I am fifty-three today.

53 is a weird number. It’s a prime number, so I can’t play the usual games like “I’m exactly twice as old as when I ____”. It’s not a nice round number age-wise, but now I’m old enough and this blog is old enough that I’m twice as old as when I wrote this entry, which is a bit weird to think about. But other than that, there’s no numerical relevance to 53. My locker in junior high was 153. My combination was 2-31-16. (Why do I remember this?)

Grasping at straws, this birthday is 35 years since I turned 18, I guess. It’s 40 years since my parents divorced, which means it’s 40 years since I got my first computer, the Mattel Aquarius. But as I start writing this, I can’t think of any other big even-numbered anniversaries or dates or anything else. It’s another year.

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I’m loath to write about this, but I guess in the interest of full transparency, I should. That little cold I got when I came back from Wisconsin? Turns out it was COVID-19. I’ve spent the last three weeks out of commission dealing with that. And although it was not as bad as it could have been, it was as bad as most people say it is.

It’s stupid to have an illness that is so politically divisive. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it, and end up in an argument about how it did or did not exist. For the most part, everyone was nice about it, and the only unsolicited medical advice I got was that I needed to take it easy and rest. And that was correct, because I was horribly tired, and sleeping twelve hours a day was not enough.

The worst part about COVID was that I had to spend about two weeks on an air mattress in my home office, staying isolated so S wouldn’t catch it. (She didn’t.) And sleeping on the floor of an 8x10 room for weeks is a good way to put the zap on yourself, especially when you’re already depressed about your station in life and what you did over the last year, and are looking up at another big milestone.

So that whole thing was no bueno. And I am supposed to be in Las Vegas right now with the usual crew, but I had to cancel that. Physically, I’m 90% better. I’ve been testing negative for a few days now, and the symptoms are mostly gone. Mentally… what am I doing?

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When I wrote this post for my last birthday, I basically said I wanted year 52 to be better than year 51, that I wanted to write more, do more, be more. Was it? I don’t know. I traveled a lot. I did another master’s degree. I published two zines. But I didn’t write anywhere near as much as I wanted. I was recently looking at the draft of Atmospheres 2 and I put a bunch of notes in it on the morning of my birthday last year, a laundry list of things I wanted to do, a punch list of what I needed to finish. I did almost zero on that. And it wasn’t because some other big project got in the way. I “un-quit” writing, but I haven’t gotten back into practice yet.

Year 52 was spent spinning my wheels on a lot of stuff, thinking about what I need to do, what I need to start, what I need to finish. Need is a bit of a dirty word, though. When I say I need to write a big book and I don’t write a big book, it just makes me feel bad or guilty. I should want to write a big book, then either do it, or do the prerequisite work or exploration or research. Ultimately this is all noise, because the era of fame and fortune from a book is about to end. I shouldn’t want to write a book because I need to keep a roof over my head or become a household name. I should want to write a book because I want to write a book.

I was emailing with my friend Michael about this need to create the other day, and I remembered a story from my childhood. I was maybe ten years old, playing with Lego, like I did for months at a time. And I must have seen the M.C. Escher lithograph Relativity in an encyclopedia or something, the one with the orthagonal staircases going off in different directions and opposing gravity wells. And instead of assembling the stock fire station or moon base or whatever you do in the instructions that come with Lego kits, I started randomly building this structure with staircases going nowhere and little side pods of houses in the air and catwalks going across them and walls sticking up akimbo, leading to towers and ramparts and pieces of vehicles affixed to turrets or cupolas. It was this endless mess of structure going everywhere and nowhere, eventually taking over the entire kitchen table until I was required to remove it. But what I remember most was just the joy of growing the thing in every direction with no plan or idea or concept, spending hours just creating for the sake of creating, and it generated such a wild out-of-the-box product. I thought about this a lot when I wrote Rumored to Exist. And now, I feel like we have unlimited Legos and an unlimited kitchen table to build on, and it’s all a matter of snapping those first bricks onto a baseplate and going.

