I had a business trip to Anaheim a few weeks ago and felt some need to document it, since it’s the first time I’ve left the house since Christmas, and it was an unusual journey. But I don’t talk about work here, and 95% of the trip was work, despite its unique location. And I don’t want to sound ungrateful about the opportunity. And I am not a super-fan of the location, but I’m not an anti-fan either. So, there’s a conundrum here, which is why I did not enthusiastically belt out five thousand words of copy while my plane was still in the air on the way home. How do I approach this one?

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OK. I first went to Disney World when I was twelve, on a family voyage where we loaded up the station wagon and drove from Indiana to Tampa for a week at Busch Gardens, then on to Orlando for a week at Walt’s thing and the then-new Epcot center. The plan was to escape the Midwestern cold for Florida sun and heat, but they had a freak storm of the century where it actually snowed while we were down in Orlando. I think I’ve told this whole story before, but anyway, that was my childhood experience with Disney and my first experience with Florida.

Smash-cut to 1997 I went to Disneyland in Anaheim with my then-girlfriend. She was a Disney person and wanted to do the whole deal, so we stayed at a hotel across the street from the park and I spent most of the time shooting with a Hi8 video camera and comparing the much smaller park with the distant memories of the bigger and newer Florida version. Oddly enough, I wrote about this trip in one of the first entries in this blog. Even though it was 15 years after my childhood journey to Orlando, I felt like this 1997 trip was in the same general era, because both of them were in the analog era, and before explosion in size of both parks with all the Pixar, MGM, Star Wars, adventure land, animal kingdom, and whatever else is going on now.

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Semi-related: when I was at a trade show in San Diego in 2000, I drove up to Anaheim for some stupid reason. Actually, I ended up going to Santa Monica to have dinner with a fan and on the way up, I thought it would be interesting to zip up Harbor Blvd and see if my 1997 memories jived with my 2000 feels. I know that’s stupid, but whatever, this was before I could just look at Google Street View to depress myself. I stopped at a McDonald’s there and wrote some thoughts down in a notebook, mostly that it all looked so familiar and yet so run-down and beat, that strip of fast food and aged motels just outside the purview of the Disney corporation. This little run ended up being in another book, probably because it was one of those colliding-worlds thing. That 1997 visit was very wound up with my time in Seattle and my girlfriend in Seattle, and the 2000 visit was very much a New York world thing.

I doubt any of this makes much sense, but it somewhat tees up a 27-years-later visit from yet a different world, maybe.

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I did absolutely zero planning for this trip. I would fly down Monday afternoon and back out Thursday afternoon. I had to schedule the flight and the Uber to the airport, but everything else was arranged by the company as a package deal. They told me to download the Disney app, put in my work email, and I’d magically have everything set up. That was the case.

I flew into LAX, and normally have the usual I-miss-LA flashbacks to 2008. Maybe the 2021 trip down partly cured me of that, but I didn’t think about it at all. I brought a single duffel bag and my usual computer laptop, no camera gear and no personal laptop, just my work stuff. The trip down and back was quick, and nothing remarkable.

The whole deal was at the Grand Californian Hotel, which I think was a parking lot when I was there in 1997. It’s on the west side of the park, and the first thing I noticed was that this side was not near anything. I think I’d have to walk at least a mile to get to anything non-Disney, and that would be just other hotels or the convention center.

I spent almost all of my time at the Grand Californian. My room, the work event, and all the meals were there, so not much to report. Breakfast started at like 7:30am and meetings and dinners lasted until 9 or 10 (or later) each night. It was pretty much the same as if we were in a hotel in San Mateo or Denver or Indianapolis or anywhere else. The only weird thing was that we saw troves of people walking around the hallways wearing mouse ears and with strollers and fanny packs and all the other tourist talismans and gear, which was odd amongst the sales talk of ARR and MAU and everything else. There was such a strange collision between the two worlds, and I wonder what it was like for these people who flew in from the Midwest or whatever to go on vacation and see all these startup people with laptops wandering around their Disney experience.

