Author: jkonrath

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fingers, food poisoning

OK, last week was pretty much a wash. First, a week ago Sunday, I was running up the subway and fell, and put out my left hand to stop myself, and smashed two of my fingers down in a way they aren’t supposed to go. Imagine doing the Spock thing with your fingers, then sticking them out of a car window at a hundred miles an hour and running the “V” into a metal signpost. That was cute. Luckily, I don’t think anything’s broke. It just took a few days to be able to type properly.

Then last Tuesday, I went to the Quizno’s at St. Mark’s for a sandwich, and in reality picked up a two-day vacation spent in my bathroom, also known as FOOD POISONING. I was at the point where I couldn’t even hold down water anymore, and I had a high fever and was hallucinating about making a film of my web searches and then scanning the screen captures and running them through OCR… or something, I don’t remember. The only real advantages to this was that on Wednesday, Sarah (the new girlfriend) came over and took care of me, which was more than nice, and also I managed to read that Motley Crue tell-all book in its entirety, since I had a lot of reading time, so to speak. Anyway, it took about a full week to get over that horror, and I lost about seven pounds, so here I am, ordering a reuben from the local greasy spoon, so I can gain it back.

I have not been able to ride the new bike once, between the stomach stuff and smashed hand and the fact that winter is upon us again. At least I will be leaving for Hawaii on Friday, so I will get a sudden 30 degree temperature boost for a week. And no, I have not begun doing a god damned thing to get ready yet, other than starting to move some reading material onto the laptop. I have two books and everything in my head and all of the maps and other junk you get from the hotel and the rent-a-car place and the airline package deal, so I will be able to keep myself busy for a week.

OK, food’s here.

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general

The useful/uselessness of the new Napster

I’ve been busy lately, with a thing or two I can mention and maybe a couple that are secret for now, but nonetheless, busy. The one thing I can mention is the zine, which is still going strong. I had a near-aneurysm trying to think of a new name for the thing, and now I’ve just decided to go the ‘fuck it’ route and keep the original name of Air in the Paragraph Line. It’s neutral, it sounds weird, and it doesn’t involve me thinking of a new name. I have a bunch of writers on board, a couple of extra spots, and I hope to have enough stuff so I can print out a huge stack of shit and bring it on the plane with me when I leave for Hawaii at the end of the month.

Here’s one I keep forgetting to write about. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to join the new Napster. Sounds stupid, you think. Well, I found it an interesting offering for a few reasons, and I thought I’d mention the pros and cons and why I think it’s a great product. And I’d first like to start by saying I don’t own stock in them or get paid per new signup or anything like that. So here goes.

Napster has a new service, and instead of being the old peer-to-peer setup where you steal music from the world around, this one is basically like an iTunes sort of online store, but with a twist. You can pay 99 cents a track like iTunes, but they also have a subscription service where you sign up for $9.99 a month and you get all-you-can eat downloads from their catalog. The way this works is they use Windows Media’s licensing scheme so you get all of these files, and they work as long as you’re a paying subscriber. When you stop paying, they don’t work. So you can’t sign up for like a weekend and then fill your hard drive and quit. Napster to Go is an upgrade from this, where at $15 a month, you can take the tunes with you on your Windows Media-enabled portable player.

Of course, most people’s immediate reaction is “WHAT A FUCKING RIPOFF! YOU DON’T GET TO KEEP ANYTHING! THEY STEAL YOUR MUSIC! WHAT A JOKE!” and so on. But here’s the deal, I know that. I’m not using Napster to buy my music. What I am doing is using it to find music that I like. It’s like I have the ultimate in-store kiosk, except I don’t have to go to the store. I can download an album, give it a few spins, and if I really like it, I’ll drop the $15 on Amazon for a copy. People can’t wrap their heads around the idea that you aren’t paying $9.99 a month for a shopping spree in which you have to download as much shit as possible; you’re really paying $9.99 a month to rent music. It’s like paying for cable TV or satellite radio. You don’t get to “keep” anything from HBO if you pay for cable; you essentially rent the shows and watch them. (Maybe you tape them, but that’s a grey area.)

