Tag: writing

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Squeak, writing, drones, walled cities

Been a while. Various things have been up, and I’ve completely lost the thread here. I always feel a need to get back to the blog and start posting regularly, but getting the first post down after a month or so sets the tone, and I have no idea what the tone is, so here goes.

First major thing was that my cat Squeak died. We got both of the cats 18 years ago in Denver, and she was maybe six months old then. So she had a good run, and she’s had various medical stuff for a while. She kept going a lot longer than expected, but the last year or so has been rough. It was still an incredibly hard decision to let her go, and a month and a half later, I’m still upset about it. This was compounded by the fact that I spent most of that 18 years working from home, and a heavy part of my routine was seeing what was up with her during the day. I was going to write more about this, but I can’t. Extremely grateful for Humane Colorado for the start of her journey and Lap of Love for the end.

Second… I guess writing got away from me for a bit. My next book is possibly too political, and I now have many fears about publishing this in the current climate. Aside from all my other fears about writing and publishing, I also don’t want to suddenly not be able to get back in the country on my next time I go on vacation.  So I lost maybe a month there before I was able to get back to it.

There are a lot of various concerns about persona and the type of writing I will do in the future. I think I waver between wanting to do something “serious” or complex, like some David Foster Wallace magnum opus. Or I want to do basically a performance art piece of wild and crazy absurdism. And I think whichever one I do, I have to sort of “become” that person to the public. I think of how I was always posting over-the-top memes and crazy stuff ten years ago, and how that dovetailed with my writing at the time. I ran into a wall with that whole thing, and I don’t know what the answer is here. (And I’m not looking for one.) This is probably the subject of another essay. Regardless, I’m writing, and that’s all I really care about.

Third (why am I still counting) – I have been busy trying to get my remote pilot license, the FAA Part 107. I’ve been hemming and hawing about taking this test pretty much since I started flying drones in 2021, and I’ve bought numerous books and video courses and flash cards and whatever else, but never got it together to take the test. Finally, I said screw it, went to the FAA, and registered for an exam last Friday. After a week or so of cramming, I realized there’s no way I would be ready, so I pushed it out two weeks. I’m still working through a course, flipping through flash cards, and trying to remember when you use CTAF versus UNICOM at a towered airport after hours to self-announce traffic advisories. (And that whole thing is stupid, because I have to know all of this stuff for the 107, and then the very last rule is, “sUAS PICs cannot communicate on CTAF.”

Aside from writing and studying, I’ve been wasting a lot of time building book nooks. A book nook is a sort of diorama about the size of an unabridged dictionary with a glass front and a very detailed scene inside. I have built four of them now, and the one that got me hooked was the Kowloon Walled City 2049 kit. Of course I feel a need to customize these things and have fallen down this rabbit hole of paints and plastics and accessories and lights and scratch-building new details. All of this is questionable because the one thing I don’t have is shelf space. But it’s been a fun distraction.

Work is work. Had a brief staycation because I canceled a trip due to all the Squeak stuff. My only other travel plans in 2025 are Christmas and the Midwest, although I’m thinking about another crazy trip for my birthday. More on that when I figure it out.

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general

Cleveland

I took a quick trip to Cleveland this weekend, to see a few old friends and headline a book reading. The trip was over before it started, it felt like. Anyway, let me rush through the usual summary.

Reason one for the visit was that my company gives us Juneteenth off, which was a Thursday. So I added the 20th and made it a nice four-day weekend. I feel some need to take more short trips like this between my longer journeys, so this looked like a good spot to do it.

The big reason for the trip was John Sheppard moved to Ohio recently, and just bought a house and got settled in near where he spent his childhood. I haven’t seen him since he retired, and wanted to check out his new place. The other big reason was that I haven’t seen Michael Stutz in a long time, and I wanted to see his record store and his house. Also, I twisted his arm a bit and the three of us set up a book reading at the store.

The trip out was easy enough. I booked a direct flight from SFO to CLE, and left at 9 in the morning. It was a bit clogged getting to the airport at rush hour, and I had to jump over to terminal 2 to get through security fast, then jog back to terminal 3. Not a major problem, though. It was about four and a half hours in the air, which I mostly spent messing around on my laptop. It was raining and thundering heavily in Cleveland all day, and while en route, there was argument over if we’d be coming in early or late, but we landed a bit early. John picked me up and we headed over to his place.

I haven’t spent time in Ohio probably since 1999. I stayed in Berea a few days on my moving trip east from Seattle to New York, at Michael’s old place. Also had a funeral later that same year in Cincinnati, and maybe an airport layover here or there. But I’ve met a lot of people in Ohio online since then. I didn’t really have a strong feel for what it would be like, especially because Ohio has become a bit of a punchline in recent years, but has also been going through a lot of upheaval. I wanted some face time with a few people, but I also just wanted to see what things were like these days.

Me and John stopped at his place to drop off luggage, and he’s got a nice setup, a 3br/1ba on a quiet cul-de-sac, basement, yard, detached garage in the back. He just moved in, so the furniture is minimal and he’s just started settling into the place. It’s got a big upstairs with a low ceiling that’s completely empty, but will make an excellent writing cave in the future. He set me up in the Ohio Room, this monument to Ohio sports teams that’s borderline disturbing and hilarious, with a neon OHIO sign on the wall, bright red Ohio State bedding, and hanging flags for the Tribe, the Browns, and the Cavs.

We headed out to Angelo’s in Lakewood to split a pizza, then drove out to Edgewater Park to see the lake and take the requisite picture in front of the big Cleveland sign. Also stopped at a giant grocery to get some supplies, and wandered around a bit before heading back to the house for a few hours of talk that evening.

Friday morning, we got up and running, then headed over to see Bailey and son over in Lakewood. It’s always interesting to meet up with someone who’s been a friend online for like a decade who I’ve never seen face-to-face. Social media’s created this odd parallel universe where you can talk to people every day but not really “know” them – or do you? Anyway, it was cool to chat for a few hours and see the neighborhood where she now lives, and the weather on Friday morning was not bad at all for hanging out outside.

For lunch, we headed over to Canary’s, which was a family restaurant. John was sure the place used to be a Pizza Hut way back when, stripped down to the studs and redone as a diner. It was the type of place with the paper mats advertising local businesses in Comic Sans, cleaning agencies and painting services and cash-for-gold shops. Lots of old folks in the booths, and we got giant menus with 167 items in them. I got pierogis, and when I asked if it came with a vegetable, the waitress said “it has onions on it.” Good food, but a bowl of cheese soup and a dozen cheese pierogis was a bit much. John got an open-faced meatloaf sandwich that looked absolutely crippling. It reminded me of the many places I’d either end up in after a church service as a kid or during a late night with two or three other juvenile delinquents.

We spent the afternoon driving between malls. I don’t give a shit about mall stuff anymore, but it seemed like we had to check out one or two while I was in Ohio. We first went to Great Northern, which looked large but beaten and half-empty. We then went to SouthPark Mall, which is much larger and seemed to have more higher-end stores open. Neither mall was particularly busy on a Friday afternoon. I didn’t pay much attention to the exact layout or details, because I had bigger things to worry about that night.

