Author: jkonrath

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The Drugstore Habit

I used to have a bad habit of going to the drugstore on a Sunday evening and dropping a decent sum of money on random stuff that I suddenly realized I needed: razor blades, acne medication that promised to work, cases of RC cola, issues of Lowrider magazine, that new Michael Crichton novel, whatever. And at various points in my geography, the drug store became a Target, which is basically a drug store but they also sell furniture and motor oil and low-end clothes. And I guess for a year, it was a Marsh grocery store, but Marsh pretty much was just a drug store that also sold 36 aisles of food. I think one of the reasons I did this is because in Indiana, everything closes at 5:00 PM on a Sunday, except Osco’s and Walgreens. (And grocery stores and Target…) And in a need to do something on Sundays, I’d go to the only thing open, and it was hypnotic, and I would suddenly realize I’d need dental floss, or beef jerky, and boom… $57.86 of consumer goodness.

And now I realize that I can’t really shop at pharmacies anymore; they have become colluded over the years. I went to a CVS last night (shampoo, glasses cleaner, legal pads, facial cleanser) and it was just impossible to shop. Maybe it was a New York thing, but whatever hypnotic spell the drug stores of 10 or 15 years ago in Indiana had, these ones had the total opposite. The aisles were spaced wrong, the ceiling height was different, everything was laid out in this “get-your-stuff-and-get-the-fuck-out” manner that broke the spell for me. And I had a friend that used to soapbox on this for ages, but drug stores have gradually sunk into this hole. It used to be drug stores had a soda fountain, and ice cream cones and a sandwich bar, and you went there to relax. They were like the Cheers bar, but no alcohol. And if you needed some tincture of iodine too, they had it. And when’s the last time you saw a drug store with a soda bar? You haven’t, because all of those old-timey stores with the hand-painted signs and the zinc ceilings and whatnot got bought out and gutted, and replaced with an exact clone of the CVS store that they have in 5,700 other cities. Has anyone written a book about this? Someone should. (Not me, though!)

I am in the middle of trying to get book 3 going. I know there are really like 9 books or whatever, but there are basically only two (Summer Rain and Rumored to Exist) and all of the other ones are greatest-hits/live at the Budokon sort of things that don’t “count”. So now, book three. And I need another book like Rumored. I need ten like Rumored. So this time, I’m trying to write a full outline, with three acts and all of that shit, for a book, and then I will have a whole plot, and I won’t have to play the “it’s a book about nothing” game that made 98% of the people out there look at me like I was starting a NAMBLA chapter in the back of a day care center. The book will have all of the expected dark zaniness of Rumored, but be a book. I think. I hope. But no word on this until it’s underway, because this is the part I always fuck up.

Not much else. I wish I was back in Alaska now. OK, back to work.

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Back from Alaska

I’m back from Alaska. I actually got back at noon yesterday, but I was up all night on the flight back, and I am taking the day to decompress and relax and stuff. I am loading the pictures to Flickr, but it is taking forever because there are 800 of them.

(Update: Flickr photos are here. Note that Flickr appeared to lose 12 of the photos during the impossible batch upload, and it will take me forever to figure out the 12 missing, and take 754 hours to upload those 12, so try to avoid the Flickr page, and try to avoid them in general, as it appears they have written an entirely impossible to use tool that’s about as reliable as a piece of wet toilet paper as a birth control method.)

