Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Nine Years

I should mention this now, because I never update this anymore, and I will simply forget to do so later: as of next Monday, this journal is officially nine years old. Okay, there were a couple of periods when I didn’t journal online. But dig this: 662 entries; 461,837 words. That’s roughly double the size of Summer Rain, and the most-received comment on that book is that it’s way too long.

I’d like to write some huge, introspective thing about what this means to me. But honesly, I’m surprised I’ve lasted this long. I’ve been keeping paper journals since 1993, but I almost never get a chance to write anything in there anymore. It used to be a daily ritual, but I just wrote something in there a few weeks ago, and I noticed I hadn’t updated since we were in Vegas in January. I need to do something about that.

Not much is up otherwise. I am listening to the new Joe Satriani, and it’s good, but I can’t tell yet if it’s great or not. He hasn’t had an album that really grabbed me since Crystal Planet, back in 1997. (When the journal started.) I have the new Queensryche album on the way, and I hope it’s interesting.

This weather is positively dreadful. It went from “almost nice spring day” to “January shitburger rain and cold” in about 24 hours. Even thinking about looking outside makes me feel absolutely morbid. I feel like I need to get a dozen of those lightbox full-UV lamp bulbs and permanently affix them to my head. Maybe I can mount them to a walker and push them around the house with me.

I was sitting in a diner tonight with nothing to read, and I found I had one of those Moleskine journal books that I started to fill last summer, but all of the entries were completely disjointed and made no sense. Like one entry said “write journal entry about guilty pleasure – liking Black Sabbath albums w/o Ozzy on them.” I’m not sure what the fuck to make of that. The next page was a drawing for a mouthguard you wear when you sleep that contains a bunch of sonicare-type toothbrush heads and fluoride injectors, along with a notation of “would cause drowning in sleep?”

I still get, on the average, a million-dollar idea every three or four days, but I never write them down. Some of them are obvious, and some require far too much capitol for me to pull off. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I thought if you had a really high-scale mall, it would make a lot of sense to install a driving range like the one they have out at Chelsea Piers, so the husbands could put a charge card in the wife’s hands and send her to Nordstrom or whatever, and they could get out the 3 iron and hit some balls. And an overpriced pro shop, of course.

Crap. I started reading old journal entries. Now I’m going to spend all week going through them. I should get off of here while I can.