Author: jkonrath

I just got a call from my friend Lisa from the parking lot of the IMU. She’s from up here (Stamford, actually) but visited to see the Lilly Library and needed directions to find it. It’s pretty weird to consider someone I think of as a “New York” person to be in the place where I lived ten years ago. It’s even more weird to give directions by phone, and mentally imagine what it would be like to be there. I was actually reading a few pages from Summer Rain last night, so I’m really in the mood to be back there. Maybe I can put some of this nostalgia into the stories I’m trying to finish.

I’ll still sick, although the cold has moved from the throat to the nose. I’m not fond of blowing my nose constantly, but it sure beats that back-of-throat post-nasal drip, or the throat-suddenly-dry, must-cough-violently thing I’ve had going for the last few days.

I finished rereading The Fuck Up by Arthur Nersessian, and it wasn’t bad. It reminds me of a modern-day Down and Out in Paris and London by Orwell, and I was able to mentally figure out more of the geography now that I work in the Village. It’s a slightly depressing book, and sometimes the writing is a bit jumpy or inaccurate, but it’s not bad. It makes me wish I could write a book similar to it, but I’m not as verbose in my prose as he is.

Okay, I need to go to Duane Reade and stock up on cold supplies (Dayquil, Nyquil, Kleenex, etc.)

Vague things I find disturbing:

First, I watched this entire TV show about Al Roker getting his stomach stapled shut. Since I am like 30 pounds overweight, I often think about this, but you need to be like 100 pounds overweight to get it done. Also, my problem is not eating large volumes of stuff; I actually don’t eat a lot in any given sitting, it’s just what I eat that got me here. It’s also amazing that he got this invasive surgery done to get down to my current weight. That doesn’t make me feel as bad.

Second, during this Dateline NBC or whatever it was, they had an ad for another Dateline show in which some parents were deemed unfit parents and had their kids taken away, then went out at gunpoint and stole them back from foster homes. The commercial depicted it as “the system has screwed us, and since we’re such strong people, we would do anything…” This is total bullshit. If a court takes away your kids, you’re given a list of stuff you have to do to get them back. The list is not unreasonable for a normal person: get a job, get off drugs, take a course on parenting, etc. The real story is probably that these folks couldn’t do any of this, but they could get a guy and go take their kids back. This is stupid, and this kind of thing will make tons of dumb parents who had their kids taken away that they could do the same thing. It’s amazing how American culture has propogated this belief that everyone is always right, and that anyone can do anything on their own terms. It’s probably Reader’s Digest’s fault for publishing all of those little amazing profiles of courage or whatever the hell they are called. People are wrong. People fuck up. Deal with it.

Third, I will probably watch the above show.

Fourth, if you download an entire first-run movie because you don’t see yourself giving the MPAA ten bucks, you are an idiot. I actually saw a LiveJournal where someone said they were going to see 8 Mile but didn’t because they didn’t want to give the MPAA the money. This is stupid. I mean, wanting to see 8 Mile is also stupid, but that’s not the point. I don’t feel that I need to justify this any further, but rather I will issue a decree making it true.

It seems like I had a fifth thing, but I can’t remember. I’m still sick and pretty much reduced to watching TV, and not much is on. I did finally sign another lease, which is always good.

Now, I must eat my soup.

When I was in Vegas, I went to a Walgreen’s across the street from the Stardust on a pretty constant basis, since bottled water cost about $87 in the hotel. I always like big drugstores because they remind me of the ones in the Midwest, like the huge Osco in the Concord Mall that has recently vanished (along with everything else in the mall.) New York drug stores suck; they have almost no selection in the medical-oriented things, and no variety in the non-medical stuff. I bet you could buy a snowblower at a CVS or Hook’s back in Indiana, whereas you might have to go to seven different places to find a 4×4-inch bandage and some gauze in Manhattan. (And when you do, it will cost more than an emergency room visit.) It’s the same gripe about lack of real estate, cost of real estate, and the fact that we don’t have a Target in Manhattan and that would make my life much better, even though all of you in the Midwest are saying, “why would he want a Target? They suck ass.”

