The Wrath of Kon

It’s another day of shitty weather. I didn’t really get a lot done last night, except for watching an almost-perfect lineup on Conan OBrien – George Carlin, Paula Per-whatserface, the supermodel, and Kevin Smith. Kevin didn’t have much time in there, but was hilarious. Also, I left almost all of my clothes in the washer, so I had nothing to wear. I came in with some dress slacks and a button-up shirt, two things I never wear unless someone has died recently (and seldom then, either).

I was at Barnes and Noble last night, which is one my favorite places to kill a few hours when I don’t want to write. There’s a test prep section that contains all of these books on how to learn calculus in 4 weeks or anatomy or physics. I think it’d be cool to buy a bunch of those books and memorize them, so I’d be able to cite medical knowledge or the postal worker’s exam in any of my fiction. But I know I’d buy them and never read them. I have about 16 learn-a-foreign-language courses in my apartment. I have used zero. I think once I learned enough German to confuse me when I commuted about 20 minutes to work – I’d listen to the tapes in my borrowed vehicle (my mom’s Celebrity stationwagon), but I’d almost always take out the tape and revert to some death metal band, since it was better to have Danzig stuck in your head instead of some dork reciting the German alphabet.

Around that time (summer if 1993), I started some detailed writing about my exploits. I planned to write a book about that summer, and write it while the summer was happening. Ray and I used to take frequent trips to Chicago to see bands, and every Monday or Tuesday, I’d have these long stories to type into my computer. I gave up on the idea at some point, and I lost everything I had on the computer when it crapped out after my stepdad powered it down and completely trashed the hard drive.

My high school went online. It’s pretty weird – most of the teachers I knew are either gone or have gone grey. After looking at the pages, I’ve decided to never go back and visit or go to the reunions. Things have changed too much in the last decade – it’s too weird. It’s like when I go back to the Monkey Ward store where I worked all through high school – a couple of people remember me, but the entire department where I worked is gone.

Why did Chick Corea start a second Elektric Band with all new people except for him and Eric Marienthal in 1993? I thought the first band was excellent, and the _Beneath The Mask_ album was the best damn thing they’d done. It was perfection. Did everyone decide to leave and make solo albums? They all sucked except Weckyl’s was tolerable. Oh well.

I didn’t mention this, but I got really sick on Sunday after we ate at Magic Dragon. I got some sort of chicken stuff and didn’t even eat all of it – I barely ate 20% of it. A few minutes later, I was almost doubled over in pain. I don’t know if it was food poisoning, or just a recurring trend in my eating habits. I have been developing more stomach problems after eating a lot of food or certain types of food, and I have to eat Tums or Rolaids or whatever. So I carry those with me, and then every time I have the medication with me, I get sick. I think it might be psychosomatic, but maybe it’s a lack of exercise and more stress. I had this problem about 5 years ago, and started spending a lot of money on over-the-counter medications. So maybe it’s the same thing. That was when I weighed a lot more, and spent all of my time on my ass, either in front of a computer or a TV. I moved back to school and started walking everywhere, lost a lot of weight, and I guess the problem went away. So maybe it will now that I’m getting a little more into shape.

I bought a bunch of different foods at Safeway the other night, in hopes of avoiding fast food. In the last few weeks, I’ve been eating at Wendy’s and McDonalds like every night, and sometimes for lunch, too. I’d like to find enough easy to prepare, not frozen foods to eat that I could just buy those and each cheaply and safely. I hate frozen foods because they all taste the same, that weird preservative taste, and they are just as expensive as eating at a fast food place. A TV dinner that has enough food in it to actually feed someone costs like $3.00, the same price as a burger and fries.

I don’t know why I am bitching about all of this – my eating habits are cyclical. I will get on a kick and figure out a diet or regimen of healthy foods, and stay on it for about a week. Then I’m back to fast food. My best diets are when I am broke and I’m forced to eat what food I have left for a week or two.

Did you know the DuPont chemist who invented polyester killed himself when he was like 46 or something? He went nuts and drank a bunch of cyanide. Maybe this 70s flashback crap with all-polyester clothes is a bad thing.

I forgot to mention that the damage to that woman’s car last week was $506, which means my insurance will go up. I got that news on Friday, and it sucked. Oh well, with any luck, I will be able to dump my current car and get something cheaper.

