Well, the Denver gig is up. We are moving again, by the end of this month, to the original Plan A city, which is Los Angeles. And I’m reluctant to talk about it at all, since the stock reaction of most people is similar to that if I told them I was building a machine in my back yard that would turn silly putty into platinum bars. But yeah, we are moving.

Sarah’s job has been less than stellar, working ten hours a day, seven days a week, and dealing with a lot of general lunacy. Then the firm lost their biggest client and laid off half the company. And those of you dot-com survivors can affirm that when half of your company gets laid off, it doesn’t mean your workplace will be just dandy from now on. It’s a lot more like being the band on the deck of the Titanic, except they didn’t have to deal with endless conference calls. Anyway, she talked to her old boss, who immediately found her a gig at their Los Angeles office. She had no real complaints about her old job, just that we were both sick of New York. And working for the biggest ad agency in the company means they don’t start selling off their office furniture when they lose an account.

As for me, I was done with work as of the 31st, last Thursday. I actually will be staying on as a part-time contractor, working remotely, but I won’t be going to meetings, dealing with politics, or driving an hour each way a day. My plan is to cut over to contracting part-time, and working as a developer. Since before christmas, I’ve done nothing but read Ruby on Rails books and work on a few simple projects that I hope to flesh out. I’ve been memorizing Ruby books, reading the Knuth books, reading the Gang of Four, and trying to learn every shortcut and trick tip in Eclipse.

But first, I have a huge marathon ahead of me. Three weeks from today, we turn in our keys and leave this apartment forever. And when you look at the place now, it’s pretty much in the 100% functional state. Sarah’s in Vegas for her family reunion this weekend, and I have been shredding papers like I worked for the Stasi in 1989. But no matter how many hours I put in, the place looks about the same. We do have the whole rockstar relocation setup, even more than last time, so the little elves will show up in our last week with their packing tape and semi trailer and haul everything west. But we still have to find a place. A week from today, I drive my car to LA solo, with the back and trunk filled with a redundant supply of clothes and toiletries and whatnot. Sarah flies there on that Friday, and we have a weekend to seal the deal on an apartment, then fly home. We then have to drive out in the Subaru, with two cats in tow (which will be an awesome time for all) and then reverse the procedure on the other end. Between now and then, I have an endless stream of appointments and errands: service cars, go to doctors, fill prescriptions, cancel things, sign up for things, and continue the onslaught of throwing out, giving away, and shredding up.

So, Denver. It has been an interesting year, and there are some things I will miss. I always like when I’m driving and I see the snow-capped mountains on the horizon. I will really miss baseball here, last summer at Coors Field and the incredible run to October the Rockies had. I will also miss walking a block to the park to see a game. I really do like sitting here in my office, looking out at the open area of LoDo, working on the computer and enjoying this apartment. This is one of the nicest apartments I’ve lived in, and everything actually works, which is new to me. Having grocery stores bigger than jesus and Super Ultra Giant Fucking Monster Target has been nice. And hey, best emergency room ever.

Denver has its issues that make it a “probably not forever” place. I didn’t have any altitude problems, but the dry air is a killer. I get so dehydrated, I wake up two or three times a night to get a drink, even if I take enough ambien to kill a horse. Allergies are worse, and most of the lifers here look like they were rode hard and put away wet. The botox people are taking a beating out here, because I see more than a fair share of ladies that resemble the crypt keeper. Yeah, they climb mountains and ski and all of that shit, but come on people, four words: SPF-50.

I always envisioned Denver as some kind of hip, high-tech mountain metropolis, and I guess it tries. There are some nice looking buildings and they try to be urban to an extent. But a lot of people think Colorado is the wild west. And when people think that in Elkhart, it’s idiotic, but here, you could drive into the mountains and shoot a bear with a .50 caliber sniper rifle. So there’s lots of camo, lots of country music, lots of fans of Larry the Cable Guy, and lots of people with pickup trucks that could fit my car and a cord of firewood in the bed.

