I haven’t started writing yet tonight, if that tells you anything about how fucked up my schedule is this weekend.

I spent part of the day at Andrea Milor’s, getting a bunch of photos scanned. It was cool to hang out there - I’ve never spent any time in Redmond before, and it’s good to know I can almost find my way around the east side sometime.

I also paid the ailing VW a visit while picking up some videos at Karena’s. It’s definitely the water pump - I can move the pulley back and forth with my hand, it is wet around the spindle, and the radiator is low. I am going to attempt the repair myself next weekend. I did move the new amp and adjust the gain, and it sounds a lot better than before. I didn’t test it with a MiniDisc, but with a tape, it doesn’t distort as much. It’s hard to really know until you’re driving down the road with the music running.

I thought I was broke all weekend, but it turns out I got paid. So I went to the CD store and picked up some stuff - a CD of Captain Janks prank phone calls, a Jawbreaker album that I really dig, and a KMFDM CD. I don’t know much about them, but the whole German industrial artist thing is pretty cool. It makes me wish I was creating some art instead of sitting on my ass. It also makes me think about painting my whole apartment black, and then tig-welding a bunch of dead machinery, old car parts, and other hunks of metal all over the walls and ceiling until the place looks like the set to a Tool video.

I’ve been doing tiny amount of incremental organizing and rearranging around the apartment, and I’m trying to figure out how to build new bookshelves to replace some of the old ones, in an order to squeeze in a few more books. It’s a real horrorshow when a cleaning operation involves buying hundreds of dollars of Craftsman power tools and raw lumber. I will, of course, paint the new shelves black.

I guess I screwed up and didn’t really write anything on Saturday, since it’s technically Sunday. I’m sure the journal police will find me and beat the living shit out of me later.

Todd Duffin taped two DVDs full of film shorts or me, because there was this Henry Rollins thing on there. I haven’t had time to watch everything yet, so last night I zipped through the tape a bit. To my surprise and delight the film La Jetee was on there. La Jetee is a French film that was the basis for Twelve Monkeys. It’s a a black and white montage film from the early sixties, and it has no moving images - just shots of photos, with narration (which was replaced with English narration here) and a haunting score. It’s about a post WWIII world where everyone is underground living like rats, and the government is experimenting with sending prisoners back in time to get food and energy. It turns out that at the end of the film, the guy realizes that when he was a little kid, he saw himself get killed. So the whole film is really this strange loop.

Weird films like this really get to me, in the good way. I was thinking about this for hours last night, about how their time travel rules and mechanisms worked. I love time travel - I don’t know if it’s because I look back at periods in the semi-near past with extreme nostalgia, or if it’s just the scifi geek in me. Most people would travel into the far future or the far past. Most people are only interested in gold arbitrage, or going back to “the good old days”. If I was seriously given the chance to go to any time, I’d probably only go back 5 or 10 years.

I shouldn’t talk about it because it is a work in progress, and it’s also seriously fucked up at this point, but my second book talks about time travel extensively, which means I’ve spent a lot of time lately “researching” it. (i.e. watching the Back to the Future movies) Any time travel book or movie needs to have a weird twist, like La Jetee’s weird book-ending. There are at least five different versions of me in this book, all talking in first person. It’s not as confusing as it sounds, but it’s confusing enough to make you think.

Why do I lose weight faster when I don’t exercise?

Someday, this war’s gonna end.

06/12/98 21

I miss VMS process names. I’m listening to Corrosion of Conformity right now - 5 years ago, I would’ve done a SET PROC/NAME=“VoteWithABullet” and waited for a reply.

The new Details magazine is here, with Ben Affleck on the cover. I didn’t know he was dating Gwenyth Paltrow. Weird. This month’s issue is better than usual; articles grabbing my attention were about demolition derbies and CMC records. I’d like to try the former sometime, and I was suprised to see how mildly positive they were about a record putting out mostly 80’s heavy metal bands, especially considering they are constantly pushing $5,000 watches in their style pages. I think my subscription runs out soon, and when it does, I probably won’t be renewing. They put so many ads in the damn thing, they should be paying me to subscribe.

I’m still listening to Coltrane and loving the hell out of it.

