I was talking to Tom yesterday about something - I think how my body is physically falling apart as I reach the 40 year mark, and I somehow started thinking about how I was forced to take a gym class in my freshman year of high school to meet some bogus Indiana PE requirement.  I obviously was not the jock type in high school, didn’t play sports, and begrudgingly took this gym class and suffered through it.  I mean, I had to also take physical education periods in all of K-6, but you don’t shower in those, and they are unisex, and instead of doing hardcore calisthenics, you play four-square or play some stupid game with a kickball on a giant surplus parachute that everyone holds and flips up and down.  (Note to people born after 1990: four-square was a game you played on a playground with a 2x2 grid drawn on a pavement and an inflatable rubber ball, long before it was a stupid web site where you reported to your friends list every location in the city where you stopped to take a dump or buy a bottle of water.)

The demographics of my PE class in 9th grade also made the situation difficult.  There was me, Jia, and these other two geeky guys.  Then the rest of the class was evenly divided between multi-letter varsity sport athletes, and every drug-fueled shop class major that would soon be a convicted felon.  My worst fear on any given day was that we’d do some activity where we’d get divided into teams, because I was one of the absolute last people that would get picked in any situation like this.  It wasn’t just that I was unpopular; I mean, in 1985 I was pretty much my current height but weighed something like 120 pounds, and I know I could not bench even half of that back then.  And I had absolutely no hand-eye coordination, couldn’t swim, hated running, and forget anything that involved hitting a ball, like tennis or baseball.  My best hope was that we’d play something like soccer, where I could just sort of stand off to the side of the field and run back and forth with the pack and not do anything.

One saving grace: our gym teacher was also the basketball coach.  And at that time, Shawn Kemp was a sophomore, but he was a starting varsity player and was scoring an average of about 96 points a game and appearing in Sports Illustrated every other week.  So for months on end, Coach Hahn would need to spend his days reviewing scouting footage or conducting press conferences with ESPN or finding Kemp a college program that would pay him well under the table but not require him to know how to read.  And on those days, he’d dump us all in the gym with a bunch of basketballs and have us divide up and play unsupervised.  This was good, because nine times out of ten, I could get on a lopsided team with one of my computer buddies and talk about the Apple II on the sidelines while the rest of our team practiced for their future college athletic and/or department of correction basketball careers.

Anyway, the reason I remember all of this is the Presidential fitness test, or whatever the hell it was called.  It was some neo-fascist Reagan Youth attempt at getting the country into shape, and I think Ahnold had something to do with it, and I’m sure it was a stepping stone toward reinstating the draft and having a huge mass of young recruits ready to run obstacle courses at top speed.  The challenge consisted of a dozen or two different exercises, and to get an A on the semester, you had to do a certain number of repetitions, or do exercises in a certain amount of time.  And of course, if you at least tried to do these things, you’d get a C, but giving a competition based on how fast you can do a shuttle run to all of the type A personality disorder jocks in the class made this probably the worst possible outcome, short of having everyone line up the cars their parents gave them and hand out grades based on which ones were newest or cost the most.

When they came up with this test, they basically said, “let’s find thirty things Jon Konrath can’t do, and then invent some ridiculous numbers for each one and hope he gets publicly humiliated thirty times in a row.”  For example, there was the aforementioned shuttle run; I don’t remember how fast you had to run it, but I would get shin splints from running any more than thirty feet, and had the aerobic capability of a high-level World of Warcraft junkie that typically needed a Rascal wheelchair to get from their SUV to the grocery store for another case of ring-dings, so it took me roughly double the required time.  Chin-ups?  I think I did one.  Push-ups in a minute?  I’m sure I could do at least a couple, but it probably required 30 or 60 or something well outside of the reach of someone who could only do curls if you took all of the weights off the bar first.