The Napster interface has a lot of clicky-clicking to do as far as finding bands related to other bands. They license some of allmusic’s information, so you get related items and whatnot. A neat feature that they have is that you can build a radio station based on the items in your library. It will look at the stuff you have downloaded, and then dump a playlist of similar stuff, so you can stream each song, or click on the album cover and go find out about the band if you are interested and want to download other stuff. This is pretty much why I was interested in doing this. I want an interactive way to cruise through allmusic, finding similar artists to the stuff I already like, listening to albums and deciding if they are worth the money or not. Amazon has had a recommendation feature for a while, and I’ve found a good number of books that way. They also have music, but just dorky 30-second clips, and it’s not driven in the same way as this guy.

Other features that I like include a good playlist system for dropping tracks into a list. I know, everything has playlists, but it’s more of a concern when you’re downloading a fuckload of stuff like me. You can use your account on up to four other machines, and there is a certain amount of persistence between logins. Let’s say I’m at home and I find a bunch of neato albums and download them. When I get to work the next day and fire up my napster client, I can then view the “out of sync” track list and download them onto my work computer. Playlists also persist across accounts. Another nice feature is that you can burn a CD of items in your library, Napster or your own MP3. It has some sort of built-in CDR software, so you don’t have to fuck with Nero or whatever. Just add your tracks to a playlist or drop them to a little burn staging area, and it figures out the minutes left and all of that. There are also a lot of browse-oriented features, like people put together their own radio stations (you can too), there are genre-specific pages of what’s new and music news-type stuff, and they have given it a good stab as far as creating community stuff (although most message boards are full of 14-year-olds screaming “THIS SUCKS! I WANT TO FUCKING STEAL MUSIC, NOT PAY FOR IT!”

There are caveats. The iPod flat-out won’t work with Napster to Go, since it doesn’t support WMA’s licensing features. You can “keep” songs, but you have to pay 99 cents each. You also can’t burn a Napster song unless you downloaded it for a buck. Not all songs download and cache; depending on the licensing and label, some will only stream, so you have to be online to play them. I’m not sure of the algorithm of when you have to be online or not to keep your license current; I have messed around for a day or so with my Tablet offline and it worked fine. We’ll see if it works when I go to Hawaii for a week.

Anyway, that’s been my new toy as of late. I’m finding old albums I’ve long since forgotten, and it has given me at least a few suggestions that actually turned out great. Another related project is that I’m throwing my CD collection into a MySQL/PHP site that I whipped up, with hopes of adding links on individual CDs or bands to reviews or little stories or whatever other crap I have. I have a few CD reviews laying around the site, but I’d like to have one central repository for them. So that’s the goal, but I have fucked up the edit page in my little project and can’t seem to get it to smash the contents of an array into the database and have it stick. I’ll deal with that after about 12 hours of sleep, I hope.

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general

New bike

Remember when you were a kid, and Honeycomb cereal used to have those contests where you could win a free BMX bike? For a while, they had those tiny little metal license plates that said “HANG 10” or whatever stupid slogan would be on there, and they were each a miniature replica of a state license plate, and then you would rig them up on your seat bottom or handlebars with a bunch of twist-ties. They probably eventually discontinued them because a kid split open someone’s face with one, or because actual metal cost too much or something. Anyway, the old contest was to get a special license plate, and you’d win the bike. Later, it was just some sort of puzzle book where you scratched off some silver lotto ticket paint off a page that said “sorry, try again!” or “25 cents of Honeycomb economy size”. Well, once after a trip to Kroger, I tore apart the cereal box and went through the book and scratched off the matte grey boxes, and I WON! I won the BMX bike!

My mom checked and double checked the rules a million times, figuring there would be a catch or that I won a chance to enter in a raffle or something. But no, it was legit. She sent the thing off, and I waited what seems like years for the package to show up.

One rainy Saturday, it did. UPS dropped off a box from the Huffy corporation, and inside was my brand new bike. It’s probably worth explaining that at the time, I was riding a total POS Huffy with a banana seat that was not cool at all, very far from BMX. And this was when BMX was bigger than Jesus. This bike had a red frame and all of the chrome parts were a bronze/gold plated finish – the rims, the handlebars, the crank, and the chainguard. It had the handlebars with the extra bar across the top that was dipped in the center, the four-bolt neck, coaster brakes but also a secondary lever brake on the rear wheels. The tires were red knobby BMX tires, and it had the pads on the bars. It was AWESOME. I put that thing together in record time, and brought it outside for my trial run.

