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30

Today is an anniversary of sorts. Thirty years ago today, I decided to be a writer, decided to “identify” as a writer, started calling myself a writer. Actually, I probably didn’t put those words together on October 30th, 1993, and I definitely did not put my occupation as a writer on a 1040 form until at least a a few years later. But today was the day this whole thing really started.

I’ve told the story before, in different permutations, different mixes of fact and fiction, enough that I don’t even know what is real anymore, what I would tell someone if I had to. I mean, I’ve always been a writer to some extent, even if I didn’t know it. I had a poem published when I was in grade school; I wrote a lot of short stories and papers and whatnot when I was in high school and college. I’d already published zines by that fall, written stuff in other zines, and put thousands and thousands of words into USENET posts and forums. I’d even published a story in a university newspaper at that point. But I’d never thought of myself as a writer, never considered it as a vocation, a career, or even a hobby. I always thought, “Someday I will write a book” but never put any more thought into it than that.

The actual story of how this started is somewhat trite and stereotypical. I was struggling in a deep depression in the fall of 1993 — that year, really — and had been abandoned by someone I trusted. And sure, it was all my fault, but it was at a key junction in my life when a maelstrom of shit was falling down on me. I’d been kicked out of school and was on probation; I was unable to continue in the computer science department; I’d lost the scholarship that was paying my tuition; I wasn’t sure what I was going to do for a degree anymore. Most of my friends were graduating, getting jobs, getting married, moving away. I was stuck, didn’t know what was next.

The abandonment thing, I won’t get too into that. I was in this relationship that I got far too invested in, and I messed it up, and she left. I’ve blamed myself for it for decades, and then recently, I read a lot about attachment anxiety and adult attachment theory and realized the fix was in decades before I met this person, and my problems go back much further than 1993, and I really can’t get into any of that in the scope of this dumb little story. Short story long, I was very damaged on October 30, 1993, and I desperately needed to find some way out.

* * *

In 1993, I lived at Colonial Crest apartments in Bloomington. (They no longer exist.) I did not have a car. I had a city bus pass, but the bus line was all screwy and didn’t run at night, so I walked, a lot. My apartment was 1.3 miles to the 17th Street office of UCS where I worked a few days a week. It was 2.2 miles to Ballantine Hall, more or less the center of campus. At the very least, I’d walk about two hours a day, every day. I would listen to a tape walkman for all of these walks, plus whenever I was sitting around campus, working on a computer, whatever. And I was spending a lot of time sitting around campus, because I’d have a class, then have 90 minutes of down time until the next class, half an hour in the student union, 20 minutes waiting for a computer, an hour eating Pizza Hut Express, whatever.

The gist of this: I spent a lot of time alone, in my head, beating myself up, in three different ways: long walks, dead time in public places, and of course the hours and hours I spent in front of computers, screwing around on the immediately-pre-web Internet. I needed some way to not do that, or do something productive with that time, and through strange kismet, this sort of fell into place.

Once again, this is horribly cliché, but my friend Ray told me I should check out the spoken word albums of Henry Rollins, who had not yet recorded “Liar” and shown up on Beavis and Butthead, but aside from the post-Black Flag Rollins Band, he was about six albums deep into the spoken word racket, and had published maybe twenty books or chapbooks. So a few days after the 30th, I bought The Boxed Life, a two-tape album of his spoken word and started walking and listening to it, memorizing it.

The whole thing seems stupid now. I think there are various machismo stereotypical male idols that men of my age back then latch onto, be it Charles Hemingway or Charles Bukowski or Joe Rogan or whoever else. In one sense, it almost pains me that I got so wound up with this thing. But I felt like I had nothing, no direction, and there were far worse things to get tangled up with. Even mentioning the male loneliness epidemic pisses about 50% of the population off, but there is a real phenomenon of early twenty-somethings not knowing what to do with their life, and turning to whatever idiot has the biggest mouth. Nobody has fathers; nobody can open up to male friends. So you’re going to have guys who get in that rut who suddenly find a Doors record and lock into Jim Morrison and start wearing leather pants and writing shitty poetry. It happens.

At some point, I thought, “Hey, this Rollins guy just talks about what happens to him and writes it in notebooks. I should get a notebook.” So I got a notebook, and I started writing in it, in those weird little gaps of time in my day, journaling from lunch or at a bus stop or late at night. I also hunted down all the Rollins books. I wasn’t a book collector at that time, and would maybe passively read a non-computer book a few times a year. But I read his stuff, then read everything he referenced: Henry Miller, Bukowski, Fante, Burroughs. That got me into the beats, which got me into postmodern fiction, which got me to experimental, which got me to a room full of books. I started hoarding, reading constantly. I’m embarrassed by my early influences, but they got me to my later influences, so what can you do.

* * *

The little 80-sheet notebook I bought at the campus book store for $1.39 turned into several journals, which turned into short stories, one of which became the start of my first book. I never healed the wound, but I filled the void. That particular relationship did not heal for years, but I now realize that it wasn’t the hole from the missing person, but a hole in my soul that existed since birth. She was just a symptom of the problem.

I wrote. I wrote badly, but it slowly got better. I slowly got better. I mean, I never got “better” like I was somehow cured. It took me years to stop thinking about her every hour of every day, how I was betrayed, how it was all my fault. It is mostly gone, and I can’t even remember what her voice sounds like. But last night I had a nightmare about her, woke up at 3:30 AM with my fight-or-flight fully triggered, didn’t even try to go back to bed and got up and hit the shower to start my day. There have been a half-dozen people who have done far worse to me since, and maybe the dream was about one of them. Anyway, writing was the one constant. It got me past this, until it didn’t.

* * *

The writing continued until 2021, when it stopped. There are a lot of threads to this story that recur: the wound, the loneliness, abandonment, frustration, emptiness, defeat. In 2021, I tried to tell myself I was no longer a writer, because the pain and frustration of my writing “career” caught up to me and I simply could not write anymore. So I quit writing, said I wasn’t a writer. The void remained. Nothing could fill it. Believe me, I tried everything. Nothing worked.

