The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

  • John Sheppard’s latest, Fire Retardant Strong Man

    Back in the day, Paragraph Line consisted of a bunch of things: semi-frequent flash fiction, weird and strange blogging, books by many great writers, a lit journal, and zines. But it was also created by me and John Sheppard for a specific reason: to publish our books. In 2010, we bought a block of 100 ISBN numbers to use as we churned out our own books.

    Both John and I saw our writing output go fallow about four years ago. This was a combination of The Algorithm and the business of selling books, and life in general getting in the way. But right as I came back and published Decision Paralysis, John also came out with a new one, called Fire Retardant Strong Man, which is now available in print and on Kindle at Amazon.

    I blurbed the book by saying it’s like if Kurt Vonnegut wrote Idiocracy, because it reminds me of the dystopian dumb-apocalypse of Mike Judge’s 2006 comedy (now documentary), but it reads in the style of Vonnegut classics like Slapstick or Cat’s Cradle. It takes place a few decades from now in a world where a group of billionaires called The Broligarch rule the country, which is under strict surveillance and everyone is in forever debt and spends their time endlessly watching The Scroll.

    It follows an Ohioan named William who fish-out-of-water ends up in a small town in Colorado, in hiding and caught in a dangerous scenario trying to frame an evil senator who is the third-wealthiest man in America, and enslaves is new girlfriend Hazel.

    FRSM is a straight-up page turner, a burn through William’s story as he tries to piece together a plan to escape with Hazel and topple Senator Charles Chase. But it’s also a heartfelt tale about an innocent young man finding out about the cruel new world and how he can fight against it.

    This book is a lot of fun, with great humor and a critique of everything from AI to big brother to oligarchy to porn. Spoiler alert: there’s an easter egg that crosses over to the Konrath-iverse, too. And I think the best thing about this is John’s firing on all cylinders and has much more gas in the tank here.

    Check it out over at Amazon. And as for Paragraph Line, we’re getting there. Both of us are busy writing, which is the good news. I need a new web site, and that’s underway. And we’re slowly re-releasing a bunch of our old books that are out of print. Stay tuned.

  • 2024’s top ten pictures

    I did not take many pictures in 2024. 2022 was a year I tried to go whole-hog into photography and I took just over 12,000 pictures. Last year: 3,200. Part of this was less travel; part of it was having two injuries that sidelined me a bit. But also, I didn’t focus on photography as much because I spent a lot more of my energy on writing, which is good.

    Anyway, here’s my top ten.

    So, five from Vietnam, one from Spain, and four from California. Six were taken with the Canon 6D mkii, two were from an iPhone, one was with a Sony a6400, and one was with a DJI Osmo Pocket3. About 1900 of that 3200 were from an iPhone 14 Pro; about 800 were from the 6D, and most of the rest were the Sony. (The DJI is relatively new.)

    I’m not 100% with this WordPress gallery thing, but I’m also not posting giant photo dumps on Flickr or whatever anymore. Does this work? Is it sustainable? Not sure. It seems okay for a small number of photos, though.

    Took 100-some photos at the Alviso salt ponds yesterday, and it was good to get out and do that. I don’t know if this is just New Year/New Me nonsense or if I can build up some inertia, but we’ll see.

     

  • 2024

    The end.Okay, last day of the year, so as I did in 2023 and 2022, time to bang out a summary:

    • Started off the year with my very first case of COVID. I was pissed I made it almost four whole years without catching it, and then the Denver airport Centurion lounge did me in. I was lucky to get on Paxlovid immediately, and spent basically two weeks asleep on an air mattress in my home office, watching the movie Moneyball over and over for some reason. I’d planned to go to Vegas for my birthday, but nope.
    • Thanks to the time stuck in bed, I released my first album, 0. It’s an ambient synth album and pretty much nobody heard it, but it was fun to do. I recorded the whole thing in Logic Pro, mostly by cutting and pasting notes in the editor and using virtual synths.
    • I got Invisalign, which was a huge waste of money and I wish I had not done it. Had to fire a dentist over this.
    • I went to Anaheim for work and stayed at Disneyland. It was almost entirely a work thing, but there were some brief reverberations with previous visits, which I wrote about in the link.
    • I went to Vietnam. This trip was amazing and difficult and shocking and incredible. I think more than any other trip I’ve taken, it’s had the biggest impact in disrupting my preconceptions about a country.
    • I went to Barcelona on a work trip. This was almost entirely work and I only had a brief bit of time to see Spain, but what I saw was interesting.
    • I broke my right arm in a stupid fall. I think this threw me off for about a month. No, I didn’t get painkillers.
    • I was supposed to go to New Orleans in August, but Sarah caught covid right before we left, so I cancelled.
    • In September, I threw out my back in a major way and spent a week on the couch, unable to move.
    • In October, based on the above, I made the decision to enter food jail  and completely locked down my diet. I’ve lost about 30 pounds since then, but probably have another 30 to go.
    • I still walk every day, but thanks to the collapse of FitBit and the stupidity of Apple Health, I have no idea how many steps or miles I walked. It’s probably about the same as last year or a little less.
    • I had both an aunt and an uncle die this year. Both were siblings on my mom’s side. The aunt was my favorite aunt and that affected me, but I did not write about it because the whole thing was non-public and weird.
    • My 2014 Prius C was traded in for a 2024 Prius Limited.
    • I published my 18th book, Decision Paralysis. It’s my second-longest book (100,000 words), and I’m happy I’m finally writing.
    • I re-published Vol. 13.
    • I wrote maybe 100,000 words between another large book and other random stuff.
    • I only published 20 entries here, down from 25 last year, and way down from when I used to post daily. I briefly tried a Substack, but that’s stupid and just another distraction.
    • I spent a lot of time, money, and effort working on my mental health. I won’t get into details, but I feel a lot better now than I did 365 days ago. This is my most important and challenging project, although writing every day is a big help with this.

