Category: general

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Shelves and boats

I need more damn space. I spent a good chunk of today shuffling around things, walking around with a tape measure, and trying to find some way to squeeze in a new big bookcase, or possibly a few smaller ones. There’s no hope in getting a larger one, unless I can sell my bike, throw out one of my chairs, or otherwise displace some big piece of furniture. I did find two or three places that I could fit a smaller set of shelves, like one of those deals that’s a foot wide. I had one of those I bought back in Bloomington that was all black enamel, very modern looking. It became the home for all of my favorite books, all of the Bukowski and Kerouac and Burroughs and other things I cherished most in my collection. Unfortunately, it got left behind in Seattle, and now I can’t find a place that sells the same model anymore, or I’d order three or four of them and cram them in every odd corner where there’s a fractional amount of floor space.

I did buy some shelves online at Target, though. I bought two bookcases that are 16″ wide and have five shelves, with the lower ones being almost square and the top ones being half that size. I then spent an hour cleaning out behind a dresser and the bed in my room, vaccumming out dust and picking up change and forever lost CD cases and stray socks and whatever else migrated back there. An even bigger project will involve moving over my three big bookcases in the room, pushing them nine inches to the left. Yeah, that sounds stupid, but I want to put one of the new shelves next to the old ones. I wouldn’t mind getting one of these that’s about twice as wide, to fit in the area between my door and closet door. I like the idea of having a room that almost completely surrounds me with books. I also like the thought of getting all of the piles of books on my bedroom floor into some shelves. And maybe someday having a filing system for everything would help.

As far as reading, I started on Tania Aebi’s book Maiden Voyage. When she was a teenager, her dad made her a deal that instead of paying for her college tuition, he would buy a boat and let her use it to take an around-the-world sailing cruise, solo. She would write articles on the go and sell them to a sailing magazine for money, and spend two years seeing the world, learning to solve problems, and getting more education than she’d find in a dull classroom. With almost no sailing experience, a pile of textbooks, and a 26-foot sailboat, she headed out of New York City on her grand journey.

The book’s one of those things that makes me wish I could do the same thing. The idea of spending that much time alone, seeing the ocean, and experiencing the voyage the way people did hundreds of years before – that just sounds incredible. I have spent a lot of time driving in a car, looking through the glass as the country rolls past me, but spending the time in the open air of a boat, with little technology other than ropes and cloth and a sextant sounds like it would be a completely different experience, like the difference between riding Amtrak and pedaling your ten-speed across the country. Of course, she ran into just about every imaginable problem when she got out of port, from engine trouble to contaminated water tanks to endless leaks to a dud sextant that threw off her navigation. But still, it’s an interesting read sofar.

It was fifty degrees out today. I went for a walk for a bit, mostly to see if the cheap store on 30th had any sort of plastic magazine holders, the kind where you put a bunch in a vertical sort of thing and then put it all on a shelf. I figure if I bought about a dozen of those, I could get all of the damn magazines off my floor. I think I now subscribe to about a dozen things, and I never seem to read half of them. Anyway, they had no plastic things like I wanted, although they had a pre-built ship model that looked like the one in Napoleon Dynamite. It was like thirty bucks, and I have too much other junk around, so I didn’t buy one.

I want to buy a real sailboat, though. I also want to buy a bunch of space-saving technology. And some sound-absorbing curtains or panels or something so I don’t have to hear my neighbors yelling.

OK, I should go write, but I probably won’t.

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34

So I turned 34 recently. I didn’t write an official story about the whole trip, but it seems like every January when I go to Las Vegas, something weird gets thrown in the mix, and the trip mutates just a little bit from the original plan. There, of course, is no real plan to start with, just the idea that I’d bring a bunch of my friends to Las Vegas in January, hopefully armed with a bunch of year-end bonus money, and then act like an idiot in some new and exciting way. This usually goes wrong in that all of my friends are cheap fucking bastards who cannot comprehend going on a plane to a place where 1) drinks are usually free 2) the hottest women in the world degrade themselves in the sluttiest outfits possible and then walk around in public and 3) hotel rooms are always under $50, and if you know me, you know how I always get a big stiffie about hotel rooms. But no, that’s horrible, I can see why you’d want to sit in the -50 degree weather and not miss the latest episode of Joey or whatever.

I should mention that my friend Bill wimped out on us for the first time in like three or four years, and that kindof sucked, but he had like two other back-to-back vacations with just a few days between them. I guess Bill is mellowing with age a bit, and he’s stuck commuting between Seattle and Indiana, so maybe fitting his six foot eight frame into a plane seat designed for a midget for six hours is something he wants to minimize. At least he had the balls to come out several other times, unlike others.

