This morning, I had an abdominal ultrasound. It was a strange experience, although I’m sure I’ve had worse. It’s odd to look at a computer monitor and see your insides displayed like some pacific ocean trench on a national geographic special about robot submarines. It wasn’t as cool as I thought it would be - the internal organs didn’t show up like the inside of some plastic visible human model or something. In fact, I couldn’t tell what the fuck they were looking at. I felt somewhat ripped off. Shows like Mad About You preach some folklore about ultrasounds, like they’re a video camera with a special lens. Really, it’s a step more advanced than tapping on the side of a gas can to see how full it is.

Also, I thought that magic wand just waved over your stomach like a UPC bar code reader, or maybe the thing they use to de-energize the hidden magnet strip inside a library book. The radiologist was pushing the damn thing so hard into my gut, I thought she was going to ask me for my wallet or something. I also had to do all of these gymnatics: get on your side, go on your other side, breathe in deeply, don’t breathe, breathe in a little, breathe out, etc etc. It was fucking unbearable. Plus they’ve got some kind of electrically conductive sex jelly all over the place, which they never show you on TV.

I guess it wasn’t bad - 50 years ago, they would’ve cut me open and rooted around inside of me with their bare hands. And I didn’t pay for the damn thing.

I haven’t mentioned why I’m doing all of this shit. Maybe I have, I don’t remember. Anyway, my doctor thinks there’s something wrong with my liver, but nothing serious. He’s taken about 4 gallons of blood, did this ultrasound shit, made me wait in lines forever, and when it’s all over, he will probably just say “don’t eat at McDonald’s anymore”. I have been avoiding fast food for the last month, since this whole thing started, and it’s not bad. I lost a couple of pounds, I spend way less on food each week, and I feel somewhat better. At least the fucking doctor didn’t have to shove anything up my ass to find out that I wasn’t eating right.

My diploma showed up this weekend, in a mailer marked DO NOT BEND that was bent almost in half by my fuckhead mailman. After straigtening out the piece of paper, tacking it in a $12 frame from target, and hanging it in my bedroom, it’s a strange reminder that my days at IU are over.

I guess that’s a harsh way of looking at it. But the piece of paper is sort of the official word that on June 30, 1995, the part of my life called college ended. I didn’t see this piece of paper because I owned the bursar some cash, and I never did the cap and gown stuff because at a school as big as IU, it’s pretty worthless. They don’t have every one of the 10,000 people walk down the aisle when their name is called - they say “school of business - please stand - you are graduated - next - school of music - please stand - ”.

Packing and moving out here changed things, and I’ve been here for long enough to forget what it’s like to be a student. But the piece of paper is a strange reminder. It’s so official - like something that would be in a doctor’s office, telling the world that this person spent a lot of money doing this and it ain’t no truck driving certificate. I sat looking at the piece of parchment for a while last night, mesmerized.

It reminded me of when I got my first driver’s license. I spent a whole evening staring at it, reading all of the text: the different restriction codes, the organ donor section, my height, my weight, my crappy picture. I drew a handlebar mustache and long hair over the photo with a pencil, which made my age go from 16 to 34. But most of all, I just thought about how strange it was to see an Indiana driver’s license with my name and picture on it. It was also abnormal to be able to get in my beat up Camaro that had been sitting for almost two years, and without a parent or guardian in the passenger seat, pull out of the driveway, turn up the radio, and slam on the gas.

-----

I was watching Larry King Live and he asked some guy in Paris if he had ever seen a car as fucked up as Lady Di’s limo after it got crushed in that tunnel. If Larry King asked me that, I’d have to answer “you’ve never seen some of the shit I’ve done to cars, Larry”. That Mercedes was in much more saleable condition than my Turismo that blew up in the parking lot of a Martins grocery store.

Chuck Stringer called me from Billings, Montana. He stole his neighbor’s plastic pink flamingo and has been driving across the country and taking pictures of it at national monuments and stuff. When I drove the same route, I didn’t sleep, and I blacked out but kept driving at some point past Spokane. It was the 4th of July and I was hoping to get to Seattle in time for the fireworks.

That was 1995. On July 4, 1993, I was driving my mom’s station wagon filled with the remainder of my belongings at the 414 South Mitchell apartment in Bloomington. I was headed to Elkhart, and somewhere around Kokomo, I saw a burst of fireworks, and thought of the year before.

It was so weird leaving that apartment. I spent 2 years in that closet of a roominghouse flat. After everything was in the car, I sat on my favorite wooden chair (that I forgot!) and looked at the dirty, wooden paneled bedroom. It looked just like the day I moved in in 1991, but so much had happened. My dating life did a full 180 at least 4 or 5 times, I listened to music, Ray slept on the floor, I froze, I sweated, and bees crawled through the ceiling and evaded three different exterminators.

