The Wrath of Kon

Eating nachos, getting ready to launch into it on the book. There is heavy construction going on just outside my apartment – they are replacing bridge decks on I-5 south. The current work is about 200 yards from my apartment, and I think it’s a 24 hour job – lots of hardcore banging and welding and scraping with tank-like vehicles and about 100 cops blocking off the road.

There’s an urban legend going around in email about waterproof sunscreen blinding kids. It’s idiotic, and the “anything for the children” types have been pummeling it out there. I got multiple copies at work, and a huge flamewar per copy. I get a lot of this – people who forward on jokes, etc. It’s an odd internet phenomenon – I bet you could get a Master’s thesis out of it without much work.

I’m not entirely sure why, but I’m listening to Mariah Carey’s self-titled album right now. The only reason I don’t have sick and/or unrealistic fantasies about her is that if I did manage to luck into something with her, I’d have a Puff Daddy number of 2 (like the Kevin Bacon numbers, get it?)

I’ve given up on finding cool journals on the web, and I’ve given up on reading about 98% of the journals I once thought were cool. It seems like in my darkest hours, I’d openly embrace the whole journal community, but I still think the idea of telling people how their personal sites should be run is stupid. It’s the reason I’ve given up on the zine community – it’s all people saying “be 100% DIY and do your own thing – just follow these steps so your stupid punk zine will look like every other one and conform to the highly regimented rules of content and appearance.”

I don’t put counters on my pages, and although I could check server logs, I never have. I think there’s a sort of beauty to that. It’s art for the sake of art, and I’ve never worried how many people read this. (I think it’s somewhere between 2 and 3, but it could be less) I guess lately I’ve been preoccupied in telling people my ideals on this, and it’s wasting my time – I feel like Lenny Bruce, spending hours talking about trials instead of telling jokes. Maybe I should shut up about it.

07/11/98 14:12

Sleeping is out of the question. They jackhammered I-5 straight through the night. At around 6, it went from one jackhammer to a dozen. I managed to sleep about 7 or 8 hours, but it was in 90 minute spurts.

I have begun trimming back my web site – I pulled a bunch of stuff today, and I’ll continue cutting, abbreviating, and moving things. Why? Because I’m sick of selling myself on the web. I’m tired of the fact that when someone gets my URL, they instantly know a bunch of things about me – maybe the wrong things. I don’t think I’m extroverted enough to tell the world all about me. I’ve always wanted to have this cool website that archived everything I’ve written – the zines, stories, books, web posting, whatever, and anyone could jump there for free and print the stuff out, or read it online. I now realize that I don’t like putting my work on the web, because my old stuff really sucks, and I’m nervous about the new stuff – it’s not the kind of writing that you want your boss or your uncle in New Jersey finding on the web. So, it’s slowly being pruned. And I’m inches away from killing this journal again. I might just remove the archives, but I’m not sure. I’ll need to think about it.

It’s 2:17pm and I’m still sitting around here – no shower, no food, incredibly depressed about nothing. I have $21 to blow this weekend in the “miscellaneous” account, and I’m trying to decide whether or not I should cut off all my hair, or just go see a matinee and walk around the mall, looking at things I want and can’t have. I’d hash out the depression issues here, but it’s essentially the same old shit, a few new players. About that shower…

I haven’t felt like writing lately. Not much has been going on with life, and that makes the journal pages seem stupid (“I got up. I took a shower. I checked my voice mail. I dried my hair.” etc.) I don’t want my journal to become that predictable, especially since I’m stuck in a 9 to 5 life, and I’m not climbing the Himalayas or walking across Africa or something else profound. And I can’t spend time with giant fictional discourses, because I don’t have the time or energy to do that with my “real” writing, aka my book.

Some people wonder (hey, maybe they don’t) why I don’t do cool graphics and site design and intricate HTML in my pages. It’s because I’m not an HTML designer or a graphic artist, and I don’t want to be. Some people enjoy tweaking their HTML by hand to get every page just right, to add next and previous links and screw with jumps and colors and sidebars and counters. I have no desire to do that. This isn’t my main project in life. That’s why I don’t spend all night writing intricate, sharp, and witty articles. It shows. Why cares? I am not “creating content” right now. I’m writing. I’m keeping a journal. I don’t have to write my paper journal in perfect cursive, and I don’t need to lint all of my pages and worry about fonts and sizes.

