Category: general

My mom moved recently (for reasons I don’t really want to get into) and told my sisters to basically get any of their shit that was around her house a month or so ago. I’d already been through this in 1997 when my mom was preparing to rent out and ultimately sell the house where we grew up, and I’m pretty sure I even wrote about that experience here. Basically, at that point, I thought it was last call and I got what I thought were the last of my mementos, old books, and keepsakes from the piles of old stuff in the basement. Well, I was wrong, and my sister found amidst a bunch of garbage a rather interesting little item that she sent to me, and it arrived today.

The item in question is my baby book. I don’t know if this is a unique tradition to the Catholics or the people in the Midwest or particularly Better-Homes-and-Gardens-type parents, and I’m interested to hear if anyone else has one of these. Basically, it is a pre-printed scrapbook with various pages dedicated to clippings, photos, and tons of statistical information that new mothers love to gather on their baby, like when they first sat up, when they first held their bottle, when they first asked if Alan Greenspan is actually the head of a tribunal Masonic government that secretly runs the entire world via the monetary system, and so on. Mothers then write down all of these factoids and save birthday cards and kindergarden grades and locks of hair and so on. In a sense, it’s almost like a throwback to the entire blog concept, except it’s not on the web, and it’s not full of ads for vitamins.

So I guess my mom bought one of these books about 32 years ago, and I completely forgot about it. I do remember as a child that this book hid away in the buffet in the kitchen, along with commemorative candles from baptisms and bibles given to us at first communion and real silver silverware that never saw the light of day. My book was very late 60s looking, although I was born in 1971. I seem to remember Monica’s book being much more Gerald Ford-esque 1970s, and I don’t even remember Angie having a baby book. Angie was the Polaroid child; my parents had a crappy 126-camera that took slide film, which means there are about a dozen photos of me before the age of four. Monica was born when the 110 camera was the shit, and there are a fair number of shots of her in the family album. When Angie came around in 1976, my dad’s new toy was the Polaroid, and we have dozens and dozens of photos of Angie doing about everything. I think this novelty replaced the novelty of the baby book in the same way that email has replaced the novelty of writing a letter and sending it snail mail, so Angie’s childhood is in a sense much more documented, but it’s a much different experience. And now that everyone has a video camera the size of a book of matches, I doubt anyone but the most dedicated mother is still using the baby book concept. And I’m sure most of them have gone to the web.

Anyway, the book showed up today, and it smells like the inside of that buffet drawer, and like our old house in Michigan. The first thing I found that amazed me was… my own receipt! The bill from the hospital was in there; the Grand Forks Air Force hospital charged Sgt. and Mrs. Konrath a grand total of $10.50 for a seven-day stay, including food. Also included are my hospital tags that went around my foot (with a US military stamp on them); the slip that was on my hospital crib; the front page of the Grand Forks Herald from January 20, 1971; the newspaper announcement of my birth; some photos showing me and my mom and dad in the wood-grained trailer where they lived when my dad was in the service; and a chunk of my hair from my first haircut.

Aside from the initial birth stuff, there’s not a lot that would be interesting to anyone but me, unless you find the fact that I walked when I was nine and a half months old, and I used to call making the bed “changing the bed” when I was a kid. It’s still a very neat little discovery for someone who is as nostalgic about the past as I am. I’m glad my sister was able to liberate it for me.

Not much else is up, except that I’m busy as hell at work, and that makes the day go by faster, but it makes the time off seem much shorter. The Rite-Aid by my house can’t get a god damned thing done right, and every single prescription I bring there gets fucked up somehow and they either don’t have the stuff or they forget to fill it or the insurance company needs some super-secret approval and they don’t fucking call me and ask for it, even though they ask me every single time what my phone number is in case they have questions. The fact that I run into stuff like this in pretty much every avenue of my life makes me wonder how things ever happen at all. I wish this generation had a saying like “they can send a man to the moon, but they can’t _______.” But the thing is – they can’t send a man to the moon anymore. They can’t even install a public toilet in the largest city in the country, and I pay them $30,000 a year in taxes. You can buy a toilet at Home Depot for $100. Thiry grand times everyone else who has ever had to take a piss buys a lot of toilets.