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So 52 was eh and 53 is no magical number. But I’m still here, and I’ve got a lot to do in the next year.

I released my first album yesterday. Yes, album. And it’s not spoken word or audio book or anything else. It’s a first attempt at creating music and releasing it into the world.

The album (more of an EP really) is titled Ø. It’s five songs of ambient drone music, and just a hair over 30 minutes long. It’s available only on Bandcamp here: https://jonkonrath.bandcamp.com/album/0

Why did I choose to make an album? I have played around with both Logic Pro and Ableton Live for a while now. I used Logic to record my old podcast, and I’ve mostly done utilitarian stuff like make backing tracks with drum sounds to practice bass and guitar. But I’ve also messed with synth and drones and wanted to pull that together into something cohesive.

Back in 2015 and 2016 when I was mostly playing bass, I started piecing together an ambient album. I listen to a lot of ambient music when I write, and I wanted my own soundtrack for my writing. I think I had maybe half the EP sitting on my hard drive for almost ten years, and it was time to get it done and out.

I will admit this album is very much a learning experience. It isn’t anything complicated or highly musical. It’s mostly simple drones with basic production, and I have no idea what I am doing, but I’m slowly figuring it out. The album was entirely written and recorded in Logic Pro, and uses no analog instruments or outboard gear. I think the only plugin I used that wasn’t included in Logic was the Valhalla Supermassive plugin, which if you are doing this kind of stuff, you really need. (And it’s free!) I used an Akai MPK mini controller when I started, then moved to an Arturia Keystep. But honestly, I do a lot of edits and even basic composition using the keyboard and mouse on the Mac.

Just for fun, I’ll run through each track and give you a couple of notes on each one:

1. Autumn Synthesis - This is silly and I don’t know how obvious this is, but the inspiration for the bright, lush drone intro for the album was actually the PlayStation 2 startup sound. This is the Alchemy synth and the Space Designer plugin at its finest. I also used the MIDI ChordTrigger plugin to build up the chords a bit.
2. Sublispheric Waves - Here’s a good example of what Supermassive does; the low-end Alchemy synth has a loooong delay through Supermassive which gives it the warped-out sound.
3. The Derision Bell - This has nothing to do with Pink Floyd; it’s just a snarky title. The low end of this was heavily influenced by the SleepResearch_Facility album Nostromo. The bell was subliminally influenced by the clocktower on the IU campus. The low end is the ES2 with some weird setup. The bell is a chopped up singing bowl sample in the sampler synth.
4. Enceladus Lost - Probably my favorite song to put together. Once again, heavily influenced by Nostromo. The synth is again Alchemy going through Space Designer. The low end is two different samples, both fed through Supermassive. The more discrete samples are from NASA mission transmissions. The lower lush drone is from Aerospace Audio’s AeroPads.
5. Inner Echoes - I know like every ambient musician messes with Tibetan singing bowls, but I think my direct influence was the David Ummmo track “Bowls” which is on Typewritten, Vol. 1, which was the soundtrack for the OmmWriter app, until it abruptly vanished from the face of the earth. The bowl is the Sampler synth, again. The low end is the Sculpture synth. The sample at the very end was something I recorded on my iPhone when walking at night in Mishawaka, Indiana in 2015. This is silly, but the decision to end the album with that sample was largely taken from the very end of the Queensrÿche album Empire.

So that’s my story. I don’t know how to sell music or “build a platform” as an artist or whatever else. My only next step is to keep playing and see what I can come up with.

Happy new year. I managed to catch a cold on the way back home, so I’m running at diminished capacity for the day. S has the same thing and she’s about a day ahead of me on the symptoms, which means this should be 75% clear by tomorrow.

The Milwaukee half of the trip was pretty lax. One of my in-laws had COVID and we did not get to see them, except for a quick present exchange at distance with masks on. That was unfortunate, and it meant we had to scramble to figure out how to move things and spend the whole week with the other parent.