After chilling out for a bit at home, we headed over to The Current Year, Michael’s record store. It’s in the same building in Parma as Rudy’s, a Polish bakery. The store is a great little space that’s crammed with a large variety of heavily curated albums, from rare records to yacht rock to psychedelic to mood music. There are lots of books (including mine) and collectibles and rarities all over the place. It’s the kind of place that simultaneously makes me wish I collected vinyl and had a turntable, and made me glad I didn’t, because I’d spend way too much money there and quickly form A Bad Habit.

Anyway, it was great catching up with Michael and his wife Marie. He has a small room for readings or bands, and two other themed side rooms for different music collections, plus several warehouse rooms filled to the brim with music and movies and things to be sold. I got all the gear set up and we ate some good Lebanese food Marie ordered, then got ready to roll.

Oh, gear for this trip: the Canon R10 for stills, with a Sigma 18-50; the DJI Pocket 3 for video; two DJI Mic2 wireless mics; and those were fed to a Zoom H5. The store also had a PA system with mic, and both me and Michael were recording on phones.

We only had a couple people show for the reading, but that was expected. This was mostly about recording and hanging out. Michael opened and read some haiku, a bit from Circuits of the Wind, and some of a newer thing he’s working on about Treasure Island. John then read the first chapter from Small Town Punk. And then I read.

I don’t do readings. I don’t like public speaking, and I don’t exactly write the kind of zingers you can rattle off to an audience. The last time I read was in 2005, in Boston, and that was an event where I co-headlined and only read a single non-fiction story from my old book Dealer Wins.  So headlining an event was a bit much. I wasn’t sure what to read, and didn’t know what the audience would be like. I don’t know how I did, and of course feel like I didn’t do well at all. But I think I survived. I read a chapter from my next book, Atmospheres 2, and the last chapter of Decision Paralysis. I also did a story from Vol. 13, plus some short bits from Book of Dreams and Ranch: the Musical. I think my total was about 45 minutes, which is probably 35 minutes longer than my longest reading ever.

Anyway, we hung out a bit more and I signed stuff, then we went outside in the night. It was strange to feel the cool air and look up at the Rudy’s sign with RUMORED TO EXIST on it. There’s something about the midwestern night in the summer that’s an immediate time machine for me, and being out after the reading in the darkness reminded me of that.

Saturday: me and John went downtown, which was almost empty, and started at the Science Center. My main goal was to see the Apollo capsule they had there, which is the one from Skylab 3. We also hung out and took a guided tour of the Mather, a 600-some foot long century-old freighter. And we wandered around the area by the stadium and the Hard Rock. Later we went further downtown to see the Arcade, a totally empty and Shining-looking shopping center, and Tower City Center and Terminal Tower. We also poked in the library downtown.

I think my general feel for Cleveland was that it reminded me of Milwaukee with the Wisconsin removed, or maybe the suburbs of Chicago without the Chicago. I liked that, the way it had lots of varying food and good infrastructure, without a lot of traffic. There were the pockets of rust belt abandonment, but there were also some pretty well-restored areas downtown, and clean suburbs that seemed pretty walkable.

But… we picked a bad weekend for walking, because it was insanely hot out, maybe the mid-90s and humid as hell. We got home and I tried to take a quick 20-minute nap before dinner. The second I passed out, the power went, taking the AC with it. That rolling blackout/brownout thing kept going as more and more people put their air on high. I’ve been to some fairly hot countries in recent years, but the sweltering midwest summers are definitely a flashback for me, back to the days when you searched the subdivision for a buddy with a pool.

We went over to Michael and Marie’s place for dinner, and they grilled hamburgers on the patio as we talked forever. Michael gave us a full tour of the upstairs of the house, which is amazing. I can’t do justice to it with a full explanation, but this was a heavy early-60s vibe, a ranch belonging to a former NASA scientist, and it’s carefully laid out from stem to stern with a collection of furniture, appliances, and collectibles that perfectly encapsulate the space age.

After dinner, Michael was ready to give us the full tour of Sunken Studios, his basement lair which is a tribute to several Tiki bars and beaches from the past. This was absolutely mind-blowing. Michael and Marie have spent decades collecting things from Tiki bars, visiting them across the country, documenting and researching and planning, then spent the last dozen years meticulously recreating it underneath his house. I really can’t do justice for the thing Michael has created, but I felt like I’d been stuck in the center of his brain, completely entangled in this world of beaches and Polynesian memories and relics. Absolutely amazing.

Sunday was pretty sedate, and a travel day. Me and John wandered around a bit, and went to another family restaurant called Gene’s Place. It was in a strip mall, and after we headed to a boutique donut place called Peace, Love, and Little Donuts. John bought a dozen of the mini-donuts, and even though I can’t really do donuts anymore, I tried one and they were great.

Most of my luggage on the way out was books I left for Michael, so it was easy to pack up everything and head out. Trip back was a bit of a pain because of a bunch of dumb little things: someone taking up half my seat, charged twice for Wi-Fi that didn’t work, videos didn’t work in my seatback thing. Got back late and exhausted, and had to turn it around and get to work early Monday. But it was a good weekend, a good break, and I’ll have to get out there again soon. Not next, though. Big trip in August, and it’s definitely not Ohio. Stay tuned.

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general

Paragraph Line site, reissues

AITPL8I’ve been slowly working on what to do about the Paragraph Line web site and social media and whatnot, as both me and John have been releasing books and have no idea how to sell them. Anyway, I did a quick reboot of the web site, and it’s live again at http://paragraphline.com/. It’s currently an incredibly rough static site, just so if someone sees the link on a book cover or whatever and clicks it, they get something.

None of the blog is there, so none of the fiction we published about ten years ago is there. I still have this stuff stashed away, and I’ve thought about republishing it, starting up the slush queue again, and going back to daily blogging, releasing other flash fiction, and that whole thing. Ultimately, that had an incredibly low ROI, and I wasted a lot of time for very little traffic. I got a lot of submissions from people who obviously never looked at the site whatsoever. I also got a lot of traffic from people who had Bizarro-related fiction who couldn’t get it placed at any official Bizarro outlet, so lots of second-rate stuff. There were exceptions, but I did not like spending all my time sifting through the queue, begging people to read the damn thing, and screaming into the void. Faced with that versus actually writing, I chose the latter.

Aside from the content generation and the general algorithm issues, I struggled with tooling. WordPress is basically a virus vector disguised as a CMS, and the “you can do anything with WordPress” people are all designers charging an obscene amount for development. I tried firing up a Ghost instance in AWS and moving everything there, and it didn’t really work well. I also recently tried pulling it into Hugo, and it was a bit of a disaster. I finally gave up and used a static template, which looks okay, but blogging there is not going to be a thing at all.

Social media-wise, I have no idea what to use. I’m absolutely not using Twitter. I think all Meta platforms are impossible to get any reach. All the kids are using Bluesky now, so I just created a profile @paragraphline and maybe someday someone will follow it. This all falls firmly into “I have no time for this” and I’m trying to get the next book done, so it won’t happen in the immediate future.

* * *

Related: John has re-released three of his books in one volume; check out After the Jump: A Trilogy. And I’ve still got my book from December you should check out, Decision Paralysis.

* * *

One of the things that came to mind as I was assembling this books page was the large number of books I have that are now out of print. This was intentional for a few reasons, but I fret over what I should do about this. It’s not as easy as “well just re-list them” because, well, it isn’t.

