The Wrath of Kon

I’ve been obsessively eating those little, red, cinnamon candies, and watching a special about nuclear submarines that sank. So it’s been a productive evening. I also got a bunch of CDs in the mail, but I fell asleep after Marie called, and I didn’t get a chance to listen to anything. Now, in a fit of “it happened ten years ago” nostalgia, I’m listening to a Lizzy Borden album. It’s Master of Disguise, probably the best one. It’s somewhat of a concept album, and really reminds me of my first semester in college. I recently found another copy, and it’s one of those albums that can really transport me back to a very specific time and era. I love music like that, even if it is somewhat dated.

I should get back to writing. Rumored to Exist is going slow, but I have a pile of edited stuff to reconcile that I’ve been putting off. And Letterman is on.

01/05/99 15:05

The government is burning tons of napalm that has been sitting around since the end of the Vietnam war. Why can’t they have some kind of lottery for it? Or sell it by the barrel at the army-navy store? I don’t know about you, but I could really use a 55 gallon drum of napalm.

It’s a slow day – I want to write more, but I can’t. Maybe later.

01/05/99 15:42

I need to do some research and find all of the nuclear subs that are still on the ocean floor. I think there are at least 4 or 5 of them. After I make my first billion dollars, I’m going to rent that Hughes explorer ship and try to find one of those subs. That Hughes boat has this gigantic hole in the middle of it, where they can lift an entire submarine with a giant claw-like thing, close the doors behind it, and dismantle it with Navy frogmen in nuclear protection gear. I guess when they salvaged that Soviet sub in ’74, it was completely hot from the nuclear missiles. They also found 9 bodies, and gave them a traditional Russian burial at sea, while they rolled a few movie cameras. They showed part of the burial on the Discorvery channel special last night – it was very bizarre, James Bond sort of stuff.

I still hear what sounds like sea otters across the street. I’ve been listening to White Zombie all morning. I’ve started cleaning my office in anticipation of my move to the other building. I only have one or two boxes of stuff – some of the people I work with have a dozen boxes of stuff. I wish I had a camera I could mount anywhere and transmit the video signal several miles away. I’d use it for lots of things, like proving that my fucking landlord is only in his office an hour a day.

I actually brought my lunch today. I’ve been going to the deli downstairs every day, but that costs money and I’m gaining weight because of it. Plus, I’m moving offices at the end of the week, and the new place doesn’t have a deli downstairs. So, I need to get used to lunchmeat and snak-paks again.

I’ve been having a minor freakout about the year. It isn’t because Prince sang about it in that stupid song, but because 1989 was ten years ago. So many key things happened in that year, from college to women to psychiatry to everything else. It was when I left for school, learned to play piano, bought my first bass, got my first real credit card, and started taking Prozac. And the fact that I can now say “Ten years ago, I…” is making my usual nostalgia trips even more chaotic.

On a similar topic, I was flipping through channels last night, and saw a “Hey, remember the 90’s?” CD for sale. I almost called the 800 number to yell “Hey, IT IS THE FUCKING NINETIES!!!!” at somebody. Remember you read it here first – this is going to collapse on itself so much, that by 2015, you will see ads for “Hey, remember 2:45 this afternoon?” CDs.

I have a lunch to finish. Catch you later.

The midwest is buried under 16 feet of snow, and the sun was out here today. Vindication.

I got a new driver’s license today. I tried to look as scary as possible for the photo, but it’s not great. I didn’t shave for a week, and wore a Cianide shirt. Unlike Indiana, they let me keep the old license (after they punched a hole in it.)

My friend Suzanne was here today. She’s been in Olympia since xmas, but her and her guy-friend Matt came up here tonight. We went to Denny’s, did a bunch of driving around, and stopped by my work for the tour. I’ve known Suzanne since 1994. She’s a manager at the Borders in Bloomington and I usually see her when I’m in town, and hassle her about stuff in the store or whatever. The first time I visited Bton after my departure, she went with me to White Castle. I went to the counter and told the girl “I came all the way from Seattle to eat here.” She said “I’m sorry.”

I wanted to write more, but I’m so tired. I read through all of Rumored to Exist tonight, and made some comments. I also read through all of my notes, and got all ready to start writing new stuff. But I’m not awake enough to do any work. (I am listening to the Dream Theater album entitled Awake, though.) My mom called me at 9:30 this morning, and I was dumb enough to pick up. And no naps, either. Maybe I will write more tomorrow.

Welcome to the new year. I need to write something here, and then go back and see if it breaks my indexing program. I’ll write more in a bit.

