Category: general

It appears I’m still suffering from a slow connection to my server, possibly from a fiber cut yesterday. Maybe it has already been fixed and my connection will always be slow. I’m not sure, but for now it means it’s impossible to do any worthwhile updates.

I’ve spent the whole day running errands, and I didn’t even leave the house until fourish. There’s still a lot of unpacking, setting up, and other miscellaneous work. Plus I had to fill prescriptions, deal with banks, and dig through luggage to find things. I guess I didn’t do as much as I planned, but some stuff is happening.

And I started writing today. Actually, my first test run just showed me that I had a lot of work to do at my writing area. I started writing, got about 3 words in, and then realized that I had to readjust stuff, or find my scrap paper notebook, or look for a pen, or whatever. Eventually, I got enough done that I could write for maybe an hour, which is decent. I’m trying to write all of the trip stories down, but it’s going slow. Maybe next week will provide for some better working conditions.

Speaking of which, I have more to do, so I better split.

I’m here – New York that is. It also appears I have the slowest connection in the world to this server, so it looks like I either need to yell at the new ISP or find a way to do this writing on my home machine and then FTP it in, like the rest of the people out there do.

This connection is completely useless, so I need to cut this short. I’ll be writing a comprehensive report on the trip soon, and hopefully I’ll get this connectivity problem fixed by then. Until then, drop me a line.

04/15/99 21:25

It looks like it isn’t the new ISP’s fault that I can’t type. There was some sort of fiber cut today that affected pair.com, the folks that host my site. Things appear somewhat better, although it’s not a zippy connection.

I now have a computer table – one of those folding tables from Staples. And I am getting more set up here. Soon I will type in an account of my entire trip, I promise. Until then, I have to answer lots of mail and keep unpacking. More later…

This should be my last entry from Seattle. Unfortunately it won’t be a great one, because I am sick, running a fever, having stomach problems, still have a lot of packing to do, and I leave in only 12 hours. If there is any one sure thing in life, it’s that I will get sick right before a trip. It looks like I will be seeing the great southwest in a dayquil haze now.

I got the rental car thismorning. It is an Oldsmobile Intrigue, in old-person white paint. It has auto-everything, and will be a real rest to drive it. It’s quite a bit different than the rabbit, which had manual-everything, except for the things that just didn’t work. I already took it for a test drive up to Lynnwood and back, and it seems great. I don’t know how good of mileage it gets, but the needle barely wavered int the 40-something miles I drove, so hopefully that will be OK.

Almost everything is packed. I am backing up the computer, and then it gets powered down. The apartment looks REALLY vacant now, just my air mattress and a bunch of piles of stuff awaiting the car or the dumpster.

I was going to write some kind of great ending at this point, but I’m trying not to get too sentimental about Seattle. I just want to get this shit in my car and get it behind me and think about it later. The cold isn’t helping me either. So I’m going to cut this short while I can still type. Maybe I’ll type in some entries from the road. If not, you’ll get the whole story when I reach New York on the 16th or so. Keep in touch, and wish me luck.

The VW is gone. I turned over the title for a mere $100 to someone who answered my usenet ad. It’s the end of an era. At least this time, the person buying it intends to fix it up and keep it on the road. When I sold my last Rabbit, the frame was rusted through and the brakes were gone. The guy who bought it, also for $100, intended to use it as a parts donor for other stuff. This one went to a kid who worked at a Jiffy Lube and wanted to put in a bigger stereo and do other stuff to it. So, I hope it went to a good home. It served me well.

I’m trying not to get sentimental about this stupid shit. I’ve got a pile of junk awaiting the dumpster, including a comforter (you know, bed sheet) that I got for christmas 92. The pattern reminds me so much of the past, the different houses and beds on which it rested from 1992-1997. It reminds me so much of a certain ex-girlfriend, of the last era of the Mitchell Street house, and of my first years here in Seattle. Luckily, it smells like hell from being in storage, or I’d be sniffing it and thinking even more. This is what my life has been like lately: throwing out things that need to go in the trash, even though they are instant time machines to events and memories of my past.

