Category: general

Categories
general

Hello from the office

Hello from my office. One of the reasons I started this again was so I could spend my lunch breaks writing and eating a brownbag lunch, instead of spending $7 and half of my break in pursuit of 600 grams of fat and some bread. I’m hoping the word count for this project will go up as my weight goes down.

I feel like I’m going to jinx it if I say it, but I started working on my third book last night. I got a good 5000 words down last night, and a rudimentary outline, and I would’ve wrote another 5000 except it was 3 in the morning and I had to be at work today. I have a good feeling about this one, and I’m not sure where it’s going, but I think it’s a cool project. I feel stupid talking about it in such vague terms, so I’ll stop for a bit.

I do have this weird feeling about starting a book like this. Both of my other books were conceived in 1995, which seems like forever ago. Summer Rain was born in an era where I was killing myself over getting a book started, and I had a great short story that begged to be turned into a full-length novel. Rumored to Exist began as a writer’s block exercise while in Boston on a trade show visit, using Bill Perry’s semi-stolen Dell laptop. I don’t remember the moment I decided to take that short story about the summer of 1992 and turn it into a book – in fact, I didn’t even write it down in my daily journal. I remember starting Rumored – I was in a hotel bar, and some drunken woman from Minnesota was hitting on me with the line “hey, is that a computer?” Starting a new book is like starting a new relationship – there’s so much charged energy, you can’t stop thinking about it, and the future goes from being indeterminate to holding so much promise.

Although this is my third book, it’s also maybe my 10th attempt at a book. So maybe by Friday, all of this will collapse and I’ll be trying to figure out what to do next. Buyer beware.

A shout out to The Meyhem Project, now posting daily again.

Categories
general

A random trip to see the collapsing bridge

I loaded up the Escort with my cameras, MiniDisc, and an atlas and headed out yesterday, with the goal of taking a short to moderate roadtrip to somewhere I’ve never been before. So I got on I-5 south with a vague plan in mind, and pressed onward.

I do miss the Escort for some of these medium-length drives. I always complained about its road noise and vibrations, but compared to the Rabbit, it is whisper-quiet. The whole car feels so different now – newer, wider, and somewhat clunkier. Even though it has power steering, it drives less responsively than the VW – which isn’t all that bad. Also, it has air conditioning, which helped yesterday – it felt like it was above 80 for my trip. The MiniDisc was great for the road, too. That’s not a car-specific thing – mine is a Sony MZ-R50, a portable recorder about the size of a cassette tape box. I plug it into my tape player with a faux-cassette adapter, and it sounds fine. I listened to the new Pat Metheny album on the highway south. The perfect sound, small size, and nice little wired remote of the Minidisc made it a good companion for trips like this.

No, I didn’t drive to Longview, although I thought it would be a nice little drive, and it would be a real freakout to see that place again – it was bad enough when I zipped past there with Ryan Grant when we went to see Joe Satriani in Portland last March. Instead, I went down to Tacoma, and got on 16, which cuts to the west and up, into the peninsula on the other side of Puget Sound. After a bit of a haul, I got to the Tacoma Narrows bridge, another Pacific Northwest engineering tragedy story. Back in the 50s? the original Narrows bridge got destroyed in a windstorm. It was a gradual thing – the bridge gyrated all over for a day, and a bunch of people shot film and pictures of the thing before it broke apart and keeled into the water (I think some footage of it was recently in some Sony or Pioneer car stereo ad). The bridge seemed solid to me, but I still unloaded the rest of the b/w film in my still camera while driving across.

After the bridge, I saw a cemetery and decided to stop and look around. When I got out of the car and the AC, I realized it was pretty damn hot, and I was wearing a black t-shirt. Oh well. I have a morbid fascination with cemetaries – I’m not some kind of gothic zombie type, but I think cemetaries are a strange sociological phenomenon. We treat people like shit during their lifetimes, and ignore them until they die. Then we spend thousands of dollars to commemorate them with a piece of land and a chunk of stone. It’s the epitome of cookie-cutter ceremonies. Nobody is born the same way – there are so many stories of rushed trips to the hospital, prolonged labor, C-sections, kids born in the elevator, natural childbirth in swimming pools, and the whole deal. But (almost) everyone who dies gets the same ceremony, the same square of limestone.

This cemetary was a dud, in my opinion – all flat markers, and no real artwork or interesting history. It was a nice looking place though – there was a little newsletter I should’ve stolen, talking about how the staff was there to serve you and to stop by the office for cookies and icewater. It was a nice location, too – you could see a tributary of the sound, with some sailboats and homes built on the hills. There were no interesting graves, although I accidentally found a WWI vet that shared my birthday, so I loaded some color film and got a shot of that.

I continued north on 16, running out the Metheny MD and switching to some Henry Rollins spoken word. You might or might not know the story about how I claim Rollins turned my life around, but maybe I should recap since I’ve been feeling pretty depressed lately:

The story starts in October 1993. I’d been in a relationship since March, and I thought it was pretty perfect. Things had settled down from the hyper-romantic “in love” period, to a more cosmopolitan “day-to-day love”, but I still thought it was the greatest relationship I was in. Famous last words – in October, she found out she had an ovarian cyst, and had to go in for surgery in December for it – really serious shit. She had doubts about the relationship, and she felt she couldn’t deal with both the relationship and the medical stuff, and she couldn’t get rid of the medical stuff, so she dumped me.

Of course this completely flattened me. But there’s more background. At that point in time, I was on this academic rollercoaster where I was barely hanging on. At IU, you go on probation for pulling your cumulative GPA below a 2, or doing something asinine in one semester, like getting all F’s. I’d spent more semesters on probation than off; my recent transcript was like: on probation, off probation, on probation, on probation, dismissal, reinstatement, off probation, on probation, and now I would’ve bet money against myself that I’d fuck up the rest of the semester and face another dismissal. I’d also given up on my original dream of finishing a computer science degree, since there were too many hurdles (calculus, foreign language) that I couldn’t finish.

My academic goal at that point was to get a degree in general studies – a loophole provided by the school of continuing studies. I could finish a non-specific bachelor’s degree if I had 120 credit hours – no foreign language, and I got to pick and choose my classes a bit, although I had to have a certain number of social and behavioral, science, and humanities classes, and I had to take a speech class. No problem. I figured I’d never get a job as a hot-shit unix programmer, but maybe I’d get a job answering phones somewhere. I worked with computers then as a support consultant,had been for three years, and knew a fair amount. I knew people with English degrees and History degrees with no experience snagging good-paying computer jobs, and I was properly positioned at the very start of the whole WWW explosion, so maybe there was hope. But I still felt like I was drifting, like all of my mooring lines were being severed one by one. I was taking stupid, passionless classes in public management and business computing, and counting away my time until the real world kidnapped me, without really getting ready for it.

