The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

  • 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 travel, 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.

  • The KonStack

    OK, so all the cool kids are using Substack as a way to publish newsletters and “blog.” Should I create yet another content platform to work on My Brand? Whatever. I guess.

    I think there’s some value in having a common platform for discoverability. I mostly say this as a person who’s had a blog on this domain for longer than most bloggers and influencers have been alive. Nobody goes to blogs anymore. Nobody uses Google. Or at least nobody finds anything, unless they’re looking for the closest plumber open on Sundays. I still write here, but it’s a bit futile. It’s largely so I’ll remember it ten years from now.

    So maybe having a presence on Substack will help? Or maybe they’ll start charging too much or somehow become a ghost town or another place to spam your antivax MLM magic beans and become useless. Who knows.

    There are two big things I was hoping would define my “niche” (ugh): what the world of writing has devolved into, and how AI can be used in writing.

    Anyway, the site’s at https://jkonrath.substack.com/.

    There’s a post about what I plan on doing there. There’s another about how I trained my own GPT with my books.

    Like and subscribe, etc.

  • July 4 stuff

    I was thinking on the 4th of July about how I have this proclivity to write about what happens on the 4th of July, even though it’s not stuff about hot dog eating contents and apple pie and going to fireworks shows and wearing clothes made out of flags and whatever else. I’ve already written about this too much, but I’m bored, so here’s more.

    The above picture is from 2002, when I flew from New York to Las Vegas, stayed at I think three? four? different hotels, and drove to Colorado in the middle of that. On the first night, I stayed at the Hacienda — not the old, classic one, but the hotel in Boulder City that’s now called the Hoover Dam Lodge. Horrible hotel. I got there late at night, and there was zero food to eat at the place. Passed out, woke up, tried to take a shower, and raw sewage started coming out of the drain. Drove to Colorado, got a speeding ticket in Arizona, and saw that giant asteroid hole in the ground. Stayed in Alamosa at a bad motel across the street from an AM radio station, and any time I picked up the phone, I could hear ranchero music on the line. Spent some time at the land, drove back to Vegas early, and ended up at the now-demolished Tropicana. I remember going out to see the fireworks and it was like 107 degrees at night and I stood shoulder-to-shoulder in this crowd in front of the MGM and looked over and saw someone who looked exactly like my ex-girlfriend from 1992. The other memory of that trip is that Rumored to Exist was waiting for final approval for production, and I think I got the email that week while I was gone.

    In 2015, I had a solo trip to Vegas, although I was flying back on the actual 4th. It was even more hot on that trip, like 112 degrees out in the day. This was the trip where I put a case of Coke Zero in the trunk of my car at like 10am, and at noon, they all exploded. I got back to the hotel at like 5 and everything had evaporated. I stayed in the Hooters hotel, which was obviously a mistake. Interesting inflection point on a really bad and strange year, though.

    I have a bizarre bathroom mirror selfie I won’t post from 7/4/20 where it looks like I haven’t had a haircut all year, which was true. I also for whatever reason went to Stoneridge Mall, probably for the air conditioning. I took a bunch of pictures of the recently closed Nordstrom. I can’t even remember the last time I went to that mall. I don’t even know if it’s still open. I think the last time I set foot in a mall was in Vietnam. (Once again, air conditioning.)

    I just realized that next July 4 will mark 30 years since I left Indiana forever. I did the math the other day and next year also makes California the state I’ve lived in longest. I lived in Indiana for a total of 17 years, and I moved here in 2008, so, math.

    In 2006, we went to Coney Island, which was probably not the best idea, because it was absolutely slammed with people. I remember hiding out in a McDonald’s watching the Space Shuttle launch, and this guy was filling a gigantic Igloo cooler with ice from the McDonald’s Coke machine, a cup at a time. I also remember meeting Sean Maloney, who was running for New York AG. He shook my hand and I had no idea who he was, except that it was like a hundred degrees out and he was wearing suit pants and an oxford dress shirt rolled up to mid-forearm like he was a tax accountant about to give a speech on fiscal policy.

