I always get disoriented when I fly open-jawed and land in an airport that’s different than the one I left from.  I don’t remember the last time I did it, but last night I landed in SFO a week and a half after departing from OAK, and it really fucked me up.  I walked down the concourse with this strong unconscious feeling that nothing was right.  I mean, I spent the whole flight sitting next to this bald dude with a handlebar mustache, black leather boots, and a crushed velvet suit jacket in a bright shade of burgundy, who read The Fountainhead in that sort of “look at what I’m reading” pose, and I really wanted to just say “okay, we get it, dude” but I didn’t.  It took me a lot of time to get used to being in the wrong airport and mentally figure out that I was on a different mass of land with a different drive in front of me, but the 50 degree temperature difference really negated that.

I haven’t been back in Indiana in two years, and I always hesitate to write about the experience, because I don’t want to piss off the people who call it home, or make it sound like I’m ungrateful for them taking time out to see this asshole who flew out from California that won’t stop bitching about a lack of vegetables and heat.  But it always puts the zap on me to see stuff back there.  I think this visit, I spent less time in a nostalgia black hole, and avoided a lot of old haunts, although it wasn’t entirely intentional.  Both the night of Christmas Eve and Christmas itself, I headed back to my hotel semi-early, and had thoughts of driving around University Park mall, maybe finding an old place to eat, and doing some serious people-watching.  And, of course, both times I was an idiot and didn’t realize that they closed damn near everything early, and I ended up back at the hotel eating candy bars for dinner.

I got a chance to meet up with fellow writer Steve Lowe, which was cool, because our Venn diagrams of South Bend-dom probably briefly touched decades ago and we didn’t realize it.  This leads me to my new year’s resolution (yes, another one of those posts): I really don’t know half of you people out there, and I never see the other half of you.  I need to make more of an effort to see people in the next year.  So if you’re in the bay area, please ping me, and I will do likewise.  I don’t care if we haven’t met before - we should grab a cup of coffee or hit a book store or whatever.  I need to do something with my life besides clicking the Like button on facebook posts.

So, saw the family.  Suffered through the cold.  Ate a lot of garbage, but only gained about a pound.  Almost hit a deer.  Didn’t write, which I wanted to do and of course I didn’t, so what the fuck.  I left Indiana a day earlier than I thought, due to a scheduling issue, and drove up to Wisconsin, then drove down to Chicago the next day to hang out with John Sheppard.  We went to this weird diner that was all classic diner food but vegan, built up out of various soy products, which was actually pretty damn good.  We got to hang for a bit, and scheme about our next big project, which is always awesome.

Speaking of, next project - you should go over to Paragraph Line and bookmark that shit.  We’ll be posting daily (we hope) dispatches, fiction, news, and other distractions.

Anyway, it’s good to be home, and I have to unfuck a million things here, piles of half-unpacked things and gifts that need to find permanent homes, and whatnot.  I got some nice little things, but after every trip back to Indiana, I always want to go Fight Club on my shit and start donating everything.  I also feel a need to do the same thing digestion-wise, hence my current issue with probiotics.  At least I will get a lot of reading done in the next few days.

Ok.  2013 done.  2014 coming up.  Still writing 2012 on my checks.  Gotta go finish this book now.

I had an unexpected trip to LA last weekend.  It wasn’t unexpected as in bad; S had a Monday work thing at the last second, and she extended it and I tagged along, leaving Friday after work and coming back Sunday morning.  I always like to go to LA, although the trips are always far too short, and it always leaves me with that hollow feeling that maybe I should have stayed there instead of moving up north.

Anyway, we stayed in Long Beach this time, a new one for me.  I think I went to Long Beach once when we lived down there, on a trip to bring the Subaru to the dealership for maintenance, and that was way the hell north, up by the Long Beach airport, and not really in the city proper.  The actual city, on the water, reminds me a lot of San Diego.  It has the same kind of modern openness to it, a downtown that’s been scrubbed clean and revitalized, the new businesses poking through in the main drag of older buildings.  Our hotel sat by the water, among this strip of chain big-box restaurants and carnival rides and roller coasters, a fairly sterile convention center vibe.  Outside our window, a massive Indian wedding happened Saturday morning, the whole nine with the saris and the white horse and everything.  Later that day, some kind of bible convention was going on, so we got two very different vibes going on during the stay.