This morning, I ate breakfast. It was a rare thing – I made oatmeal. I wasn’t starving for lunch by 11:30, which was a nice change. I went grocery shopping last night and have cabinets full of food now. I’m looking forward to going home tonight and eating a real dinner.

I read Howard Stern – _Private Parts_ this weekend. Good book, but I could only find a softcover copy. It’s 10,000 pages thick, so by the time I was done, it was all twisted and mutated and no longer book-like and flat. Oh well. I have been obsessively reading this book about the history of plastic. It’s well-written and simple to figure out but still contains good historical information and a little more than the basic science behind the formation and discovery of plastic, bakelite, celluloid, and so forth.

I took some sleeping pills last night to avoid another up-all-night event like Tuesday. They really knocked me out, and I woke up very late for work today. I could barely function, nothing made sense and I’m surprised I managed to take a shower and drive to work. Then I got violently ill at lunch, and then stuck in traffic for an hour. So it’s been a memorable Friday the 13th so far. I’m thinking about hiding under my desk for the next 10 hours until it is over.

My mind’s been wandering, and it’s hard to think of some other topic to write about. Not much is going on that I want to talk about. I keep ending my sentences with the word about. I used the word ‘was’ 589 times in the latest rumored to exist draft. I use ‘really’ 38 times. I use fuck 205 times. Actually, that includes fucked, fucking, fucker, etc.

I hit someone’s car today. It was stupid, more of a low-speed tapping that messed up the little trim piece on their door. I think it might be like $200 of damage, so it probably won’t fuck up my insurance or anything. But it was a pain in the ass, very nervewracking, and I spent 20 minutes on my cellular phone in this parking lot, shouting above the traffic to my insurance agent. What a fucking nightmare.

I wasn’t at work yesterday – bad insomnia problems and the start of what felt like a cold made me stay home and sleep all day. I did get some editing done on the book though – all of the drafts are now in one draft. Now I can print it out and start with the red pen.

I’ve been reading a lot lately. I finished the Howard Stern book, read Microserfs, and started re-reading Mark Leyner’s Et Tu, Babe. I love Leyner’s work, but it’s very addictive…

I think I’ve left Rumored to Exist alone for long enough to ferment properly (that didn’t make sense). Anyway, I read the May 15 draft (I think it was all of the corrections I did while I was in California, with no new material) and I laughed my ass off again. I think if my 3 or 4 months of editing after that point didn’t totally fuck it up, I might just do some light touch-ups and finish the damn thing.

I hated some of the randomness in the first and second draft, even though the book was about randomness. I also thought that it was too personal and I’d “out” some people in some way. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Howard Stern, it’s that you can’t out people who have fucked you over. So I’ll change the names, but everything stays. I think if I keep the dropped bits and put in the added ones, it could be 300 pages of pure bullshit. I like that.

But then I worry about really finishing a book. I mean, it’s like if you were thinking about killing someone and then you WENT OUT AND DID IT and you had blood on you and this dead fucking body and you didn’t know what to do next. I don’t know what to do next. Publishers? Agents? Editors? What? I haven’t played the ass-eating game of going to the dinners and the readings and talking to the people at the signings. When I go to book signings, I am always convinced that the authors think I am a CRAZED HOMICIDAL ON PAINT THINNER. When I met Kay Redfield Jamison, I really wanted to tell her that her writing about the manic depressive illness helped me out, but I think she thought I was some kind of JOHN WAYNE GACY ready to jump over the table and fuck her with my arm before vomiting in her eyes or something. I just have that aura about me, especially when I walk 20 blocks to the book store where everyone reads, and I’m smelling like someone who ran an iron man competition in a vinyl bondage suit.

Fuck, where was I?

Oh yeah. So I don’t know any publishers. And I have no friends in high places. And the book market, to quote Joe Pesci, FUCKS YOU. Unless you were somehow related to the OJ trial or you got your DICK cut off recently, you can’t get a book deal. 450 million manuscripts are written a year, and the 150 that are published have to do with Marcia Clark’s hair. I could print on a vanity press, which I have considered. I thought about printing like 500 books, selling a few through zines and the internet, and just giving the rest away. I’d lose money, but it would be fun to have a book and to show it to people. WHo knows.

Finger indp0100@copper.ucs.indiana.edu if you are at indiana. It’s funny.