We stayed at a pretty unique new hotel called the Kinn Guesthouse. It’s a boutique hotel downtown, just north of the Public Market and Third Ward, and is a unique setup. Instead of cramming a hundred or two rooms into the space, it has 31 rooms across five floors, each room with high ceilings and great layout. What was cool about the layout though is that each floor had a large common area, with a full kitchen and long island to eat at, a living room area with a large TV, and a meeting room with a board room table and such. My sister-in-law also evacuated to the hotel due to the quarantine situation, and it was nice to be able to sit and eat breakfast each morning. The setup felt like a large SoHo office of a tech marketing firm, almost.

Most of the trip was family stuff. I did get a good walk through the Third Ward one day, and everyone went to the Public Museum one afternoon. Otherwise, it was lots of food and conversation and whatnot. Shot 600-some photos, but I am so far behind on doing anything with pictures. I still haven’t posted albums from that June 2022 trip to Denver.

Oh, one unique thing about Milwaukee was this heavy fog during most of the trip. I didn’t have the big camera, so I tried to capture it a bit, but there was this thick soup on the first few days, like enough that you could barely see a block down a city street. It started on the drive from Indiana to Illinois and into Wisconsin and went on for days. I’d never seen Milwaukee like this, so it was unique to me.

Trip back wasn’t bad. We stopped in Denver, which was a weird flashback to my trip in 2022, which I almost called “last year” but now it’s “the year before last.” Gotta get used to that. We stopped in the Amex Centennial lounge, which was decent but way too crowded. Got home just in time for a torrential rainstorm, which almost reminded me of the Singapore trip, albeit 40 degrees cooler.

Today I did a quick spin down Highway 1 into Pacifica. There have been some crazy waves down there a few days ago, thirty or forty-foot waves crashing ashore and flooding out roads and houses. I got down there today with no real traffic problems, and the waves were at about the usual level, maybe slightly bigger. Lots of people had the same idea, though, so parking was a problem. I ended up going down to Montara Beach and climbing down to shore. I had the big camera with me, but I got there after noon, so the sun was the wrong way. The camera had the 16-35L lens, which is absolute butter for wide-open shots. It has such beautiful detail and color to it, especially on a beach. I had trouble getting down to the beach, though; there were a lot of washed-out and eroded trails, and I had to walk about a mile to find one that got down to the shore.

I love the Pacific ocean. I mean, I liked looking at the Atlantic from the south shore of Iceland, but I can get to the Pacific in fifteen minutes. The first time I touched the water of an ocean was at the Oregon coast, and I used to walk to Dockweiler Beach every day when I lived in Playa Del Rey. And of course Hawaii is amazing. But there’s something about the coast on Highway 1 south of Daly City that seems to mix together aspects of all of these places. There are rugged slopes and cliffs like Seaside, Oregon. There are the same little beach houses and surf shacks you see along the LA coast. But there’s like this rugged individualism to the beaches below Pacifica. You don’t see wall-to-wall families camping on the sand with umbrellas and chairs and grills. If you go during the week, you can sometimes see almost nobody there, except for the die-hards in neoprene suits, fighting the big waves. Places like Mavericks can be downright dangerous, and aside from the occasional fisherman, you might see nobody brave enough to take on the big surf. But I’d rather be walking on a beach like that than fighting my way through Coney Island-on-a-holiday crowds.

Anyway. I’ve rambled on for 800 words here and you may be wondering if I’m going to put some big turn in here at the end. And I honestly don’t know, but the new year/new me energy always makes me want to blog every day and write every day, and it usually times out by January 5th. But there are a lot of big questions I want to answer. One is if I can simply keep writing on here without running out of stories or things to say. I forget what the current tally is here, but it’s something like 1400 published entries and a million words, so the odds of having some original thought and saying, “Hey, I should write about my old Commodore 64” - well, I already did back in 2003. So I need to figure out a way to keep the words going. Or do I?