Anyway, I was in this Walgreen’s, and saw something I’d never seen before: an earwax removal tool. It looked like a little plastic plunger, except it had a ring on the end of it. The idea was that you shoved it in your ear and scraped out a thing of wax, and it wouldn’t push the wax further back because of the shape, or something. Since I have constant ear problems, I bought this thing, ran back to the hotel (okay, I didn’t RUN) and jammed it into my ear, carefully following the instructions to make sure that it didn’t puncture my eardrum. After all of this anticipation, it removed a piece of wax about as big as the amount of wax a crayon leaves on a piece of paper when writing a period or comma. I felt ripped off, expecting it to remove something about as big as a BB, or maybe a small kidney bean. No dice.

At first, I thought that this was just another ripoff from the health and beauty industry, like magnet-point shoe inserts, anything with the word “Igea” in it, or the ab-exercise belt. But later, I thought that maybe this was some kind of pea-under-seven-mattresses sort of perception problem. Maybe the “huge” amount of wax in my ear that bothered me was just microscopic. Maybe this was like some larger metaphor for my life, and all of the things bothering me – money, acceptance, dating, writing – were all microscopic bits of wax that weren’t that big of a deal.

Okay, this is getting stupid. I shouldn’t come up with journal ideas on the subway anymore.

Dee Snider wasn’t bad on Friday. The only problem was we had to sit through a lot of BAD bands before that, one of which looked like a U2 cover band that didn’t play U2 songs, another that consisted of a woman that looked like she took Chrissy Hynde far too seriously. (After the show, she went around with a book to get people to put down their email addresses for their list, so I put down Ray’s address.) The show was at L’Amour, which is a pretty big name in some circles for heavy metal. It was closed for years and now reopened, but has the same smell of piss and death. It’s also rumored that this was the same club where they shot Saturday Night Fever back in the disco days.

Finally, I thought we were ready to roll, since it was like 11:30 and we had sat through a half-dozen bands, including one that had a big fat guy singing and a skinny little guy playing bass and alternately singing, playing stuff with way too much bass like you’d expect some 17-year-olds to play in a jacked-out Honda Civic with a 74″ subwoofer. So after them, instead of Dee, we got Dee’s son, who looked like a Calvin Klein underwear ad (which probably isn’t that bad, given A) his dad’s looks and B) the looks of the woman he had on his arm after the set.) He jerked around spastically (this was his first time on stage, ever, so maybe that was why) and one song made me laugh hysterically, because it contained a really stupid lyric like “if you hear me now, you won’t hear me later/if you don’t hear me now, you’ll hear me later” or something. When people booed him, I thought he was going to start crying. Hey, imagine what your dad went through when he used to go onstage in biker bars wearing Tammy Faye makeup and spandex.

After we sat through an unending setup period, which pissed me off to no end (it’s not like these guys are staging the chariot race out of Ben Hur, it’s just four amps and a fucking drum set) they finally came out and opened with “Stay Hungry.” In fact, they did almost every song from this album, which made me happy because Stay Hungry was one of the first tapes I ever bought back in junior high school, and I played it so many times I still have every note memorized. They did a couple of other songs that I didn’t know, and then they did a bunch of covers, some of them pretty odd. They did “Anarchy in the UK” by the Sex Pistols; “Hell Bent For Leather” by Judas Priest; “Search and Destroy” by Iggy Pop; a weird medley that ended up finishing with “Rock and Roll” by Led Zeppelin; and AC/DC’s “Whole Lotta Rosie”. Dee talked a lot between songs, and still had long hair although not as poofy as back in the day. A.J. Pero from back in the Twisted Sister days was on drums and played a solo; there were two guitar players, and the current bass player for Overkill was in the band. Overall it was a fun time, and they played until two.

Next show: Peter Gabriel at MSG, next Thursday. I was reluctant to buy the tickets because I love his music, but I wasn’t sure how it would work outside of the studio. Also, everyone I know who likes Peter Gabriel only likes “Sledgehammer” or whatever, and his “greatest hits” are the least favorite songs for me. But since he averages about ten years between albums, I felt that it was important that I check it out. So I got a $65 ticket way the hell up in section 305. It should be interesting, though.

