Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Pantone is not a shampoo

I think this sunburn is fucking with my head. I went to the Rangers-A’s game yesterday and it was hotter than hell out for the end of September. I think part of it is the Oakland Coliseum is such a horrible place, all concrete and built by the same architects that turned out prisons in former Soviet republics in the mid-1960s. After a couple of innings, I retreated back to the concourse and walked a loop around to see the sights. There’s a huge void where center field is, a concrete tunnel of nothingness where they shut down all of the concession stands and restrooms, and it looks like some secret tunnel system under a major city, a place where mole-men would live, only it’s a handful of people who are looking for shade or maybe cell phone reception.

I thought I escaped with no sunburn, and my arms still looked white, but then like three hours later, almost like clockwork, I looked and everything was the color of a Coke can. Is that like how you cook a steak for a certain amount of time, and then you let it rest for a certain amount of time, and it still cooks on the inside or whatever? I never fully understood the whole resting thing. It’s sort of like how you have to rinse pasta in cold water to stop it from cooking. Why not cook it for less time and not rinse it? I can’t imagine people in 1827 cooking at a covered wagon, saying “you need to let that shit rest for two minutes!” as Indians shot flaming arrows dipped in shit at their wagon trains.

Wikipedia has this new feature (maybe it’s not that new) where you can mark a bunch of articles and then make a print book out of them. I’m tempted to find a thousand cool articles and make a nice bound book out of them, because it seems like I keep going back to the same articles and reading them over and over. Like, for example, every 17 months I feel a need to dig up as much information as possible about The Day the Clown Cried.  I don’t know why; maybe it’s because I think if I eventually google enough, I’ll find a copy of it on YouTube.  Anyway, finding a hundred or a thousand articles would be great, except I’d spent forever doing it, and never finish, because I’d always think the next cool article would be only two more clicks away.  And then I’d get into a huge thing about how to organize and order the articles.  Like, should there be a chapter on cult conspiracies, or should each cult leader be in alphabetical order in a “people” chapter?

It’s time to start work, and it’s now twilight at six AM.  I think pretty soon it will be pitch black, which means I will soon spend an hour a day googling to find the best full-spectrum light bulbs.