I currently have 18 books that were published at one point, and four of them are currently for sale. I think the short answer here is a combination of the fact that I am really proud of the four that are currently out, and four is more than zero, so at least there’s that. But when I think about reissuing the others, there are a few things stopping me.

First, there are quality issues. I get unending shit about “you need to hire an editor” which always bothers me. In one sense, it’s like telling Iggy Pop he needs to re-record Raw Power with autotune, because some of the notes aren’t hit perfectly. Also, I’m not going to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to an editor on a book that’s going to sell 14 copies with a profit margin of like 29 cents a copy. That said, I find typos in these old books, and if I’m going to reissue them, I at least want to sweep through them and fix things.

And the problem with pulling that thread at the edge of the sweater is I will quash typos, but along the way I’ll find paragraphs that are uneven or places I wish I’d expanded or stories that didn’t end right or… whatever. There’s an argument for changing things significantly in a new reissue. Like William Burroughs published three very different versions of The Soft Machine in his lifetime (and a fourth posthumously) and he had no problems ripping out half the book, adding back as many new pages, and rearranging the whole thing. Part of me thinks doing that would be fun. Part of me thinks it’s a bit too George Lucas. And either way, this would require a lot of time I don’t have.

I think there’s also the issue of me having past work I’m not proud of. Sometimes I go back into an old book and find it’s aged well, and parts are still funny or well-written. But there are times I look at some stuff like the trilogy of flash books (Earworm, Sleep, Thunderbird) and I feel like maybe 50% of it is solid, and the rest is plain embarrassing. (The two zine-book things, Help… and Ranch are similar. And I reread He recently and it’s absolutely horrible.) There’s a lot of gonzo writing that’s largely scatological and stupid, and I feel the people who are fans of that aspect of my old writing, that persona I used, will never get what I’m trying to do now. And it’s definitely not stuff I want coworkers or potential employers to read. A lot of it would straight up get me cancelled at this point. I don’t want to write like this anymore, and spending time reintroducing stuff that I’m actually ashamed of now is a fool’s errand. Maybe I could do a “greatest hits” with just some of this stuff picked out. Once again, that’s a lot of time invested that could be used on writing new books.

There are books that are simply too far off my path to even deal with. Memory Hunter was a fun experiment and I loved doing it. The writing maybe 80% holds up. But nobody got the joke, and those of my fans who did read it all said it was good but not Konrath enough. Summer Rain is tough, because it was my first book and it meant a lot to me. And its fans are into that heavy 90s nostalgia, but I absolutely do not want to work in that genre anymore. Nostalgia is pain, and it doesn’t help that 40% of the country is actively destroying this country trying to go back to a time that never existed because of their delusions about the past. The Necrokonicon falls into that category, too. The Vegas book and the journal book that nobody read were both quickie get-something-out experiments that failed.

That leaves Rumored and Atmospheres. Spoiler alert: both of those have sequels that are well underway. So there may be a tie-in rerelease of either or both, but there’s a combination of all of the above problems with them. Like I’ve been rereading Atmospheres a lot recently and there are some absolutely solid riffs in there that I love. And then there’s some borderline sexist diatribe or embarrassing scatalogical bit that does nothing for the story and is just “look at me! I’m crazy!” writing. I’ve actually paid an editor to proof both of those books and search out the typos, but I don’t know what to do about questionable content.

And case in point on all of this: I reissued Vol. 13 last fall. I did a quick editing pass, changed the ebook layout, and redesigned the cover. I don’t know how many hours I spent on the project, but it was not a quick job. Since then it has sold five copies. I make about two bucks a book. So the “you could just pay someone else to do it for you” argument sort of falls flat, as I’d probably sink a few hundred bucks into it and get back ten of it. And I’d be rolling the dice on getting a layout I’d actually like.

Bottom line: I’m writing a lot right now, and that’s the focus. So, more of that, right?

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Book, passports, stuff, writing

passportsI don’t usually talk about works in progress, but just a quick accountability note here to mention that I finished the first draft of my 18th book. This is more or less a spiritual continuation of The Failure Cascade, and is 20 stories, but almost three times longer. I’m moving past flash fiction and micro-fiction, maybe. I mean, there’s one story that’s roughly half the length of Failure Cascade. I don’t have any distance from the thing to say whether I like it or not, but John read a draft and he did. Completely unmarketable, but I’ll keep going on it after I catch a breath and see when I can publish it. It already has a title and a cover image. ChatGPT can write the book description and marketing crap better than I can. Those three things are always the biggest blockers on getting a book out the door.

I just realized that if I get this book out this year (and I’m not worried if I don’t) it will be four years since my last book. The longest gap before this was about 20 months between Summer Rain and Rumored to Exist. When I really got on the horse and changed around my writing schedule and cadence and work ethic in 2010, I had it in my head that I needed to publish at least a book a year because of the algorithm (or whatever) and I did that from 2010 to 2020, with two years that had two books. Now, whatever. I have been writing more and changed around my schedule to make that happen. But I’m writing for me, not for a calendar or an algorithm. I’d like to get the long list of half-done projects out the door, but I don’t care how they sell.

* * *

I also don’t talk about future travel plans, but it’s time to get out of the country again, and time to renew my passport, while I still can. I was trying to book something this morning and realized this one’s expiring less than six months from when I’m leaving. Pretty much every country has a requirement that you have six months on your passport in case you end up in a coma in a hospital or whatever. Five and a half months left is not close enough according to an airline computer, so it’s time to figure this out.

It’s always oddly bittersweet when I do this. First, this will be the last passport when I have hair. Second, there was a six-year gap from the first stamp to the second. Lots of blank pages I wish I would have filled. This one has stamps from 20 countries, which is way more than the last one. (I think that had four or five.) This one also has three visas, including a work visa, which is new to me.

I honestly don’t know how much I will travel in the future. I think it’s going to become a lot more difficult, impractical, and expensive to travel internationally. And I’m not exactly enthused about spending my tourist dollars in a large chunk of the country. I really should spend more time in California, because there’s a lot of it I haven’t seen. There are nine national parks in California, and I’ve hiked exactly zero of them. Time to look into that.

* * *

I don’t talk about politics here, and it’s hard not to. There’s a lot of dismay and there’s a lot I can’t do about the situation. For my own mental health, I feel a great need to distance myself from it and focus on what I can do. I also don’t talk about work here, but I think the best I can do is to continue to manage and mentor people, try to grow my company and my little corner of Silicon Valley, and continue to support who I can. I grew up working retail and dumb jobs in the middle of the country, and was lucky to find a way out and get a real job and benefits and live in a beautiful place. I’ll stay here while I can. When I can’t, I’ll leave. I’m fortunate enough to have options, but I love it in California.

I think one other thing is I need to take a big step back from the news/terror cycle and redouble my efforts on writing. I’ve already had serious questions about my social media use, and this pretty much sealed the deal for me. I spent far too much time doom-scrolling in Reddit, and I can’t anymore. My last news source was the New York Times, and I cancelled my subscription (even though I get it free through Amex) because of obvious reasons a few months ago. Twitter got nuked a year ago, not that I ever used it.