Okay, so before I left, I bought a Tablet PC. Actually, I bought two. First, I bought the one I really wanted from HP, along with some memory and an extended warranty, through their online store. There was a snowball’s chance in hell I would get the unit before I left town, but I resigned to the fact that I’d probably just get it while I was gone and have a new toy to play with when I returned. I then checked the HP web site about four times a day and called them daily to try to get a tracking number or updated shipping info, or whatever other info I could score on my far too expensive new toy.

Of course, I got fucked. They kept back-ordering the computer, and the day before I was due to go to Vegas, they updated my order to an estimated ship date of the end of February or something. I called HP, told them to lick my balls, and give me my damn money back. One small issue was that I already got a 512 Meg memory expansion in the mail, and they also charged my credit card for that extended warranty. I still haven’t seen the refund on the warranty, even though I’ve called them like 19 times and told them to just take the cock out of their mouth and press the three buttons on their terminal that will debit the $200-some bucks back on my card, but that never seems to work. Oh, by the way, fuck HP. Don’t buy a computer from them.

I went to CompUSA and immediately bought a Toshiba Portege (there are gay accent marks on them, but I’m not going to go all stupid and try to find out how to put them on there) and it ended up being cheaper and with more stuff. It’s a convertible laptop, meaning the top screen swivels and then closes on top of the keyboard, so it looks like a writing tablet or one of those weird computers that UPS dudes have, except bigger and not brown. The 12″ screen (1400×1050 native) has a writing digitizer built in, which is basically one of those Wacom tablets but see-through, embedded in the screen. So you can write and draw and use the special pen like a mouse. It’s very nifty.

I am still getting used to the whole idea of a Tablet PC, but it’s a cool concept. I can sit on the couch with the wireless connection and a good battery and browse the web or take notes or look shit up on IMDB or whatever else. It’s excellent for sitting in bed. The writing uses a very good handwriting recognition thing for input into any program, or you can use programs like OneNote to sketch away any old crap in the ink format, which is nice for brainstorming or sketches or whatever. I have some other specialized programs that I downloaded, like a version of the New York Times crossword puzzle that you can fill in with the pen. It’s very cool. I also got an external DVD player and CD burner, which is a bit more awkward than having a built-in, but then the whole computer only weighs like 4 pounds.

I don’t really feel like mentioning a whole blow-by-blow of the trip, because it’s not like we did tons of action-packed stuff every day. It started as me and Lon (a friend I met from Bill on previous trips) and then the next day, Jaime (a friend of Lon’s) met up with us. For the weekend, an old female friend of Lon and Jaime’s came out for the weekend. This was a bit odd for me in that I’m not super-duper best buddies with any of these people. I mean, I don’t dislike any of them, but I’ve known Bill for like 15 years or something. I was in his wedding (okay, I got his wedding crashed by the cops for being a drunken idiot, drinking tap beer out of giant iced tea pitchers, and running around building like a crazed Viking on a pillaging conquest, inviting everyone who even walked by to come in with me and get fucked up) and he got me a job in Seattle and everything. I’ve spent very limited time with Lon and even less with Jaime, so I vaguely feared that at some point, there would be some kind of long, uncomfortable silence that passes without event when you’re around people you’ve known for decades, but hangs in the air like a soggy discount beer fart when you’ve only known someone through a dozen emails and a trip or two.

When I got to Vegas and met up with Lon, we got to the cab stand and found a beautiful seventy-degree Las Vegas around us. SEVENTY. It was about -9 when I left New York. Aside from deploying to Vietnam from Alaska or something, you don’t get much more change in climate. Our cab driver was a retired rancher who knew tons of stuff about horses and guns and cowboys and everything else that makes you want to talk to Las Vegas cab drivers constantly and maybe covertly videotape it for some kind of TV show or book project. And when we got to the Tropicana (we originally had the Boardwalk all settled in, but at the last second Lon saw some kind of deal and jumped on it), we had the best set of rooms in the tower at the front of the hotel. The last two times I stayed there, they gave me shitty rooms in the towers on the back stretch, about a twenty mile walk from the strip, with a scenic view of the trash compacting facilities. This time, our windows looked out onto the strip, we didn’t have mirrors on the ceiling, blood stains on the carpet, or vibrating beds, but we did score our own fridges and a room safe that didn’t involve stuffing a dollar of quarters in a slot before you locked it.

I think you could sum up the trip by saying we ate, we drank, we went to comedy clubs, and Lon tried on 863 pairs of shoes. I got all of my hair cut off for about three times what I usually pay, but the stylist was pretty cool and told me a lot of crazy stories about people that got kicked out of casinos and ran to the beauty salon to get a haircut and disguise their shit. We went to the Apple store to harass the help, and ran into this Mac evangelist with one eye. I almost understand one mouse button, but the one eye thing sort of freaked me out, especially as he’s rambling on about how the new iPod is so damn great and the glass eye is wandering over to the left or whatever.