Probably the worst one was the rope climb.  I don’t remember how high the rope was, and I’m sure if I saw it now, it would be shorter than the ceiling in our apartment, and I’m also sure some crazed helicopter parents got the thing removed years ago because they were afraid their precious spawn would fall.  But we had to climb the damn thing, and do it in a certain speed to meet the challenge.  And two things went through my head as I sat on the ringworm-infested wrestling mats and looked up at this thing tethered to the ceiling.  One, there’s no way I can pull my weight up this damn thing if I can barely achieve a single chin-up.  And two, if I did manage to climb up to the top, how the hell do you get back down?  I had vivid visions of sailing thirty feet down, balls-first against this coarse rope that had splinters of whatever the hell ropes were made of back then scraping against my sac.  So I managed to get maybe two arm-grasps up the thing, froze, and dropped back to earth.

And of course I got endless shit from all of the jocks in the class, along the lines of “yeah, your fuckin’ computer’s not going to help you now.”  And all I could think of, which was little consolation at the time, was that in twenty years, all of these fuckers would be stuck on an assembly line, five minutes away from where they were born and where they would die, their good looks faded, their physique gone, their trophy cheerleader wives worn and uglied by a half-dozen kids, and I would be long gone, riding whatever technology I could find or invent to riches and happiness.  Okay, I’m not rich, and the jury is still out on whether or not I’m happy, but from the looks of the reunion pictures, I was right on all other counts.  But that didn’t comfort me much when I was sixteen and had to shower with these fuckers after failing their stupid tests repeatedly.

But here’s the one thing I did good at: sit-ups.  We had to do something like 56 full sit-ups in a minute, and I thought there’s no fucking way I’ll do 30, given my progress on the rest of this nightmare.  But I slugged it out, and ended up doing seventy-two.  I have no idea how I did this; maybe it’s something about weighing next to nothing, and having absolutely no gut at the time.  But I did that.  And now, I don’t know if I could do ten sit-ups without throwing out my back, so it’s a good metric about how far from being in shape I am now that I close out my fourth decade here.

The other thing about that stupid class was that by the end of the year, I had played so much damn basketball, I was pretty much an idiot savant for shooting from anywhere within the three point range.  I mean, I couldn’t defend, or do lay-ups or any of that shit.  But if you wanted to play Horse or something, I would completely kick your ass.  All of this quickly faded after I got this stupid requirement out of the way and never thought of basketball again in my life, but for a brief period in the spring of 1986, you could give me a ball and place me on any random point, and I knew the exact physics and the exact angle to get it from here to there.

By the way, I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: I will be in Vegas this year for my 40th.  If you have the means and you’re free the weekend of the 20th, drop a line.

Here’s something that comes up occasionally when googling myself, something that I do when I can’t write, which is pretty much constantly, especially when I wake up at five AM to write and I’ve only slept about four hours the night before: I once worked on the Wine software project, in the most trivial way, but enough to get my name in the list of contributors.  It’s one of the things on my ever growing list of crap I did a long time ago that I probably should have parlayed into some kind of career or fame or fortune, but did absolutely nothing with, either due to my own stupidity or poor fortune.  (At some point, I’ll make a web page of all of these.  And about ten years later, some other idiot will do the same exact thing and get a six-figure book deal out of it and everyone will call him a genius.)

Wine is an open source Windows compatibility layer written for Linux.  Basically, the goal was to be able to run a Windows program on a Linux machine, without actually buying and installing Windows on a PC.  You can now buy a virtual machine emulator like VMware and install Windows in it and run Windows software, but their goal was to reverse-engineer how Windows worked and then write this wrapper layer so you could run TurboTax or whatever the hell Windows-only software you needed to run on your unix machine.  This project started in 1993, and it was of great interest to me, because I ran Linux on a machine that I built, and I was too cheap to give Microsoft a hundred bucks or whatever Win 3.1 cost back then, and after spending all day and night sitting in front of nice SPARC stations, I didn’t want to go to the clunky monstrosity from Redmond.