So, I came back. I think. Did I? Am I still a writer? Am I writing now? The void still remains, but maybe I’m making progress.

* * *

Bill James – the baseball statistics guy (you know, moneyball, Brad Pitt, whatever) – had a quote about writing that always stuck with me:

I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.

I always felt that I fell into writing because of that, because of my ability to get lost in words, in absence of being able to get lost in people. My frustration with love and life drove me to a universe of communication in a much deeper format. I don’t know what I’m doing now with writing, or what will come next, or what I need to do. But I know that it all started when I fell into this exactly thirty years ago today.

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Zine(s)

I published another zine last week. It’s a bit of a throwaway thing, an experiment, an attempt to get back to writing. I deliberately did not make this something I would try to sell or distribute. I wanted to focus solely on writing and producing something that would take my focus and time. If my writing was running and this was a couch-to-marathon thing, this zine was like getting off the couch and walking around the block. And it worked well.

I like making zines. I think one of my biggest distractions with writing is focusing too much on what sells, what people want, what’s expected of a book. Also, working on a book takes forever and I don’t get feedback until sometimes years after I write something. Making zines just for the sake of making zines alleviates both of these. Back when I first got free access to photocopiers at my corporate job in 1995, I started Air in the Paragraph Line so I could copy dumb stories and mail them for free to a dozen or two friends. I didn’t care about the layout or the format or anything else, because I wasn’t trying to get stuff in Barnes and Noble. At the apex of this, I was putting out a zine every month, and I loved doing that. I would drop off a big box of envelopes at the PO, and within a week, people were emailing me, telling me what they liked.

Another reason I love zines is they are tactile, physical objects. There’s something about getting a zine in the mail, opening the envelope, holding the little booklet in your hands. There’s a certain joy in paginating a stack of copied pages into individual bodies, folding them in half, stapling them, counting up the number you made, stacking them up and getting them ready to stuff into envelopes. I’ve messed with e-zines and posting PDFs and whatnot, and it’s just not the same. Creating a newletter on Substack or writing a blog like this is its own thing. Reading a physical book is another. And it’s even better when you’re holding an object that you know the author held, folded, stapled, ran their fingers over the spine. It’s a direct connection between author and reader.

So, back on the horse. I couldn’t find my long-arm stapler, but I did find my (fake) bone folder to fold pages in half. I did the layout in Apple Pages this time, laid it out in portrait and pasted in a bunch of crazy graphics as backgrounds and asides, mostly screenshots taken from badly scanned PDFs on the FBI’s FOIA page, things about UFOs and cattle mutilations and how to build fallout shelters and perform tracheotomies on the battlefield. I spent a lot of time messing around with that stuff and it was a lot of fun. It reminded me of the time me and Ray messed around in Photoshop 1.0 when it first came out, in the Mac lab in the Fine Arts building at IU. They had these Mac IIfx machines (“wicked fast!”) loaded up with an insane amount of RAM, dual monitors, color printers, drawing tablets, Sytek drives, and everything else. We spent a few hours just chopping up Anne Geddes pictures of babies, and it was an overwhelming amount of joy just working on nothing, playing and having fun.

Some of the writing in this zine was old stuff from automatic writing going back to 2016. I think one of the pieces was something cut from Atmospheres in 2014 during the final edits. The actual writing was more of an afterthought. 5000-some words, 20 pages, double-sided and folded in half. I’m not selling these; maybe if I do a few more (and that’s the plan), I will bundle them up in a book. That’s not the point. It’s not about selling it. Hell, my name isn’t even on the front cover. It’s just about creating.

* * *

Pro tip: I don’t know when this happened, but Adobe made it much easier to print stuff like this. I used to have a labored process of laying out folded-in-half booklets, where the first landscape page for a 20-page zine would have page 20 and page 1, and the flipside would have page 2 and page 19, and so on. Huge pain. Now I can make a PDF that’s in portrait orientation, pages 1-20 in that order. Acrobat will turn them sideways, shrink them down, and paginate them so it’s 20-1, 2-19, 18-3, etc.

There’s a trick to this, though. If you shrink down 8.5×11 pages, the trim will be all off. So anyway, here’s what I did. (Note that this assumes you have a real printer to print the master.)

  1. When you do your initial layout, make a custom page size with no margins. File > Page Setup, I made one called “half-letter” that was 7.14 by 11 inches. (My math may be slightly off there.)
  2. Write the zine. Make sure your number of pages are a multiple of four.
  3. Print to PDF, double-sided and make sure scaling is shut off.
  4. Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader (not Preview.app or some other knockoff PDF reader.)
  5. File > Print.
  6. In Page Sizing & Handling, select Booklet.
  7. I think all the default settings will be right. You can flip through the pages in the preview to the right, although the preview sometimes looks junky. (For me, I had Booklet subset on “both sides” and Binding as “left.”

My right margin on odd pages was a bit truncated, so maybe that’s my math. Also I could not figure out how to print to PDF with this feature. https://github.com/rodyager/RWTS-PDFwriter might do this for you, but I haven’t tried it.

Oh, and if you’re on a Mac, Apple Pages has a mode called Page Layout mode. Instead of working like MS Word (ugh) it behaves more like Pagemaker used to, where you put in text flows and hook them together and resize them, and it shows at the end of a flow if there’s more text and you need to add another column or box or resize things. Back in 1993, I did Xenocide 5 in Aldus Pagemaker 4.0, which was the gold standard for desktop publishing back then, and was absolutely amazing in a world where a lot of people in the labs where I worked were still on the cyan-screened Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS. It’s a great memory to be back to juggling colums and placing images behind them.

* * *

Also, programming note that this page is back, with a list of everything I’ve written. It has the awkward issue that many of the things on there are not currently published. I’m working on it. But I’m currently at the start of another writing project which I can’t talk about, but I’m excited to start actually writing again. I’m off the couch, but I’m still walking.

Oh, and if you read this far and you didn’t get a zine, drop a line and send me your address. I’ve only got a couple left, but if not this, I’ll send the next one.