I’ve given up on Substack. It’s become a political doom and gloom circle-jerk, but more than that, I don’t know what to post there. I feel like any writing I’m not doing for a book or for work should be here. I thought about having some system where I blogged here and mirrored it there, but it was too much work and I don’t really see the benefit. A lot of the writing content on Substack is either of the “look at me” or “make money fast” variety, and I care about neither.

At this point, my two biggest social media vices are Tik-Tok and Tumblr. I don’t do much content creation on Tik-Tok, and I have only two or three friends on there, but it’s fairly easy to push the algorithm away from the bad and just waste time watching people pressure-wash driveways or travel in weird places. I also don’t do much creation and have no friends on Tumblr, but I like it because I don’t even think the people working at Tumblr are aware it’s still operational. Because I don’t create and I don’t use my real name, I don’t chase likes and follows or look at numbers. That’s what’s good for me.

Same goes here. I have no idea how many people read this, and I have no need to “grow” things here. I’ll just keep on keeping on.

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Speed, funnels, writing

A few vague thoughts on blogging and such on a lazy Sunday, which seems to be the only day I can ever pay attention to this thing.

I keep thinking about what I want to do here and how this blog should evolve (or whatever.) I sometimes think the big retirement project should be a grand reunification of all my content everywhere, into a giant meta-site of sorts, where one could see a mass of texts and books and pictures and videos and emails and whatever else, all poured into some giant Project Xanadu-esque thing. This is obviously something well beyond the ability of WordPress, because it can barely handle what I’ve got going here already.

Anyway, one of the bummers about this blog has been performance. I started using Pair to host this thing last century, and while they’ve always been rock-solid, they’ve also been somewhat dated in their offerings and tools. I mean, when I thought I needed to move from WordPress to some thing I wrote in Rails or whatever, I basically found it impossible to do anything except PHP unless I moved up a level or two on my package. Lately, I’ve been discouraged by the general performance and the fact that I have no CDN and this thing is hosted in Pittsburgh.

To be fair, it’s hard to tell if my site’s performance is because of my connection, the server I pay for, WordPress, my configuration of WordPress, or the sheer size of this thing. I’ve been looking with the P3 Plugin Profiler on the back end, and PageSpeed Insights on the front. I’ve messed around with the plugin config and switched SEO plugins, and that bought me about a half-second on page loads. I have no idea on how any of this works, but the general advice, in order, is to shell out for a good host, shell out for a CDN, look at your image situation, cut down the number of plugins, and cut down as much CSS stuff as you can. I think there are little tricks that could get this working slightly better, like switching themes, moving my archives links to another page, building my WP statically and hosting that in a CDN, or maybe finally giving up on WP and moving to Hugo or Jekyll or something else. I vaguely looked at moving to Ghost or moving to a hosted WP instance in Lightsail. The former was too limiting and the latter didn’t buy me much performance. It’s silly for me to waste time on this with the low amount of traffic this thing sees, but it’s an itch that’s hard to stop scratching.

The other thing I keep thinking of is funnels. How do people read this? How do they find it? Why do they stay? How do they come back? I don’t really market this thing at all, and I don’t fit any niche box that would make this go viral or get regular traffic. This is mostly me screaming into the void and hoping I can come back later and find something.

It makes me think back to the days of things like web rings and having a big list of favorite blogs on a page to find others and whatever else we used to do. This thing has an RSS feed, but it seems like nobody uses RSS anymore. I still use Feedly to read stuff, but everyone except three blogs have abandoned it. Is this because Google Reader is dead and nobody uses it, or is there some other reason like people “steal” content from feeds? No idea.

I think changes in the Google algorithm have made blogging organic content for the sake of organic content a lost cause. Twenty years ago, I could search for people involved in some niche hobby and find actual people, but now I just get travel links and shoe ads. I guess the big funnels are social media, but I don’t know that people leave their respective walled garden to go elsewhere and read content. And I can’t really post this stuff on TikTok or something. I guess if I had really snappy pull quotes, I could take just the text of that and put it over a video of a beach and play five seconds of a Taylor Swift song over it and people might see it. But not only is that work, it’s also stupid. I also keep thinking about how I’ve done mostly nothing with Substack, and maybe I should be pouring this stuff into that so people find it. Or not? I don’t know.

So, funnels. It’s an open question. I don’t know how I find content myself, let alone what others do.

The other big blocker here is I am far too busy with my own writing, and in deep on a project. I’m trying to finish the 18th book, or what I think might be the 18th. This thing originally started as a collection of short stories like The Failure Cascade, but it’s now almost as long as my second-longest book and will probably surpass it very soon. I’m trying to land this one by the end of the year, but every time I wrap up some little missing thing, I leave notes on three others. I think back in August, I thought I’d get this thing wrapped up by the first of September. Now we’re going into the back half of October, and I’m hoping December. Not a big deal if it’s not.

Starting in 2010, I forced myself to release at least a book a year, and got two on many of those years. It was one of those dumb self-publishing rules I thought I had to do, get something out to keep the long tail long, keep myself relevant, whatever. I now see no importance in that. I think I had a deep fear that if I missed a year, I’d miss two years, and then I’d wake up a decade later and wonder what happened.

I feel like I did that after Rumored was released – I did little things here and there, but I feel like the 00s were basically a lost decade for me. And I regret that, but I think the twist is that if I’d been productively writing that whole time, even without releasing anything, I would have been content with my output. And 2021-2023 were a wash for me, but I’ve kept busy this year, and that’s all that matters.

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Sunday

Lazy Sunday and I have not updated in a while. I’d normally do some giant bulleted list, but I’m out of bullets, so I’ll just ramble for a bit.

The main reason I haven’t updated is because I’ve been busy writing. After almost two years of trying to write and failing, I decided to shift my writing hours. Since 2010 when I started working from home on east coast time, I would write religiously from 3 to 5 PM. This started to fall apart when my work started shifting to the west coast office, and eventually, I found myself either working from 6 to 6 every day, or finishing early and being in a complete daze, unable to write. Moving to the hybrid schedule and being in the city half the time also made this schedule impossible. So, I decided on the early shift. I started waking up at 3:45 every morning, and writing until 7. It takes a minute to get my head on straight every morning, and I’m usually blacking out at about 7 or 8 at night. But it’s been very productive with the writing. It’s good to completely block out everything and spend the time in the shower thinking about the writing, then brain dump it all for a few hours, and start the work day relaxed, knowing the writing is done for the day.

* * *

I don’t like to talk too much about works in progress, especially because my hard drive is littered with projects that never did and probably never will see the light of day. But the current one is a book of 20 stories, maybe a sort of successor to The Failure Cascade and Vol. 13. The main difference is that it’s much longer; it’s currently twice as long as Failure Cascade and not done yet. Most of my books were flash fiction, maybe what’s called a short-short story, between a thousand and two thousand words. FC had one story that was 5,000 words. This book has maybe five stories that long; one is three times that long. There’s still a lot of abstraction to the stories and it’s definitely not Raymond Carver or something. I don’t know if this is at all interesting to the reader, but I’ve enjoyed stretching things out a bit. The book has a title and a cover, which is a new one for me; I usually wait until the thing is 90% done (or more) and then freak out about what to do about that. I’d like to wrap this up by the end of the year, but I’m not too worried if that doesn’t happen.