    In 2007, I went to an insane Rockies-Mets game in Denver. Highlights included the game going completely lopsided, like the Rockies were ahead by 167 runs. And also the giant purple dinosaur mascot slingshotted a t-shirt into the stands and it landed right into my fucking knee, which was injured and in a brace. For a long time, the Rockies had this habit of completely blowing out July 4 games, although now they are one of the worst teams in the sport, so I haven’t even paid attention this year.

    All the other usuals come back to me. 1992, selling glowsticks, see also Summer Rain. 1991, Chicago with my ex, car broke, etc. It’s in the other story. 1995, move to Seattle, drive a U-Haul nonstop across the country with no sleep. 2004, I wrote a story about walking home from seeing a Terminator movie and said story got published in some anthology, but I can’t understand my own filing system enough to find it without wasting an hour of my time. Speaking of Summer Rain, I sent the masters to the publisher on July 5, 2000.

    Anyway, nothing spectacular going on here last Thursday. We went for a walk in the neighborhood in Berkeley by my old allergy clinic and looked at expensive houses, then went to Whole Foods to pick up stuff for dinner. Had to dose both cats because it sounded like Fallujah outside, then I think I fell asleep at like 9:30. A life of excitement for this writer.

  • Spain

    Had a quick trip to Barcelona for work a week ago. I did zero research before I left, so it was a bit of a rush. Here’s a quick summary:

    • This was a work thing, and 90% of it was strictly work, and I don’t talk about work here, so this isn’t as all-access as I normally am with summaries. Anyway.
    • I did not pack until the last second. I was not sure what to do about camera stuff, because I broke my arm and I didn’t think I could carry a DSLR. So I brought my Sony a6400 mirrorless and a couple of lenses.
    • I left on the afternoon of Memorial Day, which meant I’d arrive in the late afternoon on Tuesday. This meant I absolutely had to sleep on the plane on the way out. Of course, I didn’t.
    • I was lucky enough to have a window seat on the left side and nobody in the middle seat. My broken arm was maybe 80% better when we left, but It would have been problematic to have someone jammed next to me for twelve hours.
    • I think eight or ten people from my company were on my flight, which is a bit unusual for me. I generally fly alone, or maybe there’s one other person on the same flight.
    • Like I said, no sleep. Then I changed planes in Zürich, Switzerland for a smaller two-hour jump to Spain. Switzerland looked nice from the airport, but I didn’t see much. I also didn’t get to eat. I did buy a Coke Zero and totally forgot they use the Swiss Franc. I passed customs there in about two seconds. They have a very nice tram connecting the airport terminals.
    • The airport in Spain was fine, with no baggage drama. The company had shuttle busses for us, so it was pretty painless to get from the airport.
    • The whole thing was at a Hyatt that was right next to the University of Barcelona. I had a narrow room but in good shape and I had a fridge.
    • We had 400 people from 20 countries there, and like I said, I won’t get into work, but the whole day was work and the whole schedule was work and there was lots of work, work, work.  (I was not “working” though; it was “tourism.” I don’t have an EU work visa.) On Wednesday through Friday, my schedule was pretty much all work stuff from six AM to one AM every day.
    • Spain has never really been on my radar and I did not know what to expect. I mean, it’s a European country, and the base things are all European: the money, the voltage, the general look of the thing. There’s old architecture that’s definitively Spanish, but the area around the university looked and felt like any European suburb built after the war.
    • One thing that threw me was Catalan. My two semesters of Spanish in an Indiana public school 40 years ago basically taught me that people in Spain spoke Spanish with a lisp. That’s incorrect. Catalan is a different language, and about 40% of people speak it there. So everything was written in Spanish, in Catalan, and maybe in English. It also meant the default outside the hotel was usually rapid-fire Spanish, and I had to just act stupid. I know maybe 200 words of Spanish, when it’s at glacial speed. I know zero Catalan. So that was fun.
    • I did get a brief look at the university each morning, as I went for a quick walk before breakfast. I think UB is like twice as big as IU Bloomington, student-wise. It’s also like two or three times older. We were staying near the hospital facilities, and I think the main part of the campus is like a mile or two away. I absolutely could not figure out the layout of the thing, and I just tried to google it and I still can’t.
    • Aside from the meetings in the hotel, there were three dinner/evening events. One was a rock band at a castle. Another was a beach event with a DJ (which wasn’t an actual beach on the water, but was an event space with sand), and the last was a sit-down dinner with flamenco dancers.
    • I did have Friday off to spend with my team, so we went to Park Güell, which is this freaky park designed by Antoni Gaudí. It’s way at the top of this hill, and it’s a municipal garden with natural park features like trees and such, but it’s framed by trippy bridges and houses and stairs with tile mosaics and almost surreal shapes to them. The top of it has a terrace with a bench seat wrapped around it that’s in the shape of a sea serpent, its scales being an ornate tile mosaic. It’s way north up a hill, which was a back-breaking hike for me, but worth it.
    • On that trip, I also got to use their metro system, which was not as nice as Singapore’s, but it was pretty good. I also got to stop at a Polish restaurant and get some pierogis.
    • I had to check out of the work hotel Saturday morning, but I was not flying out until Sunday because I extended my stay, so I moved across town. American Express hooked me up with a room at The Cotton House in the Gothic Quarter, which was absolutely insane. It’s rated as one of the 30 best hotels in the room, and Amex was paying me $300 to stay there. I got a room on the top floor of the hotel. I had my own balcony that looked south over the Gothic Quarter.
    • After settling in and eating a stellar lunch, I went walking and went to the Picasso museum. There’s a lot there, but if you made a list of the top ten Picasso paintings, I think one of them is in Barcelona and like seven or eight are at MOMA in New York.
    • Spent a lot of time wandering the gothic quarter and taking pictures. It was nice to just wander. I was slightly on edge about walking on cobblestone and uneven sidewalks with the fear of falling again. I also didn’t get any great photos, maybe because of the arm. Lots of blur; I probably should have switched to S and moved a stop faster on the shutter.
    • Went walking the next day and looked at the Casa Battló, another Gaudí design. Unfortunately I didn’t get tickets, so I just looked at the outside.
    • Stopped at a McDonald’s, just to be the ugly American. It was largely the same there.
    • Flight back was direct, 12 hours. I stayed awake the whole time and forced myself to watch five movies, so I would collapse when I got home and get back on regular schedule.

