The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

  • Colitis is not a flower

    I went to the doctor yesterday. He said I have colitis, but I don’t need to take any medicine. If I stick to a high fiber, low fat diet, it will all balance out. So disregard my panic attack a few days ago about all that.

    I’m pretty devoid of all thought today – it’s just one of those days. I wish I could be home, half asleep and reading a book. I’m starting to think more about the trip to Indiana. Some of it is excitement, some worry. All of the things like catching the plane, leaving my car in long-term parking, etc. bother me. I’m worried about what I’ll eat when I’m gone, too. I guess I can find something, but I’m worried that everyone will want to eat fast food or in restaurants for the whole trip. I’ll work that out I guess.

    I am looking forward to seeing Bloomington, and seeing everything and everyone. I’m worried about where I’ll park if I want to visit campus, and I’m worried about getting kicked out of computer labs because I’m not a student. Elkhart is just Elkhart – I get a strange satisfaction out of driving around there and seeing that things have changed, mostly for the worse. It’s eerie to see places from high school that are now vacant lots or Mexican groceries or Wal Marts. I guess even though I hated high school and the year I was at IUSB, I got comfortable with all of the stores and places and restaurants, and now many of them are gone or changed. The town in general is pretty beat, too. It’s 99% factories and 1% stupid public park projects that will never do any good, and that won’t change. But it looks more well-worn every time I visit. The roads are shittier, and busier. Crime is up, there are more cops, and the cops are even more belligerent. A “will work for food” sign on every corner. It’s weird stuff, but it’s interesting.

    I have a vivid memory of driving across the Golden Gate bridge and thinking “I’m supposed to me at work right now”. I did the same thing in Las Vegas, during a plane change. Anyway…

  • Game Boy

    I got a Game Boy last night – it was an early xmas present from Karena, so I’ll have something to do on the plane flight back to Indiana, other than planning the ritual murder of half the people on the plane. I got Tetris Plus and Star Wars, too. I like Tetris a lot, but the Star Wars is hard for me – I am not used to the Mario-type games where you have to jump around on a bunch of floating platforms to get through a maze. I prefer shoot-em-up games, or strategies of some sort. I want to go to this used record store in the U-district and pick up some more games.

    I’ve been searching the web for other Game Boy stuff and there’s a lot of it. People are hacking game boys, copying ROMs, writing code, making new hardware, all kinds of stuff. It makes sense – a Game Boy has a 6502 in it – only 8K RAM though. And no keyboard. I guess people are working on that though.

    It’s almost down to the line on this trip. I need to start thinking about what I’ll bring. I usually pack a shitload of stuff, and I need to bring less this time. But I also need to bring enough to be self-sufficient, since I won’t be staying in hotels where I can lift stuff from the room. I also want enough extra room in case I find any books or things at my mom’s that I want to bring back. I’m expecting most of my old stuff to be sold off at various garage sales in the past. Maybe there are a few books or Commodore games lying around I can save.

  • Revisiting old lit

    “I wanna feel destruction
    I wanna feel extinction”

    Sorry, listening to Henry Rollins.

    I’ve been trying to write a biography of my life for a while. It’s not like a memoirs or anything, just a few dozen pages that tell what happened to me from birth to present. Right now, I’m up to the beginning of 1992, and each year is taking progressively longer to write. It’s essentially a worthless exercise, but it’s keeping me busy. I’d rather be writing on something nobody will see than watching TV.

    I read a book called Haunted, a kid’s book from maybe the 4th or 5th grade. It only took me an hour to read the whole thing. I found it at my mom’s house last Xmas, buried with a bunch of my old junk in the basement. I tried to snag all the books I could, including a 1972 encyclopedia I shipped back to Seattle via UPS, because I knew everything would end up at a garage sale or in the trash when my mom tried to sell the place. Anyway, this book was about two boys who had to housesit in the middle of nowhere, at a place where some old German guy shot his wife, the cat, and then himself. Anyway, it turned out that they were Nazis, and the house was in the wife’s name, and willed to some american nazi party, but it turns out she was really adopted and found out her real mom died in the camps, so she wanted to change the will, and Adolf plugged her. I remembered a few of the details in my mind, and wanted to see if I could pick up on anything I was clueless about as a 10 year old. It wasn’t as memorable a book as The Haunted Cove, another book I loved when I was a kid, but it was still fun to read. Maybe someday I’ll write a “young adult” title. Who knows.