So it’s really George Bush country up here. And while I don’t really give a shit about politics (especially with the group of geniuses jockeying for the big job later this year), it sets the mentality of the place. Just down the road in Colorado Springs, you’ll find Focus on the Family; down there and in the suburbs out here, you’ll see mega churches that are bigger than casinos in Vegas. The Promisekeepers also hail from Denver. There are lots of jesus fishes on cars, and you can ignore it all to an extent (which you can’t in Elkhart), but it’s like eating in a restaurant where something’s burning on the grill in back: it’s not your food, but it still bugs you.

I think the biggest case in point is the gay situation. I have friends who are gay, Sarah has friends who are gay, and we’re both used to being in New York, where a person being gay is about as unusual as a person wearing a jacket in October. So sometimes if I’m talking to someone, something might come up in conversation where I know someone who did this or went there or owned that, and when I start to talk about it, I find myself pronouning things, which is really bullshit. But if I told a person that I had thanksgiving dinner with two guys who happened to be life partners, I might get dragged off to a reeducation camp. On the other hand, in LA, if I told someone a friend was gay, they’d probably just say, “well, does he know anyone who can read my script.”

Everyone thinks that LA is the great devil, especially people in the Midwest, especially people with the “fuck that, New York is the greatest place ever” headtrip. But I like it. There’s always been some allure to California to me, something that always made me happy or make me think I was in some huge, mythical thing. I can’t say I’ve always dreamed and hoped of living there, but more than once in the last fifteen years, I’ve interviewed for jobs there and had my fingers crossed. Like I said, LA was our first choice last year, before the Denver thing came up. It will be nice to have the ocean, and water. We are aiming for West Hollywood, which isn’t on the water, but it’s close. (And no, West Hollywood is not the one with the hookers and smack dealers, that’s East Hollywood.) There are other niceties, like multiple airports that aren’t a million miles out of town (DEN), we get to see movies before anyone else (except maybe NYC), ethnic food other than just Mexican, and while there are always jesus people everywhere, they’re pretty drowned out by the people who really don’t give a shit.

We already have a network of people out there, too. Sarah lived there for almost a decade, and still has a lot of friends, both personal and in the biz (and both) and I have a couple of old pals out that way, too. Some of our NYC friends who would never visit Denver are in LA all the time, so we get to see those people too. We both have met absolutely nobody here, mostly because the only thing to do on a Saturday night in Denver is go to the mall and watch a movie, or maybe shop at Wal-Mart.

Bad stuff? It costs more, although compared to New York, it’s maybe a bit cheaper. You need a car; we have two. Traffic, but my I-25 drive for the last six months has not been a breeze, either. I don’t know what to do about baseball. Am I still a Rockies fan? I would love to go to all of their games at Dodger Stadium, but I’m afraid if I wear a Rockies shirt, I will be stabbed by a Mexican gang member. The Angels are there, but AL baseball sucks. Who knows, I thought the Rockies were a losing prospect when we moved here, and look what happened. Maybe when we move, the Dodgers will make it to the series. (And then maybe I can get Scott Boras to arrange a deal where I move to some other city with a shit team and get them to the series.)

So that’s my story. I’ll post more when I know it. And hopefully this cessation of salaried work will help me post more. I looked at my paper journal last night, and realized I hadn’t updated it since the day I started this job. Anyway, time to shred…

I’ve come to hate writing any kind of end-of-year bullshit on here. There is no possibility of me writing a favorite music of 2007 list, as I think I bought three CDs this year. I bought almost no DVDs, and pretty much every movie in the theaters in 2007 sucked total shit. (I actually liked The Darjeeling Limited a lot, but the one major downside to leaving NY is that it’s impossible to catch these limited release movies until they hit NetFlix. I just found one of those arthouse theaters though, so that gives me hope.) I spent a lot of 2007 trying to get rid of stuff, so a list of new posessions to hang around my neck is a bit redundant.

I could talk about books; I read a lot this year, but I didn’t buy many books at all, so there were a lot of rereads. Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke was by far the best thing I’ve read in a while.  Stasiland by Anna Funder took a nice look at the brighter side of communism, and what it was like to live in a country where centralization broke down every aspect of life, as did the East German’s secret police of having something like one in four citizens on the payroll as narcs. John Sheppard’s Small Town Punk came out, albeit edited like Sherman’s troops ‘edited’ the south at the end of the Civil War. I went back and re-read the iUniverse version, and went through his next book a couple of times over the summer.