* * *

Something else I’ve been doing is a slight variation on the Richard Feynman method of “favorite problems.” His method was to come up with a list of a dozen big-picture problems he wanted to solve in his lifetime. Then, as he found new lessons, new sources, new information, or new inspiration, he’d take that and see how it applied to these open questions.

I’ve been bouncing around between projects too much, and have too many dead manuscripts and morgue files of pieces and parts lying around. So I started a list. And right now, half of the dozen and a half things I have on my list are dealing with reissues of old books (or not), but roughly eight of them are full-sized book projects. Aside from the aforementioned book, two others are 100,000+ word manuscripts that are past the first draft point, but in heavy disrepair. I still have this idea for “The Big Book” which is vaguely outlined and would be a 400,000-word, four-story novel that covers a few disparate things that all weave together perfectly by the end. I have a nostalgia book about the 90s (although I’m done with nostalgia) and there’s enough travel junk here to make a book or two, but I’m not interested in either.

Anyway, the method has been useful, because when I stall out on something, I go to the next thing on the list that interests me, or I start digging through the few million words I have in these various junk files and see what can be harvested for what.

* * *

Something that’s not on the list is what to do with this and with all my other social media or whatever. I have a professional blog I haven’t touched since I posted about my MBA two years ago. I have the KonStack, which is largely dormant because I can’t figure out what goes there versus what goes here.

There are three basic problems, not to go into a diatribe about this:

  1. Each different content pool has a different persona, and trying to focus on what I should be writing in each different place brings out this crippling self-censorship which totally blocks me.
  2. The content pools have a certain overlap and I never know what to put where. Like when I take a nifty picture, does it go to Instagram? Do I use it as a heading here? Is it part of a Substack post? Do I need to go back to Flickr?
  3. There are various dumb rules and requirements and problems that set exceptions to each pool. For example, this blog is public. I can assume that it’s being read by family members who I don’t want to read my stuff, and I have to limit what I say here. I have a completely locked down Facebook group where I post the most obscene or crazy memes and thoughts, but it only reaches a maximum of 40 people. Nobody looks at Flickr, ever. Certain stuff is only going into books, so I don’t want to burn it on posts and then have someone who buys the book realize they already read 37% of it months ago.

Etc. The real solution is to write what I want and not dictate what I do by what works for the algorithm or what other people expect or want or do. That’s what I’ve been doing, but it obviously means I do a lot less here and on other sites.

* * *

I think travel is about done for the year. I had this wise idea that I was going to leave the country the week of the election, and blocked the time off. Then a couple of weeks ago, I threw my back out in probably the worst episode imaginable, and it completely immobilized me for almost a week. I spent about four days on the couch, unable to even sit up.  My back often goes out after flying halfway around the world, and it’s been getting increasingly worse. In Vietnam, I was completely immobile for the first morning I was in Saigon, and thought I was in serious trouble.

Now I’m starting to doubt my ability to take such long trips anymore. My back is mostly better now, maybe 90%. But I’m in food jail until further notice, so I can get some of this weight off my lower spine. And I’ll do whatever stretches and exercises they give me to do. Flying to Europe or whatever next month is out of the question. We might have some holiday travel, but that sort of depends on what happens next month, and I don’t want to get into that.

* * *

I fired the con artist dentist who did my Invisalign earlier this year. When I got it taken off, he did a half-ass job getting the attachments off, and then started in on me about how I needed four crowns redone immediately, at a cost of five grand each. The last crown I had done was like $1800, and insurance picked up half of it. So, done. I went back to my old dentist, who is in a dead mall just south of where we used to live in South San Francisco. He did a few x-rays and said I needed a hundred-dollar filling at the root line of a back crown, and he polished off one of my front teeth that had the remainder of an attachment button on it, which was driving me nuts. I love this guy, and I know it’s only a matter of time before the mall is imploded and he retires, but I’ll keep going back to him until then.

It’s always weird to be back in the old neighborhood, and it gives me such 2008-2009 flashbacks. But it’s also changing very quickly, and a lot of what used to be car washes and fast-food joints on El Camino have quickly become vast 5-over-1 apartment buildings. Parts of the strip are the same, but others are radically different now. I decided to stop for lunch at an old favorite, which really hit the spot. The weather was perfect, and this was the first I’d left the house since the back incident.

I went to this low-key Mexican bar and grill, an unassuming brick building with a big hand-painted Fifties-looking sign and a horse statue on the roof, and a mural on the brick wall that just said “RESTAURANT – BAR.” Inside, two old guys nursed drinks at the bar, locked into a soccer game on the screen. A Mexican family were just finishing up lunch, but I otherwise had the place to myself. Aside from the TVs and the credit card machine, the inside of that restaurant could have been 1961 or 1979 or 2008. I got an incredibly good chimichanga plate for twenty bucks, a food jail furlough. I need to do that more often, instead of just shame-eating twenty bucks of Crunchwrap in my car. It was incredibly relaxing, as was the walk to my car and back.

Anyway. Time to reset for the week and avoid the Sunday Scaries.

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Vol.13, Revisited

Vol.13 rides again. I’ve revisited and republished my 13th book from 2016.

Let’s cut to the chase with the Amazon link: https://amzn.to/4e81lyi

For those who don’t remember, this was a book of 20 short stories and flash fiction pieces. It included two things that were in other zines, and three stories that were in my own zine, Mandatory Laxative #14.

Let’s ask the KonGPT what it was about:

Vol. 13 by Jon Konrath is an eclectic, absurdist work that blends surreal humor with societal satire. The collection of short stories and essays addresses a wide array of random yet often connected topics, including pop culture, existential musings, and sharp critiques of consumerism and modern life. With chapter titles like “Mariah Carey Is Punk as Fuck” and “The Kansas City Tofu Firebombing,” the content explores bizarre scenarios filled with dark humor. The chaotic narrative jumps from one vignette to the next, portraying a disjointed, almost hallucinogenic journey through a world where everything is skewed to the point of absurdity.

Konrath’s writing style is frenetic, with a voice that mixes cynicism and wit while layering in cultural references ranging from fast food chains to forgotten celebrities. The underlying tone is rebellious, subversive, and at times grotesque, capturing the disillusionment with American culture in the early 21st century. The stories invite the reader to experience a twisted version of reality where logic breaks down, leaving behind a vivid, often unsettling commentary on the absurdities of daily life .

As I did with The Failure Cascade and Book of Dreams, this re-visit involved a quick edit to fix minor typos. If you already own the book, you’re not getting any new content here, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find some questionable use of commas quashed. This publication was mostly a long-tail effort to get old writing back out there.

The original cover was a play on the Black Sabbath album Vol.4. Back in 2016, I labored to get the font and the look of it right. The curse was the use of “The Picture” which seemed like a good idea at the time, the height of that dumb meme. I won’t get into the exact details, but that meme is dead and I’m scrubbing it from everything possible. There was something great about having a piece of branding like that, but it also very firmly painted me in a corner persona-wise, and I’m happy to abandon it. I like the new cover a lot, and it was neat to make. Finding an icon for each story was a fun project. Is it weird to have this book sort of named after the Black Sabbath album and not have the cover? Whatever.

