Author: jkonrath

If you still can’t figure out yesterday’s entry, it’s from the Conan O’Brien show.

There are several reasons why I haven’t been writing. First is the heat – at night it gets up to about 170 degrees in my apartment, and I want to do nothing but watch TV. I’ve begun tipping back a beer or two before bed, because there’s no other way I can fall asleep with this heat. I have a ceiling fan and a box fan – maybe I need more fans.

Also, my connection at work has been messed up. It slows down and times out way too much. It’s become too much a pain in the ass to write during lunch, so I stopped.

So that means no writing on the book. A few people are reviewing the first nundred pieces from Rumored to Exist, and I’m getting back some helpful feedback. It makes me want to write more, but the heat… the heat…

I’m getting a lot of conflicting information about what to do with my dating life. It was so much easier when I could just ask a girl in my Spanish class for help with my homework, buy a pizza, make up some stories, and bam. Now I have to explain a huge manifesto about what I want to do with my life when I meet someone new. Maybe I should stay single for a while longer.

I talked to Tom G. today, an old friend from my neighborhood. I guess he wasn’t a friend for a while – in 1989, my then-girlfriend took off with him, and they eventually got married, had two kids, then divorced. But I guess the statute of limitations on that stuff has run out, and it was good to talk to him again. It wasn’t much of an “old times” type of discussion, but more of a “what’s been going on” thing. It’s weird how much can change in 8 or 9 years.

I’ve gotta split – I actually have plans that don’t involve TV or writing!

I gave up. I fell off the wagon. I relapsed. I once again have cable TV. And I’m watching way too much of it.

I decided one night that I wanted to watch the Conan O’Brien show again. He’s really funny, and I like his guests and his jokes with Andy and Max, and it used to give my life a certain amount of regularity. So did the Seinfeld reruns at 7:30, but they always preempt those with the fucking Mariners games. So the other night, I got out the wire strippers and fixed my TV cable, and there it was.

Conan was funny, and I watched some other pseudo-educational things, like a show on the Berlin Airlift, and this giant Noam Chomsky thing on PBS. But I find myself wandering the stations, which is bad. Oh well, I need some new ideas for the book, and I can’t think of any while hermetically sealed in my apartment.

It’s Friday, but it feels like Tuesday. I hope this will be a breakthrough weekend for the writing – I have been hovering right below 40,000 words on this project, and I’d really like to break through and officially be in the 40s. Yesterday, it got so nice out that there was an emergency beer and ice cream meeting on the patio. It was HOT out there – it felt good to be drinking cold Corona while standing around on the concrete and looking at Lake Union. Days like that make me wish I had a boat moored across the street, so I could hop in and hit the water.

I’m in the final stretch of this money ordeal, before the car is gone. It looks like I’m going to make it with a few bucks to spare, but I’m waiting for Ford to pull the old switcheroo somehow, and ask me for more cash. So that means I’m mostly broke for the next two weeks, but then I’ll be back to dropping bills in the CD store and buying many books I’ll probably never read.

I’m bored now. Time to do a bunch of stupid web searches.

I got paid a day early and didn’t know it. It’s raining. I think the I-5 construction is done. I gave a panhandler 75 cents. My apartment smells like something died in the pile of unwashed dishes. I’m drying some jeans for the 4th time and I hope I remember to take them out and fold them.

I got a wedding invitation from an ex-girlfriend. Not really an ex, we went out a couple of times and it disintegrated before the labels were established. But I liked her a lot in early 1993. I had a dream about her the other night. I’m not mad or upset that she’s getting married, but it’s another reminder that I’m drifting. And I wish I had a better alibi for being single and childless. I wish I was Marilyn Manson, so when people would ask me why I’m not married, I could say “Where the hell have you been? Turn on your fucking TV.”

At least I got an invitation. I’d like to make a list here of all of the people who are/were allegedly close to me who didn’t invite me to their weddings.

I think I’m taking a long weekend in Vancouver BC in the near future. I don’t even know what I would do there, but I just want to go. I don’t know anyone there, except for maybe thirdhand connections or vague stuff like that. Now I know a couple of people in LA, but I can’t easily drive there, so the investment is higher.

I really need to do my dishes and find out of something did die in the sink, before it drives me nuts.

The jackhammers continued until about 5 in the morning, when the construction crews started running something that sounded like a tablesaw running in my kitchen, even though it was 200 yards away, slicing through the bridge decks of I-5. I hope to fuck that this roadwork finishes on time (allegedly tomorrow) so I can get some sleep.

07/13/98 12:46

The Damark catalog had a “portable” hot tub for like $1000 or $2000, and I kept thinking about how cool it would be to rent a two-bedroom apartment and set that bitch up – or a one-bedroom, and I wouldn’t put any other furniture in the living room. I don’t OWN any other furniture. Instead of buying a couch and a loveseat and a bunch of tables, I could just buy the hottub, and hang out in there when I rent movies. I just have to remember not to put any Japanese tourists in my Karl Fargman dresser.