I’m once again obsessed with the idea of restoring an old Camaro. I could probably pull together the money for the car and some of the tools after tax time. I’d need to find a good two-car garage, cheap - maybe in Tacoma. I’ve memorized every single nut and bolt you need to remove to turn a ‘71 Z-28 RS back into air, earth, fire and water. I’ve memorized many Chevy part numbers I’ll need to know once I’ve stripped down the 350 cid engine. This sequence is played and replayed in my head: remove trim; remove front sheet metal; strip interior; pull engine and transmission; seperate engine and transmission; strip engine down to the bare block; remove tires; raise body; remove subframe; strip front suspension; strip rear suspension; strip body; buy a bunch of parts and go backward from here. I would document everything - film each step with my camcorder, and write down everything. Then I’d pay $1200 a year to store it, and I’d drive it 100 miles a year. It sounds nuts, but it’s more practical than a room full of beanie babies.

I keep having these life-changing, revelational ephiphanies, and then forgetting all about them a few hours later. Ever since I chucked the TV, I’ve been doing this more often. I guess I used to feel like part of the big NBC family, and I never tried to quantify things beyond that. Now… don’t get freaked out when I dig out all of the Zen books and start babbling about koans or ideal society models or whatever.

I drank the last of my high-octane, paint-stripping tea last night. Actually I didn’t drink the last half-glass because it looked like it housed an entire ecosystem of various debris and rubble. I’m hoping my body will now return to normal, or maybe it’ll take a few days of DTs and heavy withdrawl first.

If I keep listening to this Coltrane box set, I’m going to want to buy a tenor sax, and I’ll try to learn how to play for three weeks, tops. I wish I had a job where I had to sleep in my clothes and run down the tarmac at the sound of an alarm to get the bombers in the air within the 10 minutes it takes the Russian ICBMs to reach the base. I wish everyone had to take standardized achievement tests every 3 years, so people would brag about what they know about now, instead of what they knew about a long time ago. I wish the UN passed a standardized toilet treaty, so I could go anywhere in the world and find a good toilet. I wonder if a hang-glider would work from a 7-story apartment building. I wish I liked the taste of wine as much as I liked the cool looking bottles. I think about Jack Kerouac buying a jug of port and dragging it to Allen Ginsberg’s reading of Howl, or Bukowski drinking back some red in his shithole apartment while banging out the poems on his typer. Plastic two-liter bottles of Sprite don’t have the same aesthetic appeal.

Do chambermaids listen to chamber music?

06/11/98 22

I fell asleep after work - the thick, compressed sleep where it feels like you went through a weeks’ worth of REM sleep in an hour, and it takes a while to regain consciousness. Virginia Lore called, and we got into a long and 100% right-on discussion about relationships and, more specifically, my situation and my past. I’ve come to value the fact that my conversations with Virginia always fire on all 8 cylinders at high speed, and I can tell her a lot of weird stuff without freaking her out. I wish I could give you an example, but by definition, I can’t. Anyway, interesting talk, and now it’s going on 11 and I’m eating Burger King.

Was Burger Chef a Midwest-only thing, or did they have them nationwide? I remember really liking their hamburgers as a kid, and they had some kick-ass happy meals. If I remember correctly, they must’ve went under around 1980.

I’ve decided to put a bunch of useless facts [Long dead, sorry] about myself on my web page. I think I’m going to work on those more.

I didn’t get much sleep last night, so I feel as creative as a Reagan-era tax document. I managed to get some writing done last night, and it’s a really weird experience. Right now, I’m re-editing an old draft of my first book, and making edit marks with the intention of having others read them later. It’s truly weird, but the word count of this book is growing incredibly fast, because I’m slinging around parts of another book and importing them. This book was 100,000 words long before I even started.

I drank a bunch of this lethal iced tea I made on Sunday. I think I used way too much tea, like on the level that Indians used to mix with peyote during their tribal rituals. Side effects of this tea include nausea, vomiting, confusion, rapid breathing, body temperature fluctuation (+/- 12C), sleeplessness for the next week, and peripheral hallucinations. It also has strong diuretic properties, and tastes kindof like if they made a tobacco-flavored Kool Aid, and you mixed up two quarts of it with 17 cups of sugar. I made this stuff because I was too lazy to go to the store and get another 2-liter of something else. I learned my lesson - yet I’m still trying to finish off the pitcher.