The trip report [gone, sorry] is just a bulleted list now, and partially makes no sense, but I will try to expand it at some later time. Sarah actually scheduled and planned the trip at the last minute, and booked reservations and stuff for everything so we didn’t spend the whole vacation at the mall or eating at Arby’s or whatever, which is what would have happened if I went alone. So we got to do a lot of cool stuff. Probably the best thing there, and maybe the best thing I’ve ever done, was a snowmobile tour we took out of Girdwood, south of Anchorage. It was with Glacier City tours, at snowtours.net. They first airlifted us out of Girdwood Airport in a Robinson R-44, which is a tiny little four-seater. We went up and over a mountain, and then at about 6,000 feet up, we were dropped off on a glacier. There, we met our guide Chris at a basecamp, which consisted of nothing more than a tent and a bunch of snowmobiles. There was nothing but white all around us, densely packed snow, with the very occasional bamboo trailpost marking where we got to go. We took off on three polaris snowmobiles, which were an absolute blast to drive. You sit low to the ground, and even though we were surrounded by ice, it wasn’t that cold outside, and I wore a light jacket and gloves. It was a completely surreal experience, being in such cold-looking surroundings, but wearing what you’d normally wear on a May day, plus helmet and gloves. And I have prescription sunglasses, but after a half-hour of wearing them, everything looked normal because it was so bright from the reflection. The trails started simple, and then we gained speed, to where we could drive along at 40 or so miles an hour, which seems catastrophically fast when you’re right off the ground, with an open-visor helmet and no windshield, and you’re trying to hang on to your snowmobile. We stopped in a lot of places, usually where the snow ended and the mountain began, and got to crawl up for many million-dollar views. It was seriously like mountain-climbing in Tibet, but without the pesky climbing. And once we got done snapping a few pictures and admiring the view, we got back on and rode down a ski hill at insane speeds. There was even part that was like a giant natural half-pipe, covered in snow, where we could carve the side of the hill and then turn, reverse, and do the same on the other side. It was absolutely fun, and if you ever go to Alaska, it is a must-do.

There was a lot of white and glaciers and ice for the trip – we also took a cruise down the fjords south of Seward and saw a big glacier there. The big chunks of ice were blue instead of white or clear, which is weird. If I could find a way to make that ice in a bar with a machine, I would be an instant billionaire. We got to sit and watch this huge glacier calf and drop off big pieces of ice, which was pretty awesome. We also chartered a sailplane on our last day and saw two glaciers, one more like a field of ice, and the other more of a cliff. Lots of pics to be seen on my pages, so look for that stuff, even though a snapshot does not do it justice. On the cruise we also saw a lot of wildlife, like bald eagles, orca and humpback whales, sea lions, sea otters, a brown bear, and a million birds I cannot identify. And when we were driving in Girdwood, we saw a female moose standing at the side of the road. I jumped out and got a couple of photos, but was scared (mostly of some weird flea-borne disease) to get too close. She didn’t really care either way, she was just busy eating some bushes.

Speaking of which, lots of lesbians in Alaska. Lots of tough guy types too. Lots of jailbait. Lots of Jesus. It’s a very southern type of atmosphere at first, especially with the biggest economic booms being construction, petroleum, and the military. It isn’t really southern in the typical redneck Alabama way, though, and it’s hard to put your finger on it. There’s the whole outsider, outlaw thing, but there are so many differences. Yes, everyone drives pickups, but everyone needs pickups, because you never know when you’re going to have to drive 100 miles in the dirt and mud. Everyone loves guns, but everyone needs a gun. One of the big stories the day we left was that a dude woke up to breaking glass in his house, got the gun, went downstairs, and was face-to-face with a 400-pound black bear. He unloaded the glock into him at point-blank range, and the bear turned around and said “you got anything else to eat?” (Of course, it says something that this story was front-page news there.)

I always expected Alaska to be the land of frozen everything, but the whole time we were there, I didn’t need a jacket. It was nicer there than it is currently in New York. What was weird was that we could go up into the mountains and see the snow and ice, but then go back down and be in 76 degree weather. One day, we went to the Alyeska ski resort and took their tram up to the top. I figured ski season was long since over, but when we got up there, the mountain was open, and a whole bunch of kids were on snowboards, carving it out on the mountain. It was so abnormal to be up there in jeans and a t-shirt, watching people in their “winter” gear on the slopes. In fact, some people weren’t in winter gear – we saw a lot of dudes with no shirts and sunglasses, riding their boards.

Overall, I liked Alaska a lot. It was very quiet and quaint when I was there, and the people overall (with the exception of the rude blue-hairs in their tour groups) were very nice. Everyone was pretty laid back, and politically, everyone was pretty close to my own views. I want to go back again. Actually, if I could find a way to live there, and then spend the winters in Oahu, I’d be pretty much set.

