I’ve been having assorted sadistic daydreams that this SARS thing is going to be a global killer virus, something like in the movie 12 Monkeys and I, somehow genetically mutated through decades of psycological drug use and abuse, manage to survive. I had a similar dream when I was a child and suffering from a continual 104-degree fever; it’s one of my earliest memories. Except in this one, everyone was bursting into flame. At first it was isolated, but then it got to the point where you would be watching TV and an anchorman on CBS would suddenly immolate on camera. By the very end, the surface of the earth looked like the moon, and a giant voice laughed, like the end of a Vincent Price movie or something. Heavy shit for a 4-year-old, and with my newfound ability in precognitive dream prediction (see last entry), maybe it will all go down.

I’m going to see Twisted Sister tonight. I’m actually more excited at the thought of going to IHOP for dinner first, but it will be good to get out of the house, and a bit better now that there’s this no-smoking ban in New York. It’s gotten to the point that I have a second leather jacket I wear to clubs because the smoke is so bad. I do feel like going home and sleeping for a decade, but I’ll drink some Coke and jump around a little and try to get alive in the next two hours before I leave.

Not much else going on. It’s rainy and cold out here. I’ve been outlining the next book, picking at the timeline and the characters. I still don’t have a name for it, but you’ll be the first to hear.

It’s time to battle the subways and get home.

I had two books (or more) on the stove at the same time for five years. Then I had one really hard book on the front burner for another two years. And for the last year, I haven’t had anything going on, and it has been driving me apeshit. I’ve started lots of projects that fell flat, and I’ve felt overwhelmingly depressed, examining short stories and pieces of outlines letter-by-letter, wondering why things didn’t work and how they needed to happen.

Last night, I came up with an idea for a book. It’s actually one that I kicked around a while ago, but dismissed as too hard or too far off. Then I found a way to frame it, a way to put it together, and a way to get it to work. And now, it’s all in my head, and I’m very scared about planning it and laying down, but I think I can. And I think it will work. And I think it will be everything I wanted Summer Rain to be, but I get to start all over, from a blank slate. And I’m very excited to have a project, to have a mission, to have something that just might work.

Of course, I can’t tell you shit about it on here. And I might stop posting for a while as I get started with it. Just a warning.

I had a super fucking bizarre nightmare last night about someone who shall remain nameless (who has already been told about this, so nobody else needs to worry that it was you) and I can’t really explain it, but it was this thing where I was eternally in love with some girl, and then she left, and I went to see this friend and confide in her, and somehow she was less than corodial about the whole thing, and even in the dream the depression and angst were so heavy and piercing. I stopped going to work and drove around Portland with my car in first gear, trying to hit something but only going a mile an hour. Then I showed up at work and this guy Mike was installing a rack mount with a bunch of new gear. It looked cool, and he was all excited, and when he switched it on, it burst into flames.

I woke up from this dream totalled, thinking somehow I’d subliminally hurt this person in real life, or lost my friendship with her forever, or some other bullshit you’d think before you get out of the comfortable womb of your bed and into the shower. So I went to work and told the fire part of the dream to Mike, who really was installing a new rack to hold an IBM xSeries blade enclosure and something like eight new blades.

About an hour later, I went to see what Mike was working on in the NOC, and THE FUCKING BLADE ENCLOSURE WAS POURING OUT SMOKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

About an hour ago, I was watching TV - I forget what, probably flipping through the channels, and contemplating going to Taco Bell for dinner. I noticed that my lights in the living room were flickering a bit, and I was sort of pissed that my fluorescent-LED replacement things that were supposed to last for ten million hours were crapping out after less than a year. All of a sudden, there was a fucking EXPLOSION! It was far louder than anything I’ve ever heard (and I’ve heard some impressive stuff) and it sounded like it was within a block of my place. I checked the phones and the ethernet to see if it was anything that would affect that, and then I went into that weird sort of adrenaline-fueled paranoia where you memorize the location of everything in the room in case the five stories above you collapse into the basement and you need to find a quick exit. I grabbed my coat and went outside, thinking it would be a fucking scud missile or car bomb, although it sounded far too “compressed” and not as omnidirectional as an exploding car.

By the time I went outside (I waited a second - read too many stories about IRA secondary bombing) and saw some fire trucks trying to put out a couple of cars that were basically twenty foot pyres of flame. There was also smouldering smoke coming out of every ConEd manhole within a block. I got enough half-truths from the pigs that were fencing off the neighborhood; I guess there was a fire and explosion of a switch or transformer underground, hence the flickering lights, and an exploding manhole set off the cars. So I went to Burger King, came back, and ate. A few minutes, there was a second explosion, but not as loud. And I think I heard a third, but it was much smaller, maybe a car gas tank or something. The lights are still flickering, and I’m worried that they will go out. (Shit - fourth explosion!) But the computer and ethernet are working fine. I hope they get the fire underway or the dropping temps help, and I hope ConEd has some redundant systems they can get online.

---

Nothing interesting is going on in life. I am really trying to think of another writing project, but I can’t find a spare moment or two a day to do any writing. And that’s not because of anything interesting going on. I basically go to work, come home, eat a couple of meals in there, and add some TV or the PlayStation, and that’s about it. I’ve been fighting a cold, which also makes it hard to get out of a slump. But I have managed some updates to the glossary in the last week or so. And I’m still planning for Hawaii, which is in five? weeks.