A lot of shit happened in 2007, to put it mildly. I moved to Denver. I got engaged. I got married. I left my job of six years, and started a new one. We bought two cars. We adopted two cats. I saw about 20 baseball games, including a World Series. (We lost, and I’m still bitter, but at least it’s not like we lost to the White Sox or something.) I went to like 863 doctors this year. (See videos of my knee MRI here and here.) I went to my land twice. I didn’t go to any new states, but I went to the Bahamas, which is the 4th country outside of the US I’ve visited, and the first where they drove on the wrong side of the road.

My old friend Chuck Stringer died this year, which was surprising and depressing. It also really pushed the whole fear of mortality trip on me, as time keeps moving faster and I keep thinking about the limitation of the whole thing. Visiting a million doctors for various failures with my own body makes me even more fearful of this.

This journal was ten years old in 2007. The domain 34.216.9.77/ will be ten years old in 2008. The first time I got my VAX account and started using jkonrath@indiana.edu will be 20 years ago in 2009. I moved to Elkart in 1978, which was 30 years ago. In 1988, I worked at Wards, and my weekly paycheck was less than my 401K contribution these days. A nice round number like that occurring today makes me start thinking about this stuff too much.

I’m in the Milwaukee airport as we speak. Well, I won’t upload this to the internets until I get home, because $7 an hour is too much to pay for wireless, especially considering I never made $7 an hour until well into my twenties. But I’m here, at C-9, waiting for a flight to O’Hare, and another to Denver. I have two and a half hours to kill, which may seem stupid, but now that I travel with two metal hinges on either side of my knee, getting to the airport with less than a day of lead-time is usually risking it.

Or not. I’ve started wearing sweatpants and being ultra nice and offering to take off my brace and the whole nine. And because I am being super-accommodating, they don’t give a shit, and let me straight through the line. If I wore jeans over the brace and got to the airport 20 minutes before my flight, I would be detained for a week and a half as the TSA asked me slightly different versions of the same question until I snapped.

I have to admit that I hate sweatpants. I don’t even think I owned a pair until I was 18, and I wore them maybe three times. They don’t (typically) have pockets, so carrying a wallet and keys and tickets and cell phones and all of the other things you typically carry on a trip is impossible, unless you strap on your fanny pack and descend another level further into hell. Any pants without a fly make urinal use limiting, and with all of this senator crusing in the restroom stuff, I’m not that into using a stall. Most of all, sweats feel like pajamas to me, and walking around in public with them is akin to walking around in my underwear. So this time, I wore the sweats, then changed into my jeans on the other side of the checkpoint. That worked okay, aside from the gymnatics involved in changing pants without sitting on a piss-drenched throne, or touching either socked foot to the floor.

Milwaukee was fine this year, although we had way too much to do and see while we were in town, and there were few free moments in between. There wasn’t as much interrogation about the marriage as I’d expected, but we did have a lot to do with regard to the reception next year. All in all, it was a good trip, and I’m glad we got to see everyone, but I’m also ancy about getting back home, and I wish I had another week of vacation.

The Pizza Hut express across the hall from our gate is out of breadsticks. I am not into the idea of a mini pizza, but I would love some god damned breadsticks. No dice. All they have is one pizza supreme that looks like it was made back when slavery was still legal. Looks like it’s an M&M’s dinner tonight, because I’m sure the plane isn’t selling shit.

I should get back to my programming, although I am about to take some dayquil to blast out the minor cold before the plane, and eight-dimensional sight usually complicates my programming ability.

I go to the same McDonald’s by my house all the time, and they constantly screw up drive-through orders. They forget to do special orders (no onion, no pickles), they give me the wrong salad, they make a single cheeseburger into a double and vice-versa, and one in four times, they forget to give you the sandwich. I wrote a really pissy letter to corporate, just to see what form letter they would send back. A day or two later, a regional manager is calling me at home, wanting to talk about the situation. Then a letter arrived with great apologies and coupons for two free meals. Squeaky wheel, but the next time I went, they forgot my salad dressing.