  • Colitis, bipolar

    It’s been a while. Two basic things have stopped me from writing, both with twisted, deep roots. Let me explain.

    First, I’ve been having medical problems. My doctor now thinks I have colitis, which is no death sentence, but means I’ll have to radically change my already radically changed diet, and possibly go on some medication with some drastic side effects. All of this worries me – I want to change as a person, but I don’t want the limitations and stigma attached with a disease.

    Example: In 1990, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder – manic depression. This was after a year of a corny therapist in high school, and another year of Prozac and therapy during my freshman year of college. Prior to the diagnosis, I always thought my depression, my imbalance, would be something I could hide until it was all over. I ended therapy in high school, a few weeks before graduation, and thought it was just a chapter behind me, like when the inner ear infection goes away and you finish the bottle of antibiotics and you’re on your way.

    In the first year of college, when the depression returned, I hid the therapy well. Prozac was not a household word, and I didn’t tell anyone about it. In 1989, everyone and their brother hadn’t been on an antidepressant – knowledge opf drugs for mental health was limited to memories of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest or something. I kept it inside, and seldom told anyone. No problem.

    So I was diagnosed with manic depression, put on lithium, and got used to blood tests. I had more side effects and limitations, and I gained some weight. But I only let my inner circle of friends know about the medication, the doctors. I never “came out”, because I never felt a need to. I can understand how gays would want to come out and avoid telling lies about something as basic as their sexuality. But to me, the lithium and the therapy was something very personal, something I didn’t tell to the world. I didn’t want special attention or treatment – I wanted to define my own personality, and avoid mixing the diagnosis and the label with that.

    I kept with this plan, and kept in the closet, so to speak. There were small limitations that bothered me – I would never be able to fly a plane. I would never be able to work for the CIA. Oh well, I would never get drafted, something that comforted me during Desert Storm. Prozac became a household name, and I saw many attention-hungry people who told every person in the world about their “problem” and how they were on Prozac. Lightweights.

    [2020 update: I’m not bipolar as of a dozen or so years ago. I was misdiagnosed. Someone tell my mom this, because any time she hears the word ‘bipolar’ she has to call me and tell me about it.]

    Anyway, I’ve kept in the closet for the most part, although I’ve told a few people. (and I guess this post tells a few more, although I’m lucky if 3 people read this thing). And now I’m faced with another sickness that might not be as closetable as the depression. I could have to take a steroid to calm down my large intestine, which could mean weight gain, insomnia, osteoperosis, etc etc. So I spent all weekend worrying about that. I guess my solution is just to take what comes to me and to keep on fighting for my health. I’m feeling somewhat better on the diet – it’s been almost 3 months, and I’ve lost 15 pounds. I don’t even remember what a quarter pounder tastes like. It’ll give me more inspiration to write more, and hopefully I will.

    The other reason I haven’t been writing is the usual mix-up about why am I even writing a journal, and is all of this stereotypical and boring, and am I wasting my time, etc. I can’t answer that right now, but I felt compelled to write, and had a lot to talk about, so I’ll write today. Who knows about tomorrow, but we’ll see what happens.

    I met the writer Kevin Canty on Saturday and saw him read at Elliott Bay Books. I loved his short story collection and wanted to check out his new book. It was a quiet reading, but he said a few things that I liked. I read all of his new book last night and loved it…

    All out of steam now – time to think about work…

  • Back when riding a 20″ BMX bike was not ironic

    I remember riding my bike in my subdivision as a kid, maybe 11 or 12 years old, the age before you start to worry about girls and money and looks, but around the time you realize your parents are idiots and there’s more to life than sitting in front of a TV playing with legos. I won this BMX bike from Honeycomb cereal, one of the best injections of luck in my life, since before that I had a stupid bananna seat bike that I probably would’ve had until I got my first car.

    We rode the subdivision roads – me and Manges and Wonko and Tom. There were also undeveloped pieces of land with dirt trails and forests and abandoned runways and empty fields. Summertimes were spent exploring these wastelands, looking for hidden roads, old junk, or lost Hustler magazines.

    One spring day, I rode into this huge undeveloped piece of land by Wonko’s house. It had a higher piece of land that sat on the same level and behind a road of houses in the subdivision. A piece of land about as big as a baseball field cut down one side by a dirt road, it dropped down a steep hill into some thick trees and later into a lower and larger area near the Elkhart river. I pedaled the red Huffy over the crest of the hill, and started leaning into the downhill pull when I saw something that made me lay down the bike and gaze in horror. The Elkhart river, flooded with melting snow from the long winter, turned the entire back half into a lake. Where a larger-than-football sized field sat with bike trails, hidden forts, trees, and abandoned junk was now a giant sea, almost to the horizon. And I almost biked right into it.