    I don’t have any resolutions for 2025. Keep writing. Get everything else out of the way. That’s enough.

  • My new book Decision Paralysis is out now

    Decision Paralysis bookI’m very happy to announce my 18th book, Decision Paralysis, is out now.

    TL;DR: Amazon print and Amazon kindle links.

    I did not think I was ever going to write another book. I quit writing completely in 2021, and spent at least a year 100% away from it, not even calling myself a writer, not sure what to do with my life except work, eat, and sleep. But I’ll always be a writer. I could not quit. And I needed to tell myself that I had to write the next book, even if nobody read it, even if the market had completely vanished and would be replaced with dumb AI-generated murder mysteries that end on a cliffhanger with a link to buy the next of 29 books in the series. The algorithm has killed everything, but it has not killed me.

    I spent the first few months of 2024 knocking around a few other projects before I got to this. On 5/27/24, I started this book in earnest, with only a title and about 8,000 words of scraps. By the end of July, I had the idea that this book would be the spiritual successor to The Failure Cascade, which I’d re-released a few months prior. I wanted longer stories, more bleak, more introspective, and with a thickness and depth I wasn’t getting in the short micro-fiction or flash I’d been doing in the last decade.

    Aside from telling myself “just write,” the biggest change in my work habits was moving my writing time to mornings. Waking up at 3:45 and sitting in my office in darkness for a few hours listening to weird ambient music put me in a different headspace and made the words start to add up. I think in early August, I crossed the 50,000 word mark, and that was the original intention. I’d originally had these short flash interstitials between stories, and at some point, I pulled all of them out and focused just on the stories. I also started footnoting things, which may be devisive, but I had fun with it.

    A bit of an easter egg and a change is that the titles of each story are latitute/longitude coordinates. They have meaning; that’s all I’ll say. I’ve had a very specific format for titles that I think were funny, but as I am battling this persona problem, I think I got backed in a corner with them. I found that the people who thought the goofy titles were haw-haw funny were also the ones who basically didn’t get what I’m trying to do with my writing. So, clean break from that.

    It’s also always bugged me when my stuff was too short, or perceived as such. I mean, some of the books are; The Failure Cascade is 37,565 words. Any time someone told me, “It was so great because I could sit down and read it in one sitting” it was a bit of an insult, especially when that was basically my annual output of 2020. So I purposely went maximalist on some of the stories here. The best/worst example is the titular story of the book, which is 16,000 words. For comparison, 2017’s Help Me Find My Car Keys And We Can Drive Out! — the entire book — is 30 stories that total 15,848 words. That story is like “The Aristocrats” in that it was long and essentially useless (at it’s core, it’s about someone trying to buy lunch who can’t find anything to eat) and at like 3,000 words, I thought it was getting excessive; at about 5,000 I thought “I should just make the whole book this story” and it quickly shot up to 10,000 words. It took another 6,000 to finish the thing, and it’s about everything but ordering food now.

    This book was therapeutic to me. I think I was able to explore a lot about why I’m here and what I’m doing. I’ve struggled a lot in recent years with the big dillema of what I am and how I’m supposed to finish the rest of my years. I have no children and no legacy, and there’s honestly no hope that any of this writing exists beyond me. I could write a lot more about this, but the TL;DR is that I covered some of it here, and I probably need to do more.

    Final tally: 20 stories; 412 pages; 101,834 words; 249 footnotes.

    The description from the back cover:

    Euthanasia drug MLMs. Deep-fried lard rumored to have mystical healing properties sold at pirate-themed restaurants. Existential crises about dollar-menu tacos and light therapy. Is this your average terror nightmare, or just another Thursday where mind-reading dolphins are dialing 1-900 numbers to spill secrets about how DARPA taught them to master Minesweeper?

    Decision Paralysis by Jon Konrath is a surreal and darkly comedic exploration of absurdity and modern disconnection. The book plunges into a fragmented narrative where dystopian satire meets introspective nihilism. Inside, you’ll find twenty deranged tales of John Denver Illuminati theories, Taco Bell stealth tanks, Cambodian pizza chains that secretly sell time machines, and bitter online arguments about whether Norwegian timber tariffs of the 1800s ruined Chicago deep dish forever. The chaotic tales, blending dystopia and the grotesque, offer sharp humor and biting commentary, leaving readers grappling with questions of meaning, choice, and the absurdity of existence.

    A biting critique of consumer culture, decision fatigue, and the search for identity in a fractured world, Decision Paralysis is both a satire and a deep dive into the human psyche. Fans of sardonic humor, speculative fiction, and offbeat storytelling will find much to enjoy in Konrath’s latest offering, which deftly combines outrageous comedy with an undercurrent of raw, philosophical truth. This is a book that will leave readers laughing, thinking, and questioning their own paths through the maze of modern existence.