Ten days after the girlfriend left, my paternal grandmother died, and I rushed home for the funeral (I didn’t have a car – my sister drove down from Ball State, and then back up to Elkhart). We briefly lived with Grandma Konrath when my mom, dad, and I showed up in Edwardsburg, MI after he got done with the Air Force in North Dakota. We went to her house almost every weekend from age zero until I was 16, 17 and started running with my own car and friends. Even then, I’d get out there at least every month or so. My maternal grandparents lived in Chicago, and I only saw them on holidays; my paternal grandfather died when my dad was only 2 or 3, so I never met him. So my Grandma Konrath was probably my closest grandparent. I last saw her the day I picked up my truck from U-Haul to move to Bloomington for the fall, and didn’t think of it as a last goodbye, but I guess it works better that way sometimes. I don’t have problems with funerals – I don’t believe in heaven and hell, and that’s problematic when you’re surrrounded by crying people who are talking about that. I feel grief, but it usually doesn’t happen until weeks or months later. Call me weird. Anyway, the strangest part was seeing my dad – he mostly had it together, but there was this almost scared look on his face when we were at the graveyard. He’s the youngest kid in this huge family, and I suddenly realized both of his parents were gone, and it made my father, the person that I see as more of an icon or a figurehead, seem a lot more like me.

So where does Rollins fit into all of this? When I got back to school, I bought The Boxed Life, which is a hilarious spoken word album. Hank talks about travel, depression, the road, people, aggression, humility, strength, and much more. I lived about two miles away from campus, and although I had a bus pass, I’d rather walk home than wait two hours for a BT bus. So I’d strap on my trusty Aiwa walkman, put in one of the Rollins tapes (it was a 2-tape set, and I later bought up the back-catalog too) and hiked it home. His monologues made me think a lot more about my life, the depression, and reinventing myself. Pretty soon, I started hauling around a spiral notebook and writing down my observations and feelings during the lull between classes and work. I dug out my old 110 lb weight set at my mom’s house and brought it back to Bloomington, trying to get back into shape. I stole a bunch of paperback books from my mom’s – stuff like Catch-22 and Fear of Flying, and made a habit of reading an hour or two a night. Later, I started dropping more cash every payday at Morgenstern’s on stuff like Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski, and I devoured their stories of loneliness, romance, life, and living. I still thought about my ex every day, but I knew I’d need to reinvent myself if I wanted to live. And I guess the distraction of the writing, reading and the lifting got in my way, and kept me from jumping into a temporary, fucked up relationship, like the chain of them behind me. And within a few months, I was a writer. I filled the void title in my life by hacking out short stories, poems, and trying at a first novel. And here I am: Jon Konrath, writer.

About 80 pages ago, I was talking about my trip. I was headed up 16, which is a nice road, with a lot of evergreen trees on either side and some small hills in the distance. There are few stops, just the occasional Texaco station. It reminded me a lot of my time in upstate New York with my dad, the summer before my senior year of high school. The drive felt good, even though I didn’t know my destination.

I got to Bremerton, which is an old Navy shipyard town. I flew over the shipworks in a tiny Cessna plane with a coworker once – there’s a lot of old iron down there. When I pulled into town, I could see the old gray battleships right off the water – a bunch of them were pushed together, hull-to-hull,like they were in storage. I saw a sign for a naval museum, and I hoped there would be a place I could drop a 10-spot and walk onto a decommissioned destroyer. But it looked like the ships were in some fenced-off, official-looking facility, and I couldn’t even get to the water’s edge for a picture. Bummer.

I motored around Bremerton, which is a small town with a heavy naval influence to it. I can’t describe it much better than that, but maybe the smell of saltwater and presence of marinas remind me of being on the Oregon coast, or my walks around lake Union and Elliot bay. Small towns are weird, because they are always beat – worn out signs on little local stores, high school kids with nothing to do, lots of senior citizens. It’s always fucked up, but it’s fucked up out of ignorance more than corruption. In the big city, the problems are that everyone wants to make a buck – everything is a high rise or a parking lot or a no parking zone. Everything is covered with soot and neon signs and billboards for beer or Guess jeans. But in the small town, it’s all about atrophy. And the people like it – and, I guess from a lifetime of living in small towns, it’s nice for me to get a small dose of it here and there.

I got back on 16 and banged north again. I thought about going to 3 and crossing the Kitsap bridge, and headeing west, on the north side of the Olympic State park, until I either got to the ocean or a nice outlook on the Juan de Fuca Strait. Realistically, I didn’t have time for this, and you can’t go all the way to the ocean because the prime real estate right on the tip there is an Indian reservation. So I stopped in Silverdale, with the intent of picking up some cash, hitting a restroom, and maybe getting a bite to eat. I found a Seafirst – while in line, a guy started talking to me about my Joe Satriani shirt. I guess he was up from the Bay Area for the weekend. He looked Navy, but I couldn’t tell. I stopped at the Target by the Kitsap mall – the whole place reminded me of a mall I saw during a stay in Corning, NY. I decided against Burger King, and got back on 16, heading south.

I got back into Bremerton and circled around again, looking for that museum. I saw what looked like Hyatt Regency or Days Inn towers in the distance, but there were a bunch of them – sort of modern-adobe looking, pinkish-sandstone colored, with bright terraces and modern-looking roofs. Why the fuck would they need so many hotels? I got a little lost, and ended up at the gate of the Navy base, so I turned and drove the length of the base, looking in the fence. Then I realized that those buildings weren’t hotels – they were barracks! I thought all barracks were required by law to be 50’s-looking quonset huts, but these were modern, high-rise apartments. I also saw a Subway on base, which looked a little out of place. Just outside of the base were a bunch of run-down bars that looked like they’d never served a drink to a person since the Korean War.

I couldn’t find the museum (I’m sure it’s a snap to find) and I was bored of driving, so I decided to drop $8 and take the ferry back to Seattle. I got there halfway through the lineup, and only had to wait 15 minutes. I grabbed all of my gear, and spent the ride taking still and video pictures of the birds, boats, and water. You can get excellent panning shots when you’re moving through the water – if the water is moving toward your angle, and you zoom in, it looks like you’re flying over the water. Also, the birds had a horrible headwind, and were trying to fly with the boat, so it looked like they were hovering right over us. I shot about 15 minutes of film, and got some great footage (but horrible audio – the wind!) of the approach to Seattle. I got back to the car early, and spooled out the rest of my tape on the approaching kingdome (Sony Hi8 tape is actually 122 minutes long, I found out). It felt good to sit in the Escort after the sound and the headwinds. That car still smells new – it’s amazing.