Still waiting on Flickr. God damn, their upload tool is slow. Anyway, back to work tomorrow (if I can even find the place.)

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Constant daylight

I seriously think there’s more open WiFi in Anchorage than there is in New York City. It’s pretty weird. Anyway, morning of day three here, and I’m debating on whether or not to just keep updating as we go, as opposed to writing a giant travelogue when I get back (that noboy will read.)

The sunlight thing is really fucking weird. On our first night, we went to bed at like 10:30, which was like 2:30 our time, and it was broad daylight out. It was seriously like noon. I woke up to take a leak at like 2 AM and it was just barely dusk. The sun was setting and it was turning red on the horizon, but it was still light enough to read a newspaper outside. Last night, I woke up at about 4:30 AM, and the sun was already coming back up.

The night we got here, there was smoke in the air and it made your eyes tear a bit. It reminded me of when I visited my land in Colorado in the summer of 2002, when half the state was a wildfire. I thought maybe it was a preventative burn, but we saw the Sunday morning paper and it was a forest fire that took out 150 acres. You could still smell the burning wood, although it’s about gone now.

We got an early start yesterday, and drove around a lot. We have a Toyota Matrix, which is pretty much the same as the Zipcars we always get in NY. We went to a Denny’s for breakfast, then went to a Fred Meyer. I’ve forgotten how extensive Fred Meyer is – it’s like the nerve center of all grocery stores. We found more forgotten, new, and jumbo-sized products than I’d ever seen. In New York, you can’t even find corn dogs – they had a whole freezer case of them. They had two-liter bottles of gatorade, which I’d never seen. Lots of other weird stuff. They also have Kroger brand stuff, which was a blast. I found a generic package of Kroger sex lube, which was really hilarious for some reason. I didn’t get that, but we did get a cartful of water, drinks, and other crap, which is much better than paying $3 a bottle downstairs for water, and we have a fridge in the room, too.

We walked to a cafe for lunch – I really wish I remembered names or took notes, and I’m too lazy to search. But after that, we checked out a huge museum of Alaskan history. They had a weird bird exhibit, lots of stuffed falcons eating stuffed and viscerated wombats and whatnot. Lots of Alaskan art, ranging from landscape photos to native stuff made from bones and ivory. The ivory carvings were incredible. The general history part wasn’t bad, with a lot about the Aleutians and Russian Orthodox, and some cool stuff about the pipeline. There was also a smaller Russian Orthodox museum across the street, but it was closing right as we got there.

We caught a big mall on the way back, and bummed around more before going on another big drive, checking out more stuff. We found a bunch of houses built in this strange style, with almost flat roofs, a sort of shed-style 80s thing. We also found a lake by the airport that was entirely made of slips for small, one-engine floatplanes. They were all arranged like houseboats on a lake, but the middle part was their virtual runway. The airport itself is a trip too, nothing but huge widebodied jets from the lower 48, or tiny single-props flying to the bush, and nothing in between. We also drove through a huge park that was road going nowhere, maybe a former military base turned public, with a lot of construction but nothing other than this single road. There was a bridge crossing the road at one point, all brand new engineered lumber, but nothing on either side. The road finally emptied out to a big rec area on the shore, with lots of people mountain biking.

Eventually, we ended up eating at a place called Gwennie’s Old Time Alaskan Inn, which was sort of a dive, across the street from a Harley dealer, but it had a lot of charm. They had tons of pretty cool photos on the wall of when Anchorage was nothing more than two general stores and a whorehouse. Their sourdough bread was still being made from a starter they used before the war. And I think my plate of BBQ ribs was pretty much the whole animal with some sauce on it for $12.

I think that was all of yesterday. Today’s Memorial Day, and we’ll see what’s open. It’s my turn in the shower, so that’s all for now.

P.S. I was thinking about this the other day, and realized that Anchorage’s weather is actually better than Elkhart’s in all seasons. Elkhart gets much colder in the winter, and much hotter in the summer. Plus in Elkhart, you pay a lot of tax that goes toward nothing, while here you pay no tax, and the government gives you like a grand a year in oil revenue.

