Month: December 1998

I’m really not awake today. I had to drop off Marie at the airport for a 7:20 flight, which involved waking up at 5:30, which is about 5 hours earlier than my typical schedule. She also had to deal with a bunch of shit from Continental, which has this problem with forgetting about e-ticket bookings. I just spent too much of my time writing them a pissy email, and now I need to stop thinking about it.

It was nice to have Marie here, although it wasn’t nearly enough time, and it was hellish here during her whole stay. Now she knows I’m not kidding about the permanently gray skies, pissing rain, and high winds that pummel the building. Seattle is a very beautiful city, for about 15 minutes a year. Anyway, we didn’t do much of interest or get out too much, based on the traffic and weather. I wanted to go to a movie, but there’s such a poor crop of films out there this holiday. If I had free passes to go to a movie, I don’t think I could pick one. We rented a few movies though, and I got to see Fear and Loathing again. I might watch it again – I have the tapes until Friday. It’s a great film, and usually gets me going about writing and living. In a world where all of the inspirational films are about sports and overcoming odds and whatever, it’s nice to see something new.

Now that the holidays are over, I need to get back to writing as much as possible. I’m still trying to figure out which book to work on, and I don’t think I’ll know, even when I’ve got pieces and chapters on the screen in front of me. I might end up going back and forth a bit. I think that the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron game for the Nintendo might slow down my writing output, at least until I finish all of the levels.

Lunch is over. More later.

I hope you survived this year’s day of Christian celebration without too much hair-pulling.

It wasn’t too bad of a day for me. I woke up “early” (8am) and drove to SeaTac airport to pick up Marie. The snow and ice turned into rain and fog by xmas morning, but the roads were completely empty, making it the easiest drive to the airport I’ve ever encountered, even easier than a 3am on Sunday night drive I had to do once. Parking was really bad, though, and I heard that a water main broke on the rental car level, creating a small lake down there. I got there an hour early, which turned into an hour and a half early because of delays. I forgot my gameboy, and didn’t have anything else to do, so I sat down in a crappy airport chair and fell asleep sitting up for almost an hour. I wish I could do that all the time.

So Marie got here, and it’s good to have her here again. We exchanged gifts and I got the Beat Generation CD set and the Burroughs set from Giorno poetry systems, and a ton of cool books. We spent the rest of the dark and rainy day around the house, playing with the new Nintendo and eventually getting to the IHOP for dinner.

We’re getting ready to leave and do some post-xmas shopping for Nintendo games, so I’ve got to find my teargas and rubber bullets for the uzi to make the trip to the mall a little more pleasant. Later.

I wish I could describe the way a VW Rabbit smells. I was thinking about this last night, while writing the book. One time I was watching an episode of Wings (the airplane show, not the sitcom) or some other Discover channel documentary on the B-52 and one of the pilots mentioned that all of the planes had a distinct smell, of old wiring, new electronics, jet fuel, spilled Cokes, and everything else. You’d think any military hardware would be sterile inside, but it’s usually much worse than an old car. My old VW is about the same vintage as a MiG-25, and similar in many ways – the silver color, the boxy construction, the minimalist instruments and controls, and the mix of comfort and discomfort that makes it a unique piece of machinery. You can reach every piece of the engine on a VW and easily strip the whole thing apart with five wrenches, but there’s no good place to rest your left foot when it’s off the clutch. The MiG-25 can fly over Mach 3 and high enough so you can see the curve of the earth, but it uses only vacuum tubes in its circuitry, and it’s far too easy to push an engine to failure.

The smell – I think of this because I spent so much time in my car this weekend, stuck in traffic. It snowed about 4 microns on Saturday, which meant every fucking soccer mom and Microsoft yuppie with a 4×4 SUV ended up in a ditch or shutting down a floating bridge because they thought they paid $60,000 so they could drive and brake at highway speeds on glare ice. Anyway, this meant the car got nice and toasty inside, and while I was strapped into my minimalist little seat in my aluminum-silver cockpit, the odor of a 20 year old VW made me think of my history with these little cars.

