Still hobbling around with a bad back, but I think it’s making progress. I must have really tore up some muscle. Heating pads and Ben Gay have helped a lot, though. My sister told me about some Amish cream called Unker’s that is supposed to work wonders, if you can find a place to buy it. The web site (unkerssalve.com) is pretty hilarious, because it looks like it was designed in 1996, and is full of Jesus quotes and whatnot. The sidebar says “Listed on FDA Over the Counter Drug Registry. / Listed as OTC Drug Manufacturer by the FDA. / Stays Active for Years / To God be the Glory / No Turpentine Used.” Well, I’m glad they got out the turpentine. Her friend’s mom buys it by the case, because she blew out her knees praying. That’s a pretty good testimonial for atheism, especially to someone that spent about two months of 2006 in bed with a blown out knee.

I’m reading The Good German by Joseph Kanon, and I’ve got to say it’s a pretty damn decent book sofar. Yes, it’s a George Clooney vehicle on the silver screen, but the book is a lot more than that. It’s set in Berlin, the summer of 1945, when the occupation forces are trying to get things cleaned up and un-Nazified. The Russians and Americans are vying for their pieces in what will be a strongly divided pie in the future. The city is absolutely fucked - buildings smashed, no utilities, no coal for the upcoming winter, everyone shifting around the city, looting, cutting down trees in parks and city streets covertly at night for fireplace fuel. Cigarettes have become the new unoffical currency as a black market flourishes around silk, B-rations, smokes, booze, prostitutes, and oil. The Russians were stupidly given a set of plates for the occupation money, and they’ve printed it nonstop, flooding the currency market. And every German that wants a job (street sweeper, guard, pallbearer, whatever) has to be checked out to make sure they weren’t a Nazi, which makes the market for fake reference letters and paperwork lucrative. (i.e. a letter saying “I knew Mr. Falli when we were in Treblinka together, and he’s totally not a Nazi. Signed Rabbi I.M. Fictional”)

Anuway, all of this is a good setting for an excellent page-turner about a reporter finding out a crime that’s hard to unravel. The other reason I like the book so much is that I was just in Berlin, so all of the geographical references are very familar to me: the Ku’Damm, Zoo Station, Brandenburg Tor, and so on. But in the 1945 version, instead of glass malls and new shopping centers, it’s abject destruction, with still-smoldering ruins of houses sliced in half by allied bombs, and the Reichstag half destroyed and covered by Russian graffiti from the troops that overtook the city. Hitler’s bunker is still there (it’s now a parking lot) and the Russians won’t let anyone in, but every Pentagon brass hothead wants a picture there to send back to the kids. It’s interesting to intersect the two Berlins in my head and absorb that story.

A similar thing happens to me when reading fiction set in New York. I bought American Psycho I think when I was in Seattle (maybe Indiana) and I couldn’t get three pages into it. After I moved here and got the general gist of the city in my head, I read the book and loved it. Same goes for Catcher in the Rye; I read it when I was in high school and just thought it was about a snotty kid. But when I was able to overlay my knowledge of where the streets and subways were, it made it come alive in a totally different way.

I got Guitar Hero 2, and I’ve wasted some time in the last two nights with that. It has a new feature where if you play at a certain level through a group of songs, you’re asked to do an encore, and it picks a new song that isn’t on the list, and is generally cooler. The first three encores were Spinal Tap - Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You, Kansas - Carry on My Wayward Son; and Black Sabbath - War Pigs. So that’s fun.

Time to get ready for work. I wish I had a little more time in the morning, so I could get working on this journal book, but I’d rather sleep. At least this is a short week - TGIT.

I seem to have rung in the new year by somehow wringing out my back. Something in my lower back is fucked, in an entirely different way than usual. I think it’s just tight muscles, and not some greater damage, but it always drives me nuts when this happens. Typically, in three days, it’s all over, but I spend the whole three days wondering if it’s something horribly worse and I need to see a doctor or a chiropractor. It would be helpful if I owned an MRI, or I had some kind of table or contraption that I could strap into that would mechanically snap my spine into correct position.

A lot is going on with the zine. The first thing is that issue #11 now has an ISBN: 978-1-4303-0628-3. It will be available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders in a matter of weeks. The price at everywhere but lulu’s store is now $14.95; it’s still $10.95 at lulu. So if you’re morbidly afraid of their store, or hate their shipping options, or are very locked into Amazon’s wishlists and address book and all of that, you can now buy it. You pay $4 more on Amazon, and I make 50 cents less, plus I had to shell out a hundred bucks for the setup, but so many people think something isn’t real unless it’s on Amazon, that I felt I had to do it. So there.

The zine now has its own myspace page: myspace.com/aitpl. Feel free to add it to your friends and get… well, whatever you get out of MySpace. I haven’t really figured it out. It’s interesting because when I created the profile, I said the zine was female and slim/slender, and got a deluge of friend requests from dudes who are functionally illiterate but search solely on those two criteria. I changed it to male and then got a bunch of friend requests from strippers and whorey types that are probably just dudes. Some sociology grad student looking for ideas on research should probably get on this.

I’m also creating a soundtrack for the zine. It should be interesting, since three people have responded, and their songs are punk, country, and A3 (which is both and neither, I think.) More on that when I get more songs.

