Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

99% pristine

My zine is at this crucial stage where 99% of the text is pristine, and I am now just screwing around with graphics and margins and fonts and all of that stuff. It’s easy at this point to rush it to press and throw everything together fast, and then get it back from the printer and find a bunch of stupid mistakes. (or even worse, shove them all in the mail and 2 weeks later get a bunch of letters about your stupid mistakes). It’s also easy to spend another 4 months nit-picking with stuff, looking at issues of Newsweek and Playboy and Details for more layout inspiration, while the articles rot and date themselves. And it’s also easy to completely fuck everything up, and delete one text frame that forces 25,000 words of text to all be imprinted on top of each other on the cover page. So it’s a matter of balance, and I’m still shooting for that Tuesday deadline.

I just had the sudden urge for rolls, potatoes, and turkey gravy. Potatoes and gravy are one of the only guilty pleasures I can enjoy these days. After eating a week’s worth of lunchmeat and salads, I want to sink into a steak or a pizza with a lot of stuff on it, or some Denny’s fare, but I can’t anymore. Potatoes have enough starch and texture for me, though, and it’s amazing how infrequently I eat hot food these days. Enough of my weight watchers stories…

I wish life had a search engine like AltaVista. Whenever I want to find out about some obscure band or spaceship or country or whatever, I enter it into a search engine and see what comes up. Some things, like music, work great for this – even the most obscure garage bands are usually listed somewhere. But sometimes you get a bunch of ads instead of information, which is somewhat annoying. I don’t always trust the info I find on the web – I seldom do. But it makes for good reading.

I can’t stay awake. It’s been a long week, but I’ve been pulling long days, so it’s sort of a twilight zone thing. I can’t believe it’s already Thursday, but it also seems like 7 weeks since the last weekend. I don’t know – time passes fast now, and will continue to speed up for the rest of my life. Now that I have no concept of seasons anymore, it all blends together. A second ago, it was April, and a second from now, it will be October. Kinda pathetic…