Author: jkonrath

I just got back from the VW mechanic, and I dropped off my screwed up parts and new parts, and he said he should get it all done in a couple of days for around $50. That’s not a great deal, but most mechanics would’ve laughed me out of their garage if I would’ve come in with the same problem.

I’m feeling sick to my stomach, and very tired today. The tired part has worn off now, but my stomach has been killing me. I tried going to bed early last night – I even opted to skip writing so I could be in bed by midnight. But I ended up tossing and turning for hours. Temperature is always a problem in my apartment. Heat rises, and I’m on the top floor, so it’s always too hot, but it’s easy to get the fans running and drop the temp so low that I instantly get a head cold. Finding a balance is a full-time job.

The bread in this sandwich is absolutely appaling. I think it has pieces of sawdust in it. I keep biting into pieces of what look like drill shavings, or what particleboard looks like when it’s just particles. I hate the bread department in the store. Why can’t they make bread like they use when you buy a sandwich at a deli or a restaurant? Like Denny’s bread, or McDonald’s buns. Instead you have white bread, horrible generic wheat bread, and a bunch of esoteric, worthless 17-million grain breads that all taste like white bread soaked in a carinogen. I need to find some better bread.

I spent part of yesterday recording myself on the MiniDisc. It sounds pretty good, and gave me an opportunity to talk to myself for an hour 15 minutes. It probably sounds like the tapes the army recorded of Col Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (“I saw a snail, walking on the edge of a razor…”) Maybe I will trade the tapes with other people into similar stuff. Audio journals. I like it.

Reading more about Burroughs in The Job. You know it’s going too far when you’re walking in a mall, trying to make yourself invisible.

06/22/98 21:26

It’s amazing that I remember all of the words to Megadeth albums I haven’t heard in 10 years, but I don’t remember anything from a college physics course that required 10 hours a day of slaving at the scientific calculator. And it’s even more amazing that I can now casually say “ten years ago…” and refer to a part of my memory that’s vaguely considered adulthood. In high school, ten years ago meant kindergarten.

I’m a salsa convert. I was never into the stuff before, but now I’m eating it on a regular basis. I forget what the deal was in the Seinfeld episode with salsa, but maybe that subliminally had something to do with it.

I read a bunch of online journals after work today, but I couldn’t find any that I really liked. The last thing I found that I liked was The Cyprian Virago, since Heidi seems about as stable as I am. I read a lot of other journals that didn’t do it for me, and I’m thinking of making up my page next April 1 so it redirects to a GeoCities site covered with animated GIFs, an HTML-calender, and a giant diatribe about how you shouldn’t read this site if you know me in real life. And then I’ll password protect it.

I thought I had a stream of thought, but I lost it reading a travel page. I wish I could hit the road forever, but I guess I’m stuck here for now. Seattle, a TV dinner, and an evening of not much else. I guess that’s OK, for now.

Having incredible flashbacks of 1992 today. I was lying in bed, and the heat and smell of the air and desolation almost transported me there. I started thinking about details I’d forgotten, little things – the voice of a long-gone summer fling, the constant spin of the box fan in my room, the lazy emptiness of sitting around, not having a job the next day. It made me think I could put on some shorts and a shirt and go to Kirkwood and catch a WQAX streetdance on my way to CD exchange or something.

I guess going nuts over the past is permissibile, considering that I’m writing a book about it right now. I put down a few words last night about the same deal, about never really being able to touch your past again. Sometimes you can get so close – you can find that note from an ex-girlfriend and read it and get transported back, and touch the paper and know that she touched the same paper 5 or 10 or 50 years ago. It’s like when that dude from Quantum Leap went back to his own family when he was a kid, and he couldn’t tell them that his brother was going to die in Vietnam, and even when he did, it didn’t change anything. Even though my book uses the most lax, taboo, and destructive time travel methodology, it’s still impossible to go back to your own past and get what you want. All but the most devious are limited to being only observers.

