So I booked my trip to Germany this week, which was a huge hit on the credit card, but at least I figured out the dates and times. I’m going to be in Nuremberg for basically a weekend, and then Frankfurt for a week. Travel times screw with that a bit, though. I couldn’t figure out a flight to Nuremberg on a Thursday, and my first strike on all of the deal sites ended up looking like this: Wake up early for work on Thursday, work all day, take a twelve-hour flight from SFO to Zurich, then sit for eleven hours until I took an hour-long flight to Nuremberg. Um, no.
I eventually found a trip where I left a little later on an SFO to Frankfurt flight, then sit around for almost seven hours until a half-hour flight to Nuremberg. If I was smart, I’d skip the connecting flight and take a two-hour train ride, but I don’t know how to deal with the customs, luggage, tickets, etc. I know everyone speaks English, but even in the same scenario in America, I’d get stressed out. All of this means I have to sleep on the plane ride out, because there’s no way in hell I will be able to power through two days of no sleep and airports. Sonata, take me away – I need to sleep on that flight. And I will probably pay to get into one of those lounges at the airport and take a long shower and curl up with some WiFi and a power connection for the layover. Hopefully there will be plenty of cased meat German goodness for me to consume during my wait.
Speaking of Germany, we bought a second car, actually a new primary car for S. It’s the Jetta sportwagon, which is pretty nice. It has all of the extras, like a huge moonroof, leather heated seats, and a whole armada of lights and motors and switches I will never understand. I am fine with the Prius C as my daily driver, mostly because I don’t drive daily. I’ve had the car for three months and put 800-some miles and only two tanks of gas in it.
I’ve started a new book, which is good. It’s a lot different than my other books, and that’s about all I can say about it, except that it’s been a little slow out of the gate, but is very heavily over-outlined and planned from the start. It takes place in Seattle, which has been interesting for me. Although I’m only a few days into it, I am hoping to keep up with my current rate and maybe get a draft done before Germany. Fingers crossed on that.
Atmospheres has not sold at all. It hasn’t been reviewed or mentioned or purchased, aside from one or two brief blips on the radar. It’s fallen completely flat, and I went into a huge post-partum depression over that. There’s nothing I can do about that except go out and try to write another book, but it’s extremely depressing to finish something you really love and then realize you have no audience at all for it. I realize it’s a hard book to read, but it’s got some of my favorite writing in it, and went in a new direction for me, with a lot of rawness and honesty I haven’t been able to work into other books.
But it’s a tough sell, and it’s not the kind of thing I can shore up with ads and targeted mentions to communities like it’s a YA vampire book, because there isn’t really a community for this kind of shit. I’ve been greatly distancing myself from the Bizarro community and the literary fiction category, and have completely forgotten about the alt-lit thing, because I’ve realized I don’t fit into any of those, and I don’t feel welcome. This shit is high school all over again, and I’d rather write. So, that’s what I do.
Not much else is up. Still taking bass lessons, which has been good, except that my teacher let me play his Precision bass, which is one of those 50s reissues made in Japan in the late 80s, and it’s such a phenomenally awesome bass that I immediately want one. I’ve got four basses, three that are never played, and I’ve been scheming some way to arbitrage my way into something else, maybe sell three and build one. I should just fucking practice and stop thinking about it, but those vintage frets and lightweight bodies full of punch make me jones for something else.
It’s quickly becoming summer here. It’s gout season right now, and I’ve got stiff joints and fingers and a clicky neck that makes me think I should just move into my chiropractor’s office. Been reading that new Barry Miles bio on Burroughs, which I’m enjoying. I have read too many Burroughs bios in the last six months, but this one is pretty solid.
I’m starving and 1500 words in for the day, so I need to look into some waffles or pancakes or bacon or all three.
This site has been here, in one form another, for 17 years now.
In 1997, I got together a couple of half-baked elisp scripts and installed them on my shell account over at Speakeasy. This was before the word ‘blog’ was invented. Mark Zuckerberg was 13 and Facebook was nowhere near an idea yet. Social networking consisted of AOL chat and not much more. 56K modems were just hitting the scene, and some people had moved up to 800×600 screens. Google didn’t exist, and everyone used Alta Vista. There were about a million and a half web sites, compared to the three billion we have in 2014.
Back then, WordPress was not an option. LiveJournal had not been invented. Blogger would not launch for a few more years. But I wanted to keep an online journal somehow. My friend Bill Perry helped me come up with a script in emacs so I could hit a key combo and it would open up a file, named with that day’s date, with all of the HTML at the top and bottom of the page, so I could easily type that day’s entry and have a page per day. I then wrote the world’s shittiest C program to generate the index, which sat in the left frame of the page. (Remember frames? Shit.) My goal was to telnet into Speakeasy every day, and use my lunch hour to practice writing, with little public entries about current projects or observations or whatever was going on in Seattle. I’d have no way to write about my travels – laptops were huge and expensive; mobile internet was not a thing; phones were giant bricks; PDAs were either being figured out or were the Apple Newton. And photos were not much of an option, unless I took them with my 35mm, scanned them with a scanner I did not own, and then smashed and flattened them so they’d download on a slow modem. Text was king, and my plan was to keep writing short essays and updates, even if my life was boring and I didn’t have some hook or theme to the whole thing.
After I moved to New York in 1999, blogs became A Thing. I resisted calling this a blog for a long time. (“It’s a journal!”) Teenagers started livejournals. The Blogosphere happened. Due to the Iraq war and W and all of that, the news cycle became bloggy or gave blogs legitimacy or whatever. Every engineer that got laid off during the 2000 NASDAQ crash and bubble bursting started a blog company and then sold it to Google for millions. Professional blogging became a job. All of these niche blogs happened, and if you were a twenty-something and had a quirky blog and were a Cool Kid, you’d get a book deal to scrape your text into print. Maybe it would become a movie. (A blog where someone cooks all of the crap in a cookbook? Really?)