Bill Perry is here, and just got back from a trip to Japan. He’d been awake for about 24 hours straight, but gained a day on the return flight. I went to Chang’s Mongolian Grill with him and Duffin. It was the last trip I made with the car, which I guess is a good way to end things.

I hate to say it, but I feel like I’m getting sick. I don’t know, I was moving stuff on my balcony and kicked up a lot of smog dust, so maybe I’m just coughing that back up. But I would hate to get bronchitis the day before this fucking trip. I already know my digestive system will massively rebel an hour before I’m scheduled to leave – that’s a given. I think that some kind of hypnotism or aversion therapy might make these medical problems go away. I know that I occassionally use a meditation tape for depression, and it actually works fairly well when I’m trying to fall asleep and 80,000 things are going through my head. I doubt there’s a similar tape for respiratory infections, though.

It seems like there was something else I had to write about, but I’ve got to haul some more garbage downstairs, and then try to go to bed early. I’m not going anywhere tomorrow without a car, so I’m sure I’ll write more then.

Very tired. I did more cleaning, and tried to do some trip planning – maps, directions, etc. I think a GPS is going to help a lot. I’ve also been working on Summer Rain, but I ended up doing some structural changes, continuity things. I didn’t add many words, but I fixed some problems.

I should sleep. I think I breathed in a bunch of smog dust and now I’m coughing like I have TB. Anyone who thinks Seattle has clean air should check out my patio. That’s all for now.

How long has it been since I’ve updated? Everything’s been a blur of either going to UPS or hauling crap down to the dupster. I have one last trip to UPS, and that’s to send off my stereo. Otherwise, everything’s going into the trash or my car, with the exception of a few things that others might snag. The place is starting to look very empty, but now the mad rush of cleaning, scrubbing, and vacuuming needs to start.

I have allegedly sold my car, for $100. I say allegedly because I have it until Sunday night, when the sale takes place, and there’s always a chance it will fall through. But it will be gone, and I guess I’m a little sad. It’s a piece of shit, and it’s starting to develop problems, but it reminds me so much of my old VW, the one from 91-92, and there’s so much nostalgia behind that old heap. I won’t miss driving in Seattle – don’t believe anything you hear, Seattle’s transportation situation sucks balls in a major way. And don’t believe that there’s a public transit system here, because there isn’t. I won’t go into that now, though. The car – I will miss it. I should take some pictures tomorrow. I would take it for a nice two hour drive, but that only gets me about 5 miles from my house.

Almost every Friday night, when nothing’s going on, I drive to the Denny’s right off of 520 in Bellevue for dinner. I eat alone, write a bunch, and then drive to the Barnes and Noble over by Bellvue Square Mall and shop for books. Sometimes I also hit the Tower Records there, and on the way back, I go to Safeway for junk food and various caffiene. Then I get home and write. This has been a tradition since I first got to Seattle. I didn’t know where any other B&N or Denny’s was, so I would go out there. And I’ve done this on and off for about four years.

So it hit me that today was my last Friday in Seattle, and I had no other plans, so I decided I needed to do this again. On the way over, driving across 520 in the dark and listening to the last Queensryche album, it really sunk in that it’s almost over here. I guess all week I’ve been so busy with packing and thinking “I’ve got another week,” and then it was suddenly Friday. I’ve got the weekend, then Monday and Tuesday are eaten up by cleaning activities, getting the rental car, and maybe saying bye to a couple of people. But then, I’m on the road. It was an almost scary thought, as I sat there in Denny’s eating one of those awful skillet things and scribbling in my notebook.

Everyone keeps asking me if I will miss Seattle. I thought about this today while driving around Northgate, listening to the aforementioned Queensryche album. That tape reminds me so much of the apex of my Seattle experience, which was probably when it came out – late spring of 97. It reminds me so much of driving around in my old 94 Escort, I can pretty much smell the new car smell and plastic interior, and feel the power steering and plush bucket seats. I drove so much then, down to Longview every other weekend, listening to that tape over and over. It was when I was pulling out of debt, and actually had a few bucks left over on the day before payday. It’s not that I miss the situations or the people as much as the general aura, the feel that I’ll always get when I listen to that album.