I remember that day so clearly. It had rained like a mofo all night long and all morning, and it was just starting to let up, but there was still a haze. And there were earthworms EVERYWHERE. Sometimes after a good rain, they get flooded out and are all over the street. I got out just as the sky was starting to clear, and took off through the subdivision. Everything about this bike felt 100% better than my old clunker. It all looked cool, every part spun perfectly against every other, and most of all, I WON THIS BIKE! It was awesome.

I think I rode that bike well into my Freshman year, when I finally got a real ten-speed, and probably long after (or before) it was cool to ride a 20″ BMX bike with no speeds. Come to think of it, it was probably never cool to ride any kind of bike to our school, but the bus sucked, I always worked late at the school theater, and it’s not like mommy and daddy bought me a 5.0 GT Mustang when I turned 16.

So the reason I’m excited NOW, is that I just bought a new bike. I know I already have two frames and a bunch of pieces in my kitchen and neither run. And I’m not sure how long it will take before either will run, so I decided to make a small (~$300) investment in a complete turnkey bike that actually rode well. The lucky purchase was the 2005 Dahon Boardwalk D7. It’s a folding bike, which is pretty cool; with the pop of a couple of latches, the handlebars fold down, the frame folds in half, and then you lower the seat and fold up the pedals and you have about 25 pounds of fairly compact metal to throw in the trunk or schlep onto the subway.

The bike’s based on 20-inch tires and a very low-slung frame, with highly extended seat and handlebar posts. It’s got 7 speeds in the back and none on the front, so it’s not like one of these new 78-speed mountain bike mofos, but the smaller survey of gears, switched with a twist-grip on the right side, works pretty well for the city. All of the components are full-size for the most part, very well thought-out and they are made for a big guy to ride around, not as a toy or for kids. It came with a rear rack, a set of fenders, and a fairly comfy standard seat.

I bought the thing at lunch, and rode back to the office from Bicycle Habitat, maybe a few blocks at most. Later, I took it out for a quick spin around the office, and I hauled it home on the subway to the first stop in Queens, then rode the rest of the way back. It was dark and I had no lights and a black jacket, plus I didn’t want to get stranded if something broke right out of the gate. (That happened on the first MTB I bought here in New York, the Mongoose. I rode way the hell out in Queens my first time out, and the fucking derailleur SNAPPED. I ended up walking the fucking bike home five miles.)

Anyway, the little thing is FUN to ride. The balancing is a bit different, but it’s not like pumping around on a little BMX. It’s very compact, easy to weave through traffic and up and around stuff in the city. I thought there would be some warble or flex in the frame, but it’s solid, almost as tight as my old Giant road bike. Everything works well; the brakes are tight, the shifting is good, and the headset is very smooth. It’s not as smooth on the New York excuses for streets as a good rockhopper with full suspension would be, but it’s decent. And I couldn’t see riding 100K in one of these things, but I could see commuting every day with no problems.

The folding isn’t hard to do, although it took a few practices. The worst part is that everything I have for the old bike doesn’t fit. I have water bottle cages with allen screws that go into the frame, but I really need some kind of handlebar-mounted clip thing to hold my bottle. I have a nice computer that even has a heartrate monitor, but the cable on the sensor is too short, and I’m sure that’s a huge witch hunt and a $30 purchase. I can’t find the frame mount for my Kryptonite lock. (NO it is not the one you can pick with a pen, you motherfucking blog readers.) But I think maybe I shouldn’t add anything to the bike, and just tough it out. I mean, I could spend the cost of the bike getting the approved Dahon-Apple iPod mount with the Bose wraparound handlebar speakers, or I could just ride around with no music and either hum a tune or think about something else. I could spend a few hundred on the official Dahon panniers, or I could just bring less stuff, or bungee down a gym bag. I think I need to do the less is more approach.

