I got a voice mail from Simms last week, when I stepped away from the desk for a second. Tom Donohue died, he said. Tom was a really great guy who worked at a used CD store back in Bloomington, and eventually opened up his own place. Most used CD places in town are just out to rip off students coming in and going out, but he always seemed to give everyone the “friend” rate. He would talk to you about whatever music you were into, if it was the Flaming Lips or the Beatles or Cannibal Corpse or anything else, and he’d know weird trivia or obscure releases better than you would. He always kept aside weird Death Metal when I was into it, and then cheap Zappa stuff when I was into that. He also did a lot with WQAX and WFHB, and sponsored a lot of local bands. He was a class act indeed.

You know, I even mentioned Tom in Summer Rain, because back in the day, I was in his shop constantly. I went in there last August when I was in town for a split second to have lunch with Alana, and I ducked in and said hi. It was good to see him, and now I’m glad I did catch up with him. Anyway, here’s another tribute to him, courtesy of the IDS.

I’ve been in overdrive, trying to get the annotated version of Rumored to Exist ready. I have the front cover and back cover designed, and they look cool. The whole book is in FrameMaker, and it’s amazing how smooth things have gone with it. I mean, I use Frame all day long every day, so I should have great faith in its ability, but this project has been wonderful. The footnote numbering problem was a ten second fix; the new template was about five minutes of work; the importing of the document from Word took no time at all. Now I need to finish writing the introduction, and comb through the thing for any style issues, and it will be ready.

Every time I buy new shoes, I do not throw out the old ones, even though I typically wear shoes down to the point where there is a hole all the way through the sole. But I need the backup pair, and there have been many times I’ve bought new shoes that simply didn’t work, and I had to go back to the backups until I could find another store with another shoe that did work. Anyway, today I was sitting in bed and realized I had five identical pairs of white on white Nike Air Force III Mid-height hightops, each right one with a hole right through the toe side of the sole. Each left one was fine. I put them all in a garbage bag and hauled them out - that’s a lot of square feet of space. I wish I could simply replace the soles, but now this paragraph is turning into an Andy Rooney rant, so I’ll shut up.

I have been reading the Chuck Barris book Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and I really like it. I don’t know that I’d like the movie so much, but the book has a certain gritty feel to it that reminds me of Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, Elmore Leonard. I’m pretty far into it, I should finish tomorrow. I got the Bukowski book Open All Night, but that’s a poem book, so it will probably be read random page by random page at night when I can’t sleep. I think the next book is this one on the history and invention of the television, which I got at Strand this weekend, along with the Bukowski and an old book on modern warplanes by Bill Gunston, a book from 1980 full of pictures that I remember from the school’s library, so I figured it was worth the five bucks.

I actually wish I knew anything about Bill Gunston. He published hundreds of these books for Jane’s, and a million other aviation-related magazines. Maybe he’s just a figurehead, or a pseudonym for like a dozen other writers, like Louis Lamour, or Don Pendleton, the “author” of a few thousand Mack Bolan books. Anyway, when I was a kid, I used to eat up any of those airplane books, the ones with tons of photos of planes in action. It’s funny to look at these books now, and see how all of the text in the books has to do with the “looming” war with the USSR, and how various US planes were well-poised against Soviet counterparts. It’s also weird, especially in this book I got yesterday, how the MiGs and other Warsaw Pact planes had very sketchy details; the photos were grainy and improvised, the artists’ renditions were just educated guesses. Of course now, if you flew to Moscow with a suitcase of money, they would practically give you a MiG-25, teach you how to fly it, feed you like a king every day, and let you date their sister. It’s amazing how things change.

Oh, my Latitude laptop died. I should be more pissed about this than I am, but it’s almost a non-issue, given how little I use it. I think the hard drive is fried, or it could just be the registry. I guess I could nuke it and start over, but I don’t feel like messing with it right now.

Okay, I’m done for the night. Time to read for a bit.

Just a quick update. I’m so fucking busy I can’t find enough hours in the day, yet I keep playing SOCOM and I’ve been stuck on the same level since MAY. I could probably draw a map of the whole level and where all of the dudes are hiding in my sleep with my eyes closed (as opposed to that open-eye sort of sleep) and yet I play it twice or three times a day and always get killed at the last screen.

Anyway, two big projects here at home, and both of them are running at the same time, waiting to see which one hits the gate first. One is the glossary, and I am editing it on paper, adding new entries, editing stuff based on comments, and trying to get the text all locked down and in shape. That maybe will take another month, but I am getting bored of it already. Then it needs to be moved to FrameMaker, the cover needs to be designed, and then it will go out. That might or might not happen by the end of the year.