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Hello from Alaska

Hello from Alaska! Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I am SSHed to my Mac back in New York, and I’m on the 8th floor of the Captain Cook hotel in downtown Anchorage. It’s 9:12 PM and it is broad fucking daylight outside. I think we have another four hours of daylight tonight, and my body thinks it’s 1:12 AM. This could be a major problem.

Today’s 10-odd hours of flying was made much better by flying in first class. We had seats 1A and 1B the whole way; on the first leg of the flight, we were the first on, the first off, and the first served with every round of food and drink. While the poor schmucks in coach got a micro-bag of pretzels and nothing else, we ate a nice lunch off of china with real silverware and drinks in actuall glass glasses. Quite a nice change. This was slightly distracted by a late departure due to fog, and a required spring across O’Hare from gate C567 to gate B1, but once we got there, we got the royal treatment. Plus I had the laptop with two batteries, and watched about three movies, plus played a monster SimCity marathon.

Alaska’s pretty damn nice. It’s nothing like anything I’ve seen before, although there are hints of previous pasts in there that remind me of things. There’s that touch of Seattle, since they are distant cousins on some weird way. They share some similar regional businesses, and the nature is of the same genre, albeit much more pronounced here. There are some excellent mountains on every horizon, which remind me of my land in Colorado, but things are much bigger here. It reminds me a bit of my time own in Southwestern Washington, the smallness and the industry. But it’s more than any of those, and I’ve barely seen the place.

We checked into the Captain Cook, which seems like an okay place. Some of it reminds me a bit of what would have happened if Long John Silver’s every launched a line of upscale restaurants. Lots of dark wood. The rooms themselves are pretty neutral. We’re right on the corner, so we have huge windows facing both north and east, and have a good view of the city. There isn’t a lot of a city here, but we did go for a walk, looking for some food. We’re just over from the city square, which isn’t much. Things are pretty spread out here. It’s nice though, a nice breeze going through the windows and a very laid back feel.

Should I stay up a few more hours and push the internal clock? Or do I crash now and wake up at 4 in the morning? And can I even sleep now? It’s seriously as bright outside as it is at noon back home. I guess I should see what’s on the tube.

P.S. Buy the new book!!

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The Necrokonicon

Okay, the big news first. The Necrokonicon is now available! Go to http://www.lulu.com/content/309317 to check it out. I was a little worried about hot it would look, but now that it’s in my hands, I’m more than happy with it. The cover looks sharp, the photo mosaic is great, and the weird little 9×7″ size is very cool. I love the way the inside layout worked, and the fonts and two-column pasteup are perfect. It’s a neat little book. I worry about whether people will want to read a document that lends itself to hypertext in a linear format, but it’s also the kind of thing you flip open to a random page and read. So go steal mom’s credit card, do $10 damage (plus shipping) and let me know what you think.

I’m leaving for Alaska tomorrow. I’m very happy to be getting out, but I still haven’t packed. I have been loading up the laptop with movies, and I have an extra battery to survive the long trip. I haven’t really stocked up on any extra reading material, but I’ll grab some magazines when I get to the airport. I am really psyched about getting up there and taking some great pictures, eating awesome food, and seeing the great outdoors. Okay, Anchorage isn’t the North Pole, but it isn’t Wall Street either.

I got to see my old UCSSC pal Andrea Donderi on Wednesday. She was in town to hang out with her parents and brother, and she crashed with us for a night until everyone else got in town. We went out to eat at Alias, and hung out a bit. It was unfortunately too short of a time, just dinner and bit of walking around the neighborhood, but it was still cool to see her. I think I’ve seen Andrea more than any of my other Indiana friends, not due to any favoritism or anything, but because she’s always catching up to family out here, which is cool.