I wrote Bob Amstadt an email and begged to help in any way possible, which wasn’t much because I wasn’t much of a programmer, and I’d never worked on Windows before, and I’m sure Win32 calls (which are made by passing like 17 parameters, 14 of them being pointers to structs that contain pointers to structs, and every single data type is some weird custom type) would have freaked me out.  (Like, instead of passing pointers to structs, I would just write shit into a temp file and maybe later remember to actually delete it, so my VMS C programs would litter your home directory with TMP.TMP files or something stupid like that.)  So he wrote back and put me in charge of his Listserv.

Do people even remember what a Listserv is anymore?  It’s a mailing list that you subscribe to by sending commands in an email message to a server.  I guess now people use Facebook or Yahoo Groups or some other web-based thing for discussion lists or announcement lists.  But back then, Listservs were social networking, and aside from maybe usenet, they were the only way a person could announce something to a huge group.

So Wine HQ had this listserv, and every time they had a build, they sent a message to the list.  I helped out pretty early in the process, and at that time, they were trying to get 16-bit Solitaire to launch, and would post stuff like “this build gets it to almost start before it crashes”.  The problem was, this list had a ton of people on it using these primitive Linux systems hung off of very tenuous connections to the internet - flaky UUCP gateways and modems that dialed up once a day to fetch their email.  We take it for granted that even our phones can constantly open a wide pipe to the internet through the ether, but this was when a good 14.4K connection to the world was a premium service.  So every time one of these messages went out to thousands of users, at least a few dozen were using some duct-taped together mail server that would flake out and bounce the message or get caught in some permanent mail loop.  And I got a CC of all of the errors to the Listserv, so I’d get a ton of these messages and then would have to figure out if the person’s account was permanently hosed, or if their email only worked on every other Tuesday, and I’d have to unsubscribe people from the list.  And I had to handle people who wanted to move their email from one address to another.  All of this was done with these commands I’d email in, like “DROP/NONOTIFY JOESMITH8724@OLYMPUS.CCLAB.UG.SOMECOLLEGE.EDU”.

I didn’t do the job for long, and I don’t remember when I stopped - probably when I had to go home over a break, or when the whole thing got boring.  I liked the idea of Wine, but it seemed like it would take a decade to implement, and it basically did.  This was when 32-bit Windows was on the horizon, and there was a lot of discussion about the future of the project, and how Windows 95 would derail the whole thing and set stuff back another year or two, and I lost interest.  I still ran Linux for a long time after that, and didn’t actually buy a Windows machine for the first time until 2000, and even then, I dual-partitioned it and spent more time in Linux.  But it’s part of that weird little spark of a dream I had to have this ten thousand dollar Unix workstation in my apartment, except I barely had the budget to buy secondhand used PC parts from usenet.

So Wine sort of mostly works now, and people use it.  And there’s this huge list of contributors, and my name is in it, although maybe it shouldn’t be, because I didn’t do much.  I suppose if I was more of a Type A personality disorder type of person, I could hem and haw about how I’m some kind of open source revolutionary and try to get some cred for this, but it’s like a bunch of Jawas saying they were responsible for blowing up the Death Star because they sold Luke Skywalker a couple of droids.

Okay, time to make the donuts.

In 1998, I got a new credit card in the mail and after thinking about how many photocopies I could make for $1500 or if that was enough to buy like one sixtyfourth of an acre in some deserted forest, enough to build some kind of treehouse-esque unabomber shack, I suddenly realized that I had the insane desire to buy a MiniDisc recorder.  So I rushed over to The Good Guys, this old Best Buy-esuqe electronics store, and bought a Sony MZ-R50 and rushed home and recorded Joe Satriani’s Crystal Planet onto a blank disc.

(Reasons significant: 1) Joe Satriani recorded his first album after receiving a credit card in the mail; 2) He was signed to Sony, and I think a song of his was in a MiniDisc commercial, not that there were tons of those in the US; 3) I had recently broken up with a girlfriend, and the reason I broke up with her, or the catalyst at least, was driving two hours to Portland with Ryan in his Miata to see Joe Satriani, listening to CP the whole way there, and both of us bitching about our respective girlfriends and vowing to somehow escape the situations, only I did and he did not.)