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Catsup, ketchup, catch-up

I felt a need to write a catch-up on all the various things that went on in the last few months, but immediately went on a tangent about whether or not the tomato-based condiment is named catsup or ketchup. I think it’s with a k, and maybe it used to be mostly with a c in the US, until Heinz changed the name of theirs to the k spelling a century and a half ago. I guess I can remember this with the mnemonic that it’s k and my last name is k.

* * *

OK, so catch-up.

I feel like I’ve lost the first seven months of this year on stupid stuff. I wrote about the two big trips — Iceland and India — although I haven’t posted photos from either. Maybe I’ll get that done at some point, although I’m fairly convinced nobody looks at Flickr. Maybe I’ll make a book, although Blurb takes forever and just raised their prices. Charging a dollar a page for a pocket book is highway robbery. Anyway. Another big trip coming up, and I’ll write more about that later.

Working in San Francisco has been good. The bike thing didn’t really happen. I drive or Uber to the train station, and take the BART one stop, under the water and straight to the financial district. The whole thing is a relatively painless 30 minutes door to door. They feed us, so I seldom leave the building and don’t really have an idea of what’s around. If there’s not food that day, I usually end up at Super Duper, which is a block away. A couple of times I’ve walked a loop down to the ferry terminal and back, which is a decent stroll. I should get out and explore the area more, maybe take some pictures. I should do a lot of things, though.

* * *

When S worked for Smucker, she would sometimes have to travel out to their home office in Orrville, Ohio. Their HQ has a store in it, where you can get t-shirts and socks and other swag, plus the company’s products. And a weird easter egg is that the store sells Smucker’s ketchup, which isn’t available in retail stores. She brought back a jar a few times, and it’s actually really good ketchup. It has a slightly sweeter taste, and comes in a fancy wide-mouth glass jar, probably the same one they use for jelly.

They also have a thing where they will print your picture on the label of a jelly jar. It won’t let you change the slogan below it to a custom string, except to a stock set of choices like “happy birthday” or whatever. Because presentations were the bane of her existence at that job, I wanted to get a jar with the PowerPoint logo on it, and the slogan “PowerPoint is my jam!” I guess I could DIY it, but she left that job a year ago, so never mind.

* * *

In addition to that Flickr rant above, I have no idea what I’m doing with photography. I shot a bunch of film in Iceland, and was unhappy with the results. I have little motivation to go out and take more pictures of the same three things I see on a weekly basis. I bought that Sony a6400 for the India trip, and took maybe a hundred photos there, none good. I really struggled with getting good shots and exposure, and there’s something insanely unsatisfying about using a mirrorless camera. Anyway, the more pictures I take, the worse I feel I’m doing. It’s a struggle, and it’s not bringing me much joy.

Oh, and that drone I bought at the end of 2020 and haven’t touched in forever – turns out it will be illegal to fly next month, because it does not comply with the new Remote ID rules. There are rumors of a firmware update, but they are just rumors. And even if it is fixed, there is still the Karen situation that makes it hard to fly these days.

* * *

For some reason, India was obsessed with ketchup. Maybe obsessed isn’t the right word, but I went to Pizza Hut, got a personal pan pizza, and they gave me a bottle of ketchup with it. I went to a Taco Bell, got a quesadilla and nachos, and was given a bottle of ketchup. I don’t know if it’s a thing to slather ketchup on a taco in India, or just saw a big overweight white American ordering fast food and assumed I needed a quart of ketchup.

I don’t know what brand of Ketchup McDonald’s India used; it was MCD-labeled. I know in the US, they changed from Heinz to their own brand in 2013 when Heinz was acquired by a former Burger King CEO. Burger King India used a ketchup by Veeba. Taco Bell used Del Monte ketchup. Pizza Hut used a brand called “Dr. Oetker Funfoods.” I did not use the ketchup at Pizza Hut, but the food made me horrifically sick. The crust and sauce of the personal pan pizza tasted about right. The pepperoni was way off. It could have been the lack of beef; it could have been spiced differently. Anyway, I’m off Pizza Hut for a while now.

McDonald’s tasted largely identical in India, aside from the lack of beef. Chicken McNuggets were identical, but there is no sweet and sour sauce, which is my go-to. I was forced to resort to barbecue. (Or is that barbeque?) I had a veggie burger once, and it’s like the old-school bean-based veggie burger, not Incredible or whatever fake meat. Oh, and they opened at 11:00, so breakfast didn’t start until then.

Taco Bell was weird. It was closer to Chipotle in trying to be more of a sit-down restaurant. No beef, again. I was also trying to actively avoid any lettuce, so no bean tacos. I ordered nachos, and the chips were the thicker, seasoned kind, and it was served with a mix of tomatoes and uncooked onions on the top, the cheese already applied. Completely unacceptable. (I got it no vegetables the second time, but the cheese was already pre-applied, which I hate. Too much cheese on the top chips, none on the bottom.) The quesadilla was okay, but nobody could pronounce it. They say the “dill” part like the name of the herb, Napoleon Dynamite-style. The cashier tried to correct me, and I told her I worked at a Taco Bell before her father was born. Despite my white-bread Indiana upbringing, I know how to say quesadilla.

I only went to Burger King once in the morning with an uneasy stomach in search of a hash brown, a plain white potato and grease rectangle of salvation. The hash brown was actually sort of spicy, like an aloo chop. It wasn’t bad, but in the context of needing grease and blandness to absorb the rumbling of my stomach, it was slightly offputting.

I did not go to KFC. I saw a Buffalo Wild Wings, which threw me for a loop college nostalgia-wise. Didn’t go in. Not a big fan of finger food anymore.

* * *

I am back writing. Or maybe that’s a question. I am back writing? This is probably the topic of a bigger post, or a series of them. One of my tasks is to keep typing here. The other is to pull some of the other books out of retirement, maybe freshened up. Two are back, as I’ve previously mentioned. I have a few other ideas. We’ll see.

I have no idea how to sell books now. I’ll put them on KDP, but I have no idea how to tell people, and no clue on how to “brand” myself, especially because I do not want to write the kind of stuff I was writing, and I hate the persona I was trying to sell a few years ago. (No advice, please.)

