The Wrath of Kon

I take a lot of Kava to sleep. I’m back into the bad habit of coming home from work, falling asleep for two hours, and then staying up until 3 in the morning. It’s probably because I drink a 12-pack of Coke a day, but there are a lot of other factors. I used to take Nyquil, or Budweiser, or sominex to get to bed. I even got a script for Ativan recently, but all of that stuff makes my brain do weird things. I wake up hung over, and sleep in a blackened state of confusion. But Kava seems to work great, and slowly makes me more tired until I don’t realize it and slip into unconsciousness.

The flipside is that Kava gives me really fucked up dreams, the kind of dreams that you can’t even explain to people without laughing. They aren’t always funny, but they’re extremely nonsensical. Last night, I had a dream I was living in some underground bunker that looked like part of Quake II, with this family of other people. There was a huge pit, like a well, that had some kind of radioactive device in it. It would periodically leak or explode, letting loose this giant glow of energy. When this happened, you had to look away, and bury your face in the ground. Then, you would travel time. Once it happened to me, and I could feel the hair on my head falling out, my muscles atrophying. I sneaked a peek at the ground and saw dirt eroding at a rapid rate, like the movie The Time Machine. When it ended and I emerged, I looked like Tom Petty and I was a latin professor with twin baby boys that talked in Polish. The next thing I knew, I was in Canada, driving an RV with a boat on a trailer. I was visiting my friend Derik from grade school, and even though the RV was unwieldy, I whipped it through the streets of Vancouver or Toronto or whereever we were. You weren’t supposed to drive the trailer faster than 50MPH but I pushed it past 120, until the wheel bearings started smoking.

What does all of that mean?

My nephew looks exactly like me – I mean, when I was two. If I ever have kids (that can be pinned on me) I’m going to tell them that Ho Chi Mihn is a fictional character, like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Spiro Agnew. I think the worst part of having a child would be instilling a set of values in them, especially since everyone overlooks this step and turns to Jesus.

Okay, maybe I can try to sleep now.

It’s cold as hell for an April day today, and I’ve got that Yes song “Leave It” stuck in my head. One down, one to go, another town and one more show…

I’m really pissed at my ISP today. They recently switched from sendmail to qmail without really telling anyone there would be any changes, sort of assuming that all of their customers are just idiots who read their mail in IE or something. After the change, all hell broke loose and pretty much everything mail-related in my account ceased to function. See, sendmail uses a spool directory, where your messages are concatenated one after another in one big file. Qmail uses a directory in your home directory, and it creates a file per message. It’s technically a better system, but after decades of the old system, damn near every program written for unix relies on the old way. That means that my mail program wouldn’t pull in new mail, I wasn’t getting notification messages when I got new mail, my account didn’t tell me if I had new mail when I logged in, I couldn’t quickly list the messages in my account, and so on. So last night, these fucking idiots converted all of my old saved mail folders to this new format, completely screwing me. The thing that pisses me off most is that these people profess to be unix-friendly and tech-saavy and all of this crap, and for the most part they have been, up until recently. Sigh.

Yes, I really am publishing Summer Rain. I don’t want to jinx it by posting all of the details, but I’m deep in the middle of editing it and trying to shake out all of the bugs. I hope to finish this by the end of May. Then, it goes off and in about 60 days, all of you will be cracking out your credit cards and going to amazon.com to check it out. I’m very excited about the process, and I’ve been writing more in the last few weeks than I have all year. I stumbled through some pretty pathetic writer’s block for the last few months, so it’s nice to cruise through edits and work on things. I thought Summer Rain was a dead project, completely unworkable. But it’s been fun to work on it lately, and I guess that’s all that ultimately matters.

Rumored to Exist is still alive, albeit still up on blocks and awaiting more of my attention. I can’t wait to finish Summer Rain and get back to work on it. It’s been hard to write new stuff for Rumored, but the stuff that is there will blow your mind. It’s completely 110% balls-out, pure gonzo insane. I wanted to finish it by the end of the year – I might, but it might take longer. We’ll see.

And I’m thinking that between the two, I might try to publish all of the archives from this journal, with some editing and maybe an odd short story or two thrown in there. Would anyone actually be interested in something like that?

Goodbye goodbye goodbye bad
Hello Hello heaven.

So I was walking through the rain today in Times Square, going to the American Express office at 47th and Avenue of the Americas to give them $1200 before they sent in the dogs on me, and I thought about everything that’s happened to me in the last eight months since I last did this journal. I got a job, I had a minor breakdown and started therapy again, I moved to Astoria, and just last weekend, I split up with Marie. Now I’m alone in a big city, buried in work, and trying to edit my first book for publication this summer. What better time than to start an online journal, right?

