I’m having a total Summer Rain flashback right now. It’s hot and muggy outside, about twenty degrees warmer inside my apartment, and I’ve got a box fan running on overdrive. I’m listening to Chick Corea and eating a bacon double cheeseburger meal from Burger King. It makes me think I’ve got a radio show shift coming up at WQAX and it’s going to start pouring rain two minutes before I have to leave. Although I don’t enjoy the weather, I do enjoy the temporary glimpse back 13 years. For whatever reason though, I don’t look back at it as fondly as I did before. I mean, nothing’s wrong with it, but I’m just getting bored of looking back and being nostalgic. It’s something I do too much, and I’d rather look forward. And that means I’m sick of writing these books about the past and about my life, because they always seem mediocre to me, and there are too many problems involved. I try to write something that’s a metaphor for youth and age and whatever the fuck, and the only comments I get back are “D00D MY CAR HAD 15 INCH RIMS, WTF?” and it makes me wonder why I don’t just take up golf and fucking give it up.

That’s why I haven’t been writing here. I don’t know what you expect out of me, but this isn’t a blog. And I wish it wasn’t a “here’s the latest news on Jon’s personal life.” When I first envisioned this, I thought it would be just a bunch of writing exercises; a chance for me to sit down for twenty minutes during my lunch break and hash out some writing. But then it became a personal journal, but not really - I don’t like to write about all of the intimate details of my life online, unlike many LiveJournalers out there. For example, I never, ever write about my dating life here. That’s pure suicide right there. And I never talk about my job. I also don’t post the kind of pure brain diarrhea that most blogs do, like a bunch of links to other content, or political links, or whatever else. A blog is a (we)b log, or basically just a list of favorite bookmarks you see during your daily surf. It isn’t content, it isn’t creative, and it isn’t art. Okay, there are some good blogs that consolidate content and showcase news stories or whatever, and I read them, but I’m not a new-age journalist. I’m a writer.

I also recently discovered that I’m really sick of writing travel journal stories. The Hawaii one just about broke my back, and I think about three people read it. Writing about my own life has become akin to eating my own shit. It’s something I really hate doing now. And it sucks because I have almost an entire book done, a bunch of short stories about Bloomington, and I don’t even want to share them with anyone because I already know what the reactions will be, and looking at them makes me retch as much as if you somehow turned up a Dungeons and Dragons-themed paper I wrote in the 7th grade and then forced me to read it to a stadium of people holding cartons of rotten eggs.

I think that Rumored to Exist was/is the one book that I am truly proud of, although I see that as my first real book, and the next one needs to be more of the same, but exponentially better. And I’m working in that direction. But it makes me wonder what I should be doing with this journal. I see the marketing potential of having a little thing where I can tell people what new book is coming out, or where I am reading, or what friends of mine have released new stuff worth reading. But I feel like there’s a lot of bad energy in having all of these archives of old shit, with people coming here thinking I’m going to write some giant diatribe about my girlfriend or whatever the fuck people think blogs are supposed to have on them. And I worry that people see this thing and think it’s my life’s work, much like how every hipster doofus starts up a blogger page and then that’s their big project, and that’s going to get them a hundred grand publishing deal. This isn’t my life’s work. For every word I write here, I probably write a hundred in my real books.

In the last month, I’ve thought about entirely removing this thing from the web, and leaving a big 404 sunken crater to greet all of you. I’ve thought about making this page a symlink to a livejournal with only the occasional update. I’ve thought about scaling everything back, mothballing the archives, and coming up with something stripped down to put in its place. I still don’t know what the solution is.

I do know that I need to clean all of the Burger King wrappers and bags off the desk, start up another fan or two, and start work on the layout for Air in the Paragraph Line, which will be coming out soon…

Yes, I’m alive. Well, mostly. I got back from Hawaii a week ago, but I flew back with a very tiny cold - minor enough that I barely even thought about it as I got on the plane. But I thought about it a lot as we descended and my head just about exploded like that dude on Scanners. I now have two horrible ear infections. Actually, the one in the left ear has been about 10% infected, and usually doesn’t bother me at all. But the right ear has been 95% infected, and feels like when your ear is full of water when you swim, but permanently.