Jaime got a rental car from Hertz because his company has some kind of gold card where he can always get one for like $30 a day or something, no matter what. While Lon and Jaime went to the airport to get the car and then find a liquor store, I sat around and watched the highly viral “I love the 90s” TV show on VH1. Okay, normally I would make fun of this shit to no end, and I will – I mean, these people are doing a tribute to the long-lost years of like 20 minutes ago. But they’re really funny, and it’s weird how much of the stuff I remember, and scary how much I forgot. I mean, the early 90s I remember some things, but I didn’t have a TV in college and I didn’t tune in to 90210 or Melrose or whatever. And as far as the late 90s, that’s the stuff that depresses me. Because I remember very vividly years like 1996 and 1997 like they were yesterday, because in my mind, THEY WERE YESTERDAY. It was only a little bit ago that I was in Seattle and dating that-Seattle-chick and driving around that Ford Escort from Evergreen Ford and everything else. And looking back, that was a nice, comfortable, post-college, corporate, I-almost-had-my-shit-together era. And in some ways, I really miss it. And to think that it’s such ancient history that a TV show is being made about it as if it was the 14th century or something is really creepy. But I watched all of them, for hours, like I was watching a video of a BASE jumper slamming his nuts into a wall, over and over and over.

I gambled a dollar while waiting for a show, and ended up winning five dollars. So by percentages, I ruled. Otherwise, I didn’t feel like gambling. I did drink a fair amount, although Lon ended up buying Jack Daniels and some kind of fruity raspberry Bacardi, which are two things I can’t really stomach. I didn’t entirely lose my shit at any point like I did in 2003, although I got close a few times. At one point, I was so pissed off at everyone that I got up out of the restaurant, went to an ATM, took out $500, and vowed to drink all of it and then go on a complete fucking rampage, but by the time I got back to the table, our food had arrived, and I forgot all about it.

The only other thing of humor was that Lon and Jaime got talked into going to a timeshare presentation when we were shopping at the Venetian. I mean, they got a ton of coupons and swag and crap and everyone was really nice to them when they had to sit through the three-hour, high-pressure sales thing, but I thought it was sort of amateur-league. I mean, I ignore people like that as if they didn’t even exist. I’ve got the Greenpeace idiots and the children’s fund people and the moonies and the Scientologists and the copy shops with their color printing price fliers, and I can pass through them like a gallon of orange juice goes through an empty stomach. So I got a chuckle when they actually stopped to listen to them.

Anyway, four days of wonderful weather and good food and no fucking ingrates laying on their car horn like it was directly hooked up to their prostate, and not a single person telling me how Bush’s inaugaration had to do with Hitler or something, and then I return to spend two hours stuck on the runway, an hour waiting on my bags, and an hour and a half in subzero weather waiting for a god damned cab home with no gloves or hat. By the time I got home to my shithole apartment, I almost felt grateful, except for the part about having to be at work in like seven hours.

So that’s that. How are you?

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Single serving

I’m a big fan of the single serving size. I know it’s the big imperial evil American way, but I love it when I can make a meal without having 3/4 of it left after I’m done, and I’m not really into the whole leftovers thing. If I have spaghetti on Monday, I’m damn sure I won’t want it on Tuesday. So things like Lunchables and snak-paks and tiny jars are my friend, and I hate that the grocery store down the street only sells spaghetti sauce in the making-dinner-for-18 size. One of my favorite meals ever is the Dinty Moore beef and potatoes microwave bowl, which is served in a vacuum-sealed package that doesn’t need to be stored in hot or cold, and can be nuked in two minutes. Ten years ago when I worked at Wrubel’s machine room on Sunday nights, I used to hike across campus with one of these in my pack, plus a shitload of CDs to keep me busy. And now I found that the Rite-Aid drug store carries them, so I always buy all of them they have in stock when I’m there. And I just read about a new kind of coffee in a can that’s coming out that has a chemical heater in the can. You just bust open a seal, shake it up a bit, and in a couple of minutes, there’s hot coffee. It’s only a matter of time before someone puts one of those bitches in a soup can, and I’ll buy them by the case.

It suddenly turned winter last night. When I went to bed, the wind was tearing through the windows, and I got a good night of sleep in the cold. But when I woke, the weather page said it was -3 out with the windchill. (That’s Fahrenheit; I’m not a metric geek.) It took a lot of work to stumble to the train station; even with a thick hooded sweatshirt on under my leather jacket, it felt like the wind was knocking straight through my skin and splitting apart my DNA. There’s some snow on the ground here and there, but it’s mostly just little patches of glare ice here and there that threaten to knock you on your ass when you’re trying to run at top speed toward a heated building. And just yesterday, I was wondering why the hell it was so warm in December. I guessed I cursed it for everyone.

I wanted to get some more writing done, but my head is pounding, and I mostly want to lay in bed and do nothing. This is why I need a tablet PC, although I have a feeling I’d spend three grand on one and it would get about as much use as my laptop, or my Pocket PC, or any other gadget I’ve bought. Maybe I should throw $2998 in the house-building account and buy a good pad of paper at the drug store and write in there.