Although I haven’t done anything about it, I’ve been thinking a lot lately on how I could redo my apartment to fit a bunch more junk in it, yet make it ultra-streamlined. I’m thinking along the lines of the apartment in The Fifth Element, where every square inch of the place would hide something. For example, I’m convinced I could cram twice as much stuff in my kitchen if I had some kind of all-out storage system. I don’t have a real, full-sized kitchen in the first place. It’s more like a kitchenette, like something you’d find in a dorm or a good hotel room. It has appliances that are mostly full-sized and everything, but it has like 9 square feet of counter space. I want all kinds of fold out storage racks inside and underneath everything. Shelves everywhere. Giant black anodized metal racks custom made to hold all of my CDs, tapes, VHS tapes, Hi8 tapes, floppies, QIC-80 backup cardriges, vinyl, MiniDiscs, and any other format I might stumble on in the near future. But it would all be hidden, or designed to look sleek. My apartment would like like a normal, toned down hotel room, but at the snap of my fingers, I could make a kick-ass stereo, a big TV, a minibar, and a thousand-book library appear out of nowhere.

I have an overwhelming urge to date a woman who works at Medieval Times. Confession of the day. I’m outa hare.

06/10/98 19

I’m eating breakfast for dinner. I was trying to figure out what to make, when it dawned on me that I had the perfect stuff for a kick-ass breakfast: scrambled egg beaters, toast, frozen french fries, and fresh-juiced grapefruit ala the juiceman. Good stuff.

More good stuff - I got Coltrane’s complete 1961 village vanguard recordings on a 4-CD set in the mail today. I’m still on disc one, but it’s some heavy duty shit. Original tapes, between-track talking and audience sound, 20-bit mastering, and some pretty slick packaging make this worth every penny. Now I need to get some blank MD to record this thing.

I can’t wait until they come out with some sort of recording device that hooks into your spine and lets you take a color capture of the image in your mind. I think a weird but cool think would be taking a picture of your mental image of someone from the computer before you met them, and then when you meet them, you could go “whoa - here’s what I thought you looked like” and show them the photo, and you could have a good laugh about it.

I thought about this because fellow writer Michael Stutz told me he had a weird dream about me the other night, moving to California because my house in Seattle was infested with cockroaches (or something - sorry if i paraphrazed too much there, Michael.) Anyway, this scenario comes up frequently for me with the whole computer deal - I’ve known so many people I’ve never met, and you pick up a mental image of people like that from the weirdest cues. I’m bad about picking up an image based on name - if a person has a name similar to a movie star or someone else I know, I’ll always associate the two. If I met a woman on the computer named Demi, I would think she looked like Demi Moore, even if she told me a thousand times that she was 5’-0, 240 lbs, with long, blonde hair and no breasts. I’d still think of G.I. Jane. Anyway, I’ve been pretty close in my predictions sometimes, and sometimes I’ve been WAY off, both in the good and the bad way. Either way, it’s fun.

I stayed up late (a subjective term these days) last night and watched Apocalypse Now. It’s been a while, and I felt a need to go up the river with Col. Kurtz myself. You know it’s a weird night when you’re thinking more about the mission and the river than the helicopters and explosions. The movie really hit the spot.

I read a bunch of old journals from the end of 1995, trying to find out when I named my second book, Rumored to Exist. It’s always odd to read old stuff, but it’s even stranger to find thick, deep, intellectual writing in a time when I thought I was just dicking around and spending too much money. 1995 now feels like a different era to me, and all of my old struggles and exclamations made it an interesting read.

I swore against it, but I feel another trip to Indiana coming on. I think it might be the same deal as last year, but it depends on money. I feel a need to shoot a lot more video of Bloomington this time. It’ll be nice to travel with a MiniDisc, too. A MiniDisc, a GameBoy, a camcorder, a cellphone - I think RoboCop hauled around less gear.

I’m going to go eat pizza in a second, and then go to the movies with my team at work, so I better split.

06/09/98 19

We went to see The Truman Show today. It was okay. It’s hard to say it’s a great movie, because then it puts you right in the demographic of the pathetic people they satirize. I don’t know if that’s a hidden joke, or a way of business. It wasn’t the kind of movie I’d pay to see, but it wasn’t as unbearable as being forces to paying to see a Julia Roberts movie with one of your friend’s recent ex-girlfriends, or watching Threesome with your mom. (both happened - don’t ask).

Actually, the whole premise of the movie was too similar to the excellent and overlooked Dark City, which did the whole city-you-can’t-escape thing, except with this whole scifi/noir thing which was the best cinematography I’ve seen in a while. It flaked out toward the end, though.

Someone should make a self-balancing washer. The basket would have water chambers around the perimeter and in the hub, and it would fill the ones opposite the imbalance. Maybe there’s an easier way - IU didn’t have an engineering program. I wish they did - I would’ve tried to get in some classes, maybe learn how to blow up bridges or do cool things with liquid hydrogen.

It’s time to work on the book.