    The cover: it’s from Van Damme Beach just south of Mendocino. Failure Cascade‘s cover was shot on the same 2017 trip, about three miles north. It was a color image that was filtered down to black and white; this image is color, but looks almost monochromatic. I love when a photo ends up like that.

    Anyway, that’s that. I hope you check it out. I am not sure what’s next, but I have a list of stuff to do, and two big books past the first draft stage, so we’ll see what 2025 brings.

  • Book, passports, stuff, writing

    passportsI don’t usually talk about works in progress, but just a quick accountability note here to mention that I finished the first draft of my 18th book. This is more or less a spiritual continuation of The Failure Cascade, and is 20 stories, but almost three times longer. I’m moving past flash fiction and micro-fiction, maybe. I mean, there’s one story that’s roughly half the length of Failure Cascade. I don’t have any distance from the thing to say whether I like it or not, but John read a draft and he did. Completely unmarketable, but I’ll keep going on it after I catch a breath and see when I can publish it. It already has a title and a cover image. ChatGPT can write the book description and marketing crap better than I can. Those three things are always the biggest blockers on getting a book out the door.

    I just realized that if I get this book out this year (and I’m not worried if I don’t) it will be four years since my last book. The longest gap before this was about 20 months between Summer Rain and Rumored to Exist. When I really got on the horse and changed around my writing schedule and cadence and work ethic in 2010, I had it in my head that I needed to publish at least a book a year because of the algorithm (or whatever) and I did that from 2010 to 2020, with two years that had two books. Now, whatever. I have been writing more and changed around my schedule to make that happen. But I’m writing for me, not for a calendar or an algorithm. I’d like to get the long list of half-done projects out the door, but I don’t care how they sell.

    * * *

    I also don’t talk about future travel plans, but it’s time to get out of the country again, and time to renew my passport, while I still can. I was trying to book something this morning and realized this one’s expiring less than six months from when I’m leaving. Pretty much every country has a requirement that you have six months on your passport in case you end up in a coma in a hospital or whatever. Five and a half months left is not close enough according to an airline computer, so it’s time to figure this out.

    It’s always oddly bittersweet when I do this. First, this will be the last passport when I have hair. Second, there was a six-year gap from the first stamp to the second. Lots of blank pages I wish I would have filled. This one has stamps from 20 countries, which is way more than the last one. (I think that had four or five.) This one also has three visas, including a work visa, which is new to me.

    I honestly don’t know how much I will travel in the future. I think it’s going to become a lot more difficult, impractical, and expensive to travel internationally. And I’m not exactly enthused about spending my tourist dollars in a large chunk of the country. I really should spend more time in California, because there’s a lot of it I haven’t seen. There are nine national parks in California, and I’ve hiked exactly zero of them. Time to look into that.

    * * *

    I don’t talk about politics here, and it’s hard not to. There’s a lot of dismay and there’s a lot I can’t do about the situation. For my own mental health, I feel a great need to distance myself from it and focus on what I can do. I also don’t talk about work here, but I think the best I can do is to continue to manage and mentor people, try to grow my company and my little corner of Silicon Valley, and continue to support who I can. I grew up working retail and dumb jobs in the middle of the country, and was lucky to find a way out and get a real job and benefits and live in a beautiful place. I’ll stay here while I can. When I can’t, I’ll leave. I’m fortunate enough to have options, but I love it in California.

    I think one other thing is I need to take a big step back from the news/terror cycle and redouble my efforts on writing. I’ve already had serious questions about my social media use, and this pretty much sealed the deal for me. I spent far too much time doom-scrolling in Reddit, and I can’t anymore. My last news source was the New York Times, and I cancelled my subscription (even though I get it free through Amex) because of obvious reasons a few months ago. Twitter got nuked a year ago, not that I ever used it.

    I’ve given up on Substack. It’s become a political doom and gloom circle-jerk, but more than that, I don’t know what to post there. I feel like any writing I’m not doing for a book or for work should be here. I thought about having some system where I blogged here and mirrored it there, but it was too much work and I don’t really see the benefit. A lot of the writing content on Substack is either of the “look at me” or “make money fast” variety, and I care about neither.

    At this point, my two biggest social media vices are Tik-Tok and Tumblr. I don’t do much content creation on Tik-Tok, and I have only two or three friends on there, but it’s fairly easy to push the algorithm away from the bad and just waste time watching people pressure-wash driveways or travel in weird places. I also don’t do much creation and have no friends on Tumblr, but I like it because I don’t even think the people working at Tumblr are aware it’s still operational. Because I don’t create and I don’t use my real name, I don’t chase likes and follows or look at numbers. That’s what’s good for me.

    Same goes here. I have no idea how many people read this, and I have no need to “grow” things here. I’ll just keep on keeping on.

  • Speed, funnels, writing

    A few vague thoughts on blogging and such on a lazy Sunday, which seems to be the only day I can ever pay attention to this thing.