I had good years and bad years of blogging. There were a couple of times I stopped, and went dark. (1998, 2000) There were years I barely entered anything. And there were years where I had daily entries, huge essays, long trip reports, and pieces of fiction that ended up in books. I did a book of blog entries from 1997-1999. I like it, but nobody bought it. (It’s out of print now.) I often thought about doing another book, but the blog-to-book model is annoying to me, and nobody buys my books anyway, so it’s not worth the time. I often struggle with what to write here and feel bad that I don’t blaze away daily like I did ten years ago, but I eventually do come back.
Those scripts went away a few years ago, and I switched to using WordPress. And I eventually stopped resisting the term blog, although I did it just in time for blogs to be dead. I guess I still have some readers here, but it hasn’t been about monetizing this, and it’s never been my main writing project. It’s not here to sell my books (it doesn’t) and it doesn’t get the attention my other writing does. But it’s been around long enough that it isn’t going anywhere. Even if the blogging culture fully dies and everyone spends time on some new site where you just record a grunt and exchange them with friends who grunt back, I’ll still be here typing.
But yeah, 17 really puts the zap on things. I remember when I was 17. A lot of people I know were still shitting in diapers in 1997. And there’s this strange wave of 90s nostalgia, a “hey, remember…” movement for a time that feels like it was a week ago to me. Time’s strange.
Anyway, thanks for reading. I’ll keep writing if you keep showing up. And even if you don’t, I’ll probably still keep writing.
It has been impossible for me to write lately without spending time fucking around, checking the web, reading through old email, whatever. So I am trying something new: writing on an AlphaSmart Dana word processor.
The Dana is essentially an overgrown Palm Pilot, glued to a full-sized keyboard. It has a monochrome touch screen that’s about as big as two iPhone displays next to each other, and no moving parts other than the keyboard. There’s some amount of flash memory inside, and two SD card slots. It runs on AA batteries, which last about 25 hours, or you can use a rechargeable battery stick. A USB plug on the back can charge it and lets you hook it up to a computer.
Because it runs PalmOS, it can run old Palm apps. But I don’t care about that, and haven’t messed with it. It comes with its own word processor, and I only need to use that. I don’t care about the address book or calendar or any of the other things on it. The word processor holds eight files that you cycle through with the F-keys, and has some basic formatting stuff. It also does word count, which is about all I really need.
The keyboard itself is pretty nice, full-sized without any weird key combinations. The entire unit weighs about two pounds, and is wide enough that it can sit on your lap without any trouble. It’s bigger than an iPad, but smaller than a MacBook Pro. (Maybe it’s about the size of a MacBook Air.) The keys do have limited travel, but it’s about like typing on a Dell laptop. The screen itself isn’t great, but it’s functional. I’m a little worried about looking down at it, since I have a bad neck, but I guess I can not look at it when I’m typing. The touch screen is the kind that needs a stylus, and I’ve forgotten how much the old Palm screens suck, compared to a modern capacitive-touch glass screen. The backlight is also the greenish kind the Palm had, which is not great and eats batteries, but it’s there if you are on a plane or in the dark.
The coolest thing about the Dana is how you get files to your computer. It has an IRDA blaster for IR, not that any computer I have can use IRDA anymore. You could also pop out the SD cards and put them in your computer, but I think it saves files in the *.PDB format, which would involve some dickery to convert them to something I could use. You can also set up Palm Sync and sync the docs that way, but I don’t even know if they make Mavericks-compatible sync software anymore. There are other word processors out there for Palm, and software on the Mac end to futz with it, but forget all of that. I want it to just work, and it does.
Here’s the deal: when you hook this up to your computer, it looks like it’s a USB keyboard. You open a blank document on your computer, press a sync button on the Dana, and it beams over the current word processor document, as if the Dana is phantom typing it into your computer. It takes a minute, but it dumps it straight into Scrivener (or Pages, or Word, or WordPress or whatever you have open) with no fuss. I sat down yesterday and banged out a thousand-word journal entry, plugged it in, and done.
This doesn’t support a way to round-trip files back to the unit, but I don’t care about editing. I just want a text capture device, a way to sit in bed or on the couch, go into a trance state, and blow through the words, dumping them into a buffer. It’s getting harder and harder for me to do this with old emails and book sales figures and wikipedia and everything else a click away. I’ve tried turning off wireless, and installing blocker programs, but then I just end up reading through old files from 1997 or looking at old books of mine, and can’t get started. So maybe this will work.
I thought about getting an actual typewriter, a Smith-Corona or whatever, but I don’t have an easy way to get the files into the computer, other than OCR scanning, which sucks. Handwriting is an even worse proposition, unless I want to retype it, and I’d honestly rather slam my dick in a door repeatedly. I’ve also thought about writing by dictation, but after listening to an hour of me saying “um um um” over and over, I’d jump off a bridge. So this should work fine.
One thing that gets me about this is the Palm OS itself. It reminds me so much of the late 90s and early 00s, my time with a Palm IIIx, standing on the subway reading early drafts of Rumored on the little screen and playing Dope Wars. I tried writing with that, with a little clicky keyboard that folded up and was useless, and just journaling with the pen and the Graffiti function, which I never fully mastered.
I was just digging and found a backup of my Palm from 2002, a bunch of .pdb files. I should figure out how to do something with them.
I have been binge-watching the show West Wing lately, because S has never seen it, and I watched a lot of the first few seasons until it got stupid, back when I was supposed to be writing the follow-up for Rumored to Exist, which never happened. So I remember bits and pieces of the show, and then hit a long patch when I was out of town in 2002 or whatever and didn’t see those episodes.