Then Rumored to Exist - there will be an annotated version. I have been working on the annotations for a long time, and they are almost done. It needs an introduction, which I am writing, then it gets into Frame and gets a design and a cover. That might happen first. Both books will be fairly cheap and only available from one online store at the publisher, not from Amazon et al. They will not have a UPC or ISBN or be in Books in Print, but they will be a bit cheaper. And they will be cool! So I am excited about that.

I think I am almost over this cold that has been killing me since I have been back. I do not have a runny nose, but I have a horrific yet productive cough. So maybe that means another day or two and it will be done. I saw an ad on TV for some shit that is supposed to help you not get a cold. It looked like Alka-Seltzer, which would be bad because I am allergic to aspirin, plus that fizzing shit is NASTY. But the ad on TV said no details, and I don’t remember the name of it, either. It would be nice if there was some sort of inhalant that you could take, like maybe before of after you got on the germway (i.e. subway) and it would somehow protect your lung lining so it didn’t immediately absorb all of the vile shit you breathe down there from a 45-minute subway ride. Or maybe I could bring a scuba tank.

That’s all.

I’m back. I had a pretty good trip to Vegas, and the photos and a quick bulleted list are here. [Now dead, sorry] It was cool to see my sister and brother-in-law, and it’s always fun to go to Vegas with people who haven’t been there before; it makes everything seem new to me. Probably the highlight of the trip was seeing Blue Man Group again, this time in the 5th row of the center section. The lowlight was getting delayed on my way out because of the California fires. And also the last day was depressing, being by myself and being almost out of cash as I walked around without much to do. The weather was beautiful the whole time I was there, but I didn’t feel like doing much other than going to the movies and going to Denny’s. But now that I’m home, I wish I was back there again.

I’m still sick - it never really went away, and just got worse in different ways. I stayed home today and slept all day, which seemed to help a bit. Now I hope that two more days of extreme sleep and much more juice will make it clear up. I have a lot of stuff around the house to get done, and I am editing the glossary on paper, which makes for a good in-bed project.

I didn’t do anything special for Halloween. I was going to watch Psycho, and I started watching Motel Hell, but I don’t have the attention span tonight to stick with a whole movie. Instead, I flipped channels and ended up on a Friday the 13th sequel, the one in Manhattan (8? 9?). It was funny only in that it belongs to that sub-genre of cinema best described as “I hate NY.” There were all of these films in the late 70s/early 80s that formed my early impressions of the big apple, the kinds of things like showed the city as a total disaster, with people getting killed on subways, and every other building on fire. Now that I live in the post-Giuliani version of the city, it’s very amusing to watch these films. It’s almost like watching campy 60s movies about the futuristing 1995, with floating cities and rocket jet-packs and stainless steel robots. I need to hunt down a copy of Escape from New York and see if it measures up.

Not much else is up. CSI is on now, so I’m getting pulled in…

It’s really winter out now. Okay, 41 degrees, rainy, cloudy - it’s more like a Seattle winter. But it’s finally the weather where my leather jacket seems justifiable, and where it feels good to get out of the cold and huddle up in my apartment. The heat is on, which is no small miracle, given that my landlord tries to fuck us out of heat and hot water whenever possible. I remember exactly a year ago, when I had neither, and I was using an electric heating pad in bed and warming pans of water on the stove for a lukewarm spongebath. The downside to the steam heat is that I have my annual no-humidity headcold, which sucks and is slowly progressing, thanks to a regimen of about a gallon of juice a day plus as much extra sleep as I can possibly muster.

I’m leaving for Las Vegas on Friday, for a short trip until next Wednesday. This time, I will be going with my sister Monica and my brother-in-law Derek. It’s always fun to go with someone who has never been there, so we should have plenty to do. The only small issue is that my sister is currently about four and a half months pregnant. So this won’t be a trip filled with trays of stinger shots and trips to the all-nude strip clubs after several rounds of rollercoasters. I’m thinking we might hit a show or two, and take a leisurely walk around the neighboring casinos, but not much more. We’ll also have to go to the Star Trek thing, and they are getting there a day early and driving to Hoover Dam. The nice thing is that the current temperature out there is a high of 91, so I will get to break out those shorts one more time.

Nothing else has been going on. Going to bed early puts a cramp on everything. I’m reading Green Mars, and I’m past the point where I quit reading five years ago. Now it’s all new territory for me. I guess it will go with me on the trip, and I will also probably bring a printout of the glossary to mark up.

OK, time to hit the grapefruit juice again.