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general

the rubber block

I’m home today. I won’t go into too much detail about the dental procedure, except to say that I feel pretty odd today. They had to use a rubber block to prop open my mouth, so my jaw feels like I took a shot in a fight or something. My gums were also very torn up and wouldn’t stop bleeding, but it looks like tons of orange juice and a good night of sleep calmed that down.

The best part of the dentist was the nitrous. If I had that whole setup in my apartment, I’d write ten books a year. When I was first going under, I started thinking of this Ginsberg-esque poetry, stuff about apocalyptic priests of terror. Then I started thinking about Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, and I wanted to laugh so bad, but I had this block in my mouth. After all of my fun, they gave me pure oxygen, which sobered me up almost immediately. I wish my last dentist would’ve given me this stuff.

So today’s a day of those chocolate diet shakes, and maybe some applesauce. I think I can eat solids okay, I just can’t chew. And since it’s been about 24 hours since I ate anything, I feel a little weird. I’m sick of lying in bed though, so I want to try and get some writing done, or at least some shuffling.

I’ve been listening to Chick Corea’s Expressions CD, which is him playing solo piano of assorted standards. He does his own version of the Gershwin “Someone to Watch Over Me” that’s currently on repeat in the player. It really reminds of some era in my past, maybe the spring of 92, maybe the spring of 90. It’s a very eerie, familiar sound, but so is most of Chick’s piano. Anyway, it’s nice sitting home in the rain, recovering from a bad dental procedure kind of music.

It’s either time to write or get some applesauce.

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general

crown, zine, etc

In less than two hours, my dentist will be grinding down one of my molars to fit it with a crown. It sounds excruciating, but the tooth already got a root canal last year, so I shouldn’t be too bad.

I’m itching to work on another zine. I’m not sure it will be Air in the Paragraph Line, just because of the outlay of cash involved. If I had FrameMaker at home, and printing was free, I might put together another issue. But I still have reams of pages from the last issue that I haven’t folded or collated yet, which tells you the level of enthusiasm for the project.

It’s not that I don’t like AITPL – I like it very much, especially when it’s done. When I was creating that zine, I was aiming toward something similar to Frank Zappa’s work ethic – a lot of talent, no attitude, and none of the typical bullshit. You don’t need to review some punk band’s 7″ records to have a zine. I didn’t get the exposure I could have, but I got some very positive reviews and no complaints, and you can’t beat that.

Now I feel a need to work on a zine that’s so warped, that’s it’s hilarious. Something like Orgazmo meets Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Something that 90% of the population will be incredibly offended by, and the remaining 10% will worhip as a work of genius. I don’t know if this will be a paper zine or an ezine or an urban legend spread as chain mail or what.

The weird thing is this – I was talking to Michael about a zine he wrote for years ago, and one I read because I talked to one of the editors a lot. We both wished the zine was around like it used to be, and murmurred about ressurecting it from the dead for a project similar to the one I mentioned. But the editor I mentioned had dropped off the face of the earth about six months ago, so we figured the whole thing was a lost cause.

Then, last night, I had a weird dream that I was the editor for this zine. I was at a college campus, reading submissions and doing the layout for a small book-type binding. It was vivid, and I remembered the whole dream, even on the way to work. And once I got to work, the aforementioned editor that I hadn’t heard from in months wrote me some email, and we got caught up. Very strange.

I have a lot to do before the dentist, so that’s it for now. Bill Perry is in town, too, so we have some belated birthday celebrations to take care of…

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general

Ramones

I watched the Ramones video for their last concert (or one of the ten last concerts, rather) and it’s really fucking depressing. Okay, there’s a lot of funny stuff, like when they were on Sha Na Na, and tons of rare and/or old footage, but the whole video is like watching a divorce. Everyone they interview is like “The Ramones are the best band in the world and gave it 20 years of their all, but too bad they never got a big break or huge record sales like any of their flash-in-the-pan imitators.” And everyone in the band was like “we’ve run our course and don’t want to be doing this when we’re 50, but we have no idea what to do outside the band.” The performances were great, but the big finale was Eddie Vedder? Jesus christ. It is a very well put-together video though, and it has tons of stuff I’d never see otherwise. And Lemmy plays on a song, so it’s a must-have.

Last night while writing, I couldn’t think of the word “smoothie” while writing something about Orange Juliuses. I spent an hour trying to figure it out, and then started calling people. “It’s like a fruit drink… it’s like, fucking… it’s got ice. Made in a blender… freezie – slushie – slurpie – icee –” The whole piece wasn’t even that important, but I get locked into this missing-word freakout because I’m convinced that years of antidepressants have completely destroyed my mind.