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t care, and if I kept any attitude other than that, I’d quit this project again. I might, I don’t know. Maybe I’m in a slump, maybe this is a bad idea. I don’t know.

That said, let me dump two days of news on the table.

I took a day off Wednesday to figure stuff out with the two cars. The Rabbit is all good news – no more leaks, and I installed a new battery. It cranks over find, and all seems well. I need to run it around the block for a half hour this weekend and make sure it works when it’s up to temp and on the road. I’m also slightly scared that there’s some electrical problem (like my stereo wiring) that caused the battery death, even though the battery was out of warranty and it’s death was justifiable. But, I’m scared there’s a short and the new battery will be dead too. So maybe Saturday I’ll hit the road with it.

The Escort went to the Ford dealer for an estimate on my end-of-lease charges. They were fairly cool, but the body damage quote wasn’t entirely pleasant. I will have to pay $620 cash, and I don’t get the deposit back. That’s not horrible though, and I can swing it. I’m driving the Escort until 7/31, and then it goes back to Evergreen Ford in Issaquah for the last time. Sure will be weird without that thing. End of an era.

Tonight, Bill Perry called me at 5 and told me of a 20-person party at Julian’s, a restaurant/bar/pool hall/gameroom just a few blocks down from work. I hiked down there at 6 to meet up with him, Marc, and a bunch of their fellow workers at Aventail. Bill lives in Indiana now, and I hadn’t seen him in ages. He works in Seattle remotely from Vincennes, but managed to get back here now and again for a week of on-site work. Marc VanHeinengen, fellow ex-Spry, ex-IU computer geek was there with us. I shot a game of pool and sucked, and we all talked and hung out. I met some new people there, and everyone was cool. Then we got on the air hockey tables, and Bill kicked everyone’s ass. The computer games were pricy, and we were hungry, so we split.

Across the street is a semi-new place called Beppo, a family-style dining Italian place. There were 5 of us total, and since there was a wait, we hit the bar. My new drink is a Vodka-7, from Bukowski and Elmore Leonard, of course. It’s pretty good and I like it a lot better than Rum and Coke – maybe because I drink a half dozen 7up’s a day. We ate on the patio – a wild, thin-crust pizza with mashed potatoes instead of sauce, and ravioli with feta cheese inside. They brought out big-ass dishes of food, and we all shared. It was a fun time – lots of joking, talk, catching up, and the usual computer geek discussions.

After food, we split, and me, Bill, and Marc went to Aventail’s new location and played with remote control cars a bit. We also checked out Marc’s kick-ass Micron laptop, and their new setup.

Now I’m home. It always feels satisfying to spend a lot of time with a bunch of cool people, the kind of time where it’s 6 and then you look at your watch a second later and it’s 9:45. The people, the cool night on the patio, the drinks, the good food – it all made me wish I did this more often. Maybe I should.

No writing tonight. The weekend’s almost here though. I need to cover serious ground on Rumored to Exist this weekend…

Late start today, so this will be short. Not much is going on, except that I haven’t slept much lately. I remember looking at my watch during every hour from 2 to 9am, which made it seem like I was up all night, but then I remembered a snippet of a dream and I knew I must have fallen asleep somewhere in there. I’m now prepared for a day of aphasia, peripheral hallucinations, and extreme typing mistakes. Maybe I should drink a Coke or ten first.

I think I’ve decided I’m going to buy a new car in like a year, after I move to a new apartment and go through another tax season. Although I haven’t ditched the Escort yet, I think I’m already sick of problems with this Rabbit. I wish it would stabilize a bit, like my other one did. My old Rabbit had problems, but I drove it for months and months with almost no further investment. I’m whining, so I’ll stop.

