Author: jkonrath

I got a late start, but managed to pull in a few hours of writing last night. I’m trying to keep going on Rumored to Exist, but I keep hitting slow spots. I finally edged over 60,000 words last night. Every time I get close, I delete a bunch of dead stuff, and slip back a ways. I’m almost out of old stuff to delete, so there shouldn’t be much more slippage. I’m still hoping to finish this piece of shit by the end of August or so.

Since I’m still reading WSB’s The Soft Machine, and it requires extreme attention, I don’t have any current lack-of-attention reading. So, I started reading random snippets of Ted Morgan’s Literary Outlaw, a damn fine biography on Burroughs’ life. Although I have no intention of ending up in a common-law marriage with a benzedrine addict and then shooting her in the head, there are other areas of his life that I wish I could live. I wish I could pack up and go to Vienna for medical school, or spend a few years hiding in Mexico City. It takes money to live free.

I called my friend Larry last night. He’s the one in law school in Chicago, living in his grandpa’s basement. He found some kind of clerk job with a medical firm, where he looks up stuff on a computer all day. He actually gets paid for this internship, unlike 99% of the ones out there for law students. He laid some plan on me about moving to California next year, because he’d be eligible to take the bar without finishing his degree. I think Larry should move to Mexico and become a lawyer, because their brand of justice is more his style. Nothing against Lar, it’s just he would fit in better in a place where bribery is required and everything is rough and tumble, as opposed to the polished yet under the table crap in the US court system. I don’t know, maybe I’ve seen too many Mexican westerns.

My friend Ray switched ISPs for the 27th time in the last 3 years. He keeps subscribing to these piece of shit, hilbilly ISPs that are like $10/month and then he wonders why they don’t work.

I’m still asleep, so I should stop writing.

06/25/98 22:57

I planned on an early start to the writing, but I fell asleep. Now it’s 11pm, and I’m just now starting my dinner. I also had a pretty uneventful day, so I’m going to call it a wash, get to my turkey pot pie, and write more tomorrow.

Sven is carpetbombing me with stuff on his mailing list right now. I think I enjoy reading 1 in 3 things he sends me. I guess that’s better odds than flipping through the channels on a TV, and there aren’t any commercials.

The other day when I was talking, recording, and driving at the same time, I got on a major rant on commercialism, society, and what hasn’t changed since the fifties. I wish I could transcribe it, add more, and get it into it. A summary – all of these Newt Gingrich types want us to go back to he wholesome fifties, a time of family values, blah blah. People have forgotten that the fifties were full of racism, intolerance, the start of the cold war, and the beginning of mass consumerization and the homoginization of America. The sixties happened because the fifties happened. That’s all I’ll explain for now.

I considered starting On the Road last night, after all of this thought of tracing his roadtrips across America in a rental car, taking Hi8 and 35mm images of everything along the way. I’ve managed to read On the Road every year for the last four or five years, and it’s about time for another reading. But I didn’t have the energy for something new, so I read a few chapters from Burroughs’ The Soft Machine. It’s always interesting to fall asleep with stuff like this in your head.

I’m going to look at some more journals.

06/24/98 21:58

A mental circle:

I’m listening to Sigue Sigue Sputnik, a strange throwback to about 1988 for me, when I found the tape in a record store in Stratford, Ontario, and I remembered my friend Roger Eppich’s advice that I should seek out this album at all costs. (At the time, all of the Canadian tapes I found had black shells instead of clear or white. Is this normal? A unique fad to that point in time? Is anyone on Open Pages even old enough to know what a cassette tape is?)

I bought the tape, listened to it on the bus trip home (it was all at night, and they parked the busses for an hour at a rest stop at 3 in the morning when they discovered that the itinerary didn’t account for the difference in time zines) and then the next morning, I went to Roger’s to tell him about the tape and to show him a copy of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, my first copy on CD – I’d already spent years memorizing a version Tom Sample dubbed on tape for me from the vinyl. Roger had pierced his ear since I’d left for Canada, and he said he did it himself. I asked him to pierce mine, and two seconds and no numbing later, he did.