Of course, I picked the wrong day to buy a bike – we’re supposed to get about twenty feet of rain over the next two days. Maybe I should go down to the bike store and buy one of those euro full rain getups and slog through it anyway. Well, except for the pneumonia and the possibility of a wreck on a brand new bike, that’s a grand idea.

So I’m seriously thinking of saying “suck it” to the MTA and riding in every day. I don’t think the bike will go with me to Hawaii, but I’d sure as hell like to ride every day from now until then, and then rent one local and have the energy to get up those damn hills. I am so out of shape now, it’s not even funny. But I sure feel great having a motivation to get some regular exercise…

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3

I just had to restart xmms (aka my mp3 player), which meant that it went back to the beginning of my play list and went to the first album in the mp3 directory. For most people, that’s probably AC/DC’s Back in Black, but for me, it’s an odd little album called …To the Power of Three, by a band called 3. They’re basically Keith Emerson and Carl Palmer, 2/3s of the prog-rock band ELP, with Robert Barrie singing. This is a 1988 attempt at a serious rock album, back on the tail end of when Yes actually got a lot of mainstream airplay and even time on MTV. (Anyone else remember the April Fool’s day when they played like 267 different versions of the video “Leave It”, with the band upside down and singing? Except they swapped out band members for roadies and office staff at the studio and whoever else for the different iterations, and even played some of the commercials upside-down to keep with the joke. I know only like three people found that truly hilarious, but I was one of them…)

Anyway, the 3 album is a pretty weak stab at world domination. It’s got a cover of “Eight Miles High”, and the whole thing is basically 37:38 of vintage cheesomatic synth and very cookiecutter drums. I think I borrowed the tape from my friend Derik Rinehart at the time, and I’m not sure if I ever returned it (my old car had holes in the floors, many tapes didn’t make it.) A couple of years later, I found a copy of the CD for 88 cents, and picked it up. It’s one of those albums that is definitely stuck in my head, that I listened to at the time and thought “wow, Emerson sure can fucking play! This MIDI shit is the wave of the future!” and then got sidetracked when like Primus came out or something.

It’s been a nice three-day weekend here. I woke up way too early on Friday and had a bug to rewrite the backend of the glossary. I have a lot of work done on it, but I got stuck on something and decided to take a quick break and work on other stuff. I’ve been messing with this bike too, although it’s been a total pain in the ass trying to scavenge parts off of the old bike. I should have just parked that piece of shit somewhere without a lock and bought a completely new bike instead of trying to build one. I realized it’s been almost 20 years since the last time I built a bike, and everything’s changed. Every piece requires a specialized tool. It used to be with a POS Huffy all you needed was a crescent wrench and maybe a screwdriver, but now it’s like working on the Space Shuttle. I stripped off and totally fucked the crank on the old bike, so I gave up and bought a new crank and bottom bracket on eBay. That’s another hundred bucks and week and a half of time, but at least I will get a nice one, and save more weight. I have a huge problem with the front headset, but I think I’m going to tap out on that too and just bring the thing to the shop and have them put on a new one. (Probably another hundred.) Those things used to screw on, but in order to save like a dollar a year, they moved to these threadless ones that have to be pressed on with a hundred dollar tool. Well, at least I’m going to lose a lot of weight with this new bike. Not from the exercise, but from not being able to afford food anymore.

More photos are online. I’m also in the process of setting up a section of free stuff where you can download any of my books for free. You pretty much can do that already, but I want to put some section that screams “FREE STUFF! TOTALLY FREE! (p.s. sign up for my mailing list.)”

Also, has anyone ever installed vinyl flooring? Like those stick-on, foot-square things? I want to redo my bathroom and maybe kitchen floor, which have ceramic tile, but the shittiest tile in the world, and I figured if I could buy a hundred bucks of the stuff and a box cutter and invest a Saturday in it, maybe this place would look less like a crack den or something. I just don’t know if this stuff will stick to tile OK or if it’s a bad solution for what I just described. I was actually at Bed Bath and Beyond, and they had a big rack of it and no sorts of samples or pamphlets, so I took out the camera and started snapping away, and two big security guards sprinted into the flooring section like I was about to shoot the president or something. And when I asked if they had any samples or pictures or whatever, and they were like “look at our web site.” Which is pretty stupid, because what’s the difference between me taking a digital picture of the tile by myself, or going to their site and downloading a picture? So I just go to their piece of shit web site, and I CAN’T FIND THE TILE.