What’s odd is that the show doesn’t remind me of the early 00s when it aired, but instead gives me strange nostalgia for the mid/late 90s. I guess it’s supposed to be an idealized version of the Clinton presidency, spun up with some of the torn-from-headlines scenarios taken out of the W years. It hasn’t aged well, and it’s humorous to see someone whip out a giant cell phone you could beat someone to death with in less than three blows. And Sorkin’s choir-preaching sermons get a little wooden at times. But, it’s more entertaining than watching some limey chef scream at interns or a dozen sluts fighting over a dork with money, or whatever the hell else is on the tube these days.
(Side note: there’s this Slavoj Zizek theory I ran into the other night that might or might not encapsulate the zeitgeist of West Wing‘s popularity with the left in those Dubya years. His essay Denial: the Liberal Utopia talks about the left’s need to look at or analyze only failed leftist regimes in order to dismiss those in progress, because you can fetishize the failed regime/government/plan/whatever as being utopian and perfect, if it had only worked. (It’s possible I linked to the wrong essay here; I read this right before falling asleep, and the book’s upstairs and I’m too lazy to double-check it.) Basically WW was popular because Al Gore lost and the Clinton era crashed to a halt and W fucked everything up and 9/11 happened and the left could wring their hands and reminisce about how if those chads hadn’t hung in Florida, the whole world would be a utopia and perfect. That Michael Moore movie F911 even begins this way more or less. I’m not making this point to defend W, because I think he was more than harmful; I’m just saying I don’t think Gore would have cured cancer and gave us jetpacks in his first 90 days, and I found the Zizek thing to be an odd coincidence for me.)
OK, so I was thinking about it, and here’s a partial list of a bunch of stupid nostalgia touchstones that keep coming up in my brain during k-hole falling:
Everyone’s forgotten those giant CRT monitors by companies like ViewSonic that were like three feet deep and could heat an entire office, and they did that degaussing wavy lines effect when you powered them on, and it took like three seconds for the screen to flicker on.
The Mac OS was horrible, and even though it was probably better than the clunkiness of Windows, it didn’t multitask well and always hung up when one program crapped out. And the hardware was much worse, and you’d pay like $5000 for a decked-out Centris that had about as much RAM as a TV remote control has now, plus a hard drive that spun up and sounded like the turbocharger in a Japanese sports car.
(Aside: I was just googling to see how much a Mac IIfx cost, and found this weird story about someone who bought one from a scrapper on eBay, and it turned out to be Douglas Adams’ old machine.)
I used to read CNN.com constantly back in the late 90s, and I’m sure that now if you saw their 1998 site, it would look like a Commodore 64 game, but it was a clear portal to the world for me as I killed time in my office.
I didn’t use a phone book app or some cloud-based thing to sync my contacts, and this was before I got a Palm Pilot. I’d keep a sheet of paper in my wallet and write down phone numbers on it. I found one of these recently, almost torn apart at the creases. What’s interesting is that few of the numbers had area codes, because I instantly knew that someone in Indiana was 219, 317, or 812 based on where they lived in the state. And all of Washington, or at least the western part, was 206.
The Onion’s online edition only published like seven articles a week, and they were always on one day (Wednesday?) so you could stay up late the day before and keep reloading the page and you’d magically get the latest from them. Now they publish about seven articles a second and I can’t follow it anymore.
I used to spend an incredible amount of time in a command line window, telnetted to a unix machine that held my mail and news. For maybe ten years, I read my email in emacs in a central machine on a server, usually at speakeasy.org when they did that sort of thing. This was when you used actual telnet, and not ssh, or at least I did. It was one of the last throwbacks to my IU days, when I mostly did the same, back to Ultrix machines that held my unix mail.
I could tell what day of the week it was by what feature was on Suck.com, which I read religiously.
I actually used the CD player in the computer to play audio CDs.
I thought I had more of these but I don’t. I’m almost done with WW too because it’s getting to the point where everyone quit over the salary dispute, so I will move on to another show.
I woke up this morning and found the start of a flood of Facebook posts that I thought had to be a hoax, but they were true: Dave Brockie, also known to many as Oderus Urungus of Gwar, had been found dead last night. He was only 50.
I must have first heard about Gwar back in 1990 or 1991. I remember hanging out with Sid Sowder and Matt Reece over at their dorm room in Wright Quad, and them playing the Live from Antarctica videotape, while telling me the story of an infamous show in Indianapolis, where they played at an old Howard Johnson’s and completely destroyed their ballroom. They took on the role of the most extreme band in my head, this melding of Troma shock-horror movies and extreme metal, demonic costumes and fake blood. The lyrics were campy and meant to be offensive, and yet the music was nuanced and more sophisticated than most typical metal bands could belt out.
I didn’t really start listening to them until America Must Be Destroyed came out in 1992. When I DJed at WQAX that summer, the station had it on CD, and I dubbed a copy and listened to it constantly. The concept album told a story about censorship, blind patriotism, the gulf war, and predicted the dubya-ization of the country that would uncannily happen a decade later. I loved the CD, and played the title track almost every week on my show.
I was never a loyal Gwar fan, and they were more of a thing I’d forget about and then fall into every few years, going down the rabbit hole and watching and rewatching the Phallus in Wonderland tape. But then five years would go by until I’d pick up another album. The horror-metal category was always filled better for me by the band Haunted Garage, but they’d only released a single album on Metal Blade before completely vanishing from the scene. (They’ve since reformed and have done local shows in LA, though. Check them out over on Facebook.)