I think I gave myself food poisoning yesterday with some taco salad I made. When I woke up this morning, it felt like someone threw a medicine ball right into my gut. I think I’ll finish on that note.

I’m at the point in writing where all traditional forms of fiction look broken, and all of the pieces of my life around me look strange and disjointed, and I doubt everything and wonder how things happened. I can’t easily explain this, but it’s the sort of thing where I sit and look at a Coke can for 20 minutes and think about HOW a Coke can got the way it did, and why wasn’t it a triangle or a tube that was a centimeter wide and three feet long, or how they formed the metal or whatever. And then I think about how Coke cans have remained unchanged in a sense for years and years, but sometimes I find a picture of a Coke can from like 1990 or even 1997 and every aspect of it looks so different, but I can’t entirely tell HOW. And I look at everything like this, but more than that I look at writing like this, and think way too much about stuff, and flip through some random book and think, “WHY does this work?” and you start to see all of these strange patterns, like that more words or more descripton doesn’t always build a bigger picture. Sometimes less or even no words burns an indelible image in your head. It’s like looking at a stick figure, or a dot-matrix image, and your brain fills in the blanks as to what isn’t there. I have images stuck in my head from books I read 20 years ago, and when I go back and re-read the same books, I think “how the hell did that move me so much?” It’s all a very confusing way to look at things, but I feel a need to get through it before I do anything else, because I feel my current writing is pretty lame.

I’m going to see Dee Snider tonight, which should be interesting. I think one of the first tapes I ever got was Twisted Sister – Stay Hungry. I don’t know what stuff he will play tonight, but it should be cool. Other than that, I just ate a bunch of Chinese food and now I feel like I am going to pass out from MSG poisoning. I think I need another Coke.

It feels like winter in New York, in the good way. I’ve enjoyed a weekend of doing nothing but sitting in the heated apartment, and going out for groceries. I like the first time it gets cold here, when you can pass the restaurants and smell the food and enjoy the slight amount of quiet you get when more people are inside. The only thing better is when there’s a huge snow and the city shuts down, and you can walk around with this giant blanket of white absorbing all of the sound. Of course, in a day it all turns to black and grey sludge, and in a few weeks I will be bitching about the sheer cold outside, but it’s nice when it first starts.

I’m already in a weird Christmas mood, although I don’t really celebrate the holiday that much anymore. I mean, I still exchange gifts, but I don’t celebrate the birth of Christ, and I don’t believe in Santa. I don’t place any importance on the familial aspect of the holiday anymore, since I don’t usually go home for it; that’s sort of a sticking point for me. I grew up with the centralized holiday at the maternal grandparents’ place in Chicago, with tons and tons of people and excellent food, time to play with all of my cousins, and the whole tradition, the routine of piling up in the car and getting on the Indiana toll road and heading to the big city. That pretty much ended when my grandmother died, which was when I was in college, also complicating things. There are still various family get-togethers, but very decentralized and not as noteworthy. The people are still important, and I’m not slagging that, but there is no tradition. And if it’s not about the myth of Jesus or the myth of Santa or the myth of the dreidel (or whatever), then there has to be something to replace that.

I think the same feeling of Christmas happiness, or whatever you want to call it, is somehow encapsulated by being inside in the warm when it’s cold out, and having an overabundance of food in the fridge. That isn’t entirely a complete holiday for me, but yesterday I bought way too much food, and cooked dinner at home, and baked cookies, and kept my ass on the couch all day, and it was pretty decent.

One outing I made yesterday was to Game Stop to buy two new titles for the PS2: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Socom Navy SEALs. Here are first impressions on both.

I’ll start with the Navy SEALs game first. It was a real bitch to find this, and I think my used copy cost $55. The introduction is PHENOMENAL! A very cool movie showing frogmen swimming in water, attack helicopters, insertion teams, the whole nine yards. It was all meticulously rendered, with water effects better than any I’d ever seen. In general, this game is about a half-step ahead of Medal of Honor: Frontline, although MOH:FL probably has a higher volume of detailed items, while SOCOM has more night missions and stuff, which makes it easier for them. But in general, the game has some great looking graphics, and the sound is integrated well.