First, the West Germans made great little cars that were fun to drive and still got 30 or 40 MPG, but they had horrible wiring systems. My current VW has about 10 wiring problems, ranging from an intermittent rear defogger to no horn or reverse gear lights. For a while, my front turn signals wouldn’t blink when the headlights were on, and then they miraculously healed. Same with the dome light, although it comes and goes. On my last VW, all of the dash warning lights would turn on when it was raining, and on the one before, a buzzer would sound if it got too wet out. The substandard wiring gave the car one of its smells – a mix of old rubber insulation and ozone that increased when the temp went up. This mixed with the paper and cardboard used under the dash, which gives off the aroma of old books – not the paper and dust mite smell, but the thin cardboard cover of a 1960’s owner’s manual. All of this mixes with the smell of a rich gas engine, or the unique odor of the thin, black dust given off by a tiny diesel powerplant. Add the slight smell of oil and an aging plastic dashboard, and you start to get the idea.

It’s odd how unique the VW aroma is, yet how standard it is among the make. A couple of years ago, I was in Snoqualmie at a company picnic and saw two Rabbits that had been tricked out for some kind of racing – they had no doors, one seat, some NASCAR-esque netting, and so forth. I looked at the cars for a while, feeling some nostalgia for my old VW. When I climbed in, it smelled just like the interior of my old VW. And it’s not like what my old Camaro smelled like, the rich smell of 8 cylinders rumbling, with Armor-All, carpet cleaner and Turtle Wax all over the interior.

Maybe I’m nuts – I have a sensitive nose, but I can’t describe smell that good. It reminds me of different times, eras. When I spray Lysol, it reminds me of the summer of 1992, when I used to spray the shit constantly in my tiny roominghouse apartment on Mitchell Street. Every cologne I own is a time machine going back to when I first started using it – same with every shampoo, cleaning product, and candle. If I knew anything at all about differentiating this stuff verbally, I could probably get a job designing perfumes or something. Maybe not…

Speaking of time machines, I am vageuly starting to study them a bit more, so maybe I will go from Summer Rain tight into working on the third book again. I haven’t written in here all weekend, but I spent a lot of time reorganizing and moving around stuff in Summer Rain‘s third book so it fell into a logical order. I think I had about 7 or 8 weekends in August, and that didn’t work out. The shuffle went without a major hitch, but now I’m almost out of energy to continue with it. I think I’ll plow away until Marie gets here in 4 days, and then start something else after she leaves – maybe Rumored, maybe the yet-unnamed time travel book.

I better go. It’s snowing again and I’m worried about making it home. The Rabbit drives excellent on the ice – it’s such a light car, and front wheel drive. The Rabbit’s weight is distributed just right so when your wheels don’t let you turn anymore, you can swing the weight of the car around and aim it almost perfectly. But the fucking idiots out there are probably causing 200 car pileups on the freeway, and if my 3000 pound Rabbit got hit by a 9000 pound Suburban that didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, well, you could guess who wouldn’t be updating his journal for a while.

I’m tired today. And I’m trying to stay off caffeine, which is a bad combination. Last night, when I was falling asleep, I came up with an entirely new idea for a book, and even outlined most of it in my head. I barely remember it – it’s like a strange dream sequence, with events spinning and changing in my head for no reason. I’d like to write a whole book like that, progressing like a dream instead of a linear story. I’ll add it to my list of stuff I want to do when I get the time.

It rained continually this weekend, like I was in some kind of southeast asian monsoon or something. Even worse, it was cold, and the rain was heavy. This whole description sounds very cliche, but the whole thing was demoralizing. Today, the sun is almost out and it looks okay, but it will be darker than midnight by four o’clock, and it will probably start raining before I drive home. Driving is the worst – it took me an hour to make the ten minute drive home from the mall on Saturday. When it rains, the roads fill with people and then slow to a crawl. I-5 becomes a parking lot of people, and there are never any good, alternate routes. Staying inside all weekend is the only option.

Despite the fact that I only left the house three times all weekend, I didn’t get a lot done writing-wise. I did put in more than a few hours of work, but I’m starting to get bored of Summer Rain. I don’t want to keep plodding through chapters like I do now, but I don’t have the focus or attention span to start working on Rumored again. I figure if I continue at my current rate, I will be more or less done with this draft by the end of January.