But Gwar still helped define that era for me, the early 90s. I started listening to that album constantly when I was writing Summer Rain, and mentioned it a few times in there. And one of the distinct memories I have of my cross-country trip in 1999 was this long and boring drive from St. Louis to Bloomington. I had already listened to everything I owned 19 times in the last week or two of driving across the southwest, and was going through entire albums from this Summer Rain playlist, playing that game where you force yourself to not skip songs and go through the entire album from first to last track in order. I was somewhere on I-70 and very clearly remember listening to “Rock N Roll Never Felt So Good” and thinking how amazing the authorship of the song was, how it wasn’t just some speed metal collection of noise, but had such a carefully crafted structure that showed a decent musical knowledge, even though the song was about fucking a 13-year-old quadriplegic with a piece of frozen shit.
John Sheppard just saw Gwar last year, which made me go back and buy their newest album, and we planned on going to see them again when they came back to the US for the next leg of their tour. It was like a religious experience for him, and I really wanted to check it out, even if it involved flying to Alabama or something. Unfortunately, that won’t happen, which really sucks.
Oh well. I guess the lesson to be learned though is how you really need to chase down your creative extremes and beat them to the ground. Gwar started out of a freaky group of artists who wanted to shock people and do weird out-of-this-world shit, and that’s exactly what they did. They didn’t set out to win Grammies or sell albums, but instead decided to marry together extreme horror movies and the performance of loud music, and they did it balls-out for thirty years. Given the choice of doing the ridiculous and pointless that you really want to do or doing the expected and formulaic, they chose the former, and it gave them unprecedented loyalty from their fan base. There’s something to be said for that, and it’s something to keep in mind as I try to figure out what the hell I’m doing next.
I wanted to write a big post bitching about the new Facebook design, but it’s hopeless and a waste of time. I’ve wrung hands over the fact that I spend too much time there, and eventually that rug will be yanked from under me and it will become as fruitful as logging on to Friendster in 2014. Truth is, I like having a community online, and never feel like I can find one, and right now, FB is the closest I have to being in one. But eventually everyone will grow up and drop out and who knows what will happen next.
All I do know is that this thing will be here until I decide it isn’t here, so I should point some more energy at it. Blogging in 2014 can be a fruitless endeavor, as nobody reads and nobody plugs into a decentralized world of disconnected sites. But I can be guaranteed that my backlog here never goes away, and that any fruity ads that pop up in the sidebars only belong to my own products.
I recently finished filling up a journal. It’s one of those Moleskine notebooks, a large-sized (digest, really: a hair under 8.5×5.5) with 240 pages. The first entry is July 4, 2012 and I got it in a greeting card store in the Embarcadero while we were waiting to see the movie Bernie. I haven’t been religious about writing in paper journals every day, although it was a kinda-sorta new year’s resolution, so I’ve been getting better at it – I think the first half of this book was 18 months and the last half was three months.
I dug out the box of journals I’ve kept over the last twenty years, the “journal pit,” to file this one away, and could not resist digging through it. It’s like a canker sore in the mouth I cannot not poke with my tongue, and I of course had to pop a claritin to fight off the dust mites and start digging into the old entries, just to see where my brain was at various points in time.
One thing that depresses me is that I fell out of the nightly habit of journaling for a long time, when my schedule changed away from that of a hardcore insomniac and the chronic depression backed off a notch or two. I never, ever missed a day of writing in paper journals, and then my last 180-page spiral notebook goes from the end of 2006 to the beginning of 2011 or so. Like the entire period of 2007-2008 when I worked my job in Denver, there were zero entries. I have what I now call “the lost decade” which pretty much spans from when Rumored to Exist was published in 2002 up until Fistful of Pizza was published in 2011. In that time, I published some half-ass projects, and had many false starts and failed attempts at big books, but in many ways, I have almost nothing to show for those years. 2011-2014, five books published; but that period was a long stretch of not knowing what the fuck I wanted to do. The first half of it, I did pretty good in getting the pen to paper for personal journals. The second half, not so much.
I don’t write in paper journals as an early step in my “real” writing, like as some hipster way of unplugging or whatever. It’s just personal observations and current events and leg-stretching. It’s not designed for anyone else to see, so that anonymity offers me the ability to do what I want and capture the things I might self-censor here or in my books. I sometimes think it might be worthwhile to scan them or scoop out pieces, but that’s too much work. For now, they sit in a box.
One of the things I noticed when I looked back at the old, old notebooks the other day is the crazy amount I experimented with writing when I was trying to figure it out in the early 90s. Flipping through some entries from 93, 94, there were little bits like the things that ended up in (or not in) Rumored. There was a lot of poetry, little phrases that grabbed me, and a lot of bleakness captured in the writing. All of it is painfully bad, or at least most of it, but some of it is hilarious and interesting to me.
The other thing that got me was the massive time warp I’m in now, the speed of things. When I don’t think about it, Christmas was last week; I just bought a car ten seconds ago, but it was like two months ago today. I was just in Germany a few months ago, but I guess that was in 2012. Time is flipping past at this incredible rate, which is one of the reasons I get so freaked out about not being on a writing project right now, a couple of weeks after a book got released. If I blink, I’ll have another lost decade and it will be 2023 and I won’t have anything done. Not to get grim about it, but I don’t have forever to let this stuff sit.
In contrast, I was looking at a journal from 1995 where I was talking about all of the stuff that happened “way back” in 1993. Here is a timeline for you, with names replaced by letters like a 19th-century British novel:
I got dumped by someone (A) I vaguely dated a couple of weeks, although it was one of those stupid holding deals where she dumped me, went to Florida with her ex-boyfriend, and then expected me to pine for her for a couple of weeks and then run back to her after the next semester started. I didn’t, but I was depressed about it the entire break and wanted to jump off a bridge, and when she got back, we had these weird meta-arguments that nobody could win, like some kind of deranged 1970s Soviet arms conference.