    Of course, I caught a cold or something on the way back. I’ve been dragging all week, but I’m back. Good trip, but I wish I would have had more time and more research. 20 countries down. Back to work.

  • Arm, teeth, allergies

    So I have a good excuse for my blogging slowdown as of late: I broke my arm. This was two weeks ago, and there’s no exciting story behind it. I was walking from work to a hotel where we were having a convention in SF, and I wasn’t looking down and hit some uneven patch of sidewalk and fell. Landed on my right arm (I’m right-handed) and knee, and set off my Apple Watch fall detection. I went to the conference anyway, unsure if I’d actually broken anything, but within a few minutes, I knew I had, so I scrambled to find anything nearby that could see me at 4:30 without spending twelve hours in a war hospital triage room. To further complicate things, Sarah was out of town, and I don’t know where anything is in SF.

    I found a Carbon Health clinic on Market, who bounced me to another branch with an x-ray a half-mile further out. I made an appointment on their app on the way there, and got in semi-immediately. This isn’t the first time I’ve broken an arm; I broke the left one in 1992, and the right one in 2009. Both of those were bike accidents, and it turns out all three were the same exact break: a hairline radial head fracture.

    Like 2009, the urgent care folks shot some x-rays, took a look, then put me in a fiberglass splint that went from mid-hand to above the elbow. The doctor got this long strip wet, then molded it onto my arm in a U shape. It felt hot, and it looked like some emergency fiberglass repair strip you’d use to patch a hole in a boat hull. He then wrapped the arm in compression bandages, put it in a sling, and told me the name of an urgent orthopedic surgeon to see. I got on their web site and got in the next day.