My phone line was still hooked up that weekend, but I had to bring a phone with me. My girlfriend called me from Florida and woke me up on Saturday morning. I thought she was over in Willkie quad and I told her to come over before I realized she was 1200 miles away.

The year before, Yusef and I drove to Zionsville to sell glowsticks at the fireworks show. We sold almost all of them in about 5 minutes. We left right after the fireworks started and hauled ass to get to a carnival before it got too crowded. We didn’t sell them as fast at the carnival; rednecks populated this carnival, not the rich lawyers and doctors at the Zionsville fireworks show. We had to work people for every sale, and put up with the ridicule of drunken 17 year olds or drunken 37 year olds acting like 17 year olds.

I got dumped by someone at the beginning of summer, and spent two months failing miserably at dating and meeting new people. I watched all of the couples in love walking the concourses, playing the games where you win big teddy bears, buying elephant ears and eating them together. This was the part of Indiana where bringing your girlfriend to the county fair would get you laid every time. Not only was I alone, but I was working as a street vendor, one of the most demeaning jobs that didn’t involve shoveling shit or holding a “Will work for food” sign.

And I heard Metallica’s “black” album constantly that night. The people running the tilt-a-whirl or the gravitron or one of those rides kept playing it over and over. It was the anthem to the whole event.

It felt demeaning putting up with these peoples’ shit. Every time some redneck started with the power trip, I felt like telling them that I was halfway done with a computer science degree, had all of my teeth, and was holding $2500 in ones and fives in my pocket.

I took that money and one Saturday when I was depressed, this little freshman girl called me up and wanted me to buy her alcohol. I bought a fifth of Bacardi black rum and drank most of it myself in about an hour. Someone called and didn’t leave a message, so I called almost everyone I knew, trying to find out if it was them. I kept calling people after I blacked out, and a bunch of people called me the next Sunday to see if I was okay - people I didn’t remember calling.

While I was hung over, I bought the Ice-T “Cop Killer” album, a new pair of sunglasses, and did my laundry. I met up with Leslie Puccinelli while I was at the laundry on 3rd street, across from Jerry’s Liquor’s.

Yusef used to walk to Jerry’s Liquor, buy a 40, and drink it on the walk home. One time me, him, and Derik rented a VCR from Sun Coast, along with all of those Chucky movies. We hooked it up to a black and white 12” tv, and then realized we needed to get fucked up first. We got into my car and on the hill just before 3rd street, a tire blew out on my Rabbit.

The spring before, Patty and I were at my apartment, and we woke up at like 5 so she could get to her dorm, get ready, take a shower, and walk to her 8

music class. It was March and in the 60s that night, but when we went outside, there was a foot of snow on the ground. I offered to drive her home, but when we got to my car, the passenger door wouldn’t open - I had to pry it open. Then, it wouldn’t shut - the latch caught on about the 15th slam. When we were driving up the hill, the door flew open and a sea of moving white and ice and powder appeared and lit the car like a supernova. She grabbed the handle and held the door shut, but on the drive home, the door flew open and shut on every turn.

On the 4th of July weekend, 1991, I was with Jo in Chicago and the same Rabbit got hung up on a manhole cover that ripped off the entire exhaust. We cancelled the reservations, stayed with a friend of hers, and got a new Meineke exhaust for about $160.

I took the Rabbit to Meineke two more times - once when it needed a new flex pipe in the exhaust, which cost about $120, and once when it finally died. The brakes went out, and the frame was so rusted that they couldn’t lift the car on the rack.

Once I was at that laundry on 3rd street with Racquel’s car. I made her a deal that I would wash her car if I could use it to drive to the laundry and do some other shopping. I scraped the spoiler part on the underside of the car, but she never saw it, so I never told her. It’s the part that gets scraped up anyway from the parking lot dividers. I also listened to Cannibal Corpse’s _Tomb of the Mutilated_ while I was driving around town.

Later, I was in the same part of town with her and we went to some kind of company event where there was a generic 50’s band and some catered stuff. It might have been the kind of thing where you buy tickets for $20 and the proceeds to to some schmuck who needs a new kidney. We walked around before then and she gave me a toy puzzle that was made out of a few pieces of metal and a string and you had to move one piece over the other on the string or something.

Come to think about it, I guess some other stuff happened that night, but maybe I should check my diary.

In 1991, Becky gave me a leatherbound diary for Christmas. She destroyed my entire room after we broke up, including my diary. I wrote a bunch of stuff in it the first week, like how I wanted to break up with Jo and how it was good to be with Tom again, even though he lost a bunch of weight in China and now looked like some kind of Vietnam POW from a Rambo movie.

And then I wrote a parser for an adventure game in modula 2, on an IBM-PC with only one 5.25” floppy drive. And I bought a new keyboard, and I drove on the new US-20 bypass, and I thought about how things would change once I got back to school. They did.