Oh yeah, and Best Buy was closed for Easter. I had to go buy DVDs and Barnes and Noble for like double the MSRP. I’m going to write them a pissy letter and complain that they don’t close for any of the Satanic holidays. Or at least a half day off for the Firestorm.

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general

new camera

My new camera is here! I got a Fuji S3100 from Amazon. It is very neato and the first test photos look pretty good, although some are out of focus because I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s a neat new toy though, and should be good for the trip to Hawaii. I have some rechargable batteries on the way, as well as a 512 MB xD card, which is good because the 16 MB card holds only 16 pictures.

It’s also a good time to mention my little project to put together a PHP-based gallery that works and doesn’t require MySQL and half the Linux libraries and packages available in the world to operate. Go here to check it out and look at a bunch of old photos. It’s very crude now, but it’s all dynamic and doesn’t require a lot of editing each time I drop in new photos, and that’s cool.

It’s weird to think that I bought my old camera about five years ago, and it was 1/4 the resolution and about 1/4 the zoom, but it cost about twice as much. Moore’s law in action. Anyway, pizza’s here.

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big trip

I am excited – I finally planned and booked my “big trip” for the year, and it will be… Hawaii!. I didn’t get anywhere near enough time there in 2003, so I will be going back at the beginning of May. I’m going to Oahu again, flying into Honolulu and staying in a hotel in Waikiki. It’ll be a different place this time, the Ohana Maile Sky Court, in an oceanview room that purports to be a little larger than my micro-capsule of a room last time (but hey, I had my own deck!) I got the whole deal through Delta for maybe a hundred or two more than my ultra-stellar deal back in ’03, although this does include an extra night free, and most other deals I found cost twice as much. It’s not the cheapest time to fly, so I’m happy I locked in this rate. I’m also happy I will get another 10,000-odd frequent flier miles, which means a free trip later in the year.

I haven’t planned at all what I will do when I get there. I’m not sure if I will go flying again – it was fun, but it was also expensive and took up the better part of a day. I think I will climb Diamondhead again, although I’ll try to remember a flashlight and some suntan lotion this time. I’d like to find some more stuff like that to do, and bring a bit more money for shopping. I also didn’t try any good food while I was there last time, unless you consider the Spam at McDonald’s to be good. (It’s not horrible, but not worth the trip…)

I had Balti beef tonight, from the local Indian delivery place. I guess I’ve never tried it before, and when I googled around, I found several sites explaining the origins and virtues of this style of cooking that’s named after the Hindi word for “bucket”. It’s essentially a poor man’s stir fry, done up in a pot that’s brought out to the table, and then eaten with nan bread. It’s a northwestern/Pakistani style of spices, hot but different than the curries you’d get from Southern India. I like a good vindaloo, especially when it’s cold out and I’m trying to beat a head cold. But the Balti is a slightly different mix, and I really like it. Also there’s just this whole tactile difference, the novelty of having it all together, that somehow appeals to the gadget-head in me. Plus you get a shitload of food for not much. So that’s cool.

I really feel that I should be writing this book, but I really want to play Mercenaries. Which one do you think will win?

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Mercenaries

I’m in the middle of eating a huge burrito from the tortilla joint on 30th ave and failing miserably. Time to go get a fork…

This was a weekend of media consumption. I did get out on Saturday and do some shopping with some fairly decent weather on hand, about 40 degrees and clear. I made a mega-purchase at Best Buy, since I was still getting over the whole sick thing and wanted some stuff to do while planted on the couch. The big thing that I spent too much time on was Mercenaries for the PS2, which is a very strange little game that’s a mix of Grand Theft Auto with SOCOM, and then some. You play an “independent contractor” who is dropped in North Korea to go through a deck of cards that contains all of the evil generals and lieutenants serving under the big man dictator. Like GTA, if you see it, you can pretty much steal it, as far as all modes of transport are concerned. Pandemic (Star Wars: Battlefront) did the game for LucasArts, and it’s got all the little touches while still being immensely playable. I’ve finished almost the whole lower rung of lieutenants, although I still haven’t figured out how to take people alive, since I usually end up nuking everything from orbit and then identifying the corpses for my reward money. It’s a lot of fun, but I think it’s going to turn into a huge time-suck. And I finally got the first season of the Chapelle Show on DVD, and laughed my ass off at that for a few hours.