I previously said I like Book of Dreams like 95% and Failure Cascade maybe 75%. I would honestly say I like Vol.13 maybe 80%. There are a few cringe bits here, and I do fall into some of the same Konrath tropes that I repeat far too much. (Me and Fat Mike go to the 7-Eleven; someone babbling about something at a fast-food restaurant; I’m at a Kroger talking to some weirdo; a military strike in everyday life.) There are certain callbacks that I used to make as part of my “brand” that have been driven into the ground that I can’t erase: Mariah Carey, Lunchables, NyQuil, etc. I’m done (or trying to be done) with writing like that, but I can’t erase all of it.

There are some stories in here that I absolutely love. “The Metaphor of Poundcake” is one of my favorite stories ever, and has two threads that weave together perfectly. “#JustKilldozerThings” has some absolutely fabulous lines and exchanges in it. While most of my flash fiction hovers around 1000 words in this era, there are a lot of stories that stretch out for two or three times that. It’s similar to Failure Cascade (and my next book) in that the stories almost get too long to be flash, but still feel like exactly the right balance between punchiness and story.

Anyway, there it is. Now, on to the next one.

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30

Today is an anniversary of sorts. Thirty years ago today, I decided to be a writer, decided to “identify” as a writer, started calling myself a writer. Actually, I probably didn’t put those words together on October 30th, 1993, and I definitely did not put my occupation as a writer on a 1040 form until at least a a few years later. But today was the day this whole thing really started.

I’ve told the story before, in different permutations, different mixes of fact and fiction, enough that I don’t even know what is real anymore, what I would tell someone if I had to. I mean, I’ve always been a writer to some extent, even if I didn’t know it. I had a poem published when I was in grade school; I wrote a lot of short stories and papers and whatnot when I was in high school and college. I’d already published zines by that fall, written stuff in other zines, and put thousands and thousands of words into USENET posts and forums. I’d even published a story in a university newspaper at that point. But I’d never thought of myself as a writer, never considered it as a vocation, a career, or even a hobby. I always thought, “Someday I will write a book” but never put any more thought into it than that.

The actual story of how this started is somewhat trite and stereotypical. I was struggling in a deep depression in the fall of 1993 — that year, really — and had been abandoned by someone I trusted. And sure, it was all my fault, but it was at a key junction in my life when a maelstrom of shit was falling down on me. I’d been kicked out of school and was on probation; I was unable to continue in the computer science department; I’d lost the scholarship that was paying my tuition; I wasn’t sure what I was going to do for a degree anymore. Most of my friends were graduating, getting jobs, getting married, moving away. I was stuck, didn’t know what was next.

The abandonment thing, I won’t get too into that. I was in this relationship that I got far too invested in, and I messed it up, and she left. I’ve blamed myself for it for decades, and then recently, I read a lot about attachment anxiety and adult attachment theory and realized the fix was in decades before I met this person, and my problems go back much further than 1993, and I really can’t get into any of that in the scope of this dumb little story. Short story long, I was very damaged on October 30, 1993, and I desperately needed to find some way out.

* * *

In 1993, I lived at Colonial Crest apartments in Bloomington. (They no longer exist.) I did not have a car. I had a city bus pass, but the bus line was all screwy and didn’t run at night, so I walked, a lot. My apartment was 1.3 miles to the 17th Street office of UCS where I worked a few days a week. It was 2.2 miles to Ballantine Hall, more or less the center of campus. At the very least, I’d walk about two hours a day, every day. I would listen to a tape walkman for all of these walks, plus whenever I was sitting around campus, working on a computer, whatever. And I was spending a lot of time sitting around campus, because I’d have a class, then have 90 minutes of down time until the next class, half an hour in the student union, 20 minutes waiting for a computer, an hour eating Pizza Hut Express, whatever.

The gist of this: I spent a lot of time alone, in my head, beating myself up, in three different ways: long walks, dead time in public places, and of course the hours and hours I spent in front of computers, screwing around on the immediately-pre-web Internet. I needed some way to not do that, or do something productive with that time, and through strange kismet, this sort of fell into place.

Once again, this is horribly cliché, but my friend Ray told me I should check out the spoken word albums of Henry Rollins, who had not yet recorded “Liar” and shown up on Beavis and Butthead, but aside from the post-Black Flag Rollins Band, he was about six albums deep into the spoken word racket, and had published maybe twenty books or chapbooks. So a few days after the 30th, I bought The Boxed Life, a two-tape album of his spoken word and started walking and listening to it, memorizing it.

The whole thing seems stupid now. I think there are various machismo stereotypical male idols that men of my age back then latch onto, be it Charles Hemingway or Charles Bukowski or Joe Rogan or whoever else. In one sense, it almost pains me that I got so wound up with this thing. But I felt like I had nothing, no direction, and there were far worse things to get tangled up with. Even mentioning the male loneliness epidemic pisses about 50% of the population off, but there is a real phenomenon of early twenty-somethings not knowing what to do with their life, and turning to whatever idiot has the biggest mouth. Nobody has fathers; nobody can open up to male friends. So you’re going to have guys who get in that rut who suddenly find a Doors record and lock into Jim Morrison and start wearing leather pants and writing shitty poetry. It happens.

At some point, I thought, “Hey, this Rollins guy just talks about what happens to him and writes it in notebooks. I should get a notebook.” So I got a notebook, and I started writing in it, in those weird little gaps of time in my day, journaling from lunch or at a bus stop or late at night. I also hunted down all the Rollins books. I wasn’t a book collector at that time, and would maybe passively read a non-computer book a few times a year. But I read his stuff, then read everything he referenced: Henry Miller, Bukowski, Fante, Burroughs. That got me into the beats, which got me into postmodern fiction, which got me to experimental, which got me to a room full of books. I started hoarding, reading constantly. I’m embarrassed by my early influences, but they got me to my later influences, so what can you do.

* * *

The little 80-sheet notebook I bought at the campus book store for $1.39 turned into several journals, which turned into short stories, one of which became the start of my first book. I never healed the wound, but I filled the void. That particular relationship did not heal for years, but I now realize that it wasn’t the hole from the missing person, but a hole in my soul that existed since birth. She was just a symptom of the problem.

I wrote. I wrote badly, but it slowly got better. I slowly got better. I mean, I never got “better” like I was somehow cured. It took me years to stop thinking about her every hour of every day, how I was betrayed, how it was all my fault. It is mostly gone, and I can’t even remember what her voice sounds like. But last night I had a nightmare about her, woke up at 3:30 AM with my fight-or-flight fully triggered, didn’t even try to go back to bed and got up and hit the shower to start my day. There have been a half-dozen people who have done far worse to me since, and maybe the dream was about one of them. Anyway, writing was the one constant. It got me past this, until it didn’t.

* * *

The writing continued until 2021, when it stopped. There are a lot of threads to this story that recur: the wound, the loneliness, abandonment, frustration, emptiness, defeat. In 2021, I tried to tell myself I was no longer a writer, because the pain and frustration of my writing “career” caught up to me and I simply could not write anymore. So I quit writing, said I wasn’t a writer. The void remained. Nothing could fill it. Believe me, I tried everything. Nothing worked.

So, I came back. I think. Did I? Am I still a writer? Am I writing now? The void still remains, but maybe I’m making progress.