Hell, that circle didn’t work like I planned it. There are a lot of interlocking references, but none circular. I wanted to do an A -> B -> C -> D -> A, but it fell apart. There are some other weird references I could mention from the above – I heard the song “Mother” on the radio today, and I still know all of the words; Roger Eppich lived with Tom Sample briefly in 1987 before Roger went completely insane; something else involving roadtrip with either of these bastards. I’ve spent forever talking about roadtrips with Tom, but one time me and Roger loaded up his piece of shit Citation after a Friday night of work at Monkey Wards and drove to his girlfriend’s place in Middleoffuckingnowheere, MI. Roger could drive like a maniac – we must’ve been airborne at least a few times – and we listened to a soundtrack of what was the coolest industrial mix tape you could hope to find in 1988. We get there, and this weird Bladerunner-esque trip dumps us into the most run-down Pizza Hut in the world, where we ate cheesy bread and waited for this girl to finish work. I can proudly? say I’ve eaten at small, redneck Pizza Huts from New York to Washington, and they’re all the same – families bringing in an army of kids for the weekly “restaurant” food, some idiot feeding quarters into the jukebox and picking the same Winger song 20000 times (once, at the Goshen Pizza Hut, we (me, Tom Sample, maybe Matt Wanke) got there just as a huge line of religious motherfuckers walked in. I went to the juke, fed in a fiver, and picked all of the AC/DC songs on the list, mostly the songs “Hell’s Bells”. (On another side note, my independant testing labs have confirmed that Back in Black is the best all-time CD to have in the player at a pub when you’re getting shit-faced drunk with a couple of buddies. There was a bar called Bear’s Place that was stumbling distance from my house, and once when I was there with my old roommate Yusef on $2.50 pitcher night, I heard the tolling bells and realized they were going to play the whole thing through. We tipped back about 5 pitchers between the two of us during the next 10 tracks, and it really hit the spot))

I don’t even remember if Roger even brought the girl back to Elkhart, or if we just went to say hi for an hour and eat free shit at Pizza Hut, or what. I know that on the way he gave me the “she’s got friends” speech, and when we got there, she gave me the “boy, I wish I could think of a friend for you” speech. Not that I would’ve known what to do back then – even with millions of years of genetic predispositioning, I would’ve been lost. At least Roger was cool enough to occasionally try to steer me in the right direction – give him five bonus points for optimism.

I’m now listening to Billy Idol – it’s some kind of nostalgia night. Believe it or not, but for a brief period of time, I had short, spiked, platinum hair similar to Mr. Idol’s. I don’t have any good pictures of it, though.

I don’t want to spend all night writing pages of obscure stuff that will throw 98% of my readers (what is 98% of 4?). I’ve got a book to write, so I better get to it.

It’s after midnight…

I’ve been obsessed with reading this journal, about endless cool travels on the road. I wish I knew how this guy pays for all of it, so I could get into a similar situation.

Nothing else is happening. I had incredibly vivid dreams about a woman similar to someone I dated toward the end of 1992. It really freaked me out, the level of authenticity, the emotion involved. It made me wish I knew where the hell she went after school.

Connection’s slowing down, on the way to death. I’ll write more tonight.

06/23/98 21:44

It’s almost July and I’m running the heater. Welcome to Seattle.

I don’t know when I fell asleep, and I didn’t know where I was when I awoke. I was freezing, and I rolled on my other side, thinking “go back to that cool dream I had thismorning.” It didn’t work, although I felt like either sleeping for another day, or injecting a cardiac medication directly into my heart with a vetirenarian needle, I knew I had to get out of bed, get a cold drink of something, and force myself to eat a TV dinner, even though I felt nauseous. Said TV dinner (beef tips, carrots, potatoes, a cherry cobbler) has been reconstituted, I’m on my second glass of Sprite, Type O Negative’s latest is in the album, and I feel ready to describe… what was I going to describe tonight?

