I really wanted to go to the movies this weekend, but it’s amazing how much total and utter shit is playing at the high point of the movie season. I think the only reason the movie industry is making any money is because the theatres are air conditioned. I’m sick of this formulaic thing where they make a sequel of a movie and then expect us to pay for it. I thought the first Austin Powers was moderately funny, but I thought the joke wore too thin to see the second one. And there’s no way in hell the third one would keep my interest. I also didn’t think Men in Black 2 would be worth paying $10 to see. I saw K-29 already, and that’s about it. I think I almost seriously considered seeing that new Halloween movie, even though I don’t like that genre at all and this is like the 68th sequel, and it has  Jamie Lee Curtis in it. But I didn’t.

I spent most of the weekend watching DVDs, although the lack of AC in my living room makes this a losing proposition. I got a 2-DVD set of all the Mr. Show episodes from the first two seasons. I think I saw one episode of this back in 1997, so I’m glad they got the DVDs out. They remind me of the old UCB show, but slightly earlier and it was on HBO, so there’s more general obscenity. It’s always weird to see something like this or the Chris Rock Show DVDs and expect the general network TV level of dialogue, but then get all of the fucks and shits and everything else thrown in on top of it. I like the general format of their show too, the jumps into randomness. It reminds me a little bit of what I was trying to do in Rumored to Exist, which is also like what they did in Kentucky Fried Movie.

I am hell-bent on changing the “related books” fields in Barnes and Noble by buying some really stupid books and then buying a copy of Rumored in the same basket. I’m slightly amused that a bunch of Oprah books ended up under Summer Rain for the same reason. So I just ordered some stuff to test my theory. I’m still waiting on Amazon, and I have no idea when the book will show up there. I also wish I had more copies with me to take back to Indiana, because I know I could get rid of them if I had more. I think I have 3 or 4 spare copies around the house.

And yes, I am going back to Indiana on Thursday, for my sister’s wedding. This will be a tightly booked trip, and I have no idea if I will have any time to do anything other than the wedding and other family stuff. I will go to Bloomington maybe for an afternoon, to have lunch and take some photos. It has been ten years since the stuff from Summer Rain happened, so I need to get some kind of story out of this, and it would help to have some pictures, too. I’d like to redo the Summer Rain site, but I also need to redo this journal site, and I’m not happy with the Rumored book site, either. And that’s on top of about ten million other things I need to do.

Oh well. Waiting for lunch. It’s too hot to go outside, something like 95 out, maybe over 100 with the heat index. I need to figure out a way to rig my air conditioner so the humidity tank doesn’t fill up and shut off the AC in the middle of the night. I’ve got a hose, I just need to do some Rube Goldberg thing to rig a secondary tank. But first, I need to find out what the hell is up with lunch.

I don’t really feel like writing in this, but I feel I should. Lots of other stuff up, not enough time to mess around.

I started writing down books I’m reading. A list of what I’ve read sofar this summer is here. At some point, I’d like to make a better page with reviews, buy links, dates, etc etc but I don’t have time right now. Reading the books is work enough.

I’ll be in Indiana in a week and a day. I’m getting a bit nervous for too many reasons to list. I’m also writing about Indiana again, but I’m not that nervous about it.

OK, back to work.

It is so hot here, I’m afraid the computer will start melting at any moment. I just filled the bathtub with cold water and sat in there for a while. That’s not bad; it would be better if my laptop worked in the water.

I’ve been piddling with a short story about when I worked as a computer consultant back in Indiana, in the student labs. A lot of weird shit happened on a daily basis, and I didn’t think much of it at the time, but it was really like being in the army or something, we had so many different people working on different things. And every night I worked in the library, it was like Saving Private Ryan, only I didn’t have a gun or anything. So I think there’s enough there to get a few thousand words on a page.

My friend Andrea is in town briefly, and we got together for lunch at John’s Pizza and later for dinner at one of the Indian places on curry row. She’s got a very atypical appreciation for the city that I can’t fully explain. Most people (myself included) who go to a different place try to explain it by comparing it to another point of basis. For example, I might (and did) say, “Alamosa’s about as big as Goshen. But they’ve got a Safeway like one from Seattle.” But A has seen enough cities in enough different eras to appreciate it from a different angle, so that’s cool. She keeps bumping in here during other trips to Montrel or Sweden or whatever, and it’s always cool to see her. I wish I could convince more friends from way back to pop through the city and hang out, too. I don’t really have a great motive to brainwash them into thinking New York is the greatest city in the world or whatever, but it’s always cool to see people, and New York draws more people than Elkhart or something.

Too damn hot. I’m going to watch a few more episodes of The Osbournes. Marie gave me a tape with all of them, and last night I saw my first couple. I love Ozzy and have for years - I saw him back in 96 at the Tacoma Dome, but have been playing the tapes for years before. It’s a cute little show, and usually I avoid shit that everyone and their uncle thinks is neato and trendy, but this is an exception. It’s pretty good stuff.