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I had exactly four hours on Wednesday to experience Disney. We each got a pass for the park and a fifty-dollar gift card to use on refreshments or whatever. Someone asked me earlier that day what my top two rides would be. I said the Haunted Mansion and Space Mountain. Both were closed. I didn’t know what to do, and ended up in a rush to find rides I wanted to ride and figure out some game plan to get on them.

My first observation of the post-analog Disney is that everything is monetized to the point of absurdity. One used to get admitted to the park and then ride everything all day. Now there’s a whole maze of passes and bands and services and tiers and things in the app, where you have to buy Genie+ and find reservations and sign up for slots and get in different lanes and… I don’t even know what. I think you had to wait an hour, or smash a bunch of buttons and put in a strong enough credit card and take the pain. I paid about sixty bucks to get on four rides in four hours.

Having a phone in the park was an obvious plus. I don’t know how I would have been able to find and coordinate with others without it. Also, the app has a map, plus shows all of the wait times, which is half useful and half an incentive to shovel more money at them for the FastPass or EZPass or whatever. Another plus was that while I was standing in line forever, I could play Duolingo and pump Slayer straight into my brain to drown out everything and everyone.

Another thing the phone changed was that nobody had cameras at all. I think maybe I saw someone with a mirrorless here and there, but nobody carted around camcorders or big cameras. That was a fascination of mine, a peoplewatching fixation point, looking at what giant Sony kit people were lugging around to tape their four-year-old dropping ice cream on the ground. Those kids now have kids. I wonder what happened to those old tapes, just like how I wonder what happens to all the video that people shoot on their phone, upload to a cloud service that will go bankrupt in two years, and then forget all about it.

The park closed at 8:00 because of some valentine’s thing. I went back to my room to go straight to bed and prepare for a 04:00 product release the next day, then realized in the mad rush of trying to get on rides I’d totally forgotten to get dinner. I ordered a greasy pan pizza from room service and tried to watch TV. I think they purposely make TVs in Disney properties horrible so you will leave the room and spend more money. The pizza was not bad.

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I said I was not a Disney superfan, and that doesn’t mean I’m an anti-fan. I honestly don’t have any strong feeling either way. I don’t think it really burned in when I was a child, and I was already out of college and working when the first Pixar movie came out. I know people who are Disney superfans, and honestly, I’m slightly envious of those who can have that strong sense of joy wrapped up in a place they can go and see and visit. It’s the same way I feel about people who have a strong sense of camaraderie about sports, where a stadium is “home” and they can be with tens of thousands of people who dress alike and have the same shared experience. I’ve tried, and maybe it’s because sports was not in my childhood, but I’m not wired for it. I wish I was.

I’ve spent a lot of my midlife crisis pondering this, wondering if I just bought a boat or started collecting baseball cards or got a cabin in Montana or went to coin shows if I would find my people, if I would find joy in something I could easily purchase or fixate on. And that’s not the answer. It’s great if it works for you, but for me, I know I can’t get lost in it, and that’s what I need.

And that put me in this unfortunate position, surrounded by people who paid large amounts of money to be at their Happiest Place on Earth, and I’m not exactly there at gunpoint, but I am there to work. So, yeah.

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There was no time to go see LA. I didn’t even leave the grounds of the park. On Friday, I did an Irish goodbye, grabbed an Uber, and had an overly enthusiastic Korean driver who wanted to be my new best friend when I told him I used to work for Samsung. On the loop in to LAX, I did feel a very slight nostalgia/homesickness as we cruised through Hawthorne and El Segundo on the way in. Had a quick flight back, and then a quick Uber home in time for dinner.

I have a much bigger trip in a week. More on that later.

I am fifty-three today.

53 is a weird number. It’s a prime number, so I can’t play the usual games like “I’m exactly twice as old as when I ____”. It’s not a nice round number age-wise, but now I’m old enough and this blog is old enough that I’m twice as old as when I wrote this entry, which is a bit weird to think about. But other than that, there’s no numerical relevance to 53. My locker in junior high was 153. My combination was 2-31-16. (Why do I remember this?)