OK, Tylenol, TV…

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Dead arm

I fell asleep for a couple of hours and woke up to find my left arm all fucked up, slept on and twisted around the wrong way. It feels like if I could contort it in just the right way, it will pop back into place and stop hurting, but nothing has worked yet. So I thought I’d start by bitching about that a bit.

I actually got out of the house today, to drop off laundry, pick up a prescription, and go buy books. Barnes and Noble was pretty nutso today, with lines out the door and lots of people running around with stacks of books. I got this new collection of Kerouac’s journals edited by Douglas Brinkley, which I was actually a bit reluctant to buy. It’s weird, because a few years ago, I would have dropped twenty or thirty bucks on any Kerouac stuff I didn’t already have. But the cottage industry has grown so much, and there are so many players that are seeking to twist things around to fit their own agenda. Kerouac’s family (really his wife’s family) has supressed so much of his writing and tried to mask any work that might suggest that Jack occasionally messed around with men or took drugs or whatever. And then the hippy crowd on the far left wants to comb over the fact that Kerouac was a Catholic, supported the war in Vietnam, and didn’t really care for the whole political thing that Ginsberg was into. So now all of these books are coming out, and you don’t know who to trust. It’s too bad, since Kerouac was such a working-man writer, someone with many sides but who came from a solid background and loved America as a whole, not just the two coasts but the whole country in between.

I got that book, and also some other random book from the sailing section, containing a score of tales about people dealing with extreme emergencies out on the seas. It’s basically Perfect Storm sorts of things, but a wider variety and not as dumb. I like reading it, because there’s this whole new vocabulary of different equipment and parts and pieces and knots and terms. And I like stories that are told on the road, even if the road is a shipping lane cutting across the Pacific. So I hope that turns out to be a good read. And I hope I don’t end up wanting to buy a boat by the end of it.

Not much else to report, other than that I’m enjoying having all of my MP3s on shuffle and feeding through the stereo. I found a plugin to take care of the volume normalization problem that works fairly well. There’s another method that puts some kind of gain number in the ID3 tags, but I haven’t fucked with that yet.

OK, on to writing.

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After Hours, F/X, Goodfellas

All I’ve done this weekend is consumed movies and consumed food. Well, I’ve done a bit more than that; I actually broke down and did the whole stereo rewiring project I have had on the back burner for years. It involved a lot of dusting and me crawling around to figure out where wires should go. I retired my Kenwood 6+1 CD player that I bought in 1994, since I usually only listen to CDs on my digitally-linked DVD player. And I got my computer hooked up to the stereo now, so I can run xmms on continuous shuffle. The line level is a little weird, and I keep readjusting it at the mixer level, xmms level, receiver level, etc. to try to get it right. Sometimes it’s perfect, and then an MP3 sounds louder and muddy and I have to dick with the volume. I’m not really into that, but it’s cool to have 5000-some songs on shuffle.

Movies… I’m getting a lot of stuff in for xmas, so I’ve been trying to watch stuff and get ideas for writing. The other night was After Hours, which I have only seen once, and that was five or six years ago. It’s funny because it all takes place a few blocks south of where I work, but even though they did film there, the place looks like a closed-off movie set more than it does look like New York. I mean, there are some 80s stereotype things in there, like the bohemian artist’s loft (which honestly looks like my office building before a good cleaning, a corporate paintjob, and a cube farm installation) and the guy working as a word processor. No, he’s not working WITH a word processor, he IS a word processor, typing archaic commands on an old greenscreen mainframe terminal. After Hours is one of those films that formed my only opinions about living and working in Manhattan before I actually came here, and it’s almost nostalgic and strange to revisit that old opinion and see how different it is from the reality of being here.

There are two other things that are captured in After Hours that I took away from this recent viewing. One was the way it captured the chase that crumbles in your hands to but still keeps you on your feet. I used to feel this back in college, the blind date that falls apart but leaves you at a bar where you run into someone else and then follow them to a party, where you end up talking to someone else and going to a different bar and then running into other friends and so on and so forth. It’s the kind of thing that only happens when you’re around other people who look around the usual social convention and chase the same thing just like you. I mean, now, dating and socializing is such an alien thing to me, and it’s such a formal constraint. When I was in college, I’d hit on someone in the student union, I’d ask a couple people working in a store a totally random question and then end up in a long conversation that would turn into a years-long friendship. Paul (in the movie) ends up in the apartment of a waitress after knowing her for ten seconds, and they’re listening to Monkees records and she’s drawing a sketch of him. It seems like in college, weird shit like that was happening all the time, ending up in a dorm room at three in the morning talking to someone about the Civil War or going to Germany to paint or whatever. And I miss that now. Maybe I should write about it – there are bits of it in Summer Rain, but I wish I could write more like that.