One of the very cool things about the game is that it comes with a Logitech headset that plugs into the USB port of your Playstation 2. Most adventure games have on-screen hints on what to do, i.e. “destroy the radio to escape” popping up in a little window or whatever. But in this, someone tells you these things via radio in the headset! It’s a weird effect, because stuff is blowing up around you or whatever, and you hear someone saying “Delta team, advance to their position – over” or whatever. Very cool! The other, even more fucked-up part is, the game has voice recognition! There is a push-to-talk button on the controller, and you can issue commands to you other SEAL team members just by saying them! A menu appears on screen to help you, and the comamnds are in person-verb-object format. So, for example, you can say “team deploy frag” and everyone will throw frag grenades at the target. The recognition works well, and there is no complicated training or anything. It’s incredible!

Overall, the game is great, but very complicated and difficult. It’s not a thing where you go in, shoot a bunch of dudes, and then you are at the next level. It involved a LOT of strategy, hiding in shadows, taking out people from behind, and so on. So I haven’t played it much, but it’s cool. It also supports online gaming, so I’m going to have to get the ethernet adapter and try it out.

The other game I got is Vice City, the followup to Grand Theft Auto 3. It’s sort of a prequel, happening in the 80s in a Miami Vice-like environment. The coolest part of this is that when you get in a car, you can change channels and listen to the radio, just like in GTA3. But now, there are a lot of 80s channels, and one of them is similar to the old K-ROCK, but called VROCK, and it has nothing but old 80s metal. So it’s pretty cool to be listening to Megadeth – Peace Sells… or Slayer – Reign in Blood while driving a stolen sports car and killing cops. There are way more cars, people, weapons, details, and everything else, too much to describe. I spent hours last night and thismorning driving around, stealing stuff, going on rampages. It’s absolutely great.

Not a lot else. I’ve been working on this short story about Bloomington, one of many I hope to get into a book. It’s going slow, but it’s going. I think I will be able to write more as winter progresses. It’s much easier to cocoon up to the computer when it’s too cold to wander around outside. Also the jerkoffs that sit in front of my building tend not to do that when it’s twenty outside, plus windchill.

Okay, I just poured a quart of sulfuric acid down my bathtub drain, and I think I need to either flush it out with some water, or get some kind of gas mask.

After finding a plot, cleaning off the desk, uploading my photos, and getting everything ready for the NaNoWriMo contest last night, I decided I wasn't going to do it. I really want to write another book, but I want to do it at my own pace, and worry about quality more than quotas. Also, I have a couple of small projects I need to juggle, like a trip report for Vegas, and I want to putz with some PHP stuff, and I don't think I can do that if I'm constantly worrying about output. And there's not anything in it for me even if I do finish. So, fuck it.

Speaking of photos and PHP, give https://www.rumored.com/vegas/oct-2002/photos/ a spin if you haven't already. [Long ago broken, sorry.] I am still hacking the PHP code for this, but I got the captions working correctly, and fixed a couple of other errors. It's my first stab at doing anything longer than a line in PHP, and it seems to work okay. If I can improve some of the features a bit, I will use this script in other places on 34.216.9.77/.

It's nice to be home on a Friday night with the wind whipping away outside, and the radiators glowing with heat. I bought a dehumidifier on my way home from work for about $40. It has some kind of air filter, a cool mist function, and other assorted features I ignored that promise me better comfort from the air as I sleep. It also came with a mostly useless gauge that measures the humidity (a hydragometer? Hydrometer? Hygrometer?) except it doesn't have any accurate numbers of markings, just a green band called "comfort zone" in the middle, with "humid" and "dry" in red on either side. It gauged my apartment as being below the "comfort zone", but now that this little plastic beast is churning out humidity, it appears I am once again in the "comfort zone". That's comforting.

Just the other day someone pulled like $3.5M out of the New York horse betting computers through some kind of security breach. Dammit! Why can't I figure this kind of stuff out?

I’m back. I spent all day yesterday flying, but it wasn’t too terrible. In Vegas, I bought this giant Tom Clancy nonfiction book on the story of the general in charge of the Air Force during Desert Storm. It was a HUGE book, like 500-600 pages but the physical size of a college textbook, and that kept me busy for most of the day. My lunch was at about 10:00 at Denny’s before I left; my supper was at about 10:00 at night in the Cincinnati airport’s piece of shit Pizza Hut. I make it back to LaGuardia at about 12:30, and got a quick cab back to my place.