Okay, gotta go see if Ray actually bought a region-free DVD player or not.

I just got a copy of my phone bill dated December 1, which is due on December 26. (Yes, last December 26.) I don’t know if this was a screwup with Verizon (very probable) or a screwup with my online bill payer situation, which recently was merged or bought or otherwise shifted over, resulting in massive disruptions in .05% of their customers, which means me. Hopefully I will get another bill shortly that is double, and I’ll pay it, and in the meantime, my phone won’t get disconnected. That’s my hope, anyway.

This is one of the kinds of situations that throws me for enough of a loop that I spend days wondering, “why does anyone ever pay their bills?” and I start wondering about grandiose systems to replace all international monetary functionality, and then I realize that the people I work with are just trying to upgrade a tiny, tiny, tiny facet of the banking world, and the amount of incredible bullshit involved with the infrastructure is tremendous. On one hand, I look at a bank (mostly when standing in line) and I think, “why can’t they replace all of this, and have it work for a fraction of the cost?” and on the other hand, I have no idea how trillions of dollars can flow through the system without catastrophe on a daily basis. It’s like when I’m washing dishes, and I think I’ve found a way to invent an entirely new dishwasher – no, an entirely new concept in dishes that is custom-engineered not only for comfort, but for maximized, automated washing and sterilization. Meanwhile, I can’t actually finish washing my own fucking dishes.

I’m still playing with this Ethernet adapter on the PlayStation 2. I still can’t get the Navy Seals game working. Tony Hawk 4 works great, although I can barely play it against others. I am slowly learning more about different tricks, but it’s complicated, and requires more manual dexterity than I can muster. But it’s an excellent game. I didn’t realize how good the PS/2 is until tonight, when I got Quake 3 going on my work machine. The graphics are very blocky and crappy-looking, compared to something like Medal of Honor. Maybe I don’t have them maximized fully, but they look very primitive to me. Quake is interesting, but playing games with a mouse and keyboard is very counter-intuitive to me, and ergonomically disastrous. Still, it’s fun to play networked with other people at work after hours.

Not much else. A lot of trouble sleeping, and I took Tylenol PM last night, so I was out of it all day today. I heard from my PSA at the book publisher, and I should have proofs in a few weeks. That could mean the proofs are done when I’m on vacation, but I told them to push back until I get back so I don’t have to try to download them over a modem or anything.

OK, gotta go play a bit more before bed…

I’m watching a TV movie about Enron that’s both compelling and stupid, and I’m not sure which of the two keeps me watching. It also has Shannon Elisabeth from the American Pie movies, but she looks somewhat terrible, and is playing the role of a whiny, two-dimensional Enron wife, which pretty much kills any sort of sexual attraction she would normally exude. Anyway, it’s the only thing on TV right now, so here I am.

I went out last night to see Bowling for Columbine and go eat in Times Square. The Times Square thing was unusually busy and very strange, given the ghosts I see of my two years or so of working there. But many of the stores are changing, and many new things are opening up. One new good thing is this huge Toys R Us store, which is where a cheap theater and a bunch of those annoying junk camera stores used to be. One bad thing is that the food court next to the AMC 25 on 42nd is now gone. That sucks, because it was one of the open, public, and no-hassle restrooms in the area. And speaking of ghosts, I once again ran into former coworker and standup comedian Matt Daly, handing out fliers to his comedy show at a club right off of Times Square. We didn’t have too much to say other than the usual catching up, but he’s always a cool person to talk to, and I really hope I manage to catch one of his shows.

After dinner at the Howard Johnson’s, which was pretty unmemorable, especially my $16 faux stir fry, I went to the AMC 25 for the movie. I resisted going to this movie for a long time. I am not always down with Michael Moore’s confrontational style. I did like Roger and Me a lot, but I saw The Big One in the theater, and found it to be uneven at best. There was good information in this one, but it didn’t really offer any kind of a thesis or solution. And while some people might consider it some sort of in-your-face vigilante justice to corner a company spokesperson in a lobby while waving a fake check in their face and telling them they laid off too many people, I ultimately don’t see how it does much of anything, especially when you consider that most company spokespeople and other talking heads are brainwashed and functionally useless.