I got home tired, and sort of depressed. It was 7:30 on a Saturday night, and I was broke and with nothing to do. No messages, no calls, no email – I felt like I should’ve kept driving. Instead, I fell asleep, woke about 3 hours later and ate a TV dinner while watching the tape that was in the camcorder. It had the tail-end of my vacation last October to Indiana (which shows you how much I use the camcorder). My mom had a bunch of old slides from when I was a baby, so we rented a projector, aimed it at the wall, set up the camcorder, and I had her talk about each slide while I taped it. The picture quality is poor, but the commentary is great. I also faux-interviewed my friend Tom Sample in his apartment in Indy and got him to recall some great stories about our time together. After the tape, I spent part of the night, screwing with the new glossary system, and reading the Cliff Stoll book about the German hacker, The Cuckoo’s Egg.

Now I’ve spent forever typing all of that and yet I don’t feel like I’m really talking about what’s going on. I want to get out of the house though, and this will probably be more pedestrian, like a trip to safeway. More later.

06/07/98 21:48

I just re-read and edited what was above. I can ramble when I have nothing better to do with my time. My apologies to low-baud users.

I spent the day wandering in the Escort, wandering Northgate mall, wandering Mountlake Terrace, wandering University Village. It felt good to get out of the house, even though I didn’t have money to blow shopping. Malls have a certain cathartic appearance, and they’re a prime location for peoplewatching. It drives my friends nuts that I will spent so much time at malls without even going in stores, but hey – it’s exercise.

I was reading a book at a bookstore (Waldenbooks? It was someplace I don’t buy books) and it said that you can give your dendrons in your brain a workout by doing things you aren’t used to doing. So maybe I wouldn’t feel as atrophied if I started studying Sweedish or Russian or something. I think that’s true to an extent, because when I was suffering with physics or Spenser and Chaucer, I felt a lot more alert than when I was watching TV 19 hours a day.

I’ve declared Rumored to Exist officially stalled. I need to change gears again, and I have an idea for a third book that might work out well right now. Mum’s the word until I can get an outline hammered out.

Did you know Indiana University had a president with the first name of Elvis? Did you also know that Indiana University, defined by law on January 20, 1820, shares a birthday with me (1971), Bill Perry (1971), physicist Andre Ampere (1775), second man on the moon Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin (1930), Deforest Kelley – Star Trek’s “Dr. Bones” (1920), mathematician and physicist Daniel Bernoulli (1700), creator of Little Orphan Annie creator Harold Gray (1894), Lorenzo Lamas (1958), Kiss guitarrist Paul Stanley (1949), novelist Johannes Jensen (1873), and Skeet Ulrich (1968)? That’s quite a lineup – I’m thinking a secret society is in the works.

I need to figure out dinner and then start outlining this book.

Categories
general

A return to posting

After about 5 hours of hacking, this thing is up and running again. Sure feels weird to have all of the old entries on the server, and only one new one. I had to redo all of my interface here, and rewrite the C program that indexes everything, but it seems to be working. There are many bugs and rough-around-the edges things that need work, but it’s letting me enter in stuff, and it’s putting it on the web site, so that’s all that matters for now.

I have my Escort back. It feels weird to drive it after the Rabbit – almost like it’s a big car or something. It smells new, and the seats are more comfortable. I like the feel of it, and the interior, but it’s very sluggish. Going up hills, I kept grabbing for the gearshift to downshift. It also feels odd without a clutch under my left foot. Although I’ve cursed that car the last 34 months I’ve had it, I will miss it when it’s gone. It’s about as stable and well-adjusted as American cars get. Although my trips to Longview last year got to be a pain after a while, I will miss driving down I-5 on a nice, sunny day in that car. I’ve owned it longer than any other car, so it’ll always symbolize the beginning of my Seattle experience. And in 2 months, it will be back at the Ford motor credit office, on its way to another sucker.

I feel a need to update anyone who may have read my last journal and then got to the new one (or people who maybe read all of the old entries and then wondered what happened in the 6 month gap). So I guess I should run through the list.

I guess the biggest thing is that I’m single now. I split things off with Karena about 3 months ago. It’s hard to describe diplomatically in a public forum, but I guess I’ve been in the middle of some kind of weird identity crisis, and I wanted to get more serious about my writing. There weren’t any major dramatics, fights, etc. It’s hard to go into it any more than that, but I can describe what’s been going on with me, and maybe that will explain it more.

First, I’ve been writing a lot this year. I screwed around for a month or so, got a bunch of new computer gear with my tax money in January, and then decided to get back on the horse with my first novel, Summer Rain. In the middle of editing this book, I got to the point where I wanted to write full-time on it, and it became hard to do anything else. I thought about it so much, I *dreamed* about being in the book. And in all of this wanting to be a writer, and having a crisis about my purpose in life, I didn’t think I could live this bipolar life of working and being in a serious relationship, and writing. So, I got more into Summer Rain after the split, and then got into my second book again, Rumored to Exist. Right now, I’m supposed to be editing Rumored, but I’ve been blocked for a few weeks. So who knows what is next.

I bought a second car, another VW Rabbit like the one I had back in 1992. I was fixated on it after working on Summer Rain, since the car in that book is practically a main character. My old one was a 1980 diesel, 4 door, sunroof, 4 speed, silver. This is a 1978 gas, 2 door, sunroof, 5 speed, silver. It ran good for a while, and now this water pump shit started up. After I get that fixed, and a few other little things, it will be an okay car.

Since the beginning of last December, I’ve also bought a new stereo for the VW, a MiniDisc recorder, a bunch of computer crap, a bunch of books, and about 250 CDs. I’ve still managed to do okay with the bills – most of that was from a windfall of money at the start of the year, taxes and bonuses. I’ve been somewhat broke lately, and I am worried because the Escort has some paint scratches and I’m almost certain they will charge me $1000 for them when I return it. So I’m eating a lot of ramen and lunchmeat sandwiches these days.

I signed another lease on my apartment. Not much to say there, except that I’m too lazy to move, and I’m afraid if I move elsewhere, I won’t get any writing done.

My friend Bill Perry moved back to Indiana at the end of January, because his mom had cancer. She passed away the day before Memorial day, which really sucks. It’s weird without him here, since he moved me out here and he was kindof my default Seattle friend. He still works in Seattle (remotely) and shows up every once in a while.

Life has otherwise been very boring and routine, and maybe that’s part of the problem. I’ve been suffering fits of depression about what to do next. It’s not that I’m planning on quitting my job and backpacking across Tibet. It feels like the only interval after entering the corporate world is retiring, and that’s why people get married and buy houses volvo stationwagons and take package vacations and have kids and go to church. I don’t feel like I could do any of those things, but I almost feel like it’s expected of me. When I was in school, I always had goals – getting money for a semester, getting past midterms, getting through the semester, finishing requirements, meeting the right woman, etc. But it seems like life is a giant open frontier. I guess that’s good and bad.