I’m re-reading Leyner’s The Tetherballs of Bougainville and enjoying it. The only thing I hate about his writing is that it gives me so many good ideas, and I can’t just rip them off.

Okay, lunch is over…

Why must I live my whole life feeling like I just stayed up all night? I decided to knock my sleep schedule back into the daytime mode with some sleeping pills last night. Instead, I got a truly surreal experience of alternating periods of undead catatonia and extreme awake, paranoid rushes where my senses were supertuned to the rumbling of traffic 7 stories below me. I spent all day in an odd mood, like I’d accidentally breathed a short whiff of nerve gas and was waiting to see if it would cause my insides to boil. I just tried to take a nap as the tail-end of rush hour traffic zipped by on I-5, and I can honestly say I’d feel better if I would’ve forced myself to stay awake.

I have some food burining in the oven…

Very tired. The Rabbit’s plumbing might be fixed, but the battery had no juice and I couldn’t turn it over to tell. I finally made a discovery that would’ve helped my car repair experiences long ago – latex surgical gloves. I slipped some on before monkeying in the deep antifreeze and grease of the engine, and it felt great to just snap them off when done.

Both of my parents called today (separately – not a joint thing. Sort of a flashback of my last ten years of being parented.) I only hear from them every month or two, and I usually have enough experiences queued up to get me through a phone conversation, but today I didn’t. I know that when they talk to me and all I have to say is “I haven’t done anything lately. I’ve been working a lot.” that they interpret it as “I’m getting ready to go off the deep end.” And it seems kindof stupid that if they called and I said “oh, I just went shopping for new cars” or “I’m going to Boston next week” or something idiotic like that, they’d be content.

I need to get off of here and do some work on the book…

I fell asleep after work until after 11pm, so I didn’t really feel like writing in here, or writing at all, really. I did work on my biography a bit, and that kept me up far too late. So today I am the walking dead again, but there’s relief in that I have tomorrow off.

It’s been weird writing about 1993 for this bio project. It feels like that stuff just happened, but it’s already been five years. Five years since I first ran Linux! I’m in the middle of writing about that summer, when Tanya was still a new item, yet she was in Tampa for the break, and I was working at Voyager on the punch press, and going to shows with Ray almost every weekend in Chicago. Ray lived at home then, and was at the height of his anti-female stage, which made it difficult for me. But we had a lot of good times together – we rented every concievable zombie film on the face of the earth that summer.

I talked to Micheal Stutz for the first time on the phone last night. It’s always weird at first to talk to someone from the computer, but we had a lot to talk about. We’re both stuck in the same place writing-wise, and wish there was some sort of “movement” going on, sort of like the Kerouac-Ginsberg-Burroughs alliance. I need to write about this more when I am awake and have some amount of energy. And I need to keep writing on my own, because even if I had a group of people to trade manuscripts with, it doesn’t work if I don’t have manuscripts.

Blah, I’m going to screw around for the rest of lunch, start looking around on the web. Hopefully, I’ll be able to write more tonight.

07/02/98 22:03

I just woke up, put some french fries in the oven, made some Kool-aid, and nuked some kind of demented aloha chicken meal. If it says 99% fat-free and works in the micro, I’ll try it at least once.

So it’s not a “school night”, and I’m excited about staying up all night, doing some cleaning, writing a bunch, and doing my grocery shopping at 3 in the morning, when there’s no chance at all of Screaming Kid Syndrome. Tomorrow, my pal Jennefer Wagner will be here from Eugene, OR. She’s only in town for a night, and she’s crashing with another friend of hers, but I’ll hopefully get to hang out with her for a bit during the day.

Ford Credit keeps sending me more and more bizarre letters. I think Col. Kurtz works there. The car thing is starting to worry me more and more, especially since the VW doesn’t run. I’m hoping to get that taken care of this weekend.

I found a good web site to waste a lot of time.

Out of it. Nothing to report. More later.

I’m listening to Rush – Power Windows, which is sort of embarassing to admit. This was the tape in my walkman when I mowed lawns to buy model airplane kits. Was it in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle where there was a kid who only built model airplanes and jerked off? Anyway, for a moment that seems generations old to me, this album still sounds pretty fresh to me.

