Category: general

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I wish someone would slap me every time I think probiotics will make my life complete

I always get disoriented when I fly open-jawed and land in an airport that’s different than the one I left from.  I don’t remember the last time I did it, but last night I landed in SFO a week and a half after departing from OAK, and it really fucked me up.  I walked down the concourse with this strong unconscious feeling that nothing was right.  I mean, I spent the whole flight sitting next to this bald dude with a handlebar mustache, black leather boots, and a crushed velvet suit jacket in a bright shade of burgundy, who read The Fountainhead in that sort of “look at what I’m reading” pose, and I really wanted to just say “okay, we get it, dude” but I didn’t.  It took me a lot of time to get used to being in the wrong airport and mentally figure out that I was on a different mass of land with a different drive in front of me, but the 50 degree temperature difference really negated that.

I haven’t been back in Indiana in two years, and I always hesitate to write about the experience, because I don’t want to piss off the people who call it home, or make it sound like I’m ungrateful for them taking time out to see this asshole who flew out from California that won’t stop bitching about a lack of vegetables and heat.  But it always puts the zap on me to see stuff back there.  I think this visit, I spent less time in a nostalgia black hole, and avoided a lot of old haunts, although it wasn’t entirely intentional.  Both the night of Christmas Eve and Christmas itself, I headed back to my hotel semi-early, and had thoughts of driving around University Park mall, maybe finding an old place to eat, and doing some serious people-watching.  And, of course, both times I was an idiot and didn’t realize that they closed damn near everything early, and I ended up back at the hotel eating candy bars for dinner.

I got a chance to meet up with fellow writer Steve Lowe, which was cool, because our Venn diagrams of South Bend-dom probably briefly touched decades ago and we didn’t realize it.  This leads me to my new year’s resolution (yes, another one of those posts): I really don’t know half of you people out there, and I never see the other half of you.  I need to make more of an effort to see people in the next year.  So if you’re in the bay area, please ping me, and I will do likewise.  I don’t care if we haven’t met before – we should grab a cup of coffee or hit a book store or whatever.  I need to do something with my life besides clicking the Like button on facebook posts.

So, saw the family.  Suffered through the cold.  Ate a lot of garbage, but only gained about a pound.  Almost hit a deer.  Didn’t write, which I wanted to do and of course I didn’t, so what the fuck.  I left Indiana a day earlier than I thought, due to a scheduling issue, and drove up to Wisconsin, then drove down to Chicago the next day to hang out with John Sheppard.  We went to this weird diner that was all classic diner food but vegan, built up out of various soy products, which was actually pretty damn good.  We got to hang for a bit, and scheme about our next big project, which is always awesome.

Speaking of, next project – you should go over to Paragraph Line and bookmark that shit.  We’ll be posting daily (we hope) dispatches, fiction, news, and other distractions.

Anyway, it’s good to be home, and I have to unfuck a million things here, piles of half-unpacked things and gifts that need to find permanent homes, and whatnot.  I got some nice little things, but after every trip back to Indiana, I always want to go Fight Club on my shit and start donating everything.  I also feel a need to do the same thing digestion-wise, hence my current issue with probiotics.  At least I will get a lot of reading done in the next few days.

Ok.  2013 done.  2014 coming up.  Still writing 2012 on my checks.  Gotta go finish this book now.

 

 

Categories
general

Jelly Donut. Jelly Donut. Jelly Donut.

I don’t even remember the last time I’ve updated this.  Every time I think about writing something here, I either can’t think of something cool and mind-bending and I think it’s stupid to go here and write “I went to Target today,” or I think of something cool and think it needs to go in a book and not here.  There’s no real middle ground.  So, let me tell you about my plans to go to Target today.

I went to Hawaii about a month ago, which was cool.  I also went to Reno last month, which wasn’t Hawaii.  There are pictures of both on flickr, although the Reno pictures are mostly of relatives, because I didn’t do much beyond that.  I did lose some money on a Godzilla slot machine, which I didn’t fully understand.  I also stayed in the hotel and wrote for about 17 seconds, and now I’m trying to catch up.