It’s getting daylight out – I should probably sleep. More about this later.

06/06/98 12:23

I imagine I’ll be doing 9 entries a day for the first week, but the reading level will taper off with time. Bear with me.

As you can tell, I don’t sleep much on weekends. It’s very eerie to be sitting in bed, listening to a CD, and catching up on the paper journal as the sky turns from black to blue to broad daylight. The days are getting longer, which puts a cramp on a person who claims they can only write during darkness.

Although I am broke and tired, I promised myself I would leave the house and do something of interest today, and going to the mall doesn’t count.

Categories
general

Everything I touch breaks

Sometimes, it seems like everything I touch breaks. Almost three years ago, when I first moved to Seattle, I went through a period where I never wanted to leave my apartment, because I was certain I would accidentally do something that would cost me money. My salary looked decent on paper, back in Indiana<, but once I got a car, an apartment, and got hit by all of the nickel-and-dime real world expenses, I had way less in my pocket at the end of the week than I did at my poverty-level hourly job back in Bloomington. And then every time I moved, I got hit with another asinine fee or bill – it felt like these people expected me to have a few grand in the bank for idiot expenses. So on Saturdays, when I was alone and had nothing to do all day because I was so broke, I feared going downstairs to the mailbox, because I knew I’d find some new bill awaiting me. And I feared leaving the house, because I was certain I’d either get in a car accident or in a breakdown that would cost me tens of thousands of dollars.

I’m beginning to feel like this again. Today, my VW started making engine noises that sound expensive. It actually started on Tuesday, but today was the first time I opened the hood with the engine running and gave it a good listen. I talked to a friend of mine who says it might be something like the water pump or timing belt, and that makes more sense – it will also be a hell of a lot cheaper than a complete engine rebuild to fix a knocking rod or something. Either way, I don’t have time time or money to deal with it right now, so I will switch back to driving my Escort full-time.

I spent part of last night watching old Twilight Zone episodes. The day of the last Seinfeld episode, I got on a major anti-TV rant, tore my cable out of the wall, and cut it so I wouldn’t be able to watch any TV again. I’ve since found that I can barely get a decent picture of channel 5, the local NBC affiliate, but it’s so fuzzy and screwed up that I can’t focus on a TV show. Life without TV has been more lonely than exhilirating. I’ve realized that it opened me up to a whole different world of people and experiences. Granted, most of them made me feel like shit – everyone on TV is thin and in shape and beautiful and together, and after watching for 3 or for hours a night every night of the month, you wonder if you’ll ever be able to find a woman as beautiful as Monica or Phoebe or any of Jerry’s girlfriends, and you’ve become programmed. You can’t buy the cars or the clothese they advertise, so you revert to buying the beers and pizzas, and soon you’ve gained 50 more pounds and you’re less together and less beautiful than when you started. It’s all a trap.

Background info: I grew up on TV, like the rest of you. We only had 5 channels (NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, and a neo-nazi religious channel) until we got cable around 83 or 84 (my parents were late adopters on most things – we didn’t get a VCR until about 1988. We did have a microwave oven around 1980 though.) I got out of TV when I was in high school – by the time I had a car, a job, and friends who were interested in anything but TV on a Friday, I stopped watching. And when I went to college, I didn’t have a TV to bring with me. In my first year of college, I watched maybe 4 hours of TV. But in my second year of school, I lived at home. I worked, but there was usually a night a week where I watched every show – the first semester it was when LA Law was on. And I watched a slew of stuff on Sunday night – it was part of the routine, to go to the grocery with my girlfriend, and then watch America’s Funniest Home Videos. Somewhere in there, I realized that I didn’t do anything outside of work anymore – I didn’t write, or play bass, or get into music that much, or go to movies, or anything. I also gained 30 pounds from sitting in front of the tube with a bag of chips or some candy or a pizza. So I went off of TV again, for almost six years. I didn’t own a set, and when my roommates did, I seldom watched. I did watch movies on VHS, but I think that’s a different experience. Movies aren’t written to draw you in and herd you toward a sponsor. The only TV show I watched in that timeframe was Beavis and Butthead – I taped a bunch of those when I was home one summer. My TV celibacy continued until the end of 1996, when I bought a TV and a VCR to watch movies. At the start of 1997, I bought a cable to hook up and watch the free cable in our apartment. Then I got hooked again. I got locked into must see tv, saturday night live, syndicated seinfeld, abc’s wednesday lineup, and late night talk shows. Any time I didn’t feel like writing or doing anything creative or productive, I would channel-surf. And about two weeks ago, I stopped. It was weird at first, like I had a lot of extra time on my hands. I used to watch TV and eat, and eating in silence or with a CD going seemed weird. I usually start writing at 9, and that used to mean I’d eat, finish my shows and go to the computer. Now I sometimes have hours between eating and writing, and I don’t know what to do. Anyway, it’s weird. I wanted to give you the background so you don’t think I’m an anti-tv nazi or a devout couch potato. I’ve lived both roles.

Anyway, I was watching Twilight Zone last night. I have a bunch of them on tape, and sometimes I watch tapes or movies to get over the eerie silence of the evening, or when I have writer’s block. When I was a kid, we watched these every night at 10 on WGN. After a few summers of this, I thought I saw all of the episodes. Maybe I’ve forgotten some, or maybe there are ones that weren’t in syndication before, but many of these seem new to me. I wish I could’ve written some episodes for Serling, because I bet I could bang out a bunch of weird ideas that would’ve been great. Other odd things I noticed – have you ever noticed how many Twilight Zone episodes had a wild west background? I bet they used the Universal Studios wild west lot to shoot all of them. Also, ever notice how many times Robbie the Robot from Lost in Space appears in Twilight Zone episodes? They must’ve had some kind of loaner program.

I don’t remember what the hell I was going to say about the Twilight Zone. I’ve been watching in an effort to pick up weird ideas for the now-almost-stalled work on Rumored to Exist. I’m in a weird sort of funk and I can’t write anything new or unique. I’ve been pushing around old ideas, and cleaning things up, but there’s no energy behind it. I’ve also been having a series of weird dreams, 2 or 3 a night, that all have to do with women. They are completely different dreams, but usually involve falling in love with somebody or chasing after someone, and the women are all composites of various ex-girlfriends or other women I knew in Bloomington. The dreams are vivid and lifelike, and I wake up wishing they really happened.

This is the first journal entry I’ve done for a while. Now I need to get the archive of old stuff and get this site going again. Maybe I will journal for a few more days first….

