Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Indiana Jones and the battery-powered mobility scooter

I saw the Indiana Jones movie last night. It was okay, but not incredible. I don’t know – I was never 100% into the movies as a whole (although I liked the last one.) I think part of it is that so many people have taken the genre of action movie and ran with it, so now when they try to do some “fakeout/the hero is so slick” moves, it doesn’t do much. Like, after the first few Jackie Chan movies where he’s doing all of this crazy kung-fu shit, seeing Harrison Ford get away from the bad guys wasn’t that impressive. I don’t have any great loyalty to the first three movies, so it wasn’t like the movie was raping my childhood or anything. It was a good popcorn flick, nothing more. And I saw it at the Arclight, so that can make a bad movie okay.

I’m still dicking around with the old entries in the journal, fixing things. I’ve been trying not to read old entries and get all nostalgic and then waste half my day reading them, but it’s hard to avoid. I updated a lot more back in the day, but the entries were much shorter. And over half of them had to do with me not being able to sleep, or trying to overanalyze what I was supposed to be writing. It’s a lot like repeating the same word over and over for five minutes, and then really thinking about it and saying “but what is ‘strawberry’?” Anyway, sometimes I think I should do another journal book, with entries from 2000-2008, but then I remember I will fuck around with it for weeks, and nobody will end up buying it. So I’m on another project.

Dentist just called – I am in at 3:30 for a crown. It should be fun. I should go get a steak for lunch, something that I won’t be able to eat.

I have lost almost 15 pounds. My pants are starting to not fit anymore. My wedding ring is a tiny bit looser, which freaks me out, because I don’t want to have to get it resized, and then if I do, I will surely gain all the weight back. But it was a touch tight, so it’s fine now.

I am going to Las Vegas in two weeks. Sarah has to go to a conference, so I am tagging along. I don’t know what I will be doing during the day, especially if it’s 120 degrees outside. I do want to go to a minor league baseball game. And Simms will be there, I think. But I have to avoid the food and avoid shopping and avoid gambling. So unless I buy some food coloring and glass jars and make sand sculptures in the middle of the desert, there’s not a lot of other options. Wait, are fireworks legal in Nevada?