It’s bachelor’s weekend here in Astoria – Sarah’s visiting her family in Milwaukee for a few days, and I’ve been here on my own. That doesn’t mean scores of Mexican hookers having sex with mules and snorting coke off my bathroom floor or anything; it mostly means I’m sitting around getting over this death-cold-flu I’ve had all week, and a lot of PlayStation. It has been incredibly boring, and after five months of having someone to share my weekends with, I’m surprised I was able to do this every weekend without Cobaining myself years ago. I’m so bored, I even went to K-mart and bought a Stephen King book.
In my last post, I talked about getting the glossary ready for a print book. I decided not to do that. It’s a long story, but I basically don’t think there’s any demand, and it isn’t worth the time. I need to work on a “real” book, and it isn’t one. I still have this book of short stories about Bloomington, but I’m not sure that’s going to make it either. I’m picking at some ideas that might make a new novel, a few really vague themes that didn’t make it in Summer Rain, but that if given a new place and a new look, would make for an interesting story. Maybe. I’m still having a lot of trouble figuring out what’s next, because the only advice I get on what to do next is extremely conflicting. All I know is I need the challenge and the pace of writing another book like Summer Rain (except maybe half as long) but some distance from my own life, a completely fictional story. So, we’ll see.
It’s been a great morning, very cool in the apartment and quiet. I still love how my living room is completely silent now, thanks to the Mac Mini. I’ve got it plugged into my stereo so iTunes can serve up all of my music. With my old setup, to update the iPod, I had to boot to windows, then run MusicMatch and this horrible bag-on-the-side solution that totally sucked. Now I just plug in the iPod and it works. And as bad as this sounds, I used to have a copy of the music in Linux and a copy in Windows, and use xmms, which sucked, and it made the whole operation very kludgey. Now I just use iTunes and that’s it. So I’m enjoying the Mac thing a lot.
Sarah’s back tonight and I get Monday off, which is nice. I think I’m going to go for a long walk, think about this book, and get some lunch.