Categories
general

Drew Carey book

I read the whole Drew Carey book last night. It’s actually pretty good. He does a section that’s just jokes, a section that’s stories about the TV show, his life, etc, and then a section of short stories he wrote that are vaguely based on some events in his life, but fiction. I liked all of the other stuff, but the stories really kicked ass. They almost reminded me of some of the stuff in those Kevin Canty books – they really stuck with you after you put the book down. He should write more stories during hiatus week or something.

I am going to seriously try to edit Rumored to Exist this weekend. I know something will stop me, but I’m going to try. If I still drank Coke, I’d buy four two liters on my way home and pledge to finish them all by lunch on Sunday. Instead, it will be Sprite, and there’s no real reason to drink it that fast. I did more editing last night, although not a lot, and ideas are starting to come to me in the shower or on the drive over.

I’ve been listening to AC/DC in the car. My order from cdconnection didn’t get filled – all of the CDs were out of stock, so I got my money back. Maybe I’ll spend that money on some AC/DC CDs or that new boxed set. Of course, I am so whipped on this Silver Platters coupon system that I only buy CDs on Wednesday so I can get double points. I also found out if you buy 15 CDs on Wednesday, you practically quadruple points. If I could afford to blow a few hundred bucks a week, I could get a serious cache of points going.

(Do you remember the episode of the Brady Bunch where the kids needed the money to engrave their parents’ anniversary present, so they formed a band and went on TV to win the cash? The band name was Silver Platters. Coincidence?)

(I guess that only made sense if you lived in Seattle and knew I bought all of my CDs at a place called Silver Platters).

Categories
general

Rancid sandwiches, alternate realities

I guess I’ve officially re-started the edits on Rumored to Exist. I spent some of last night hacking at the text, trying to turn some of the “one-hit” stories into longer pieces. There are all of these parts with a single plot element, and they somewhat fall flat. It’s cool to work through these in edits and get some more length and depth in there. I think after (if) I finish an edit like that, and add the 55 fragments that are missing, the manuscript will be about 100,000 words long.

I just had to buy another lunch because the sandwich I made was rancid. I hate packing my lunch, but I hate buying lunch downstairs or down the street. Spending $3 on a tiny pasta salad or a half of a sandwich isn’t worth it. I’m almost used to eating the same stuff every day when I bring my lunch. Sort of like how David Lynch ate lunch at the same place for 17 years in a row or whatever.

I’m reading a Phillip K Dick book (I don’t remember the title) that takes place in 1960 in an alternate universe where the Japanese and Germans won World War two and divided up America between themselves. It’s not perfect prose – I’ve liked PKD for his ideas and stories, but never for his flowing use of the English language. Anyway, it’s an eerie and strange idea, and it reminds me a lot of an American version of 1984 in a way. Everyone thinks 1984 was such a high-tech story (the people who don’t read it), but it was really about the low tech situation. I should re-read 1984 right after this, it’s been a while. I bought a new copy at a garage sale about a year ago – it looks like it was originally from a school library. My old version was falling apart – I bought it 5 years ago for a class, and got a few reads out of it.

Orwell’s awesome, even outside of 1984 and Animal Farm. I’ve read Down and Out… many times in recent years. It’s a great book to read when you’re poor and out of money – one of my favorite college reads.

It looks like none of the CDs I ordered from cdconnection will make it – they’re all out of stock. I went CD shopping last night, and bought 2 Tori Amos singles and 2 albums by Tony MacAlpine, this mid-80s guitar hero type. I thought he dropped off the face of the earth, but here he is…

Categories
general

At war with Columbia House records

It doesn’t look like my new update program is working that well now – it mysteriously got confused and started creating 0 length files out of some journal pages. I think I fixed it, but I’m not sure. I’ll have to modify it a bit more so it makes a backup of stuff before it starts destroying things.

I spent a lot of last night either trying to fix the above program, or trying to get to the end of Tetris Plus. I think I’m about 4 levels away from finishing. But the last time I said that was when I was on vacation and thought I’d cleared the four worlds on the map. Then, Atlantis and another 20 levels magically appeared, and each level has been tremendously difficult. I’ve probably burned through 6 sets of batteries on my Game Boy trying to beat this thing. While waiting in O’Hare, I went through one set of batteries on one level, playing it over and over. An addiction – it isn’t heroin, but it will probably burn out my eyes over time.

I’m at war with Columbia House records. About two months ago, they sent me a “we want you back” offer saying I could get 15 CDs for free, WITH NO SHIPPING, and then I’d have to buy 4 more and quit. I get this kind of thing all the time, but not with free shipping – that’s like $40. So I signed up (but not with the little stamps they gave me – I dug out my A-Z catalog and ordered a bunch of jazz stuff that never appears in their fliers) and I waited. And waited. That was on 10/7. With 6-8 weeks of postal malady, they’d be here by now, right? This Saturday, I got my first “return this or we’ll send you the new Madonna album or something else horrible”. OK, it had a membership number and everything, so that meant that either the stuff got crossed, since they send CDs 4th class and mailings second class, or someone took all of my CDs from the rental office and sold them for methadone. More waiting. Last night I got like 6 hangups on my answering machine while I was playing GameBoy (if your name doesn’t show up in caller ID, you talk to the little black box). I answered on the 7th, thinking maybe I’d won some German lottery, or my girlfriend was at a payphone with her kidney missing or something. It was… Columbia House. Some poor kid was reading off a notecard and asking me if I wanted to come back to Columbia House. After his canned speech, I told him I THOUGHT I WAS A MEMBER. He gave me an 800 number to call from 8am-10pm Indiana time (of course it was 7:01PM, aka 10:01 Indiana time). I called thismorning, and they didn’t know where the CDs were, although they sent them out on 10/22. But, they were nice enough to re-send all of the CDs to me and I didn’t even have to threaten them with bodily harm. (They run this club out of Bloomington – I could probably fly to Indiana, buy a flamethrower and an AK-47, and get my 15 CDs the hard way). Anyway, maybe my stuff will show up in another 2 months. Maybe I’ll get both shipments and I can sell one set of CDs.

My sister Monica bought a 98 Saturn, so I no longer have the newest car in the family. Maybe after I get rid of my Escort, I could buy the oldest car in the family. Come to think of it, that wouldn’t work – my mom’s husband has a bunch of 55 57 chevys.

Categories
general

Ugliest C ever

I just spent most of my lunch hour trying to add the stuff to my index program so the next/previous tags will automatically be updated on my pages. It is the UGLIEST piece of C code I’ve ever written – if you can even call it C. It constructs a couple of sed scripts that it systems out, and also runs a perl script to do all of the replacements. It is slow, of course, but not that bad. It’s only hacking at two files at a time. It looks like its working though, so I’m happy. I’m nervous that it will hit some kind of weird case where it will erase a bunch of files or something stupid like that, but it tested fine, and I think I’ll be able to just forget about it now and let it do its own work.