I did not have a good way to record digital to digital for a long time, and the MiniDisc required you to record stuff in real-time - you didn’t just download a bunch of MP3s and dump them to the disc.  You also had to carry around however many discs with you, and if you brought three and went to work, you were guaranteed to be sick of all of them by the time you got to the train station.  I vividly remember going on an awful first date with a lowtalker who produced feminist programming for cable access and still lived with her mom and wanted to go to dinner at a soup restaurant and then go to see this movie about white supremacists, and then I really fucked things up because the movie interviewed all of these white supremacists in Bloomington, Indiana, and while they’re talking to these guys about the evils of Jews, they’re all drinking out of Pizza Express cups and I’m like HOLY SHIT THOSE ARE PIZZA EXPRESS CUPS I HAVE LIKE 90 OF THOSE IN MY APARTMENT.  She was still somehow interested and kept calling and I eventually told her I was in love with someone who lived in LA, which was partially true anyway.  So after this first date, I had to walk her to her car at the cable access thing, and it was like eleventy billion blocks from the train station.  And the only MD I had with me was a best-of from Millions of Dead Cops, which is like 27 songs, a dozen of them being “John Wayne Was a Nazi” and the rest being entirely unintelligible 22-second long songs.  And I think I listened to it nine times on the walk back to the train.  And that’s why I got an iPod.

I have an 80GB iPod and it’s almost full, and it’s also lasted longer than any other, which means it will fail soon.  It is my damn lifeline for morning traffic though.  Is there something that will hold more music that I need to get?  Maybe I need to get a bunch of iPods and put them on a bandolier like Chewbacca.  If they made an iPhone that could fit 80 GB I would just do that.  Maybe when the drive dies in this (inevitable) I will find a way to hack it into a socket that I can hot-swap a bunch of different drives.  Maybe I will just wise up and say “why the fuck do I have all of these Charlie Parker albums and I only listen to two of the songs, so fuck it” and get the collection down so it will fit on my iPhone.

I’ve still got all of this MiniDisc crap in my storage locker.  I think if I had infinite time I would make some kind of art project out of it, like make a MiniDisc-based mellotron keyboard. Someone did a movie about the mellotron, a documentary, which I guess is a lot better than my last attempt at a documentary.  I got blindingly drunk in Laguardia airport, then had to fly to Pittsburg via Cincinnati Ohio (which is really in Kentucky, the airport I mean) and so I got to OH/KY and had a few more beers and decided I was going to make a concept movie about the moving walkways in the airport and started filming The Walkway is about to end, which is basically me sitting on the floor by the end of the walkway, and every ten seconds, a robot voice says “the walkway is about to end!” and every single person that walks past ignores it and stumbles when the moving ground becomes non-moving ground, and the whole thing is an important metaphor for something, but then I started to sober up and had to catch a plane to Pittsburgh and that’s the end of the story.  (The footage for that is in my storage locker, too.)

I don’t know why, but I suddenly remembered that random.yahoo.com used to be an obsession of mine.  I mean, this was back when there were only like 800 web sites and 680 of them were under construction and had one of those stupid animated GIFs of a construction worker or bulldozer, but it meant that every reload of that URL brought you to something interesting to read, while now, 9 times out of 10, you get directed to a spam farm that’s full of harvested content someone’s using to game their search rank.  But I was going to write something about that, and it made me think about the Ouija board.  And now I wonder if anyone still plays with these, or if the slow demise of the board game and all things printed is going to make those go away.  I mean, you can’t really do a spirit seance with your Nintendo Wii.  (Or can you?)