There’s also a little social media rant I could go off on here, or not. I radically cut down my social media time after Iceland, and disconnected or deleted everything entirely in like May, went cold turkey for weeks. I was down to just Reddit, and then all of Reddit went dark. I’m partly back now, although Twitter is done done and deleted. I got on Threads for two seconds, and there’s not enough Xanax in the world for me to even try. I hate to be one of those people who acts like they are above social media because they have such rich social lives in real life. I’ve been online for 34 years this month, and I’m not going to pretend. But I’ve had some serious problems online in the last six months, and have no idea how to really reconcile that. Blogging might be what I need. Nobody reads this, so it’s perfect.

* * *

I can’t think of any ketchup-related anecdotes about Iceland. I think most of the times I got french fries, they came with some esoteric mayo-based sauce, like an aioli. Oh, the one time I had a hot dog (which you have to do there at Bæjarins Beztu), it had ketchup, but it was a very sweet ketchup made with apples. The standard one-with-everything also has a remoulade and a very sweet mustard called pylsusinnep on it. The hot dogs are a mixture of lamb, pork, and beef. Very good stuff.

I had mixed feelings about Iceland when I was there, but it’s weird – now that I have some distance on it, the trip was truly profound to me, and exactly what I needed at that moment. Pardon me for being such an asshole with all these travel stories, but this was more than travel. Iceland was like an alternate universe for me, like a bizarro world. If you’re curious, go hunt down some of the work of Roni Horn, especially Island Zombie. That book is such a perfect description of how the desolation and solitude and viciousness of the island’s climate and terrain are a meditation on presence. I love that book and it makes me want to go back. And there’s no “but” in that, like “I want to go back but take two weeks” or “rent a camper” or “go when the weather is better.” Honestly, I want to go when the weather is worse.

I have such a clear memory, like one of those memories that I will have for the rest of my lifetime, of sitting at the top of Bjarnarfoss, after spending an hour climbing up there and then falling. It was way too cold and I was dressed wrong, and I honestly wasn’t sure if I broke my leg or not. And I was trying to calm myself down, and figure out how to get back down on one leg, and I sat in the mud at the top of this mountain ridge, looking out over all of Snæfellsjökull and the ocean, and being the only person there for miles and miles in every direction, completely alone, everything silent except for the melting snow and ice of this waterfall. Everything in my mind shifted, and I wish I had a word better than “profound” to describe this, but it was almost overwhelming how serene and deep the experience was. I have to go back. I will.

But that’s not the trip this month. Stay tuned on that.

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MSML, what’s next

I briefly mentioned this a few months ago, but I went back to school for a second master’s degree in April. I turned in my final capstone presentation on Sunday, and got back my grade yesterday. That’s one of several reasons I haven’t been writing much, and that’s done, so here we are.

The MBA program I finished last year overlaps the school’s MS in Management and Leadership program with three classes in common. That meant I would have six classes and the capstone project to get a second degree. The basic difference between the MSML and the MBA is the MSML is more soft-skill stuff around leading teams, innovation, and strategy. The MBA is more core business school stuff like finance and accounting, plus classes on project management and a taste of the leadership stuff. I liked the MBA, but figured as a manager of people, I could probably use more leadership work in a structured way.

I’ll be honest: I learned a lot of good stuff in the MSML program, but it was nowhere near as good or as challenging as the MBA. Part of the reason I did this back-to-school thing last year was I didn’t want my brain to go to mush, and crossword puzzles only do so much. I also needed to challenge myself and do something hard that I didn’t think I could do. Taking finance and accounting with absolutely zero background in either was a really big boulder to roll uphill. Getting past that gave me a real sense of accomplishment.

The MSML? Not so much. The most challenging courses were actually deep-dives on a couple of the most tedious classes in the MBA. One of the “tough” classes, Business Acumen, was basically a junior version of accounting, finance, econ, and marketing rolled up into one course. Two of the harder classes, Strategic Management and Change Management, had so much overlap, the papers gave me a constant “didn’t I just write about this?” situation. And this degree had zero math or Excel, but it had two classes that required a recorded presentation, three that involved Powerpoint, and it had a team project.

So, there were two proctored tests, twelve papers total. That includes the capstone, which was pretty eh. In the MBA, the capstone project was really cool. You played this simulation where you ran a business, competed against other players, and then did everything from pitch for venture cap to write a shareholder report, and that was a lot of fun, to be honest. The capstone for this was an annotated bibliography of three sources per class and what we learned from them, which was mostly tedious; then a giant paper on a training plan; then a speech on that paper. A lot of the papers in this class were pure tedium. A lot of people in this program are in HR, so maybe that’s the point.

The one unusual thing about this degree is I ended up working on it in six different countries. I was either cramming for tests or working on papers in Iceland, England, Qatar, India, and the UAE. I particularly remember being up all night in Dubai, sitting in an airport lounge and downing as many free Diet Cokes as possible while pulling articles for that stupid bibliography.

I hate to sound bitter about the experience; I’m mostly exhausted by it. I did learn a lot, although I think quantifying that is a bit out of this silo and bleeding into the Work Jon silo, which I don’t care to write about here. But I did pick up some stuff that will be useful in my career. I guess it just didn’t challenge me enough. I think I really phoned it in here, and part of it was the return to office, along with the travel. I finished the degree in four months, and probably put half the effort into it that I did last year.

Another thing… So, I would not say I was in a great place last year, for various reasons I won’t go into here. And as I worked through that Situation, I also worked hard on the MBA, and the two were very intertwined. So it was surreal sometimes to be sitting in a Hilton in Bangalore which looked identical inside to the hotel I was at in Denver last June, like down to the same paintings on the walls. And I’d be staying up late alone, working on the same kind of papers in the same templates and the same online library and the same learning system, listening to the same albums, and thinking back to last summer and thinking I really don’t need to be thinking about last summer. There’s a much bigger essay about nostalgia that needs to be written in short order, but let’s just say that whole thing was disturbing. And the good news is it is probably so disturbing because I’m in a much better place now and don’t want to be in 2022, or 1992, or 2002, or whatever else.