We landed at LAX just in time to hit the rush hour traffic on Friday, so we went to the Veggie Grill in El Segundo.  I spent a lot of time in that area when we lived in Playa Del Rey,  because that main drag on Sepulveda had our grocery store, drug store, bank, Petco, Frey’s, and a host of other regular destinations.  The Veggie Grill is this place with all vegetarian food that’s got fake meat in it, but it isn’t like most health food stores, which are typically these run down retreads of 70s hippie joints, with dim lighting and patchouli smell and a shelf of strange astrology books about fasting and crystals.  It’s a very modern-looking place that resembles a Chipotle more than anything, with lots of bright colors and a smart interior.  I got this huge kale salad and sweet potato fries, and gorged on that stuff, wishing I could eat there every day.

I always associate LA with healthy food, because it’s where I lost so much weight, and if you want to do a vegan, gluten-free, macrobiotic diet, it’s the place to do it.  But it’s also interesting, because it’s the fast food capital of the world. I mean, you don’t see all of the people who live on it 24x7 in morbid obesity, like you do in the Midwest.  But everywhere on the main drags through town are taco stands and burger joints and diners and every possible chain you could think of: In-n-Out, Jack in the Box, Rally’s, Fatburger, and all of the usual ones.  I guess I started my 2008 stay in LA eating everything and everywhere, but then graduated to just the healthy stuff.  It’s really both ends of the spectrum.

On Saturday, we ate at a mostly forgettable omelet place in Long Beach, then went on a long drive into Orange County to see a friend of S’s.  We drove back into Culver City to eat at Leaf, this raw food place.  I’m not a huge advocate of raw food, and I think some of the claims are dubious, but I also like it when it’s done right. I first found out about this place because I arrived in LA for a week-long apartment hunting mission back in 2008, and stayed at a crappy Econo-Lodge right across the street.  I went there a few times that summer, and even when I was on a fries-and-burgers diet, I always liked the food there.  Unfortunately, the place is closing down this week - they are razing the whole block and building a giant apartment complex.  But we got there just in time, and I had a falafel and a sampler plate of hummus and chips and rolls, and although the service was terrible, the food was great.

That’s one thing that’s always night-and-day for me when I go back to LA.  Oakland can be a real shithole when it comes to urban renewal.  Like our neighborhood doesn’t even have a grocery store, and every time someone starts talking about building one, it always gets derailed with discussions from causeheads about whether or not it will have locally-sourced organic nut-free options serviced by transgendered indigenous peoples or whatever the fuck, and it drags on for years.  There’s something fundamentally broken in Oakland’s zoning or local government, and I think it prevents any development or major investment in the city.  Right across the line in Emeryville, things have absolutely exploded with new development and businesses and construction and offices and jobs.  The only thing we’ve seen new in our neighborhood is a tent city full of homeless people that shit in a field next to an overpass.  I think when we moved here, I had high hopes that the neighborhood would get gentrified and cleaned up, and five years later, I have pretty much given up hope for that, and drive to Emeryville or Berkeley for everything.

Anyway, when we’re in LA, I always see that insane urban development, with every square foot suddenly spouting up new businesses and mixed-use developments.  On one of our previous trips, I think 2011, I was on a sort of depressive riff in my head about the economy and state of the union, and we went to Santa Monica and walked around the promenade at night, and it was absolutely out of control there.  They built this giant addition to the mall, all filled with high-end retail, and every spot of the old main drag had some kind of store in it, selling high-ticket items or hand-crafted clothes or super good food, and the streets were filled both with tourists dumping cash at every turn, or locals driving their fine European autos and wearing expensive clothes to go spend serious cash on drinks and dinner.  And just outside of the bustle, every little area that was vacant was currently under construction, erupting with new retail space.  It reminded me of New York, the parts of New York that were always expanding, always growing, like the quick cell growth of some mutant superhero, constantly replicating and strengthening.  Compared to our neighborhood, which is nothing but empty lots and vacant warehouses, it was astonishing.

Anyway, very far off topic here.  We also went to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which is… interesting.  It’s a very meta art project more or less, a museum poking fun at museums, filled with exhibits of questionable verifiability.  I don’t know - it might be a little over my head, but the basic gist of it are that there are a lot of freaky exhibits, and you don’t really know what’s real and what’s completely fictitious.  The whole thing reminded me of walking around a living Tool video of some sort.  I bought a book about it, and will read and review it later, but it’s worth checking out if you’re ever in Culver City and have eight bucks to spare.