Had a weird dream that I was hanging out with a few different women in Wright quad back at IU – no real prospects, just friends. Maybe I was living there? Anyway, Jenny McCarthy was going to college there, and was friends with one of the girls. One morning, I was sleeping on the floor there, and she came in completely naked, wanting to borrow something. It was very awkward, and I wanted to tell her “I loved your CD-ROM” or something else to piss her off. Later (or maybe earlier) she called the room and I answered, and she said “This is McCarthy” and I said “Joseph McCarthy?” Also in the dream, I got into a huge ethical discussion with her and the roommates about whether or not it was safe to go to a college class if it’s three weeks into the semester and you haven’t attended once. When I woke up, I was still thinking about cover stories that might work for this (clinical depression, father was sick, allergy attacks…)

I think I’m going to go see the X-Files movie after a hit of lunch…

06/21/98 22:01

I don’t want to slag the X-Files film on the off-chance that Gillian Anderson is stalking me, reads this, and then decides not to suprise me. I’ll say this much: Scully=good, Mulder=good, all of the other characters=what the fuck? Everyone else was a caricature of a caricature. And wasn’t this black oil alien already discussed at length in the series? Why didn’t Mulder know about it, if he was infected with it in that Russian gulag? Am I hallucinating? I don’t know. It was nice watching the X-Files without commercials, even if it seemed like a padded out 1-hour epsisode. They didn’t cut it off in the middle or end with a To Be Continued. And it looked and sounded great. I dunno – maybe if they would’ve divided the movie into 4 continuous episodes, like the Twilight Zone film, and gave each episode to a different director. Then you’d get a little of humor, a little high-tech angle, some more about the other people, etc. Oh well. Worth $4 and the bullshit involved with so many people and having to sit in the second row.

Beautiful day today. I got home, opened the window, and sat in bed, with a nice breeze coming over me. So nice, that I fell asleep and awoke to darkness.

It’s already twilight out, and I can’t sleep. I’m feeling sort of nauseous – I think I drank too much caffeine. On top of that, my monitor just made a sharp cracking sound, went completely blank, then came back on and is now working fine. Maybe it’s going to blow up. I just bought the damn thing in January. Maybe the 6-month warranty timer just went off.

I finished reading Naked Lunch, and what can you say – pretty awesome stuff. I read the reviews on amazon.com, and everyone gave it either a 10 or a 1. The 1 reviews are hilarious. I have to admit, I wasn’t 100% fond of the book because of the randomness, but now I’m a convert. I think I’ll start reading some of his other more challenging stuff, like the cutup trilogy. I’ve read all of his more basic stuff, like Queer, Junkie, and Interzone. Time for a trip to the bookstore.

I got a fair amount of writing done on Rumored tonight. I’m way behind schedule – like 10,000 words behind. But, I cut a bunch of dead wood I knew was going to be dropped, and my schedule didn’t account for that. Although by wordcount, it appears that I lost about 4,000 words tonight, I lost about 7,000 and gained 3,000. And since I ideally write 2,000 a night, that’s a good haul. Most of all, I’m happy that a lot of new stuff is appearing in the time travel part of the book, and the order is all falling into place. I have a lot to do in this half of the book – it’s maybe 50% done at this point, not even that. The other half of the book is about 60% done.

I’m sure these numbers bore you. It’s 5 in the morning. I’ve got to get to bed before it’s completely daylight out, and the room temperature goes from 55 to 273.

06/20/98 12:26

I played GameBoy until like 6:30am, and couldn’t dissolve the caffeine fast enough. Now I feel like the living dead, and I’m preparing for the great water pump surgery, and eating some applesauce for lunch.

On my way to sleep last night, I thought of a long ramble of something I wanted to talk about in here, but now it’s gone. Story of my life.

To quote Dennis Hopper, “let’s hit the fuckin’ road.”

06/20/98 17:51

I knew it would be a mess. It always is.

