that had about as much RAM as a TV remote control has now, plus a hard drive that spun up and sounded like the turbocharger in a Japanese sports car.
• (Aside: I was just googling to see how much a Mac IIfx cost, and found this weird story about someone who bought one from a scrapper on eBay, and it turned out to be Douglas Adams’ old machine.)
• I used to read CNN.com constantly back in the late 90s, and I’m sure that now if you saw their 1998 site, it would look like a Commodore 64 game, but it was a clear portal to the world for me as I killed time in my office.
• I didn’t use a phone book app or some cloud-based thing to sync my contacts, and this was before I got a Palm Pilot.  I’d keep a sheet of paper in my wallet and write down phone numbers on it.  I found one of these recently, almost torn apart at the creases.  What’s interesting is that few of the numbers had area codes, because I instantly knew that someone in Indiana was 219, 317, or 812 based on where they lived in the state.  And all of Washington, or at least the western part, was 206.
• The Onion’s online edition only published like seven articles a week, and they were always on one day (Wednesday?) so you could stay up late the day before and keep reloading the page and you’d magically get the latest from them.  Now they publish about seven articles a second and I can’t follow it anymore.
• I used to spend an incredible amount of time in a command line window, telnetted to a unix machine that held my mail and news.  For maybe ten years, I read my email in emacs in a central machine on a server, usually at speakeasy.org when they did that sort of thing.  This was when you used actual telnet, and not ssh, or at least I did.  It was one of the last throwbacks to my IU days, when I mostly did the same, back to Ultrix machines that held my unix mail.
• I could tell what day of the week it was by what feature was on Suck.com, which I read religiously.
• I actually used the CD player in the computer to play audio CDs.

I thought I had more of these but I don’t.  I’m almost done with WW too because it’s getting to the point where everyone quit over the salary dispute, so I will move on to another show.

It is time for another bulleted-list update.

• I was recently so bored that I rewrote the first three pages of an erotic story, retitled it as “Randy Orton and the Loins of Passion” and submitted it to a small press for consideration.  The story was an erotic coming-of-age tale involving Randy Orton, his father Cowboy Bob Orton, and Roddy Piper.  It was not picked up, so I will cease writing homosexual incestual WWE-related pornography and go back to my usual work.

• Speaking of which, Ryan Werner mentioned me in this essay he wrote a bit ago about starting said small press, going on tour, and working as a janitor.  Read it here.

• I am 83,477 words into a book and still do not know what it’s about.  It may actually get split into a couple of things.  It is 200-some pieces of flash fiction, and maybe could end up similar to Rumored to Exist, but it may take a while to get there.

• I never knew this, but Jackson Pollock was allegedly decapitated in the car accident that killed him.  I’d like to think the interior of the car looked like one of his paintings after the incident, but that’s just wishful thinking.

• Having just one hobby that I am no good at that makes me constantly want to spend thousands of dollars on new gear instead of practice to increase my skill (bass guitar) is not enough, so I have been doing down a k-hole with photography.  I am intent on learning WTF the difference between aperture and shutter speed is (I think I know now) and I’m trying to stop using the automatic mode on my camera.  I’m also trying to not spend any money on new gear.  I haven’t taken any phenomenal pictures I’ve posted online lately, but my flickr page is the home of all shots I have snapped.

• Here is a new thing to obsess over: http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/4716/a-russian-enigma/

• One sister-in-law was here for about a week, so we got to go to all kinds of places we only go when people visit us, like the Pacific Science Center and the Oakland Museum (pics).  Unlike her last visit, we did not have a blackout, did not have a closet collapse, and did not go to see a Jackass movie, but otherwise it was cool.

• We babysat the 18-month-old twins overnight for the other sister-in-law last weekend.  Even more miraculous than the ease of this operation was the fact that not one person mommyjacked my status update on facebook to ask me when I was going to have kids.

• Joel-Peter Witkin created, among other things, the photo used for the Pungent Stench album Been Caught Buttering. Witkin claims that his vision and sensibility spring from an episode he witnessed as a young child, an automobile accident in front of his house in which a little girl was decapitated:

  It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived. We were going to church. While walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother’s hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it — but before I could touch it someone carried me away”.

• We’re going to Maui in October.  I have never been to that island, although I really liked both of my trips to Oahu.  (2003 pics, 2005 pics)

• Thunderbird is still available and you should buy it.

• I believe the 2015 convention for my UFO cult will be in the Bahamas, so please contact me for details.