Rain. It’s one of those days.

I’ll spend the afternoon watching drops fall on the pavement six stories below my office, watching the funky clouds drift over the condominiums across the street from the Puget Sound and over to Lake Union. I never turn on the lights in my office because I have two windows, so on days like today, I work in almost total darkness, just the glow of two monitors on my face.

The rain pretty much symbolizes my feelings right now. I’ve finished the zine and mailed all of the issues today, and now I can get my life back on track. I haven’t slept in a while, my back is shot from bending over a stapler all night, I feel like I have carpal tunnel syndrome from folding, and I have some kind of toner-blacklung thing going on. But now it’s done, and I get to sleep, rest, and get back to reading trashy scifi and scribbiling in my notebooks.

One summer in Bloomington, five years ago, it rained for what seemed like two weeks straight. Everything was flooded to hell, and the worms were on the pavement because their holes got all fucked up or something. I almost went insane, because I had to walk to classes, drive to work, etc, and it just stayed gray outside for so long. It was like the Twilight Zone where the Earth went too close to the sun and it stayed really hot outside, and everyone was going nuts trying to get out of the cities.

That’s sort of like what winter is like in Seattle. It’s 40, raining like hell, and stays that way for a long time. Maybe I should drop $500 to get one of those all-out sunlamps that you’re supposed to use to avoid depression from lack of sunlight. I’m afraid the DEA will do an infrared scan on my apartment and bust me for growing dope. I’ll come home and find exactly 101 plants in my closet, and I’ll get some mandatory sentence even though I’ve never used pot in my life.

I’m listening to Type O Negative, the perfect music for rainy weather…

My zine is done. I did my traditional thing for zine good luck, kiting a check, and printed everything last night. I thought it would only take a few minutes, and I went before eating supper. I wanted to wait there until they were done, and I spent over an hour in Office Depot, looking at the computer stuff over and over. They have some nice furniture that would never fit in my apartment there, and I found some crappy computer books, but otherwise it was a long wait.

By the time I got dinner, talked to some people, etc. it was about 10

and the folding and stapling operation only yielded about 50 zines before I couldn’t see straight. I’m hoping to finish tonight.

Today’s disaster was trying to find a post office - they are well-hid in Seattle, and the USPS web site lists addresses of buildings that were tore down in the 1900’s or postal jeep repair facilities. I spent all of my lunch hour trying to find one, no luck. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get there. It’s not as if I need a couple of dollars worth of 32 cent stamps - I need some pretty esoteric stuff - 23 cent coils, panes of 55 cent stamps, priority mail envelopes, etc.

After the dust settled last night, I sat in bed with the first issue I assembled, and read through it. I like the stuff, and it’s satisfying to see it in a booklet format. Maybe in a few months, after I’ve forgotten everything about it, the thing will look better. I’ve read through the whole thing 27 times in the last week, so it’s still pretty burned into my head.

Now I’m suffering from some strange post-partum-ish depression with this zine release. I like the zine, but I don’t know of that many people who will read it. I liked it back in the death metal days when I knew I could sell as many zines as I printed, and I had plenty of other people to trade ads, tapes, zines, and readers with. I’m not sure this zine will live another issue, partly because of this, and partly because of money. It would cost me almost $1000 a year to just give away a quarterly zine like this, and I could be doing cooler things with $1000. Hence, the feelings of unease.

I was reading some of the diary criticism stuff on the web - I can’t believe people take themselves that seriously. I write this online diary as a small side project, a way to tell my news to the people who follow it and a way to later go back and search for things or use the electronic records for nostalgia or whatever. There are people who must spend all of their time writing these great academic philisophical tracts about everything, and doing intricate html with imagemaps, high graphics, and everything else. Here’s some insight into what it takes for me to create this page: I hit Control-X Control-J, and then if it is a new page, I hit Control-C Control-T. Then I type the text, save it with a Control-X Control-S, and log out. It is indexed automatically. If I “had” to do anymore, I wouldn’t keep this journal - I’d stick to paper. Oh well, different strokes for different folks.

If someone would’ve explained the futures market to me when I was 18 years old, I’d be a fucking billionaire by now. If I had the money to do it, I mean. I’ve been trying to figure out my money situation lately, especially since my average daily balance in savings in 1996 was 4 cents, and someday I’ll get sick or laid off or will want to buy a new pair of shoes and I’ll be fucked. I’ve been thinking about a mutual fund or something like that, where I can put in a few dollars a week and when I decided to buy a house or whatever, I’ll have the cash.

Anyway, I found out how futures work and it’s all highly skeptical and everything, but sounds incredible. It’s about like betting on the world money market - horseracing but slightly more legitimate. I’d probably do bad, since every prediction I’ve made about the business world has gone under. But it’s the thought that counts.

It’s been one of those days where I am so miserable that I wonder what I’m doing and why I’m not doing something better. Yesterday, I spent the whole day on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and I couldn’t even blame it on anything. Maybe it was diet or this stomach sickness or food or lack thereof or something, but I had complete and literal tunnel vision, and couldn’t do anything as simple as open my car and get something off of the dash without formulating a complete battle plan and executing it at a movement per five minutes, like some kind of lunar probe being controlled from a million miles away. And when I can’t even watch TV, I can’t do things like write, think, etc. So it’s been frustrating and tiring. Sleep hasn’t helped a lot. I think my glasses are going, or I need a new prescription, or I scratched mine up too much.