I also have the themes for the next two zines picked, and I’ve mentioned them to everyone who contributed to #11. I’ll talk about that more later - I’m more concerned with pushing this issue before I get rolling on the next one. If you’re really itching to write something for the next issue, email and I’ll tell you more.

I finished reading all of my journal entries from 2000 and 2002-2006. (I did not write during 2001, and I will probably write an essay explaining why.) I don’t know the exact division, but a bunch of entries talk about weather and my bitching about it; a bunch talk about how I’m sick; and a bunch talk about how I can’t write. I don’t know if those are interesting to anyone else, although sometimes the weather entries get pretty insane and hilarious when I’m dealing with the New York summers with no AC. What doesn’t fall into any of those categories gets into my longer essays, which I really do like. And a lot of those are reactions to some kind of media: book, movie, music, or whatever. Some are strictly reviews, but some are more interesting stories relating to some part of my past versus said media. I’m not sure why I’m explaining all of this, since there are a couple of links to the left that will show you everything, but the summary of all of it is interesting to me. Taking ten years of your life, cutting it in half, and looking at the layers like the rings in a tree trunk is always an interesting exercise.

Speaking of bitching about health, I’m going to take an hour-long shower to see if the hot water shakes out this spinal kink.

It’s a New Year. It’s hard to believe it’s 2007, after spending forever in the 80s and 90s. It’s even weirder to think I retire in 2041, which sounds like a hugely futuristic year where we all have jetpacks and clones and bionic arms, although we will just have computers 50 times as fast and a version of Windows that runs 50 times slower, so it’s basically the same shit.

It was impossible to get out of bed and come in here to sit under the blue light for a while. There’s Seattle weather outside, 54 and everything covered in rain. We went to dinner last night, then came home and watched Dr. Strangelove for some reason. We watched about 8 minutes of the various Times Square crap to see the ball drop, and then went to bed. I’m getting old - I remember when midnight meant the start of the party, and now I’m pretty much dead by then. The neighborhood was pretty sedate, aside from some stupid fuck with what sounded like a bird call that wouldn’t shut up. There are many moments when I wish I had a sniper rifle and diplomatic immunity. Instead I had sleeping pills, so it all worked out well.

I think to continue my current cleaning binge, I will be removing names from the right of journals I read, and removing friends from my LiveJournal, in order to pare down the amount of stuff I read. I found that after my return, there’s a lot of stuff I simply don’t want to read anymore, because life’s too short. There’s also the issue that I seldom click on the links to the right; I just go to my friends list on LJ and read all of the posts. Unfortunately, it is impossible to remove someone from your LJ friends list without causing high drama, like I didn’t pick you for my 4th grade kickball team or something. Seriously, just because I met you at a party 10 years ago, I am not obligated to read your reposted memes and drama for the rest of my life.

My old pal Derik Rinehart has a band called Speechless that just came out with a CD. You can preorder it now, although I think it comes out in February. They also posted four songs on MySpace in that little media player that’s typically annoying, but works well in this case. It’s hard to describe the band, maybe prog-rock except with more of a metal edge and some slight jam band aspects, but not in a crappy way. Anyway, go to their myspace page to check it out.

Another CD I just ordered is the new Stuck Mojo album, available at their site. I never got into Stuck Mojo when they first came out, as I dismissed the idea of a metal/rap fusion as stupid. Since then, I’ve enjoyed Rich Ward’s work in Fozzy, Sick Speed, Cafu, and his solo album, so when Stuck Mojo came back around, I found it a lot more interesting. They are releasing their own CD now, trying to avoid the problems with record companies, which have repeatedly ripped them off. So you can get the tracks for free on MySpace, YouTube, and the web site, but you can also send them the ten bucks if you find it worthwhile. The new disc, called Southern Born Killers has a couple of weird, anti-terrorist songs that have been generating a buzz because of the politics, which I guess is a good way to sell some albums. Either way, it’s interesting.

I also got a gift card for iTunes that I’ve entered into the system, and I’m now looking for worthwhile songs to add to my collection. It’s weird, because I will suddenly think, “I don’t have a copy of Ziggy Stardust anywhere”, and three clicks later, I do. I guess a lot of people deride the iTunes model because you don’t really “own” your music, as in you don’t have a piece of plastic and aluminum you can drag from computer to computer for the rest of your life. But face it, you don’t really own anything in this life. I have a deed to 40 acres of property, which you’d think is the ultimate in ownership, but every time I think about building or drilling holes in the ground, I realize I don’t really “own” the property - I just have the ability to permanently use it as the county sees fit, provided I pay taxes every year. I’m at the point in my life where I really don’t give a shit if I really own that copy of Eye of the Tiger as much as I care about listening to it when I feel like it.

Speaking of Ziggy Stardust, we re-watched The Life Aquatic the other night, and it’s still really hilarious as a repeat viewing. It’s very much a Bill Murray vehicle, but it’s got that Wes Anderson absurdity to the max, and everyone else in the cast gives an excellent performance.

Okay, I’m very curious to see if this new entry for 2007 will completely topple my new indexing changes. I also need to get back to reading through 700+ journal entries to separate the wheat from the chaff. Christ, I bitch about the weather a lot - that’s like half the entries.