And speaking of wishing and writing, I love the way that After Hours flows. It’s the granddaddy of Clerks and the “I wasn’t even supposed to be here today!”, with this guy looking at his watch and knowing that in the morning, he’s gotta be at the desk doing his word processing, and he just wants to put head to pillow, but with someone as beautiful as Rosanna Arquette kissing you, you want to keep going after it. Screw sleep, you can catch up when you die! And of course, she’s insane and giving more mixed signals than a bad traffic light, but… man, she is beautiful! The whole film unwinds like that, mostly in real-time but with the tension of getting the fuck home and the drama of the million related coincidences, that it works so well. I would love to write a book like that.

Last night I saw F/X, a very underrated suspense movie that I used to love back in high school. I rented the hell out of that thing back in the day, but I haven’t seen it in years. I never thought about it, but it’s another New York Eighties movie, with lots of cops in the old cop cars and huge loft apartments and “dirty” streets that are far cleaner than when they actually clean the streets here. What was funny is how new the movie felt to me, although I remembered so many of the little nuances, especially Jerry Orbach’s acting.

Today, as I waited for my shipment from FreshDirect, I watched Goodfellas for the New York trifecta. I saw most of it recently on TV, but of course, Joe Pesci was talking about “Mother melons” or whatever else they dubbed over his cursing. I liked the movie, although I’m somewhat reluctant over it, because every jerkoff in my neighborhood worships it like it’s the new fucking testament, and they all think they are fucking gangsters and can double-park everywhere and act like they own the damn neighborhood. Even though the moral of the story is that if you’re in the mafia, you’re basically fucked, the people here don’t really see that. But it’s entertaining to see Pesci go off, and Ray Liotta’s a great actor in this kind of role.

The thing I got out of Goodfellas was the “last day of the wiseguy,” the last sequence where Liotta is driving all over, getting coke, trying to sell guns, making the meat sauce, looking for helicopters, and so on. I love how that sequence is cut together, how it makes you feel like you are him, paranoid on coke and rushing through a futile set of obstacles. I would love to try that in a book somehow, although I really need to think about it.

And then I saw Real Genius tonight, which was good, but it made me absolutely wish I could date that girl Jordan in the movie. I went out on a date once with a girl who looked almost exactly like her, but she was really shy and the whole thing didn’t work out. I don’t know, I had this strange idea that maybe she did like me from how she acted, and I cooked her dinner once, but she was a vegetarian and I had to scramble to do everything right, and I don’t know what happened. This was all the semester before Summer Rain starts and I guess I forgot about her in the wake of everything else going on, but then years later she suddenly popped in my head again, but by then I was 2500 miles away and couldn’t even remember her name let alone how to get in touch with her.

Speaking of which, I was reading old paper journals last night. Man, that’s always fucked up. That’s like starting a story with “Okay, I smoked a bunch of PCP first” – there’s really no way it can get better. I don’t know, I guess I at least feel better about money, reading myself bitch about cash back in 1996. Sometimes now I’m a little tight in the wallet, but I guess I’m more above water than under.

Okay, I’m debating Mean Streets or trying to get some writing done, so I should go flip a coin or something.

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Shuffling

I’m listening to MP3s on random shuffle on my PC, which is new to me. I know, this is something I was supposed to start doing five years ago, which is also when I was supposed to chuck my CD player and receiver and start stealing all of my music. I used to listen to a lot more music in Seattle, when everything was in one room and my bed also served as my couch, my kitchen table, and the place where I read, wrote, watched videos, and played music. Now I never seem to want to find a CD I like, and except for the times when I’m writing and I listen to the same handful of discs, I usually turn on the tube when I need background noise. I need to stop doing that.

I have been interested in some kind of master convergence solution that would somehow solve all of my media woes and not cost a fortune. I was just having this discussion with Ray last night, although his idea is more like a credit card-sized drive that holds fifty gazillion terabytes and can wirelessly communicate with every type of electronics in his house or anywhere else. He’ll never find this, and with about 20,000 CDs in his house, he’s never going to find any kind of mobile drive to hold all of that. I have less of a problem, as I don’t need a car unit, and my iPod takes care of most of the mobile issues. Also, if my stereo is up loud enough, you can hear it in any room, so that solves the multiple-speaker/multiple-zone problem.

I saw a writeup on a new system by Sonos which is promising. You hook up your computer to their box, and then you have a ~$500 unit per zone. Each unit talks to the PC wirelessly, and has a built-in amp and inputs for other audio components (turntable, CD, iPod). Each one operates on its own; you can be listening to something downstairs while someone upstairs has another song going. The whole thing is controlled with a very slick handheld remote that has a color screen driving a good navigation system, and touch controls that look easy to use. I like the controller a lot, but I already have a good receiver and don’t like the idea of paying for another one and then somehow wiring it in tandem with my DVD sound setup. I also like its general looks, but I don’t like that it probably requires me to run in Windows all the time.