Where to start… okay, there’s the job. I’m working as a technical writer for a large ISP, one of the largest. I guess they’ll remain nameless, just to keep a solid line between work and play. It’s the same kind of stuff I did in Seattle, but I have a little more power, a little more money, and a lot more fun. I’m glad I have a job. It’s solved some of the problems from last summer, of not knowing what to do and having no interaction with anybody. Right now, this job’s one of the only reasons I’m still in New York. And stability can be a good thing.

The book – Summer Rain. It’s my big epic about the summer of 1992 in Bloomington, and it’s going to be published somewhere around the end of the summer. I’m in a frenzy of editing and corrections, which should probably finish by the end of May. It’s going to really be published, and I hope all of you go to Amazon or Borders or whatever and buy a copy. I don’t ask for many favors…

I moved to Astoria in December. I’ve got a cozy one-bedroom with a new TV, a new leather couch, a new DVD player, a new bed, my bookshelves filled with books, and a 384/128Kbps DSL connection to the outside world. I’m a half-hour on the N train from work and central Manhattan, and the neighborhood here isn’t too bad. I still miss my apartment in Seattle, but I’m starting to settle into this place.

I guess that’s it for now. I need to get back to work on the book…

I think I’m starting to calm down after my week of everything gone wrong. I planned on getting a bunch of writing done, but spent the day doing laundry and leafing through a generic history of philosophy book, a sort of cliff notes-esque thing that wasn’t that detailed, but contained such a wide overview that I got pretty lost in it, in the good way. And I continue to work on a contract job that will probably be done by the 20th or so. But no real work on Rumored, just a few dozen words.

I guess I’m still lost; I thought about that a bit more today. A catalog for the New School came in the mail and I wondered if $400-something on a night class in fiction would be a waste of money or not. The timing is bad right now – a fall class would really butcher my time with Rumored, and this week has demonstrated that I’d really need to work to fit anything else in my schedule. Even though I spent most of my day doing nothing, that nothing provides me with the lack of structure I need for the bursts of work that eventually add up to great things. It’s something that’s impossible to fathom when you’ve spent years doing things according to tightly planned schedules. I can’t force myself to write x pages a day, especially if I want them to be creative and unique. All I can do is provide myself with a comfortable situation – plenty of food, plenty of sleep, something good in the CD player, and the words will eventually come.

I was reading about Sartre and his book Nausea today. The main character, during a bunch of research, withdraws and gains the ability to recognize that things and events in life are not categorizable, and contain no intrinsic meaning. What he discovers is that cultural and social efforts enforce or impose an order or meaning onto things. When those systems are ignored, the bare existence of things, or their facticity, is revealed. And once you see that, you realize that any meaning of events is supplied by your own free will, and you are what you choose to be.

It sounds simple, but Sartre also goes into the extreme difficulty of comprehending the extreme freedom and the extreme responsibility that comes with this realization. The freedom is in a sense a trap, because one you experience it, there’s no way you can go back the the straight-man, 9 to 5 world and expect to deal with it on any level. Also well-said by Bon Scott in the first line of Highway to Hell: “It ain’t easy living free.”

What the hell does this mean? I don’t know, I need to sit down and read Nausea when I have some time. But I do know the difficulty of dealing with this much freedom. A lot of options also means a lot of confusion. Sometimes I wish writing books was more like a 9 to 5 job at a corporation, where I went in and wrote fucked up stuff every day, and knew what was wanted from me. That’s not really true – I’ve already mentioned that I can’t write in those conditions, and I don’t think I would want to. But the problems with comprehending this whole thing that Sartre talked about is something that comes and goes for me. Sometimes, I’ll be walking down Broadway and I’ll think that none of this makes sense, the way people are controlled like slaves by religion and corporations. I don’t know why anyone would do something like run a fruit stand for their whole life when they could write or pick up a guitar or learn HTML or SOMETHING. It sounds elitist, but… I don’t know, maybe I’ll explain it all later someday.

With that, I should try to get some sleep…

Hello from Virginia. I’m at Larry’s, waiting for him to take a shower so we can go eat. It’s been a cool trip so far, and I’ll need to write up the whole thing at some later point.

On Friday, I spent all day at Air and Space, checking out the planes. They have the best collection in the world: The Wright Brothers’ first plane, Apollo 11, a lunar lander, the X1, the Spirit of St Louis, and tons others. A slew of space stuff too, like a Skylab backup that you can walk through, capsules from all of the three early programs, Russian stuff, space suits, moon rocks, and a lot more. I spent most of the day there, looking at all of this stuff in awe, and shooting lots of film. Later, I went to the American history part of the Smithsonian and saw more stuff, including Old Glory and the restoration of the Star Spangled Banner.