It’s another tiring day. I was up late last night reading my old journals from way back when. It’s pretty trippy – my first journal is very hands-offish and doesn’t really tell any details about what was going on in my life. I talked about paxil, and depression, but I never talked much about the women, or buying a new CD player, or working for UCS, or meeting Simms for the first time. A lot of weird stuff happened in that first few months of journaling, but it didn’t capture much. I had two journals going at once for part of that year, and the summer of 1994 (I kept one with me in a backpack, one at home). That journal was never finished, but the gossip and the dirt on a lot of the summer’s actifvities is all there – shit I forgot about. There were some strange gaps though. I talked about sex when I wasn’t having any, but on the rare opportunities that I did lure someone back to the apartment, I never filled the pages the morning after.

Some of my best paper journals are from the 94-95 school year. During this period, I wrote about 3 times more in my notebooks than I do now. And the stuff is classic – it was a period when I was reading a lot of stuff – my first Bukowski, WS Burroughs, Henry Miller, some Rollins – and I wrote for pages and pages every night about how much I hated Bloomington, and how I wanted to save my pennies and drive to San Diego or Mexico or Texas or Seattle and live in my car and write books about my fucked-up experiences. The stories about my wild ideas of escape would make a pretty good book in themselves. I guess I wrote a lot about my problems with Simms when we were living together, but most of it was some intense writing about that situation. I also had (shitty) ideas for a new novel about every other day. And the depression stuff was at its strongest then – a lot of rejection, all-out dating problems, almost no friends except for Larry, and I spent most of my time wondering when I would be fired from UCS for something I didn’t do. It’s pretty intense reading.

I thought about it a little, and it’s strange that my journals don’t talk about depression too much. I guess it has been pre-empted by long entries talking about dietary problems and gastroenterological problems. But ALL I used to write about was depression. It wasn’t that boring of stuff, either – a cross of parapoia and philosophy. I guess it’s hard to write about it when you’re doing OK.

I want to make sure this index works OK. Maybe I will write more, maybe not.

Categories
general

Stories of Japan and India and Morocco and Amsterdam

It’s sad when you spend a half an hour reading your own web page. I guess these things happen. Actually, I’ve been tearing things apart a bit. I just changed all of the colors (again), and I’m trying to find a scheme to put next/previous links at the bottom of each page. Don’t hold your breath – it’s going to be a weird hack to get it to happen for the new additions, and I have no idea how I’ll fix all of the old pages, except by hand, I guess.

I’m back from Thanksgiving, and it was okay – no major complaints, no real excitement. I’ve been sick since Friday afternoon or so, and as I type, I’m working on my first real meal since maybe Saturday. I’m pretty low on sleep right now – I went to visit my friend Bijan, who is moving to SanFran today, to start a new job.

Bijan went on this massive trip, basically around the world, recording sounds on his MiniDisc, taking lots of photos, and meeting up with weird and cool people all over the place. He was supposed to be packing his stuff last night, but spent most of the time showing me fliers and CDs and photos and playing me stuff on his MD (which, by the way, kicks ass). He showed me a japanese reissue of Miles Davis – In a Silent Way on MiniDisc that was probably the coolest piece of music media I’ve ever seen in my life.

All of his stories of Japan and India and Morocco and Amsterdam made me wish I would’ve packed up after UCS and spent a few months on the road like that. There were always excuses – mostly money, but also language barriers, time, etc, that stopped me. Now it’s things like responsibilities, money (again), and the idea of traveling Europe with colitis isn’t a pleasant one. But a summer over there would probably generate a thousand short story ideas

It’s December! Shit, I didn’t even notice that until a second ago. This weekend, I did all of my Xmas shopping except Karena’s stuff. My sisters and nephew are just getting gift certificates, which was easy and should save on shipping stuff back to Indiana. I should avoid posting a message about what I got my respective parents, on the extreme off-chance that they somehow get an AOL account and a computer in the next 24 days. Less probable things have happened.

The CD of today is Black Sabbath – Heaven and Hell. I had no Black Sabbath on CD, just a motley collection of compilations on tape that I bought at gas stations when I was driving too much through central Indiana and got bored of every tape I owned, causing the purchase of many $3.99 cassettes at Marathon stations. Anyway, I got this Black Sabbath 4-pack of CDs at Costco (and miraculously, the CDs weren’t reissues, cutouts, or mangled in any other way). Anyway, three of the discs were Ozzy-era (Black Sabbath, Paranoid, and Sabotage), but Heaven and Hell is also included. It’s an odd-man-out because Ronnie James Dio sings on it. Plus, it doesn’t sound at all like a Black Sabbath album. It sounds more like a more refined version of early Krokus or something. It’s a decent album, and ahead of its time (it came out in 1980). I never liked Ronnie James Dio that much, but he’s tolerable here. During his solo career, I thought everyone in his band was pretty good except him. They should’ve fired him and becoem an instrumental band called “The Ronnie James Dio Experience”.

Speaking of Indiana, I am eating with a plastic spoon from Kroger. Of the things I miss about Indiana, Kroger is strangely on the top ten list. It’s probably because my mom shopped there when we lived in Michigan. She actually drove from Michigan to Indiana to get groceries at Kroger. Of course, if you live in Edwardsburg, MI, you drive to Indiana to put gas in your car, blow your nose, get a haircut, and about everything else. This was a town – sorry, this was a village – that had the village hall in a strip mall, next to a laundromat and a bait shop (and both of them were larger).

I think I’ve decided not to move from my apartment. To sort of offset this decision, I’ve decided to go through the whole damn place and throw out everything that’s not getting any use, and then buy some new shelves or an entertainment center, or some of those closet shelf organizer things, or something, so I can free up more spare room. If I get caught up on sleep, I might try to do that tonight…

—

I have put previous/next links on all of the pages except for this one. This one has a comment in it that will be replaced by the update program with a correct and automated line of html that will add its own prev/next links without my intervention. That piece of code hasn’t been written yet, but it won’t be difficult.

I weighed myself last night and I was down to about 185. Four months ago, when this whole dietary thing started, I was probably pushing 215. I’m probably close to the range considered healthy, although I’m still a little flabby around the midsection. I think I am also within a couple pounds of my weight 3 or 4 years ago, before I got a car and money to actually buy food. I’m still 20 or 30 lbs above my weight in high school. I always hated being that thin – I looked like a ghoul. Of course, if I was in high school now, with all of these Seattle bands and waif commercials and calvin klein, i’d be about perfect.

I think I’m leaving early. Nobody’s here, and I’m about to fall asleep. Later…

Categories
general

Old CDs, older stories

I spent last night putting my CD collection online. I’m at 273 CDs as of last night. My goal is to get at least 500. If I wouldn’t have sold or traded so many during college, I’d have at least a thousand, I think.