Over the break, this girl I had a weekender with back in 1991 (B) came into town, and we went out to the lake, sat around, and then made out for a while. She then dropped me off at Lindley Hall and I agreed to myself to never acknowledge that this ever happened because I was so infatuated with (A) and things would work out. Last I heard, (B) is now a lesbian and just got married to her long-time partner, which is now legal for them, so good for her, but the memory of the various stuff that happened during that 1991 weekend that I did with a lesbian is a bit of a mindfuck.
Despite the (A) saga, I was emailing with (C) and that became an out-at-second date thing for me. (C) ended up dating a friend of mine who also coincidentally messed around with (B) for a minute after I did.
I met (D) and cooked dinner for her and had another date or two and envisioned this happily-ever-after life with her and then it became this long string of broken dates and I got incredibly depressed about it and started slashing my arms with a razor, which I now recognize isn’t the best plan for coping with your feelings. Until I wrote about it in a short story decades later, the only person I admitted this to was (A) who was then briefly sympathetic to me for about ten seconds.
In my book Summer Rain, I mentioned this girl I briefly dated (fictionally) named Jenn. (See chapter 16.) She (E) had just fallen out of some abusive relationship, but was also an unmedicated manic-depressive on a major manic cycle, and I was a hopeless insomniac, and we started hanging out again. I’d go to her dorm late at night and we’d sit around and talk and sometimes sleep together – not sex, just sleep in the same bed. But like I said, she was seriously manic, and I recognized that this could get ugly fast and somehow magically didn’t let my dick do all of the thinking on this one and sort of took a big step back from it.
Then I met on the computer with (F) and we hung out and messed around and flirted and did everything-but for a bit, before that sort of randomly ended (although we’re still friends to this day.)
And then I met (G) and we hit it off and ended up dating for about six months and then she dumped me and it completely fucking gutted me and I didn’t date again until like a year after leaving college. (Not for a lack of trying.)
So the timeline for all of the above was between Christmas 1992 and spring break, or March, of 1993. TEN WEEKS.
In the last ten weeks, I’ve… read a couple of books, and worked out twice.
And reading these journals is very dangerous for me, because I fall down this horrible rabbit hole of nostalgia. I’m in that dangerous state where I’m trying to think of ideas for the next book, and it’s very easy to think I should just Bukowski it and take all of these old journals and twist together some kind of coming-of-age story set in the 90s blah blah blah basically what I did in Summer Rain, but again. And I tried to do that with this book I was writing during the Lost Decade, which is this 120,000-word pile of suck sitting on my hard drive, with no plot and no flow, just fifty or so pieces of memory that are divided into “stories” that aren’t. It’s so painful to think of all the times I’ve looked at that folder and though, “with a little elbow grease, I could…” and then I need to go slam my dick in the door and prevent myself from even going down that road. There’s nothing more painful than writing a book about your life and then having it not sell.
Anyway, not sure where I was going with this, except to say I need to write in these little paper journals more, and of course I need to be writing on here more. And you need to be reading it more, so maybe I should be making it better. Let’s see what happens.
Enter the standard disclaimer here about never posting and needing to post something more often and how I’m going to be pissed ten years from now when I go back to find out what I was doing in 2014 and find out that entire months went by with no updates.
I’ve actually done well with writing in my paper journal, and force myself to write a page or so before work every day. I used to write in a paper journal every night, for decades, and that slowly fell off after getting married (not to blame the institution or the partner, just the change in evening routine, or something) and now I’ve been burning through pages at a steady rate, which is nice. I did switch from the standard spiral notebook to a leather bound book, a larger digest-sized Moleskine, because spiral notebooks tend to disintegrate at the edge of the page where the wire goes through the punched holes, and the processed paper attracts dust mites a bit more during long-term storage. I also like the feel of the leather books, even if they are half the page size and cost five times as much.
I just published a book, and am now quickly entering the post-partum depression that comes with it. I now come to expect this to happen, and there’s no easy way around it, although it feels like taking time off makes things worse. I don’t have a next project at this point, just some vague ideas and a new unnamed manuscript that’s got about 14,000 words of wandering in it, maybe pieces that will end up as flash or short stories or will get folded into something longer. And I have over 60,000 words that were cut or left over from Atmospheres, and no idea what will happen to those. This tends to happen on each of the books, and it’s sort of like making yogurt, where a bit of the leftover ends up starting the next batch, although yogurt is much easier to make.
I’m having this great internal struggle about what to write next. I feel like the current style of writing, the stuff in the last few books, has run its course or started to blur together from book to book, and there needs to be a giant leap-frogging into something radically different, but I’ve been ho-hum about everything I’ve read and seen lately. I want to write a novel, something that can’t be confused for a bunch of short stories or look like a patchwork of leftover crap bound together in a single volume. But I don’t know what that is, and I can’t force it. I hope I can figure it out soon.
What else… I have been taking bass lessons from a guy here in Oakland. It’s good, but it’s work. I’ve had a lot to learn, with music theory and all of that, but I also have a lot of bad habits to break and new technique stuff to take into consideration, and that can be overwhelming. But it’s good, and I feel like I’m slowly progressing. We also work on stuff where he’s playing drums and I’m playing along, and that’s a lot of fun. I still suck, but it’s better than sitting around watching TV.
My new car is still very nice. It still smells like a new car. I’ve only put gas in it once since I’ve bought it, and managed to get about 375 miles on 8.1 gallons of gas, which is lower than I think I should be getting, but I’m still getting used to how to drive a hybrid. There’s a trick with getting the EV system to work and the gas engine to shut off while at cruising speed, and once you change driving style to get that happening, your mileage improves.