Saturday was a huge roadtrip in Larry’s van. I’d need to look at a map to describe it, but it involved driving to West Virginia, and then making a huge circle through Virginia and eventually going to Richmond to drink with the college students. We also went to VMI, Washington and Lee, and saw a barn that George Washington allegedly stayed in. A dude was dressed in Washington garb as part of some local publicity stunt or something, and I thought about giving him a bunch of shit (Do you grow pot? Are those teeth wood? Are you a freemason?) but I didn’t.

OK Larry is done and it’s time to eat. More later.

I’m passively getting ready for my short trip, which begins tomorrow. I usually have these things more planned out than an Apollo space mission, but this time I’m probably going to end up throwing everything in a gym bag before I leave. I haven’t done any research on museums or anything else, so I’ll probably buy a map at the bus station and go from there.

It’s been very unproductive lately. I think I did about a line of writing for Rumored today, and that’s it. I spent the whole day digging through old mail messages, wishing I had more complete archives for the time I was in Bloomington. I kept mail messages from some people, but I also botched it up and accidentally deleted all of my mail from an ex-girlfriend, a very vital point in my history. I found out about the mistake when I was still in Bloomington, but it was far too late to get a backup from tape. I wish I had kept more outgoing mail, and more stuff from 1992 and 1993. But I didn’t. It’s too nostalgic to read the stuff I do have anyway.

The whole thing relates to this weird part of my disorder or makeup or whatever where I look back at the past a lot. It’s not like I used to play football and date cheerleaders and I want it to be the summer of 69 again. It’s a much more complicated nostalgia-related depression, where I think of myself in a different era. I wrote Summer Rain because of my feelings for myself in 1992, how much different I was and how I have so many vivid thoughts of those times. I can still see myself in the fall of 1992 like it was yesterday, like I’m really on some kind of vacation and I’ll return there again and pick up at some point on my old timeline. It’s like some kind of confusing time travel book, which is fitting because I’ve already started to write a confusing time travel book just so I can figure this stuff out.

So I dug through old mail. And it reminded me of 1993, 1995, different people and things I should have done and things that I miss. I don’t know if my thoughts are normal, somehow exaggerated, or psychotic. I’m guessing it isn’t too abnormal, as I’m pretty much able to function in society. I mean, I’m not blowing up computer companies because they will create machines that will someday destroy the world. Just reading a lot of old email.

I’ve got to record a few MiniDiscs and pack up some camera gear before bed. I probably won’t update this while I’m gone, so look for a full report when I return.

I haven’t updated for a while, because the shit hit the fan right after my last update on Tuesday the 6th. Where do I start?

Okay, on Tuesday, I left the house to eat in an air-conditioned restaurant, ride the AC-equipped subway downtown, and sit in a frigid movie theater, watching movie after movie until I ran out of money. I got all ready, hiked to the subway station, and found chaos. The escalators were broken, and I couldn’t get to a train. I live at 181st, which is the highest point of Manhattan, which means the trains are far underground instead of just a flight of stairs from the street. So I couldn’t just climb down a bunch of stairs and get to the track level. Oh well, I hoped I would be able to walk to the 1 train instead of the A and still make it down south without problems.

I went to the corner cafe, a dive I regularly frequent. The night before, Marie and I spent some time basking in their air conditioning. The place isn’t clean or a four-star restaurant, but it’s a good place to catch a quick meal. I got there, and the AC was dead. So was the soda fountain, but they luckily had some canned drinks. I ate a quick grilled cheese that could’ve cooked itself in the afternoon heat, and headed out.

There are two 181st street subway stops for the A, a couple of blocks apart, so I walked to the other one. No dice there either – the elevator was out, and some old-timer was saying it was a power outage. I figured that a capacitor or a transformer blew from the heat, and the station would be out for a few hours. A biggie, but not insurmountable. I walked to the 1 station, which is a few blocks away, also on 181st. This station just got closed for construction, and on that day it was all fucked up with moving trucks and reels of cable and jackhammers and the precursor to much more major repairs. Although it was supposed to be open, it wasn’t that day. It looked like the same damn problem – a power outage. Fuck it, I thought, I’ll just walk south until I get to an open station.