Grasping at straws, this birthday is 35 years since I turned 18, I guess. It’s 40 years since my parents divorced, which means it’s 40 years since I got my first computer, the Mattel Aquarius. But as I start writing this, I can’t think of any other big even-numbered anniversaries or dates or anything else. It’s another year.

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I’m loath to write about this, but I guess in the interest of full transparency, I should. That little cold I got when I came back from Wisconsin? Turns out it was COVID-19. I’ve spent the last three weeks out of commission dealing with that. And although it was not as bad as it could have been, it was as bad as most people say it is.

It’s stupid to have an illness that is so politically divisive. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it, and end up in an argument about how it did or did not exist. For the most part, everyone was nice about it, and the only unsolicited medical advice I got was that I needed to take it easy and rest. And that was correct, because I was horribly tired, and sleeping twelve hours a day was not enough.

The worst part about COVID was that I had to spend about two weeks on an air mattress in my home office, staying isolated so S wouldn’t catch it. (She didn’t.) And sleeping on the floor of an 8x10 room for weeks is a good way to put the zap on yourself, especially when you’re already depressed about your station in life and what you did over the last year, and are looking up at another big milestone.

So that whole thing was no bueno. And I am supposed to be in Las Vegas right now with the usual crew, but I had to cancel that. Physically, I’m 90% better. I’ve been testing negative for a few days now, and the symptoms are mostly gone. Mentally… what am I doing?

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When I wrote this post for my last birthday, I basically said I wanted year 52 to be better than year 51, that I wanted to write more, do more, be more. Was it? I don’t know. I traveled a lot. I did another master’s degree. I published two zines. But I didn’t write anywhere near as much as I wanted. I was recently looking at the draft of Atmospheres 2 and I put a bunch of notes in it on the morning of my birthday last year, a laundry list of things I wanted to do, a punch list of what I needed to finish. I did almost zero on that. And it wasn’t because some other big project got in the way. I “un-quit” writing, but I haven’t gotten back into practice yet.

Year 52 was spent spinning my wheels on a lot of stuff, thinking about what I need to do, what I need to start, what I need to finish. Need is a bit of a dirty word, though. When I say I need to write a big book and I don’t write a big book, it just makes me feel bad or guilty. I should want to write a big book, then either do it, or do the prerequisite work or exploration or research. Ultimately this is all noise, because the era of fame and fortune from a book is about to end. I shouldn’t want to write a book because I need to keep a roof over my head or become a household name. I should want to write a book because I want to write a book.

I was emailing with my friend Michael about this need to create the other day, and I remembered a story from my childhood. I was maybe ten years old, playing with Lego, like I did for months at a time. And I must have seen the M.C. Escher lithograph Relativity in an encyclopedia or something, the one with the orthagonal staircases going off in different directions and opposing gravity wells. And instead of assembling the stock fire station or moon base or whatever you do in the instructions that come with Lego kits, I started randomly building this structure with staircases going nowhere and little side pods of houses in the air and catwalks going across them and walls sticking up akimbo, leading to towers and ramparts and pieces of vehicles affixed to turrets or cupolas. It was this endless mess of structure going everywhere and nowhere, eventually taking over the entire kitchen table until I was required to remove it. But what I remember most was just the joy of growing the thing in every direction with no plan or idea or concept, spending hours just creating for the sake of creating, and it generated such a wild out-of-the-box product. I thought about this a lot when I wrote Rumored to Exist. And now, I feel like we have unlimited Legos and an unlimited kitchen table to build on, and it’s all a matter of snapping those first bricks onto a baseplate and going.

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So 52 was eh and 53 is no magical number. But I’m still here, and I’ve got a lot to do in the next year.

I released my first album yesterday. Yes, album. And it’s not spoken word or audio book or anything else. It’s a first attempt at creating music and releasing it into the world.