I walked to work today. It was sort of surreal, listening to Biohazard and twisting through all the skyscrapers and highway overpasses and crap to get here. It took about 45 minutes. I made it but my walkman didn’t – it is a real piece of shit, and maybe the batteries are dead or the tape is all tensioned weird and running slow, but it is fucked. Anyway, it was a decent walk and very strange, because I used to walk so much when I was in school and didn’t have a car. I walked an hour and 15 minutes each way to work on Sunday night, and almost every day walked an hour from campus to my apartment, sometimes each way. I spent a lot of fucking time walking, listening to a walkman, watching the terrain move at one or two miles an hour, wishing it was a hundred. But I walked so damn much that I could eat anything and never gain weight. At the time, I thought I was a little heavy, and lifted weights, ate salad, did sit ups, walked more on my days off, all of that stuff. I think I was about 25 lbs lighter than I am now, which is about right. In high school and my first year of college, I probably weighed about 50 lbs less than I do now. I hated it back then, because I was a major geek and wanted to put on 40 lbs of muscle or something. I was a walking fucking skeleton, and I ate Chips Ahoy by the bagful. I think I had a tapeworm. Anyway, all of this lithium and prozac and everything else has fucked my metabolism, plus I never exercise. I drive everywhere. I am nowhere near being the size of the average Jerry Springer audience member, but I wish I had the metabolism I used to have.

And I usually don’t work out. But sometimes I get on a kick. There’s a gym in my apartment building, and I convince myself – “All I have to do is get on the treadmill, at 3 in the morning when I have the place to myself, and run while I listen to the first Black Sabbath album, and do that 3 times a week and I’m set.” I go up there, and run for 40 minutes or an hour or whatever and come back and drink a gallon of water and take a shower and think “fuck! That was great. All I need to do is keep this up and eat better and I’ll be able to wear all of my clothes from high school.”

Of course, three days later, I will be in bed watching some assinine documentary about Nazi hot air balloons from World War II and eating Doritos. I can’t stick to a regimen like that, because it’s useless. It’s useless to sit on a piece of machinery and run for an hour and waste an hour of my time, just so the little readout tells me that I almost burned off the calories from one of the 16 Cokes I drank today. If I had to run for an hour to win some cash prize, or if I was at the Miss Nude Everything World adult theme park and I had to walk 16 miles over the course of the day to see all of the exhibits, I would do it. If my car broke down and I had the choice between the Metro and walking to work, I’d walk. If the walking is mixed with doing something, seeing something more than a rubber belt spinning around two rollers, than I would do it. But right now, I don’t have anything like that in my life. I don’t walk to classes, or to work, or to whatever. I sit in a chair and write. So maybe if I had something creative to do, I might be in better shape.

And before anyone says anything about hiking, climbing, rollerblading, distance cycling, or any of the other hip and trendy thirtysomething hobbies of the Pacific Northwest: NO. I am not going to participate in any sport where step one is buying five grand in equipment. Also, in all of these sports, there are people who would make me look like a complete idiot. I know fifty year old men that could kick my ass in mountain climbing. I couldn’t climb the rope in gym class in 9th grade. That was about 50 pounds ago, I know I couldn’t now. The reason I write and work with computers is because that is my gift and I was given that gift in lieu of any physical ability. It’s no secret that I’m no good at sports. Shawn Kemp can’t write WinHelp. Michael Jordan can’t program in C. I can’t run a single lap around a gym without getting shin splints. It’s something I’ve learned to accept.

I’m reaching some weird point with the manuscript, the point where I usually bail and forget about it. But I need to stick with it, and I think I’ve identified the problem as a problem with the voice of the whole book. I’m trying to be too serious, too wordy, and it makes the whole thing drag and doesn’t make it too interesting. That sounds too simple to just say that, the hard part is going to be fixing it. I have some ideas, but nothing I’d like to mention yet.

I finished reading Bukowski’s _Post Office_ last night. I love that book. I almost went back to page 1 and started reading it again. Maybe I will. I think I will read _Women_ first, it is the logical continuation.

At least today I feel okay sleepwise. Karena was over last night, and she had to leave at like 6am to get to work. I stayed up with the headphones on, trying to write, while she slept. When she took off, I slept for another 4 hours. I guess I woke up and started saying a bunch of funny shit, but I don’t remember. I was pretty out of it – the sleep felt good. I’m looking forward to a good 3 or 4 hour dive through the writing tonight.