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Ignore my previous interest in the www.everything2.com site. After messing with it more, I’ve found great shortcomings in using it as a reference tool. It does, however, make a great popularity contest if you miss the days of high school. Sigh.

I feel largely functional today, with almost all of the wheezing gone. The other night, the blinds in my bedroom fell down and I had no way to re-fasten them. I live on the first floor, so this was a problem. I ended up duct-taping a sheet across the window so I could go to sleep. I got that whole nightmare fixed last night. And I’m almost caught up on sleep, so maybe I’ll get something productive done in the next few days.

I’ve been in a strange situation as far as trying to figure out what to do next in life. I realize I always say this, but don’t explain it. I also realize that I make it sound like I’m going to quit my job tomorrow and go join the circus or the Marines or something. It’s nothing like that. It’s just that there’s a lot of slop in my life now, a lot of emptiness. I feel this inside of me, but it’s also in my schedule, my activities. I go to work, I come home, and there’s nothing but an answering machine with zero messages and a book that I couldn’t possibly work on for ten hours straight every night. I don’t want to watch TV, and I don’t have cable, and I don’t really feel like going anywhere. So what do I do? When I had a girlfriend, I had an excuse, a person to call or see or whatever. And I realize I was not the best boyfriend in the world and I didn’t entertain her with tons of neat, new activities on a constant basis. So what am I supposed to do? If I was religious, I’d go to church, but I’m not. And I’ve thought about volunteering but I have severe social anxiety problems related to this. I could start other projects, program computers, start a zine, something like that. But the bottom line is, I need to find a way to fill my time that will eventually help me feel better about things and give me room to grow.

I guess in the past, I would jump right into another relationship, and the fastest way to do that is to get into a dysfunctional relationship. I don’t want to do that, but I also don’t want to shun away from the opposite sex entirely for a mandated sentence until I get “better”. I wish I could just hang out with more people, experience things, do things. I don’t know, I’m babbling. But I feel a need to write, and to explain.

Everything2 really bothered me. It’s like IRC or any other bbs in that there’s a group of popular, trendy people, just like in high school. And if you’re not for them, you’re against them. People were voting down my stuff just because I wasn’t writing stupid new nodes that were chatty and useless. I can’t really deal with stuff like that. Everything2 is a good idea in theory, but it’s nothing more than a glorified chat server for a bunch of airheads.

I don’t know if I want to stay and work until the trains calm down, or go get a drink somewhere and edit the book, or just mess around for a while. I guess I’m going to go find out.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated, I realize that. I guess a lot has been going on with me mentally, although very little is happening in real life. I feel like I say this in all of my entries these days, and it makes me wonder if I should even be doing this anymore. But I’m too lazy to remove it, knowing that I will probably restart it in three months anyway.

I’m in a trancelike state, from having allergies all weekend and not being able to breathe. I was up until three AM last night, trying to find a combination of fans and blankets to get everything at an ideal temperature without too much dust or pollen or fungus or whatever the hell is making me wheeze. So I took a bunch of stuff last night to knock me out – benadryl, ativan, kava – only it didn’t do much. Now I’m hung over, feeling confused and strange, drifting from monent to moment. If I was working on Rumored, this would be great. But, I’m not.

Work on Summer Rain continues. I had a very productive week, and I got changes made to books one and two, little grammar things and misspellings. The last part will take forever though, especially if I’m all loopy like this. I want to get the book done and move on to Rumored. I feel like I’m entering a state of mind where I can really get into Rumored a bit more, and I want to finish it. It will be an interesting summer.

There’s little to say about my personal life except that it’s depressing. I bought a mountain bike, but it has rained every day since I got it. This is my latest obsession. There’s a new Motorhead CD. That’s all.

It’s hot. That 90-degree kind of hot that tells you it’s summer and makes you wish for cold weather, like last week. I just spent money on a spring jacket, and I got to wear it about three times. Sigh. At least the apartment isn’t completely unbearable. I’ve got the windows open and I just bought a fan, so it’s functionally cool, but not entirely comfortable. I’ll survive.

Things have been strange and I haven’t been able to concentrate on much of anything lately. Still getting used to my new life, and I’ve been running into glitches. There are huge voids of time where I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with myself that bug the hell out of me. I know, I should be working on the bok, but sometimes I just need to relax, or talk, or socialize, and I’m still trying to find a social structure to relax in. It all sounds stupid and petty, but it’s also very depressing and it’s one of those situations that can consume your soul if left unchecked. And it’s very unchecked at this point.

I haven’t been doing much work on the book in the last few days, because of this sickness thing (I think it was bronchitis – mostly better now) and everything else. I did print out most of the draft and started carefully red-penning it for one last pass. I don’t want to drag this out forever, but it deserves one more chance before I start the publishing process.