My predicament now is that I dual-boot into Windows to use my iPod software, so all of my MP3s have been stranded on a different hard drive. I just got NTFS mounting to work in linux though, so now I can just fire up xmms and point it at that directory and it works. But I am playing through the tiny speakers built into my LCD, which are about as big as the one in the back of my watch. I need to figure out a way to string some cables across the room and get the signal to my receiver. Then I need to figure out how to get XMMS to run so it isn’t microscopic. Also, it would be cool to do some kind of web-based control for it so I could fire up a browser on my laptop in the next room and change songs. Or maybe I should do something useful, like clean my bathtub.

I’m now listening to an Asia song from the Over the Top soundtrack that rhymes fire with desire. I think all of the songs on this soundtrack do, though. Anyway, I think I’m going to either write or play videogames.

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Heat

When I lived in Seattle, my studio was on the top floor of the building. Okay, there were only five floors, but with the couple of levels of parking lots underneath there, it gave me a bit of altitude over Pill Hill. Seattle winters aren’t too brutal, and I probably could have survived the whole season without a winter coat, especially given that I drove everywhere. My apartment had a single baseboard heater next to my bed, about four feet of inductive coil inside a metal case, maybe something you could buy for $30 at your local hardware store. I seldom ran the heater, though, because everyone below me ran theirs. I’d often get home from work and find my apartment about the temperature of a bread oven, because the jerkoff below me left his heat on full and then went to work all day or all week. That meant, I opened the window or the patio door, and let the cold and usually rainy Seattle winter battle the apartment until it got comfortable.

I don’t have control of my heat system here either – most apartments in New York have steam radiators that are centrally controlled by who knows what kind of mechanical or manual algorithm. This usually means in mild weather like today – mid-40s or so – my apartment also approaches the temperature resembling a kiln. Unfortunately, the opening the window approach isn’t as pleasant. For one, my crap windows are very difficult to open, and are more binary than linear; you apply way too much pressure to a non-ergonomic handle like you’re trying to open a can of pickles, and after too much time – CREEAK – the window opens about as far as you’ll be able to correct it. Compare this to my Seattle digs, which were only a few years old and had all-new, tight-sealing, perfectly-balanced Andersen windows. And in Seattle, the distant rain and hum of traffic (with no horns or car alarms – I think most people in Western Washington aren’t even aware their cars HAVE horns) sounded so much better than the too-present sound of jocko-homo-italiano guys beating their wives or whatever else I hear outside my window on a regular basis.

I had another round with the dentist today, the last for the year. He finished up a root canal, put in another titanium post, and sealed it all up in temporary crud to await a real crown next year. I’ve burned up all of my insurance for 2004, so I will come back right before my Vegas trip for the porcelain replacement. And I’m doing the flex-spend thing so I will save a little bit of cash and not pay as much in taxes. I am all for any way to pay less tax, although I wouldn’t want to go through all the hoops of considering my writing a “business” so I could write off my computer and stamps and pencils and whatnot. It’s too much work, and I haven’t even bought a new computer in a while. Maybe I should, and deduct the whole deal. Those Tablet PCs look nice…

I finished reading the stock market book I was talking about, and I guess it is good, in the sense that the guy lost like a million dollars and was a total dumbass and admitted it at the end. The whole thing makes me NOT want to invest, to just shovel cash into some kind of blind trust and not look at it, and not buy anything and just read and write and let the money quietly accumulate. I guess that’s what the 401K is for. I have like a dozen choices in the thing, in contrast to old jobs that used Fidelity and offered a bazillion options. All I know is that I max out the thing every year, and I actually made a decent amount of money from my picks last quarter. So that will be there, and if Social Security survives, maybe I can use that money for books each month.

I came to the realization that my biggest fear about retirement now is not getting the money to stop working, but actually living long enough to spend the money. I know that sounds nuts, but 67 is a long way off. I mean, all of my grandparents died at just a few years older than that. Okay, I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, and I don’t sit around eating giant blocks of organ meat doused in lard like my grandfather. But when I get out of bed in the morning, my 33-year-old ass doesn’t exactly feel young. What will it be like when it’s twice as old. Maybe I need to get my ass off the couch and run around the block a few times. I mean, having five million in the bank doesn’t do much if my arteries are 99% clogged and my bad cholesterol is a four-digit number. Of course, maybe in 30 years, I will take a roto-rooter nanotech pill and have my circa 1985 heart back again.

After spending the whole day veering in and out of sleep and hoping the dull pain of the new metal in my mouth would go away, I’m now far too awake, and I don’t feel like writing on this new book. I need to dig through my pile of unread books and find something new…

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Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving’s always weird. I’m not one of those people that ironically scoff about how the pilgrims raped the indians, and I’m not the kind that gets all weepy and talks about being thankful for the baby jesus or whatever the hell else. I have problems eating large amounts of food, so eating 8000 calories of turkey and then passing out isn’t my style. Both parades with floats and football bore me.