Have I mentioned how slow the book is going yet today. Slow. Monumentally slow. Motherfucking slow. So slow, I shaved my dog’s ass and taught him to proofread backward. Wait, that doesn’t make any sense. Here’s an example – imagine you have to put yourself on a “tight schedule” to write a mere 300 words a day. Then imagine you break that schedule like 5 out of 7 days a week, and on the other two days, you don’t make up for it. This is why I’m thinking about a rewarding hobby in paint-by-number clown pictures, maybe working up to some dogs playing poker.

I was just looking at a web page and I couldn’t figure out why I would reload it and it would jump right to the end of the page. I thought maybe they used some kind of special anchor or something… until I realized I was holding down the space bar. It’s one of those days.

Eating nachos, getting ready to launch into it on the book. There is heavy construction going on just outside my apartment – they are replacing bridge decks on I-5 south. The current work is about 200 yards from my apartment, and I think it’s a 24 hour job – lots of hardcore banging and welding and scraping with tank-like vehicles and about 100 cops blocking off the road.

There’s an urban legend going around in email about waterproof sunscreen blinding kids. It’s idiotic, and the “anything for the children” types have been pummeling it out there. I got multiple copies at work, and a huge flamewar per copy. I get a lot of this – people who forward on jokes, etc. It’s an odd internet phenomenon – I bet you could get a Master’s thesis out of it without much work.

I’m not entirely sure why, but I’m listening to Mariah Carey’s self-titled album right now. The only reason I don’t have sick and/or unrealistic fantasies about her is that if I did manage to luck into something with her, I’d have a Puff Daddy number of 2 (like the Kevin Bacon numbers, get it?)

I’ve given up on finding cool journals on the web, and I’ve given up on reading about 98% of the journals I once thought were cool. It seems like in my darkest hours, I’d openly embrace the whole journal community, but I still think the idea of telling people how their personal sites should be run is stupid. It’s the reason I’ve given up on the zine community – it’s all people saying “be 100% DIY and do your own thing – just follow these steps so your stupid punk zine will look like every other one and conform to the highly regimented rules of content and appearance.”

I don’t put counters on my pages, and although I could check server logs, I never have. I think there’s a sort of beauty to that. It’s art for the sake of art, and I’ve never worried how many people read this. (I think it’s somewhere between 2 and 3, but it could be less) I guess lately I’ve been preoccupied in telling people my ideals on this, and it’s wasting my time – I feel like Lenny Bruce, spending hours talking about trials instead of telling jokes. Maybe I should shut up about it.

07/11/98 14:12

Sleeping is out of the question. They jackhammered I-5 straight through the night. At around 6, it went from one jackhammer to a dozen. I managed to sleep about 7 or 8 hours, but it was in 90 minute spurts.

I have begun trimming back my web site – I pulled a bunch of stuff today, and I’ll continue cutting, abbreviating, and moving things. Why? Because I’m sick of selling myself on the web. I’m tired of the fact that when someone gets my URL, they instantly know a bunch of things about me – maybe the wrong things. I don’t think I’m extroverted enough to tell the world all about me. I’ve always wanted to have this cool website that archived everything I’ve written – the zines, stories, books, web posting, whatever, and anyone could jump there for free and print the stuff out, or read it online. I now realize that I don’t like putting my work on the web, because my old stuff really sucks, and I’m nervous about the new stuff – it’s not the kind of writing that you want your boss or your uncle in New Jersey finding on the web. So, it’s slowly being pruned. And I’m inches away from killing this journal again. I might just remove the archives, but I’m not sure. I’ll need to think about it.

It’s 2:17pm and I’m still sitting around here – no shower, no food, incredibly depressed about nothing. I have $21 to blow this weekend in the “miscellaneous” account, and I’m trying to decide whether or not I should cut off all my hair, or just go see a matinee and walk around the mall, looking at things I want and can’t have. I’d hash out the depression issues here, but it’s essentially the same old shit, a few new players. About that shower…

I haven’t felt like writing lately. Not much has been going on with life, and that makes the journal pages seem stupid (“I got up. I took a shower. I checked my voice mail. I dried my hair.” etc.) I don’t want my journal to become that predictable, especially since I’m stuck in a 9 to 5 life, and I’m not climbing the Himalayas or walking across Africa or something else profound. And I can’t spend time with giant fictional discourses, because I don’t have the time or energy to do that with my “real” writing, aka my book.

Some people wonder (hey, maybe they don’t) why I don’t do cool graphics and site design and intricate HTML in my pages. It’s because I’m not an HTML designer or a graphic artist, and I don’t want to be. Some people enjoy tweaking their HTML by hand to get every page just right, to add next and previous links and screw with jumps and colors and sidebars and counters. I have no desire to do that. This isn’t my main project in life. That’s why I don’t spend all night writing intricate, sharp, and witty articles. It shows. Why cares? I am not “creating content” right now. I’m writing. I’m keeping a journal. I don’t have to write my paper journal in perfect cursive, and I don’t need to lint all of my pages and worry about fonts and sizes.

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t care, and if I kept any attitude other than that, I’d quit this project again. I might, I don’t know. Maybe I’m in a slump, maybe this is a bad idea. I don’t know.

That said, let me dump two days of news on the table.

