I didn’t get much sleep last night, so I feel as creative as a Reagan-era tax document. I managed to get some writing done last night, and it’s a really weird experience. Right now, I’m re-editing an old draft of my first book, and making edit marks with the intention of having others read them later. It’s truly weird, but the word count of this book is growing incredibly fast, because I’m slinging around parts of another book and importing them. This book was 100,000 words long before I even started.
I drank a bunch of this lethal iced tea I made on Sunday. I think I used way too much tea, like on the level that Indians used to mix with peyote during their tribal rituals. Side effects of this tea include nausea, vomiting, confusion, rapid breathing, body temperature fluctuation (+/- 12C), sleeplessness for the next week, and peripheral hallucinations. It also has strong diuretic properties, and tastes kindof like if they made a tobacco-flavored Kool Aid, and you mixed up two quarts of it with 17 cups of sugar. I made this stuff because I was too lazy to go to the store and get another 2-liter of something else. I learned my lesson – yet I’m still trying to finish off the pitcher.
Although I haven’t done anything about it, I’ve been thinking a lot lately on how I could redo my apartment to fit a bunch more junk in it, yet make it ultra-streamlined. I’m thinking along the lines of the apartment in The Fifth Element, where every square inch of the place would hide something. For example, I’m convinced I could cram twice as much stuff in my kitchen if I had some kind of all-out storage system. I don’t have a real, full-sized kitchen in the first place. It’s more like a kitchenette, like something you’d find in a dorm or a good hotel room. It has appliances that are mostly full-sized and everything, but it has like 9 square feet of counter space. I want all kinds of fold out storage racks inside and underneath everything. Shelves everywhere. Giant black anodized metal racks custom made to hold all of my CDs, tapes, VHS tapes, Hi8 tapes, floppies, QIC-80 backup cardriges, vinyl, MiniDiscs, and any other format I might stumble on in the near future. But it would all be hidden, or designed to look sleek. My apartment would like like a normal, toned down hotel room, but at the snap of my fingers, I could make a kick-ass stereo, a big TV, a minibar, and a thousand-book library appear out of nowhere.
I have an overwhelming urge to date a woman who works at Medieval Times. Confession of the day. I’m outa hare.
06/10/98 19:34
I’m eating breakfast for dinner. I was trying to figure out what to make, when it dawned on me that I had the perfect stuff for a kick-ass breakfast: scrambled egg beaters, toast, frozen french fries, and fresh-juiced grapefruit ala the juiceman. Good stuff.
More good stuff – I got Coltrane’s complete 1961 village vanguard recordings on a 4-CD set in the mail today. I’m still on disc one, but it’s some heavy duty shit. Original tapes, between-track talking and audience sound, 20-bit mastering, and some pretty slick packaging make this worth every penny. Now I need to get some blank MD to record this thing.
I can’t wait until they come out with some sort of recording device that hooks into your spine and lets you take a color capture of the image in your mind. I think a weird but cool think would be taking a picture of your mental image of someone from the computer before you met them, and then when you meet them, you could go “whoa – here’s what I thought you looked like” and show them the photo, and you could have a good laugh about it.
I thought about this because fellow writer Michael Stutz told me he had a weird dream about me the other night, moving to California because my house in Seattle was infested with cockroaches (or something – sorry if i paraphrazed too much there, Michael.) Anyway, this scenario comes up frequently for me with the whole computer deal – I’ve known so many people I’ve never met, and you pick up a mental image of people like that from the weirdest cues. I’m bad about picking up an image based on name – if a person has a name similar to a movie star or someone else I know, I’ll always associate the two. If I met a woman on the computer named Demi, I would think she looked like Demi Moore, even if she told me a thousand times that she was 5′-0, 240 lbs, with long, blonde hair and no breasts. I’d still think of G.I. Jane. Anyway, I’ve been pretty close in my predictions sometimes, and sometimes I’ve been WAY off, both in the good and the bad way. Either way, it’s fun.