I remember when I was 14 I had this babysitting gig for the better part of a summer, where I watched these two boys, went to their house every day while their mom worked, and tried to entertain them for the working day, for something like $45 a week.  I can barely get out of a California Pizza Kitchen for less than that now, but I think my allowance at that point was something like $5 a week, so that was gold rush money.  The two kids were unholy terrors, and in today’s modern world, would probably get drugged out of their minds for ADHD, bipolar disorder, or whatever the hell they diagnose hyperactive kids with these days.  They weren’t bad kids, I guess, but this wasn’t one of those gigs where I could sit around and watch TV all day - I had to actively think of something to do all day every day.

Anyway, their mom had a bunch of board games, and we burned up maybe a week of time playing those.  She had all of the basics: Life, Monopoly, Clue; she also had that game Anti-Monopoly, which was in the news because they got sued by Parker Brothers, but I think it was too complicated or too boring, so we never played that.  But she had a Ouija board, and we spent a lot of time screwing with that, trying to figure out if we could call up any ghosts or dead people.  I think we spent the better part of a summer trying to call up various professional wrestlers, because this was when WWF was really huge and the kids were really into Hulk Hogan and the Iron Sheik and all of that crap.

I just started googling Ouija because I wonder how it works.  I mean, I don’t believe in the paranormal and never believed all of the various Christian fundamentalist types who said I’d go to hell for playing with a board game, or introduce some kind of trapped demon spirits that would somehow channel into this world through a piece of plastic dancing across a board of letters printed and sold in a Kay-Bee toy store.  Wikipedia says something about the ideomotor effect, and I’ll buy that, even though wikipedia is generally full of shit.  Still, it all makes me wonder if there’s some way to write an iPad version.

That whole summer though - it was such a weird little period of time, because it was after junior high, before high school.  I absolutely hated junior high, because things seemed almost normal as a kid in grade school, and I knew my place among the few dozen people in my class, and then all four grade schools got thrown into one big school, and everything changed.  And everyone makes this weird jump from being little kids in an almost socialist situation where everyone is equal to this place of cliques and castes and a social pecking order based on who you know and what you wear and how you look.  And I never got the memo, and spent way too long infatuated with computers and D&D and science fiction and model airplanes, and did not do well on that jump.

So in a sense, that summer was this weird sort of “end of innocence” thing, where I built at least one or two 1/48 scale fighter jets a week, and mowed lawns when I wasn’t babysitting, and pretty much memorized every Rush album to date while pushing a 3.5 HP Briggs and Stratton across a manicured bed of green and getting another five bucks closer to someday buying a drum set and learning every single thing Neil Peart laid down in a recording studio.  That summer, I did buy a drum set, my friend Derik’s old double-bass set - I have no idea how I talked my parents into that one - but I never did learn much, and sold the whole thing a year later to buy a new bike.  I played a lot of D&D when D&D was totally uncool, and spent a lot of time typing in computer games from Compute magazine into my Commodore-64.

I think I also underwent some shift in brain chemistry in that period.  Every psychiatrist I’ve talked to said that’s when things hit, that last spurt of puberty that changes the plasticity of your brain or something, alters the structure in some way.  I never remember ever being depressed before that, and it seems like after that summer, when I grew like a foot in three months, I spent all of my time in some undefined funk.  At the time, it was all situational - it was all a lack of friends or popularity, a lack of whatever clothes or haircut or social placement that made me unsuccessful.  And all of that was true, but there was also this new serotonin imbalance or whatever it was, masking the whole thing.

No real moral to the story here - I just fell into a brief time hole, thinking about this.  I remember watching TV when I was babysitting those kids, there was some morning news program, the last thing they would show before they got into the soap operas, at which time we had to shut it off and go play game #263 of Life that week.  But they were talking about the 40th anniversary of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, showing the grainy newsreel footage of the giant mushroom cloud, and the decimated little paper and kindling wood city after the 18-kiloton blast.  And the 65th anniversary just passed - and that screws with my head, thinking that summer was 25 years ago.

I should wrap this up.  I’ve started googling Hiroshima, and will probably waste the next two hours reading stuff online, and eventually convince myself I need to dig up the Richard Rhodes book, and I have other crap to do instead.

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.