The whole time I was in Hawaii, I plotted out a book, and I started writing it in November.  I didn’t participate in NaNoWriMo, but I wrote 50,000 words in the first half of the month, so I would have won, but the book is far from done.  It is an attempt at writing a linear, plotted book that still has a lot of weirdness to it, and involves startups, UFO cults, alien abduction, and depression.  I ran into some serious Act 2 issues and decided to let it sit and simmer for a while.  Maybe I’ll figure it out over the holidays and get back on it in January.  It’s not “straight” fiction, but it’s long-form stuff, and I found it incredibly difficult to get back on that horse.  I’m not sure of the quality of what I got done last month, but I know if I stick to the length I had, it will end up being longer than Summer Rain, and I got unending shit from idiots about how that book was “too long” so I don’t know what will happen if I finish this.  And no, I wouldn’t split it into multiple books.

I am still working on this other book, which is sort of like Rumored but more chaotic and lacking a central story (or maybe it isn’t.)  I would like to finish it soon, but it’s been a slow war growing and editing this.  It’s above 60,000 words, but it makes most of Burroughs’ work look incredibly linear and structured, so it’s sort of chaos right now.  I really like some of the bits in it, though.  I wanted to finish this by the end of 2013, but that won’t happen.  Maybe I’ll get it done in early 2014, but there’s also the chance this thing will stew for another five years, like Rumored did.

I have a bunch of new hardware at the house.  I got a 4th-gen iPad right before we left for Hawaii, literally hours before the new iPad Air was announced.  I was upgrading from a first-gen, so that change was huge.  The retina screen and increase in processor speed is tremendous.  And the old iPad was stuck on iOS 5, and crashing constantly when it ran out of memory.  The new one runs iOS 7, and now I get all of the good new features that I didn’t have before.  (AirPlay mirroring is a big one – I can now zap Amazon Instant videos to the Apple TV in the living room.)  I also recently updated from the iPhone 4S to the new 5S, which is insanely fast, and has a slightly bigger screen, but is lighter and has more battery life.  It also has the fingerprint sensor, which sounds like a gimmick feature, but it actually works well and is insanely useful to unlock the phone.  I also swapped out the battery in my laptop, which is still doing fine but is now the weakest link.  I hope to keep it going for another year or two though, and the battery will help.

I sent out my first newsletter to my mailing list.  It included a coupon for a free book.  If you missed it, you should probably click here to subscribe.

I have a bunch of holiday travel coming up, and I will predict now that I’ll end up with a death flu by the end of December, so thanks in advance to whoever’s kid gives me that.

I think I am going to Target today, BTW.  I need Claritin, Coke Zero, and a crossbow.  I’ll probably be 2/3 on that.

Categories
general

Twenty Years

I’m writing from the Maui airport, getting ready to board the big silver tube that shoots me across the Pacific and back to the land of wearing full-length pants and bitching about smog and seasonal depression. (And excuse the typos and formatting fuckups here – I’m typing on the extremely buggy WordPress for iOS program, and actually writing this on an iPhone with an external keyboard, while old people in aloha shirts scream at flight attendants about not being able to bring 17 bags as their carry-on luggage.) It’s been a good vacation, albeit with little writing, and I missed a very big anniversary while I was gone.

I consider October 30, 1993 as the day I became a writer. I mean, I learned to put together words into sentences and paragraphs decades earlier, and I wrote short stories and term papers for classes before that, plus I did five issues of a zine of heavy metal record reviews. But that’s the day my life took a major turn and I decided to put pen to paper and start the long crawl of learning the craft and piecing together my first book.

The story is stupid, and I’ve told it before. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy falls into an endless depression about said girl. But after a long run of failed relationships, I turned to brain-dumping my thoughts into spiral notebooks. I lived a few miles from campus and did not have a car, so I’d walk to work, walk to class, and had this patchwork schedule that involved enough time stuck on campus with nothing to do to go completely mad with boredom, but not enough time to hike home and then back. I guess I spent a lot of that time logged into VAXes in the public computer labs, but I found it cathartic to find a remote corner of the student union, sit down with my little notebook, and pour out words. I did not even know what I was writing about, I just felt a compulsion to write.

I started reading then, too. Vonnegut, Orwell, then I fell into a Henry Miller obsession, which led to Bukowski. I didn’t have tons of money, but I always found myself at the used book stores, digging around for paperbacks. I didn’t even have a real book collection at that time – maybe a single three-shelf bookcase with mostly computer books. But I started hoarding novels, and getting lost in the pages late at night, wondering how I’d pull together a novel like Kerouac, if I needed to split from Indiana and hit The Road.

My career in computer science fell apart around the same time. I was a horrible student, and could not deal with the math. A semester later, I dropped out of the program, and went over to general studies, so I could finish my degree by taking as many English classes as I could get into in my last year. I still worked with computers, helping people print their papers or whatever, but it was just a paycheck, another way to pay my rent and blow the rest on books.