    I keep thinking about what I want to do here and how this blog should evolve (or whatever.) I sometimes think the big retirement project should be a grand reunification of all my content everywhere, into a giant meta-site of sorts, where one could see a mass of texts and books and pictures and videos and emails and whatever else, all poured into some giant Project Xanadu-esque thing. This is obviously something well beyond the ability of WordPress, because it can barely handle what I’ve got going here already.

    Anyway, one of the bummers about this blog has been performance. I started using Pair to host this thing last century, and while they’ve always been rock-solid, they’ve also been somewhat dated in their offerings and tools. I mean, when I thought I needed to move from WordPress to some thing I wrote in Rails or whatever, I basically found it impossible to do anything except PHP unless I moved up a level or two on my package. Lately, I’ve been discouraged by the general performance and the fact that I have no CDN and this thing is hosted in Pittsburgh.

    To be fair, it’s hard to tell if my site’s performance is because of my connection, the server I pay for, WordPress, my configuration of WordPress, or the sheer size of this thing. I’ve been looking with the P3 Plugin Profiler on the back end, and PageSpeed Insights on the front. I’ve messed around with the plugin config and switched SEO plugins, and that bought me about a half-second on page loads. I have no idea on how any of this works, but the general advice, in order, is to shell out for a good host, shell out for a CDN, look at your image situation, cut down the number of plugins, and cut down as much CSS stuff as you can. I think there are little tricks that could get this working slightly better, like switching themes, moving my archives links to another page, building my WP statically and hosting that in a CDN, or maybe finally giving up on WP and moving to Hugo or Jekyll or something else. I vaguely looked at moving to Ghost or moving to a hosted WP instance in Lightsail. The former was too limiting and the latter didn’t buy me much performance. It’s silly for me to waste time on this with the low amount of traffic this thing sees, but it’s an itch that’s hard to stop scratching.

    The other thing I keep thinking of is funnels. How do people read this? How do they find it? Why do they stay? How do they come back? I don’t really market this thing at all, and I don’t fit any niche box that would make this go viral or get regular traffic. This is mostly me screaming into the void and hoping I can come back later and find something.

    It makes me think back to the days of things like web rings and having a big list of favorite blogs on a page to find others and whatever else we used to do. This thing has an RSS feed, but it seems like nobody uses RSS anymore. I still use Feedly to read stuff, but everyone except three blogs have abandoned it. Is this because Google Reader is dead and nobody uses it, or is there some other reason like people “steal” content from feeds? No idea.

    I think changes in the Google algorithm have made blogging organic content for the sake of organic content a lost cause. Twenty years ago, I could search for people involved in some niche hobby and find actual people, but now I just get travel links and shoe ads. I guess the big funnels are social media, but I don’t know that people leave their respective walled garden to go elsewhere and read content. And I can’t really post this stuff on TikTok or something. I guess if I had really snappy pull quotes, I could take just the text of that and put it over a video of a beach and play five seconds of a Taylor Swift song over it and people might see it. But not only is that work, it’s also stupid. I also keep thinking about how I’ve done mostly nothing with Substack, and maybe I should be pouring this stuff into that so people find it. Or not? I don’t know.

    So, funnels. It’s an open question. I don’t know how I find content myself, let alone what others do.

    The other big blocker here is I am far too busy with my own writing, and in deep on a project. I’m trying to finish the 18th book, or what I think might be the 18th. This thing originally started as a collection of short stories like The Failure Cascade, but it’s now almost as long as my second-longest book and will probably surpass it very soon. I’m trying to land this one by the end of the year, but every time I wrap up some little missing thing, I leave notes on three others. I think back in August, I thought I’d get this thing wrapped up by the first of September. Now we’re going into the back half of October, and I’m hoping December. Not a big deal if it’s not.

    Starting in 2010, I forced myself to release at least a book a year, and got two on many of those years. It was one of those dumb self-publishing rules I thought I had to do, get something out to keep the long tail long, keep myself relevant, whatever. I now see no importance in that. I think I had a deep fear that if I missed a year, I’d miss two years, and then I’d wake up a decade later and wonder what happened.

    I feel like I did that after Rumored was released – I did little things here and there, but I feel like the 00s were basically a lost decade for me. And I regret that, but I think the twist is that if I’d been productively writing that whole time, even without releasing anything, I would have been content with my output. And 2021-2023 were a wash for me, but I’ve kept busy this year, and that’s all that matters.

  • Sunday

    Lazy Sunday and I have not updated in a while. I’d normally do some giant bulleted list, but I’m out of bullets, so I’ll just ramble for a bit.

    The main reason I haven’t updated is because I’ve been busy writing. After almost two years of trying to write and failing, I decided to shift my writing hours. Since 2010 when I started working from home on east coast time, I would write religiously from 3 to 5 PM. This started to fall apart when my work started shifting to the west coast office, and eventually, I found myself either working from 6 to 6 every day, or finishing early and being in a complete daze, unable to write. Moving to the hybrid schedule and being in the city half the time also made this schedule impossible. So, I decided on the early shift. I started waking up at 3:45 every morning, and writing until 7. It takes a minute to get my head on straight every morning, and I’m usually blacking out at about 7 or 8 at night. But it’s been very productive with the writing. It’s good to completely block out everything and spend the time in the shower thinking about the writing, then brain dump it all for a few hours, and start the work day relaxed, knowing the writing is done for the day.