I’m waiting on an eBay auction for a new mountain bike frame for another endless project I think I’m starting. I have this idea to strip my old bike of components and build up a new one with a lighter frame that doesn’t have a rear suspension. The rear shock is a nifty looking toy and all, but it actually sucks when you’re really torquing down on an uphill and the whole frame is bouncing up and down on you. Also, the bigger problem is that I have two different racks I’ve tried to put on the back of that bike, and neither one works well because a bike with half of its frame moving doesn’t really have three stable points to mount a rack. I want to get a good, rideable bike by spring and maybe get out of the neighborhood a bit more. I’ve rode from my place to Flushing Meadow a couple of times, and although it’s slightly a pain in the ass to get there, you have miles and miles of strips of asphalt to ride up and down, and also a lot of dirt trails with fun hills and stuff.

There is no way I am going to finish this burrito. I need to put this thing down and get back on the Playstation or something…

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general

Cockeyed Ghost, Naked Lunch

I’m waiting for dinner to show, listening to Adam Marsland’s band Cockeyed Ghost, a CD I got for free a long time ago (99? somewhere back in Seattle, anyway). I don’t even know what category in which to put this CD, except that I never would have bought it on my own, and now I think it’s one of my favorites. I guess if you started with something like Verve Pipe or something and added in more of the whole singer/songwriter tradition of the late seventies with a bit of later Beach Boys (after they were done trying to get chicks on the beach and were trying to tell you how truly fucked up life really was) and made the whole thing fairly modern with a decent dose of alt-indie sprinkles. Anyway, I don’t know why explain any of this except I don’t want people thinking I just sit around listening to Gwar all the time.

I have been on and off sick all week, mostly with this pinkeye thing. My right eye has been alternately been seeping battery acid and/or wanting to clog shut and/or feeling like it’s got a large grain of sea salt stuck deep under the eyelid. I think the best thing you can do for pinkeye is not mess with it, which of course is exactly what I do on a constant basis. It seems to get about 10% better a day, although staring at a computer all day also makes it get about 8% worse, so maybe it will clear up by the fourth of July. I also have a slight runny nose, just enough to mess with me, and a certain amount of wheeziness that is probably just because of the 4% humidity in my apartment. I really do wish I had one of those Bacta tanks like they had in Empire Strikes Back so I could just sleep in some fluid healing gel all night and maybe make some headway on this whole cold season disaster.

I woke up about three hours early today, mostly because I called in sick yesterday and slept all day, and decided rather than sit in bed and listen to the radiator wheeze for three hours while tossing and turning, I’d just give up, take a shower, and go to work early. I found that before eight in the morning (at least at this point in the year), my cube is absolutely flooded with sunlight as the sun rises. It was nice to eat breakfast and get a ton of stuff done before people started showing up, and it was even nicer to split just after five and go home early. I saw a completely different crowd on the train, which mixed things up nicely. It’s so weird to see the same people on the train every day, and yet never know who they are or what they do. It was nice to see some new faces.

I’m re-reading Naked Lunch for the first time in years, and enjoying it so far. There is a new edition that came out in 2002, based on some old thought-to-be-lost drafts that were recently found in a library collection. Burroughs is a strange influence on me; I think if you read Rumored to Exist and any Burroughs back to back, you might see how I structurally and stylistically owe a lot to him. But I think when you talk to most people about William S. Burroughs, they assume queers and junkies and whatnot, and that’s not my gig. It’s like how I’m reluctant to tell people that I’m a big Bukowski fan, because they’ll automatically assume I write bad poetry about getting drunk and beating women, when that’s entirely not why he interests me. Oh well.