It took me a couple of years to really get into the swing of things and apply myself, start my first book, and apply myself to write for hours a day. It didn’t start to fully click until I got to Seattle in 95 and had nothing to do every night except sit at the computer and type. And I guess the first book didn’t cross the transom until 2000. But I still consider 1993 as my start point, when I decided to do this.

I look back and it’s hard to imagine a time when I wasn’t a writer. In the worst of my writer’s block, when the frustration is so high that I seriously contemplate quitting all of this, I try to think back to what I did with my time before I was a writer, and I can’t even remember. I burned a lot of cycles with depression and relationships, and I guess I obsessed over music and computer programming, but there wasn’t any defining force like writing in my life.

I’ve now self-published nine books, and published a bunch of stories, some in anthologies or published elsewhere. I’ve met some great writers, and in the course of doing this, ended up reading hundreds of books, many of which have changed my life. I always feel a certain disappointment in my writing, that the last book wasn’t good enough, that I’m not progressing as fast as my other peers, and that sales are bleak. None of this thought is good, and I wish I could just stop it, but I can’t. I think a certain amount of it is helpful, in that it motivates me to keep writing. Regardless, I think I have found my momentum in the last few years, and I’ve been pretty productive and able to put out a lot of books. They don’t sell, and even worse, everyone assumes I’m making bank because some other guy with an almost exact same name as me is making millions writing detective stories, but that’s something I’m learning to ignore.

I’ve got a book almost done, and I’m just about done outlining the next big thing, which I am hoping I won’t self-publish myself, but will get someone else to do. I have a lot going on, and I’m always tired of looking back and falling into a huge nostalgia trap. But nice even numbers make you stop and think, and so I am.

Almost ready to get on the plane and lock into five hours of internet-free writing. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing. Thanks to everyone who has supported my work so far, and I hope to be doing this until the next big even number and beyond. Mahalo!

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general

Look at my knees! Look at my knees!

First things first: go to The Lit Pub and read this review of Thunderbird:

http://thelitpub.com/featured-books/thunderbird-flash-stories/

I am still working on two projects, switching back and forth when one gets to be too much. One is just starting, and the other is getting close to 100,000 words, but is still very vague in its overall structure.  That’s keeping me busy, but it’s also taking all of my time, which is why I haven’t been updating much.

I have been obsessed with the movie Eraserhead for the last few days.  This started because I went to Amoeba records this weekend, which is my favorite record store, although I usually associate the name with their big store in Hollywood, because it is the record store in LA.  I don’t go record shopping anymore, and buy everything from iTunes, which I don’t tell musicians, because that’s sort of like telling old people about Obama.  But I used to love going to record stores, and walking the racks from A to Z, looking for stuff I hadn’t seen elsewhere, rarities and imports and bootlegs and whatever other oddball stuff I could find in the wild.  And Amoeba is a cool store, a wide selection with a lot of unique stuff and a cool staff, so I grabbed a few things I hadn’t seen lately.

One of the things was the soundtrack to Eraserhead, which is this twisted combination of ambient noise, wind sounds and radiator hissing and layer after layer of dialogue and dirge and destruction.  It’s the perfect writing music, because it’s ambient, but isn’t new-agey and won’t put you to sleep.  The only problem with it is that it pulls me down this rabbit hole where I need to watch the movie again, need to read all of these articles and interviews and find out what was in Lynch’s head as he put this whole thing together, and it’s an unanswerable question.  I can’t even find the real script, which is some 20-page oddity, a prose poem with weird drawings all over it.  But I find too many articles about the movie, and they keep me diving through the internet, coming up with more questions.

One of the things I wonder about with Eraserhead is if it’s possible to write such a minimalist surreal work in print.  My writing tends to be the opposite, long sentences with lots of twists and turns and terminology, very manic and frenetic.  I don’t even know if I could write something so subdued.  But I wonder if it would even work without the film element or the soundtrack, just the text itself.

Music makes me think the same thing, because I listen to a lot of drone music, stuff like Boris or Sleep, where the same riff or guitar feedback is sustained or repeated over and over, building this long-form sonic texture.  I don’t know the literary equivalent of doing that, because if I just repeated the same text over and over, it would get stupid fast.

Nothing else to report.  I’m trying to cram in as much writing as possible before a flurry of appointments and travel and other distractions come up in the next couple of months.  I’m also getting close to the book purchase lockdown that I have to enact before the holidays so I don’t buy duplicates of gifts.  That means I’m buying too many things now, and I have a stack of reading taller than me.  What about you?