To the introvert like me, Thanksgiving is a nice day to not have to be around people. I woke up at the usual 7:30 or so today, but then went back to bed and enjoyed drifting in and out of sleep, feeling the cold outside and hearing the rain and wind, and being nice and comfy inside my fortress of blankets and pillows. I did get up to drink juice, take medicine, use the restroom, then go back to bed. I kept repeating the cycle until about two in the afternoon.

On a work day, I rush through the whole teeth-shave-shower cycle as quickly as possible. But on days off, I almost savor it, and spend a lot of time on small details. I spend forever going over my teeth with floss, inspecting each gap and gumline. I usuaully clean the bathroom as I clean myself, spraying the scrubbing bubble stuff and rearranging the things in the cabinet to find some optimum order maximizing storage space and access to frequently-used medical products. I spend too much time with q-tips and peroxide, dousing out my ears. And then, once in the shower, I spend forever under the hot water, never wanting to get out again.

I got dressed and considered going out for lunch, but it looked like hell out: thunderstorms dumped rain from the dark sky, and cold winds tore across the streets, blowing the rain almost sideways. I didn’t need to be anywhere, so I watched a show on PBS about old railroads and played Ace Combat 5 for a while. Finally, at about 4:00, I got the wise idea that maybe I wanted to cook dinner. I figured the stores would probably close at 5:00 (city that never sleeps, my ass – crap closes here like a small church town with blue laws, and meanwhile in Goshen, Indiana, you can go to Meijer and shop for groceries at three in the morning if you want) so I bundled up and headed out.

The rain stopped, and the sky looked dark, but it was that kind of perfect bad weather, the eye of the tornado kind of stuff. Once again, another reason introverts like me love Thanksgiving is because I get the city all to myself. Everyone else is passed out in front of the tube or has a day off, which means nobody is on the streets and I can roam around without running into the usual assortment of derelicts, idiots, yentas, bad drivers, and everyone else that make this neighborhood a pain in the ass. It was absolutely quiet and still. I loved it.

Even the normally idiotic Key Food store wasn’t that bad at all. A few stragglers were in there, buying last minute stuff or stopping in on their way home, probably. But I got to wander the store with no screaming kids, no people leaving their carts blocking the whole damn aisle, none of the usual madness. I didn’t even have to wait in line.

I spent the evening alternating between watching the tube and doing various household crap like washing dishes and working on organizing my CD collection. It feels nice to spend the evening getting stuff done, relaxing, and eating a bunch of food I just cooked. It’s also nice to know there will be three more days of this ahead.

I guess when I spend Thanksgiving doing nothing, I feel slightly guilty in some weird way, that some relative or person will get all weepy about “oh my god he’s all by himself and he’s building a gallows in his bedroom” or whatever. But the truth of it is that I’ve always been alone on holidays like this. At any family gathering, there’s always the group of men, who want to eat their weight in turkey and drink a bunch of beer and watch football and pass out, and then there’s the group of women, who want to talk shit about all of the members of the extended family that aren’t there and exchange their voodoo/gossip, and there’s the group of kids running around like tasmanian devils. That always left me in the middle with nothing to do, and I learned from an early age that the best way to deal with family dinners was to bring a book. (This was long before the days of the GameBoy or portable DVD player.) So even though I had a dozen people around, I was essentially alone. Actually, I was alone but wanted to really be alone, but instead I was in a basement sitting at a card table or whatever, reading my Fiend Folio or something, wishing I could be away from the people passed out or catting out upstairs, except my parents usually drove. And okay, my maternal grandmother was an excellent cook, and I had enough cousins on my mom’s side that I could find someone to hang out with. But we didn’t go to Chicago that much, so Thanksgiving and many Christmases were spent at my stepdad’s folks’ house. And his mom could not cook. Imagine the mom from Better Off Dead and her grotesque cooking, and that was it. So sitting at home, cooking my own food that I chose, changing the channels on my own TV, and enjoying myself, that’s cool. What I did today made for a good day.

Okay, this Seinfeld thing is on TV, so I am going to watch that.

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The liberation of nothing

I did nothing this weekend. NOTHING. It was both depressing and liberating. I really do enjoy being in my apartment when it starts to get cold out, when it’s chilly outside and the thoughts about holidays and winter first fill my head, and long before I realize how shitty the insulation and heating in this place really is, when the January wind pounds through the windows at eighty miles an hour. But for a short period, there’s that warm feeling of being inside with a crisp and cozy amount of heat in the place, and the feeling of cold outside, and a good video to watch and maybe a nice drink and something to eat and an afternoon on the couch thinking good thoughts. I don’t know, I think growing up with a woodburning stove changed my internal wiring somehow. My parents got this giant cast-iron Fischer stove and had an installer build a little “stage” for it in the family room, along with a wall of bricks and a big chimney. And since I was a kid, there’s some kind of social aspect to being warm. You come home to a cold house, and someone starts the fire, and it heats up the whole room, the whole house, and that feeling, that dry heat in the air while you sit on the couch with everyone else, watching TV and waiting for supper, it somehow sticks with you. It seems so much more human, or communal, than just pressing a button or setting a thermostat. And I guess now, even when the impersonal steam heat kicks through the radiators, it reminds me of that comfort.