    * * *

    I don’t like to talk too much about works in progress, especially because my hard drive is littered with projects that never did and probably never will see the light of day. But the current one is a book of 20 stories, maybe a sort of successor to The Failure Cascade and Vol. 13. The main difference is that it’s much longer; it’s currently twice as long as Failure Cascade and not done yet. Most of my books were flash fiction, maybe what’s called a short-short story, between a thousand and two thousand words. FC had one story that was 5,000 words. This book has maybe five stories that long; one is three times that long. There’s still a lot of abstraction to the stories and it’s definitely not Raymond Carver or something. I don’t know if this is at all interesting to the reader, but I’ve enjoyed stretching things out a bit. The book has a title and a cover, which is a new one for me; I usually wait until the thing is 90% done (or more) and then freak out about what to do about that. I’d like to wrap this up by the end of the year, but I’m not too worried if that doesn’t happen.

    * * *

    Something else I’ve been doing is a slight variation on the Richard Feynman method of “favorite problems.” His method was to come up with a list of a dozen big-picture problems he wanted to solve in his lifetime. Then, as he found new lessons, new sources, new information, or new inspiration, he’d take that and see how it applied to these open questions.

    I’ve been bouncing around between projects too much, and have too many dead manuscripts and morgue files of pieces and parts lying around. So I started a list. And right now, half of the dozen and a half things I have on my list are dealing with reissues of old books (or not), but roughly eight of them are full-sized book projects. Aside from the aforementioned book, two others are 100,000+ word manuscripts that are past the first draft point, but in heavy disrepair. I still have this idea for “The Big Book” which is vaguely outlined and would be a 400,000-word, four-story novel that covers a few disparate things that all weave together perfectly by the end. I have a nostalgia book about the 90s (although I’m done with nostalgia) and there’s enough travel junk here to make a book or two, but I’m not interested in either.

    Anyway, the method has been useful, because when I stall out on something, I go to the next thing on the list that interests me, or I start digging through the few million words I have in these various junk files and see what can be harvested for what.

    * * *

    Something that’s not on the list is what to do with this and with all my other social media or whatever. I have a professional blog I haven’t touched since I posted about my MBA two years ago. I have the KonStack, which is largely dormant because I can’t figure out what goes there versus what goes here.

    There are three basic problems, not to go into a diatribe about this:

    1. Each different content pool has a different persona, and trying to focus on what I should be writing in each different place brings out this crippling self-censorship which totally blocks me.
    2. The content pools have a certain overlap and I never know what to put where. Like when I take a nifty picture, does it go to Instagram? Do I use it as a heading here? Is it part of a Substack post? Do I need to go back to Flickr?
    3. There are various dumb rules and requirements and problems that set exceptions to each pool. For example, this blog is public. I can assume that it’s being read by family members who I don’t want to read my stuff, and I have to limit what I say here. I have a completely locked down Facebook group where I post the most obscene or crazy memes and thoughts, but it only reaches a maximum of 40 people. Nobody looks at Flickr, ever. Certain stuff is only going into books, so I don’t want to burn it on posts and then have someone who buys the book realize they already read 37% of it months ago.

    Etc. The real solution is to write what I want and not dictate what I do by what works for the algorithm or what other people expect or want or do. That’s what I’ve been doing, but it obviously means I do a lot less here and on other sites.

    * * *

    I think travel is about done for the year. I had this wise idea that I was going to leave the country the week of the election, and blocked the time off. Then a couple of weeks ago, I threw my back out in probably the worst episode imaginable, and it completely immobilized me for almost a week. I spent about four days on the couch, unable to even sit up.  My back often goes out after flying halfway around the world, and it’s been getting increasingly worse. In Vietnam, I was completely immobile for the first morning I was in Saigon, and thought I was in serious trouble.

    Now I’m starting to doubt my ability to take such long trips anymore. My back is mostly better now, maybe 90%. But I’m in food jail until further notice, so I can get some of this weight off my lower spine. And I’ll do whatever stretches and exercises they give me to do. Flying to Europe or whatever next month is out of the question. We might have some holiday travel, but that sort of depends on what happens next month, and I don’t want to get into that.

    * * *

    I fired the con artist dentist who did my Invisalign earlier this year. When I got it taken off, he did a half-ass job getting the attachments off, and then started in on me about how I needed four crowns redone immediately, at a cost of five grand each. The last crown I had done was like $1800, and insurance picked up half of it. So, done. I went back to my old dentist, who is in a dead mall just south of where we used to live in South San Francisco. He did a few x-rays and said I needed a hundred-dollar filling at the root line of a back crown, and he polished off one of my front teeth that had the remainder of an attachment button on it, which was driving me nuts. I love this guy, and I know it’s only a matter of time before the mall is imploded and he retires, but I’ll keep going back to him until then.

    It’s always weird to be back in the old neighborhood, and it gives me such 2008-2009 flashbacks. But it’s also changing very quickly, and a lot of what used to be car washes and fast-food joints on El Camino have quickly become vast 5-over-1 apartment buildings. Parts of the strip are the same, but others are radically different now. I decided to stop for lunch at an old favorite, which really hit the spot. The weather was perfect, and this was the first I’d left the house since the back incident.