The trip was, unfortunately, over just as fast as it started.  I had to fly back Sunday morning, and Sarah dropped me off at LAX after an unprecedented drive up the 405 with no traffic whatsoever.  When we zipped past Carson, I saw the GZ-20 Spirit of America, better known as one of the three Goodyear blimps, which is always nostalgic, because I was obsessed with the Goodyear blimp when I was 5 or 6.  I got through security at the airport in record time, and got to camp out and get my day’s writing done before the flight.

And like I said, I got that bummed feeling after getting back home.  I know you’re supposed to hate LA, and all of the people are “fake” etc etc, but I really do like it there.  I now must resist the urge to go to redfin and start looking up house prices there, and try to get more work done on the next book.

Linky links for you:  go check out my new book, Thunderbird.  Like it on Amazon, add it on goodreads, help a brother out.  I’ve also been stepping up my review game on Amazon a bit.  Check out my reviews, and click that like button a few times and show some love.  Also, if you’re a writer and you’d like to swap books for review, leave a comment or drop a line at jkonrath at this site’s address and let’s set up a trade.  Thanks!

It feels like I was just here, but I guess that was almost a year ago.  And it feels like I just lived here, but that ended six years ago.  Six years?

Anyway.  Woke up early.  Packed a carry-on and a personal item.  Drove to SFO and left the car at the wrong terminal, the one equidistant to the Virgin America gates.  Sat at their little desks with power plugs and banged out the morning’s writing.  I’m still writing in OmmWriter half the time, and it was somewhat ironic that the fake-ass ambient drone music in the headphones was the sound of being on an old train, the clacking of the rails, and I’m in a super-futuristic airport that looks like a Kubrick wet dream, watching giant Airbus spaceships launch into the skies at near-Mach speeds.

Full flight.  No meal on the plane.  I cobbled together a fake meal of dry goods, and then realized that eating tuna while sealed in a tiny tube is a dumb idea.  Couldn’t write on the plane so I read half of Fight Club in one clip on my Kindle.  Reading a book about insomnia, being crammed in planes, and a lack of life fulfillment isn’t advisable when you haven’t slept, are crammed in a plane, and aren’t feeling fulfilled with your life.  Good book, though.

The wait for a cab took a half hour.  I was behind two women who were fresh from London, and bitching about the cabs and how you couldn’t just take the “tube” from JFK.  Well, you sort of can, but it’s not advisable.  It was raining, 30 degrees, just trying to snow.  I got a cab, headed in, and it took about 90 minutes to cover that 9 miles, as the snow started to stick.

And now I’m in my old neighborhood, the LES.  I’m staying in a hotel right by my old house.  This really freaked me out last time, and it’s doing it even more.  It’s my old hood, my old McDonald’s just down the street, my old subway stop just a couple of blocks away.  Allen, Orchard, Stanton, Delancey. We used to go to Clinton Street Bakery and Alias and walk up and down these side streets almost every day.  We’d order from Schiller’s and wait in an impossible line at the Rite Aid while they fucked up our prescriptions and talked on their cell phones instead of actually working as cashiers.  My current office is my old office, and the walk to work will be the same tomorrow morning.

I just emailed John about something and remembered how he stayed here with us at our old place, right before we left in 2007.  I know I hated a lot of things about New York, and I know I could never live here again, but I really do miss our place over there - it was the most tolerable place I’d lived here, a real gem of an apartment.  Lots of light, a deck, a nice view of a park below us, big rooms, and my own little office to hide in and try to write, although I don’t think I got anything substantial done the whole time we lived there.

My nostalgia really tortures me sometimes.  I think the ironic thing is, I’m slowly losing my memory, and I fear that at some point in the future, I will remember nothing of the past, won’t have any idea if I already ate the sandwich I’m holding in my hand, and the only thing left will be these unbearable pining feelings for certain eras of my life, specific times or places or feelings or moods that can be summed up by the menu of a restaurant or the pair of jeans I used to wear.  So I sit here, a few blocks from my old apartment, and miss that era, that feeling, even if I’m making more money and living in a nicer place and married and way more productive.  The nostalgia is overwhelming and depressing and uplifting and impossible to capture, but impossible to avoid.

It’s past my bedtime, but of course I’ll be wide awake for three more hours due to the magic of time zones.  I was so starving, I went to the sushi restaurant in the hotel, sat at the bar lined with raw fish, and ordered a cheeseburger and fries.  I’ve been impeccably good with weightwatchers for the last couple of months, but snapped, ate a day’s worth of food, and now I’m pumping with insulin and not ready to sit down and write, but I must.

[I wrote this on 5.17.2012 and it doesn’t really have an ending.]