I had a few things I could’ve done first – drain the coolant, remove the water pump pulley, loosen the alternator – and none of them were going to happen. I couldn’t hold the water pump pulley still to break the bolts (I also found that one the three bolts was MISSING!) I couldn’t move the alternator because I’d forgotten that a shitload of VW stuff isn’t held on by standard bolts, but by allen-head bolts, and I have no wrenches for those. I bought a siphon and did manage to get some of the coolant out of the radiator. I’m suprised the damn thing even ran – it looked like Love Canal sludge, more black and muddy than antifreeze green.

Okay, there’s a Sears about 10 miles from Karena’s (did I mention that I had to do this repair at her apartment complex, where I’m storing the Volks? She’s out of town, so I was there by myself.) so I went to get some 3/8″ drive allen wrenches. I guesstimated it as a 6mm, and found that my mailbox key almost snugly fit inside there. I drive there – some kind of weird radio station on location deal is going on, with a guy dressed as a clam, a bunch of freaks wearing dayglow yellow painter’s overalls and dancing like one of those stupid Intel commercials, and a bunch of people honking their car horns. Inside, the Sears hardware department was a zoo – Father’s day is tomorrow. A set of 6 or 8 metric allen wrenches was like $28, so I guessed and got a 6mm and 7mm for $12. The sales clerk kept trying to guess how to pronounce my last name based on my Visa card, and I thought I was going to have to wheel her over to a display radial arm saw and cut her head off. I wanted to wander the mall, but I already had antifreeze and grease all over me, I’d just spend money, and I promised I’d work until 5 and then fuck around for the rest of the evening. The round trip took almost an hour.

I had a weird system of draining the car, involving a 2 quart tupperware bowl, the plastic tray from a one-gallon vaporizer (that would probably now kill everyone in the room if I plugged it in), and a 2 or 3 gallon dishtray-type thing. I had a couple of fuckups, and spilled some antifreeze, but most of it stayed in the plastic pans. I pulled the bottom radiator hose and got a few quarts to dump loose there, and after I fucked with the pulley a bit, the water pump leaked a steady drip. But I only got maybe 3/4 of a gallon out of the thing, and it supposedly held 2. The radiator had been half empty already, so maybe there wasn’t a lot of water in there.

I broke loose the alternator, no problem (it was a 6mm hex). Then I found that one of the two bolts on the pulley wasn’t much more than finger tight. I spent forever fucking with that last bolt – I couldn’t turn it when the pulley itself was turning. Finally, I jammed a screwdriver in the way so it wouldn’t spin, and got the last nut out. The water pump was now in the open and ready to be pulled.

A lot of cars have a one piece pump that bolts right on the engine, but this particular VW uses a hollow housing that bolts to the engine and has the three hose mounts, and then the water pump bolts on the side of that. Imagine an open-mouthed canister, with a bunch of hoses on the closed end, and a hole in the side that goes to a pipe. The lid to the canister has a fan blade on the inside, so when you put the lid on, it churns around and moves water from the hoses to the hole in the side. The canister is the water pump housing, and the lid is the water pump itself. And what I was trying to do was loosen the 8 or so bolts so I could pry off the lid, throw it in the dumpster, and put on a new one.

What’s the catch? I kept breaking the fucking bolts. There are like 8 bolts holding the two pieces together, and they were snapping off like plastic when I got a socket in there. Plan b – I tore off the alternator, and pulled out the entire housing and pump at the same time. It was only 4 bolts and 3 hose connections, and I got the whole damn thing out without much difficulty. It also drained another 2 quarts of coolant from the system.

So I sat on the sidewalk, with this piece of shit part, trying to see if I could remove any of the bolts without snapping the heads off. A semi-attractive woman that lived at the complex walked by as I sat there, drenched in grease and antifreeze, fucking with this cumbersome piece of cast iron that looks like something off of a 19th century steam engine. Right as she said “Having fun?” I snapped another bolt in two. After the damage was done, I snapped maybe 5 of 8 bolts, and couldn’t pry the two pieces apart. My only hope is to find a shop that will drill out the bolts, pry off the old pump, slap on the new one, and install some new bolts, hopefully for less than $10,000. Hopefully some VW shop will be a pal and do it on the cheap for me. Plus, then they will be the ones installing the gasket between the pieces and torquing it all down, not me. And once I have the housing-pump-pulley assembly, it’ll be easy to put back together – 4 bolts, 3 hoses, plus the alternator.