I need to take a rest for a bit. I’ll write more later.

When all of my writing projects are dead or blocked, I have a fallback project that I use to keep the typing going. I don’t remember when I started this, but a few months back I started writing a biography. I started at January 20, 1971, and moved forward, trying to keep a steady pace with all of the essentials, and without getting stuck on some tangent. Late last year and earlier this year, when I was really blocked and unable to work on either book, I belted out a serious amount of writing, and stayed up all night many times taking the story from childhood to gradeschool to high school.

I’m back on the bio. Everything else seems dead, and I’m sick of my own writing style, so it’s time to pound out the facts for a while. I don’t care how glossy or artistic my prose is (kindof like this journal), I just want to get everything down. I’m now up to the fall of 1992, and there are 43,000 words behind me (maybe 100 pages). Each year gets more difficult. 1971 through 1975 are only a couple of paragraphs; 1992 is already close to 10,000 words. I want to keep writing fast, until I get to 1998 (or 1999, or whenever I finish) and then start at the beginning, making a second pass and adding more detail. I keep forgetting things, or start talking about a person without introducing them in the right place, and I’ll have to fix that. I don’t know if anybody will ever read this, or if I will neaten it up for human consumption, but it’s a fun chore. Maybe the next time I date someone, I will just print and bind the whole damn thing, hand it over, and then have no disclaimers. I’m usually pretty honest when I date people, but it would be relaxing to be able to avoid all of the long stories and make them do the work. But, I guess I like the long stories, so maybe it’s a stupid idea.

I started reading Desolation Angels, and I was certain it was going to throw me, but I read 135 pages last night and would’ve kept reading if it weren’t for that sleep thing. It’s sort of like a darker, more serious version of The Dharma Bums, that’s a little less accessible but also much deeper. It’s got a lot more detail about his time as a lookout, and a lot of Washington details, which is a weird clash of two worlds. It’s cool to read about Kerouac on the UW campus, and wandering the Pioneer Square area. I’m looking forward to some more reading tonight.

It’s been a month and a half since I pulled the plug on the TV. I can barely remember when I sat down and watched hours and hours of shows. I don’t have enough time to do anything now, and I’m not getting a lot of writing done, so I don’t know how I could fit in TV too. TV’s like alcohol – you have to enjoy it in moderation. Unless you’re depressed – then it’s nice to drown in it.

My typing is messed up – not sure if it’s the keyboard, the hands, or the slow connection, but I keep dropping letters. I better quit while I’m ahead.

06/30/98 23:48

Listening to the white album, thinking about the fall of 1992 in order to keep moving on this weird, masturbatory biography. It’s interesting.

I fell asleep for about 4 hours after work, nothing else happened today, and I’m not into whipping up some introspective essay about the past, so I’m going to quit while I’m ahead and get back to writing.

I finished reading On the Road last night, after ditching any attempt at writing and plowing through the pages like Dean’s Hudson across the country. Each time I read the book, there are parts that hold my interest more than other times, and other attributes or pieces that I skim over with little interest. This time, I was most interested in the routes of the roads – I followed along with my atlas, and tried to find the paths taken. I was also into the Burroughs stories, since I’d just read a snippet of a Burroughs bio last week, and it happened to be the same piece that was described in OTR. This time, I wasn’t into the music descriptions – Kerouac goes into these long, drawn out monologues about the bop joints and clubs full of musicians and everything, and it’s cool and all, but I didn’t feel like it this time around. Maybe I should re-read it this week and see if my interests transform into something else. Actually, I think the next read will be Desolation Angels, although I got stalled on that when I read it 2 or 3 years ago.