I’m on day three of the AC/DC marathon. I wish they made a 600 minute MD, so I could record all of my AC/DC stuff into one giant mix MiniDisc, and antagonize everyone in my general vicinity. I think there are few people that could listen to six live versions of “The Jack” back to back without some form of restraint. I was going to post a bunch of AC/DC lyrics in my journal, but lyrics.ch is down.

I haven’t left the house all day (except for a quick trip to the post office and bank) and I haven’t eaten either, so I better shove off and go out into the grey shittiness and find a relatively kid-free McDonald’s or something. Later.

01/23/99 20:30

Guns N’ Roses is allegedly in the studio recording their next album, according to a rumor I heard. The only original members are Axl Rose and their touring keyboard player – everyone else is new. Their assorder resumes sounded reasonable, but there were no big names (i.e. Tommy Lee won’t be playing drums or anything, not that it was a rumor.) I don’t remember the producer, except it wasn’t Mike Clink and it wasn’t Moby. (Moby was really a possibility, I heard from a friend who knows him. It was just a scheduling problem.) Anyway, I expect that in a few months or a year or whatever, everyone will be listening to a new Guns N’ Roses album, and they’ll be headlining Lollapalooza, and the songs will be all over radios and MTV and millions of people will be saying “I’ve been a fan all along.” I hate this shit. I have been a closet Guns N’ Roses fan for about ten years now. Over the last five years when everyone was talking about how Axl Rose was an idiot and would never put out anything else, I still listened to the albums. I don’t know if that’s something to be proud about or not, but it bugged the fuck out of me when 100 million people jumped on the Metallica bandwagon, the same ones who gave me so much shit for listening to them back in high school. The whole music industry is idiotic.

I still haven’t done anything today, except for going to McDonald’s. It’s cold and I 100% know the traffic is bad on I-5. I did get a book from Amazon today that’s a walking tour of many beat generation landmarks in New York. Michael had a copy when I saw him there, and I intend to take some walks and pictures when I’m in town next. And it’s cool reading in the meantime.

I think it’s Nintendo time.

Categories
general reviews

Saxon

I think I have some kind of seasonal disorder. This rain isn’t very fun anymore. It’s 45 and slightly drizzling, but it’s been raining for so long that the sky is always grey and the ground is like a full sponge. Don’t move to Seattle – If you do, show up in April and leave by October.

The CD(s) spending most of the time in my player(s) lately is the latest Saxon album, The Eagle Has Landed. It’s a live album from 1995, and I love it. I used to listen to Saxon back hin high school – I bought a copy of Crusader because Vyvvyan on The Young Ones was wearing a Saxon shirt. I loved their sound, this NWOBHM two-guitar attack with lyrics about British motorcycles and castles and military history and touring the world. Their sound wa kindof cheesy – almost Spinal Tap-esque, but I didn’t care. I grew up on their albums from the early and mid 80s, but when the 90s came around and the albums started looking slightly stupid, I gave up on the new stuff, and stuck to the classics.

Fast forward to 1998, when I felt a need to replace every cassette in my collection with a CD or MD. I had a lot of trouble finding any of the Saxon stuff, although I did find a Dutch pressing of Crusader. Then, this week I decided to pick up this live album, because it had some of my favorite old songs. I guess these guys kept touring and playing all of this time, because they sound really tight. They sound like if Bruce Dickinson was singing for the new Helloween. It’s a great 2-CD set, and it will probably be in my player all weekend.

Aah, the weekend. I haven’t done shit all week, so it’ll be nice to get caught up on Rumored. I’m sure it will be pouring all weekend, so I’ll be at home, on the computer.

I can’t seem to spell today, and I want to finish my reuben. Maybe I’ll get to write some more entries this weekend.

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general

birthday, AC/DC day

Today is unoffically AC/DC day in office 375. I got the Bonfire boxed set last night, and I’ve got two of the five CDs with me today. I think I now own about six different recordings of “Whole Lotta Rosie.” Time to go out and buy one of those leather caps and a Jack Daniels t-shirt.

My birthday is over. It was pretty low-key, and to anybody but myself, would have appeared depressing. After fielding phone calls last night, I went to Denny’s, ordered a porterhouse, and wrote in my journal while eating. Then I went on what was probably my biggest CD shopping spree ever. I got two boxed sets, an Ultradisc II CD, and another double album. The total: $145.96. I think I’ve had other binges close to that, but it’s always nice to set a record. I was inches away from buying the Pink Floyd uber-boxed set, but then I thought it out and realized I have all of the CDs I like from that set, many of them in their new remasters, as opposed to the 1992 remasters. So I stuck with AC/DC.

I’m thinking, since almost nobody reads this, that I might parody another online journal for a while. I don’t know if it would be a specific one or a stereotype, and I’m not sure if it would live here or on another server. I could always get a geocities account. I guess I’ve screwed it up by mentioning it already, but what the hell. I loved Stale when it and Slate first came out. Is Slate even around anymore? What a stupid fucking idea.