I’m guessing that at least one reader will look at that giant monologue, say “what the fuck is this guy’s deal?” and never come back to this journal. Right on.

I’m going to wash my hands for the 900th time, and either take a nap, or go to the mall and maybe the movies.

My digital interface project has been a disaster sofar, and I’ve had no luck with it. I spent a couple of hours screwing with it last night – it just involves hooking up three wires inside my PC case, and doing a little soldering, but no luck. I suck at soldering – it frustrates me to no end. By the time I gave up on the project, the apartment was a disaster, and I spent almost another hour putting things away. I’m wondering how many people will be killed during my “simple” water pump swap on the VW tomorrow. I’m thinking of doing some of the work on Saturday, then going home to calm down for a while and finish the job on Sunday. It’s 11 bolts, only 11 bolts, but I’ve got to drain the damn antifreeze first. I wish I had my own garage.

Virginia came over last night and we saw Men in Black. Did I write about this already? During the film, Kim Gibson called and I had to wave her off and promise to call her back today. I thought she had fallen off the face of the Earth – she was living with her boyfriend, and the last time I called, the number was disconnected. She’s in my address book like 28 times – home numbers, work numbers, pager numbers – I don’t know what the fuck’s what. I thought about calling her parents and asking, but I’ve already done that once in the past and I don’t want to repeat it. So she called, and she was at home – her and the boyfriend are living with her parents, and she’s still getting married this summer.

Fuck, I’ve just realized I’ve been telling this story and it’s of nosignificance except to maybe two people on this planet, and neither one reads this. I guess I could go back to the beginning of 1993 and tell the whole story, but I don’t want any permanent, public record that would later piss someone else off. So I’ll shut up, and just say that it was good to hear she hasn’t fallen off the face of the earth, and I’m looking forward to giving her a call later tonight and exchanging the last 6 or 8 months of what’s been going on in my life.

Shit, a lot’s happened in 8 months. That’s 10/19/97 to present. All of the medical bullshit from last fall, a trip home, my first Christmas away from home, Bill moving back to Vincennes, new computer crap, the split with Karena, lots of writing, another car – and those are just the quantitative changes. There have been so many emotional changes I can’t even explain over the phone. Oh well.

I’ve seen 29 of the top 100 American movies. Whether this is good or bad is left as an exercise to the reader.

06/19/98 23:05

I never realized online journals had to have a huge apologetic introduction that tells people who know the journaler not to read any further. When the hell did this start? Why bother doing a journal if its anonymous? The whole anonymous, geocities thing seems a little too odd to me. When is the last time you’ve picked up a paperback novel that said “don’t read this if you know me?”

It’s been an unproductive evening. I had the aforementioned phone conversation with Kim, and we talked for a few hours. There’s an odd rapport between us, but I guess it’s good. I resisted talking about the past, but it eventually came up. I feel stupid talking to anyone about 1992 like it was 1952 or something, but I guess it’s inevitable. Within time, every person’s conversations turn into nostalgia and medical malady.

I have pictures I took one of the last weekends I saw Kim, in 1993. They aren’t of her, or me – I snapped some photos of my room at 414 S. Mitchell, before and after I packed up the last of my shit and moved out. My lease on my boardinghouse room there lasted until August, but I moved back to Elkhart in search of better work, and left the room vacant, along with all of the non-essential gear I couldn’t fit in Ray Miller’s mom’s stationwagon when he moved me back in May. On the 4th of July, I drove my mom’s wagon to get everything else, and while I spent the weekend there, I hung out with Kim for a bit. This was when I was dating Tanya, and she was in Tampa for the summer. I was still very much in love with her, and probably didn’t have second thoughts about it, but there was a weird vibe between me and Kim then. One night we went driving around in her car – she even let me drive – and went to Colonial Crest to see my apartment for next year. It was an eerie combination of eras, seeing the place where I’d spend the next year, spending time with her, sleeping in the room where so much had happened and that I’d soon never see again. I’m suprised I didn’t have an anneurism.