I got the new Dream Theater live album. It’s 2 CDs and both of them are completely full of stuff, which is cool. I’m sick of buying a 2 CD set and the second one has like 20 minutes of stuff on it. I saw Dream Theater on this tour, although I didn’t have their newest album with I saw them, so I didn’t know what to expect of the new stuff. I’ve since bought Falling Into Infinity and I love it, so hearing the stuff live is incredible. I’ve been a Dream Theater fan since before their first album – a guy at a record store in Elkhart gave me the advance tape, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

I’ve got a sandwich to eat, so I better split.

I’ve been listening to the G3 live album all day, and I’ve realized that I really need to see Steve Vai live again. His albums are incredible, but his live guitar is mind-boggling. Everything is twice as complex and four times as fast. And it’s all incredibly exact. He only has three tracks on the CD, but the stuff he did at G3 really blew me away. I went on November 8, 1996 at sat in about the 10th row. I think his sound is perfectly engineered for people in the first few rows who are wearing earplugs. The low end bass sounded completely alien – it was totally undistorted, but felt like it was ripping through my chest and rumbling my bones. And he was all over the place, holding his guitar to the side, high, low, above his head, not even looking at it and playing things inhumanly fast yet hitting every note perfectly. The way he bent notes, wrapped them up and down and used the whammy at the same time, it felt like he was talking to me telepathically, through his guitar. His face would like like he was in a conversation, but the sound wasn’t coming from his mouth. Sure, Satriani was good both times I saw him, but Vai – it must’ve felt like this when people saw Hendrix for the first time 30 years ago. I wish he’d come out with a 3-CD live album for his last tour. He’s allegedly working on some huge 8-CD boxed set, so maybe it will have some cool stuff.

I got a bunch of CDs yesterday. Well, 7 – new CD club. I’m trying to clear out their AC/DC and Ozzy back-catalog. I’m about 18 CDs short of 500, which was my goal for the year. My next goal is to find a place to put all of them, since they are currently stacked on top of every piece of A/V gear I own.

I’m not in the journaling mood today. I’m going to go eat my sandwich.

12/11/98 20:45

I guess it’s a day to talk about what’s in the CD player. Now it’s Rush again, and I’m listening to all of these old Rush songs that remind me of spending an entire summer on a ten-speed bike, or in the basement putting together model airplanes. It’s really amazing how much scope my career with Rush really covers. One summer, I’m listening to the brand-spanking-new Grace Under Pressure and mowing lawns to save up for a drum set, and only a couple albums later, I’m listening to Presto in my walkman as I trod around the Indiana University campus. It’s pretty eerie when you think about it.

For the longest time, I thought that the last line of Rush’s song “The Trees” was “And the trees were all kept equal by magic acts and song.” It’s really “hatchet, axe, and saw.” And there’s still this Dokken song where I swear the guy is saying “your cufflinks are gold” but I know it has to be something else. Speaking of Dokken, I watched almost all of one of those greatest hits of the 80’s infomercials and almost ordered all 125 dollars’ worth of CDs. Several observations: First, the girl doing the commercial is the model who was in the Cherry Pie video. She is allegedly two years older than me, which is about right. So, while I was mixing paint at Monkey Wards for $3.50 an hour, she was only two years older and probably driving a pink Ferrari or something. Also, have you noticed the large number of vaguely metal-based songs that were popular back then? I don’t even remember that much of a bias, even from the middle of Indiana, but I guess it was true. About every third time I talk to Ray, we have a huge disussion about this. Right now, part of the country’s default musical taste is R&B-type stuff, and the rest is “alternative”, meaning almost nobody listens to metal anymore. Ray wouldn’t listen to Poison if they were the equivalent of, say, Green Day, but it would mean a lot of people would be willing to make the transition from Poison to Motley Crue to Metallica to Motorhead to Rotting Christ. Somebody listening to the Backstreet Boys isn’t going to follow the same path.