I had a very strong Summer Rain deja vu the other night, Saturday night. I ate dinner at the Neptune and then came home around 10 or so with absolutely nothing to do, and an apartment that was too hot for me to just sit around for 3 or 4 hours. I got on moviephone and found out American Beauty was playing at the new 14-plex that’s about a mile and a half from my place, at 11:40. So I got all decked out, put on some cologne, and hiked through the night. The walk reminded me so much of the book, of 1992 in Bloomington. The streets in Astoria are like the nice houses just outside the student ghetto in Bton, houses all clustered together with no yards and old cars in the driveways. That, and Joe Satriani in the walkman, and the smell of my cologne was a temporary time machine – both to 1998, when I was working on the book so much, and 1992, when it actually took place. Very weird, very cool.

I didn’t like American Beauty. It had its moments, but the time structure of the film was all fucked up and distracted me. It was so long and drawn out, two and a half hours for something that essentially had as much plot as an episode of Three’s Company. Oh well, it was a nice walk.

I’m too hot to be slaving in front of this monitor. I’m going to go sit in front of the fan with my clipboard and red pen and read some of Summer Rain.

I feel sick.

I mean the kind of sick where you think you should go to the emergency room, but then you remember the last time you spent an hour on the subway to go to Columbia’s emergency room and the attending nurse just stared at you for twenty minutes without even asking your name or if you’ve been shot or were in the middle of a heart attack or anything. I feel like I’m crawling out of my skin, like I can’t focus on anything for more than three seconds. I think my body is having some adverse reaction to Claritin. I also feel like I have pneumonia. I want to sleep for a month. I think I slept about an hour last night.

I had a dream that I met up with this cheerleader from my high school. Maybe she wasn’t a cheerleader (I never went to the damn games) but she was in that crowd. But she always looked older than the rest of the kids, like she was 36 back in high school. So in the dream, I was mowing my parents’ lawn and she came over and I was trying to get her drunk. I drank one beer and she drank 11 and was suddenly my best friend. She went to IU and wondered why we never ran into each other then, or why we didn’t hit it off in high school. I didn’t explain to her that we never even talked in high school. She passed out, and while I was mowing the rest of the lawn, my friend Larry performed exploratory surgery on her, and perfectly closed her back up with fishing line. I asked him when he learned surgical techniques, and he told me they taught it to him in law school. We left her at a gas station before she woke up.

Summer Rain is finished, more or less. I hate it. I’ve read the book so many times, it makes me physically ill to even open the files now. And it sucks. I would give it a 5 out of 10, and I think it would take a year of heavy edits to get it to a 6. I just need to get the thing out of here, and finish it. I want to get back to work on Rumored to Exist, which I think has much more potential. And so does everyone else, I guess, because nobody ever reads drafts of Summer Rain. I don’t blame them – it’s 500 pages of mediocrity.

I mean, you should still buy a copy when it comes out. Just don’t read it. Like that copy of Pale Fire you’ve never opened.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about this.

I’ve been pretty fucked up lately. For the first time since I was a kid, I’m getting allergies. I spent all weekend in bed, suffering and taking Benadryl. I went to the doc and got set up with Claritin, and I also got a HEPA air filter. Plus the bit of rain and temp change has calmed things down a bit. So I’m mostly feeling better, but I’m slightly off from all of the rollercoaster ride of Benadryl and Sudafed and everything else. Now that my brain is programmed to completely shut off at night with the Benadryl, I can’t sleep well without it. So, things are weird.

Since I finished the last Summer Rain draft, life has been much more unstructured. I really hate reading stuff for the 19th time, trying to fix “i before e” crap. I wish I could just hire someone to do this for me, but I’m too cheap, and I’m not sure it’s worth it. So I trod along, reading chapters with my red pen.

I’ve reached a point where editing Summer Rain is pretty much the only thing in my life outside of work. That’s okay, but I’ve realized that if I do anything else, it seems unnatural. Last night, I didn’t want to edit after about an hour of work, so I sat down and tried to watch some of The Matrix. It was cool and all – the DVD has so much extra shit – but I felt nervous, like I was trying to get away with something. I stopped, and tried to go to bed early, but I just paced the apartment like there was something wrong. I also feel weird because I’m not reading anything else these days. Reading Summer Rain is pretty much a full-time job, so I can’t sit back with Tolstoy or whatever when I’m not working. It would be counterproductive, and it would make my edits resemble whater I’m reading. So I will look forward to the point when I can stop reading this book and actually start something new.

Of course by then, I’ll be reading Rumored.