The big question is what’s next. I feel like this degree has been a big distraction in the way of what I need to be doing. Now I need to dust off the journals and the Scrivener things and figure out what the hell I am doing. I wrote about this in March, and I guess I was really thinking about it at the start of the year, and I was thinking about it last fall. And I need to stop thinking and just type. There are a lot of things in my way, and I need to ignore them, because they are all noise.

On my birthday, I wrote in my personal journal a big, raw, insane state-of-the-union, trying to put down exactly what I wanted to do next, along with a punchlist of what needed to be done to get Atmospheres 2 done, which obviously never happened. There was a lot of confusion and sorrow and anger in that entry. But there’s one paragraph I’ll leave you with, and I think I need to listen to what I said on 1/20:

I need to write. I need to write. I need to get on here every day and push it. I need to work harder. I need to capture everything. I need to riff, and slay, and build, and exercise, and work it out. I have no goal except everything. This is my life. This is what I need to do. There is no alternative.

When Ichiro Suzuki was in little league, he wrote the word “集中” on his glove. Concentration. I need to remember that.

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The Failure Cascade, revisited

So, much like I recently did with Book of Dreams, I recently re-read my 2020 book The Failure Cascade, and made the decision to republish it.

TL;DR – here: https://amzn.to/3JwiUu7

My description of this book from a long-deleted post:

This is […] a bit of a departure because although it contains a few super-short flash pieces, there are also four much longer stories. I felt a need to stretch out some stories a bit, and spend more time in them, so instead of a bunch of sub-thousand word things, there are some that go beyond the 3000-4000 word mark.

This isn’t like a major departure from what I’ve done in the last few books, but it is starting to move away from it. For almost ten years now, I’ve tried this absurdist/gonzo thing, and I feel like I’ve painted myself in a corner a bit. I’ve burned a lot of cycles creating a persona I now can’t stand. I’m not exactly ready to go off and write murder mysteries or tales of martians or anything, but I feel like the part of my personality I’ve mined for stories in all of my books in the 2010s has been stripped away, and I need to start doing something else. I write about this a bit in the title story of the book.

This was a difficult book to pull together. I mean, the problem was this year, 2020, and everything shitty that happened to all of us. I took a little break after Ranch, and when I went off to Vegas in the first week of March, my goal was to hole up in a suite and spend seven days starting to build out this work-in-progress which was to become Atmospheres 2. And just as I got into that, the whole world ended and we got locked down and… well, you know the rest of that story, and it’s still ongoing. As the pandemic built, I worked on the book, and got it above 100,000 words. (The original was 60,000.) But the more I got into it, the more it didn’t make sense. And the idea of writing a manic book of post-apocalyptic non-linear madness wasn’t that appetizing, especially since I was spending most of my day doom-scrolling through a reality that was that but worse. So I set that book aside a couple of months ago, and started collecting together the core bits for this book.

Of course, I never finished Atmospheres 2. After about nine months of beating my head against the wall, I gave up writing entirely. But now, it looks like I’m back.

While I like Book of Dreams like 95%, I like Failure Cascade maybe 75%. It’s too “Konrath” and some of the structure isn’t as good as I’d like it. Not a ringing endorsement, but it’s going in the right direction. When I read through the book, I found maybe a dozen typos, and corrected those in the new version. If you already have this book, you don’t need to buy it again. I didn’t want to do anything more than fix the obvious typos, so I didn’t. Chances are, you didn’t buy this book, because almost nobody did. The Amazon algorithm does not work for me. Oh well.

I love the cover of this book. I took the picture in Mendocino, California, from a 2017 trip up there. It’s at Point Mendocino, looking out at Portugese Beach and Mendocino Bay. There was a really good taco place behind another restaurant there, and I can’t find it on the map anymore. I’ll have to go back at some point. I think probably three of my favorite twenty pictures I ever took are from that trip.

Anyway, it’s live now, so check it out. Now I’ve got to figure out what’s next.

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general

Book of Dreams revisited, writing un-retirement

So, in 2021, I unpublished all of my books and stopped writing. There were a few reasons for this. Maybe there’s a post in that. Bottom line though is that I’ve been trying to get back out of that and write again. And as I do that and try to figure out what to write, I’m trying to figure out what to do with the 17 books I’ve published since 2000. I have 1073852 words and 3649 pages in purgatory right now, and probably the same amount in never-published projects.

I’m slowly trying to work through this. In reading a few of my old books and thinking about it, one bit of low-hanging fruit is 2018’s Book of Dreams. When I gave it a quick read, it was 99.9% solid for me. I didn’t find it particularly problematic for me, especially when it comes to persona and general flow or structure of the book. I love the cover, done by Casey Babb. And when I read through the whole thing, I found maybe a dozen bone-headed typos or little nits that could be fixed in three keystrokes, but no major issues.

I mentioned this in my original announcement for the book:

I think this book is slightly less “Konrath” than my last few books. It’s not as manic or as fast-paced. NyQuil and Mariah Carey are not mentioned. It still has the same kind of humor; it just doesn’t lean on the persona as much, if that makes any sense.

I think that’s the key. And the fact that it’s all dreams is a big point for me. I write down my dreams a lot, whenever I can remember them, and I always find great stuff in them. I’ve snuck dream journals into a lot of zines and small collection books, and I use them as parts of ideas for stories.

Anyway, the book is live here. It’s in print and kindle. If you already have the 2018 version, there is no need to get this. The only thing that has changed are a few stealth edits, and a “, 2023” on the copyright page. Same ISBN, same page length. The price is slightly higher for print. $9.99 is not the end of the world. I’m done trying to competitively price my books at 7 cents more than the print cost. Publishing is dead and I don’t care if it sells. That’s not why I do this.

I need to go through the rest of the books. I really wanted to do some special edition of Rumored because I love that book, and then I was reading through it last October on vacation and thought, “oh shit, that’s getting me cancelled” about 19 times in the first 20 pages. I don’t know what to do about that. (I’m not asking for advice. I’m never asking for advice.)  Dealer Wins is out because it’s 100% obsolete, and was largely filler in the first place.   The Necrokonicon (aka “the glossary book”) is more of the same. Memory Hunter – nobody got the joke, and I wrote my most structured book ever and people bitched about the lack of structure, so that one is dead.