Given all of this, I thought Bowling for Columbine was interesting and entertaining. I would have done a few things differently, but I dug it overall. I was going to write much more about this, but I have no energy to do so right now, so I’ll stop.

I bought the Ethernet card for my PlayStation 2, along with Tony Hawk 4. I can’t get the card to work with Socom Navy Seals, but I read online that it’s because Sony fucked up on their servers and they never let people log in because of load. They should get that shit figured out if they’re going to run commercials constantly. The Tony Hawk game is pretty cool, and it’s incredible to play it online. It doesn’t use that much bandwidth, and there you are skating along with other dudes in the same skatepark. It’s a very hypnotic game, the sort of thing where you can play forever, going back and forth on the same level, trying different tricks over and over. A very good time-waster.

Not much else. I need to get out of here and think about going to bed in a few hours. I was up till about four or five last night, so getting up at seven tomorrow will be a real trick.

Happy New Year. I think I’ve figured out all of the associated issues with knocking the journal over to 2003 without completely mangling access to the old archives. There are still broken bits and pieces, and the UI isn’t wonderful, but it looks like it’s at least mostly functional.

And what did I do to usher in the new year? I was mad at work trying to finish things for my next book. And now, I’m happy to report that Tell Me A Story About The Devil: Selected Journals, 1997-1999 is on its way to the publisher and will hopefully be available in a few months. It’s a collection of old journals from right here, edited and pulled together into a nice, bound copy. I’m very happy about making this a book, and I really do like all of this old writing. Of course you can get all of this stuff for free on this site, but it will be a different experience to be able to sit in bed or on the bus or whatever and read a copy on real paper.

The last few days have been a real bitch, pulling together the manuscript, dealing with the little bits like the back cover text, marketing summary, and all of that, and getting the cover ready. (It’s here if you want to look at it.) Ray did the cover again, and it took some work to find a photo that I liked. But I think it looks good, and I’m happy that after two black book covers, I will have a bright red book to put on the shelf next to it. Anyway, I haven’t slept much, and my food schedule is way off too, so I feel like shit. After finally submitting everything to the publisher at 10:30 this morning, I got a few hours of sleep and went out in the pissing rain to get some Subway for lunch at about 5:00. Now, only a few hours later, I really want to get supper, but I really don’t. And I don’t want to work tomorrow, but I have to go in. At least it will be a nice, short, two-day work week.

Not much else is up. I am not going to ramble on about resolutions or look back at the year in review or anything like that. I do too much of that stuff on a daily basis. Right now, I need to clean the disaster in my house from working at full-bore for the last week or so. I’ve got a bedroom full of photos everywhere, a living room covered in red-penned printouts, and a sink full of dishes. I doubt I will do too much damage to that tonight, but I would like to get things returned to normal so I can get started on the next book.

And yes, there is a next book! I have an idea, but I won’t jinx it. For now, I need to get thinking about the trip to Vegas in about two weeks. I just ordered a new battery for my laptop, and I hope that fixes the problem so I can get mobile and running. If it doesn’t, I think I’m going to buy a used PowerBook and go Mac. But I hope the battery fixes everything. It’s weird to think that I used this laptop for the last 40 or 50 hours almost constantly, scanning photos and plugging away at the manuscript, but it won’t work without a cord.

Okay, time to look at this dinner problem again…

I took my last vacation day for 2002 today, and I’m glad that I did, because I started to come down with a cold, or at least the horrific sore throat part of a cold that usually happens when you live in a dry heat environment and have to run around in the cold and then get on a crowded subway with a bunch of sick people. So I went to bed at about 8:00 last night (not on purpose) and essentially slept until 4:00 this afternoon. I did wake up in the middle of that to eat a can of Dinty Moore stew and watch another episode of Band of Brothers. And after a shower and about a gallon of juice, I finished the last disc, aside from the special features. Overall, I liked the series a lot, although it’s probably going to be like that Moon series that Hanks did for HBO in that I won’t crack the DVDs again for another year.

The book of journal entries is slowly progressing, but it’s at the point now where I really need to worry about the end-game issues, most of all how I’m going to sell the damn thing. Part of me wants to send it to the publisher and then not tell a god damned person about it. Nobody will buy it, but it will be out there. I still need to finish editing, and then get together the cover and marketing crap. Luckily, the editing is going fast, and I’m not finding a lot of corrections. Of course, if I were to rewrite it, there would be lots of work, but I’m just fixing major mistakes. I’m not even fixing the fact that I used to use em-dashes like a motherfucker five years ago.