I tried all the basics: yawn, shower, gum, sutafed, nasal spray, heating pad on throat: no dice. Sometimes I could get the stuff to slosh around a bit, but I was looking for a huge POP, a clearing of everything, like when your ears are clogged from swimming, and an hour later, BAM, you’ve got a clear ear and a bunch of shit on the shoulder of your t-shirt. Finally, I dipped into the stash of prescribed but never taken drugs, and started a regimen of Flagyl, thanks to my dentist and root canal. It didn’t do much, so I finally had to call in the last resort: the doctor.

I hate doctors. Doctors never solve anything, unless you show up at their office dead, and then they say “yeah, he’s dead” and sign the death certificate. Otherwise, a doctor usually can’t tell you anything you didn’t already know from google. And believe me, I read every damn entry about the inner ear last week. I could pretty much do surgery on someone’s inner ear if my hands weren’t so shaky from drinking Coke all the time. Anyway, doctors can only do one thing, other than cut people up legally, and that’s prescribe drugs. You’d think keeping the mighty power of dispensing medicines locked away in the hands of the few would be great, but it introduces the problem that drug companies turn these people into drug fiends. I don’t mean they will be shooting heroin into their eye (although the might.) What I mean is when I come in for a hangnail, the doctor’s going to suddenly say “hey, your cholesterol is a point high, and instead of telling you to get off your ass and run around the block a few times, I’m going to put you on Lipitor.” Why would he do that? Is it because he cares about my well-being? No. Is it because someone from Pfizer will take him on vacation in Aruba? Probably. Is it because he’s an enabler for a drug industry that will now collect a few hundred bucks a month from me for the rest of my life and possibly subject me to horrific side effects just in order for me to get at the bottom of their pyramid scheme? Dingdingdingding, we have a winner.

It was bad enough when I was in my twenties, and every therapist and shrink I talked to wanted me to take about 12 different mood enhancers, probably so Eli Lilly could take them on golf vacations. I didn’t need to be heavily medicated as much as I wanted the answers to some common questions about how my brain worked and how I reacted to others and how I perceived the world around me, and how I could change that. It was basic “teach a man to fish” stuff, and everyone wanted me to get addicted to fish pills for the rest of my life. And now that I’m about at my mid-30s and not in great shape, admittedly, every time I see a doctor, they want to lock me into a long-term contract for cholesterol-lowerers and blood-pressure lowerers, and sugar-lowerers, and everything else, and IT PISSES ME OFF.

I have an endocrinologist, who I might not have anymore as I stopped going to him, who pulls this drug freak shit on me every time I go there. I have a potential thyroid problem, or maybe I don’t. It seems enlarged, but it tests OK. They run another test to see if it’s some rare exotic autoimmune problem, and it tests OK, but they say the test doesn’t work 50% of the time. I, of course, use some Lewis Black logic that if I didn’t go to my job 50% of the time, I wouldn’t have one. But anyway. He says, well, take the thyroid medicine anyway. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, you’re just making your piss that much more expensive. I can almost live with this logic, but then he wants me to come see him constantly, and take blood tests constantly, and miss work constantly, and the most he can come up with is trying to get me on another prescription.

ALL OF THIS IS INSANE. I AM NOT 94. I DO NOT WANT TO HAVE 17 PRESCRIPTIONS THAT COST 25 DOLLARS A MONTH, EACH. That’s a fucking car payment. Not to mention that it’s a full-time job to get the fucking yo-yo down at Rite-Aid to actually fill the shit correctly, because they completely fuck up one in four prescriptions. You know what? I bought a fucking bike. It cost $300. My blood pressure as of Friday was 120/80. FUCK THESE DOCTORS. FUCK THEM ALL IN THE HEAD.

But I had to go to the doctor anyway. I went Friday and he gave me eardrops and a Z-pack antibiotic to nuke the thing from orbit. ($50. And that’s with insurance. Whoever raised our copay to $25 should be taken outside and hung from a streetsign by his dick.) I feel a little better, on day 3 of the new stuff, but still can’t hear.

So there’s that. I haven’t finished the Hawaii trip, although I’m sick of writing these things and I’m not even sure if people read them or if the hits are all spam-bots using my pages to up the hit counts on their stupid “discount Hawaii we don’t sell anything, we’re just a referral passthrough trying to up our pagerank” type of shit. I will eventually get to it. The photos are there, though.

It’s very nice outside, but humid. It looks like it could break into a rain at a moment’s notice. I want to go ride my bike, but the lack of hearing and lack of balance make it difficult. And walking is too boring.