    I don’t know why I thought about this, except that I’ve been trying to think of a time in my life when I wasn’t depressed or upset, and when I had a solid network of friends without condition or distance. I think my closest experiences were when I was a kid, in the 6th or 7th grade, maybe going into 8th. My first thought on this is that I wasn’t as concerned about my place in life during those years, and kids aren’t as competetive or cliqueish in those years (at least at my school – I’m sure that little John-Benet Ramseys get their first boob job at the age of 10 now). But after reading more about it, I’ve realized that my depression probably started around then. At the very beginning of 9th grade, I had a huge growth spurt which probably did something to my brain. It sounds far-fetched, but I’ve read in a bunch of psychology books that manic-depression usually hits like that.

    The different pieces of my life don’t come into question until I start thinking of book ideas and plots. I’d love to knock some story out of my childhood or teenage years and come up with a book about it. Writers like Hemmingway, Orwell, Henry Miller, and Bukowski seemed to be masters at that. But my life has been pretty boring. Case in point – my first book, Summer Rain. I put a lot of time into it, and loved the idea as I was writing it. But after a year or writing, I held a largely boring and rambling story about my life one summer. With enough bullshit, the basic plot almost made sense, but it never grabbed you. And then I took it to a writing conference and talked to some GenX hipster/shyster that told me I had to change 1000 different things about the plot. His ideas were like taking The Grapes of Wrath and turning it into Microserfs, a plot change at a time. It’s been eating at my ever since, whether or not I should rewrite that book. It was based on a short story originally, and a lot of people liked it, including me. Maybe at some time, I’ll chop at the existing manuscript and make it into a series of short stories, and then clean up each one as I go along. Who knows.

  • New glasses, old books

    New glasses are strange. I always worry if they’re crooked or not, since the lackeys at the optical store adjust the frames like I adjust an aluminum can before I chuck it in the trash. I mean recycling bin – if recycling is such a big hit around here, why isn’t aluminum any cheaper? Why don’t they reprogram some of those GM welding robots to pull cans and paper out of garbage so we don’t have to separate things? Instead of throwing all that stuff in landfills, they should get some joint venture going between the scrap dealers and the landfills. When the trucks show up, they dump everything in a waiting area. Then the salvagers can pick through it for free, and send the rest down the line.

    I always wanted to open a salvage shop, one of the kinds that goes through buildings before they are destroyed, and takes the sinks and toilets and rare tile and whatnot, and then resells them. It’d cost some money up front, but you could make a killing. A character in a book did that, but I forget what book. They went after the big stuff, like boilers and furnaces, and sold them at el cheapo rates to scummy apartment buildings. I wish I could remember the name of that book…

    There are a few books that haunt me, the details show up in my everyday life without warning. Deja vu is worst when you feel like something in a story or a movie instead of your own life. The Five Gates of Hell by Rupert Thomson is a book with plenty of scenery that reappears in my life periodically. And anytime I’m on the ocean, I still see the setting for this book I read as a kid, maybe 20 years ago, called The Haunted Cove. When I was on the Oregon coast, I thought I was IN that book. Even though I hadn’t touched it in decades, I could see the little cottages, sand-swept roads, and breaks in the water along the shoreline. I dug my copy of the book, a book club hardcover now faded by a quarter century in my mom’s basement, and it turns out it was written by a woman, Elizabeth Baldwin Hazelton, who lived on the Oregon coast also. Pretty freaky stuff.

  • The art of being a pompous asshole

    More doctor-like stuff today, that I don’t want to talk about. Nothing disastrous, just not publically consumable.

    In the waiting room, I spent a while reading the John Gardner book, The Art of Fiction. What a pompous asshole. He goes on about Shakespeare all the time, like everybody’s read the complete works and memorized them. I’m sure some of you bastards out there have read more of the Bard’s stuff than me – that isn’t the point. Getting through the plots is one thing; comparing every frigging metaphor in your life to parts of his work is just plain annoying. Of course, Gardner’s book does have some good points and it does have some kick-ass exercises in the back. I’ve done some of them before, but I’m thinking its time to repeat them.

    I got my new glasses, and it’s time to go pick them up. Another short day of writing on here… I hope my paper journal does better.