Slow day. I’m going to screw around for a while.

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general

28

Today is my 28th birthday. It feels like any other day in some ways – I’m here at work, I don’t have any plans tonight, and I’m eating my usual sack lunch. It’s a weird year; Bill Perry has the same birthday as me, and we usually do something together. This year, he’s in Bloomington and I’m in Seattle, so that won’t happen. He will be here this weekend, though, so there will be some late celebration. Marie isn’t here either, and I wish I was in New York today, just to hang out and get out of the greyness and miserable weather here.

28 is a weird number. I didn’t like 27 because it’s an odd number, an in-between. I’m no numerologist, but it reminds me of when I was 17, which seems like the first non-landmark birthday. You get a license at 16, and you can do all kinds of stuff at 18, but when you’re 17, there’s nothing. I think you can get into R movies. 28 is also odd because it’s 10 years after 18, and so much stuff happened then. It really opens me up for more “ten years ago…” moments.

And ten years ago… my 18th was on a Friday. I went out with my friend Julia Zehr. We got into her Renault Alliance and drove to University Park Mall, which is vaguely near the Notre Dame campus in South Bend. We were going to eat someplace first and then go to the movies, but we got a late start, and ended up going to the Chick-Fil-A in the mall and eating while we waited in line. We didn’t have time to eat, and smuggled chicken dinners into the theatre. We watched Naked Gun – it was my second time and her first. The thing I remember the most were the long and strange conversations we had while driving in the darkness of the middle of nowhere. Julia is a great person to talk to and it was a great way to spend my 18th birthday.

I have a lot of birthday memories, and a lot of weird stuff has happened on January 20. I made a web page (long since deleted, sorry.that talks about other people who share my birthday and events that have happened today. The page needs some work, but it’s a good start.

I thought today would make me write scads of nostalgic and introspective stuff, but I don’t feel like doing anything. Oh well. Send you credit card numbers, I am thinking of buying a sit-down Star Wars arcade game for my birthday.

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general

late, NYC, dreams

I’m starting late – actually, I’ve been writing for 45 minutes and decided (for the second time) to kill a giant rant about how unhappy I am with other journals out there. I will shut up and keep looking for other similar journals by writers that aren’t just taking up space.

I bought (on Amazon) a book that contains walking tours of various beat landmarks in NYC. Michael had this book when I met up with him last November, and it looked like a cool way to blow an afternoon or ten, not to mention a few rolls of film. I’m going to NYC on 2/10 so maybe I’ll find some of this stuff. I also ordered a long out-of-print book on the early history of Indiana University, in the hopes that their old book service will eventually turn up a copy for under $4000. I don’t know how rare the book is, but it was published in 1970. I heard a lot about it from this pictorial history book of IU I bought last year. It was cited frequently, and sounds like it has all of the details I’d like to hear about when the campus was over by the Kroger a little southwest of the current campus.

I had very vivid and bizarre dreams last night. I was at a very small and shitt theatre reminiscent of the dollar theatre in Bloomington, and they were showing three different trailers to the new Star Wars movie in a continuous loop. I was dressed as Luke Skywalker, in the white robe get-up from the first movie. I think you had to pay once to get in, but people were staying to see the trailers over and over. During a break in the loop, they had a large video projector, and Sean Penn as Jeff Spiccolli was there, playing Rogue Squadron for the Nintendo on the huge screen. (“Whoa dude, these TIE interceptors are most bogus.”) I remember studying the credits to the trailers later, and many of the people’s names were purposely obfuscated for some reason, maybe to prevent people from figuring out the plot or how many special effects were used. Maybe James Cameron was the guest executive producer and they didn’t want people to know. It was a weird dream.

My writing is slowing down a little, although I think there’s a direct correlation between my diet and my muse. I made shake and bake chicken last night and ate until I was about reado to drop. Then, it wasn’t hard to start working on the book. I think I need to keep the fridge stocked to finish this book on time.

Well, I’ve screwed up – I’m out of time, and spending 45 minuted on my previous aborted entry means this is it for now.

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general

unproductive weekend

This weekend wasn’t very productive for me. I had tons of stupid stuff to do – laundry, bills, cleaning, groceries, shopping, etc etc etc and I spent the whole weekend getting caught up on errands. I never got in the mindset to do any writing all weekend, except for a few occasional scraps. I do my best writing when my apartment’s clean, no pending errands are nagging me, and everything is in a state of calm. I don’t write as well when my todo list is full and I feel like I shouldn’t be on the computer. And I don’t get much done when other tasks run into my scheduled writing time.