Speaking of just like yesterday, it’s been four years since I left Seattle. (Actually, the four-year mark is on Monday.) I’ve been thinking about Seattle a lot, even in my dreams, which is part of my depression lately. I have these dreams where I go back and somehow my apartment was still held for me, and a bunch of stuff of mine is in storage, stuff that I thought I lost years ago. The apartment is always different in the weird, surreal way that dreams distort reality, but it still has so many details that remind me so much of 600 7th Ave #520. This morning I had the dream, and when I woke up, a cool, clean breeze drifted through a window. For a moment, it felt like I was back, like my big window looking out over Harborview was cracked open, and I could wake up, run downstairs, and jump in the Escort for a quick run up I-5 and to the nearby Denny’s, or over the 520 to some record shopping in Bellvue. It’s always weird what I miss and what I look back on over time, but right now it’s really kicking me in the ass because I don’t feel like the present is offering that much. Of course, ten years from now, I could be anywhere in the world, wishing I was back in Astoria the night the manholes exploded.

Now I’m off to play some Playstation for a while.

It was almost seventy degrees outside today. Since I am going to Hawaii in May and it seems like everything will be a two-mile walk, I have been trying to walk a bit more, so I put on the iPod and went out for a while today. I crossed through an area north of my house, north of the highway that consists of a lot of warehouses, small homes covered in barbed wire, and lots of half-disassembled and scavanged Crown Vic taxicabs on blocks. It’s all concrete, not much in the way of life, just a set of twisted railroad tracks on pylons and steel a few dozen feet in the air, snaking through the buildings a hundred years after they were put there, as an afterthought. I watched a trio of Conrail blue locomotives pushing steel across the horizon, and the random shuffle of the iPod (which I sometimes think is not that random, based on the songs it sometimes throws at me), and it hit me with a Peter Gabriel song - Secret World - from a ten-year-old album that made me think of ten years old. Back in 1993, when I used to take the same kind of walk once or twice a day, listening to the walkman, I’d walk underneath the trestles at 15th Street in Bloomington, and I’d sometimes look up at an engine assembling together boxcars into a freight train as I hustled toward class, toward work. And now here it was, ten years later, worlds away, watching trains as a killed an afternoon a step at a time.

It’s all stupid but symbolic that I think of my life ten years back, the relationship I was starting in 1993 and how great it feels to be in love in the spring, to start something new and know it’s mutual. And that carried through the summer and into the fall, and then it was over. I should have forgotten about all of this years ago. I’ve been through enough other, longer relationships to think this should have been bumped out of the cache long ago. But it’s funny how a nice round number can make things come up again. And for the rest of the walk, things felt so insignificant, in the sense that I felt like nothing had happened in the last ten years, that I was back to walking nowhere with a walkman on my hip instead of doing anything productive with my life. And that sounds stupid, given everything that has happened in the last decade. But it’s weird how things can go full-circle on you like that.

A reply RE http://elemeta.com/retrocase/index.html

Oh man, you just brought back a horrible repressed memory with your case page…

When I was in college in 1991, I didn’t have the cash for a computer, and needed one bad. This guy sold me an XT clone motherboard for ten bucks, and I scoured the used junk shops looking for the rest of the pieces to get something together that would run Procomm and sit behind a 2400 baud modem so I didn’t have to leave the house to get my email.

So a local place that sold lamps and lighting equipment and had a side-line selling mail-order Commodore 64 parts also had a beaten up 5150 case, PS. and keyboard, and I talked the guy down to five bucks for all three. Great! I could just slap in that newer motherboard and get to work, right?

Um, no. Turns out, as you probably know, that not a damn thing lined up between the case and board. Every single mounting hole except one was off, and I had the whole thing supported by a suicidal mix of plastic standoffs and mix-and-match screws and bolts. My mobo had like 8 or 9 expansion slots, which didn’t jive with the 5-slot webbing on the back of the case. So I borrowed a friend’s dremel and went to work, tearing out all of the slots on the case until the whole thing looked like a Civil War field amputation done with a blunt butterknife. The worst of all was the keyboard connector. The damn thing did not line up at all, so at three in the morning one night, I got out a soldering iron, melted out the stupid thing, and reattached each wire with a few inches of lampcord or whatever I had laying around. I could then move the plug a few inches over.

The whole thing sortof worked for a semester. I fried that 55-watt power supply when I got one of those full-height, five Meg hard drives on usenet for about ten bucks. I went to a local place and got a 100-watt power supply for a few dollars, and managed to get the drive working, although when it spun up, I was afraid it would blow out every fuse in the house.

I had a lot of intermittent shorts and lockups, and I figured the case was flexing the board, or crossing some traces on the backside. So when I got my tax refund next spring, I went out and blew $100 on a really nice mini-tower that I ended up using for the next ten years. But the shorts continued. I would disassemble and reassemble the damn thing in rage every night, hitting the case, the PS, flexing the motherboard, doing everything to get it to come back on. Finally one night, I had the whole thing torn down to air, earth, fire, and water, and I found the problem - the damn CPU was replaced with a V20 before I got it, and it was seated in the socket crooked. When the system heated up, it would pull half of the pins from the socket. I re-seated it, and all was well until I got a real 486 a year later.

Anyway, your project made me nostalgic for the old days, and glad I have a nice case now.

-Jon