Maybe if I keep my feet in a bucket of water, I’ll feel cooler…

I’m back. I’ve been back for a week, I just haven’t been in the right state to get back into this. It was a long trip and everything went great, but it was also the kind of thing that made returning to New York difficult, and I’ve spent the last week not really able to work on anything.

The good news is that Rumored to Exist is out, and it’s at Barnes and Noble and I got my first six copies in the mail last week. It looks incredible, and having the book in my hands as a real book and not a bunch of laserprinter paper feels great. But I have no idea how to tell people about it, and I am not the salesperson type. So please check it out, and read it online, and tell other people or mention it on your site or whatever else you can do to help. I think people will really enjoy the book, it’s just a matter of getting it to them.

I am oscillating between two writing projects, and I’m not sure which one will take. The first is called The Device, and it is a time-travel story I wrote a while ago that I’ve been trying to get into a book for a few years now. The other is another book about Bloomington, something that takes place after Summer Rain and basically fixes a lot of things that were wrong in there. I’m not sure which one will happen, but I’m sortof gravitating toward the Bloomington thing, and I plan to visit there when I’m in Indiana in two weeks, so that might be the catalyst for the whole thing.

I’ve been reading a lot lately, mostly because it’s too damn hot to do anything but sit in one place. I’m working on this book by Joseph Heller that talks about his early life, his childhood. He grew up on Coney Island, a Russian Jew during the depression. His dad died when he was five, so everyone worked a million odd jobs to get by. But the way he describes the neighborhood, the boardwalk in its heyday, is the kind of writing I enjoy. I go to Coney Island maybe once a year, and it’s pretty much a shithole now. But there are these little glimpses of a more majestic past that intrigue me. I wonder what it would be like to live there, to have the ocean as your backyard and have all of Brooklyn and Manhattan in front of you. I’m only 50 pages into the book, but I’ve always been a big fan of Heller’s since I found a battered copy of Catch-22 in my parents’ books. (My parents were not literary by any means, but it must have been my mom that bought some of the grocerystore paperpacks that I eventually stole years later - stuff like Fear of Flying, The Terminal Man, and The Godfather.)

I saw the movie The Bourne Identity this Saturday, in a rare trip to the theatres. Since they closed the old Steinway theatre, so the “talk through the whole movie” crowd has moved to the multiplex where I usually go. That means I pretty much can’t go to movies like Men in Black and I either have to go to a really late show, or to a movie that I know no adolescent Queens boys would like. And that’s fine, but it means I go less. Anyway, Bourne was a good movie, and had one of those prototypical Robert Ludlum thrillride suspense plots. As much as you want to make fun of me, I think Matt Damon’s a capable actor, and handled the lead in this well. Good action took place with the beautiful background of Europe. I realize I’m saying nothing about the movie itself, but it was worth a watch, and I enjoyed getting out of the house for the evening.

Lots of movies lately, lots of books, and lots of heat. It will be nice to go to Indiana in the beginning of August only because I will have an air-conditioned car.

Gotta go finish my Big Mac…

I’m packing it up and getting ready to head out. Tomorrow, I fly to Las Vegas, pick up a car, and drive to the Hacienda, which is out by the Hoover Dam. (Not to be confused with the old Hacienda, which was imploded a couple of years ago.) Then on Sunday, I drive to Alamosa, Colorado and hang out there for four days. I stay at a Best Western, and basically just see my land and check out things. Then it’s back to Vegas for two nights at the Tropicana. Should be a decent week.

I think I broke my toe last night, though. I’ve had a lot of misery with my feet over the last year - gout, pulled muscles, and flat feet - so this really sucks. I had my suitcase out, my hardshell samsonite, and I put it in the hallway to air out. I forgot, and when I went to get a drink of water in the middle of the night, BAM! I just thought I stubbed it, and it was OK all day, but when I got my shoes off tonight, it was pure murder. The middle toe is all purple right now, like a ring of purple. I am not going to a doctor, because aside from the fact that doctors can never fix anything, I know that there’s nothing you can do for a broken toe except tape it to the neighbor toe and load up on pain meds. So I got some tape, and I got my little “bootie” from when my gout was killing me, and I got some Tylenol, and it’s fine. I think it will be decent for walking if it is taped up; the middle toe isn’t that important. But when your big toe is messed up, you are fucked. I learned that the hard way last year.

Not a lot else, just packing. I hate that I never know what music format the rental car takes. Ideally, I would just pack MiniDiscs and a cassette adaptor, but now some cars have a CD in them. So I pack a mix of CDs and MDs, or I end up going to a Best Buy or WalMart and buying a bunch of CDs while I am there. Last trip, I ended up listening to the same BT album over and over and over, so I need to be more careful about what I pack this time.

I should get out of here. Not sure if I will update while I am gone, but I might be writing some kind of story or offline journal of the whole trip, depending on my mood. Anyway, see you in a week…