OK, last week was pretty much a wash. First, a week ago Sunday, I was running up the subway and fell, and put out my left hand to stop myself, and smashed two of my fingers down in a way they aren’t supposed to go. Imagine doing the Spock thing with your fingers, then sticking them out of a car window at a hundred miles an hour and running the “V” into a metal signpost. That was cute. Luckily, I don’t think anything’s broke. It just took a few days to be able to type properly.

Then last Tuesday, I went to the Quizno’s at St. Mark’s for a sandwich, and in reality picked up a two-day vacation spent in my bathroom, also known as FOOD POISONING. I was at the point where I couldn’t even hold down water anymore, and I had a high fever and was hallucinating about making a film of my web searches and then scanning the screen captures and running them through OCR… or something, I don’t remember. The only real advantages to this was that on Wednesday, Sarah (the new girlfriend) came over and took care of me, which was more than nice, and also I managed to read that Motley Crue tell-all book in its entirety, since I had a lot of reading time, so to speak. Anyway, it took about a full week to get over that horror, and I lost about seven pounds, so here I am, ordering a reuben from the local greasy spoon, so I can gain it back.

I have not been able to ride the new bike once, between the stomach stuff and smashed hand and the fact that winter is upon us again. At least I will be leaving for Hawaii on Friday, so I will get a sudden 30 degree temperature boost for a week. And no, I have not begun doing a god damned thing to get ready yet, other than starting to move some reading material onto the laptop. I have two books and everything in my head and all of the maps and other junk you get from the hotel and the rent-a-car place and the airline package deal, so I will be able to keep myself busy for a week.

OK, food’s here.

I’ve been busy lately, with a thing or two I can mention and maybe a couple that are secret for now, but nonetheless, busy. The one thing I can mention is the zine, which is still going strong. I had a near-aneurysm trying to think of a new name for the thing, and now I’ve just decided to go the ‘fuck it’ route and keep the original name of Air in the Paragraph Line. It’s neutral, it sounds weird, and it doesn’t involve me thinking of a new name. I have a bunch of writers on board, a couple of extra spots, and I hope to have enough stuff so I can print out a huge stack of shit and bring it on the plane with me when I leave for Hawaii at the end of the month.

Here’s one I keep forgetting to write about. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to join the new Napster. Sounds stupid, you think. Well, I found it an interesting offering for a few reasons, and I thought I’d mention the pros and cons and why I think it’s a great product. And I’d first like to start by saying I don’t own stock in them or get paid per new signup or anything like that. So here goes.

Napster has a new service, and instead of being the old peer-to-peer setup where you steal music from the world around, this one is basically like an iTunes sort of online store, but with a twist. You can pay 99 cents a track like iTunes, but they also have a subscription service where you sign up for $9.99 a month and you get all-you-can eat downloads from their catalog. The way this works is they use Windows Media’s licensing scheme so you get all of these files, and they work as long as you’re a paying subscriber. When you stop paying, they don’t work. So you can’t sign up for like a weekend and then fill your hard drive and quit. Napster to Go is an upgrade from this, where at $15 a month, you can take the tunes with you on your Windows Media-enabled portable player.

Of course, most people’s immediate reaction is “WHAT A FUCKING RIPOFF! YOU DON’T GET TO KEEP ANYTHING! THEY STEAL YOUR MUSIC! WHAT A JOKE!” and so on. But here’s the deal, I know that. I’m not using Napster to buy my music. What I am doing is using it to find music that I like. It’s like I have the ultimate in-store kiosk, except I don’t have to go to the store. I can download an album, give it a few spins, and if I really like it, I’ll drop the $15 on Amazon for a copy. People can’t wrap their heads around the idea that you aren’t paying $9.99 a month for a shopping spree in which you have to download as much shit as possible; you’re really paying $9.99 a month to rent music. It’s like paying for cable TV or satellite radio. You don’t get to “keep” anything from HBO if you pay for cable; you essentially rent the shows and watch them. (Maybe you tape them, but that’s a grey area.)