That wasn’t the wisest idea in the world. It was almost noon, and above 100 degrees, with a rapidly climbing humidity. With my medication, I dehydrate easily, and within a few blocks, I felt like I was 18 miles into a marathon. Luckily, I found a vending machine and bought a drink, and kept at it. I walked from 181st to 168th, descended into the hotter than hell station, and after a few minutes, got a crisp, new A train that just started its day with us. It was about 40 degrees cooler inside, and my body must’ve lost a quart of water weight in sweat almost instantly.

I went to 14th and switched to the L train, to go to Union Square. There, I got tickets to the new Adam Sandler film (it was either that or Star Wars again) and then wandered Circuit City and Virgin a bit. It felt excellent to sit through the movie, even if it was just a mediocre comedy with a predicable script and a few sort of-funny lines. The movie wasn’t worth $10, but the AC was.

I thought about staying to see The Red Violin, but it was about 4:00 and I knew I’d have to fight rush hour traffic home. So I got in a train, stood the whole way back, and got to the house.

It was hotter than FUCK at home. Our AC wasn’t doing much anymore, and even taking a shower didn’t help. Then, we had a serious brown-out that cut out and reset all of the appliances except my computer. I took that as a sign and powered down everything non-essential. Then I waited. Minutes ticked away like hours, and I counted them, hoping they would eventually lead us to January and sub-zero temps. I didn’t know how I’d ever sleep without our window AC pushing cold air into the room. So I waited, kept the TV off because of the brownouts, and hoped for the best. That didn’t happen.

At about 10:00, I was in the kitchen with the lights off, enjoying a very faint breeze that would come through the window every 10 minutes or so. It wasn’t enough to keep me cool, but it was better than nothing. As I looked out the window over Washington Heights, I saw the lights of the apartments, the projects, the streets and stores. And then I saw all of them go out in one fell swoop. The entire neighborhood screamed like something out of a jet crash. EVERYTHING went black – stores, hospitals, streetlights, everything as far as I could see. Actually, I saw a few things on the horizon, probably buildings way into the Bronx, but it looked like all of Manhattan had lost power at once.

We were fucked. We tried the tap water, and it was just spurting. We had maybe 3 liters of water in the fridge, and our fridge had also been on the blink. Marie found some candles, and got on her walkman to listen to the radio for any news. The apartment, now without any fans, quickly heated up well beyond the 100 degrees on the street six floors below, while we tried to figure out what the hell to do. We knew the power wasn’t going to click back on in ten minutes, and it would mean suffering through the night. Marie got a news broadcast that said ConEdison wouldn’t get things back online until the next evening.

We both sat in the living room, Marie on the floor and me on the couch, looking outside and trying not to move. We were both horribly scared for the cats – they were both terribly overheated, and even panting because of the temperature. Seeing a cat pant is a rare occurence, and looks terribly demonic. We hoped that the temp would drop a few degrees now that it was after nightfall, and that the four of us would make it until the morning.

I had a secret weapon of sorts: I didn’t take my medication all day. I forgot it in the morning, and I decided not to take it that night. I knew that I could go for 4 or 5 days without any serious problems, and the lack of lithium would help me survive the heat. And it did – I felt less of a desire to drink water, and the heat didn’t completely wipe me out. But it had me fucked – I was sweating buckets, and couldn’t do anything except struggle through it.

I watched outside for a while, looking at the bizarre landscape. There’s always noise in New York City, but then it was absolutely quiet. The only lights were the police riot wagons making slow, methodical sweeps of each block. Oh, and choppers were circling with their spotlights. It pissed me off that the police were more concerned about their anti-looting position than they were about actually helping people, handing out water and ice, or whatever. If anyone ever tells you that cops are there to serve and protect, they are leaving out part of the proverb – cops are there to serve and protect themselves.

I tried to sleep, but it was one of those nights where you look at your watch every hour. I sweated until I was covered in liquid, and I also had problems with the too-short futon couch. I guess I’ve had to sleep through worse, but this one was in the top ten. I think I sneaked in 3 or 4 hours, but I was up by seven or so when Marie got up. She was supposed to stay home to bitch at a refrigerator repair guy that was coming over, but with no power, that wasn’t going to happen. She went in to work, and I woke up and tried to think of a plan.

The power was down from 150th or so on up to the northern tip of Manhattan, which is 220th. The subways were running, but not in the blackout area. According to the news, MTA was running a bunch of shuttle busses to get people to their stops. So I decided to get the hell out again, and go to Jersey City for the day. The plumbing was back, so I got a cold shower, brushed my teeth, and felt somewhat better. I walked down to 168th street again, and it actually felt almost okay on the street. There was a little breeze, and the temp was closer to 90, so I made it without getting completely totalled. The bus shuttle situation was a mess, but I managed to get downtown and on a PATH train to Jersey without trouble.