Similarly, Sarah has been sending nasty mail to American Airlines since we got back from our honeymoon, over their inability to actually ship luggage correctly. To ensure success, she got on EDGAR and sent copies of the letter to each person on the board of directors. We got an apology letter on Saturday, along with $500 in vouchers and 10,000 miles. The only thing I wonder is how do you spend a paper voucher for a plane ticket? I don’t think I’ve ever bought a plane ride in person as a cash transaction, unless I was flying it or jumping out of it.

My other random train of thought lately is all of the stuff I used to like that I don’t like anymore. It’s odd, because when I was in New York, I really craved certain things that weren’t available without renting a car and driving to Pittsburgh, and I used to constantly bitch about not having them. Now, for the most part, I do, and a lot of them, I don’t care for anymore.

Case in point: Denny’s. I used to absolutely love that place. Went there for my birthday every year, and spent many a late night there. In Seattle, my Friday night routine after waking up from my post-work slumber was to drive across the 520 bridge to Bellevue, eat a dinner at Denny’s while scribbling in a spiral notebook, then head over to B&N to browse the books and buy one or two or ten. Then stay up reading or writing all night, wake up Saturday afternoon, and sit in bed reading, and basking in the sun through my giant window next to my bed. And New York broke that routine, even though there were a lot of diners. Denny’s was moved to that special treat when I was traveling somewhere else, and I wanted to catch a grand slam and some writing when it was 3AM in Vegas, or Tampa, or DC, or whatever. (Actually, don’t go to that one in DC at 3AM.)

But now, I really don’t like Denny’s. Maybe the food has changed, and I know the menu has changed. Maybe I don’t have any tolerance for the run-down interiors. Maybe it’s because I always accidentally show up on the insipid “kids eat free” night, when you always see a family with 28 kids who should probably be medicated for their hyperactivity, and of course the guy always leaves a 12-cent tip and the servers are so pissed off, it’s impossible to eat there. But seriously, I used to be able to tell you exactly what I wanted from the menu, and now I stare at it forever, thinking “I don’t know…” and I’m never happy with the end result. Maybe I’m growing up/old/stupid.

Other examples: 7-Eleven. I used to go there every night in Seattle, when I finished writing, to get a slurpee. Now I never go there. Nothing there really interests me anymore. And after bitching forever about not having one in NYC, they finally got them, and I think I went twice.

The McRib: used to love it. It never came to New York, but I remember flying home from somewhere, and ending up in the Cincy airport and the McD there had them, and it was pure joy. I ate one in Germany and it was horrid, because the pork is cured weird there or something. They just got them back in CO and I had one - no good.

IHOP: similar to Denny’s. I want to like it because I have some nice memories of the place, as stupid as that may sound. But it also gave me food poisoning this year. And none of the IHOPs here are those little A-frame chapel-type things. The only two I remember in NYC were way the hell out in Queens (I remember going to that one with Julie after we saw Twisted Sister at L’amour) and the one up in the Bronx. I remember eating at one with SiD in Kansas City. My old friend Tom Sample lived across the street from one in Indy in like 95. When Ken Rawlings swung through Seattle once, that’s where we hung out and talked. Me and Marie ended up at one on a Thanksgiving night, because everything was closed. Many nice memories. And memories of spending a week hunched over a toilet, puking my guts out.

The one thing I always missed that I have now is Target. And I wish I didn’t, because I spend about $200 a day there. They do have nice motorized carts there, if you’re a cripple. Even if you aren’t, go borrow some crutches and check it out.

The other thing is Coke. I mentioned the holiday Coke bottles a few posts ago, but they did this new thing this year: they released Coke bottles that look like the old, turn-of-the-century, non-hourglass bottles. They’re from when Coke was a patent medicine filled with cocaine and whatever else, and was in those rubber stoppered bottles that look like old-timey whisky bottles. Well, they’re selling six-packs of those bottles, slightly miniaturized, with a modern crown cap on top, and they are cool as hell. Same Coke as ever, but it always seems to drink better in glass. And they make a nice Molotov cocktail, too. Try doing that with a plastic 2-liter.