I keep a running monologue at almost all times, unless I’m 100% buried in interesting work, which hasn’t happened in a while. I don’t know if I would call it a monologue, or more of a daydream. I find a certain topic, a puzzle, scenario, or fantasy, and use it like a screensaver. When something isn’t burning cycles on my brain, I slip into this interactive daydream. In its simplest invocation, I’m figuring out a problem or maybe doing some shopping in my head. For example, maybe I’ve stumbled across a grand from a tax return, and I want to update my computer. When I’m stuck on I-5, I’ll be thinking about this monitor and that motherboard, and getting x amount of memory and video card y. I’ll hash and rehash the combinations and think about installing it, tearing apart the old PC, buying the pieces, and so forth. It’s a simple game that lets me have some fun, and avoid thinking about the ozone layer or the fact that my insurance company is raping me, or whatever.

That’s the simple case. A more expansive and fictitious case would be a few weeks ago, when I was thinking about buying an old Camaro and restoring it. I don’t think I’ll be doing this now, especially in the wake of my latest car repair disasters, but it’s an interesting way to burn up free cycles. Another similar future-planning-for-something-I-won’t-do game is thinking about graduate school – taking classes to get in, what program I’ll try to finish, etc. A flag is usually thrown by the time I think about how I’ll pay for and find time for grad school, versus my inability to get in a program, versus the lack of practical value of a master’s degree given my current situation. Then the whole thing is blown, and i need to find a new mind game, like planning a trip to Amsterdam.

These are the the simple, practical hallucinations to which I subscribe. Here’s a good one that is embarassing to admit, but has pulled me from the depths of heavy depression; a psychiatrist taught it to me about 6 years ago, although it’s fairly obvious: imagine that through some kind of weird inheritance, someone has dropped an incredible amount of cash in your lap. Then extrapolate what you’d do, and how you’d blow $661 million tax-free dollars. It’s like a vial of the purest heroin for your central nervous system – I can roll in this for days, weeks – I’ve been using it on and off since 1992 to keep me in line. It’s totally self indulgent, it’s childish – sort of like the people that play PowerBall every week, and it might put you further off-course than the original depression. But if you’re pointing a loaded gun to your head every day, it can knock you off track long enough for the biological low to pass and for life you resume course somewhat.

Now I have all-out fantasy programming that I can’t even describe here, weird stuff that’s probably dangerous for me to think about for long periods of time. Joining up with old ex-girlfriends, hanging out with famous people, going on book tours for books I haven’t written yet, that sort of thing. Sometimes I wonder if I’m operating beyond the bounds of sensibility, and if I’m hurting myself more than helping with these mind games. There are days I spend more time shopping for Italian sports cars in my head than I spend thinking about the things in front of me, yet I don’t feel detatched or removed. I’m not driving around my neighborhood in a motorcycle thinking I’m in Vietnam like Stacy Keach in Up in Smoke. Yet I’m not one of those super-applied people with three degrees and a shitload of stock options before their 25th birthday. So I don’t know. You tell me.

Like I said, I am listening to Type O Negative’s October Rust, which I think is a beautiful, powerful, and impressive album. When I go shopping for new speakers (winter? fall? spring?) this is the only test album I’m bringing. Aside from the sound, it’s an incredibly emotional album. I first got it when it came out, in September? of 1996. I’m going to go into a tirade here, so let me go back to where it all begins here.