Looks like I will have a reading in Boston on the first Friday of June. I am planning on making a min-vacation of it, driving up for a long weekend and exploring points north. More details when I have them. I also have a brand new/never published snippet of a piece in the next issue of Zeno’s e-zine, whenever it comes out. And I got a royalty check from iUniverse for a whopping $28.85! Drinks are on me! (If you’re drinking Big K soda. Limit 1.)

Food’s here…

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general

Sadaam’s gun course

This has been the longest week in the god damned world since they switched to the 7-day calendar. I forget when they actually did that, but I remember writing the Gregorian to Julian crap in Pascal about 15 years ago, and I seem to remember something about the Mayans using ten-day weeks, but maybe I just made that up, I’m not sure. Anyway, I’ve been slogging through a cold all week that hasn’t done a lot to my respiratory system, but has made my eyes all runny and gunky and crud-encrusted, and it’s made it impossible to focus on the screen for too long. To add to the mix, I’ve got this differently-resolutioned tablet PC that I use in bed, and today I got a new LCD panel at work, and it supports higher resolution, hence tinier fonts. So my eyes have felt about ready to explode all week, and I think I might just sleep all weekend, except for the thing about wanting to write.

Wanting to write: I am still picking away at this book, or ideas about this book. I hate the story I have written so far, but I read all of my random notes are really incredibly funny. So I need to spend more time on getting that stuff to work out, or drink a bunch of Robitussen, or something. But mostly, I need to get more time into this thing. I wish I could work out some kind of short stories from this material so I could put them up here and get some reaction, but everything’s in too much of a jumble right now.

I had this intensely realistic dream this morning that I was riding in some bike race around the city, and I had it planned that after the first ten miles, I would be right at the front of my apartment and I could stop to get a drink and go to the bathroom. So I chugged this entire 64-ounce glass of cold water, and then I went to the bathroom to pee, and I pissed for a moment and then started urinating pure blood. The dream continued and I was trying to clean up this blood, and then I woke up and it was about six in the morning, and I really had to pee. Let me tell you, that was the scariest piss in my entire life, because I was 100% certain I would start bleeding and need to rush to the ER to get a new set of kidneys installed. But all was well.

A few weeks ago, I had another very vivid dream in which I went to this gun place in Florida  and I was going to take an AK-47 class. When I got to the classroom, there were 4 or 5 other dudes, and… Saddam Hussein! He was secretly being held at a prison outside of Tampa, and through some kind of federal work-release school tuition program, he was allowed to take classes, so he took this gun course. I was really scared to even look at him or say anything, because I was certain if I somehow disrespected him in some subtle way, a couple of Iraqi expatriate goons would jump out of an alley some night and destroy me ten times over. But, surprisingly, he turned out to be a really cool guy. He was cracking a lot of jokes as the instructor taught us how to field-strip the AK-47, and he even gave me his mini-butterfinger bar from his Lunchables when we all stopped for lunch break. At the end of the class, I got him to change my answering machine message to freak people out. It was a pretty abnormal dream.

That said, I’m about ready to hit it. I haven’t been taking any Nyquil lately, but I might just dose up a bit to make sure I sleep in tomorrow morning.

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Baby powder air freshener time machine

I went to New Jersey yesterday, in an effort to see something other than my job and my apartment for once. It was okay. I’ve been trying to sleep without Tylenol PM lately, and went through the whole week without taking any. By Friday night at about 11:00, I was pretty much dead, and fell asleep. That meant I woke up way early and spent the morning reading in bed. After that, I went to Neptune for a grilled cheese, then hopped the subway down to 34th street. Then I got a ticket and got on a PATH train to New Jersey for the trip to the Newport Mall.

I know a lot of people go to NJ every day, but it’s still a rare novelty for me to take the PATH. It’s a completely different train system than the MTA, with different cars, different announcements, little paper tickets, and fairly clean train stations that look much more modern than the century-old New York system. I only go to Newport maybe once a year, and it always reminds me of when I first lived in New York and found it a really Big Deal to go out there.