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general

My Daily Carry

Everyone else on various gadget and tech sites has been doing this lately, so I thought I would, too.  Here’s a picture and explanation of every item I carry in my pockets on a daily basis:

The items are:

  1. Serrated bread knife.
  2. Soaring Society of America glider pilot flight log.
  3. Butcher knife.
  4. $250 in Confederate currency.
  5. Auvi-Q epinephrine injector.
  6. Business cards.
  7. West German circa-1980s analog metronome.
  8. LensCrafters wet glasses cleaners.
  9. 50,000 Saddam-era Iraqi Dinar.
  10. Proventil inhaler.
  11. WikiReader portable offline Wikipedia browser.
  12. $800 US cash in $20 bills.
  13. Glover Pocket Ref reference manual.
  14. Keys to house, two cars, storage locker; garage remote; loyalty keychains for Panera, Borders, Ralph’s, CVS, Subaru roadside assistance.  (I do not live near Ralph’s or own a Subaru.  I’m lazy and don’t want to split my fingernails apart removing old ones.)
  15. US Passport.
  16. CRKT anti-shark dive knife.
  17. Moleskine notebook and pen.
  18. Cough drops.
  19. iPhone 4S.
  20. Big Skinny Wallet containing driver’s license, credit cards, $1000 US cash.
  21. Kleenex.
  22. Microfiber.
Categories
general

Randy Orton and the Loins of Passion

It is time for another bulleted-list update.

  • I was recently so bored that I rewrote the first three pages of an erotic story, retitled it as “Randy Orton and the Loins of Passion” and submitted it to a small press for consideration.  The story was an erotic coming-of-age tale involving Randy Orton, his father Cowboy Bob Orton, and Roddy Piper.  It was not picked up, so I will cease writing homosexual incestual WWE-related pornography and go back to my usual work.
  • Speaking of which, Ryan Werner mentioned me in this essay he wrote a bit ago about starting said small press, going on tour, and working as a janitor.  Read it here.
  • I am 83,477 words into a book and still do not know what it’s about.  It may actually get split into a couple of things.  It is 200-some pieces of flash fiction, and maybe could end up similar to Rumored to Exist, but it may take a while to get there.
  • I never knew this, but Jackson Pollock was allegedly decapitated in the car accident that killed him.  I’d like to think the interior of the car looked like one of his paintings after the incident, but that’s just wishful thinking.
  • Having just one hobby that I am no good at that makes me constantly want to spend thousands of dollars on new gear instead of practice to increase my skill (bass guitar) is not enough, so I have been doing down a k-hole with photography.  I am intent on learning WTF the difference between aperture and shutter speed is (I think I know now) and I’m trying to stop using the automatic mode on my camera.  I’m also trying to not spend any money on new gear.  I haven’t taken any phenomenal pictures I’ve posted online lately, but my flickr page is the home of all shots I have snapped.
  • Here is a new thing to obsess over: http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/4716/a-russian-enigma/
  • One sister-in-law was here for about a week, so we got to go to all kinds of places we only go when people visit us, like the Pacific Science Center and the Oakland Museum (pics).  Unlike her last visit, we did not have a blackout, did not have a closet collapse, and did not go to see a Jackass movie, but otherwise it was cool.
  • We babysat the 18-month-old twins overnight for the other sister-in-law last weekend.  Even more miraculous than the ease of this operation was the fact that not one person mommyjacked my status update on facebook to ask me when I was going to have kids.
  • Joel-Peter Witkin created, among other things, the photo used for the Pungent Stench album Been Caught Buttering. Witkin claims that his vision and sensibility spring from an episode he witnessed as a young child, an automobile accident in front of his house in which a little girl was decapitated:

    It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived. We were going to church. While walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother’s hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it — but before I could touch it someone carried me away”.

  • We’re going to Maui in October.  I have never been to that island, although I really liked both of my trips to Oahu.  (2003 pics, 2005 pics)
  • Thunderbird is still available and you should buy it.
  • I believe the 2015 convention for my UFO cult will be in the Bahamas, so please contact me for details.

 

Categories
general

Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response

I went to the farmer’s market in Berkeley.  Farmer’s markets are strange, because the places that have the most farmers generally don’t have farmer’s markets.  I grew up in a state where every other person around me was a farmer, and they barely had vegetables. I think attempting to open a farmer’s market in my home town would get you thrown in prison for being a communist.