The Napster interface has a lot of clicky-clicking to do as far as finding bands related to other bands. They license some of allmusic’s information, so you get related items and whatnot. A neat feature that they have is that you can build a radio station based on the items in your library. It will look at the stuff you have downloaded, and then dump a playlist of similar stuff, so you can stream each song, or click on the album cover and go find out about the band if you are interested and want to download other stuff. This is pretty much why I was interested in doing this. I want an interactive way to cruise through allmusic, finding similar artists to the stuff I already like, listening to albums and deciding if they are worth the money or not. Amazon has had a recommendation feature for a while, and I’ve found a good number of books that way. They also have music, but just dorky 30-second clips, and it’s not driven in the same way as this guy.

Other features that I like include a good playlist system for dropping tracks into a list. I know, everything has playlists, but it’s more of a concern when you’re downloading a fuckload of stuff like me. You can use your account on up to four other machines, and there is a certain amount of persistence between logins. Let’s say I’m at home and I find a bunch of neato albums and download them. When I get to work the next day and fire up my napster client, I can then view the “out of sync” track list and download them onto my work computer. Playlists also persist across accounts. Another nice feature is that you can burn a CD of items in your library, Napster or your own MP3. It has some sort of built-in CDR software, so you don’t have to fuck with Nero or whatever. Just add your tracks to a playlist or drop them to a little burn staging area, and it figures out the minutes left and all of that. There are also a lot of browse-oriented features, like people put together their own radio stations (you can too), there are genre-specific pages of what’s new and music news-type stuff, and they have given it a good stab as far as creating community stuff (although most message boards are full of 14-year-olds screaming “THIS SUCKS! I WANT TO FUCKING STEAL MUSIC, NOT PAY FOR IT!”

There are caveats. The iPod flat-out won’t work with Napster to Go, since it doesn’t support WMA’s licensing features. You can “keep” songs, but you have to pay 99 cents each. You also can’t burn a Napster song unless you downloaded it for a buck. Not all songs download and cache; depending on the licensing and label, some will only stream, so you have to be online to play them. I’m not sure of the algorithm of when you have to be online or not to keep your license current; I have messed around for a day or so with my Tablet offline and it worked fine. We’ll see if it works when I go to Hawaii for a week.

Anyway, that’s been my new toy as of late. I’m finding old albums I’ve long since forgotten, and it has given me at least a few suggestions that actually turned out great. Another related project is that I’m throwing my CD collection into a MySQL/PHP site that I whipped up, with hopes of adding links on individual CDs or bands to reviews or little stories or whatever other crap I have. I have a few CD reviews laying around the site, but I’d like to have one central repository for them. So that’s the goal, but I have fucked up the edit page in my little project and can’t seem to get it to smash the contents of an array into the database and have it stick. I’ll deal with that after about 12 hours of sleep, I hope.

Remember when you were a kid, and Honeycomb cereal used to have those contests where you could win a free BMX bike? For a while, they had those tiny little metal license plates that said “HANG 10” or whatever stupid slogan would be on there, and they were each a miniature replica of a state license plate, and then you would rig them up on your seat bottom or handlebars with a bunch of twist-ties. They probably eventually discontinued them because a kid split open someone’s face with one, or because actual metal cost too much or something. Anyway, the old contest was to get a special license plate, and you’d win the bike. Later, it was just some sort of puzzle book where you scratched off some silver lotto ticket paint off a page that said “sorry, try again!” or “25 cents of Honeycomb economy size”. Well, once after a trip to Kroger, I tore apart the cereal box and went through the book and scratched off the matte grey boxes, and I WON! I won the BMX bike!

My mom checked and double checked the rules a million times, figuring there would be a catch or that I won a chance to enter in a raffle or something. But no, it was legit. She sent the thing off, and I waited what seems like years for the package to show up.

One rainy Saturday, it did. UPS dropped off a box from the Huffy corporation, and inside was my brand new bike. It’s probably worth explaining that at the time, I was riding a total POS Huffy with a banana seat that was not cool at all, very far from BMX. And this was when BMX was bigger than Jesus. This bike had a red frame and all of the chrome parts were a bronze/gold plated finish - the rims, the handlebars, the crank, and the chainguard. It had the handlebars with the extra bar across the top that was dipped in the center, the four-bolt neck, coaster brakes but also a secondary lever brake on the rear wheels. The tires were red knobby BMX tires, and it had the pads on the bars. It was AWESOME. I put that thing together in record time, and brought it outside for my trial run.