I took a day off Wednesday to figure stuff out with the two cars. The Rabbit is all good news – no more leaks, and I installed a new battery. It cranks over find, and all seems well. I need to run it around the block for a half hour this weekend and make sure it works when it’s up to temp and on the road. I’m also slightly scared that there’s some electrical problem (like my stereo wiring) that caused the battery death, even though the battery was out of warranty and it’s death was justifiable. But, I’m scared there’s a short and the new battery will be dead too. So maybe Saturday I’ll hit the road with it.

The Escort went to the Ford dealer for an estimate on my end-of-lease charges. They were fairly cool, but the body damage quote wasn’t entirely pleasant. I will have to pay $620 cash, and I don’t get the deposit back. That’s not horrible though, and I can swing it. I’m driving the Escort until 7/31, and then it goes back to Evergreen Ford in Issaquah for the last time. Sure will be weird without that thing. End of an era.

Tonight, Bill Perry called me at 5 and told me of a 20-person party at Julian’s, a restaurant/bar/pool hall/gameroom just a few blocks down from work. I hiked down there at 6 to meet up with him, Marc, and a bunch of their fellow workers at Aventail. Bill lives in Indiana now, and I hadn’t seen him in ages. He works in Seattle remotely from Vincennes, but managed to get back here now and again for a week of on-site work. Marc VanHeinengen, fellow ex-Spry, ex-IU computer geek was there with us. I shot a game of pool and sucked, and we all talked and hung out. I met some new people there, and everyone was cool. Then we got on the air hockey tables, and Bill kicked everyone’s ass. The computer games were pricy, and we were hungry, so we split.

Across the street is a semi-new place called Beppo, a family-style dining Italian place. There were 5 of us total, and since there was a wait, we hit the bar. My new drink is a Vodka-7, from Bukowski and Elmore Leonard, of course. It’s pretty good and I like it a lot better than Rum and Coke – maybe because I drink a half dozen 7up’s a day. We ate on the patio – a wild, thin-crust pizza with mashed potatoes instead of sauce, and ravioli with feta cheese inside. They brought out big-ass dishes of food, and we all shared. It was a fun time – lots of joking, talk, catching up, and the usual computer geek discussions.

After food, we split, and me, Bill, and Marc went to Aventail’s new location and played with remote control cars a bit. We also checked out Marc’s kick-ass Micron laptop, and their new setup.

Now I’m home. It always feels satisfying to spend a lot of time with a bunch of cool people, the kind of time where it’s 6 and then you look at your watch a second later and it’s 9:45. The people, the cool night on the patio, the drinks, the good food – it all made me wish I did this more often. Maybe I should.

No writing tonight. The weekend’s almost here though. I need to cover serious ground on Rumored to Exist this weekend…

Late start today, so this will be short. Not much is going on, except that I haven’t slept much lately. I remember looking at my watch during every hour from 2 to 9am, which made it seem like I was up all night, but then I remembered a snippet of a dream and I knew I must have fallen asleep somewhere in there. I’m now prepared for a day of aphasia, peripheral hallucinations, and extreme typing mistakes. Maybe I should drink a Coke or ten first.

I think I’ve decided I’m going to buy a new car in like a year, after I move to a new apartment and go through another tax season. Although I haven’t ditched the Escort yet, I think I’m already sick of problems with this Rabbit. I wish it would stabilize a bit, like my other one did. My old Rabbit had problems, but I drove it for months and months with almost no further investment. I’m whining, so I’ll stop.

I’m re-reading Leyner’s The Tetherballs of Bougainville and enjoying it. The only thing I hate about his writing is that it gives me so many good ideas, and I can’t just rip them off.

Okay, lunch is over…

Why must I live my whole life feeling like I just stayed up all night? I decided to knock my sleep schedule back into the daytime mode with some sleeping pills last night. Instead, I got a truly surreal experience of alternating periods of undead catatonia and extreme awake, paranoid rushes where my senses were supertuned to the rumbling of traffic 7 stories below me. I spent all day in an odd mood, like I’d accidentally breathed a short whiff of nerve gas and was waiting to see if it would cause my insides to boil. I just tried to take a nap as the tail-end of rush hour traffic zipped by on I-5, and I can honestly say I’d feel better if I would’ve forced myself to stay awake.

I have some food burining in the oven…

Very tired. The Rabbit’s plumbing might be fixed, but the battery had no juice and I couldn’t turn it over to tell. I finally made a discovery that would’ve helped my car repair experiences long ago – latex surgical gloves. I slipped some on before monkeying in the deep antifreeze and grease of the engine, and it felt great to just snap them off when done.

Both of my parents called today (separately – not a joint thing. Sort of a flashback of my last ten years of being parented.) I only hear from them every month or two, and I usually have enough experiences queued up to get me through a phone conversation, but today I didn’t. I know that when they talk to me and all I have to say is “I haven’t done anything lately. I’ve been working a lot.” that they interpret it as “I’m getting ready to go off the deep end.” And it seems kindof stupid that if they called and I said “oh, I just went shopping for new cars” or “I’m going to Boston next week” or something idiotic like that, they’d be content.

I need to get off of here and do some work on the book…