I also went CD shopping last night. The bounties: The Beatles – Past Masters Vol Two, ELP – Trilogy (gold disc), and Queensryche – Queensryche EP. I’m listening to Past Masters right now – it’s a great collection of the late sixties stuff, which is my favorite era of Beatles stuff. Observations about the Beatles that I made last night:

  • It’s annoying that so many commercials use their songs and ruin them for me
  • It’s amazing how many bits of children’s songs are mixed in there
  • The song Paperback Writer must’ve been like Motorhead when it first came out and knocked the shit out of all the American Bandstand, Monkees-looking idiots that were into the “fab four” before then.
  • The track “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” is pretty fucking weird.
  • I need to buy all of the Beatles CDs.

As for the ELP CD, it is probably the best sounding disc in my collection. That album was one of the first CDs I bought way back when I got my first player (in 1987). The original AAD pressing sounds way better than most remasters on the market these days. The gold disc sounds even more incredible than that. It even sounds good on the total piece of shit Koss computer speakers in my office. Of course, when I listened to it all the way through at home, it revealed a lot of the deficiencies in my current sound system. I really wish I could just rush out and drop the cash on a pair of Magnepan speakers and a good amp, but I guess I have to wait on that, probably until after I move.

As for the third CD – I’ve had that Queensryche EP probably since the summer of 1987, before the CD player, but on tape. The CD has one extra song on it, the Prophecy, which was also on the soundtrack for Decline of Western Civilization 2 – The Metal years. That addition means I now have the complete Queensryche discography, barring singles and imports, which will cost more than a fucking house to find.

Sorry if today’s post sounds like record collector’s anonymous or something, but I have another bitch, and that’s mass-produced “collectible” stuff. Here’s an example that I told Ray about and he completely agrees to the point of suicide: A lot of the Motorhead albums were remastered this year. Every single one of them had about 3 or 4 rare tracks also included, like B-sides or live stuff, and they all had the original artwork plus some more liner notes. That’s cool if you’re like me who doesn’t have any of their stuff on CD yet, but it is a mixed bag for someone like Ray who owns all of their stuff, and now has to buy all of it again to get the singles tracks, which he won’t really *own*, so he still needs to keep his eyes out for that stuff. Okay, so now Castle decides to put out this 4 or 5 CD boxed set of Motorhead stuff. Now, my question is: should I spend $50 to get this, which doesn’t include all of the albums, just to get the few odd extra tracks, and then should I, in addition, buy all of the reissues too, so I can have the whole albums? The purpose of a boxed set was probably originally so you could say “I don’t have any of their albums, now I can get all of them in one fell swoop, and maybe save a couple of bucks”. There’s a Beatles boxed set that contains all of their recordings, plus the singles, and nothing extra except this cool roll-top wooden box, but you probably save yourself some cash doing it. (I haven’t done the math yet, and I already own enough stuff to make it prohibitive to have doubles). Anyway, what’s a collector like Ray to do about a boxed set like the Motorhead one? He probably has all of the stuff in the set, albeit not remastered and in that order, and not with the package or booklet. But if he says fuck it to buying it, he doesn’t have the complete collection.

All of this makes me think about my collection, and how “complete” you can get. Like the Beatles thing – you can go to any big record store, buy the couple dozen studio albums, the two past masters albums, and you’re essentially “complete”. But you could spend the rest of your fucking life buying singles, 45s, reel to reels, bootlegs, live performances, solo albums, collector’s albums, UK pressings, German pressings, fan club records etc etc etc.

Another artist I’m closing in on with regard to completion is Peter Gabriel. I have all of his studio albums (solo – don’t fuck with me about his stuff with Genesis), but I’m missing the live albums, the compilations, and the singles. (actually, between paragraphs above, I got on line with cdconnection.com and ordered 3 Peter Gabriel singles, and the German version of Security). Anyway, this will probably be unfulfilled for a while, because both of the live albums, although pretty good, cost more. And singles – the only singles stores ever carry are Mariah Carey or whatever. I don’t even know what singles Peter Gabriel released in his pre-Sledgehammer career, let alone where I can buy them. Oh, and he has a CD-ROM out too. Maybe he has two?

Nothing else is going on today – it’s slow, everyone is gone or leaving early. I imagine traffic will be pretty gnarly leaving work today. It’s actually nice out, though – the sky is blue and the sun is shining. Maybe I should leave early, too.

—-

(I’m bored as hell, and there’s nothing to do, so it’s time for another weird game of thought association. Since I’ve been babbling all day about CDs, I’ll start there)

I bought my first CD player in the summer of 1987, with my first paycheck from my new “real” job at Taco Bell. Two weeks of stirring giant tubs of cold reconstituted bean paste bought me a Toshiba player that was somewhere between a portable and a full-sized model. It ran on AC power only, and was a top-loader with a tiny LCD display and the basic buttons for operation. I think it had some memory function, and you could see elapsed vs. remaining time. With a metal case and not that much plastic in its construction, it felt much sturdier than most el cheapo models on the market right now. At K-Mart, I paid maybe $99.99 for it, and then went over to Super Sounds in Concord Mall to spend the absolute last of my cash on a single CD. This was when they were half vinyl, half tape, and had maybe two bins with CDs in them. My first choice: Iron Maiden – Somewhere in Time. I rushed home on my bike, plugged into my Soundesign rig, and listened away. The beginning of an addiction.

A few months later, I was at World Records in Pierre Moran mall, right after school on a Tuesday. I picked up a copy of Metallica’s new EP, Garage Days Re-Revisited, and a RYKOdisc sampler called Steal This Disc. I bought it because it was only $8 or something, and every CD helped back then. I piled back into the Camaro, probably turned on Master of Puppets, and left for work. Now I drove, and I had a new job – I was a dishwasher at this Italian restaurant called Columbo’s. My friend Matt Wanke convinced me to bust suds over there, because he worked on the pizza line and it’d be cool to work together. I gave notice at Taco Bell, and they didn’t schedule me for my last two weeks.

The only thing noteworthy to come out of Columbo’s was that I met a guy named John that was even more insane than me, and I kept running into him for the next few years. While we were slamming through dishes from the dinner rush, he’d just stand up from his sink and say “I wonder what would happen if we put angel dust in the mozarella shakers” or “I’m going to go tell customers to leave their tip under the food on the dirty dishes, so we get a shot at the money”.

I also had to close the restaurant one school night a week. I learned how desolate Elkhart can be after 10PM. Sometimes I’d drive all the way to Goshen to get some food at the late night drive through Burger King.