Last night I started reading Rumored to Exist again, with plans to take it with me, and also to try to get back into that mindset to start work on the next book. I’m surprised at how much I still really like the book. Now that I’ve been away from it for so long, I start to see some of the structure, the lines through the book and the methods I used to piece together narratives. And I thought I would think the book is drivel, but I still really do enjoy reading it. That, to me, is the reason why I write. It’s not a business, or how many I sell, or “how many people I touch” or whatever. It’s whether or not I can come back to something after forgetting it for five years and read it and really, deeply enjoy it. So there you go.

Goodbye, farewell, see you all on 6/6/06. (And of course I know it’s Slayer Day.)

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Another book done

The book is done. Well, maybe. I uploaded the last iteration of the cover and the body, and ordered a copy, and when I get it and look at it and make sure it’s fine, then it’s done. Maybe I’ll get it before I leave next week for vacation, or maybe I won’t. I don’t think a lot of people are at the edge of their seats for this one, except for those couple of people who aren’t going to buy one, but still want to read it just to find my spelling fuckups or whatever. It always amazes me that I ask people to read stuff 28 times before I print it, and the dickheads that take the most pleasure out of finding others’ mistakes always wait until after it goes into print to make a federal case over a transposed period and paren.

This book was worse than the others because I picked this weird 9×7″ size. I could not get the PDF to jive with the printer’s auto-PDF-reader-sizer crap. Distiller would either kick out a 9×7 that looked like an 8.5×11 to the world, or it would print a 7×9 landscape instead of a 9×7 portrait, which are the same size and orientation, but not the same thing. All of my other books are 6×9, and I wanted something different in the lineup. I thought about square, but they just started offering this new size, and it worked perfectly with the glossary’s weird size. So it ended up being 200 pages, and $9.99. No barcode, no Amazon, no stores, just ordering from lulu.

I’m glad this fucking book is done so I can forget about Indiana for a while and work on something else. I’m reading a lot of different stuff right now to sort of relax my mind. I should be reading the book about Alaska I bought last week, but I still haven’t. Something to do tomorrow, I guess. It’s too damn big to read on the subway. I’m debating whether or not I should cut the pages out of the spine and only bring the ones for Anchorage.

So it’s a nice day, and we just got a zipcar to go out and go to the mall or something. More news on the book when I get my copy, etc.

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Writing a book in an empty forest

I have put a small news page for info as I get the Necrokonicon ready for print. It’s located here. I have been incredibly depressed as this book nears completion, mostly because I am almost certain in my mind that nobody will buy it, read it, or even understand why I would do it. And a lot of my lack of excitement has to do with the fact that this isn’t my pride and joy baby or whatever, but just something that I have to do so I can get it done and move on. The reason I am doing this is not so I can be the next Dan Brown. I don’t expect every Oprah-watching housewife in middle america to rush out and buy my book. I’m just doing it so I can stop fucking writing about Indiana. Because as long as the glossary is sitting on my site, every time the IU Foundation takes one of my old favorite places to eat and shop and turns it into a new parking lot or Urban Outfitter, I won’t feel the need to break my train of thought and go research it from the piece of shit Bloomington newspapers that don’t publish articles online unless you send them a DNA sample and buy three subscriptions, and update the stupid site, for fear some dumb fucker leaves me a comment telling me I’m an idiot because I don’t know the facts about a store that I’ve never visited, in a state that I largely avoid, that happens to be built on the ground of a 7-Eleven where I bought a Coke once, in 1989.

I watched that movie Art School Confidential last weekend. The bullet review is that it’s okay – too much of an attempt to slap a serious plot on a Clerks-type film, but some good jokes here and there, and Malkovich plays a convincing weirdo, if you can believe that. There was this whole subplot where the main character was doing what art he thought was best, but was running into problems where everyone else was doing really stupid “art” shit that was essentially worthless, but was praised by the teacher and others. And he goes to visit the Malkovich professor to discuss whether he should change styles or work on finding his own voice or whatever, and he realizes that the teacher has been painting giant paintings with just a triangle on them. And the teacher praises his attempts at work and says that maybe someday, after 25 years of hard work, he can find his own voice, like the stupid triangles paintings that he’s turning out.