I don’t know who reads this or how people find it or if there are any on-ramps to blogs anymore. I think people just doom-scroll and sit and spin on their favorite low-attention-span app on their phone. (I know I do.) Is this something I could change? Is there some alternative to blogs that scratch the same itch as blogs? I don’t know. I know I don’t need to old-man-yells-at-cloud about how blogs were so much better in 1998 and these damn kids need to get off their phones. That war has already been lost. I guess what I need to figure out is how to spend my time and do what I want to do and what I can do. I want to keep writing about nothing and everything, and try to see what gels. So, here I am.

I did this last year, so I should keep with it and do another big year in review post. So, in 2023:

• Started the year by going to Las Vegas for my birthday with a bunch of the regular crew. This was a great trip, and good to finally see a bunch of people and have fun.
• Went to Iceland (and London) for a solo trip. Hauled a lot of film camera stuff. The trip started very dark, but by the end, it all came together, and this was probably the most impactful and memorable trip of the year.
• Went to India (and Dubai and Qatar) for the first time for work.
• Solo trip to Poland. Great food. Auschwitz was overwhelming but necessary.
• India (again).
• Went to Singapore on the way back from India, and it was incredible.
• Went to Reno for Thanksgiving. It’s been a while.
• Went to Indiana and Wisconsin for Christmas.
• The travel total was eight countries total, six new, and something like 100,000 miles total.
• I finished an MS in Management and Leadership at WGU. I forget how much I ended up writing for this course, but it was 12 papers and two tests. I wasn’t as into this as the MBA, but it’s done. I started on 4/1 and finished on 7/31, so there’s my summer.
• FitBit and my FitBit scale crapped out on me, but I have Apple Health data and I did work out every day of the year. Steps are 2,568,505 and miles are 1168. 2022 were 2,200,380 steps; 1,038.01 miles, so a bit of improvement there.
• Weight is not good at all. I definitely did not meet that goal of quitting Taco Bell. I’m pretty much back to my pre-WW numbers, so I need to get on that.
• Returned to office, so I’m in SF three days a week now.
• I “un-quit” writing, but got no appreciable work done on anything solid. I have two titled projects that are starting to congeal, but there were a lot of roadblocks in the way on this. I got about 35,000 words into both.
• I “re-published” two of my unpublished books, so there’s that.
• I published two zines. That was a lot of fun, and I’d like to do more.
• I published 25 entries here. That’s eight more than last year, but it’s still rookie numbers.
• I did a lot of writing in Day One. I also published one-off hardcover books of my entries from 2013-2018 which were somewhat depressing and reminded me I’ve been trying to write the same three books for ten years now and making no progress.
• Only took 6490 photos. I got an Sony a6400 for the times when I need a “real” camera but can’t carry the full DSLR. I’m a bit burned out on photography, so not sure how that’s going to play out in the future.
• I gave up on dead malls and tried to take a big step back from nostalgia stuff in general.
• I got pretty much no reading done except for books on management theory, which were not exactly pleasure reading.
• Way more interpersonal drama I can’t get into, which involved taking a months-long break from all social media, which pretty much nobody even noticed, which tells me a lot about the strength in my online friendships and value of social media in my life.

I think my resolutions this year are to try to get writing again (or figure out what writing even is); throw out or donate about half of what I own; stop buying dumb stuff I will never use; and continue trying to get healthy both mentally and physically. And write. And write.

I just spent five days in Indiana for the pre-Christmas Christmas with my side of the family. It’s a split trip, with this second week in Wisconsin. We flew into Chicago on Monday, then rented a car and drove out to South Bend for the first week.

It’s always weird to be back. The area around University Park Mall was all cornfields when I left in 1995, and now the Grape Road and Main Street strips that run parallel to the mall have exploded with big-box stores, strip malls, and chain restaurants. This time we stayed at at Hilton Home2 that’s roughly by where the old Night Lights all-ages club was in the 80s. (I think that club is a Hooters now, but I don’t remember where it was.) The hotel was built in 2017, on the site of what used to be some anonymous banquet restaurant. Everything around it is new to me. Day Road used to be an empty road through corn fields we’d drive at high speed on the way to the mall. Now it’s full of big boxes of stuff.