01/01/99 05:31

That took major brain surgery, but my war-torn indexing program now works for more than two years, and might even be a step closer to being Y2K compliant. I have no respect for people who meticulously hand-code pretty calenders for their journal pages. If you think you’re hot shit, try automating everything with a nice, messy C program. Machine-generated HTML is where it’s at, and I’m not talking FrontPage.

I wanted to write a bunch on Rumored tonight, but ended up playing the Star Wars game on the Nintendo. I found cheat codes that let you fly a TIE interceptor, or the Millenium Falcon. The TIE kicks ass – you can really weave around, and it’s great to be able to follow other TIE fighters through tight manuvers. There are many times in this one level where I am 3:1 against TIEs in an A-wing and during a quick approach, I’m lucky to randomly pick off one. In the TIE, I can stay on them like stink on shit and quickly destroy all three without thinking. The only bad thing is that the TIE has no shields, and no missiles. It’s a poor weapon for attack runs on ground equipment. The Falcon, on the other hand, kicks complete ass. It manuvers tight, turning on its side in corners. It has some heavy shields, and can take some serious fire. And, it’s weapons systems aren’t aimed with the craft – the guns swivel on turrets, and there are proton torpedos that home in automatically – you just get the target in your sights for a second, and a targeting circle will follow the ship while you move off in a different direction. I’ve been stuck on a level all week, and with the Falcon, I was able to completely pummel everything and finish. Unfortunately, you can’t use it on all of the levels – I’m now stuck on a level where you have to use the snowspeeder. The snowspeeder is really odd to fly – the weapons suck, and you can’t loop or dive too much, because it hovers. You can slam on either brake and turn on a dime, which is cool, but it usually runs me into a building. On this level, you are in these shitty little hovercraft, trying to down TIE bombers, which is like fighting an M1 abrams tank with a Schwinn bike and a ball-peen hammer. And at the end of the level, you have to do the little harpoon-cable-on-the-AT-AT’s-legs trick, which I’ve found impossible with the Nintendo controller. Oh well, maybe I’ll find another cheat.

So yeah, no writing. A little, but not much. I flipped through the channels a bit at 12, and luckily haven’t heard that fucking Prince song. Leno was pre-empted, which meant Conan was either late or gone, since Leno was in his spot.

Not much else. I should get back to work.

I’m really not awake today. I had to drop off Marie at the airport for a 7:20 flight, which involved waking up at 5:30, which is about 5 hours earlier than my typical schedule. She also had to deal with a bunch of shit from Continental, which has this problem with forgetting about e-ticket bookings. I just spent too much of my time writing them a pissy email, and now I need to stop thinking about it.

It was nice to have Marie here, although it wasn’t nearly enough time, and it was hellish here during her whole stay. Now she knows I’m not kidding about the permanently gray skies, pissing rain, and high winds that pummel the building. Seattle is a very beautiful city, for about 15 minutes a year. Anyway, we didn’t do much of interest or get out too much, based on the traffic and weather. I wanted to go to a movie, but there’s such a poor crop of films out there this holiday. If I had free passes to go to a movie, I don’t think I could pick one. We rented a few movies though, and I got to see Fear and Loathing again. I might watch it again – I have the tapes until Friday. It’s a great film, and usually gets me going about writing and living. In a world where all of the inspirational films are about sports and overcoming odds and whatever, it’s nice to see something new.

Now that the holidays are over, I need to get back to writing as much as possible. I’m still trying to figure out which book to work on, and I don’t think I’ll know, even when I’ve got pieces and chapters on the screen in front of me. I might end up going back and forth a bit. I think that the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron game for the Nintendo might slow down my writing output, at least until I finish all of the levels.

Lunch is over. More later.

I hope you survived this year’s day of Christian celebration without too much hair-pulling.

It wasn’t too bad of a day for me. I woke up “early” (8am) and drove to SeaTac airport to pick up Marie. The snow and ice turned into rain and fog by xmas morning, but the roads were completely empty, making it the easiest drive to the airport I’ve ever encountered, even easier than a 3am on Sunday night drive I had to do once. Parking was really bad, though, and I heard that a water main broke on the rental car level, creating a small lake down there. I got there an hour early, which turned into an hour and a half early because of delays. I forgot my gameboy, and didn’t have anything else to do, so I sat down in a crappy airport chair and fell asleep sitting up for almost an hour. I wish I could do that all the time.

So Marie got here, and it’s good to have her here again. We exchanged gifts and I got the Beat Generation CD set and the Burroughs set from Giorno poetry systems, and a ton of cool books. We spent the rest of the dark and rainy day around the house, playing with the new Nintendo and eventually getting to the IHOP for dinner.