Three years ago today, my Mustang’s engine blew up, and I was in a mad dash to sell it’s smouldering carcass, sell all of my furniture, and get enough cash together to rent a U-Haul and leave Indiana in 2 days. I made it too – on July 1, 1995, I locked the door of the ten-foot moving truck and headed toward Elkhart, where I’d spend the night, loot my mom’s house for anything I’d need to set up shop in Seattle, and beg a few bucks off of my parents. On the way up, the trusty Konrath Sound System ™, a pair of battery-powered speakers I bought in 1991 when my Rabbit was sans stereo, finally died. I stopped at the Kokomo mall, and got a new pair of Koss speakers at Target. Those speakers are on my desk here at work, as I speak. When I got to Elkhart, I pitched the old speakers into a trash at the Concord Mall Montgomery Wards, with great sadness. When me and Ray piled into his Buick – FM radio only – and drove to Chicago to see a show, the Konrath Sound System always saved the day. With that, a walkman, and maybe even a discman, we had demos, new music, and death metal, instead of the boring and static-bombed radio stations of northern Indiana.

I talked to a window washer today, one of the guys that rappels down the side of big glass buildings with a bucket and a squeegee. I always wondered how one got started on a job like that, and he said he worked with an older guy, a sort of apprenticeship. I didn’t know if they went to a trade school, started washing cars first, spent a lot of time mountain climbing, or what. So there’s your useful/useless factoid of the day.

06/29/98 20:50

Just woke up from a short nap with the windows open and a nice breeze whipping through the apartment. I love it in the summer, when a post-work nap doesn’t mean waking up in the dark.

I spent all afternoon moving and reconfiguring a SparcStation and a JavaStation, so they’d work in the conference room in the other building. (We have the original building at 1500 Dexter, and the new building at 1100 dexter. This was moving from old to new, but just ’til tuesday.) It took a lot longer than expected to get the Sparc acclimated to its new gateway and IP number, and a lot longer to get all of the associated baggage involved with the JavaStation to work. The JavaStation boots from the Sparc – it has no disc drive, so it pulls an OS and its associated Java applets from the Sparc to boot, a neat but messy approach. It was fun in an odd sort of way – it presented a bunch of problems and involved a lot of thinking and logical analysis. About three hours into it, both mchines worked fine, and we got the product running on both of them, more than I’d ever seen before. By the time I thought about looking at my watch, it was already 5. I had an absolutely beautiful walk back to the other building, and tried to get as much work-work done as possible before I split.

The second shoe will hit the floor a week from Wednesday at Evergreen Ford in Issaquah. That’s when I go there with the Escort for the estimate on damages and soforth. I thought about telling them I’m thinking about leasing a brand new car as they are writing out my estimate, and then when I return the car and pay their written estimate, I’d say I decided to buy a new Beetle or something.

I started reading Desolation Angels tonight, and I can see why it threw me last time. It’s nowhere near as accessible as On the Road. I’ll have to dig in to keep on this one. Among the many books I want to get but can’t afford right now is the book of Kerouac letters. I wish I knew the whole story behind the Ann Charters vs. Gerald Nicosia vs. Jan Kerouac or whatever. I read the Nicosia biography and found it to be the best. Charters seems to presumptuous, and when I leafed through her bio, it seemed watered down – like if you bought a Sylvester Stallone biography and it had no mention whatsoever of his years in Sweden making porn films. Why would you read a history book with no history. Interested viewers are encouraged to mail me with text files or URLs providing more details about the whole argument.

I have an overwhelming urge to go to Barnes and Noble, but it’s time to work on the book.

It’s been a quiet day. I slept and/or sat in bed until almost 3, and then headed out to the bookstore, where I read books on day trips in Washington State, and thought about going into the mountains to write, ala Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. But would I be able to strip my routine down to the bare minimum to spend time in a fire lookout station? You can rent them for cheap – $20,$30 a night, but no electricity, running water, etc. Maybe I could make a weekend of it, I’ll have to do more research.

Other than that, I’ve been reading On the Road. I zipped through maybe a hundred pages, magically transporting me to New Orleans, New York, Bakersville, San Fran, and every point in between. It also makes me think of back in 92 when I started the book, 95 when I read it during my beat lit class, 96 on a long weekend trip back to Indiana, and 97, on my way to LA. I should get a new copy someday – mine is falling apart, yellowed pages, but maybe it’s betterthat way.

I don’t feel like I can write on the book now. Maybe I’ll get back to reading.