Berkeley can be weird sometimes.  I think they’re the only city that banned nuclear weapons.  And they changed the name of Columbus Day to “Indigenous Peoples Day” or something like that.  I don’t give a shit either way, it’s just sometimes a bit much.

So next to the locally sourced organic vegan lard tent, there was an empathy booth.  I don’t know if it cost money or not, but it said something about the people there listening to anything you told them, without judgment or offering any advice.

My thought was that I should go up to them and lay some heavy trip on them, to see what it would take for them to crack.  You know, like “I’ve got this dude chained to the furnace in my basement.  We’ve been waterboarding him for hours, but I’m thinking about cutting his head off now.  It just makes more sense.  I’m trying to find a Wal-Mart around here to buy a chainsaw, but I’m not having much luck.  Maybe I’ll just use a butcher knife. Is that knife sharpening dude here today?”

But I really needed a diet coke.  The closest thing I could find to diet coke was a place selling some kind of locally-brewed kombucha, so I left.

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general

A history of Rumored to Exist, by RCS checkin comments, without commentary

When I wrote Rumored to Exist, I used RCS, a source control system that used to be popular for unix.  (Since then, the cool kids have gone to using CVS, then Subversion, then Git.)

Each time I checked in a file, I left a little comment.  Here’s a log of those comments, in reverse chronological order.  (Note that I started using RCS about three years into the writing of the book, so everything before that was not recorded.)