* * *

Bill James – the baseball statistics guy (you know, moneyball, Brad Pitt, whatever) – had a quote about writing that always stuck with me:

I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.

I always felt that I fell into writing because of that, because of my ability to get lost in words, in absence of being able to get lost in people. My frustration with love and life drove me to a universe of communication in a much deeper format. I don’t know what I’m doing now with writing, or what will come next, or what I need to do. But I know that it all started when I fell into this exactly thirty years ago today.

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Zine(s)

I published another zine last week. It’s a bit of a throwaway thing, an experiment, an attempt to get back to writing. I deliberately did not make this something I would try to sell or distribute. I wanted to focus solely on writing and producing something that would take my focus and time. If my writing was running and this was a couch-to-marathon thing, this zine was like getting off the couch and walking around the block. And it worked well.

I like making zines. I think one of my biggest distractions with writing is focusing too much on what sells, what people want, what’s expected of a book. Also, working on a book takes forever and I don’t get feedback until sometimes years after I write something. Making zines just for the sake of making zines alleviates both of these. Back when I first got free access to photocopiers at my corporate job in 1995, I started Air in the Paragraph Line so I could copy dumb stories and mail them for free to a dozen or two friends. I didn’t care about the layout or the format or anything else, because I wasn’t trying to get stuff in Barnes and Noble. At the apex of this, I was putting out a zine every month, and I loved doing that. I would drop off a big box of envelopes at the PO, and within a week, people were emailing me, telling me what they liked.

Another reason I love zines is they are tactile, physical objects. There’s something about getting a zine in the mail, opening the envelope, holding the little booklet in your hands. There’s a certain joy in paginating a stack of copied pages into individual bodies, folding them in half, stapling them, counting up the number you made, stacking them up and getting them ready to stuff into envelopes. I’ve messed with e-zines and posting PDFs and whatnot, and it’s just not the same. Creating a newletter on Substack or writing a blog like this is its own thing. Reading a physical book is another. And it’s even better when you’re holding an object that you know the author held, folded, stapled, ran their fingers over the spine. It’s a direct connection between author and reader.

So, back on the horse. I couldn’t find my long-arm stapler, but I did find my (fake) bone folder to fold pages in half. I did the layout in Apple Pages this time, laid it out in portrait and pasted in a bunch of crazy graphics as backgrounds and asides, mostly screenshots taken from badly scanned PDFs on the FBI’s FOIA page, things about UFOs and cattle mutilations and how to build fallout shelters and perform tracheotomies on the battlefield. I spent a lot of time messing around with that stuff and it was a lot of fun. It reminded me of the time me and Ray messed around in Photoshop 1.0 when it first came out, in the Mac lab in the Fine Arts building at IU. They had these Mac IIfx machines (“wicked fast!”) loaded up with an insane amount of RAM, dual monitors, color printers, drawing tablets, Sytek drives, and everything else. We spent a few hours just chopping up Anne Geddes pictures of babies, and it was an overwhelming amount of joy just working on nothing, playing and having fun.

Some of the writing in this zine was old stuff from automatic writing going back to 2016. I think one of the pieces was something cut from Atmospheres in 2014 during the final edits. The actual writing was more of an afterthought. 5000-some words, 20 pages, double-sided and folded in half. I’m not selling these; maybe if I do a few more (and that’s the plan), I will bundle them up in a book. That’s not the point. It’s not about selling it. Hell, my name isn’t even on the front cover. It’s just about creating.

* * *

Pro tip: I don’t know when this happened, but Adobe made it much easier to print stuff like this. I used to have a labored process of laying out folded-in-half booklets, where the first landscape page for a 20-page zine would have page 20 and page 1, and the flipside would have page 2 and page 19, and so on. Huge pain. Now I can make a PDF that’s in portrait orientation, pages 1-20 in that order. Acrobat will turn them sideways, shrink them down, and paginate them so it’s 20-1, 2-19, 18-3, etc.

There’s a trick to this, though. If you shrink down 8.5×11 pages, the trim will be all off. So anyway, here’s what I did. (Note that this assumes you have a real printer to print the master.)

  1. When you do your initial layout, make a custom page size with no margins. File > Page Setup, I made one called “half-letter” that was 7.14 by 11 inches. (My math may be slightly off there.)
  2. Write the zine. Make sure your number of pages are a multiple of four.
  3. Print to PDF, double-sided and make sure scaling is shut off.
  4. Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader (not Preview.app or some other knockoff PDF reader.)
  5. File > Print.
  6. In Page Sizing & Handling, select Booklet.
  7. I think all the default settings will be right. You can flip through the pages in the preview to the right, although the preview sometimes looks junky. (For me, I had Booklet subset on “both sides” and Binding as “left.”

My right margin on odd pages was a bit truncated, so maybe that’s my math. Also I could not figure out how to print to PDF with this feature. https://github.com/rodyager/RWTS-PDFwriter might do this for you, but I haven’t tried it.

Oh, and if you’re on a Mac, Apple Pages has a mode called Page Layout mode. Instead of working like MS Word (ugh) it behaves more like Pagemaker used to, where you put in text flows and hook them together and resize them, and it shows at the end of a flow if there’s more text and you need to add another column or box or resize things. Back in 1993, I did Xenocide 5 in Aldus Pagemaker 4.0, which was the gold standard for desktop publishing back then, and was absolutely amazing in a world where a lot of people in the labs where I worked were still on the cyan-screened Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS. It’s a great memory to be back to juggling colums and placing images behind them.

* * *

Also, programming note that this page is back, with a list of everything I’ve written. It has the awkward issue that many of the things on there are not currently published. I’m working on it. But I’m currently at the start of another writing project which I can’t talk about, but I’m excited to start actually writing again. I’m off the couch, but I’m still walking.

Oh, and if you read this far and you didn’t get a zine, drop a line and send me your address. I’ve only got a couple left, but if not this, I’ll send the next one.

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Catsup, ketchup, catch-up

I felt a need to write a catch-up on all the various things that went on in the last few months, but immediately went on a tangent about whether or not the tomato-based condiment is named catsup or ketchup. I think it’s with a k, and maybe it used to be mostly with a c in the US, until Heinz changed the name of theirs to the k spelling a century and a half ago. I guess I can remember this with the mnemonic that it’s k and my last name is k.

* * *

OK, so catch-up.

I feel like I’ve lost the first seven months of this year on stupid stuff. I wrote about the two big trips — Iceland and India — although I haven’t posted photos from either. Maybe I’ll get that done at some point, although I’m fairly convinced nobody looks at Flickr. Maybe I’ll make a book, although Blurb takes forever and just raised their prices. Charging a dollar a page for a pocket book is highway robbery. Anyway. Another big trip coming up, and I’ll write more about that later.

Working in San Francisco has been good. The bike thing didn’t really happen. I drive or Uber to the train station, and take the BART one stop, under the water and straight to the financial district. The whole thing is a relatively painless 30 minutes door to door. They feed us, so I seldom leave the building and don’t really have an idea of what’s around. If there’s not food that day, I usually end up at Super Duper, which is a block away. A couple of times I’ve walked a loop down to the ferry terminal and back, which is a decent stroll. I should get out and explore the area more, maybe take some pictures. I should do a lot of things, though.