I have a sequel to Summer Rain in my head that would probably mean a quick edit to the original and both of them going out at once, but that sequel has been languishing for years. I also have a sequel to Atmospheres in its fourth draft, which is roughly twice as long. I would love to fix the cover of the first one, do a new layout, add some bonus material, and release it at the same time. That’s a plan, but an uphill battle. The sequel needs maybe a year of full-time work, and I’m not working on it right now.

I reread He and thought it was horrible. It has incredibly inconsistent and cringey writing, and nobody got the concept (which came from a Hubert Selby book.) All the “little” collection books (Ranch, Help…Thunderbird, etc.) have good and bad stuff. Maybe a bunch of that could be rolled into one omnibus. Maybe not. Maybe I should be writing new material instead.

Failure Cascade is probably the next-closest to being republishable. I like the cover, and I gave it a re-read and it was decent. I think almost nobody read this book, and it died right out of the gate. I’ll need to read it again with a thing of sticky flags and see what it will take to get it in shape.

I’m reluctant to write about exactly why I quit writing, but maybe I need to get that off my chest soon.

Categories
general

MBA, Maui, Writing

So I finished my MBA. Did I mention I was doing an MBA? I should probably write a larger post about this. But I completed my final capstone project in mid-October, then spent a week or two in administrative purgatory, and now it’s done. It feels odd to have this giant framed thing saying the trustees have conferred on me blah blah blah, but here it sits. I didn’t even think about having an MBA until maybe this spring, and it’s over. I am an MBA. I can read a statement of cash flows. Ask me anything about Pareto charts. But make it quick, as I will forget most of this in a month.

* * *

Went to Maui last week. This was our fourth trip to this island; we also went in 2013, 2015, and 2017. We stayed on the windward side each time previously, which is nice but very touristy. (Complaining about the Four Seasons being full of tourists is like complaining about Disney World “selling out,” but the combination of tripping over octogenarians at every turn and getting charged ten bucks for a baby-sized bottled water does get old.)

This time we stayed at a yoga resort in upcountry, which was a few clicks south of Mama’s Fish House on the north shore. It used to be a bunch of indigent housing built by the Baldwin family (farming magnates that owned half of everything at one point) and it was used for military training housing during the war, then plantation worker housing, then it sat empty until someone restored and reconfigured it in about 2011 to make it into a bougie new-age yoga retreat center. It’s a semi-circle of bungalows with decks on the front and rear, a big courtyard in the middle, lots of trees and landscaping and the occasional fake buddha statue. There was almost nobody there, and although they offered various yoga and meditation classes, I didn’t go and I actually didn’t even see them happening. When I booked the place, I had the fear that some new age zombies would start chanting at four AM every day and try to beat some cult veganism in my head if I left the house, but there was nothing like that at all.

The rooms were cool. The whole place had high ceilings, big wooden ceiling fans, and old, dark wood furniture. We had two big rooms and the bathroom, plus the front and back decks. Lots of hammocks overlooking the ocean in the distance. The whole thing looked like a French plantation in Vietnam from the 1950s.  No AC. No TVs. No espresso machines. No wall tablets and room service intercoms and everything else you find in modern hotels. I always hate it when I go across the country and check into a Hyatt and it’s the same exact Hyatt I’d see in Denver or Chicago or San Jose. This was very distinct, so that was cool.

Being upcountry was generally 10-15 degrees cooler than being elsewhere on the island. Lots of trees, too. Unfortunately, walking was not great there – a winding road with no sidewalks or room for pedestrians, and nothing in every direction. I still got my 10,000 steps a day in, and we saw a lot of other areas on the island, so that worked out. The place had a small restaurant where the food was decent, but it was usually two or three couples sitting on the porch for dinner, and a server and a chef, and they would just say what they were serving and we said “ok, cool” and they brought it out. I like that a lot, though. Also went to a good Italian place, and actually a tiki-eque lounge a bit further south.

No real big adventures while we were there, just a lot of chilling out, walking, and eating. No work. That’s the most important part. Usually on these trips, it’s a big thing to come up with an itinerary and activities, things. Zip-lines and jet skis and museums and shops and statues of dead people that you must see. I think we’ve covered most of that in previous trips, and it was an opportunity to just do nothing. So, that was good.

There are pictures, but honestly I haven’t even sorted out my Denver pictures, and that was like three trips ago. I’ll get to it when it starts raining and I can’t go outside anymore.

* * *

Now that school is over, I’m trying to write. I should probably make this a separate post and explain it fully, or maybe I shouldn’t talk about it at all. But I completely quit writing fiction just over a year ago, just a sudden rage-quit “I can’t do this anymore.” thing, and it was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make, and it was probably the wrong one.

Right before I doused every bridge with gasoline and lit them on fire, I wrote some notes on exactly why I stopped writing. And at the time, I thought these issues were insurmountable, and maybe some of them are. And maybe it’s impossible to write fiction in a world when everything has become TikTok-ified. I don’t know. There are a lot of other major obstacles that I have to figure out. The big one is I simply do not know what to write about anymore. I’m out of ideas, and I can’t keep repeating myself.

So I’ve been chipping and trying to get started again, trying to figure out which way is up. I used to write daily, and for almost ten years, had to write something every day. I always had this strong belief that if I stopped, I would lose momentum, and then the next thing I knew, years would go by and I wouldn’t even know what went wrong. That’s basically what happened. And starting from an absolute dead stop has been difficult. I have a feeling it will take me months to get back to the same cadence I was at a few years ago. But that’s the goal.

* * *

Nothing else going on. Lots of other stuff going on. I should write more about the writing thing later. And the MBA thing. Stay tuned.