I remember that day so clearly. It had rained like a mofo all night long and all morning, and it was just starting to let up, but there was still a haze. And there were earthworms EVERYWHERE. Sometimes after a good rain, they get flooded out and are all over the street. I got out just as the sky was starting to clear, and took off through the subdivision. Everything about this bike felt 100% better than my old clunker. It all looked cool, every part spun perfectly against every other, and most of all, I WON THIS BIKE! It was awesome.

I think I rode that bike well into my Freshman year, when I finally got a real ten-speed, and probably long after (or before) it was cool to ride a 20” BMX bike with no speeds. Come to think of it, it was probably never cool to ride any kind of bike to our school, but the bus sucked, I always worked late at the school theater, and it’s not like mommy and daddy bought me a 5.0 GT Mustang when I turned 16.

So the reason I’m excited NOW, is that I just bought a new bike. I know I already have two frames and a bunch of pieces in my kitchen and neither run. And I’m not sure how long it will take before either will run, so I decided to make a small (~$300) investment in a complete turnkey bike that actually rode well. The lucky purchase was the 2005 Dahon Boardwalk D7. It’s a folding bike, which is pretty cool; with the pop of a couple of latches, the handlebars fold down, the frame folds in half, and then you lower the seat and fold up the pedals and you have about 25 pounds of fairly compact metal to throw in the trunk or schlep onto the subway.

The bike’s based on 20-inch tires and a very low-slung frame, with highly extended seat and handlebar posts. It’s got 7 speeds in the back and none on the front, so it’s not like one of these new 78-speed mountain bike mofos, but the smaller survey of gears, switched with a twist-grip on the right side, works pretty well for the city. All of the components are full-size for the most part, very well thought-out and they are made for a big guy to ride around, not as a toy or for kids. It came with a rear rack, a set of fenders, and a fairly comfy standard seat.

I bought the thing at lunch, and rode back to the office from Bicycle Habitat, maybe a few blocks at most. Later, I took it out for a quick spin around the office, and I hauled it home on the subway to the first stop in Queens, then rode the rest of the way back. It was dark and I had no lights and a black jacket, plus I didn’t want to get stranded if something broke right out of the gate. (That happened on the first MTB I bought here in New York, the Mongoose. I rode way the hell out in Queens my first time out, and the fucking derailleur SNAPPED. I ended up walking the fucking bike home five miles.)

Anyway, the little thing is FUN to ride. The balancing is a bit different, but it’s not like pumping around on a little BMX. It’s very compact, easy to weave through traffic and up and around stuff in the city. I thought there would be some warble or flex in the frame, but it’s solid, almost as tight as my old Giant road bike. Everything works well; the brakes are tight, the shifting is good, and the headset is very smooth. It’s not as smooth on the New York excuses for streets as a good rockhopper with full suspension would be, but it’s decent. And I couldn’t see riding 100K in one of these things, but I could see commuting every day with no problems.

The folding isn’t hard to do, although it took a few practices. The worst part is that everything I have for the old bike doesn’t fit. I have water bottle cages with allen screws that go into the frame, but I really need some kind of handlebar-mounted clip thing to hold my bottle. I have a nice computer that even has a heartrate monitor, but the cable on the sensor is too short, and I’m sure that’s a huge witch hunt and a $30 purchase. I can’t find the frame mount for my Kryptonite lock. (NO it is not the one you can pick with a pen, you motherfucking blog readers.) But I think maybe I shouldn’t add anything to the bike, and just tough it out. I mean, I could spend the cost of the bike getting the approved Dahon-Apple iPod mount with the Bose wraparound handlebar speakers, or I could just ride around with no music and either hum a tune or think about something else. I could spend a few hundred on the official Dahon panniers, or I could just bring less stuff, or bungee down a gym bag. I think I need to do the less is more approach.

Of course, I picked the wrong day to buy a bike - we’re supposed to get about twenty feet of rain over the next two days. Maybe I should go down to the bike store and buy one of those euro full rain getups and slog through it anyway. Well, except for the pneumonia and the possibility of a wreck on a brand new bike, that’s a grand idea.

So I’m seriously thinking of saying “suck it” to the MTA and riding in every day. I don’t think the bike will go with me to Hawaii, but I’d sure as hell like to ride every day from now until then, and then rent one local and have the energy to get up those damn hills. I am so out of shape now, it’s not even funny. But I sure feel great having a motivation to get some regular exercise…