It is sixty-eight degrees out! I don’t know how the fuck this happened. At lunch, it was mild out, but after work, I practically needed a jacket. I might actually be able to sleep tonight without taking a fistful of sleeping pills. It’s not even muggy or anything. I wish it would stay like this all month. (I hope I didn’t just curse it.)

I officially have too much stuff to read. The Asimov books are great, and I’m almost done with the first one. But I also got a copy of The Watchmen from Amazon the other day. It’s a graphic novel (i.e. comic book) from DC that everyone keeps telling me I really need to read. I don’t collect comics - I did for a little while in college, but got out of it when I was spending way too much money on Spiderman stuff. But I do occasionally like to read something when it’s good. The last good thing I read was the new Punisher title in the Marvel Knights series. I really like the faux-Mack Bolan anti-hero character, although he got a little too cartoony and weird during his run in other various Marvel comics. Ray told me to pick up the hardcover anthology of the first dozen or so of the new series, and they’re excellent. The art is much more realistic and gritty, and the stories have much more of a raw human feel to them. Like I said, I’m not the greatest fan of comics, but that book did it for me.

As far as other reading, I got a new book on flying ultralights today, but I forget the author/title. A quick flip on the subway showed a lot of good info about the meteorology side of things, which is good. I have a whole slew of books on my Amazon wish list. (If you’re curious, it’s here.) And then the other day, the guy who sits next to me ordered a shitload of books on Barnes and Noble, and they couriered the books to him THAT DAY. FOR FREE. Only in New York…

I think I’m back on the book of Bloomington short stories, and I’ve officially killed off any thought of working on my book called The Device. I did steal about 4,000 words out of it that I might use in a short story though, so that’s cool. I have 65,000 words of this book written, but much of that is in first draft format and horribly needs a rewrite. I hope I stay on this project, because I really need to get writing.

OK, that’s it. Time to sleep.

Still hot as hell here. I think I hit my upper bound on hot food, too. I never really got used to spicy foods, as I lived in the Midwest and ate a lot of really bland stuff. In college, I worked with a lot of people into the cult of the chile pepper, which seems to be prevalent in computer geeks for some reason. I had horrible stomach problems for years, so I didn’t get started on this, though. Since I moved to New York, I’ve slowly tried to introduce hot food to my diet, but I can only do it to a certain extent. I do okay with a chicken vindaloo, and I’m to the point where Tabasco is pretty middle-of-the-road. But I’m nothing like a coworker who is both New Mexican and of the aforementioned chile/tech geek cult, who can put ten ounces of pure nuclear habanero sauce on a single taco without flinching.

I don’t know if I mentioned that I bought a Tandy 102 from EBay. They are very neat little machines, especially given their mid-Eighties vintage. They have a full keyboard and a 40 by 8 character LCD display. Their 8-bit processor and up to 32K of RAM ran a tiny OS with BASIC, a text editor, and some other basic stuff like an address book and calendar. What’s cool is that the whole thing ran on 4 AA batteries for twenty hours, and when you hit the on switch, the thing immediately came on, more like a calculator than the five-minute wait on a current Windows laptop. It has a serial port to connect to a real PC, and should be a neat toy to play with on the train or while sitting in bed. Maybe I’ll run a serial cable from it and use it as a dumb terminal off of my Linux box. Of course, I have a real VT240 collecting dust in my closet, so I probably won’t do much with it. And the size on this places it smack-dab between my SideKick and my laptop. But for only $45, it’s not too bad.

I’m currently in the process of re-reading a bunch of Asimov stuff in order. In my senior year of high school, I only had to take a couple of classes in the last semester, so I had a few study halls, an hour that I worked in the theater, a piano class, and a lot of other filler. I had high hopes of reading every book in the library, or at least the ones I found interesting. After I read every World War II book cover to cover, I started reading all of the SciFi they had in the place - Bradbury, Orwell (okay, not really SciFi) and I worked through a lot of the Asimov. I don’t think they had any PKD, which would have been great too, although it seems like all of the good anthologies of his stuff have come out in the last decade or so. Anyway, I am reading through the robot books (I, Robot,The Robots of Dawn, The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun) and I’m considering going into the Foundation books, but it depends on how I do on the other stuff. I did some digging around, and I never knew that Asimov actually died of HIV complications. He had a heart bypass in 1983, and he got a bad blood transfusion. It was kept secret at his death, until a biography that came out last year. Pretty weird.

OK, I need to go write, if that’s at all possible in this heat.

It’s hot as hell, still.

I did manage to get out today and find the new location for Coliseum Books. This was a pretty cool, non-chain bookstore up on 57th Street where I spent many a dollar on new books back in the day. Not only did it have a good location, but they had a cool selection, especially of history and literature. Unfortunately, they lost their lease, and the location is now a Fleet bank. I thought that was that, but on my walk the other day, I found they have a brand new store on 42nd Street, near the public library. I went in today and dropped about $50 on some new stuff, including a John Fante reader and a bunch of Asimov that I read back in high school, but really want to re-read. So that was nice, as was the air conditioning.

I thought that maybe eating hot foods from hot regions would maybe help me out here, so I had Mexican tonight and Indian the night before. I figured if they ate hot food all of the time, maybe they knew something that I didn’t. It didn’t help much, though. I think I really need to move, or build some kind of astronaut suit that has air conditioning.