I’ve been reading a lot of Jonathan Lethem lately, trying to get down all of his stuff. I’ve hit all of the first-tier books, and now I’m going through the novels that are less critically-acclaimed, although I seem to like all of them. Nothing so far tops Chronic City, which is still one of my favorite books ever, and I will probably end up reading it for the fourth time soon. I’m also thinking about an Infinite Jest re-read over the summer, but who knows. Gravity’s Rainbow and Ulysses are both sitting on the shelf with a bookmark on page 12, staring at me. Someday.
I just found myself re-reading old blog entries here, and I am dumbfounded by how much I updated this thing two or three years ago. I should spend more time on here. And I sometimes think about pulling together some of those old posts and putting them into a book, although I guess if you wanted to read them, you would have already read them.
Allergy season is starting. Not looking forward to that. At least the Benadryl will help me with the weird dreams.
I was going through old mail and found this letter I wrote to Mark Cuban at some point last year. I never got a response. I think my goal was to keep writing mail to him until I got a response or was told to stop, but like most projects, I lost interest. Here it is:
Mr. Cuban:
Thanks for reading my email. I am a big fan and am also an Indiana University alum (’95) so I’m excited to write you!
Is it true that OJ Mayo declined the player option on his contract and became a free agent because he had an argument with you about which Strawberry Shortcake character from the original 1979-1985 Kenner Strawberry Shortcake toys was the best one?
I read in an article (I think in Wired, or the New Yorker) that you are an avid Strawberry Shortcake collector and often run up bidding on Strawberry Shortcake collectibles on eBay during the NBA off-season. It also mentioned that The Purple Pie Man of Porcupine Peak was your favorite character because he often talks about himself in the third person and has the flock of Berry Birds which keep him informed on the goings-on of the Strawberry Shortcake World.
If this is true, I could see why this would be a conflict with Mayo. He’s mentioned several times on SportsCenter that he’s a fan of Sour Grapes and her pet snake, Dregs. I remember one interview he gave in 2007 or 2008 (I can’t find the clip online) where he called Purple Pie Man a “punk-ass bitch” and said “I don’t care if she didn’t appear until the third special (1982’s _Strawberry Shortcake: Pets on Parade_) – Sour Grapes is the bomb!”
Do you disagree with his assessment? Do you think the use of performance-enhancing drugs could have clouded his judgment on which character is truly the best?
New in 2007. Check out Coors Field in the background.
I bought a new car yesterday. I didn’t plan on it, but I walked away with a 2014 Prius C Two, with 12 miles on the odometer. I’d originally planned on getting my old car fixed so it would pass emissions, because the wiring was messed up after my 2009 wreck. But when the service center quoted me a high price for the repair, I went to another dealer’s trade-in counter and waded through three hours of paperwork.
This is all very bittersweet, because I loved my last car. It was a 2008 Yaris, the base model with almost no options, just a little three-door hatchback with a tiny engine. But the car meant a lot to me for whatever odd reason, and I spent a lot of time cooped up in its little cockpit. It symbolized a few different eras of my life, and was one of my last strong ties to my life in Denver.
I bought the car in 2007, a month before getting married, and the weekend before I started my new job at MX Logic. We had one car, the Subaru, and Sarah worked right across the street, so the original plan was for me to drive down to the Denver Tech Center every day in the Outback. But she always had off-site meetings, trips to the airport, doctor appointments, and other things that would require a car. So the plan was to buy the cheapest new car we could as a backup, and we looked at the lowest-end Toyotas and Hondas before ending up test-driving the Yaris, and deciding to go with that. Sarah had financed the Subaru, so I financed this car. And then I started driving the Toyota to work every day, and although in finance it was already my car, it became “my” car.
I worked way the hell south, just past the county line, near Parker, which took about a half hour to drive in. The Yaris had a line-in aux jack, still somewhat of a novelty in those days, so I could listen to my iPod on the commute to work, and maybe catch the latest Rockies gossip on 850 KOA on the drive home. This was when Rocktober was starting up, the big push towards the postseason and the World Series, and I was hooked, listening to any pre-game, post-game trash talk I could catch on the airwaves. Fall turned to winter; the car’s little electric heater kept me warm, and the ABS brakes became a godsend on the icy pavement. Even though the car didn’t have all of the luxury items, I felt comfortable in the tiny bubble of an interior, driving to and from work every day.
My job was oddly solitary. As a tech writer, I was thrown into a QA group for lack of a better home, and they were tightly-knit, always running in emergency mode, so I didn’t make many friends or lunch buddies. Instead, I’d get in my car and drive to one of the nearby fast food places, and eat in the car while listening to AM sports radio or a podcast. This was before my weight loss, so I’d go to Taco Bell or Sonic or McDonald’s, and sit in the Yaris with the little heater running and some music on the player, eating my fries and maybe scribbling in a notebook or reading a novel. Even after spending an hour or more in the car round trip, I took some strange solace in spending another hour in there with my fast food.
Within six months, Sarah’s job fell apart, and we set our sights on Los Angeles. I quit my job, and while she worked, I drove ahead to LA to scout for apartments and haul out a small load of essential things we could have while our house was in transit with the movers. The solo drive halfway across the country took some work, because that tiny engine really struggled going over the Rockies. But I had my new TomTom GPS on the dash, my tunes in that AUX jack, and six cup holders, no waiting. The car got covered in salt and dirt, after crossing the snowy mountains and then the desert, spending a night in Las Vegas, and then hitting the streets of Culver City as I apartment hunted. I drove all over the City of Angels looking for a place for us to live, and then picked up Sarah at LAX so we could sign the papers at our new home in Playa Del Rey and then go back to Denver to pack. I left the Yaris there at the new apartment, filled with dishes and housewares, to wait a few weeks until we’d come back.