I’m in Nuremberg today, sitting in my hotel with a glass bottle of Coke and listening to Jimi. I’ll get to the first leg of my German trip (and the horrible travel day I had getting here), probably about the time I’m leaving here for Berlin. First, I wanted to put down some thoughts about London.

I’ve never been to London before, and I didn’t know what to expect. I envisioned it as a city like New York, except older, darker, and replace all of the Ray’s Original Real Famous pizza joints with fish and chip restaurants, or maybe pubs. What I found was completely different from that, and I have to say that I really enjoyed London.

I don’t feel like recapping in paragraphs, so I’m going to drop right into the bulleted list.

• We flew out of SFO at around noon. That put us into town at about seven in the morning the next day. It was maybe an eleven-hour flight, and I almost slept an hour. S had a seat in business class, and because her ticket was booked from her work and mine was done by me on the web, I got an economy plus ticket. That meant I had a hair more room than the steerage section, but not enough to stretch out. I wrote for a long time, played games on my iPad, and watched the new Jim Gaffigan special, which was worth the five bucks.
•  Heathrow is big. We got out and my first impression was that it was roughly the size of Newark, JFK, and LaGuardia put together. It took us forever to get from the plane to customs. Clearing customs was a non-issue, even though I had been up all night and was liable to say something stupid, but they asked me nothing except for the purpose of my visit. I did not answer “to fuck shit up,” so I passed.
• All of the cabs are the same kind of car, and I don’t know the make or model, but it looks like an old 1940s sedan.
• Once we got on the highway in the back of a cab, I quickly got confused by the right-hand drive thing. Like I’d look over and think “how the hell is that car driving itself, and why is that kid just sitting in the passenger seat and watching?”
• For a country from which people get so shitty about the metric system, there are so many god damn inconsistencies. Like on the highway, some warning signs were in miles, but others were kilometers. I also noticed this in the right/left thing. For example, I would always expect a down escalator to be on the left, and on an escalator, for the standing/slow people to be on the left, and the faster/walking people on the right. I found a mix of both. I never knew what side of the sidewalk I should be using for a given speed/direction. Also, there wasn’t a bar where you could buy a 0.473176L of beer.
•  We stayed in Marble Arch. I have only the vaguest idea of London geography, and I feel we barely scratched the surface in our brief stay, but to me, it felt like this was a slightly richy-rich neighborhood, although nowhere near as much as Nob Hill.
• We checked into our hotel, which was one of these little boutique things that used to be a row of townhouses, but was converted into a hotel. It was pretty nice, albeit small, but we’re probably spoiled from American hotels.
• On the first day, we showered and then vowed to not immediately sleep, and try to power through a day of seeing sights, to remedy the jetlag. This meant the first day was hell. I am officially old, because staying up past 9
  at night will total me the next day, so an all-nighter is absolutely crippling to me.
• We ate breakfast at a diner-type place, and I had a full English breakfast, which I always used to get at this diner in Queens when I lived there. This was roughly the same, although it didn’t have blood sausage, and had beans.
• While at the diner, we talked to this couple next to us that had just finished this all-night charity walk, in which they walked a whole marathon over a period of like ten hours, so they were about as loopy and walking-dead-esque as us. One interesting thing that came up in conversation was that they had a son in college who was in an American Studies program, and as part of the degree, he was going to the states next fall to study for a year. He wanted to get into San Diego State University, but instead got assigned to Lincoln, Nebraska, and the parents had many questions about what the hell a Lincoln, Nebraska was. I’ve never been there, but my general guess answers were: a) It will be cheap; b) They have beer (sort of); c) Everyone will be really nice; d) If he likes blonde-haired, blue-eyed girls away from home for the first time, the world is his oyster; and e) I hope he likes steak and isn’t a vegan.
• We went for a long walk that took us out to Buckingham Palace, where we ran into this huge congregation of people gathering. We asked a cop why, and he said the changing of the guard was happening in 45 minutes. We snapped a bunch of pictures, and headed south for a bit. (The guards, BTW, are now behind a huge fence with about 30 yards of space between you and them. You can get a decent shot with a zoom lens, but you can’t get in their face and try to make them laugh or whatever. I don’t know if this was some 9/11 terrorist thing or what.)
• A bit later, we saw the Royal Guard building or museum or headquarters, and inside of that fenced-in compound, we stopped and watched them congregate. There was a marching band of some sort assembling and getting ready and inspected by their officer. These were the red coat guys with the big black penis-looking hats.
• About half of the guards had on their belts, along with mounts for drums or drumstick holders or whatnot, a sheathed knife. S asked me why they had them, and I said “because you don’t want to bring a tuba to a knife fight.”
• They got ready and started playing, and I expected to launch into some heavily British big brass jingoistic national anthem thing, but they started with this slightly jazzy easy listening-type number, like something that would be played on Lawrence Welk, which sort of blew my mind.
• I should also mention that the tourists were out in force, and mostly consisted of high school students from other EU countries or further East. So lots of French, Italian, along with some Russian and Polish and other languages I couldn’t catch. All of them had the same Justin Bieber haircut, and it smelled like an Axe factory exploded. (Axe is, coincidentally, called something else in the UK. I think it’s Jaguar or maybe Sex Panther.)
• We kept walking, and saw Westminster Abby, The Parliament, Big Ben, the London Eye, and crossed the Thames, then got some lunch and took the subway home.
• One thing I noticed in general the whole time there was that service at restaurants was extraordinarily slow. Most places automatically add on 15% in service, and I don’t know if that’s part of it, or if Americans all suffer from ADD and impatience. (Maybe both.)
• The undergroud (aka the subway or the tube) is pretty huge, and well-organized. It’s relatively clean, fast, and efficient. I’d compare it to the BART. Or I’d give the NY MTA about a 6 or 7 out of 10, and the underground a solid 8 from my limited experience.
• I ended up falling asleep for about three hours, and then couldn’t fall asleep that night.
• On Monday, it rained, and in some ways, being out in London in the rain gave me a better feel for the city. I expected London to be grey and dreary, and being out on the rain matched that. But the city had a bustle to it, and kept on running during the storm, which was impressive.