I guess that sums up about what I’m thinking now. The Indiana thing is dead and gone for me, even if I have an almost-complete book of stories about Indiana, and at least two half-done, all-dead book maunscripts about it. I’m sick of writing neaty-neat prose because people just look for the plot points and the predicable story, of which there are only about 12 possible ones, total, in the world. I know just about everyone hated Rumored to Exist, or didn’t get it, but it’s the closest thing that I’ve wrote to what’s in my mind. Writing soap opera dreck in novel form is bullshit. When people started inventing cameras, painters stopped painting Polaroid-portraits of people. In a world as fucked up as the one we live in, I shouldn’t be forced to say “Oh, it’s The Sound of Music, but with gay cowboys” when I’m thinking of ideas for a book.

I want to write the books that Kilgore Trout was supposed to write in Vonnegut’s books, and I want to get to the point where I can write them just as fast. I want to write stories that Crispin Glover would say are too fucked up to print. I don’t want to have paragraphs and chapters and lines and arcs and subplots and all of that shit – I want to find a way to make a total braindump of sheer anarchy readable somehow. I want to do this, because I can only occasionally find writing that’s like this, that I really like. Mark Leyner’s books were the first that really made me think the revolution had arrived. And his last book was a stupid worthless trivia book. I want more books like this, and I can’t find them, so I will write them.

So fuck all of you for not buying my other books, and I don’t care if you buy any of the new ones. I am writing to fill my bookshelf. If you happen to look at what I put out there and like it, great. If you write similar stuff, or can point me to some similar stuff that I could buy, even great. If you don’t like it, you’re always welcome to to buy the latest plagarized, fictionalized, non-fiction book from Oprah’s list and act like you’re smart.

Fuck, am I ever glad I’m going on vacation. In two weeks, I will be on a plane (first class, no less), going to Alaska. I bought an extra battery for my laptop so I will have enough juice for the flight, and I’m ripping a bunch of movies from DVD so I can pack those on the drive. I still don’t know what the hell we are doing, but I plan to buy another Alaska book or two when we’re out tonight, so we’ll see. Lots of photos, hopefully. And maybe some flying, like a little seaplane or whatever.

Okay, time to go read…

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Zoo, Intrepid, glasses cleaning-related breakdown

Long weekend. Sarah’s sister and sister’s boyfriend were in town from Milwaukee, and that was cool but also kept me very busy. On Saturday, we went to the Bronx Zoo. (Pics on flickr here.) The zoo wasn’t bad, although getting to the Bronx was a pain because of the usual MTA weekend issues. The zoo’s big, and I guess I haven’t been to another zoo in recent memory to have a basis of comparison. I think I went to the Seattle zoo about ten years ago, but all of the animals were asleep and the whole place was small, about as big as one of the “worlds” in the Bronx zoo. Everything was cool, though. My personal favorites were the polar bear, the apes, and some of the indoor jungle-looking scenery, which reminded me of the arboretum we saw in Amsterdam, with very high humidity and that jungle smell of very rich soil and plants.

On Sunday, just me and Dan went to see the USS Intrepid museum, while the girls did their own thing. I got a membership, so if anyone’s in town and wants to get in free, I’m your hookup. (Oh, flickr pics here.) The museum was basically the same as last time I went in 2003, except the planes on deck were moved, and they swapped the USS Edson for a big barge containing one of the Concorde SST jets. We walked through the Concorde – there were jetways on either door, so you could walk into the midsection and then walk up to the front and back down. The inside was all blocked with plexiglass to stop dumbasses from tearing out seats or trays, so it looked a bit odd. The cockpit door was open, but there’s such a long stretch between the plexiglass barrier and the actual seats, you could barely see the gauges and dials. The cockpit had a very distinct smell though, and then I realized it smelled like my old tape player in my first car when it was brand new, and the sunlight oven in the passenger compartment activated the new plastic smell of the 80s technology. It was a very distinct smell, and oddly coincidental that all of the electronics in the nose of the plane smelled the same way.

Anyway, the Intrepid was good, although those Navy ship ladder-stairs aren’t made for a gimp with a bad knee. By the time I cleared the gift shop (got a book written by one of the radar operators on the old ship), got a cab, and got us home, I was seriously hobbling. After some sleep and general rest around the house, I’m feeling fine now.