    I went to this low-key Mexican bar and grill, an unassuming brick building with a big hand-painted Fifties-looking sign and a horse statue on the roof, and a mural on the brick wall that just said “RESTAURANT – BAR.” Inside, two old guys nursed drinks at the bar, locked into a soccer game on the screen. A Mexican family were just finishing up lunch, but I otherwise had the place to myself. Aside from the TVs and the credit card machine, the inside of that restaurant could have been 1961 or 1979 or 2008. I got an incredibly good chimichanga plate for twenty bucks, a food jail furlough. I need to do that more often, instead of just shame-eating twenty bucks of Crunchwrap in my car. It was incredibly relaxing, as was the walk to my car and back.

    Anyway. Time to reset for the week and avoid the Sunday Scaries.

  • Vol.13, Revisited

    Vol.13 rides again. I’ve revisited and republished my 13th book from 2016.

    Let’s cut to the chase with the Amazon link: https://amzn.to/4e81lyi

    For those who don’t remember, this was a book of 20 short stories and flash fiction pieces. It included two things that were in other zines, and three stories that were in my own zine, Mandatory Laxative #14.

    Let’s ask the KonGPT what it was about:

    Vol. 13 by Jon Konrath is an eclectic, absurdist work that blends surreal humor with societal satire. The collection of short stories and essays addresses a wide array of random yet often connected topics, including pop culture, existential musings, and sharp critiques of consumerism and modern life. With chapter titles like “Mariah Carey Is Punk as Fuck” and “The Kansas City Tofu Firebombing,” the content explores bizarre scenarios filled with dark humor. The chaotic narrative jumps from one vignette to the next, portraying a disjointed, almost hallucinogenic journey through a world where everything is skewed to the point of absurdity.

    Konrath’s writing style is frenetic, with a voice that mixes cynicism and wit while layering in cultural references ranging from fast food chains to forgotten celebrities. The underlying tone is rebellious, subversive, and at times grotesque, capturing the disillusionment with American culture in the early 21st century. The stories invite the reader to experience a twisted version of reality where logic breaks down, leaving behind a vivid, often unsettling commentary on the absurdities of daily life .

    As I did with The Failure Cascade and Book of Dreams, this re-visit involved a quick edit to fix minor typos. If you already own the book, you’re not getting any new content here, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find some questionable use of commas quashed. This publication was mostly a long-tail effort to get old writing back out there.

    The original cover was a play on the Black Sabbath album Vol.4. Back in 2016, I labored to get the font and the look of it right. The curse was the use of “The Picture” which seemed like a good idea at the time, the height of that dumb meme. I won’t get into the exact details, but that meme is dead and I’m scrubbing it from everything possible. There was something great about having a piece of branding like that, but it also very firmly painted me in a corner persona-wise, and I’m happy to abandon it. I like the new cover a lot, and it was neat to make. Finding an icon for each story was a fun project. Is it weird to have this book sort of named after the Black Sabbath album and not have the cover? Whatever.

    I previously said I like Book of Dreams like 95% and Failure Cascade maybe 75%. I would honestly say I like Vol.13 maybe 80%. There are a few cringe bits here, and I do fall into some of the same Konrath tropes that I repeat far too much. (Me and Fat Mike go to the 7-Eleven; someone babbling about something at a fast-food restaurant; I’m at a Kroger talking to some weirdo; a military strike in everyday life.) There are certain callbacks that I used to make as part of my “brand” that have been driven into the ground that I can’t erase: Mariah Carey, Lunchables, NyQuil, etc. I’m done (or trying to be done) with writing like that, but I can’t erase all of it.

    There are some stories in here that I absolutely love. “The Metaphor of Poundcake” is one of my favorite stories ever, and has two threads that weave together perfectly. “#JustKilldozerThings” has some absolutely fabulous lines and exchanges in it. While most of my flash fiction hovers around 1000 words in this era, there are a lot of stories that stretch out for two or three times that. It’s similar to Failure Cascade (and my next book) in that the stories almost get too long to be flash, but still feel like exactly the right balance between punchiness and story.

    Anyway, there it is. Now, on to the next one.

  • Ode to a 2020 MacBook Pro

    Time for another one of these posts. This upgrade is not as catastrophic as a battery explosion like last time. It does have a slightly dumb story to it, though.

    So yesterday, I was supposed to fly to New Orleans. If you’ve known me for a few years, you know Louisiana is one of the last states I have to visit, and I’ve been trying to go there for a while. And every time I book a ticket to New Orleans, something catastrophic happens. The first time I tried to visit, I booked a ticket on September 10th, 2001. That obviously didn’t work out. Then I tried booking a trip in the summer of 2005, and that August, Katrina showed up, and I had to cancel again. This time, it looked like we were going to make it, but Sarah caught COVID last week, and I had to cancel a third time.

    I’ve wanted to update this 2020 Mac for a while, but also didn’t want to, because it’s an Intel, and I don’t know what software on this machine requires an Intel processor. I know VMWare does, but I haven’t used VMWare in forever. It seems like every time I fire it up, they’ve upgraded a major version and mine doesn’t work anymore and I have to give them another hundred dollars. Meanwhile at work, I’ve been on Apple Silicon for a year and a half with no problems and a decent speed increase. And the 2020 has been slowly aging out. Firing up Photoshop or Lightroom almost always kicks in the fans, and even basic Safari usage is getting pretty sluggish. So I’ve wanted to make the switch, but I keep dragging it out. But with a huge negative balance on my Amex and a week of staycation where I’ll be confined to my office, it felt like now was the time.