Not much else. I feel pretty fucking tired for having slept almost 20 hours, though.

Christmas.

I don’t have any giant, special, holiday issue of the journal ready. I didn’t do much for the birth of the baby jesus or baby santa or whatever. I mostly slept, and had some macaroni and cheese for lunch, and then ordered some Indian food for dinner, and fielded a couple of phone calls, and talked to my nephew about nintendo, and that’s about it. It was a nice day off of work, and I couldn’t ask for anything more, really.

My sister and brother-in-law’s gift to me was the Band of Brothers DVD set, which includes 6 DVDs inside a cool metal box, for a total of about 863 hours of viewing. It’s a Spielberg-produced HBO miniseries about the 101st Airborne in World War II, akin to Saving Private Ryan, but a different story. I also got the special edition of Platoon the other day, and spent all of Christmas Eve watching that with the commentary.

It’s snowing out, one of those winter white christmas wonderland snows. It was just raining with cold temps, then it started hailing, then slush, and now it’s white enough for Bing Crosby to start singing about it. I went out earlier today to go to the drug store (and the god damned pharmacy was closed even though they said they would be open) and I had to battle through some impressive downfall to get there. The wind is the worst – it cuts through everything when it hits. 25 mph gusts. Not fun.

I’ve been editing and slowly working on the book of journal entries, and it’s getting there. I think I will try to get it to the printer by the end of the year, and then it will take them a couple of months to figure it out.

So that’s Christmas. Back to work tomorrow, then a three-day weekend. Hope your holiday worked out.

Watching Platoon. It’s on TNN and is “uncut”, which means they can say “shit”, but they still bleep out “fuck”. I haven’t watched this movie in a long time, and I forgot how many now-famous people are in it. It’s quasi-realistic and okay looking, but it also suffers from the Vietnam Cliche Syndrome like most other movies of its genre. They all have the same soundtrack, the poor black guys that don’t want to fight, the obligatory drug scenes, the out-of-nowhere VC ambush, the My Lai analog, and so on. Still, it’s an interesting waste of a few hours, at least for free.

I haven’t been writing much lately, haven’t been doing much of anything. Last night, I played Sim City for like 6 hours. I tried to build an entire city supported by nothing but rail, but then I gave in and had to build some roads. I got up to about 60,000 people, and then the fucking program crashed, and didn’t save anything. I haven’t played it since, mostly because I have to reboot my computer to Windows, and that’s a huge pain in the ass because I can’t get the stupid GRUB bootloader for Linux to work, so I have to open the BIOS and set a different drive, and that’s about a step away from opening the case and soldering a jumper or something.

Nothing else. No transit strike, BTW. Now I just need to brave the cold every day to get to the damn train.

I had tickets to see Ronnie James Dio at Roseland last night, but I was so tired and miserable by the end of the day Friday, that I just wanted to go home, order some food, and sleep. It was a long week, there’s this looming MTA strike, it gets dark at 4:30 now, and it’s rainy and 40 degrees pretty much all the time, so I didn’t feel like waiting in the rain for an hour to see four shitty opening bands all for Dio.

Instead, I got some Indian food and watched a DVD I forgot I hadn’t watched yet. I got this three-DVD set of documentaries about atomic weapons by Peter Kuran a while back. They’re pretty cool; one is called Trinity and Beyond and it’s your basic “about the atomic bomb” movie, but with a lot of new footage I’ve never seen. It also includes some 3D footage and the red and blue glasses, but it’s not a very good effect – maybe either my TV or my eyes are not calibrated correctly. There’s also Atomic Journeys, where they go to various places bombs were tested, including the test sites I visited in New Mexico in 1999.