Categories
general

Film, memoirs, rollovers

I just got back from another walk around NAS Alameda with two of my film cameras, the Vivitar point-and-shoot and the Canon QL-17. Nice weather for a walk, although there was some event going on and the west side of the island was far too busy for me. I should probably get used to that, because at some point, they’ll tear down the old barracks and put in live/work condos and it will always be this busy.

Shooting with that Vivitar is always weird, because sometimes I forget it isn’t the same one that I bought in 1993 and had back in the 90s. When I’m walking around the Bay Area with it, it’s a strong memory hole back to my first trip to California in 1996.  Looking at grainy, faded analog pictures (like the one above) reminds me so much of that trip, and the late 90s San Francisco, and it makes me wonder what it will be like in 2045, looking at 20-megapixel DSLR images on whatever crazy 3-D 200K screens we’ll be staring at by then. (Provided I still have vision in 25 years. And will still be alive.)

I made a vow to not buy any more film until I shot everything I have on hand, and I did that today, minus the 20-some shots of black-and-white still in the Canon. I’m expecting some crazy supply-chain stuff that’s going to completely throw that off, though. I haven’t bought any film since 2018, and I’m sure things have changed. I’ve got a dozen rolls waiting to be processed, so maybe when I drop those off at Mike’s Camera next weekend, I’ll see what they have in stock. Or, it’s off to eBay.

* * *

Writing is still going nowhere. This week, I was revisiting a book I started writing in 2012. I’ve tried a few times writing a book that is basically a Summer Rain prequel, that takes place in the summer of 1989, between high school and college. I’ve had at least two false starts totaling maybe 100,000 words between them, and they always die about halfway through. I started a very Raymond Federman-esque book in ’12 that was about the attempts to write this book, and the problems therein. It came from reading Double or Nothing too many times.

I thought I’d revisit it, thinking about how I look back at that era as a 50-year-old, and all of the problems I have now with nostalgia. And maybe a meditation on the need to write a memoir, and why it’s a bad idea, or has been distorted or changed in recent years. I think when I was living in that era, and a bunch of stuff happened that summer, I always thought, “this would make a great book,” because it all lined up so exactly with the traditional novel plot curve, and the events were so extraordinary or traumatic or whatever. That was before I considered myself a writer, and back then, writing a book was a giant, insurmountable goal, like climbing a mountain or running a marathon. The idea of “getting published” was such a high bar, a lofty thing, and I always thought maybe someday I would.

Now, I’ve published so many books I can never remember how many and have to look it up any time someone asks. (It’s seventeen, more or less.) Anyone can publish their own book in five minutes. And the national zeitgeist isn’t about publishing a book, because nobody even reads books anymore. It’s about going viral, making a fifteen-second video that catches on, or whatever. Old man shakes fist at air, I know.

The other main reason I need to put this down is I know I have some deep, unsettled trauma about those years. It’s not like Trauma trauma, like I watched my parents get killed after going out to a movie and had to become a crime fighter dressed as a Chiroptera. But there’s some heavy unresolved something there, something that’s best left alone. Nothing specific, just generalized. I don’t want to spend my time going back anymore. But it’s a problem that when I’m faced with a blank page and no ideas, that’s where I go.

* * *

Nothing else. I wasted about half of today trying to figure out how to roll over an IRA from Schwab to E*Trade. That place I worked in Denver got bought by McAfee a long time ago, and I had like a month of 401K stuck there, which got moved to an IRA, and they mailed everything to my old address and it got lost. After much phone tag, I found it sitting in an account at Schwab, then promptly forgot all about it. I just remembered, and 25% of it is gone because of fees. I thought transferring it would involve actually finding a fax machine in 2021, but it appears they take a PDF by email. Fingers crossed.

Categories
general

videos, writing, programming, pocket computer

I am sort of done with the Random Life project. There are 100 videos there now. It was fun digging through some old stuff, but I got almost zero reaction from anyone out of it, and maybe it was a dumb idea. Oh well. Maybe in two or three years, I’ll look at it again and it will be interesting.

Been insanely busy with a big work release, and that’s finally done, but I haven’t been back on the horse with anything writing since then. It’s the time of year where I start to panic about not getting a book published this year, since the last year I had nothing published was 2010. But I’m in a weird place right now, where I am having a lot of trouble writing anything cohesive. I am just repeating myself at this point, and I really don’t like what I’ve been doing the last few books. And a lot of people agree, based on my sales numbers. So who knows what I will do. Maybe I will pull something together in the next 96 days. Or maybe I will pick up this writing thing after I retire. I really don’t know.

* * *
For whatever reason, I started programming again. One of the three projects I always take up when I think I’m going to learn programming is writing a Zork-like game, a text-based RPG. Yes, I could just use Twine or some other game engine to do this. I mean, I could just play Zork. This is mostly just a dumb hobby for me to do because I can’t write, I don’t want to spend two thousand dollars on a gaming PC, and I am not about to start playing golf.

So I started writing this game in straight vanilla C, with nothing but the standard library. I still know a remarkable amount of C, given that I think I learned it thirty years ago. What I didn’t remember is that C is such a pain in the ass to work with. Every data structure that isn’t an integer requires you to either write or steal a library to do it. Dynamic arrays? DIY. Binary trees? You’re on your own. It all involves pointers and malloc’ing memory, and every time I would write ten lines of code, I’d think, “well, that’s going to break in actual use” or “that’s completely insecure.” I got a few hundred lines into the thing before I decided to switch to using Ruby.

I guess Ruby is now an inherently uncool language. All the cool kids use Rust, or JavaScript, or maybe Python. I first started messing with Ruby in the context of Rails development in 2006 or 2007, and spent a couple of years doing a ton of it, on a brief  sabbatical from tech writing. Haven’t done much since then, but I thought maybe I’d do this game in Ruby, no Rails, no ActiveRecord, no crazy gem dependencies. I think it took me about 25 minutes to redo the couple of days of work I did in C.