I don’t care too much, since I don’t listen to the radio much, and selling metal CDs is not my livelihood. But I’ve noticed that I don’t have a default preference for music anymore. I liked it back in high school when I was into bands like Anthrax and Megadeth, and there were tons of other similar bands. I’d buy a tape or two every week, and when I got to the store, the people there would point me to new stuff or cool bands. I didn’t make much money back then and couldn’t afford CD binges like now, so my biggest problem was that there were hundreds of new things I wanted, and I could only buy a few a month. Now I seem to drift, and I buy a lot of old stuff. I feel somewhat cheated when buying something old – it’s like watching an old Seinfeld rerun vs. going to see a new, really good movie. The Seinfeld rerun is great, but there’s a certain something in seeing something new. Sometimes I wish I was into rap or techno or jazz or punk or industrial just so I could go to the store and say “I’m into this scene” and have the guy behind the counter hand me some new stuff that I’d like. But now I pick through the racks and come up with some really disjointed selections.

I have almost 500 CDs, but sometimes spend 15 minutes trying to find something to listen to. Is that pathetic?

I only skipped school twice in high school. (I think I only went to class twice in college.)

The first: I think this was in the fall of my senior year, but I’m not sure. I was driving in to school, and a bunch of fire trucks and emergency vehicles were blocking off everything. Firemen were telling us to turn around and go home because there was a bomb threat. What they meant is that we should come back in a few minutes and go about the regular school day. What that meant to me is to get the fuck out of there and do some kind of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off routine. I drove to South Bend, which was our closest mecca away from Elkhart. I went to University Park Mall, which wasn’t open yet, and slept in my car for a few hours. I bought the then-new Joe Satriani EP, walked around downtown South Bend, and then came back to school because I had to work at the theatre that night. Not much rebellion.

The second: I got a speeding ticket one night for going something like 87 in a 35. This meant a mandatory court date, and the kind officer summoned me to appear before a judge on a Friday morning. I should probably mention that the attendance office was run by someone who graduated magna cum laude from the Nazi school of administration. Every parent was called when a kind was gone. Attendance was taken every hour. The FBI crime lab was used to compare handwriting samples from sick notes. I could think of ways to break out of prison, but cutting class was another story. But going to court was a legit excuse. And I figured I would be in a waiting room all day until I got my turn. So I told the attendance office that I’d be gone all day, and they bought it.

I drove to court in South Bend, and within minutes, I was sitting there with the public defender guy and the judge in an insane plea-bargain arrangement, where I must’ve said the word “sir” 900 times in 3 minutes. I thought I was going to lose my license, and the judge made me aware that I could. Then he reduced the charge to 9MPH over the limit, and told me to pay my fine and get the fuck out of there. I budgeted and saved several hundred dollars for a reckless driving fine, but 7 minutes and $70 later, I was free. It was 10:11am, I had an excuse saying I was in court all day, and I had a bunch of money to blow.

I spent most of the day driving around South Bend, which, as I mentioned, was our mecca back in high school. I’m not saying it’s an incredible city (there are subway stations in New York that are bigger than South Bend) but it wasn’t Elkhart, and there were some unique stores and places to eat. There was also Notre Dame, and I was convinced as a high school student that there were dorms full of half-naked nymphomaniacs just waiting for an inexperienced male with a high ACT score. I guess I never thought that one through – Notre Dame is a religious school. Anyway, I spent the whole day gone and I got away with it.

Now, you ask, why the hell am I thinking about this? A new Rush live album has come out, and the last one came out around the time that the second hooky incident took place. This was just after my 18th birthday (1/20/89), a time when I knew I was going to IU, and I was just starting to step out of my shell for the first time. I was having my first disastrous experiments with dating, I didn’t have a curfew anymore, and the end of my high school career was in sight. Not only that, but I wasn’t taking any real classes, so I just had to coast for a few more months. It was one of the first times in my life I had a shred of self-confidence. The whole thing, even though I was getting ready to fuck up in so many ways before I even got out of the gate, is a very memorable era.