It’s Friday, and in about an hour, I’m off to OAK to catch a flight to LAX and spend a weekend celebrating my birthday.  No real plans, except for a quick trip, and probably a lot of nostalgia for the time five years ago when I lived down there.  I really do love LA, even if it’s trendy to hate it; I probably like it more than any of the other places I’ve lived, which makes it seem silly that I own a house in the dreary north part of the state, but that’s another discussion.

I was thinking about the first time I’d ever visited LA, and then realized that I wrote about it in the early days of this site, as one of my very first entries ever.  It’s funny to read it after having lived there, and it seems like it happened a million years and several lifetimes ago.  Like, I remember having to stop and fill up the car near LAX, and pulling into a neighborhood that at the time seemed like some kind of Tarantino-esque inner city gang nightmare.  Now, I realize I was probably in Hawthorne or something, which isn’t far from where I lived in 2008 and is a fairly sedate place to be.

I always divide my life into these discrete eras, like my Seattle era, or my K era when I dated her, or whatever.  And all of the eras are very compartmentalized from each other.  So it’s always interesting to me when different eras have these hyperlinks to each other, like when we visited the place where, ten eras later, I’d live.  Or another example: I lived in New York, and went to this conference in San Diego for a week, back when big companies actually paid for tech writers to go to conferences.  And one night, I drove up to LA to see a friend of mine.  And on the way, I swung through Anaheim, and stopped to eat a late lunch.  There was this McDonald’s right off the main drag by the Disney property, and it was a huge version, designed for giant lunch rushes of tourist busses dumping off scores of kids.  I remember eating there once in 1997, only because at that time, they had the McPizza, and only the highest-volume stores had the pizza, because the prep time of the pizza was longer than the holding time, so you had to move serious units to get it on the menu.  I didn’t get one, and for whatever stupid reason, went back to that specific McDonald’s in 2000 to see if I could get one, but by then, the McPizza was McHistory.

So that one visit for a Quarter Pounder meal deal knitted together at least three eras:  The Seattle/K era, the New York era, and the future 2008 living in LA era.  I did not visit the same McDonald’s in 2008, although I did go to Anaheim and see it when I went to an Angels game.  I was on Weight Watchers and off McDonald’s by then, though.

Another thing I remember from 2000: I was sitting there, reading a newspaper and picking at my fries, when this lady was mopping the floor.  It was an off hour, like maybe 2 or 3, so nobody was in the dining room but me.  This was a redneck woman, maybe someone who was working there either because it was all she could get or it was part of the terms of her parole or rehab.  And she started talking to me about the nomination of George W. Bush as the Republican candidate.  She told me “well, I’ll probably vote for him.  He probably knows the most about the job, since he already was President.”  I did not correct her.  This was the beginning of the next era.