September or so, 1991. Ray is visiting me in Bloomington from South Bend for a long weekend. This is when I am dating the girl Ray refers to as “The Za Chick”, for reasons I’ll have to get into later. He HATES her, and when the three of us our together, it’s like sodium and water, so the time spent only with Ray was the best of the weekend, of course. I left Ray alone with my roommate Yusef so I could go do my thing with the Za Chick one night, and they took off on ten-speeds at 3 in the morning looking for parties, which sounded infinitely cooler than what I endured. Anyway, Ray was there, and this was when I was back in the fold with Metal Curse – because of strict martial law and psychological warfare at home during the summer of 91, I ditched one issue of writing for Ray’s zine, something I put high on my all-time regrets list. But I was back, and when me and Ray were driving around Bloomington in his Escort, eating a Pizza Express pie in the parking lot of the library, he laid this new tape on me, by a band called Type O Negative. The album is called Slow, Deep, and Hard.

“It’s all the guys from Carnivore, but a new name,” he said. Cool, I remember hearing some Carnivore songs like Jesus Hitler a few years before, and thinking they were cool. “These songs are a lot longer, and slower. And totally fucked up,” he said. The tape started with a twelve minute song called “uncuccessfully coping with the natural beauty of infidelity”, which really hit the spot, since I was 100% certain that the Za Chick was fucking everyone else in the galacy, and I was completely oblivious to it. Then, over a fast metal-meets-hardcore beginning, singer Pete Steele said “Do you believe in forever? I don’t even believe in tomorrow.” The album was coated with a self-hatred so thick, it would make Sister Angelica slit her wrists and piss in the severed veins. The music went from a fast but relatively clear metal sound (this was when Death Metal and unintelligable vocals were on the way in, and ultrafast grindcore with little cohesive guitar work was on the way out) and lots of feedback-laden guitar work. Then it would downshift with fifth to first with totally doomy, almost gothic low end stuff, and blood-curdling screams. Although it attacked every part of your brain with extreme toxicity, it had a somewhat accessible tone to it – you could hear the lyrics, which were incredibly depressing, satirical, and offensive.

I really got into this album that fall semester – Ray had picked a winner for me. It was both depressing and funny, and I listened to the violence of “xero tolerance”, the eerieness of “glass walls of limbo” and the extreme, mind-numbing self-hatred of “gravitational constant…” I asked Sid and Matt, a couple of my punk rock friends, about the album, and they were totally into it to – it transcended the barriers between punk and metal, at least for freaks like these guys. And my long and depressing walks at 4 in the morning became Slow, Deep, and Hard walks with the tape in my walkman. It burned into my experience so deep, if I had to pick one album to summarize that few months, that would be it.

Fast forward to the summer of 1992. I was pretty much right about the Za Chick, so Pete Steele is smarter than I thought. I’m now DJing at WQAX thanks to the punk friend Sid, who is the acting GM for the summer and tells me to come in and play whatever the fuck I want. The first thing I spy in the racks is – a prerelease of a new Type O Negative live EP called Origin of the Feces It’s got 7 tracks – two are new, one is an intro called “Are You Afraid” that’s pretty cool, and a cover of “Hey Joe” that’s pretty over the top, sandwiched between the two halves of “Kill You Tonight” (aka Xero Tolerance). I play the SHIT out of the EP – I play the whole thing at least once a week, and play select cuts constantly. Turns out Sid’s doing the same thing. At the end of one week, the Hey Joe cover turns out to be not only the #1 metal song on the station’s charts, but the #1 song played, period!

I get on the case and start letter-bombing Ken Kriete, their manager, and Sophie, the PR rep at their label. Within a week or two, I get a nice letter from Ken and gang saying “don’t you have anything better to play at the station?” and “give us a call if you’d like to set up an interview on the air”.