    * * *

    Whenever I retire a machine, I always think back to what I got accomplished with it. And this machine is somewhat depressing, because a good chunk of its tenure was when I “quit” writing. The Failure Cascade is the only book I released while on this Mac. There were also two zines, and a bit of writing that was unreleased. During the time I wasn’t writing fiction, I did finish two master’s degrees, and that required a ton of writing. And since I “unquit” writing, I’ve done a fair amount of fiction writing, and hope to get something released soon.

    This laptop did travel a lot more than any of my other machines, even though there were a few years at the start of the pandemic where it never left my desk. But since 2022, it’s been to Sweden, Iceland, the UK, Qatar, India (twice), the UAE, Poland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Taiwan, Switzerland, and Spain. In the US it went down to LA twice, Reno, Vegas, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Hauling a full-sized 15-inch laptop (and sometimes two of them) wasn’t pleasant. But it was nice to have everything with me when I was on the road.

    I still wish I would have gotten more writing out of this machine, though. I guess that gives me a goal for the next one.

    * * *

    I went on the Apple store online on Friday night to do the deal and go buy a new MacBook Pro, but they did not have one in a store with a 2TB drive. I ordered a custom build, and it said it would take two weeks. Today I was at the mall-not-mall in Emeryville for lunch and decided screw it, I’ll just get the 1TB version.

    The latest iteration is the 14-inch Nov. 2023 MacBook Pro. It’s the Space Black model, with the M3 Pro 12-core CPU/18-core GPU. It has 18GB unified memory and the 1TB drive. I decided on the 14-inch after hauling around a 16-inch on all those long trips. I think I can sacrifice a little bit of screen size for a much easier haul. The new one is almost a pound lighter, and maybe two inches of width and an inch of depth smaller.

    So the upgrades on this machine… aside from the architecture change (I’ll get to that), there’s a display that’s twice as bright with a higher refresh rate; an HDMI jack; the return of MagSafe, with its own port; the ports go from Thunderbolt 3 to 4; a built-in SD card reader; a better camera; better WiFi; real function and Esc keys; the ability to do Spatial audio; and a huge increase in battery life. (It says “up to 11 hours” on the old one and “up to 18 hours” on the new one.)

    Missing on the new model: the Intel chip; the AMD Radeon Pro GPU; the Touch bar (good riddance), and one Thunderbolt port. The HDMI port is on what I consider the wrong side, since I keep the thing sideways on the left side of my desk. Same with the headphone jack, although I seldom use it these days. (It’s nice to have, though.)

    The compute stuff is huge. Looking at the Geekbench score, it’s between double and triple the performance. GPU performance is also doubled. But the ML inference score, the ability to run data points into a machine learning model, is insanely improved, something like twenty times faster. I don’t even know or understand exactly what the Neural Engine or the Media Engine do, except my old machine didn’t have them. And now I have the ChatGPT app on the Mac, which I can use for my KonGPT.

    * * *

    Of course, the upgrade was a major pain in the ass. I always forget this, but you need a real, honest-to-god Thunderbolt cable, and Thunderbolt != USB-C. I spent hours churning away on various iterations of upgrading the old machine, updating the new machine, doing backups to disk, and trying to get an Ethernet cable to work. It turns out that trying to migrate from an external drive is roughly as fast as trying to type in all your old documents by hand. Using Wi-Fi is an order of magnitude slower than that. I eventually did some magic dance between the two machines to get Ethernet running directly between the two, and then it took about two hours to pull over everything. I also bought a real Thunderbolt cable for next time, although I’m sure I will lose it.

    The new machine is humming away. I’m actually on it now. It’s always strange to swap in a new machine, but I’m at the old screen, old keyboard, old trackball, and the same background images and icons and junk on the desktop.

    I haven’t taken it through its paces yet, and I’m still solving little problems one by one. But even saying the word “Lightroom” in the same room as my old computer would make the fans jump to life. Now, going to a photo in Lightroom instantly generates the preview from RAW without any hesitation.

    Sarah’s testing negative and is mostly better. I’ve got a week of staycation. I need to get back to writing today. In July, I managed to write and hit my quota every day, so I’m getting back to it.

  • How to Rob a Bank

    I saw a doc on Netflix the other night called How to Rob a Bank. It’s about Scott Scurlock, a bank robber who had a big run in Seattle in the mid-90s, hitting 18 (or 19) banks for a bit over $2M in 1990s money. It was a pretty generic doc, but had lots of footage of 1992 and 1993 Seattle that really brought me back.

    I lived in Seattle starting in 1995, and the film ends in 1996. I honestly have no memory of this news story, but I didn’t have a TV or cable back then, and didn’t read a newspaper, so I totally missed it. But the stock footage, the establishing shots they used, that totally brought me back. It all looked like it was shot on a Hi8 camera, both a crummy quality but a way-too-bright color palette that makes it look far too sharp and vivid. I think I got a Sony Hi8 right around the time of the end of this movie – maybe the same month – and I regret not walking around Pioneer Square and shooting hours and hours of footage of everything and nothing.