Kim had the disgusting habit of only listening to Billy Joel, something that got my second girlfriend a pink slip (among many other reasons). It’s odd that I still like the album Glass Houses in a weird, closeted way. It was one of the first pop albums my parents owned, so when I was 9 or 10, I played the shit out of it. I still have the entire thing memorized note for note. Don’t tell anyone.

Listening to Fear Factory right now, some heavy duty industrial-metal stuff. It brings back some strong memories from 92 and 93 – answering mail at Ray’s house that summer, listening to this, the Danzig EP, Gorefest, and the second Dismember album on his little CD player.

I’ve got a book to write. I’m sure I’ll be bitching about this water pump transplant tomorrow.

I’ve been obsessed with the image of someone eating a bunch of nutmeg, screaming “I got the fear!” and then jumping out of my window.

Dream last night – I was at my ex-step-grandparents’ house. (i.e. the parents of my mom’s second and now ex-husband) It was a tense situation, and they offered me a drink. Like Bukowski, I asked for a vodka-7. I’ve never had one in real life, so when I knocked it back, I was amazed at what it tasted like.

Still working on Naked Lunch. I think I’m at the halfway point now. It’s nice when I hit a little piece that’s on one of his CDs because I can hear his voice reading it to me. I guess there’s a NL book on tape – maybe I should find a copy.

I feel like I’m getting back into Rumored to Exist mode, even though the wordcount isn’t climbing at this time. I’ve been moving a few things around, and it’s starting to make more sense to me now. I still wish I was writing 2000 words a night – it seems like I’m averaging 200.

Speaking of which – supposed to meet vlore tonight and rent a movie, so I should be writing a bit now…

More vivid dreams last night, but nothing directly related to the book. When I fall asleep and see my characters, then I’ll know I’m fully immersed in this thing. I’m getting more done each day, but it’s still slow.

The reading of Naked Lunch has been smooth, my best attempt yet. Although I’m into all of this beat generation posturing, I’ve never read Naked Lunch all the way through. I love the movie, and I’ve read other WSB stuff. And I love On the Road – I manage to re-read it every year. But I always seem to get stuck partway through NL. It’s a hard book to read – you need to take it slow, and really pay attention. It’s not 100% linear, so you have to be prepared when it throws you by talking about a character that hasn’t been introduced yet. But it’s making more sense now, and giving me ideas.

Nothing else.

06/17/98 22:11

Sometimes, when I pull into my parking spot just as the song on tape is ending, I wonder if this is all choreographed. But, you can drive yourself nuts trying to figure that one out. You’ll end up putting your hand into a radial arm saw and shouting “I bet that wasn’t planned!”

The original soundtrack/score from the movie Naked Lunch is one of my most prized CDs. And I didn’t even buy it – Ray Miller gave it to me when he was in Seattle in 1995. Howard Shore in front of the London Phil, with a lot of horn work from Ornette Coleman. It’s simply incredible, laid-back, eerie stuff. It has this eerie jazz/bop feel, like you’re wandering the dark streets of New York circa 1948, but other tracks have the slightly Tangiers feel of Interzone. A lot of people slag the movie for its variance from the book (not me – I love it) but this music is unmistakably incredible. I was reading the book last night, and I put in the CD – it really hit the spot.