Shit, I didn’t know USWEST really had their yellow pages online. I thought the commercials were some kind of stupid joke, and when you went to the URL, it would say “Use the yellow pages!” and then have a phone number where you could call to get a paper copy of them (if anyone ever answered the phone).

Okay, so I now have an appointment to get new glasses, which is somewhat of a scary thing. First, I have had glasses since I was in first grade. And not some little token, about-as-distorting-as-plate-glass glasses, but big, thick, coke-bottle glasses. So from a young age, I’ve always thought of having to buy new glasses as something like having to replace the engine in your car - an expensive and time consuming process that 99% of the people out there probably don’t have to deal with. I know a lot of people that get all kinds of Brooks Brothers, Anthony Edwards-looking glasses to correct their 20/29.5 vision, and they love new glasses like they love a new pair of $300 shoes. That isn’t me. First, nobody can fill my prescription right. One time I went to a place in the mall where their ad said “we will fill any prescription in an hour!”. It took them 9 days to grind me a pair of glasses, and when I got them, they were not perfect. So I’ve always had problems with getting new glasses. Plus now, it adds the fun element of dealing with my cryptic and impossible to decipher insurance coverage. I think this will be a fairly cheap thing, but we’ll see. If it does work out, it will be nice to finally have a new pair of glasses…

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…

I finished reading Red Mars last night. Things get pretty weird and intense at the end of the book, and I really liked how it went. It made me think a lot more about capitalism and historic themes. Mars was a neutral place like Antartica, and then when big companies found out they could mine the fuck out of it, they broke treaties and lured human slaves to the strip mines with promises of money and good work that never happened. I read somewhere that any colonization happens not because of a lack of natural resources, but because of a lack of freely available natural resources. It took less firepower to steal land from the Indians than the French or British.

I bought Blue Mars and Green Mars, so I can keep going with the trilogy. I also saw Mark Leyner’s new book and Vonnegut’s new book, but I didn’t have the cash to buy them both in hardcover - maybe on payday. I think I’ll be busy reading for a while.

There’s a Jello Biafra interview on The Onion, and it’s amazing how much he repeats himself, sometimes in the same interview. I’d be afraid to interview him again in person and find that 50% of what he said is stuff I’ve already printed in the zine. But he has a lot of good things to say. He’s very anti-punk, in the sense that most punk rock these days is as brain-dead as the disco scene was in the 70s, and that scene was why punk was formed in the first place. Most rap is more punk than punk these days.

It makes me think about heavy metal - there was a long period where I thought heavy metal was a thinking man’s music, because my only exposure to it was reading Iron Maiden liner notes in the basement of my mom’s house. There was no metal scene in Indiana, and everyone else was listening to Warrant or whatever, so I bought my Slayer and Megadeth and Anthrax albums in the equivalent of a Musicland, and thought that with all of this anti-war stuff, that metal had sort of a moderate-left political position. Then when I started doing the zine, I found that most metalheads were mostly drunken rednecks and far to the left by default, and they listened to anti-war lyrics and thought they were pro-war and the coolest thing in the world. And it’s a strange hypocrisy - there are all these Swedish bands who bitch about the high taxes, but live off of welfare illegally while they tour America.

I’m not a hippy or anything - I guess I’m angry about such non-cerebral people taking a fake political stance and thinking they’re infallible. Most punks who hate corporate america and subscribe to that whole prefab belief are probably more conservative than your average NRA member. And most gun-slinging gangsta rappers are probably more to the left with Clinton - they all have this giant communal posse, and spread the wealth when they become famous. The first thing a rapper does when he gets signed is build a house for his mom. The second thing he does is buys a mercedes or bmw for each of his friends. It’s almost like socialism, redistribution of wealth. It’s rare I agree with rap artists, but if I had more money than I could spend, I wouldn’t just sit on it, either.

Speaking of which, how about that Ted Turner deal? That’s the first thing he’s ever done that I’ve agreed with. He loses a billion but I bet he gains it back on his stock prices. Despite the arguments from the black helicopter crowd, I think it’s a good cause. It’d be nice if the UN had the cash and the balls to figure out some thing and to get some damn money and aid to some of these poverty stricken country. It’s amazing how some countries have life expectancies that are half or even a third of ours. And despite what Sally Struthers’ fat ass tells you in a commercial, a dollar a week or whatever won’t fix those peoples’ problems. That dollar never makes it to the adopt-a-kid, because there’s some fascist puppet regime opening all the mail and eating fat on the proceeds. People gave millions of dollars of food to Ethiopia 10 years ago, and none of it got there. They should’ve starved out the fat cats and gave them a taste of their own medicine. If the US wants to do something worthwhile with their trillion dollar aircraft carriers, they should liberate some of the starving countries in the southern hemisphere - you know, the ones without oil.

Enough of the political bullshit - that Biafra interview got to my head…