So yeah, no going out this weekend. I’m also taking it easy on the wallet and preparing for another round with the dentist tomorrow. This will be for another post insertion, another piece of titanium that will be with me forever, or until I do a Bruce Willis-12 Monkeys and tear it out so the men from the future can’t track me anymore.

Not much else. I think I’m going to read some Lester Bangs before bed.

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The Wards nightmare

It seems that my most common recurring dream/nightmare has to do with me working at Wards, or rather not working there. There’s usually some part of the dream in which I am not working there and I’m probably on the schedule, but I haven’t quit or anything, and I’m too embarrassed to go back in and tell them I’m not working there anymore. There’s also usually some component in where they still owe me a paycheck or two, and I’m not sure whether or not I should go ask for it or if they will eventually mail it to me. There are a lot of other side plots and situations to the dream, but that’s the basic deal.

This is the part where some wise ass says “have you ever had that dream where you’re in college, and you find out you have a class you didn’t know about?” Let me tell you something: that really happened to me, on a pretty regular basis. Okay, maybe it didn’t happen every semester, but I skipped a lot of class in college (because I was an idiot) and there were many times I had like a Calculus 5 class that I had only gone to the first class and I was somehow planning to go in and take the midterm cold and somehow get enough points for a half a semester of missed quizzes and homework. I have that dream regularly, to the point where I wake up and I have to verbally tell myself over and over “I’m not in school anymore. I graduated. I’m not in school. Go back to bed.”

Anyway, I always wondered if there were other people out there that worked at Wards on the web, like an alumni association. I mean, this place was around for a hundred years, with a lot of people that worked there for their entire lives, starting out in the shoe department and working up to be store managers, in charge of hundreds of employees. Some stores were the only thing in their communities, the equivalent of Wal-Mart these days, except even bigger because there was no Target or Meijer or Best Buy to go against them. I wish I could remember or write down a tenth of the stories I heard with people as I watched the clock and dealt with customers on the watch at that store. Everyone that worked there had a story, from the giant pro wrestler-looking receiving manager who still lived with his mom to the ex-schoolteacher who lived in the UK for ten years in the Air Force and now sold NAPA parts at the auto counter, to the janitor who seriously won like $2.6 million in the state lottery, yet loved working so much that he still kept his $5.15/hr job mopping up puke in the restrooms. (He did, however, buy a house on a golf course, a Lotus, and entire dispensers of those scratch-off lottery tickets from 7-Eleven, because he had a severe gambling habit and was convinced lightning would strike twice.)

So there’s never been much out there. But now, it seems someone has re-bought the Wards brand. I knew they were trying to sell everything but the fillings out of the employees’ teeth when they got down to the last days in 2001. GE credit bought them during their earlier chapter 11, and I’m sure they counted on salvaging out every sign and shelf when they tore out the stores. Now it appears the domain name and trademarks went too, because wards.com is now an online store with the same logo and look, selling housewares and other junk to web surfers. I couldn’t find any more information about how it happened, who is running it, what kind of PR went out, etc etc. You’d think there would be a picture of the president or a letter from the CEO or some sort of news item that said “we’re back!”, but I can’t find anything. It appears to be some kind of shithole, cookiecutter business-in-a-box that was incorporated by a paralegal in a strip mall and run out of someone’s basement. Too bad, because part of me would almost be interested in seeing Wards come back. I didn’t drink all of the Kool-Aid they fed us back then, but I took a few sips, and I really did believe in the place, as much as a kid in high school could.

What’s funny is that this is the second time this has happened to me. My first job out of college, spry.com, is now running as a pseudo-bizarro phantom business, this time an ISP. I don’t know if it has any relation to the original company – maybe someone bought their network infrastructure and name and tried to run with it – but it also has a fake-ass web site that doesn’t list who works there or what their deal is. I care less about Spry, but it was still an interesting place to be for a year.

Not much else is going on here. I am barely scraping at the next book, maybe writing 40 words a day, just trying to write down ideas and not much else. I have lots of scraps and pieces, and the eventual goal will be to melt all of that down into a real book, but the theme isn’t there at all. The pieces, though, are great. I haven’t named it yet, but it goes through title changes weekly like a bad heavy metal band. It was Zombie Fever!, then Toast Fucker, then Anal Sushi, and there were a few others.

OK, I fell asleep this afternoon, so it should be a long night.