The third movie, which I forgot about and just watched last night, is called Nukes in Space, and it’s all about various high-altitude nuclear tests by the US and USSR, plus a lot about the history of the ICBM and ABM. This is incredibly fucked up stuff and I never knew about a lot of it, but the US did tests where they tried to inject bursts of high radiation into the Van Allen belts to see what would happen. These top-secret tests, called Project Argus, were (at first) from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and they basically found out they could completely fuck up radio waves with the EMP that would be carried through the belts, which they thought could eventually develop some kind of all-out radio and radar fuck-up weapon against the Russians. A later test in the Pacific fucked up radio transmission across the ocean for three or four days and even knocked out the power grid as far away as Hawaii.

Lots of other weird footage on that DVD included LOTS of failed rocket takeoffs, which you can see in The Right Stuff, but they had a lot of alternate views and other launches. They showed two launch failures in the Pacific that WERE ACTUALLY CARRYING NUCLEAR WARHEADS! The warheads did not explode, but they did get consumed by the huge fireball of hot-as-the-sun propellant, which probably did something to the value of property within a 100 mile radius. Oh, also they showed the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, better known as America’s only (formerly) operation ABM base. It’s located very close to where I was born, and was in fact designed to protect my birthplace of Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota. (They did not build this to specifically guard the base because I was born there; although I’m sure some of you appreciate my contributions to American literature, I don’t think the military does.) The SRMSC is a really fucked-up looking place, and looks more like a Mayan burial ground or some kind of 70s sci-fi movie set, because of the strange buildings and antenna. It was built, but then when Congress was dealing with the 1972 ABM treaty and the fact that newer Russian missiles would probably get around the highly complicated and expensive system, they scrapped the program – exactly one day after it was fully operational. Now, it sits dormant and maybe someday if someone decided we need to spend another 40 billion on anti-missile programs, they will reopen it.

While digging around for info on the SRMSC, I found a cool site called Cold War Leftovers that has some excellent pictures of the Safeguard site, plus a bunch of other stuff like abandoned Nike Missile sites and planes stored in the desert. Pretty cool stuff.

Not much else is going on, other than the threat of an MTA strike. If it happens, I will stay at home and work. I have FrameMaker and Windows on another partition, and I have all of my work stuff on a CD-R. I really don’t know if they will strike or not, but everyone seems to be ready for the worst.

Anyway, I’m arguing whether I should go into the city and get something to eat and either brave a movie or pick up some DVDs, or stay here, order some food, and rewatch some old stuff. It’s raining on and off, so it’s a tough choice. We’ll see…

I’m in an all-day meeting today and we broke for lunch at 11:00, so here I am, updating early and eating Wendy’s.

I went to bed early last night and woke up at about 3AM, my room freezing. I got up and found all of the radiators stone-cold, and the hot water somewhat lukewarm. This immediately launched me into a severe panic attack, with visions of spending the next week bathing in my kitchen sink with hot water from the stove and running the spaceheater for a tiny amount of warmth. I don’t know how I managed to fall back asleep, especially since the last two nights were filled with insomnia and looking at the clock every hour and hoping I would get in a few minutes before the alarm went off. But I did fall asleep, and at 6:00, I heard the creaking of water in the pipes and when I felt the radiator, it was slowly getting warm again. So the hour from 6:00 to 7:00 was the most wonderful sleep in the world.

The threat of a transit strike still looms over the city. I won’t go into the details, because I’m sick of repeating them, but you can look them up anywhere. Basically, if the union and the MTA don’t agree to a new contract by Sunday, the trains won’t run on Monday. I talked to my boss, and have a contingency plan: I will burn a CD of all of my Framemaker files on Friday, and if there are no trains on Monday, I stay home until there are trains. It actually wouldn’t be that bad, not having to ride the train in the morning and battle the cold; I could sit at home and listen to music and eat peanut butter and jelly every day and get work done in retreat. It would add an extra two hours to my day. And I normally don’t have meetings anyway. So we’ll see what happens.

Still working on the book, slowly. It’s above 60,000 words and my goal is 70-75K. The writing needs a lot of editing, though. I feel like I’ve said this over and over again, so maybe I should stop saying it.

I watched the movie Dark City the other night, at least part of it, and it’s nowhere near as good as I remembered. The scenery didn’t look as stunning as I’d remembered, and the plot was so forced that it seemed silly. I’ve heard the movie is much better if you turn the sound off until the first appearance of Kiefer Sutherland, but I haven’t tried it.

OK, gotta finish eating.