Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Revisiting old lit

“I wanna feel destruction
I wanna feel extinction”

Sorry, listening to Henry Rollins.

I’ve been trying to write a biography of my life for a while. It’s not like a memoirs or anything, just a few dozen pages that tell what happened to me from birth to present. Right now, I’m up to the beginning of 1992, and each year is taking progressively longer to write. It’s essentially a worthless exercise, but it’s keeping me busy. I’d rather be writing on something nobody will see than watching TV.

I read a book called Haunted, a kid’s book from maybe the 4th or 5th grade. It only took me an hour to read the whole thing. I found it at my mom’s house last Xmas, buried with a bunch of my old junk in the basement. I tried to snag all the books I could, including a 1972 encyclopedia I shipped back to Seattle via UPS, because I knew everything would end up at a garage sale or in the trash when my mom tried to sell the place. Anyway, this book was about two boys who had to housesit in the middle of nowhere, at a place where some old German guy shot his wife, the cat, and then himself. Anyway, it turned out that they were Nazis, and the house was in the wife’s name, and willed to some american nazi party, but it turns out she was really adopted and found out her real mom died in the camps, so she wanted to change the will, and Adolf plugged her. I remembered a few of the details in my mind, and wanted to see if I could pick up on anything I was clueless about as a 10 year old. It wasn’t as memorable a book as The Haunted Cove, another book I loved when I was a kid, but it was still fun to read. Maybe someday I’ll write a “young adult” title. Who knows.