As for this new Rush album, I have mixed opinions. It’s not bad musically. I hate the packaging – it’s in one of those cardboard slip-case things that inevitably get worn and torn. I like that they included a third CD with a 20-year old show from the Hammersmith Odeon, and it includes a very eclectic playlist with a lot of songs they don’t play live anymore, at least not in full. (I disclaim that by saying I didn;t see them in 97 when they played two full sets, so maybe they do now.) Anyway, it’s both odd and great to have songs like Xanadu, Cygnus X-1, and Cinderella Man on a live disc.

I’ve been typing and not eating, and now my food’s cold. I better get my lunch finished.

Sunday night, as I was falling asleep, I wrote an entire journal entry in my head, but I didn’t mention any of it in Monday’s entry, because I got sidetracked. (Writing things just before bed isn’t that unusual for me, but the same practice happens more frequently when I am asleep, and most of all when I am in the shower. I come up with all of my good ideas in the shower, which is a reason I’ve been afraid to move to another apartment for 4 years.) Let me see if I can recap the idea.

On Sunday, I called one of my friends in Indiana (who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent, but it’s obvious to those who know me) and in the course of our long and interesting discussion, a name came up that I hadn’t heard in a while. It was a girl that I’d hung out with five years ago, who now worked with my friend. That’s not too strange, considering how incestuous a social community Bloomington really is. There were many social circles, but they all collided in so many strange ways that talking about any person from our old gang was usually like talking about how virtually any rock musician is somehow related to one of Frank Zappa’s touring or recording bands. And in the usual fashion of our long and winding (yet very interesting) conversations, I started to tell my friend the story about how I knew this girl way back when.

It’s probably a boring story if I just dumped out the facts – girl x emailed me way back in the beginning of 1994, I spent a few months chasing her even though she wasn’t interested in me, she spent a brief period of time enamored in me, even though I had bigger fish to fry. She was cute, and fun to be with, but had some major issues. And hey – so did I; this was only a few months after Tanya dumped me. The spring of 1994 was a confusing time, and telling this story made me think about all of the other things going on back then.

The basic mood of the day could best be summarized by going to your local record store and shoplifting a copy of the Rollins Band CD Weight. It was the CD of the week for about three months back then, and it’s still not a bad little opus. If you put the last three songs on repeat, that would give you a feel for my life back then. The first song would be this eerie, quiet, art-rock-esque number with Rollins quietly talking about despair. Then it explodes into the second song, which is a speedier, pissed-off-Rollins thing, and the last spng is a more laid back song that talks about how you only get one chance so you better not fuck it up/make the most of yourself kindof rap. If you go get that album, listen to it 400 times, and then listen to the rest of the story, it will help, but I’m not going to force you or anything.

So I liked this girl, and we had a connection going, although it was more playful and childlike than anything else. We shared lots of inside jokes and emailed a lot and spent tons of time on the VAX phone talking. But I could never make the transition to real life. And then summer happened, and when she got back, I found out she got married to some dork she just met so she could get financial aid. End of story.

This is another chapter in the seven volume set entitled “Konrath’s lost and missed opportunities”, which, as many of you know, is also the basis of many of my best short stories. In fact, my last two good stories are about missed opportunities from the same timeframe, the beginning of 1994. At the time, I just wanted to get past it. And now, although I’m not saying I would trade my current situation for anything, I often think about those days. But who couldn’t? My writing career was only months old and beginning to grow, I lived in a pretty kick-ass apartment, I was in good shape, and even though I was busy 14 hours a day, I had a certain freedom that you don’t find in a 9 to 5. I’m 100% sure that in a few years, I’ll be looking back to 1996 as my prime, even though I spent half of the year wanting to drink a gallon of Drano and get it over with. I don’t think time heals all wonds – it distorts them.

Nothing else to report except that I actually slept 8 hours last night with no interruptions. I didn’t have as many odd dreams, but I did find my first car, the Camaro, in Edwardsburg, Michigan. I bought it back from the current owner. Then I met at a Long John Silver in Bloomington with my first girlfriend and the guy who split us up (they later married and then split, so I don’t know why they were together again.) I also had a dream where someone mentioned planting an autographed picture of Nixon and a bag of hash on somebody, but I don’t remember the context.

That’s all…