RCS file: RCS/rumor-current.txt,v
 Working file: rumor-current.txt
 head: 7.10
 branch:
 locks: strict
 jkonrath: 7.10
 access list:
 symbolic names:
 keyword substitution: kv
 total revisions: 54; selected revisions: 54
 description:
 Rumored to Exist main book
 ----------------------------
 revision 7.10 locked by: jkonrath;
 date: 2002/06/09 16:01:14; author: jkonrath; state: Exp; lines: +9 -6
 OK, I'm taking it over to Word. Wish me luck...
 ----------------------------
 revision 7.9
 date: 2002/06/08 03:23:29; author: jkonrath; state: Exp; lines: +644 -545
 No flags! A complete draft, and I just checked spelling, but it needs
 more work...
 ----------------------------
 revision 7.8
 date: 2002/06/01 22:17:12; author: jkonrath; state: Exp; lines: +272 -260
 This is the finish of a paper draft. Lots of corrections...
 ----------------------------
 revision 7.7
 date: 2002/05/29 03:31:44; author: jkonrath; state: Exp; lines: +1345 -934
 More changes, after going through a half paper draft.
 ----------------------------
 revision 7.6
 date: 2001/12/24 04:36:04; author: jkonrath; state: Exp; lines: +493 -482
 This includes comments and corrections from a paper draft edit that
 slowly took place over november and december, I think.
 ----------------------------
 revision 7.5
 date: 2001/12/23 05:16:11; author: jkonrath; state: Exp; lines: +584 -429
 Moving to a new machine, and there may be some editing cruft in there, too.
 ----------------------------
 revision 7.4
 date: 2001/09/26 20:51:32; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +1370 -1444
 Just thinking checking in would be a good idea. No logic behind it tho.
 ----------------------------
 revision 7.3
 date: 2001/09/07 03:41:30; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +170 -322
 Removed a couple of dead ones, did some merges on three sets of them.
 ----------------------------
 revision 7.2
 date: 2001/09/03 04:50:30; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +203 -195
 This has all of Marie's edits, plus a spellcheck, and some comments.
 ----------------------------
 revision 7.1
 date: 2001/07/29 05:04:33; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +509 -455
 Changes from paper edits on 7.0. Includes some comments.
 ----------------------------
 revision 7.0
 date: 2001/07/05 20:53:40; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +2 -2
 Bumping up to draft 7 in rcs.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.32
 date: 2001/07/05 20:17:29; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +504 -38
 Aah, no comments. Close to the finish? Probably not.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.31
 date: 2001/05/24 02:06:22; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +391 -419
 Another check-in, with most of the comments fixed, and just a bunch
 of vacant stuff and ordering issues to be done before this draft
 is wrapped up.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.30
 date: 2001/05/20 01:36:35; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +327 -529
 I cut out about 4 or 5 things, pushes this below 80K, but makes it much
 better. Now I need to start writing more new stuff.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.29
 date: 2001/05/10 04:08:50; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +777 -750
 This is the version recovered from a PDB file.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.28
 date: 2001/05/10 04:08:06; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +397 -474
 This is a messup from a crash.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.27
 date: 2001/02/25 06:23:10; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +452 -379
 The rest of the paper draft in there.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.26
 date: 2001/02/25 00:38:17; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +131 -107
 The beginning of comments on a paper draft - 0-38.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.25
 date: 2000/12/18 02:09:15; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +861 -855
 Another reorg, spelling.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.24
 date: 2000/12/08 23:17:56; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +401 -488
 Another paper draft....
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.23
 date: 2000/11/25 04:50:27; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +1223 -1394
 A bunch of stuff done, holding at 200...
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.22
 date: 2000/11/09 03:51:40; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +213 -144
 I just entered a ton of comments from a paper edit. No real new stuff
 though.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.21
 date: 2000/10/26 02:56:56; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +473 -510
 A quick checkin with comments from a 9/20 paper draft. No real changes
 in content, though. I'm going to start moving things, hence this.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.20
 date: 2000/10/16 21:05:32; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +548 -24
 206, 83K
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.19
 date: 2000/09/16 15:44:09; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +1010 -490
 Almost 78K, 0-192, 75% there. This also includes all of the edits on a
 paper draft from about a month ago, including tons of comments on ordering
 and stuff I don't like anymore.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.18
 date: 2000/08/22 21:16:54; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +438 -14
 72812, 180. Checking in just because.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.17
 date: 2000/07/31 16:40:47; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +476 -174
 I feel a great need to check in. 0-168, almost 69K.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.16
 date: 2000/05/26 17:21:28; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +99 -16
 Just making sure everything is cool here.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.15
 date: 2000/03/17 05:31:21; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +22 -46
 blah.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.14
 date: 2000/03/02 17:57:50; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +170 -7
 I haven't been doing anything for a long time. 65K, 161?
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.13
 date: 2000/01/26 16:10:30; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +301 -54
 I'm above 63K, but it's going slow. Just wanted to ci and get
 something in for the new year.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.12
 date: 1999/12/21 04:58:46; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +372 -278
 The first checkin at the place in Astoria. No idea what's here - it
 has been almost a month since I did any work. Maybe it will pick
 up soon? At 61K now.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.11
 date: 1999/11/20 04:15:04; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +236 -7
 Lots more - broke 60K, 148.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.10
 date: 1999/11/16 18:59:04; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +179 -11
 I'm slowly doing some work - 142/57658. Staying home sick today, hoping
 to hit 60K someday.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.9
 date: 1999/11/11 02:21:44; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +115 -3
 Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.8
 date: 1999/11/06 18:09:16; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +76 -1
 Almost 55K words. Not much new here, but I should be checking in
 as much as possible since I'm moving between 2 machines.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.7
 date: 1999/10/27 03:09:24; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +154 -2
 54K, 133 done. Just checking in to be on the safe side. I'm
 shuffling stuff back and forth to write at work, and you never know.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.6
 date: 1999/10/24 16:13:48; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +174 -57
 Mostly checking if the log message works, a couple of new things.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.5
 date: 1999/10/17 16:55:39; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +557 -1
 I haven't even looked at this in months - started my new job at juno
 and all - i am checking in before i start to fuck with anything,
 just in case there are changes - actually, i think i stopped right at
 the halfway mark, so there are some new things.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.4
 date: 1999/08/16 22:14:08; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +1265 -18
 Approaching the halfway mark, running out of steam. i just wrote
 the same comment for the seattle checkin, too.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.3
 date: 1999/07/31 00:22:54; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +794 -89
 Slow month. Given up on the annotations. Up to 82 now, still
 chugging along on it.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.2
 date: 1999/06/30 01:03:31; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +215 -0
 Here's 0-63 (well, no 0), but they still need a once-over.
 This is where I will start messing with annotations.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.1
 date: 1999/06/29 06:44:34; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +538 -9
 Here's a checkin with what I decided to keep plus some salvaged stuff.
 ----------------------------
 revision 2.0
 date: 1999/06/19 02:22:08; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +73 -4660
 Here's the first major cut and dice. not much left!
 ----------------------------
 revision 1.10
 date: 1999/06/18 20:30:02; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +41 -7
 This is the first checkin of the sixth draft, aka the "New York" draft
 In a second, I will blank this out, and start clean. I've got another
 copy called the Seattle Draft, and I'll hand-pick the stuff I like
 and put it back in here. Right?
 ----------------------------
 revision 1.9
 date: 1999/06/11 22:09:58; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +264 -13
 I'm in New York, so I should check in.
 This is up to 159, maybe 63K words. Still many comments, and
 a few new pieces.
 ----------------------------
 revision 1.8
 date: 1999/01/31 10:51:49; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +148 -59
 above 150 now. they all suck, though.
 ----------------------------
 revision 1.7
 date: 1999/01/28 05:51:01; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +537 -36
 60,000 words, motherfucker.
 ----------------------------
 revision 1.6
 date: 1999/01/12 05:15:53; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +1045 -649
 Contains a single pass of commenting on the first half, Marie's
 comments integrated (mostly), and a few new ones that pretty
 much suck.
 ----------------------------
 revision 1.5
 date: 1998/10/26 06:03:21; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +732 -29
 0-127 (I hope)
 ----------------------------
 revision 1.4
 date: 1998/08/04 03:39:49; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +73 -1
 eating white castle, checking in shit.
 ----------------------------
 revision 1.3
 date: 1998/07/31 03:41:47; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +74 -2
 more junk for the peanut gallery.
 ----------------------------
 revision 1.2
 date: 1998/07/26 22:02:31; author: root; state: Exp; lines: +1 -0
 this is a test of rcs - i hope it works.
 ----------------------------
 revision 1.1
 date: 1998/07/26 21:05:55; author: root; state: Exp;
 Initial revision
 =============================================================================
Categories
general