It was easy to get lost in this, but I also ran into a few issues. The first is the constant though of “nobody uses Ruby anymore.” The other is thinking that some bit of code is a very un-Ruby way to do things. I started reading more about Ruby, and it sort of drove me nuts because the Ruby way to do stuff is usually inherently unreadable. It’s neat and cool, but in my mind, doing a “if this thing is nil, do something else” is more readable than “do something else unless this thing is nil.” I realize I’m probably losing all of you non-programmers here, and I’m being pedantic, but I have some basic fear of writing this thing, publishing it on GitHub, and then having a seasoned veteran look at it like I’d look at a Reddit DIY post about some idiot who proudly enlarged their living room by removing every load-bearing interior wall in their house.

Also I get to the “why are you even doing this?” point. And the fact that I’m relaxing after a dozen of hours of hacking away at unreadable garbage in the Atom editor and pushing it to GitHub by spending a few hours hacking away at unreadable garbage in the Atom editor and pushing it to GitHub. So, yeah. How much does golf cost?

* * *

I bought this “Pocket Computer” – a Sharp PC-E500S. It came out in 1995, and has 32KB of memory. It’s roughly half the size of an iPad lengthwise, about 9×4 inches, maybe 3/4-inch thick. It has a 4×40-character display, LCD, and more or less a full QWERTY keyboard, except plastic little keys like a calculator. You can write BASIC programs in it, but it also has a bunch of crazy engineering software in it, so you can do integral calculus or pull up a periodic table of elements. It runs forever on four AAA batteries.

I don’t really know what I’ll do with it. I won it on a lark – made a hail mary offer on it on eBay, and the seller accepted. It has a serial port that uses a connector I’ve never seen, and a cartridge port for proprietary memory cards that are impossible to find. It is slightly more useful and interesting than the Casio FX-7000GA I have from 1990, which currently spends its time in a storage container in my closet. I need to keep in mind that buying things doesn’t really give me the joy I think it will.

* * *

The helicopter picture above is apropos of nothing. It’s from my Alaska trip in 2006. I think I’m at the point where I want to go back to Alaska, and I’m currently stuck with a bunch of Alaska Air credits I can’t use, but who knows when it will be safe to get back up there. I sometimes think it would be cool to go further north, head up to Fairbanks, but I don’t know the logistics of it. Maybe at some point.

Categories
general

Coke Zero, Hybrid Failure, SR2, Etc

They recently changed the formula of Coke Zero to make it “more like regular Coke.” It tastes like a mix of Listerine and cloves now. The only thing is has improved is my ability to quit soda, which hasn’t happened yet, but probably should.

I would normally be more upset about this, but I ultimately have no time to care. I drank a case of it and can’t tell the difference now, so on to the next problem/outrage. I used to be much more upset when a company made a lame decision like the discontinuation of Surge, the dropping of the Taco Bell Mexican Pizza, or the fact that I’ve eaten the same exact oatmeal every morning for twelve years and they decided to stop selling in packets. Life is too short.

* * *

After dumping all the money into my car over the last month, I had a fun experience with it. I was driving off to the mall a week ago, and after I got up to highway speed on the 580, every warning light in the dash came on, and the info panel said “HYBRID SYSTEM FAILURE – PULL OVER IMMEDIATELY.” The dynamic braking stopped working, and the EV system went completely offline. There was a Toyota dealership just past the next highway exit, so I swung in there and dropped it off. They said they’d get to it on Monday.

This began a weekend-long spiral into figuring out if I needed to buy a new car. The hybrid system is still under warranty, so if it needed a $5000 battery, that’s covered. But I figured the dealership would add a $4000 spine reticulation charge or whatever the hell, or take six months to fix it. The car’s probably worth about $7000 in good condition. When the Yaris reached the end of the line in 2014 and had unknown wiring problems only fixable by a dealer, I brought it to the sales counter and they made me a good deal on the trade-in, so I figured I’d do the same. They don’t make the Prius C anymore, and the Camry and Corolla hybrids are honestly better cars than the Prius, so I burned a lot of cycles pricing this stuff out, trying to figure out what I wanted to pay, what I wanted to finance, etc etc.

Monday morning, they ran the diagnostic and said it was just the ECC lost communication with the system and threw a few codes, so it shut down the entire hybrid system. (If you stumble across this in a search, the DTC codes were U0140, U0073, and U0126.) The only obvious culprit was that I have a ScanGauge II plugged into the ODBII port. I have since I got the car; it’s a holdover from when I had the largely-gaugeless Yaris. I don’t really use it anymore, and the tech theorized that maybe the cable got bumped, or something else happened. He cleared the codes, unplugged the ScanGauge, and no problems since. No charge on the scan, either. So I saved $200 plus another $25,000 on a new car.

* * *

I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting anything going writing-wise. In a fit of “do something completely different,” I did a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V on the project file for my first book, and started on page 1, taking notes and editing things. I’ve had this stupid idea to write a thirty-years-later sequel of the book, and I thought I came up with a good gimmick to get it going, but I needed to go through the old draft, partly to get it all back in my head, and partly to George Lucas in a few minor changes to get the two books to line up correctly.

It’s an …interesting experience to read writing I haven’t touched in over twenty years, especially when it’s a radical departure from what I’ve been writing ever since. There’s obviously some very wooden writing, and little bone-headed typos abound. The usual complaint about the book is that it’s too long, and generally plotless. I could see trimming the book slightly, tightening up things. But for every subplot I would think about trimming, I think there’s another that could have been explored more. And it surprises me now that there are so many characters, so many subplots. It also follows an overall arc more than I thought.

After I got about a third of the way through it, I got disinterested with the idea, though. I can’t go too into it without revealing the gimmick, but I wasn’t interested in writing that book. And it’s been a long time since I’ve put a lot of focused thought into Bloomington. I haven’t spent more than a few hours in town since 1999 when I stopped there for a few days on my move east. Writing a sequel would need some solid reason to be there, and not just the main character wandering around having regrets about every person he dated a million years ago, and being amazed at how all of the stores at the mall closed. Maybe at some point I will visit again and get the spark to write this, but who knows.

* * *

Speaking of, I’m still on for the Seattle trip in two weeks. I have been working on a list of what to do, but I haven’t done any heavy research yet. I just now started thinking about what camera or cameras to bring, or if it’s time for a new one, and I need to shut down that conversation before it starts.