Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

You know it’s going too far when you’re walking in a mall, trying to make yourself invisible.

I just got back from the VW mechanic, and I dropped off my screwed up parts and new parts, and he said he should get it all done in a couple of days for around $50. That’s not a great deal, but most mechanics would’ve laughed me out of their garage if I would’ve come in with the same problem.

I’m feeling sick to my stomach, and very tired today. The tired part has worn off now, but my stomach has been killing me. I tried going to bed early last night – I even opted to skip writing so I could be in bed by midnight. But I ended up tossing and turning for hours. Temperature is always a problem in my apartment. Heat rises, and I’m on the top floor, so it’s always too hot, but it’s easy to get the fans running and drop the temp so low that I instantly get a head cold. Finding a balance is a full-time job.

The bread in this sandwich is absolutely appaling. I think it has pieces of sawdust in it. I keep biting into pieces of what look like drill shavings, or what particleboard looks like when it’s just particles. I hate the bread department in the store. Why can’t they make bread like they use when you buy a sandwich at a deli or a restaurant? Like Denny’s bread, or McDonald’s buns. Instead you have white bread, horrible generic wheat bread, and a bunch of esoteric, worthless 17-million grain breads that all taste like white bread soaked in a carinogen. I need to find some better bread.

I spent part of yesterday recording myself on the MiniDisc. It sounds pretty good, and gave me an opportunity to talk to myself for an hour 15 minutes. It probably sounds like the tapes the army recorded of Col Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (“I saw a snail, walking on the edge of a razor…”) Maybe I will trade the tapes with other people into similar stuff. Audio journals. I like it.

Reading more about Burroughs in The Job. You know it’s going too far when you’re walking in a mall, trying to make yourself invisible.

06/22/98 21:26

It’s amazing that I remember all of the words to Megadeth albums I haven’t heard in 10 years, but I don’t remember anything from a college physics course that required 10 hours a day of slaving at the scientific calculator. And it’s even more amazing that I can now casually say “ten years ago…” and refer to a part of my memory that’s vaguely considered adulthood. In high school, ten years ago meant kindergarten.

I’m a salsa convert. I was never into the stuff before, but now I’m eating it on a regular basis. I forget what the deal was in the Seinfeld episode with salsa, but maybe that subliminally had something to do with it.

I read a bunch of online journals after work today, but I couldn’t find any that I really liked. The last thing I found that I liked was The Cyprian Virago, since Heidi seems about as stable as I am. I read a lot of other journals that didn’t do it for me, and I’m thinking of making up my page next April 1 so it redirects to a GeoCities site covered with animated GIFs, an HTML-calender, and a giant diatribe about how you shouldn’t read this site if you know me in real life. And then I’ll password protect it.

I thought I had a stream of thought, but I lost it reading a travel page. I wish I could hit the road forever, but I guess I’m stuck here for now. Seattle, a TV dinner, and an evening of not much else. I guess that’s OK, for now.