I guess I didn’t answer my question. But, it’s hard to explain. I miss all of the places I’ve lived, even the horrible ones, for different reasons. And I wouldn’t want to go back to them today, but the memories are great. And I guess that’s what will happen with Seattle.

I’ve gotta hit the hay. I’ve been trying to push back the sleep schedule so I can leave at 6am on Weds. I’m waking up at about 9 now, so I should be able to make it. We’ll see.

I am working on Summer Rain as much as I can right now. Actually that’s not true, but I am working on it several hours a day. I find that after 4 or 5 hours of it, I can’t go on any more, unless I’m really on a run with it. I was hoping to finish a draft before I moved, but it doesn’t look like that will happen now. But it’s still going good.

I am thinking of recording a “leaving here”/”on the road” MiniDisc with a bunch of songs appropriate for leaving one town and going to another. You’d be surprised – it’s like the second-most popular song topic behind the sappy “[s]he left me, boo hoo” sort of thing.

My sleep schedule is so bent out of shape – I’ve been staying up till 5, and I need to be waking up by 5 or 6 next week. I need to get out of here and go to bed.

I have so massively behind on shit I have to do tonight that I’m bleeding out of my eye sockets. This is just a short one. Go check out my top level site, www.rumored.com and let me know what you think of the new layout. The last few items in the list will go somewhere else eventually. I’m esp. interested in how it looks in IE since I don’t have a copy. Netscape doesn’t do the mouse-over highlighting on links. And I did a bunch of stylesheet hacks which are supposed to be browser-independent, but never are.

Summer Rain, book 3 = 66268. That needs to be 85000 soon. Like I said, gotta go.

[2020 – long ago, rumored had its own layout, and this was under one directory. Now, the home is the blog. Weird to still see these old entries, so I’ll leave them.]

Today felt like a day in Bloomington back in 1992 – the weird vibe you get when it’s about to rain and it’s light out, but the clouds are trying to stomp it all out. Although I ignored this in my book describing that summer, the first week or two was filled with cold and borderline rainy weather like this. I didn’t have a job, the girlfriend had split, and I was stuck taking a political science class that looked pretty daunting. For about the first 10 days, it felt like the entire world was going to collapse in on me. And that weather helped reinforce the feeling.

I read in one of the Bukowski letters books (I’ve been reading both of them on and off, just opening to a random spot and reading for a few minutes or hours) and when he quit the post office to write full time, he went on a ten day terror ride of drunkenness, hangovers, no food, and despair. I guess things have been somewhat easier here, although every time I go to Safeway and drop a fiver on a couple of 2-liters or something, it makes me cringe a bit and think about money. It’s going to be an odd trip across the country.

Ryan’s party on Friday was pretty decent. I got there early and we were both a little freaked because nobody showed up for a couple of hours. I guess everyone learned their lesson on his last party, when there was no food and he was still cleaning an hour into the thing. But the whole gang showed up, plus a bunch of other people I didn’t know. It was pretty fun because everyone knew it was my going-away party so all sorts of strangers were coming up to me and talking to me. I had to tell the whole story a thousand times, but it was much better than doing so with the people at work, because these were all people that thought the whole adventure was cool.

So I shot a bunch a video, talked to everyone, drank a fair amount of beer, and got home around 5am. Since that has been my new bedtime lately, everything worked fine.

All I’ve been doing, aside from sleeping and wandering around aimlessly, is working on Summer Rain, or throwing stuff out. I’ve been shuffling through various shelves, boxes, and corners and pitching more and more stuff in the garbage. I sort of feel like those guys who pushed helicopters over the edge of aircraft carriers during the evacuation of South Vietnam.

Oops, I went off and started reading something for like 45 minutes, and now I forgot what I was talking about. I guess this would be a good place to stop.