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So, various family stuff on Tue-Fri. Ate a family lunch at the Howard Park Public House on the river. I think that used to be a parking lot or empty field when I grew up, and now the entire riverfront has a walk and parks and an ice skating rink, and looks great. South Bend appears to be on the up and up, with all the new spots and the ever-growing Notre Dame. I always regret that I did not spend more time in South Bend as a kid and really learn what was there so I could appreciate what it has become.

It was good to see family, exchange presents, eat too much, and do the usual grip-and-grin photos lined up against a tree or wall. Not into what I look like in the photos, and the food is adding to that. I really need to lean into the “new year new me” coming up shortly, but that’s another discussion.

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I keep saying I am not into nostalgia anymore, or I’m trying to get away from it or whatever, and honestly I am trying. I intended to not even go to Elkhart for this trip. But S had to catch up on work and I had an empty afternoon with nothing to do, so I got in the car, put on my 1990 playlist, and went on the grand nostalgia misery tour.

First stop was IUSB. I pretty much lived in Northside hall in the 1990-1991 school year. I worked in the computer labs in the basement, my first real paying computer job, (occasionally) went to classes, and hung out with Ray endlessly. I had really strong memories of that place, but in a very isolated base way, probably because of my depression level and loneliness at the time. I commuted every day, which meant spending long periods by myself, rolling through the long strip of nothing between Elkhart and South Bend.

I wanted to take some pictures because the street view in the area is pretty lacking. But I wanted to find places that looked exactly like they did 33 years ago, which is tricky with all the additions that have happened. There’s a bridge from Northside across the river to a set of dorms, which is pretty odd compared to my commuter experience. The old education building has been torn down; at least two other big limestone buildings are where a soda bottling plant used to be; a chunk of the mega-parking lot is now a garage. And most of Northside, the main class building on the river, has been completely redone inside.

Walking around the halls, I did find a few things that haven’t changed. The outside structure of NS is the same limestone, the same courtyard with a walkway going across on the second floor. I ducked in a stairwell that I used to climb up and down multiple times a day to get from the sub-basement computer labs to the second-floor computer science classrooms, and they are absolutely identical inside. There’s a long cafeteria, more like a wide corridor with tables where me and Ray would hold court and pretend to study, and it’s still there but completely redecorated now. But I went around the corner to the vending machine alcove, and there’s a set of microwaves that look absolutely identical to 1990. I’m not sure if they’ve been cleaned since then. The area outside the auditorium looked very similar too, with 1961 wood trim and a set of benches where I’d sit and read between classes.

You can take the US-20 bypass to get between Elkhart and South Bend pretty quickly. I guess it’s not called the bypass anymore; it’s just US-20. But that didn’t exist in 1990, so I took Lincolnway east, which is now 933 aka “old 33” aka US-33 back then. That road isn’t quite a highway, and is mostly 35 MPH and winds through Mishawaka, then Osceola and into Elkhart. Like most of these drives, the bones of things are still there; there’s still a McDonalds and Taco Bell in the same place in Twin Branch, and the giant gas station at County Line Road. Signs change, the colors of houses sometimes change, and buildings vanish. But most of the drive is hauntingly familiar.

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I really did not want to do this. But I had to do this.

I went to Concord Mall. The former Concord Mall. They are just started with the big transformation, which is gutting the mall and turning it into seven light industrial spaces. They have painted the vintage brick exterior a generic drab white, and chopped off the signage, awnings, and entrances, sealing things up in anonymous industrial doors. The JC Penney parking lot was full of heavy machinery, pallets of construction material, and various debris and jetsam from the construction work. The exterior entrance of the old McCrory’s was a gaping hole in the brick exterior. The Hobby Lobby, aka my Wards store, remains untouched. The Martin’s grocery, Concord 1 and 2 theater, and USA Fitness buildings are all in various states of disassembly or abandonment.