Re the flickr thing, I’m still not sure if I like it or hate it, but it’s easy to do, and I’m lazy, so I’ll keep dumping new pictures there, until I find something better. I ordered a couple of prints from my last Hawaii trip, blown up to 8×10, and they looked pretty good, and for an okay price. I like that aspect of the operation, especially for other people who want to print photos, without me having to set up some giant operation and move the sun over 28 feet to get it all to work.

I’m having a serious glasses cleaning-related breakdown right now. My glasses were very easy to clean when I first got them in December, and now it takes me 278 tries with 22 cleaning solvents and 97 sheets of three different types of cleaning pad or sheet to get them even vaguely translucent. And usually on about the 273rd pass at cleaning (and each pass involves me cleaning the glasses; cleaning my hands; cleaning the glasses; cleaning all surfaces of the room where I’m cleaning; cleaning the glasses; cleaning my hands; then seven passes of successive cleaning with additive and subtractive amounts of solvents and water of different temperatures, and if I mess up any of these parts, the pass doesn’t count and I have to start over) one of the lenses smears about to the same effect as emptying a one-pound tub of Vaseline on a contact lens. I’m very frustrated with cleaning my glasses, especially after 30 years of glasses wearing, and I really wish I could get LASIK, but I can’t.

Okay, I must go clean my glasses.

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Thousand Mile War

I’ve been sick all week, with a really light cold. It’s so mild, I have almost no symptoms and it hasn’t been the knock-you-down sort of virus like usual. But even the slightest cold seems to mentally knock me out of orbit and make me feel like the living dead. I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything lately, and that blows away any chance of writing or doing anything creative, hence the lack of updates.

I got a Flickr account, or rather paid them the $25 to become a Pro user. My account is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkonrath/. I am still not sure why I did this. There are a million little bugs that I need to work out to get it integrated into my life, and I’m still not sure I want to ditch the photos hosted on my site. I hate the gallery script I have, but I’m not that fond of how it does things, either. I also know the second I get all of my crap up there, the company will go stupid or raise their rates to an unholy amount. For now, I’m just playing, and it might be a better solution, but who knows. And if you have flickr (or something else), please let me know and maybe I can bounce some of my problems off of you and see if there are obvious solutions I missed.

I just finished reading The Thousand-Mile War by Brian Garfield, and it’s one of the best World War II books I’ve read in a while. It’s about the war fought in Alaska’s Aleutian islands (the westmost tiny pieces of lava on Alaska’s “tail”.) Not many people know the Japanese captured a few of these islands, actually bringing the war home to American soil. The resulting battles were a comedy of tragedies that remind me of a real-life Catch-22 and made this an incredible read.

First of all, the Aleutians are a shithole. There’s this constant low-pressure front that creates basically a permanent hurricane of fog and high winds right over the islands. Planes can’t see anything; weird mineral deposits and iron ore threw off compasses; and radar was so primitive, the 11th Air Force went out the bomb the shit out of Japanese submarines once and after unloading their HE on target, found out they actually cratered a grouping of uncharted islands instead of Jap pigboats. There were no maps of Seward’s Folly, especially the far extremes. The Army was using a Rand-McNally map that you’d find in front of a third-grade classroom to plan their invasions. Radar was primitive and largely unavailable. When planes did have this new feature, they would often do stuff like report a flock of geese as a Japanese naval division. Aside from the wind, there was the fact that this was a place with super-low temperatures, where you had to keep two pairs of boots, one on your feet and one on the stove that you switched out every fifteen minutes. Men were living in tents that knocked over daily in 90 MPH winds, with mud floors. Entire islands were made of mud that sucked in trucks, boots, and airplanes. Airstrips couldn’t be made of concrete, since it would freeze and crack instead of cure, and you couldn’t dig down enough. They used premade steel mesh strips, which worked, but weren’t much fun when wet, which was constantly.