The album (more of an EP really) is titled Ø. It’s five songs of ambient drone music, and just a hair over 30 minutes long. It’s available only on Bandcamp here: https://jonkonrath.bandcamp.com/album/0

Why did I choose to make an album? I have played around with both Logic Pro and Ableton Live for a while now. I used Logic to record my old podcast, and I’ve mostly done utilitarian stuff like make backing tracks with drum sounds to practice bass and guitar. But I’ve also messed with synth and drones and wanted to pull that together into something cohesive.

Back in 2015 and 2016 when I was mostly playing bass, I started piecing together an ambient album. I listen to a lot of ambient music when I write, and I wanted my own soundtrack for my writing. I think I had maybe half the EP sitting on my hard drive for almost ten years, and it was time to get it done and out.

I will admit this album is very much a learning experience. It isn’t anything complicated or highly musical. It’s mostly simple drones with basic production, and I have no idea what I am doing, but I’m slowly figuring it out. The album was entirely written and recorded in Logic Pro, and uses no analog instruments or outboard gear. I think the only plugin I used that wasn’t included in Logic was the Valhalla Supermassive plugin, which if you are doing this kind of stuff, you really need. (And it’s free!) I used an Akai MPK mini controller when I started, then moved to an Arturia Keystep. But honestly, I do a lot of edits and even basic composition using the keyboard and mouse on the Mac.

Just for fun, I’ll run through each track and give you a couple of notes on each one:

1. Autumn Synthesis - This is silly and I don’t know how obvious this is, but the inspiration for the bright, lush drone intro for the album was actually the PlayStation 2 startup sound. This is the Alchemy synth and the Space Designer plugin at its finest. I also used the MIDI ChordTrigger plugin to build up the chords a bit.
2. Sublispheric Waves - Here’s a good example of what Supermassive does; the low-end Alchemy synth has a loooong delay through Supermassive which gives it the warped-out sound.
3. The Derision Bell - This has nothing to do with Pink Floyd; it’s just a snarky title. The low end of this was heavily influenced by the SleepResearch_Facility album Nostromo. The bell was subliminally influenced by the clocktower on the IU campus. The low end is the ES2 with some weird setup. The bell is a chopped up singing bowl sample in the sampler synth.
4. Enceladus Lost - Probably my favorite song to put together. Once again, heavily influenced by Nostromo. The synth is again Alchemy going through Space Designer. The low end is two different samples, both fed through Supermassive. The more discrete samples are from NASA mission transmissions. The lower lush drone is from Aerospace Audio’s AeroPads.
5. Inner Echoes - I know like every ambient musician messes with Tibetan singing bowls, but I think my direct influence was the David Ummmo track “Bowls” which is on Typewritten, Vol. 1, which was the soundtrack for the OmmWriter app, until it abruptly vanished from the face of the earth. The bowl is the Sampler synth, again. The low end is the Sculpture synth. The sample at the very end was something I recorded on my iPhone when walking at night in Mishawaka, Indiana in 2015. This is silly, but the decision to end the album with that sample was largely taken from the very end of the Queensrÿche album Empire.

So that’s my story. I don’t know how to sell music or “build a platform” as an artist or whatever else. My only next step is to keep playing and see what I can come up with.

Happy new year. I managed to catch a cold on the way back home, so I’m running at diminished capacity for the day. S has the same thing and she’s about a day ahead of me on the symptoms, which means this should be 75% clear by tomorrow.

The Milwaukee half of the trip was pretty lax. One of my in-laws had COVID and we did not get to see them, except for a quick present exchange at distance with masks on. That was unfortunate, and it meant we had to scramble to figure out how to move things and spend the whole week with the other parent.

We stayed at a pretty unique new hotel called the Kinn Guesthouse. It’s a boutique hotel downtown, just north of the Public Market and Third Ward, and is a unique setup. Instead of cramming a hundred or two rooms into the space, it has 31 rooms across five floors, each room with high ceilings and great layout. What was cool about the layout though is that each floor had a large common area, with a full kitchen and long island to eat at, a living room area with a large TV, and a meeting room with a board room table and such. My sister-in-law also evacuated to the hotel due to the quarantine situation, and it was nice to be able to sit and eat breakfast each morning. The setup felt like a large SoHo office of a tech marketing firm, almost.