I now have hot water and heat. Too much heat, actually – the place was like a kiln when I came in last night. I think I need to buy a dehumidifier of some sort. I’m afraid the books will get damaged, but if it is 0% humidity and I jack it up to 30%, I don’t think any harm will be done. The place is a disaster right now: the kitchen is still set up as my imprompu bath room; the living room is filled with books I shuffled from the bedroom floor; two weeks of clean laundry are in a giant pile in the bedroom; and most of my stuff is unpacked (I didn’t bring a lot with me) but I have to get stuff off of the laptop and get the pictures online. So I already have a busy weekend ahead of me. And I am still trying to figure out if I will actually do the NaNoWriMo thing or not. I thought of a good plot yesterday, so maybe I will. But I have so much other shit going on, so I’m not sure if this will be a good time investment.

Okay, gotta eat lunch now…

I’m still sick. It’s progressing, and it’s just a cold, but colds tend to completely level me out. And since I have about no immune system, stress makes them worse. Unfortunately, a million and one things all tend to go wrong when I have a cold, which is what I’m currently experiencing.

First, I have no heat and no hot water. I haven’t for three days. Calling the landlord does no good, because he’s – I don’t know where the fuck he is. Italy, I think. Or dead. I’m not sure. He has a son in New Jersey that still cashes the checks and comes over every few weeks, but that’s it. And there’s no super. Which is illegal. So is not having hot water any time of the year, or not having heat during heat season (starts this weekend) or when the temperature is below 50 or something (it was 36 this morning). I called the city today and started the long and drawn out process to get the landlord in trouble. This morning there was a sign on the front door that said “we are repairing the boiler, thank you for your patience.” I don’t know if that means it will be fixed today or it will be fixed in ten years. The other major sticking point is that I don’t have a new lease, and my current lease ends in December. Legally, anyone in a rent-controlled apartment automatically gets their lease renewed unless Bad Things happen, like you run a drug lab or something. But as this motherfucker has no concept of the law, I have extreme fear that I will be looking for a new apartment in December with no money for deposits (i.e. sleeping in a cardboard box.) So that kind of shit certainly adds to your stress level and lowers your ability to fight a cold.

So the last two days my mornings have consisted of putting every pot and pan on the stove, filling them with water, turning on the oven for some heat, and washing in the kitchen sink. The one thing that would really, really help my motherfucking cold would be a half-hour in a hot shower. But no.

Also, I have to fly tomorrow. It’s a little-known fact that taking someone up in a plane with a head cold was ruled a form of inhumane torture by the Geneva Convention in 1947. I did this once before, from Boston to Seattle, and if the doors on a 757 actually opened during flight, I probably would have jumped out DB Cooper-style without a parachute and plummeted to my death instead of facing that horror. As the plane pressurizes or depressurizes or whatever, every individual sinus explodes outward with an incredible force, like someone is driving white-hot steel stakes into your face. And that’s before all of the shit you go through with the ears. One of my ears didn’t actually uncompress until three days later at a doctor’s office, when he shoved some kind of evil death rod into the depths of my ear. It’s not pleasant. I’ll be there tomorrow for a 1PM flight. I plan to drink an entire bottle of nyquil before the flight, and then put in those earplanes ear plugs. Those actually help a lot, they balance the pressure between the inner ear and the cabin. Just don’t buy them at the airport, because they cost twice as much.

I also have tickets to go to this Rush concert tonight ($100) and I really don’t feel like going. But, I know if I don’t go, I will forever regret it. So I will load up on the DayQuil in a few hours and go to MSG and check that out.

I haven’t started packing at all for this trip. I did all of my laundry last night, which was a major bitch, but at least it’s done. I will be very happy in about 30 hours when I am sitting in a nice hotel room with working heat and a working shower and cable TV and nothing else. The main goal right now is to reduce the number of variables from here to there. I’ll feel much better when I’m sitting at the airport gate with my bottle of nyquil in hand, ready for the plane to board…

Ok, I may or may not update after this. If not, be back in a week.