Every once in a while, Michael Stutz sends me something in the mail that makes me think we should find a third writer and start our own beat generation. He could be Al Ginsberg (he’s met him like a million times) and I could get a little more weirded out and be Bill Burroughs. Now all we need is a Kerouac, and maybe a Cassady for kicks. Anyway, Micheal wrote a highly indugent, first-person novel called Sunclipse, that reminds me a lot of Summer Rain. Even more than that, I think we both went through a similar process in writing – the need to get the feelings down, to capture the past, and the inability to turn anyone else on to such a plottless journey. Today he sent me a story he wrote after finishing Sunclipse, that talked about why he wrote it, and reminded me a lot of the writing I did on the third book, about why I wanted to work on Summer Rain. It makes me realize I’m not alone in the work I did on SR, even though I feel alone in that few people have read it or understood what was going on.

I ate at Jack in the Box for the first time tonight. I know, it’s a death sentence, “we cook the shit out of our burgers”, etc. It’s a weird little place because they offer so much on their menu – weird stuff like fish and chips, tacos, breakfast, pita bowls, and more – it’s not just burgers, burgers, and one fish sandwich. I was going to get an antenna ball for my office or something, but I didn’t for some reason. The food’s okay, but I really shouldn’t be eating hamburgers.

I was listening to the track “Welcome to Annexia”, and someone outside honked their horn in almost perfect time with one part, so it sounded like it belonged on CD. As Bill would say, nothing is true; everything is permitted.

I woke up at 7:30, almost full rested, after some weird dreams about playing golf inside a Kroger store and taking a shower in a 2’x2′ stall in the back of a 7-11 while on vacation in New York. I ate a bunch of nachos and salsa right before bed, so blame them.

Nothing else is going on. I’m going to work on my book now.

06/16/98 21:55

The desire to buy a drum set for my office fades as I get into the book. I managed to get a few lines down during lunch, and I’m thinking about it more. I need to let this take over, like a virus, until I can’t talk about anything but time travel and multiple storylines and the whole deal. I hope this happens soon. To help it along, I’m rereading Naked Lunch, getting into Burroughs. His writing seems to get stuck in my head. The last time I read NL was on a plane on the way to Boston. When I got there, I hooked up with some people and went on a massive pubcrawl in Harvard Square. It was the Saturday before Halloween, and people in costumes were roaming the streets. After a few drinks, it all became Interzone to me.

Speaking of, some of Kerouac’s journals from 1948-1950 are in the newest issue of New Yorker. It was $4 and there are only a few pages’ worth, but I really dug it. This was on the tail end of The Town and the City, his first book, but it was the period that was chronicled in On the Road. It’s great, but it makes me wish I had a couple of writing friends here in Seattle, a tight-(or not so tight) knit group of writers and weirdos that end up in all of my stories. My friend Michael Stutz is looking for the same thing, but he’s out in Ohio. Maybe with a few more enlightened souls, we’ll create some kind of online beat generation possee that swaps manuscripts on the web, and takes the occassional roadtrip to meet the others. It’s a thought.

I’m listening to Burroughs’ Spare Ass Annie. More specifically, “The Junky’s Christmas.” I’m probably not going to be home this year, and I’m not going to be with Karena, either. So I guess Christmas will be a few phone calls, a junk food binge, some sleeping in, a few xmas albums, and this track. Sure beats spending 12 hours in an airport, I guess.

Time to get working…

Monday. Raining. Dark. Cold. Pass the Robitussen.

I have an overwhelming urge to buy a drum set. If you’ve ever seen my apartment, you’d see the humor in this statement. I’d have better luck putting it in my office.

One of the editors at Mad magazine has a drum set in his office.

I’ve been listening to the same Jawbreaker CD all weekend.

I almost got in a car wreck last night. The guy in front of me stopped on the bridge on I-5, and I had to lock the brakes at 65, in the rain. I was 100% certain I was going to hit. I stopped so close, I don’t think you could’ve put a sheet of paper between the bumpers.

I think it stopped raining, but it still looks ugly.

I haven’t started writing yet tonight, if that tells you anything about how fucked up my schedule is this weekend.