Aside from the environmental problems, there were tactical and governmental issues. Uncle Sam couldn’t decide whether or not there should be any troop strength in the area, since it was tactically useless property. The first round of Navy ships were old mothballed WWI dinosaurs that were brought out of retirement, which led to some extremely lopsided engagements between the US and Japan’s top-notch fleet. Not that many men were sent to Alaska. When they were, they usually got told they were going to the Pacific, and then got piled in windowless trains to Seattle, where they were shipped out and then told their destination. News was heavily censored back then, and very little was said about the Alaskan theater. Troops weren’t rotated out regularly, and supplies were a major issue, both because of the lack of government buy-in, but because of the difficulty in sending stuff up north. This was before the Alcan highway was built, and you couldn’t just pile up a deuce with shipping crates and head north. The territory of Alaska as a whole wasn’t self-sufficient and needed to ship in stuff to live. Result: lots of troops eating C-rations and canned Spam three meals a day, freezing their asses off in tents that collapsed every day, counting off days until never, when they could go home.

Garfield’s book reads like a modern-day Clancy novel, but better. He was a fiction and screenplay writer before he turned to history, actually writing the infamous Death Wish book that became Dirty Harry’s movie vehicle. The whole book flows well, and he has a great talent for making you feel like you’re following the battle from a recon plane, rather than just reading a regurgitation of facts and dates. He also pulls together a lot of the weird coincidences and factoids that make the story funny, either in a ha-ha or dark comedy way. It’s good stuff.

Not much else. I just started reading Kerouac’s new (well, newly compiled and released) book of journal entries. It’s not bad. I actually skipped the stuff from when he was writing his first book and jumped into the writing of On the Road.

I was hoping for a good weekend of great weather after the 70-something weather the other day, but it looks like it’s dipping into shitty and raining all weekend. Maybe it’s a good time to make a drive to the mall…

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Nine Years

I should mention this now, because I never update this anymore, and I will simply forget to do so later: as of next Monday, this journal is officially nine years old. Okay, there were a couple of periods when I didn’t journal online. But dig this: 662 entries; 461,837 words. That’s roughly double the size of Summer Rain, and the most-received comment on that book is that it’s way too long.

I’d like to write some huge, introspective thing about what this means to me. But honesly, I’m surprised I’ve lasted this long. I’ve been keeping paper journals since 1993, but I almost never get a chance to write anything in there anymore. It used to be a daily ritual, but I just wrote something in there a few weeks ago, and I noticed I hadn’t updated since we were in Vegas in January. I need to do something about that.

Not much is up otherwise. I am listening to the new Joe Satriani, and it’s good, but I can’t tell yet if it’s great or not. He hasn’t had an album that really grabbed me since Crystal Planet, back in 1997. (When the journal started.) I have the new Queensryche album on the way, and I hope it’s interesting.

This weather is positively dreadful. It went from “almost nice spring day” to “January shitburger rain and cold” in about 24 hours. Even thinking about looking outside makes me feel absolutely morbid. I feel like I need to get a dozen of those lightbox full-UV lamp bulbs and permanently affix them to my head. Maybe I can mount them to a walker and push them around the house with me.

I was sitting in a diner tonight with nothing to read, and I found I had one of those Moleskine journal books that I started to fill last summer, but all of the entries were completely disjointed and made no sense. Like one entry said “write journal entry about guilty pleasure – liking Black Sabbath albums w/o Ozzy on them.” I’m not sure what the fuck to make of that. The next page was a drawing for a mouthguard you wear when you sleep that contains a bunch of sonicare-type toothbrush heads and fluoride injectors, along with a notation of “would cause drowning in sleep?”

I still get, on the average, a million-dollar idea every three or four days, but I never write them down. Some of them are obvious, and some require far too much capitol for me to pull off. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I thought if you had a really high-scale mall, it would make a lot of sense to install a driving range like the one they have out at Chelsea Piers, so the husbands could put a charge card in the wife’s hands and send her to Nordstrom or whatever, and they could get out the 3 iron and hit some balls. And an overpriced pro shop, of course.

Crap. I started reading old journal entries. Now I’m going to spend all week going through them. I should get off of here while I can.