The Wrath of Kon

Nothing is going on. I am at a bad stuck point with this book because it is ultimately very depressing to write about your life right after high school. I feel that every single thing I did in that era was hopelessly wrong. Not in a moralistic sense, but in a very awkward way. If I could redo it all, there are so many things I’d do: I’d run ten miles a day, work two jobs, save every penny, take every summer class I could, and definitely handle things different dating-wise. But it’s stupid to look back at that shit and think about changing it. And I’ve done it so much, that the topic is worn out for me. And I didn’t really think about any of this when I went into this book. I am very tired about writing about this, and it’s very frustrating. It feels like I wrote “I will not think about Indiana anymore” 500 times on a chalkboard and someone asked me to do it a 501st time.

I think part of the problem is that there is not a catalyst for this like there was with Summer Rain. With SR, there were two “true loves”, two different people that I was obsessed with way back in 1992, very different people with very different reasons behind them. And a lot of that was still left over, and that really kicked me in the ass and made me want to write that book. With this book, the love interest that I am kicking around is really my first love. And it’s someone that royally fucked me over a long time ago, so long ago that it isn’t even worth thinking about. I obsessed over her and I felt pain for about half of a semester. Then I moved on. And now, I don’t even remember what it was like to be with her, to fall in love with her. It was a hundred thousand years ago to me, and so many things have happened since. So it’s hard to scrape up the energy to keep moving with this, which is frustrating because I really need something to keep going with.

I’ve been in a sort of social black hole lately. A lot of other people are busy with a lot of other things and I come out of this project to look around and see that everyone else is gone. I’ve had a few strange weekends where I’ve had nothing to do, and the PlayStation takes too much energy, and you can only watch Full Metal Jacket so many times on repeat before you think someone else should be going on besides your ass and the couch. It’s strange to think that I think there is nothing to do in New York, but I realize that it’s just me, not the city. I could be anywhere and be bored. All I really want is another book. Actually, part of me wants another relationship, but I don’t think I’d be able to manage one, let alone find one. What I really want is another book, like Captain Willard wants another mission at the beginning of Apocalypse Now. And hopefully, I’ll get it soon.

I want another book like Rumored. I feel some strange pain inside, some kind of hatred toward everything, everyone. I feel like this pain has been created by everything around me. And I feel like I’ve conditioned myself to ignore all pain. I’m not talking about the kind of pain where you grab the stapler off of your desk and empty a whole clip of metal into your forearm. I mean the kind that you tune out to ignore everything, everyone around you, to get up at the same time every day, sit at a desk, take a train home, eat number 9 with fried rice and a Coke every day from the same shitty Chinese restaurant, and never really think about any of it. And I think that Rumored was a good first step in taking all of that and putting it into prefabricated pieces on a page, combining the rage with the humor of knowing that nothing is taboo and everything is a joke. And I guess the next step is to keep going, and to make this more real and more of a book and something that more people will pick up like a virus and either love or hate, but at least experience.

I think. Or maybe I’m full of shit.

I think I have another three weeks until vacation, so maybe I will think of a good idea before then. Not much else to report here.

Ah, allergy season. I was wondering why I suddenly couldn’t breathe and my eyes were on fire. I skipped work yesterday and started the Benadryl/Claritin rollercoaster, which by mid-afternoon today had me to the point where I could see through walls. I think it will rain tonight, so the weekend might be tolerable. It’s amazing and yet not that amazing that I had no allergies for years, and then when I moved to the city with the absolute worst air quality in the country, I’m back to wheezing and gasping.

Not a lot has been up. I’ve been working on this book, which is going okay. I’m above 10,000 words, so I guess that’s an offical hull-laying, or at least enough that I can really say I have started. No title yet, though. The book is similar to Summer Rain in many ways, but it takes place over the summer of 89, when the main character (and me – what a coincidence) graduate high school and get ready to leave for college. It’s supposedly going to be heavily themed in heavy metal, or at least that will be a big component of it, the metal culture or lack thereof in a shithole town in Indiana at the end of the 80s. There’s also a lot of angst over going to high school with a bunch of dumb football jocks that will be in there, the whole coming-of-age thing, etc. The fact/fiction ratio will be more fiction than Summer Rain, but still somewhat based on my reality. It won’t be a true prequel to Summer Rain, because I have to change a few things to get stuff to work. It will hopefully be shorter, and the writing a bit lighter, but it won’t be anything like Rumored. That’s about all I can tell you right now.

Someone sent me one of those dumb things where you take the year you were born, multiply by 9, add the number of times a week you eat out, etc etc and then divide by 23 or whatever and it says how old you are. I couldn’t get it to work, and it was just tonight that I realized I FORGOT HOW OLD I WAS.