Noncompliance to ASTM F 899-12 Standard

I am now 58,000 words into a book that has absolutely no structure, no plot, and for the most part, no characters.  It is basically 226 nightmares and dream sequences back-to-back in no real order.  (In comparison, Thunderbird was 38,844 words.)  Part of me wants to come up with an overarching story that links these pieces together.  Or maybe I should not use this structure and stitch together the pieces into longer stories.  A big part of me just wants to publish it as-is and Captain Beefheart it, and people can either like it or hate it.  I think it would be awesome to just do that three times a year for the next twenty years, but it might get old fast.

(Dream last night:  I was in London for an extended vacation of some sort.  I found a loophole in the unemployment law that would enable anyone who spoke English, even if just on vacation, to collect unemployment.  The problem was that the unemployment office was in a basement, and legislators had removed the door, so you had to climb through the window.  While looking for a way to spend my Dole money, I went to a huge department store and really wanted to buy a bass guitar.  I kept seeing people carrying them or playing them, but could not find them in the store.  Then I started wondering if the bass guitars in the UK were the same as the US, or if the strings would be upside-down.)

There’s still that part of my brain that is begging for the release of dopamine from the completion of some amount of straight fiction.  I just finished reading that Junot Diaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and I really loved how he described Washington Heights.  I mean, the book was much deeper than just a novella about Dominicans running around and screwing each other, but the language of it made me think about writing something other than a guy taking a dump on a roulette wheel at Circus Circus, or whatever it is I’ve been writing lately.

There are two things that have happened that have made me think about the past in a strange and opaque way, and that’s what itches me about this straight writing thing.

One, I got a leak of the new Carcass album, Surgical Steel.  (Thanks to Ray for the hookup on this.)  I don’t really listen to death metal anymore, and certainly don’t keep up with news on it, but for whatever reason, I was curious about his, and it turns out my suspicions were correct on it.  It’s an excellent album, and sounds like they went into the studio in 1993 and recorded another album as perfect as their Tools of the Trade EP.  It’s amazing that they didn’t fuck this up and insert all kinds of nu metal or have a dubstep remix or, even worse, do what metal bands usually do after a twenty year hiatus and release a SSDD polished turd of exactly what they used to do in the 80s or 90s. It’s a perfect progression from what they did before, unique, and yet with a slightly haunting and familiar sound to some of the melodies.

I was a huge fan of their 1991 album Necroticism – Descanting the Insalubrious and probably mentioned it a thousand times within Summer Rain, because I listened to it ten thousand times in the summer of 1992, and then constantly put it in the player when I needed to teleport back to that time during the book’s writing.  I have so many memories of that summer that are directly tied to that 48 minutes of music, because I used to open my radio show with it every week, and kept it in my CD deck constantly.