I guess part of it is that I never go to malls anymore unless I’m in another city on vacation, and I have this strange obsession with them. Even when I am not buying stuff, when I’m not shopping, I still used to love to go to malls and just walk around and look at people. I grew up working in the Concord Mall after years of riding my bike there as a kid, and then I spent a lot of college going to the mall in Bloomington to do my laundry, go to Morgenstern’s, shop at Target, and just walk around the place. In Seattle, when I didn’t really have any money to do anything for the first year I was there, I would always drive to different malls, trying to find new ones to check out. I know that all sounds strange and pathetic, and I know a lot of people think the mall is the death of society and the symbol of homogenization of our culture, but I guess I see it differently. A mall is a huge open space that’s always static, the perfect place to go during the winter when you can’t walk around outside, but strolling a mile or two indoors might get things going. The culture of the mall is very relaxing, at least to me, and it always seemed futuristic in the sense that so many different wares are presented in this single modern building, the next step toward just having a teleporter that magically made corn dogs and new CDs for you to consume.

New York City doesn’t have malls, of course. You’re supposed to go from store to store in the rain and sleet and shop from an even more limited selection that’s marked up 400% because the place has to pay an insane rent to keep the store going, and you’re supposed to like it. I don’t care about the shopping aspect, seeing as I just buy everything I need online, but the giant open space aspect is something I miss. There are malls within a dozen or two miles of NYC, but without a car, most of them are not reachable. I know that seems silly, seeing as we lived in Elkhart and would drive to South Bend to shop all the time, but a Target store four miles away from me here is practically unreachable because it’s not on a subway line.

I got out to Jersey City, and the first thing I notice off the train is the faint perfumy smell of whatever they use to clean out the stations. It smells almost exactly like some kind of baby powder air freshener that was in my mom’s old station wagon in the summer of ’93, when I had to borrow it every night and drive to my third-shift job. So in addition to memories of the summer of ’99 and when I first explored the PATH, I also have memories of Indiana twelve years ago as I walk up the tile-lined tunnel that empties out to the street level.

The area around the Newport Mall is that sort of generic suburban commercial genre of architecture, with lots of five or ten story office towers covered in mirrored or emerald glass, belonging to anonymous insurance companies. It’s a drastic change from the buildings-everywhere look of Manhattan, where everything is a hundred years old and brick, instead of late Eighties corporate expansion modernism. It reminds me of the east side of Seattle, or the north side of Indy, or any outlying part of a major California city. The transition from Penn Station to the open air surrounding these buildings always astonishes me. It also makes me think that I’m some kind of weirdo, the only person who actually enjoys being around office sprawl architecture instead of the look of New York City.

You have to walk through an office building to get to the mall, and then you’re in a typical Simon mall. Simon owns a bajillion malls in America, including College Mall in Bloomington; Northgate Mall in Seattle; and Newport Centre in Jersey. I can tell I’m in one of their malls the moment I set foot in it, just from the arrangement of the stores and the look of the common areas. It seems like every one of their malls is a wormhole into some other part of my past, which is another reason I like to go there.

I didn’t actually spend a lot of time at the mall once I got there; I was mostly interested in the trip, in killing a few hours to get out of the house and do something different. I made a couple of laps of all of the stores, walking through the three stories and looking at the shops for anything I might need or want to buy. I did spend some time at Sears looking at power tools, but didn’t really think it would be worthwhile to spend a few hundred bucks on a table saw and then haul it home on the PATH. I also went to the pet store and looked at the dogs, wishing I had a big house with a yard so I could get one or two of them. Mostly I just window-shopped, then got bored and headed back to Manhattan, so I could go to Best Buy and blow some money on new DVDs.

I had a state tax check burning a hole in my pocket this weekend too, but I dumped it into E*Trade and bought some stock. Despite the fair amount of stupid discretionary spending I’ve done this year, I’ve actually managed to sock away some cash. I wonder if that trend will continue. (Probably not, especially when I start thinking about vacation again.)

Made tacos tonight, for the first time in a while. Sunday turned into taco night for a while, a worthwhile tradition. I just finished reading a book about the post-Soviet expatriate bubble when capitalism briefly flourished and everyone bought lots of Russian bonds at 220% interest and drank thousand-dollar champagne like it was kool-aid, until the bottom fell out in ’98 or so. I have a stack of other books to read now, I need to find out what is next. It’s good reading weather, dark and cold outside, the perfect conditions for bundling up in bed with a good book…