Okay, gotta start writing…

About an hour ago, I was watching TV – I forget what, probably flipping through the channels, and contemplating going to Taco Bell for dinner. I noticed that my lights in the living room were flickering a bit, and I was sort of pissed that my fluorescent-LED replacement things that were supposed to last for ten million hours were crapping out after less than a year. All of a sudden, there was a fucking EXPLOSION! It was far louder than anything I’ve ever heard (and I’ve heard some impressive stuff) and it sounded like it was within a block of my place. I checked the phones and the ethernet to see if it was anything that would affect that, and then I went into that weird sort of adrenaline-fueled paranoia where you memorize the location of everything in the room in case the five stories above you collapse into the basement and you need to find a quick exit. I grabbed my coat and went outside, thinking it would be a fucking scud missile or car bomb, although it sounded far too “compressed” and not as omnidirectional as an exploding car.

By the time I went outside (I waited a second – read too many stories about IRA secondary bombing) and saw some fire trucks trying to put out a couple of cars that were basically twenty foot pyres of flame. There was also smouldering smoke coming out of every ConEd manhole within a block. I got enough half-truths from the pigs that were fencing off the neighborhood; I guess there was a fire and explosion of a switch or transformer underground, hence the flickering lights, and an exploding manhole set off the cars. So I went to Burger King, came back, and ate. A few minutes, there was a second explosion, but not as loud. And I think I heard a third, but it was much smaller, maybe a car gas tank or something. The lights are still flickering, and I’m worried that they will go out. (Shit – fourth explosion!) But the computer and ethernet are working fine. I hope they get the fire underway or the dropping temps help, and I hope ConEd has some redundant systems they can get online.

—

Nothing interesting is going on in life. I am really trying to think of another writing project, but I can’t find a spare moment or two a day to do any writing. And that’s not because of anything interesting going on. I basically go to work, come home, eat a couple of meals in there, and add some TV or the PlayStation, and that’s about it. I’ve been fighting a cold, which also makes it hard to get out of a slump. But I have managed some updates to the glossary in the last week or so. And I’m still planning for Hawaii, which is in five? weeks.

Speaking of just like yesterday, it’s been four years since I left Seattle. (Actually, the four-year mark is on Monday.) I’ve been thinking about Seattle a lot, even in my dreams, which is part of my depression lately. I have these dreams where I go back and somehow my apartment was still held for me, and a bunch of stuff of mine is in storage, stuff that I thought I lost years ago. The apartment is always different in the weird, surreal way that dreams distort reality, but it still has so many details that remind me so much of 600 7th Ave #520. This morning I had the dream, and when I woke up, a cool, clean breeze drifted through a window. For a moment, it felt like I was back, like my big window looking out over Harborview was cracked open, and I could wake up, run downstairs, and jump in the Escort for a quick run up I-5 and to the nearby Denny’s, or over the 520 to some record shopping in Bellvue. It’s always weird what I miss and what I look back on over time, but right now it’s really kicking me in the ass because I don’t feel like the present is offering that much. Of course, ten years from now, I could be anywhere in the world, wishing I was back in Astoria the night the manholes exploded.

Now I’m off to play some Playstation for a while.

It was almost seventy degrees outside today. Since I am going to Hawaii in May and it seems like everything will be a two-mile walk, I have been trying to walk a bit more, so I put on the iPod and went out for a while today. I crossed through an area north of my house, north of the highway that consists of a lot of warehouses, small homes covered in barbed wire, and lots of half-disassembled and scavanged Crown Vic taxicabs on blocks. It’s all concrete, not much in the way of life, just a set of twisted railroad tracks on pylons and steel a few dozen feet in the air, snaking through the buildings a hundred years after they were put there, as an afterthought. I watched a trio of Conrail blue locomotives pushing steel across the horizon, and the random shuffle of the iPod (which I sometimes think is not that random, based on the songs it sometimes throws at me), and it hit me with a Peter Gabriel song – Secret World – from a ten-year-old album that made me think of ten years old. Back in 1993, when I used to take the same kind of walk once or twice a day, listening to the walkman, I’d walk underneath the trestles at 15th Street in Bloomington, and I’d sometimes look up at an engine assembling together boxcars into a freight train as I hustled toward class, toward work. And now here it was, ten years later, worlds away, watching trains as a killed an afternoon a step at a time.

It’s all stupid but symbolic that I think of my life ten years back, the relationship I was starting in 1993 and how great it feels to be in love in the spring, to start something new and know it’s mutual. And that carried through the summer and into the fall, and then it was over. I should have forgotten about all of this years ago. I’ve been through enough other, longer relationships to think this should have been bumped out of the cache long ago. But it’s funny how a nice round number can make things come up again. And for the rest of the walk, things felt so insignificant, in the sense that I felt like nothing had happened in the last ten years, that I was back to walking nowhere with a walkman on my hip instead of doing anything productive with my life. And that sounds stupid, given everything that has happened in the last decade. But it’s weird how things can go full-circle on you like that.