So when I hear a new album that still invokes some ghost of that album, in the tone or the melodies or whatever it is that makes the two similar, it pulls me back to that time and to my old book and makes me wonder if there’s some other writing left in that era.  There’s a part of me that wants to do some Summer Rain 2 that either takes place right before or right after that book, or maybe takes place twenty years later when the protagonist goes back to a 2012 Indiana that’s not doing very rosy and the state of the economy and the world and the experience of hitting 40 and being at that fork in the road somehow echoes what happened in 1992 when I (and/or that character) was at a different fork in the road.  I know SR was rough, and I got unending shit because the book was “long” but it’s something that sometimes pulls me back in that direction.  And it’s not helpful that I have an almost complete but nowhere near finished book of stories that take place around the same time that’s sitting on the hard drive that will probably never see the light of day.

Here’s the other thing.  My allergies are bad now.  We’re talking attack-bad, give-me-more-steroids-than-ARod bad.  And so I went to the hardware store and bought a respirator mask, like you’d wear when you’re tearing down mold-infected drywall, and I started wearing that in the house today, just to see if it would help.  (It did, but it was so goddamn hot, I had to take it back off.)

There is something in those masks, some smell in the filter that is so distinct.  I haven’t thought about it in 25 years, but pulling air through that N95 filter and into my nose gave it such a distinct odor, the smell of surgical gauze and sterile supplies, it immediately teleported me back to the last time I wore respiratory equipment regularly, which was when I was 16 and working on my first car all the time.  I’ve talked about it too much before, but I had this old beaten Camaro, and even before I could drive, I spent all of my time and money sanding away rust and beating on metal with hammers and painting it back up with krylon rattle-cans.

I spent so much time back then wrenching on that car, and it was a piece of shit, but it was my piece of shit and it symbolized this additional freedom that gave me the ability to leave my house and branch out of my limited social strata and just point it in any random direction and feel the rumble of a V-8 for a twenty-minute side of a tape, until it auto-reversed and flipped sides and I changed directions and drove back.

I spent summers and weekends wearing this dust filter, a blue rubberized plastic thing that cupped over my nose and mouth and contained some kind of treated cotton or fiber inside of it that got replaced every time it became caked with paint and plastic dust.  The smell of that filter is the same as the smell of this filter, and it immediately reminds me of sanding down body filler and mixing together more bondo to squeegee into cracks and paint with more primer.  Everyone else in my high school turned 16 and magically had a car appear in their driveway, usually a brand new 5.0 Mustang.  I didn’t, and that’s why I spent time in junkyards looking for new sheet metal on the cheap, and trying to break rusted bolts and sand compound curves in my garage while listening to Grim Reaper and Megadeth on a jambox.

So that makes me think of that time in the 80s, the struggle of being a nerd when being a nerd wasn’t cool, being poor in a school where being poor wasn’t cool, driving a Chevy when driving a Ford was cool.  I wrote a book about that too, sitting on the virtual shelf, probably not to be released.  I always think about jumping back into that one, but the writing in it makes me cringe.  When I was in Mexico in 2009, I was sitting in a hammock every morning, staring at the ocean and busting my ass trying to turn out that book.  It’s hurried writing and painful to read now, but if I had infinite time, I’d beat it into shape.

Of course, I don’t have infinite time.  This is why I never post here – I need to be writing.  Gotta get back to it.

 

Categories
general

Art By Focus Group: my new idea for an art installation

This is my idea for a new art installation:

  1. Set up a focus group.  I know there are places that do this, where they pay people some amount of money to sit around and tell you how they feel about a bank’s new stupid ad.  I used to do them in LA when I didn’t have a job, and it was a good way to make $100 cash plus as many cookies as you could cram in your mouth from a snack tray.
  2. Lock everyone in a room for 12 hours.
  3. The room has food, and bathrooms.  (Maybe a good deli tray, some various sandwiches, or box lunches. Also cookies.  Maybe some chili or indian food, too.)
  4. Each person in the focus group has one of those dial things where they spin it one way or the other if they like or hate something.
  5. Show the people 12 hours of slides of various art installations.  Also mix in other random slides, like pictures of Julia Roberts or Khmer Rouge death camps.
  6. Allow people to break every hour to eat more sandwiches or use the restrooms.
  7. Wire up the restrooms so that the output from all of the toilets is actually diverted into some kind of portable septic tank.
  8. Also record all audio from the rest rooms.
  9. Discard all voting results from the focus group.
  10. Put all of the urine and feces from the restroom into mason jars.
  11. For the installation itself, have a large white room with white pedestals around the perimeter.  On top of each pedestal, put a jar filled with either urine or feces.  Broadcast a continuous loop of the bathroom sounds.  The title of this is “ART BY FOCUS GROUP (2013) Urine, Feces, audio.”

If you know of any grants that will pay me money to do this, please contact me.