* * *

When S worked for Smucker, she would sometimes have to travel out to their home office in Orrville, Ohio. Their HQ has a store in it, where you can get t-shirts and socks and other swag, plus the company’s products. And a weird easter egg is that the store sells Smucker’s ketchup, which isn’t available in retail stores. She brought back a jar a few times, and it’s actually really good ketchup. It has a slightly sweeter taste, and comes in a fancy wide-mouth glass jar, probably the same one they use for jelly.

They also have a thing where they will print your picture on the label of a jelly jar. It won’t let you change the slogan below it to a custom string, except to a stock set of choices like “happy birthday” or whatever. Because presentations were the bane of her existence at that job, I wanted to get a jar with the PowerPoint logo on it, and the slogan “PowerPoint is my jam!” I guess I could DIY it, but she left that job a year ago, so never mind.

* * *

In addition to that Flickr rant above, I have no idea what I’m doing with photography. I shot a bunch of film in Iceland, and was unhappy with the results. I have little motivation to go out and take more pictures of the same three things I see on a weekly basis. I bought that Sony a6400 for the India trip, and took maybe a hundred photos there, none good. I really struggled with getting good shots and exposure, and there’s something insanely unsatisfying about using a mirrorless camera. Anyway, the more pictures I take, the worse I feel I’m doing. It’s a struggle, and it’s not bringing me much joy.

Oh, and that drone I bought at the end of 2020 and haven’t touched in forever – turns out it will be illegal to fly next month, because it does not comply with the new Remote ID rules. There are rumors of a firmware update, but they are just rumors. And even if it is fixed, there is still the Karen situation that makes it hard to fly these days.

* * *

For some reason, India was obsessed with ketchup. Maybe obsessed isn’t the right word, but I went to Pizza Hut, got a personal pan pizza, and they gave me a bottle of ketchup with it. I went to a Taco Bell, got a quesadilla and nachos, and was given a bottle of ketchup. I don’t know if it’s a thing to slather ketchup on a taco in India, or just saw a big overweight white American ordering fast food and assumed I needed a quart of ketchup.

I don’t know what brand of Ketchup McDonald’s India used; it was MCD-labeled. I know in the US, they changed from Heinz to their own brand in 2013 when Heinz was acquired by a former Burger King CEO. Burger King India used a ketchup by Veeba. Taco Bell used Del Monte ketchup. Pizza Hut used a brand called “Dr. Oetker Funfoods.” I did not use the ketchup at Pizza Hut, but the food made me horrifically sick. The crust and sauce of the personal pan pizza tasted about right. The pepperoni was way off. It could have been the lack of beef; it could have been spiced differently. Anyway, I’m off Pizza Hut for a while now.

McDonald’s tasted largely identical in India, aside from the lack of beef. Chicken McNuggets were identical, but there is no sweet and sour sauce, which is my go-to. I was forced to resort to barbecue. (Or is that barbeque?) I had a veggie burger once, and it’s like the old-school bean-based veggie burger, not Incredible or whatever fake meat. Oh, and they opened at 11:00, so breakfast didn’t start until then.

Taco Bell was weird. It was closer to Chipotle in trying to be more of a sit-down restaurant. No beef, again. I was also trying to actively avoid any lettuce, so no bean tacos. I ordered nachos, and the chips were the thicker, seasoned kind, and it was served with a mix of tomatoes and uncooked onions on the top, the cheese already applied. Completely unacceptable. (I got it no vegetables the second time, but the cheese was already pre-applied, which I hate. Too much cheese on the top chips, none on the bottom.) The quesadilla was okay, but nobody could pronounce it. They say the “dill” part like the name of the herb, Napoleon Dynamite-style. The cashier tried to correct me, and I told her I worked at a Taco Bell before her father was born. Despite my white-bread Indiana upbringing, I know how to say quesadilla.

I only went to Burger King once in the morning with an uneasy stomach in search of a hash brown, a plain white potato and grease rectangle of salvation. The hash brown was actually sort of spicy, like an aloo chop. It wasn’t bad, but in the context of needing grease and blandness to absorb the rumbling of my stomach, it was slightly offputting.

I did not go to KFC. I saw a Buffalo Wild Wings, which threw me for a loop college nostalgia-wise. Didn’t go in. Not a big fan of finger food anymore.

* * *

I am back writing. Or maybe that’s a question. I am back writing? This is probably the topic of a bigger post, or a series of them. One of my tasks is to keep typing here. The other is to pull some of the other books out of retirement, maybe freshened up. Two are back, as I’ve previously mentioned. I have a few other ideas. We’ll see.

I have no idea how to sell books now. I’ll put them on KDP, but I have no idea how to tell people, and no clue on how to “brand” myself, especially because I do not want to write the kind of stuff I was writing, and I hate the persona I was trying to sell a few years ago. (No advice, please.)

There’s also a little social media rant I could go off on here, or not. I radically cut down my social media time after Iceland, and disconnected or deleted everything entirely in like May, went cold turkey for weeks. I was down to just Reddit, and then all of Reddit went dark. I’m partly back now, although Twitter is done done and deleted. I got on Threads for two seconds, and there’s not enough Xanax in the world for me to even try. I hate to be one of those people who acts like they are above social media because they have such rich social lives in real life. I’ve been online for 34 years this month, and I’m not going to pretend. But I’ve had some serious problems online in the last six months, and have no idea how to really reconcile that. Blogging might be what I need. Nobody reads this, so it’s perfect.

* * *

I can’t think of any ketchup-related anecdotes about Iceland. I think most of the times I got french fries, they came with some esoteric mayo-based sauce, like an aioli. Oh, the one time I had a hot dog (which you have to do there at Bæjarins Beztu), it had ketchup, but it was a very sweet ketchup made with apples. The standard one-with-everything also has a remoulade and a very sweet mustard called pylsusinnep on it. The hot dogs are a mixture of lamb, pork, and beef. Very good stuff.

I had mixed feelings about Iceland when I was there, but it’s weird – now that I have some distance on it, the trip was truly profound to me, and exactly what I needed at that moment. Pardon me for being such an asshole with all these travel stories, but this was more than travel. Iceland was like an alternate universe for me, like a bizarro world. If you’re curious, go hunt down some of the work of Roni Horn, especially Island Zombie. That book is such a perfect description of how the desolation and solitude and viciousness of the island’s climate and terrain are a meditation on presence. I love that book and it makes me want to go back. And there’s no “but” in that, like “I want to go back but take two weeks” or “rent a camper” or “go when the weather is better.” Honestly, I want to go when the weather is worse.

I have such a clear memory, like one of those memories that I will have for the rest of my lifetime, of sitting at the top of Bjarnarfoss, after spending an hour climbing up there and then falling. It was way too cold and I was dressed wrong, and I honestly wasn’t sure if I broke my leg or not. And I was trying to calm myself down, and figure out how to get back down on one leg, and I sat in the mud at the top of this mountain ridge, looking out over all of Snæfellsjökull and the ocean, and being the only person there for miles and miles in every direction, completely alone, everything silent except for the melting snow and ice of this waterfall. Everything in my mind shifted, and I wish I had a word better than “profound” to describe this, but it was almost overwhelming how serene and deep the experience was. I have to go back. I will.

But that’s not the trip this month. Stay tuned on that.