We spent about six months in LA in 2008, me without work (other than some part-time consulting) and Sarah with a job she hated, always traveling up to SF and elsewhere. I drove around LA a lot and really loved it, the strange little areas like El Segundo and Santa Monica and Marina Del Rey and Culver City. I had a few friends there, and I seemed to have a lot of doctor’s appointments, too. But LA is very much a car city, and that melded me to the Yaris. Gas prices shot way up, and I wrote (but never published) a book on saving gas, which involved installing a ScanTron II in the car and messing around with all sorts of experiments to drive up my MPGs. And for whatever reason, I washed that car an ungodly amount of times in LA.
The LA experiment ended, and we both got jobs up north. This involved a few solo drives from LA to SF and back, during the moving and job interview process, and I have a lot of memories of cruising through the central valley, listening to comedy podcasts in the middle of the night during that long haul. We moved to an apartment in South San Francisco, so Sarah could commute to the city, and I could drive down to San Jose every day. This drive was hell. It was about 40 miles each way, which took me at least an hour every day. This really Stockholm Syndromed my love for the Yaris, as I spent all of my time in that damn car, shuffling up and down the peninsula. Gas was at an all time high, well above $4.50 a gallon, but I’d get close to 40 MPG on the highway. I can still close my eyes and envision every exit and every turn between SSF and San Jose on the 101, so firmly burned into my brain from that commute.
In 2009, on Good Friday, I was driving in stop-and-go traffic in the rain on 237, and at about 35 miles an hour, I glanced in my blind spot to change lanes. When I looked back up, the car in front of me was at a dead stop, and it was too late for me to do anything but lock the brakes. My car hit a truck, at an angle, the nose diving just under his bumper. The airbags did not deploy and I hit the steering wheel hard enough to not know what happened for the next minute or so. The car wouldn’t start, and when I got out, the front end was fucked. I got a truck to push the car off the road, and after an hour or so, got flat-bedded to a body shop. I did not know the fate of the car for a weekend, and became insanely depressed over the outcome. It was a coin toss as to whether or not the car would be totaled, and I felt so close to the vehicle, I was really sad to let go of it. They came back and said they’d repair the damage, and within a few weeks, I had the car back, good as new. (Or so I thought.) It took a while, but I got my old friend back, looking as good as new, with a new paint job and Toyota-certified sheet metal and plastic pieces bolted onto the front end. I was very happy to have her back, and it made that insufferable commute to San Jose almost bearable, at least until that novelty wore off.
I kept driving the car, and by 2010, I’d started working from home, which meant no more commuting. I still used the car for trips to the store or to run errands or whatever else, but went from driving a hundred miles a day to maybe 50 miles a week, sometimes less. But every time I drove the little car, it was like a home away from home. I’d listen to Rockies games on my iPhone, and imagine I was back on I-25, listening to the AM radio broadcast back in Colorado. I’d drive past a line of palm trees in Berkeley and remember driving past the same kind of foliage on Sepulveda or near LAX. And sometimes I’d have to make the trip in to Palo Alto and remember the daily ordeal of doing the same run up and down the peninsula. The car would make me homesick for homes I used to have, and became this strange nostalgia well for the recent past. Just the feel of its controls, the look of its dashboard, would remind me of these places and times in a deep and painful yet nostalgic way.
That wreck came back to haunt me. There was wiring damage to the car, which would cause the check engine light to go off. I’d tried at two different dealerships to get this straightened out, with no luck except advice to get the wiring completely torn apart. You don’t have to emissions test a new car in California, but after so many years, you’re no longer exempt, and it requires a test. And this year, I did, and could not pass. When I went to the dealer again to try to get this straightened out, I was told the car would need a $500 diagnostic, and probably $2000 or $3000 of labor to unfuck the wiring issues. The blue book value of the car is probably $5000 to $7000. So, I reluctantly traded it in. I looked at maybe getting another Yaris, but the Prius C is the same platform, but a hybrid, and it was only a few thousand dollars more. I did the paperwork, handed over the keys, and now I’m in a new car.
I had to clean out the old car before I left it with the dealer, and it was profoundly sad. The trunk was full of cleaning products and junk from Auto Zone that I’d purchased in a proud new car frenzy, various polishes and waxes, some still from Denver. There was my Colorado snow brush, which doesn’t get much use anymore. And the glove box contained receipts and paperwork down to the original window sticker from when it came off the lot in 2007. I put everything in plastic bags, and sat in the car one last time and said goodbye. It probably saved my life, or at least saved me from much worse injury, when it crushed apart in that stupid wreck. And it was a big part of my life for the last six and a half years. It looked so sad, cleaned out and empty, sitting next to all of the new Priuses, waiting to get wheeled back to service and repaired and prepped for the auction house. I really do miss it.
The new car is nice. It has more auto-everything stuff and a complicated computer I will never figure out, plus the new car smell, the better gas mileage, and a bluetooth setup to connect to my phone and all that jazz. It’s a little roomier, but physically feels similar to the old Yaris, a similar ride and turning radius. Some of the parts inside of it are the same, the same font on the same electronic mirror control; the identical pieces to the inside hatch cover and back seat headrests. I don’t know what the soul of the car will be like, if cars do have soul. Every car has its mojo, or doesn’t, and this one has a different one than the Yaris did. I’m sure in time it will become as familiar. But it’ll take time.
I know it sounds stupid to mourn the passing of a $14,000 pile of nuts and bolts and plastic. But, I do. I’m hoping that when I go back to the dealership next week to drop off some paperwork, I don’t see it there, because I’ve already spent enough time thinking about this and need to move on. It’s just a damn car, but it was my car. It was a constant in my life for a long time, and I’ll miss it.