Thanksgiving. It’s another one of those things I don’t really care about either way (other than the day off of work), yet other people get completely bent out of shape over. Everyone that is a complete and utter prick is converted into a Nice Good Christian that acts like he cares about his family. Everyone gets all worked up into a frenzy over the idea of waking up at three in the morning to go stand in the freezing cold outside of a big box store, so they can get a $40 DVD player made in China by slave labor that scratches disks and will go completely dead by March. You have to have these specific foods. You have to watch the floats. You have to watch football. You have to gorge until you pass out. And then on Monday, you have to waste 200 man years of labor by telling every person within shouting distance that your grandma’s secret recipe for sweet potatoes involves Mountain Dew, as if we give a fuck. And all of this is to celebrate a group of puritanical, evangelical fuckholes that aren’t my ancestors and probably aren’t yours, who basically stole this country and are used as a touchstone by bigots who waste our time and money by going around and saying it’s okay to beat the shit out of gays, and by the way, the earth is only 47 years old, and it’s proven because it was in a Mel Gibson movie.

So yeah, I have no great love for T-day. I don’t like the attire (“let’s dress up so we can go to grandma’s and pass out!”), I don’t really care for the food (turkey is the one thing that’s the most easily fucked up that you could cook. Hint: if the meat is as dry as a piece of cardboard, you fucked up, no matter how much gravy you hide it with), and I’m not into the whole gorge thing. Thanksgiving does not offer me much in that respect.

My fondest memories of Thanksgiving were going to my former stepfather’s parents for the day. His mom could not cook worth a shit. She seriously couldn’t make a glass of water without fucking it up. If you remember the movie Better Off Dead, the mom cooked this shit that was like a green slime; that’s basically her deal. And since she had 50 years of people lying and saying “everything’s top notch!” she kept making her marshmallow green bean jello oyster surprise. So we’d load out there every year, where my stepfather and his brother and their dad would get completely fucked out of their minds on manhattans, which they drank like I drank Cokes on a hot July day. The other adults would engage in mindless gossip, and if I was smart, I brought a book or something else to do. We then endured the minefield of food, I got a lot of shit because I didn’t eat 29 pounds of overcooked turkey, and then everyone passed out or whatever. The TV had to remain on football; if I touched it, everyone would wake up. Also, the step-grandfather was a blazing racist and would not allow anyone to watch a TV show with “colored entertainers” in it. (Seriously.)

And so I guess that soured me on the whole nostalgic memory thing. And it got even worse when I was required to shell out the gas money and waste hours of driving time to get back to Elkhart for this memorable occasion. And so now, I guess I like some of the idea of food, but not the usual stuff. We had indian food last year, and that was great. New York doesn’t shutter itself down for the holiday - plenty of Jews and Hindus and Chinese to keep the thing running. I just went out here to grab some pre-dinner McDonald’s, and I had to drive about ten miles to find one open.

Blah. A bunch of other stuff is going on. We got two cats last weekend. One is about a year old, all black, and she gets into absolutely everything. The other is about six months old, a mackeral tabby, and is very sick. She had an upper respiratory infection, plus conjuctivitis, and wasn’t eating. She’s almost better, but we have to give her antibiotics and eye medicine, and if any of you have experience in doing this with a kitten, you know our pain. Also, she is almost litter trained, but will occasionally decide to piss all over for no reason. So the house smells wonderful, and we also have this two-front war going on, in that we have to keep the small one in the bathroom or our bedroom 24/7 so she doesn’t piss all over and to keep her germs from the big one. We also have to keep the big one away from the little one, while also keeping her out of the laundry room, the computer room, the outdoors, the trash, the sinks, and so on. And I am certain that the big one thinks she owns the house now, so when we have to let the little one out in a week or so, it will be world war 3. So that’s pretty much been my week.

Not much else. I am slowly reading Denis Johnson’s new one, and I’m digging it. It makes me want to keep writing on my current (I think) project, but I’m not. I need to figure that one out. But John Sheppard just posted a clip of that awful Star Wars thanksgiving special, and I can’t not watch…