All of this is sort of a precursor for the big discussion about writer’s block. I don’t know how much I can just jump into this, since every writer and aspiring writer has their own opinion on it. My basic theory is that I tend to freeze up when I don’t have enough structure and I have too much writing ahead of me. When I was blocked on Summer Rain last year, it was usually when I didn’t have a good outline of the chapters I was trying to start. I’d have lots of ideas and thoughts about what needed to be included, but I didn’t know how it would happen, so I couldn’t write. I’ve known writers who don’t have this problem, and a few who don’t even use outlines. But for me, planning is the key. That’s why Rumored to Exist has been such a hard book to write. Because it’s non-linear, it basically has no outline, and I write the ideas that come to me each day, or things I have in notes. I have some pacing, an idea of how much to write each day. But it has been hard to keep up. I used to write more words per day, but a lot of the writing was shit and required major revisions or simply got junked. I guess I’ve been going slower to prevent that.

I was looking through my current paper journal – I use those 120 page, 3-subject spiral notebooks. It’s interesting, because I’m in the final stretch of this one, but I started it at the end of July. I went to the front of the notebook and read some of the entries last night. So much has happened in the last six months, with my relationship with Marie, the summer of extreme heat, getting rid of the Escort. It’s weird that those entries and my current ones are still in the same book. I guess I need to start writing faster. Historically, I go through two of the 120 page notebooks a year, but the last few times, It’s taken me about 7 months to fill one of them up. I think my pace has quickened in the last couple of months, though. I should probably mention that what goes on in my paper journals never crosses over to here. I know some people form their electronic pages by forming a “best of” from their paper stuff, but I’ve found it easier to avoid that.

Still listening to Snap Judgment. I think I’m going to go buy some books online.

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general

Snap Judgment

Thank you to Ray for my early birthday present, which I got in the mail today. It’s the best three demos from the Chicago hardcore/Death band Snap Judgment, all compiled together on a CD-R. Ray put the whole thing together for his own evil intentions, but he also made me a copy, with a nice laserprinted package that has scans of the original three covers and very comprehensive, anal-retentive track info that a fellow audiophile would love. The first demo, Tomorrow Will Be Worse reminds me most of a trip to Chicago I took with Ray during spring break of 1992. There’s a funny and tragic story that goes along with this which I need to tell at some point, but these six tracks remind me more of other imagery from March 92, like my VW, my old girlfriend Patty, the spring break trip home I took with Ken Rawlings along for the ride, the new Realistic cassette-only deck in the dash of my car, and Eternity cologne. The second demo, Hey! Soul Classics reminds me of Jan/Feb 1993, when I was dating both Kim and Danielle, and walking everywhere because I didn’t have a car. I only heard the third demo, 1993 once or twice, and never got a copy. Around that time, I was going to Chicago a lot with Ray, almost every weekend, and I must’ve met their lead singer John Tekiela a few times, but I don’t remember for sure. I never saw them play, but I heard many times the fable of when Ray saw them on his birthday. They threw together an impromptu cover of the Motorhead song “We Are the Road Crew” for him, and when John didn’t know the words, he gave the mike to Ray and let him sing.

Memories like that make me wish the music scene hadn’t gotten so stupid in the last five years. At least I’m finding more old, cool stuff on CD so I can listen to it until the next wave of decent stuff comes out.

I hate to cut this short, but I just got home and ate dinner, and I have a new Nintendo game waiting for me. Maybe I’ll write more later.

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general

BL Sandwiches, taxes

I’m getting a very late start today – I had a meeting that ran late, and now I’m eating a BL, since the sandwich shop was out of tomatoes. It’s pouring rain outside, but I borrowed one of the huge golf umbrellas from the receptionist’s desk. It was a good plan until the wind picked up to about 90 miles an hour and it started raining sideways.

I remember reading about some famous poet in jail or a mental institution who wrote his epic poem a line a day, because he had no paper and he memorized a line each day. When I’m at my current level of output, I’m grateful I’m not that guy. I’m averaging about 30 lines a day, since I figured out that for Rumored to Exist to be about 100,000 words when it’s done, each section from 0-255 would have to be about 30 lines long. I need to increase my pace, but it’s hard. Once I hit that perfect frame of mind, I’ll write a few thousand words a night of really hilarious shit. But for now, I trudge along, hoping that my future editing passes will add some life to the mediocre prose I’m putting on the page.

I did my taxes this morning. This is the earliest I’ve ever filed. I use the tele tax phone thing, and I will be getting a ton of money back. Because I do not have the ability to save a few bucks a week, I have the government take an extra fifty out each check, and then when I get it back, I blow it on computer equipment or whatever. I should have this wad of cash back by the time I go to New York (Feb. 10).

I’ve got another meeting in a few, and I need to eat. Maybe I’ll write something better tomorrow.