I spent part of the day at Andrea Milor’s, getting a bunch of photos scanned. It was cool to hang out there – I’ve never spent any time in Redmond before, and it’s good to know I can almost find my way around the east side sometime.

I also paid the ailing VW a visit while picking up some videos at Karena’s. It’s definitely the water pump – I can move the pulley back and forth with my hand, it is wet around the spindle, and the radiator is low. I am going to attempt the repair myself next weekend. I did move the new amp and adjust the gain, and it sounds a lot better than before. I didn’t test it with a MiniDisc, but with a tape, it doesn’t distort as much. It’s hard to really know until you’re driving down the road with the music running.

I thought I was broke all weekend, but it turns out I got paid. So I went to the CD store and picked up some stuff – a CD of Captain Janks prank phone calls, a Jawbreaker album that I really dig, and a KMFDM CD. I don’t know much about them, but the whole German industrial artist thing is pretty cool. It makes me wish I was creating some art instead of sitting on my ass. It also makes me think about painting my whole apartment black, and then tig-welding a bunch of dead machinery, old car parts, and other hunks of metal all over the walls and ceiling until the place looks like the set to a Tool video.

I’ve been doing tiny amount of incremental organizing and rearranging around the apartment, and I’m trying to figure out how to build new bookshelves to replace some of the old ones, in an order to squeeze in a few more books. It’s a real horrorshow when a cleaning operation involves buying hundreds of dollars of Craftsman power tools and raw lumber. I will, of course, paint the new shelves black.

I guess I screwed up and didn’t really write anything on Saturday, since it’s technically Sunday. I’m sure the journal police will find me and beat the living shit out of me later.

Todd Duffin taped two DVDs full of film shorts or me, because there was this Henry Rollins thing on there. I haven’t had time to watch everything yet, so last night I zipped through the tape a bit. To my surprise and delight the film La Jetee was on there. La Jetee is a French film that was the basis for Twelve Monkeys. It’s a a black and white montage film from the early sixties, and it has no moving images – just shots of photos, with narration (which was replaced with English narration here) and a haunting score. It’s about a post WWIII world where everyone is underground living like rats, and the government is experimenting with sending prisoners back in time to get food and energy. It turns out that at the end of the film, the guy realizes that when he was a little kid, he saw himself get killed. So the whole film is really this strange loop.

Weird films like this really get to me, in the good way. I was thinking about this for hours last night, about how their time travel rules and mechanisms worked. I love time travel – I don’t know if it’s because I look back at periods in the semi-near past with extreme nostalgia, or if it’s just the scifi geek in me. Most people would travel into the far future or the far past. Most people are only interested in gold arbitrage, or going back to “the good old days”. If I was seriously given the chance to go to any time, I’d probably only go back 5 or 10 years.

I shouldn’t talk about it because it is a work in progress, and it’s also seriously fucked up at this point, but my second book talks about time travel extensively, which means I’ve spent a lot of time lately “researching” it. (i.e. watching the Back to the Future movies) Any time travel book or movie needs to have a weird twist, like La Jetee’s weird book-ending. There are at least five different versions of me in this book, all talking in first person. It’s not as confusing as it sounds, but it’s confusing enough to make you think.

Why do I lose weight faster when I don’t exercise?

Someday, this war’s gonna end.

06/12/98 21:37

I miss VMS process names. I’m listening to Corrosion of Conformity right now – 5 years ago, I would’ve done a SET PROC/NAME=”VoteWithABullet” and waited for a reply.

The new Details magazine is here, with Ben Affleck on the cover. I didn’t know he was dating Gwenyth Paltrow. Weird. This month’s issue is better than usual; articles grabbing my attention were about demolition derbies and CMC records. I’d like to try the former sometime, and I was suprised to see how mildly positive they were about a record putting out mostly 80’s heavy metal bands, especially considering they are constantly pushing $5,000 watches in their style pages. I think my subscription runs out soon, and when it does, I probably won’t be renewing. They put so many ads in the damn thing, they should be paying me to subscribe.