The front entrance, by what was once Super Sounds and Enzo pizza, was open, but had “no mall walking” signs on it. An optometrist was still operational, so I could go in the entrance. The interior was bleak. A chain-length fence blocked off most of the concourse, with a floor-to-ceiling wall of black plastic running the length of the hallway. I could hear water falling behind the plastic, and assumed they were doing asbestos abatement. Storefronts were all covered in plywood, but I could still see glimpses of the original brick, which was a signature of the mall, and will probably either be chipped out, covered in drywall, or painted an industrial battleship gray soon.

I didn’t stay long. I snapped a few pictures and got out of there. I went to Hobby Lobby to use their restroom and buy nothing, and on the way out, I realized something: they had the same fixtures as Wards, the same shelves and brackets, and they hadn’t been repainted. I painted all of those fixtures in the summer of 1988. It took me like a month to wash every one of them with turpentine, prime them, then roll them with a special shade of Wards-brand oil-based enamel. Examining one of those shelves, now filled with Jesus-based Christmas crap made in China, sort of freaked me out. It was a strange legacy for me to have in this town.

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I did the rest of the tour: my old house in River Manor; the old runway that got turned into a subdivision in the 80s; my old abandoned Taco Bell where I worked my first job in 1987. I drove up main street and through downtown, and some of that strip is utter devastation. I don’t mean to keep shitting on Elkhart; I’ve done enough of that over the years, and it’s somewhat pointless now. But it’s just amazing how far it has fallen. I heard news while I was in town that the last movie theater closed, and the mall closed. The city is apparently buying the failed strip mall that was built when Pierre Moran got de-malled and doing… something with it, or not. There are long stretches of properties that have been abandoned for decades, or razed and left vacant. There are I think two major overpass/viaduct projects starting, and more businesses are closing and houses are being moved or demolished. The only growth industry in town seems to be Superfund sites.

Previously, these trips would give me heavy “you can never go back” vibes. Now, it’s just a big door closing. There’s nothing to be nostalgic about anymore. Everything is gone and done.

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There are many reasons I could never go back to Indiana. And the Indiana I knew is rapidly vanishing. But sometimes I get a strong and strange feeling of deja vu I can’t entirely integrate.

I was walking across a parking lot the other night, and it hit me. There was something about the crisp winter air, the clouds overhead, the look of the sky. I was in the parking lot of a casino, but when I looked out, I saw fields plowed down for winter, and the one row of tall trees a quarter-mile in the distance, the leaves fallen in December, just century-old skeletons reaching into the sky. There’s something about the sparseness, the feel of the atmosphere, that gives me a deep base memory, a sense memory that goes deep into my bones. It reminds me of the holiday breaks of childhood, the feeling of being 16 and driving a beat-up Camaro to a friend’s house on the back country roads. It’s a very entrenched time machine and these memories aren’t about a specific event or person. They’re just a sense, a feeling. Not happy or sad, just a quick flood of memory about everything and nothing.

When I was on the second floor of IUSB, looking out a window across the parking lot, I had an incredibly strong memory of looking out the same window in 1990. It was a Friday, during a shift at the computer lab, in mid-December. The air was the same crisp cold, the clouds heavy, and I could feel in the air that it was going to start snowing. I knew I would mess around on the VAX computer or two or three more hours, go to the McDonald’s on McKinley, and listen to the same Queensrÿche album I listened to every day that school year as I ate my #2 meal on the long drive home. I knew that classes were over, and I’d spend the next two weeks indoors, at my girlfriend’s parents’ house in Ottawa Hills, or at my parents’ house. It was not good or bad or anything else, but that moment is so entrenched in my head, and it’s amazing that it instantly came back 33 years later.

Anyway. It’s Christmas morning and I’m in Milwaukee for the week. I should write about that next, but I have a few thouand calories to eat first.