Since I quit caffeine, I sleep right through the night and never wake up or sleep lightly, which means I also never remember any of my dreams. The other night I was reading John Fail’s weird dream journal, and then when I slept, I remembered an abnormal dream. I wrote it all down, but I don’t remember what it was now. Thismorning, I almost remembered part of a dream, but I couldn’t pull it all together.

Just as I thought the whole zine was going to be composed solely of writing by me and Larry, a bunch of other stuff fell in place. I’m still worried that the big pieces are there, but the small bits that really make a zine readable aren’t there. I also have very little writing in this next issue, and all of my stuff is recycled. It’s been hard to write anything new, even though I have a bunch of projects on my back and I probably could sit and just work on other responsibilities for a month straight.

I bought a Commodore 64 the other day. I don’t have it yet, it should show up on Monday or so. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the net, and trying to pull together some games and stuff. I have about 3 or 4 carts that I rescued from my mom’s house, and I probably have some other stuff lying around her basement. It’s fun to think about - I got my first C-64 for Christmas during the 8th grade, and spent ALL of my time with it. Before that, I had an Aquarius with 4K of RAM, no tape drive, no disk drive, no printer, a chicklet keyboard, a horrible BASIC, and NO place to buy any accessories or documentation for it. I pushed that thing to the limit, which wasn’t hard. It was pure joy going to the 64, with way more memory, good graphics, excellent sound, standard joystick ports, lots of magazines and software available, and lots of programmability. I never got the disk drive, which was my one big downfall - I did all of my work on a tape drive. But I had friends with 64’s and we’d copy games onto tape, and I’d spend forever writing stuff in BASIC. It’ll be nice to toy around with this new machine. I even got a disk drive, too. Maybe I’ll sit down and try to write that adventure game parser, now that I have a bunch of CS classes behind me.

It has been 4 days without caffeine now. That’s not entirely true - I have been drinking a half glass of Coke in the morning to ward off the horrific headaches. Yesterday I didn’t get a headache, but today I did. I’m hoping that if I make it through the weekend, I’ll be fine. But I’ve been having strange hallucinations. Not the bugs and locusts kind of thing, but I see somebody and I think they are somebody else. Like I see a too-strong resembelance between someone in the grocery store and someone famous. I do that a lot when I am really sleepy, but now I do it all the time. I am hoping that after the withdrawl goes away and the energy from eating real food kicks in, I will balance out a bit.

I’ve been listening to this Shadowfax CD that reminds me a lot of the summer 4 years ago. I lived in Elkhart, but worked so much I didn’t really notice the city. When I have time to mess around in that city, like on a vacation, I really notice all of the things that are different or gone. But that summer, a lot of my surroundings just felt the same as when I was in high school. For a big part of the summer, I worked two full-time jobs and slept a couple of hours a week. Those five days, I’d be perpetually covered with grease, oil, dirt, metal filings, cardboard dust, or whatever. But on the weekends, I’d sleep in, take a long shower to get decent, and sit around listening either to metal or to new age or ambient stuff, while I ate real food that didn’t come off of a break truck and do a little writing.

I had two dreams at that point - one was to go back to Bloomington and move into a really nice apartment, and get some good furniture on the cheap, and have a real place to live. I spent two years living in a boardinghouse apartment about as big as a walk in closet, and wanted more. I wanted to be able to invite over 10 people, cook a dinner, and watch some movies with plenty of room. I spent my few odd moments that summer rounding up furniture: a new bed, a new couch, a new chair, a new computer table. Well, not all of it was new - but the new stuff was discounted through my mom’s job as a decorator or my job at Monkey Ward’s. So I collected the furniture in the basement and daydreamed of having some posh living quarters after I moved.

Incidentally, I have almost none of this furniture, except a nightstand and a small halogen lamp. I sold almost all of it when I moved to Seattle.

The second thing was not my girlfriend, although I did spend a lot of time daydreaming about her while she was in Tampa, Florida. I guess the second thing varied. One week, I would think about buying a car. The next, it would be a 20,000 CD collection. I did not have a major in college that summer, and I thought about what I would do. I wanted to somehow get involved at NASA, and thought that maybe there would be some kind of technical writing gig there. I also wanted to start another magazine for a while, or do some other writing for bands. It always changed, which means I can sort of map the different things to the different points in time over the summer.

I shot 5 or 10 rolls of film on this new camera I bought that summer, partially intending to send photos to my girlfriend, and partially because I wanted to learn how to use a camera for art and journalism purposes. I took a lot of photos of me and my house and my back yard, and some of friends like Ray and Tom. Not only was this project one of the only ones with a concrete result that I still have today, but the photos are all indelible references to the past.