We’re getting ready to leave and do some post-xmas shopping for Nintendo games, so I’ve got to find my teargas and rubber bullets for the uzi to make the trip to the mall a little more pleasant. Later.

I wish I could describe the way a VW Rabbit smells. I was thinking about this last night, while writing the book. One time I was watching an episode of Wings (the airplane show, not the sitcom) or some other Discover channel documentary on the B-52 and one of the pilots mentioned that all of the planes had a distinct smell, of old wiring, new electronics, jet fuel, spilled Cokes, and everything else. You’d think any military hardware would be sterile inside, but it’s usually much worse than an old car. My old VW is about the same vintage as a MiG-25, and similar in many ways – the silver color, the boxy construction, the minimalist instruments and controls, and the mix of comfort and discomfort that makes it a unique piece of machinery. You can reach every piece of the engine on a VW and easily strip the whole thing apart with five wrenches, but there’s no good place to rest your left foot when it’s off the clutch. The MiG-25 can fly over Mach 3 and high enough so you can see the curve of the earth, but it uses only vacuum tubes in its circuitry, and it’s far too easy to push an engine to failure.

The smell – I think of this because I spent so much time in my car this weekend, stuck in traffic. It snowed about 4 microns on Saturday, which meant every fucking soccer mom and Microsoft yuppie with a 4×4 SUV ended up in a ditch or shutting down a floating bridge because they thought they paid $60,000 so they could drive and brake at highway speeds on glare ice. Anyway, this meant the car got nice and toasty inside, and while I was strapped into my minimalist little seat in my aluminum-silver cockpit, the odor of a 20 year old VW made me think of my history with these little cars.

First, the West Germans made great little cars that were fun to drive and still got 30 or 40 MPG, but they had horrible wiring systems. My current VW has about 10 wiring problems, ranging from an intermittent rear defogger to no horn or reverse gear lights. For a while, my front turn signals wouldn’t blink when the headlights were on, and then they miraculously healed. Same with the dome light, although it comes and goes. On my last VW, all of the dash warning lights would turn on when it was raining, and on the one before, a buzzer would sound if it got too wet out. The substandard wiring gave the car one of its smells – a mix of old rubber insulation and ozone that increased when the temp went up. This mixed with the paper and cardboard used under the dash, which gives off the aroma of old books – not the paper and dust mite smell, but the thin cardboard cover of a 1960’s owner’s manual. All of this mixes with the smell of a rich gas engine, or the unique odor of the thin, black dust given off by a tiny diesel powerplant. Add the slight smell of oil and an aging plastic dashboard, and you start to get the idea.

It’s odd how unique the VW aroma is, yet how standard it is among the make. A couple of years ago, I was in Snoqualmie at a company picnic and saw two Rabbits that had been tricked out for some kind of racing – they had no doors, one seat, some NASCAR-esque netting, and so forth. I looked at the cars for a while, feeling some nostalgia for my old VW. When I climbed in, it smelled just like the interior of my old VW. And it’s not like what my old Camaro smelled like, the rich smell of 8 cylinders rumbling, with Armor-All, carpet cleaner and Turtle Wax all over the interior.

Maybe I’m nuts – I have a sensitive nose, but I can’t describe smell that good. It reminds me of different times, eras. When I spray Lysol, it reminds me of the summer of 1992, when I used to spray the shit constantly in my tiny roominghouse apartment on Mitchell Street. Every cologne I own is a time machine going back to when I first started using it – same with every shampoo, cleaning product, and candle. If I knew anything at all about differentiating this stuff verbally, I could probably get a job designing perfumes or something. Maybe not…

Speaking of time machines, I am vageuly starting to study them a bit more, so maybe I will go from Summer Rain tight into working on the third book again. I haven’t written in here all weekend, but I spent a lot of time reorganizing and moving around stuff in Summer Rain‘s third book so it fell into a logical order. I think I had about 7 or 8 weekends in August, and that didn’t work out. The shuffle went without a major hitch, but now I’m almost out of energy to continue with it. I think I’ll plow away until Marie gets here in 4 days, and then start something else after she leaves – maybe Rumored, maybe the yet-unnamed time travel book.

I better go. It’s snowing again and I’m worried about making it home. The Rabbit drives excellent on the ice – it’s such a light car, and front wheel drive. The Rabbit’s weight is distributed just right so when your wheels don’t let you turn anymore, you can swing the weight of the car around and aim it almost perfectly. But the fucking idiots out there are probably causing 200 car pileups on the freeway, and if my 3000 pound Rabbit got hit by a 9000 pound Suburban that didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, well, you could guess who wouldn’t be updating his journal for a while.