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Surge Redux

They relaunched Surge!

I guess I wrote about this years ago (see Surge, Vault) when they half-ass relaunched Surge as Vault about ten years ago.

I used to be extremely obsessed with different sodas. I also used to weigh 250 pounds and need thousands of dollars of dental work a year. Surge was like the apex of this addiction. Seattle was a test market for Surge back in the late 90s, and I got onboard in early 1997. Then I quit soda and caffeine entirely for most of that year, and stopped drinking it. But about a year later, I fell off the wagon, starting with the occasional soda during writing sessions.

In 1998, I was going hard on the Rumored to Exist manuscript, and trying to figure out exactly what rituals would put me in the right frame of mind to finish this insane book. Like I used to write starting exactly at 9 PM, and then stop at midnight and go to the 7-Eleven on the corner of 16th and Madison to get a Coke Slurpee. And I started chipping in on the Surge during writing sessions, and managed to get a decent (although disorganized) second draft of that book done before I left for New York.

There was no Surge in New York, and no 7-Elevens at that point in time, either. I would have occasional Surge sightings – one time I had rented a car for some reason, and drove on the Long Island Expressway way the hell out to Syosset or something, and stopped at a two-pump gas station with one cooler of sodas, and they had four cans, which I hoarded. And once when I was visiting my then-girlfriend at Cornell, I went to a Wendy’s that had it on tap. But by 2001 or so, it had entirely vanished from the region. And my writing dried up after I published Rumored in 2002, although one probably doesn’t have to do with the other, except in my head. Case in point: Vault came back in 2006, and I still didn’t get shit done.

So Surge is back now, although the distribution is still spotty and weird. I haven’t seen it in stores, but it popped up on Amazon Pantry while I was shopping for other stuff, so I bought a case. It was ridiculously expensive — $14 for a dozen 16-ounce cans — and I don’t know that I can even drink all of this. Back in the old days, I’d plow through it in a few nights. But now I’m logging every calorie I consume, and 230 empty calories is a pretty big hit. I also haven’t drank soda with sugar in it for almost ten years now, aside from a few odd occasions where nothing else was available. (Like I remember stopping at a beach cafe in rural Mexico a few years ago and buying a glass-bottled Pepsi, which was miraculous after spending a few hours off-roading on ATVs.) I haven’t drank any yet, and maybe I’ll only try a can or two.

The whole episode is a strange hit of nostalgia for me. It reminds me of Seattle, of the start of New York, and I’ve been thinking a lot about Rumored lately, how it was the perfect storm of weird writing and chaos. It also makes me think about the cyclical nature of these things, how Coca-Cola seems to be hitting these things every ten years on the dot, how they have these limited markets and test runs and special windows of time. There are times I’m heavily affected by how these things from recent history just vanish, how I can never go to Garcia’s Pizza again, or go to the University Park Mall Bally’s and play Smash TV. And then I’m thrown little bits of the stuff back, like a web page about a nostalgic item, an eBay auction for a Mattel Aquarius, a ROM so I can play a long-lost game on my Mac. They just rebooted New York Seltzer, which I thought for sure was long gone, and now I see the little squat glass bottles every time I go to my neighborhood diner.

I always wonder if we’re now in a hyper-accelerated version of a wayback machine, constant pings back to these limited-time-only items that are relaunched like a McRib as a cash grab. Or is this the same as when Fifties nostalgia hit hard in the Seventies? Will there be any satisfaction in a relaunch of an old product I missed, or will it be a pyrrhic victory, never bringing any real satisfaction? Maybe it even causes more distress, because I’ll get one little hint of a past that I think would make me happy (even though I know I wasn’t happy then) and it will give me a brief hit of dopamine and nothing else, making me want even more. We’ll see, I guess.

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Death of The NecroKonicon

I made the decision to retire the print and ebook versions of my book The NecroKonicon, also known to many as “the glossary.” It was a bittersweet decision, but it’s not something I want available anymore. I unpublished the online version of the glossary about ten years ago, which was a tough decision back then. The book seems a bit redundant at this point.

I had a lot of fun creating the glossary when I started it about fifteen years ago. I became obsessed with it when I started it, constantly thinking of new articles to add, new links to make. I dug through old photos, researched old names and places, and every time I got a topic just about done, I’d think of five others to write. Once it went online, I started getting a lot of feedback, too. People searching on old names or places would stumble across my articles. This was right as Wikipedia was starting, and way before Facebook, so sometimes my pages were the first or only hit on google.

The problem with the glossary was that I wanted to write about my memories, and I got a lot of input that my entries were “wrong” and people would endlessly mansplain what really should have been there. I remember getting in a huge, stupid argument in the comments section with some #BlueLivesMatter-type idiot about my entry about the IU Police Department, and no matter how many corrections or additions I made, he demanded that I rewrite it or take it down.

And some of it was legitimate – I took a lot of swipes in some of the inside jokes, and there were entries about ex-girlfriends and people I was no longer in touch with, and those could be seen as violations or whatever. I think the attitude towards this has changed in the last decade; I think if Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski were writing in 2017, they would be spending most of their time in a courtroom, getting sued by the people in their books.

But, part of the fun of the thing was the personal side of it. I think if I only wrote about old restaurants and stores and food items, it would not have had the same intrigue. Or it would have just been Wikipedia. I keep thinking of putting a “scrubbed” version of it online, installing some wiki software and porting over the old entries, maybe writing a bunch of new ones, but not about people, just about the nostalgia, the places and things. But, that’s a lot of time. And I’d constantly be correcting things, adding more, dealing with complaints, etc.