  • Lack of food and jazz

    I haven’t eaten “real” food in a few days now, and although I feel a little tired, there’s a strange clear-headedness about it. I can’t remember things as well, but I thought it would be a lot worse. I’m feeling somewhat better, and maybe this round of stomach problems is over, but I don’t want to go from a diet of cup-a-soup right into a gyro sandwich from the mall or something.

    I’ve probably said this before, but I wish writing were a more collaborative effort, like music. I’ve been listening to some jazz lately: Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Chick Corea, John Coltrane, and I’ve been reading up on these guys. It’s incredible how the jazz scene in New York and really all over the place was so strong back in the 50s, when bop was spreading like a plague everywhere. It links to the whole Kerouac-Burroughs-Ginsberg thing. I guess if I ever get any writing done and then die, everyone will think that me, Ray and Larry were an inseperable group in the same way.

    Anyway – jazz – it’s music I like. It’s the kind of music that makes me wish I played an instrument or had an old secondhand sax in my apartment so I could teach myself. Before the day of the guitar hero, these guys were king. I’m listening to Coltrane now, and wishing I had a hundred more CDs in my collection. I’ve been looking to find some genre of music to replace the now-defunct death metal collection. It’s good laid-back music, but I’m not sure it can do everything. It does support a community though, in the sense that there’s so much history and folklore and audience. So maybe I’ll spend more time in the jazz section of the record store. I don’t think I’ll be spending any cash on a sax, though.

  • Dreams, gameworks, Apple CDs

    Ever have one of those days where you have some free time, some cash in your pocket, more in the bank, and you just want to go out and do something by yourself like buy a whole stack of books or look at CDs for 6 hours or try on new leather coats or something like that? I’m still feeling sick, or else I would.

    Dream from last night: I sold my Escort and bought a Ferarri convertible. I was nervous about calling my insurance company because I was sure they’d drop my policy. I went to a high school reunion and saw a girl I used to like named Christi. She was with some guy, and she asked me what I’d been doing. I told her I just bought a new Ferarri and she got all pissed, because she had a beat up Honda and it just broke down that week.

    Food: mix two cup-a-soup packets in a mug: one cream of chicken, one chicken broth with noodles. Add a cup of hot water and mix. I’m still sick, still not eating solids. I tried to eat at Subway yesterday and it almost fucking killed me.

    I went to Gameworks last night with Bill. Because of all the hype surrounding the opening, and because it is right by a Planet Hollywood, I thought it would be a trendy place full of assholes, overpriced, etc. It wasn’t too bad – sunday night has a special where you can play everything from 9-11pm for $10. They had the 360 degree jet game I played at Disney, and I got another run on that. Most of the games were newer, and there were only a handful of old 80s games, all of them Atari units like Missile Command and Centipede. I was hoping for Smash TV or Star Wars – oh well. There was a driving game that I liked a lot, and a networked tank game that kicked ass. One shoot-em-up game had a big Rambo-like machine gun that you had to hold with two hands that shook as you blasted the hell out of everything in your path. I loved not having to worry about money – they gave you a smart card with an infinite balance, which was nice for those $1.75 games.

    I somehow got signed up to the Apple Developer List, and someone just dropped off a stack of CDs for me. I think I’m going to go install a bunch of junk on my Mac…

  • Memories fading

    I need to start working on a book again. This morning in the shower, I decided I need to pick up the Rumored to Exist draft and start working on it full time, until the end of the year. Last night, I thought about Summer Rain more, but I decided I’m not in the right mood to work on that book anymore. Maybe in a while, but I think those memories are fading and the events are becoming more insignificant to my life (although they were the most significant events I’ve had – nothing has replaced them, but they’ve faded with time).

    I still don’t know my direction with selling this book or printing it myself or whatever. I’m mostly concerned with writing the damn thing. I want to make my next cut of the manuscript much longer, maybe twice as long, and I want each piece to blend into the next one somehow. Plus I’m hoping the new stuff will be as strange as the last third of the current draft – all of the stuff I wrote in late 96 and this year. It’ll take some work, but I need a new project.

    I’m not as sick today, but I’m still having problems. It feels like fall out today – clouds and cold, but breaks of real sun flirting through the occasional rain. It feels alone – reminds of me being in Bloomington about four years ago, walking alone on a sunday and feeling the wind tear through my leather jacket. I don’t know how I could miss walking in the rain every day, but sometimes I do…