    Scurlock, aka “Hollywood,” habitually hit Seafirst bank, which was my bank. When I got my first real paycheck in 1995, I went downstairs from our office and walked in a Seafirst on Occidental and opened a checking and savings account. I got a special deal which was new back then: no monthly fees or minimum balance, but I had to pay to talk to a human. I could call their voice mail thing to hear my balance or make a transfer (this was before web banking), and I could use the ATMs or drop off a check. But for an introvert who hated lines, this was the perfect deal.

    It also meant I was never standing in a bank lobby when a dude with a rubber nose and chin glued to his face jumped on a counter, waved around a Glock 17, and started screaming for the vault teller. This was a good feature to have, since Scurlock and crew used to repeatedly hit the Seafirst on Madison about a mile from my house, across the street from this classic red-roof Pizza Hut I would always visit when I needed a quick case of nostalgia and/or diarrhea.

    The movie built up Hollywood to be this Robin Hood type who lived a vagabond lifestyle, traveling worldwide, living in a treehouse in the woods, writing poetry in his journals. What’s weird to me is he looked like someone I might know, like a friend of a friend of someone who went to Evergreen to study vegan architecture. He had this longish but not long hair, used to be a nudist and live in the woods near Olympia, but wasn’t like a hippy hippy. He seemed more like a weird libertarian guy who was a UNIX system administrator at Boeing and spent a lot of time on bondage groups in USENET news. I never really hung out with anyone like that, and he was a half-generation older than me, but I spent enough time in Belltown that I knew the type.

    And I’m not saying I’m into a guy like this, but one of the reasons I’ve never gone back to Seattle is I’m sure Amazon has completely homogenized it, and the weirdo underbelly has all died out or sold out. I’m sure if I went to a cafe in  Fremont now, it would all be people talking about crypto or keto muffins or crossfit. In 1996, it would have been dudes in 79 different garage bands, perennially only two connections from making it. Like your refrigerator delivery guy was in a band that would share a practice space with an iteration of a band that split and half the members went to the first version of Lords of the Wasteland that later had a second iteration that became Mother Love Bone that became Luv C2 that became Mookie Blaylock that changed their name to Pearl Jam. Anyway.

    It was also funny to see the doc throw in a quick grunge reference, even though Scurlock was probably totally unrelated to that scene. They spent about 90 seconds showing those crazy flannel kids, playing some unrecognizable music the film could clear without paying the Nirvana estate seven figures. “Hey, these kids hate corporate rock! They’re rebels! It’s the spirit up here!” Sigh.

    Spoiler alert, Hollywood tried to go out big with a giant heist, and ended up in a firefight and chase, then killed himself before the cops could. It was on Thanksgiving in 1996. I was trying to remember where I was that Thanksgiving, and the funny thing is, I remember exactly where I was that day, because it’s one of my funniest meet-the-parents stories. I’ve always been hesitant to write about this publicly, but this was almost thirty years ago, and I have not talked to her in 25, so here goes.

    I used to date someone who lived in a small town in Southwest Washington, a hundred miles south of Seattle, just before the Oregon border. This started in October, and we’d been trading off weekends, one of us driving to see the other. And Thanksgiving became the “let’s have dinner with my parents” weekend down there.

    I’m always nervous in these situations, and this one was slightly amplified because she said her parents were very religious and pretty conservative, and I’m neither. We got there and they lived in a second-story walk-up at this boarding school where her dad worked, like a staff housing thing. Her dad was really nice, and the dinner was great, and I mumbled through saying grace, and then I answered the usual questions. Her mom was okay but sort of quiet, fair enough. She had two older brothers and they were cool, although I knew nothing about sports and sports was like their entire lives. I’d need to memorize some stats or figure out the name of the baseball team that played across the street from my apartment before I saw them again. (“Hey that Kevin Griffey guy, he’s like, pretty good, right?”)

    After dinner, I got the big curve ball: her parents were moving. Tomorrow. And nothing was packed, and the house was crammed with decades of stuff and all the fixins from a big turkey dinner and a bunch of appliances that were going with them. And it was a second-floor walk-up. No elevator. And it all had to be moved and the apartment cleaned that Friday.

    I’ve moved a bunch and I’ve helped people move, and I’ve been in some disorganized situations, but this was the most chaos I’d ever seen in this kind of operation. It’s impossible to help someone pack their stuff into boxes when you’ve known them a grand total of 37 minutes and you have no idea what is trash and what is treasure and there’s piles of stuff going back to like 1976. Hauling a fridge, a chest freezer, a stove a dishwasher, and a washer and drier down a set of exterior stairs was bad enough. But packing in all the assorted bric-a-brac was torture. They had a big U-Haul, like a 24-foot thing, and I think we filled it twice, plus a bunch of carloads of stuff.

    They bought a new pre-manufactured home in a retirement community, which was pretty nice, although it made me wonder how much of it was assembled on a line in Elkhart. We got all the boxes off the truck, then realized the truck was parked in the yard in a small lake, except the lake was slowly getting bigger? We took a look and one of the sets of tires was parked directly over some main water connection to the entire little village, and had cracked it open. So their “Welcome, neighbors!” was getting everyone’s water shut off during Thanksgiving weekend. Fun stuff.

    Anyway. Movie review concluded. Check out my Substack. Have a nice day.