A lot of me doesn’t want to deal with nostalgia anymore. I waste a lot of time trying to think about things from 1990 or whatever, and I’d rather be creating new stuff, not rehashing old stuff. So that’s a big reason for discontinuing this. And the book didn’t sell anyway.

That said, I wish I could create something that had the same collaborative and dynamic aspect that The NecroKonicon did. It was a glorious waste of time, and brought a lot of people in. I got a lot of emails and comments, and it was a lot of fun working on it (until it wasn’t.) I wish I could find some other project like this, like a podcast or comic or an online site of some sort, and maybe at some point I will.

Until then, I’m supposed to be writing the next book, so I need to figure out what that means exactly.

 

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Latest Distraction: Astronaut.io

I found something recently that has been an entirely too hypnotic waste of time. Go here:

astronaut.io

This site will find videos on YouTube that have no views, then drop into a random location and play about five seconds. It continues to do this in a never-ending stream, and the effect is bizarre.

First of all, all the videos shown tend to be people, or homemade. Actually, a majority of the videos are peoples’ kids, which is a testament to the futility of taking videos of your kids. But it reminds me of those found photos sites like Internet K-Hole, that have endless candid snapshots taken at malls or parties back in the mid-Eighties. There’s a certain personal aspect to it, and to just dump in the middle of a home movie is chaotic and bizarre and wonderful. It is like an experimental James Benning movie, but continues forever.

OK, just for fun — I’ve had this running in the background for a while, and I’ll rattle off a quick description of what’s showing:

  • A shot of some mountains out of the window os a plane.
  • A dog running in the snow in a back yard.
  • A Chinese toddler beating a Fischer-Price cash register.
  • Eight grade school girls playing what sounds like a Jewish folk tune on violins.
  • A guy from what looks like a former Soviet satellite country trying to pull a train car on a rope.
  • A kid and grandfather with a remote control plane.
  • Someone skiing down a slalom run.
  • An guy talking in Arabic at a podium with four microphones.
  • Someone explaining physics homework on a whiteboard in German.
  • A girl doing horse dressage.
  • A college stoner dude doing a video essay for a class.
  • A golden retriever running back and forth in a yard.
  • A girl in a class explaining what the ACL ligament is.
  • Some people playing a TV trivia game.
  • Two french toddlers rapping.
  • An elementary school talent show with a girl dancing back and forth.
  • Someone cooking Alfredo pasta.
  • A fat guy on an Oculus Rift.
  • A walkthrough of a house under construction.
  • Four Vietnamese guys in a grass hut.
  • A guy talking in Spanish while shampooing a woman’s hair in a salon.
  • A Pop-Warner football game, shot from about 9,000 feet away.
  • Someone installing an engine in a small general aviation plane.
  • The worst Led Zeppelin cover band imaginable.
  • Someone filming a baby stroller.
  • An Indian video about gluten-free diets.
  • Someone in Spain playing NBA 2K.
  • Two white guys rapping at a beach that looks like Racine, Wisconsin.
  • A choir in an adventist church in what looks like Bali.

…and so on.

This reminds me of one time when I had the bright idea of searching google for IMG_1954 and seeing what came up. But this is a thousand times better. Check it out.

 

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fitness update

I know none of you give a fuck about my fitness stuff, but I need some accountability. I also wouldn’t mind being able to go back in a few years and see this data. So, serious post, bear with me. All stupid replies to this will be deleted, so save your jokes for another post.

My one basic goal for 2016 was to use my Apple Watch and finish the “three rings” every day. That means standing once an hour for twelve hours, exercising for at least 30 minutes, and burning a specific set of calories. I got a late start on this because of stupid stuff in January of 2016, and started my streak in February.

So yesterday, I broke a one-year streak, or 365 continuous days of meeting all three goals. This usually involves a brisk walk of about an hour a day. In summer, this is great, because I get the sun and it helps my mood a lot. This time of year, it is a real challenge, because it is dark and rainy and shit out. But I persisted on this, and it was my one goal, and I made it. I am going to continue on this for the rest of the year, and now I really don’t want to miss a day, but it’s part of my routine, so I’ll try to get the next 11 months perfect, too.

My second goal of 2017 was to write down everything I ate. I still use a Fitbit One (don’t ask why I use this and the watch, it’s complicated.) and I use a Fitbit Aria scale and weigh myself every day. So I use the Fitbit app to log food. My goal wasn’t to be all judgmental about what I ate and stick to any kind of diet, but just to log everything. I find when I do that, I’m somewhat accountable about eating 178 granola bars in one sitting. And for January (and the start of February) I have done that.

The third thing is that I have been following Fitbit’s guidance of how many calories I should be taking in versus how many I burn, with a 250-calorie deficit. I have not been that rigid with it, just keeping an eye on it. I generally eat a few hundred calories lower than I should, but have one or two days a week when I eat more. And I realize that calorie counting isn’t the way to go, and despite all the “fat isn’t bad” hokum on mommyblogging sites, fat is bad for me. The Weight Watchers point system works better for me, but WW fucked this all up in one of their annual reboots, and I hate going to WW meetings, so I can’t do that.

I ended the year on 12/31 at 204.5 pounds, thanks to being in Wisconsin. As of today, I am at 196.0. My goal is like 170-175, and I realistically shouldn’t be losing more than five pounds a month. I am also expecting to fall off the wagon at some point and stop logging every day, because it is a huge pain in the ass. So, that’s why I need to make another post like this next month.