The trip to Jersey City only takes a few minutes, but it felt like going through time to me. New York is all about big buildings and tiny stores and a totally different paradigm than what I got used to in the Midwest. But the Newport mall is more like what I’m used to: grassy strips along institutional boulevards, lots of parking, lots of standalone buildings in the middle of asphalt seas, and a few hundred stores in one giant building, with a food court and concourses and everything else that reminds me of Alderwood Mall in Lynnwood, Washington.

And I was three doses behind on my medicine. This wasn’t enough to throw me into a full-blown psychotic attack, but it meant any edge on my depression was gone, and I really felt like sitting around and listening to Pink Floyd. I’ve been taking this shit for almost ten years, and for the most part, I have no complaints. But this was the first time since 1990 that I’ve missed more than two doses, and I could feel the difference. I was dealing with a lack of sleep, lack of food (that grilled cheese was the last thing I ate in 24 hours) plus the lack of medicine, so it could’ve been that, too. But nostalgia hit me like a runaway train, and everything reminded me of some other period. The walk through the mall concourse reminded me of fall 88, summer 93, seattle 98, portland 97, and so on. The mall vaguely reminded me of this place in Portland that I used to visit with Karena, but all of the stores reminded me of Alderwood in Seattle, And the whole PATH station smelled like my mom’s old car that I drove in the summer of 93, some kind of powder-fresh air deodorizer. The whole thing freaked the fuck out of me, even more than those things usually do, and it simultaneously got me thinking of like a dozen people that I used to love and would never see again, enough to really make it difficult to go in a Spencer’s and make fun of all of the Wild Wild West bullshit.

So I went to Burger King, for an uneventful solo meal and more recurring thoughts about my life. I decided it would be good for me to see the South Park movie again, so I bought a ticket, went in early, and listened to my MiniDisc while the stupid commercials played before the show. They played, and played, and played… and played. For 45 minutes, me and about 10 other people waited for the fucking movie to start. Finally, someone showed up with a handful of vouchers and announced that the projectionist didn’t make it. Great. At least I got a free pass to another movie, and I could use it at any Loew’s or Sony.

I tried to find something else to do, but the depression trip was laying on strong, and I didn’t know what the hell to do about it. I made a lap through the concourse, and then headed back to New York, vowing to take the lithium the second I got there. I did, and I made a couple of phone calls, since that still worked. Right after 5:00PM, all of the lights and fans and everything else bounced into action, and the entire neighborhood cheered like Sammy Sosa got traded to the Yankees or something. Everything was normal.

Actually, it wasn’t – I was so far off base with medicine, food, and sleep that it took me days to get straight. I’m still a little off, but I am doing a lot better. Today’s the first day I wrote on Rumored in I don’t know how long, though, so there’s a lot of missed time in there. The fridge got fixed, the cats are back to normal, and it’s so cool out tonight that I think I’m going to have to dig out a blanket before I go to bed. So how’s that for a happy ending?

I’m going to DC on Thursday, BTW – I got my tickets and I’m ready to roll. It’s a 4-hour bus ride, and then I’ll be at Larry’s, going to 7-Eleven and driving around aimlessly. I still need to do some quick research and figure out what I’ll be doing, but I will be gone until the 20th. Maybe I’ll update from there, he has a computer. Who knows.

For now, I need to get some shit done and then get some sleep…

Ignore all of my previous statements about how hot it is here – today it is relentlessly motherfucking hot. And it has been for days. Yesterday was a new record high, something like 103 and the humidity was at 99% all day. It didn’t let up much after the sun went down, either. I took 6 or 7 showers yesterday, and even with the air conditioner in our bedroom, it felt very uncomfortable indoors. The rest of the apartment felt like when you turn the oven on all the way for a few hours and it turns your kitchen into a kiln. Today isn’t supposed to be any better – I think on wednesday, the temps will drop to the low 80s, but they will go back up by the weekend. I’m thinking of stealing a car and driving as far north as possible, until I get to some Canadian glacier I can lay on for a while.

Really, I am planning a trip to DC in two weeks. My old friend Larry Falli is working an internship at the EPA (he is in law school, which is slightly ironic) and I’m trying to figure out the bus situation to get down there for a 4-day weekend. I’ve got the time and the money, so I figure I’ll greyhound down there, spend a day wandering around while he’s at work. There are still a ton of details to work out, but I’m excited to check out a new city and hang out with Larry again.

It’s way too hot to be here – I think I’m going to go to the movies or something.