It’s January 4th, which might make it too late to write one of those year-in-review posts, but I will try anyway. I’ve been insanely busy getting ParagraphLine.com going, and you should be reading that, too. But I thought I’d take a second to make a humblebrag list of what I got done 2013.
First, I finished my book Thunderbird. This took me longer than I thought, and it was a really mixed bag for me emotionally. I initially thought I would get another publisher to do the book, and then I chickened out and did it myself, and then the double-whammy of inevitable post-partum depression and trying to publicize and sell the thing just completely gutted me. This happens with every book, and I think it gets worse each time. I wish I could just throw the stuff over the transom and let someone else sell it and then find a way to not pay attention at all to the reviews and sales numbers. I think my new year’s resolution should be to not care about this shit and just keep writing, but it’s hard to write in a vacuum and not ever get any feedback or praise for what you’re creating. So yeah, a big chunk of 2013 was spent wondering why I ever stopped stamp collecting back in grade school.
One thing that kept me somewhat sane was working on this book called Atmospheres. Starting back last spring, I would sit down and turn off everything and start up the Sleep album Dopesmoker and listen to it all the way through every day and just brain dump, with the goal of making all of these short, disconnected pieces with no plot, just 500 words a day of descriptions of destruction and despair. I had (and have) no idea how this would play out, but by the fall, the book got up to about 120,000 words. I’ve been trying to edit it back down, and I still have no idea what to do with it, because it reads like Naked Lunch but without editing. And as the race to the bottom with self-publishing continues and people only want the same perfect three-act cookie-cutter detective book on their Kindle, it’s hard to put out there something that I can’t even describe or pitch, even if it is some of my best writing ever.
In November, I started another book, which remains untitled, but it was an attempt at writing an extremely plotted story. I spent probably a month just taking notes and writing outlines, and then wrote the first third of it, which was absolutely brutal, because it’s not bizarro or absurdist or anything like that, and it’s much more long-form than I’m used to writing. It’s like G.G. Allin trying to write a serious opera in Italian. I got the first third of it written, something like 60,000 words, and I’m letting it ferment, because it had some serious act 2 issues I need to figure out before I proceed. I like the idea of the book, although if I stuck to the current pace, it would end up being about a quarter-million words, and then I’d have to deal with the usual cocksuckers that gave me unending shit about my first book being “too long.” Books are as long as they are long. Nobody complains about paintings being “too big.”
“The Long John Silver Vinegar Douche Abortion Attempt” at The Strange Edge(2013)
Big thanks to all of the editors that ran that stuff for me. I also had a long-form interview over at The Lit Pub that is worth reading. I met Joseph Owens through that, and really enjoyed our talk over there.
I guess I also did a hardcover of Rumored to Exist mostly because I wanted one for my own library. I don’t think anyone else bought one, but that’s fine.
I stopped keeping track of reviews in other publications, because at the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013, I feel like the review “industry” just went sideways. There aren’t many good review sites anymore, and I sent a ton of books out for review and in many cases never heard back. The Lit Pub did run a good review of Thunderbird, and I’ve seen some decent reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, but it’s become almost impossible for me to find places to get my books reviewed, and of course I blame myself for not giving up on this shit and turning out formulaic YA Vampire erotica novels or whatever the hell.
I did a little bit of travel, but it’s never enough. Got out to New York once for work, LA twice for short visits, went to Reno for Thanksgiving, got in a long weekend in Monterey, spent a week and change in Maui, and did the trail of tears visit to Indiana and Wisconsin for the holidays. I liked Maui, and really miss LA. I’ve determined there’s no way I could ever afford to live in New York again, although it’s nice to visit for three or four days on someone else’s dime. I’ve had a strange nostalgia for my place in Astoria, being holed up there during winters, with the Eraserhead-sounding radiators and hoarder collection of DVDs and video games. But then I remember I hated it there, and I never really got any writing done. And I recently found an old video tape of this “tour” I did of my house in 2003, specifically so I’d remember it ten years later, and it absolutely horrified me. I’m no zen minimalist, but I had some serious mental health problems back then to stock my tiny apartment with so much shit. I watched that and immediately packed up four bags of books and videos to take to Goodwill.
My computer ended up in the shop on a recall issue, but I got the motherboard replaced, and I’m still milking the 2010 model for as long as possible before I have to upgrade. I did upgrade both my phone and iPad. I otherwise spent my gear obsession energy on the bass, buying a new five string and then building a new four string. I think my playing slightly progressed over the year, but it’s still an ongoing thing.
Had a death flu at the start of the year, but otherwise physical health has been okay. I started going to Weight Watchers meetings again, and went from 189 to 171 over the course of the year. My ideal weight is between 170 and 175, so I’ll take it. My mental health was somewhat fucked all year, as was my sleep, and I don’t want to get into that except to say it’s getting better.
My only goals for 2014 are to write more, read more, and not care about the past and the stuff I really shouldn’t be caring about. I also have this goal to see more people this year, and if you’re in the bay area, you should ping me and we should hang out.
With that, I should get back to actually writing. Hope your 2013 was decent.
So I booked my trip to Germany this week, which was a huge hit on the credit card, but at least I figured out the dates and times. I’m going to be in Nuremberg for basically a weekend, and then Frankfurt for a week. Travel times screw with that a bit, though. I couldn’t figure out a flight to Nuremberg on a Thursday, and my first strike on all of the deal sites ended up looking like this: Wake up early for work on Thursday, work all day, take a twelve-hour flight from SFO to Zurich, then sit for eleven hours until I took an hour-long flight to Nuremberg. Um, no.