Most of the trip was family stuff. I did get a good walk through the Third Ward one day, and everyone went to the Public Museum one afternoon. Otherwise, it was lots of food and conversation and whatnot. Shot 600-some photos, but I am so far behind on doing anything with pictures. I still haven’t posted albums from that June 2022 trip to Denver.

Oh, one unique thing about Milwaukee was this heavy fog during most of the trip. I didn’t have the big camera, so I tried to capture it a bit, but there was this thick soup on the first few days, like enough that you could barely see a block down a city street. It started on the drive from Indiana to Illinois and into Wisconsin and went on for days. I’d never seen Milwaukee like this, so it was unique to me.

Trip back wasn’t bad. We stopped in Denver, which was a weird flashback to my trip in 2022, which I almost called “last year” but now it’s “the year before last.” Gotta get used to that. We stopped in the Amex Centennial lounge, which was decent but way too crowded. Got home just in time for a torrential rainstorm, which almost reminded me of the Singapore trip, albeit 40 degrees cooler.

Today I did a quick spin down Highway 1 into Pacifica. There have been some crazy waves down there a few days ago, thirty or forty-foot waves crashing ashore and flooding out roads and houses. I got down there today with no real traffic problems, and the waves were at about the usual level, maybe slightly bigger. Lots of people had the same idea, though, so parking was a problem. I ended up going down to Montara Beach and climbing down to shore. I had the big camera with me, but I got there after noon, so the sun was the wrong way. The camera had the 16-35L lens, which is absolute butter for wide-open shots. It has such beautiful detail and color to it, especially on a beach. I had trouble getting down to the beach, though; there were a lot of washed-out and eroded trails, and I had to walk about a mile to find one that got down to the shore.

I love the Pacific ocean. I mean, I liked looking at the Atlantic from the south shore of Iceland, but I can get to the Pacific in fifteen minutes. The first time I touched the water of an ocean was at the Oregon coast, and I used to walk to Dockweiler Beach every day when I lived in Playa Del Rey. And of course Hawaii is amazing. But there’s something about the coast on Highway 1 south of Daly City that seems to mix together aspects of all of these places. There are rugged slopes and cliffs like Seaside, Oregon. There are the same little beach houses and surf shacks you see along the LA coast. But there’s like this rugged individualism to the beaches below Pacifica. You don’t see wall-to-wall families camping on the sand with umbrellas and chairs and grills. If you go during the week, you can sometimes see almost nobody there, except for the die-hards in neoprene suits, fighting the big waves. Places like Mavericks can be downright dangerous, and aside from the occasional fisherman, you might see nobody brave enough to take on the big surf. But I’d rather be walking on a beach like that than fighting my way through Coney Island-on-a-holiday crowds.

Anyway. I’ve rambled on for 800 words here and you may be wondering if I’m going to put some big turn in here at the end. And I honestly don’t know, but the new year/new me energy always makes me want to blog every day and write every day, and it usually times out by January 5th. But there are a lot of big questions I want to answer. One is if I can simply keep writing on here without running out of stories or things to say. I forget what the current tally is here, but it’s something like 1400 published entries and a million words, so the odds of having some original thought and saying, “Hey, I should write about my old Commodore 64” - well, I already did back in 2003. So I need to figure out a way to keep the words going. Or do I?

I don’t know who reads this or how people find it or if there are any on-ramps to blogs anymore. I think people just doom-scroll and sit and spin on their favorite low-attention-span app on their phone. (I know I do.) Is this something I could change? Is there some alternative to blogs that scratch the same itch as blogs? I don’t know. I know I don’t need to old-man-yells-at-cloud about how blogs were so much better in 1998 and these damn kids need to get off their phones. That war has already been lost. I guess what I need to figure out is how to spend my time and do what I want to do and what I can do. I want to keep writing about nothing and everything, and try to see what gels. So, here I am.