    And the question everyone asks: no, there were no drugs. I got no painkillers, no shots or IVs or anything, just the advice that I should take Tylenol and ice the thing.

    Went to the ortho the next day for another round of x-rays. The bone wasn’t chipped or shattered in any way that would require surgery. He took off the splint and said I’d be better off using the sling, keeping on the ice, and trying to get it moving as soon as the swelling let up.

    The only real problem was this happened Monday night, and I had my biggest product release of the year on Wednesday morning. I had to wake up at 3:15am to get this thing rolling, and I had to do the whole thing one-handed. I switched from my Kinesis Advantage keyboard to a small 65% keyboard for one-handed typing, and a trackpad on my left hand. I also used Apple’s voice dictation, which has gotten surprisingly good. The release got out, and without the cast, I was able to actually shower, which was nice.

    Not having a right hand is a problem. The first time I broke my right hand, I thought I would have a ton of trouble because I could not write, and it turns out that’s not much of a problem at all anymore. Also, it turns out I can write without much difficulty, because that doesn’t involve moving my arm. The mouse is the big problem. Also, turning things is bad: keys, doorknobs, the ignition of my car. And I can’t do anything involving weight.

    It’s been almost two weeks, and I’m out of the sling for the most part. I still wear it on the train so I don’t accidentally grab an overhead strap, and so people don’t bug me. Typing on the Kinesis is no problem. The mouse still is. I’ve got more x-rays Tuesday, and a list of rehab exercises I’m supposed to be doing. I think the timeline for total healing is maybe 6-12 weeks, but I expect to be largely up to speed by the end of the month.

    * * *

    I’ve also got some dental trauma blogging to do, although this one is largely done. I finished a course of Invisalign on Friday. This was largely a stupid idea and I have serious buyer’s remorse over it, although not as bad as when I was in the middle of doing it.

    I did an extremely short course of it: 14 trays, a week per tray. I also used a different brand than Invisalign, which only required me to wear the trays at night. The huge pain with this that I didn’t know until we got down to starting the whole thing was that you have to have attachments glued to your teeth. These are little porcelain buttons that are bonded to the front of your teeth, which anchor your teeth into the clear plastic trays. The attachments were not totally visible unless you were really looking at them, but they drove me insane. I continually felt like I’d been eating a candy apple and got a chunk of crushed peanut stuck on my teeth. I had nine attachments, and I never got used to them.

    The first two weeks were horrible, mostly because they also coincided with the worst weeks of allergy season. I have this thing where my sinuses drain through my upper teeth during the worst of the worst part of allergy season, and with the plastic trays blocking my teeth, it felt like I was being waterboarded with battery acid. This eventually passed, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought to wear the trays at night. I would switch to a new tray on Fridays, and those were the worst days, but things moved around that first night, and by Saturday, they would be fine.

    I went in on Friday and they ground off the attachments, and it feels so good to have just smooth teeth now. I don’t feel like a magically changed person or proud of my smile or anything else, and it was far too much money for what I got out of it. I’m just glad it’s done.

    * * *

    Speaking of allergies… First of all, I had zero allergies in Vietnam. Same in Iceland. Maybe I need to move. Anyway, I was doing allergy shots for like a decade and had to stop when Covid started up in 2020. I need to do something, and I don’t care about needles, but the whole drill is such a big waste of time, driving to Berkeley, paying to park, sitting in the waiting room full of sick kids, etc. I recently started doing sublingual immunotherapy, though. I got a blood test for allergies, and they sent me some drops in the mail, which I put under my tongue every day. It’s the same stuff as regular immunotherapy: pollens, dust mites, and grasses. I just started, and it’s supposed to take months or years to get up to full speed with them. I never thought the injections were a magic bullet or anything, but I think once I got to top dose, it maybe took 20% off. If I can get that without leaving my house, I’ll take it.

    That’s about a thousand words of medical updates, and I don’t like talking about medical updates. So, back to your regularly scheduled program, I guess.