Fuck – my mom called and threw off my whole train of thought. At least she didn’t mention the $450 rental car tab I put on her credit card

I walked out of Columbo’s on a Saturday night, without another job lined up or any money saved. (aside from CDs, I blew a bunch of cash putting a new exhaust on the Camaro). I got a job at Ward’s a few days later, and started a long tenure that took me through high school and beyond.

My first couple of Wards checks (which were my first non-$3.35 checks of my life) went to a new heater core in the Camaro. By that point in time (September? October?) the Indiana fall made driving to school in the morning pretty unbearable. My old heater core was full of holes, so I took the ‘in’ and ‘out’ hoses and connected it together with one hose. I didn’t lose any more of the precious green fluid on the driveway, but I also saw my breath when I drove anywhere in the AM.

The weekend of the heater core replacement also included some other repairs – I think I also installed a manual choke control (aside from freezing my ass off in the morning, the carb also had its problems) and a manual oil pressure gauge. That was actually on Halloween weekend, and I planned on going out with my friend Jia that night. It’s impossible to see the oil pressure sender on that engine (it’s sort of hidden back by the HEI distributor) and I didn’t tighten something enough. I started the engine with the hood open, and it shot oil all over the damn place for a dozen seconds, until I killed the engine. So we had to take Jia’s car.

I think our plan back then was similar to most – we’d drive around in downtown Elkhart or downtown Goshen and hope that some incredibly beautiful and loose women would be walking around and then they’d somehow end up in the car, and the magic would happen, so to speak. This, of course, NEVER HAPPENED. (Regardless, my friend Ray thinks this is 100% feasible and still wants to do this all the time.) The odds of this happening would probably be higher if we were in a crappy Camaro than in his car, a green, four door, Dodge Dart. We went out in his car anyway, listened to Master of Puppets on a crappy jambox, and went to some fairly hidden and now probably completely destroyed video game place, that had a shitload of games and a little cafeteria where you could get a hamburger or some nachos or something. Lots of people hung out there, and none of them were from our school. We played a bunch of Tron Deadly Disks or Spy Hunter or whatever I was into at that moment, and had some heavy discussions about how much stuff sucked in relation to our 16 year old worlds, which seemed infinitely wise at the time, and were infinitely stupid in retrospect.

On the way home (this was Halloween), we got egged and the Dart had no windshield washer solution, so we put on the wipers and drove for an hour, hoping they might scrape enough at the molecular level to remove the egg without any solvent. Then, while driving, swearing, and listening to Metallica, a black cat ran in front of the car, and Jia almost hit it. We both shit our pants and prayed to the reaper, knowing that we’d probably be killed in the next ten seconds.

We weren’t.

On the 4th of July in 1989, my parents found out that I had several thousand dollars in credit card debt hidden from them, and wanted to kill me, throw me out, and bitch for hours about how horrible I was. I decided to help them out by leaving and going to Jia’s to cool off, so I left the house without telling them where I was going. I found Jia at a tennis court at the high school (I didn’t really know he played tennis), and we hung out at his house that night. I called my parents back and they were crying and all upset over it. My mom expected them to find me dead and penniless under a bridge in Minnesota a few months later, and instead I was looking at porno and listening to Led Zeppelin in Jia’s bedroom a mile away. It was then that I learned I could win almost any campaign against my parents, and I was largely right.

I’m having a hard time remembering when I first started hanging out with Jia – we met in 7th grade algebra, along with Roger Eppich and Larry Falli and the rest of the braniacs. I guess it was at the end of the 9th grade school year. We were riding around on bikes, and to get to his house, we had to go into Ox-Bow park, and then scale some fence to cross the street. (you could’ve just not gone through the park, but it saved like maybe 4 seconds of time or something). Anyway, we went to his house, and he lost a joint that was hidden inside a ball-point pen, somewhere in his comic book pen. He had a cornoary while tearing through all of these old issues of Silver Surfer or whatever, and then found it. Aside from Health Studies class pictures, it was the first time I saw pot, ever. During the whole bike ride, Jia kept talking about all of these girls he was taking to the movies and then later messing around with. We were in a gym class before that and he’d come in with these insane and obviously false reports about his exploits, and always offered to get me a cut of the action. I figured it might be possible, because at this point in time, Jia and I looked almost like identical twins. In fact, Mr. Post, my junior high algebra teacher, signed my yearbook “To Jia..”.

About that gym class – it was made of 49% future pro atheletes – and not just the stupid ones who could run a mile in 10 seconds or shoot a million freethrows in a row – I’m talking about the ones that go to Stanford to be on their rowing team plus study corporate law. 49% of the class were the future license plate makers of America. And the other 5 of us – me, Jia, Jerome, Nathan, and maybe one or two others, were all like Silicon Valley hopefuls. The only reason we didn’t get the shit kicked out of us on a regular basis was because the other two groups were beating the fuck out of each other in basketball games. Most of the year was basketball – the coach was also the basketball coach, and this was when Shawn Kemp was shopping for a shoe contract or something, so he was always doing press conferences with ESPN and we were always playing the always-no-supervision basketball games. By the end of the year I got pretty good at it – all of us Apple II programmers played a 3 on 3 game, and would occasionally have to take in a loser, like this guy Ernie Friend, to round out the teams.

Other memorable gym class moments – we had to do some super-olympic event thing that involved running, jumping, gymnastics, climbing the rope, etc etc and you had to do all of this shit and beat certain goals and you’d get the A. Anyway, I didn’t pass ANY of the hundred-some events. Because I actually tried all of them, though, I still got a C.

About Jia, like a week later he was going to come over and spend the night, hang out, see my place, all of that. (this was at the age when it was still cool to go to someone’s house to see how many cool computer games they had, or whatever). My mom had to go pick up Jia, and when we got there, he was completely stoned. I guess my mom didn’t figure this out, but I knew he couldn’t stay in the house all night, because he was really fucked up, speaking in tongues, etc. So we went outside, and wandered around my subdivision and the once-vacant land to the east of the division. He spent a while laughing and making stupid observations, and then got really serious and started talking about a lot of the same issues that we shared, things that plagued both of us. Both of us were smart, poor, geeky, creative, and somewhat outside the loop within our rich and trendy high school. Jia’s outer shell was more defined than mine, and he had more confidence in many social situations. I never understood how he dealt with it, and it wasn’t until then that I realized that he didn’t deal with it, sort of like me.

Anyway, I got Jia back to my place many hours later. He ate a whole bunch of fairly rancid pizza like it was the best thing on earth, and I found, via note, that I was grounded for leaving the house for so long. After that, we were friends. And I found a secret that he hid from a lot of people – he collected Transformers. Once at his house, I had a strange “two worlds collide” experience when a fellow Transformers collector showed up to hang out for a while. He was Ray – known to me as the guy from my electronics class, but now known as one of my best friends.

Talking about high school is boring me, so I should get out of here…