I don’t know if you can imagine this, but going from worshipping a band’s album to having them say “give us a call, and we’ll talk” is a complete mindfuck. I was nervous as hell – this is an interview Ray didn’t get in the zine, because radio stations usually get the good stuff first. We were both sure that Steele would fuck with me, and I had no idea what questions to ask. The night of the interview, they were late in calling, so I thought they bagged out on me or something, and I went to doing something else on the air. Then I got the call from both Pete (vocals, bass) and Josh (keyboards) and off we went. The whole thing is printed in Xenocide 5, wherever it is on my server these days, but it went from weird to strange to disastrous to hilarious. I think they thought I was pissed off, but I was really just straining to hear over the piece of shit phone link at the studio. Either way, I taped the interview, it was live, and I ran it in my zine later. They wrote back and sent me a Type O Negative pin (a black circle with a green minus inside of an o) and I proudly wore it on my jacket until it fell apart about a year ago.

Their next album was highly anticipated and highly delayed. I re-ran the interview in the spring of 93 with an addendum, since I heard the album was coming out that summer. Perfect timing – I got the promo for Bloody Kisses the weekend I was with Ray at the Metalfest (~June 31, 1993). This album was more produced, less metal, more gothic, and just as powerful as the last. I played the shit out of my copy while awaiting my return to Bloomington from my temporary exile in northern Indiana for the summer. This album completely blew me away – it was incredibly catchy, but still had the weird invade-your-soul propertyu that tore you apart with depression and angst, yet made you feel good about it. There was still a lot of humor, but no chainsaws and “kill you tonight” type stuff like the last album. I was depressed about my girlfriend at the time being in Tampa while I was stuck in Shithole, IN, and songs like Blood and Fire and Can’t Lose You permeated while thinking about her. I loved this album – it had its weak points, but I thought it was incredible.

I guess some other people thought so, too, because within a few months, a lot of goth people really got into the album, and it went a lot further than its original metal roots. So when I wore my jacket, a few non-metal people would see the pin and say “hey, Type O Negative!” and I could lay the story on them. Then, one night I was reading the liner notes, and – I saw that John Conner from WQAX was thanked. Hey, that’s me! They totally misspelled it, but it was there. By the time I found this, the album had already gone gold, so it was an even bigger deal.

So I kept listening, especially since I walked everywhere in the 93/94 school year and I had my walkman on for at least 20 hours a week. Bloody Kisses was the perfect album to listen to when it’s 2 in the morning and you have to walk 3 miles to get back home. It’s even better when you’re completely devastated by the loss of a girlfriend and you need something to enrich your depressive lows. It became the soundtrack for my long-ass walks back from campus that fall and spring, and permeated most of my memories in that area.

Fast-forward to September of 1996. I’m in Seattle, at the Bellevue Silver Platters, and I grab the new album, along with $100 of other stuff. The clerk looks at it and says “hey, I heard about this…” and I lay into the ego trip. (Once I was at Tower and a clerk saw the button and said “cool button”. My reply: “Pete Steele gave it to me”. Him: “You heard Bloody Kisses?” My reply: “I was thanked in the liner notes.” His reply: “Check this out…” and he rolled up his shirt and showed me that he had one of the gargoyles from the digipak artwork tattooed on his back. End of ego war.) I got the album home, and started the memorization…

October Rust is a much more produced and consistent album than the others, and it seems like they went totally all out with the gothic thing, but still poked fun at it, which is good. It has more songs about relationships than the others, and it’s more of sadness and nostalgia than depression and rage. Songs like “Love you to death”, “Die with me”, “Haunted”, and “Burnt flowers fallen” knocked me over like a full-speed metro bus full of lead. I was already in an extreme depression at the time, and listening to stuff like this filled it out nicely. It’s not like Pink Floyd or something that pushes you over the edge – it just provides a nice soundtrack for what you’ve got. And the lyrics are simple, but try on stuff like this when you’re depressed about someone that dumped you:

now like a bird
she flew away
to chase her dreams
of books and praise
still i miss her
yeah i miss her
since she’s gone

 

girl i want to die with you
in each other’s arms
we’ll drown in flame

I’ve rambled for long enough. Now the apartment’s too hot. I appreciate it if you made it this far.

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…