Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

9 CDs away from 500

I’ve been listening to this new live Dream Theater CD so much, I want to go out and buy a guitar or a drum set or something. But I know I’ll end up spending $400 on a guitar and within a week I’ll realize I don’t have the persistence to learn how to play the damn thing, and then I’ll sell it for $200. So I’d rather just cut to the chase and spend the $200 on CDs tonight.

(BTW, after two orders show up on my doorstep, I will only be 9 CDs away from 500. And I have enough silver certificates to get a free one tonight. And if I shop around, that could be a free double album. So I might sneak in by my self-imposed 12/31 deadline.)

I should mention that there is a new Andrew Dice Clay website at www.dicemanrules.com. Not much there yet, but you can order his latest 2-CD set and get a bonus CD. I think it is a mail-order only thing – he probably lost his record deal when American went under and got bought out by Sony. Clay was on Politically Incorrect the other night, and made me realize two things: he is a genius and Kennedy is an idiot.

Yesterday was a wash for any productive work. I tried to stay awake long enough to get some writing done, but I fell asleep for a couple of hours and awoke to find that my heater had been on full blast the whole time, and the apartment felt like a pottery kiln. I had to open all the windows to get it back to a reasonable temperature, and I spent the rest of the evening babbling in a half-daze.

I did do some reading – I’m trying to get through this Thomas Pynchon book of short stories. He’s very critical of his early work, and that helps me – it’s cool to see the mistakes that a good writer did early in their career. I’m on this big kick about trying to reinvent my writing style. I know that’a big cop-out, but I have some ideas floating around and once I get my shit together, I’ll start with some smaller practice stories or something.

I have to go eat now.