I’m waiting for dinner to show, listening to Adam Marsland’s band Cockeyed Ghost, a CD I got for free a long time ago (99? somewhere back in Seattle, anyway). I don’t even know what category in which to put this CD, except that I never would have bought it on my own, and now I think it’s one of my favorites. I guess if you started with something like Verve Pipe or something and added in more of the whole singer/songwriter tradition of the late seventies with a bit of later Beach Boys (after they were done trying to get chicks on the beach and were trying to tell you how truly fucked up life really was) and made the whole thing fairly modern with a decent dose of alt-indie sprinkles. Anyway, I don’t know why explain any of this except I don’t want people thinking I just sit around listening to Gwar all the time.

I have been on and off sick all week, mostly with this pinkeye thing. My right eye has been alternately been seeping battery acid and/or wanting to clog shut and/or feeling like it’s got a large grain of sea salt stuck deep under the eyelid. I think the best thing you can do for pinkeye is not mess with it, which of course is exactly what I do on a constant basis. It seems to get about 10% better a day, although staring at a computer all day also makes it get about 8% worse, so maybe it will clear up by the fourth of July. I also have a slight runny nose, just enough to mess with me, and a certain amount of wheeziness that is probably just because of the 4% humidity in my apartment. I really do wish I had one of those Bacta tanks like they had in Empire Strikes Back so I could just sleep in some fluid healing gel all night and maybe make some headway on this whole cold season disaster.

I woke up about three hours early today, mostly because I called in sick yesterday and slept all day, and decided rather than sit in bed and listen to the radiator wheeze for three hours while tossing and turning, I’d just give up, take a shower, and go to work early. I found that before eight in the morning (at least at this point in the year), my cube is absolutely flooded with sunlight as the sun rises. It was nice to eat breakfast and get a ton of stuff done before people started showing up, and it was even nicer to split just after five and go home early. I saw a completely different crowd on the train, which mixed things up nicely. It’s so weird to see the same people on the train every day, and yet never know who they are or what they do. It was nice to see some new faces.

I’m re-reading Naked Lunch for the first time in years, and enjoying it so far. There is a new edition that came out in 2002, based on some old thought-to-be-lost drafts that were recently found in a library collection. Burroughs is a strange influence on me; I think if you read Rumored to Exist and any Burroughs back to back, you might see how I structurally and stylistically owe a lot to him. But I think when you talk to most people about William S. Burroughs, they assume queers and junkies and whatnot, and that’s not my gig. It’s like how I’m reluctant to tell people that I’m a big Bukowski fan, because they’ll automatically assume I write bad poetry about getting drunk and beating women, when that’s entirely not why he interests me. Oh well.

Looks like I will have a reading in Boston on the first Friday of June. I am planning on making a min-vacation of it, driving up for a long weekend and exploring points north. More details when I have them. I also have a brand new/never published snippet of a piece in the next issue of Zeno’s e-zine, whenever it comes out. And I got a royalty check from iUniverse for a whopping $28.85! Drinks are on me! (If you’re drinking Big K soda. Limit 1.)

Food’s here…

This has been the longest week in the god damned world since they switched to the 7-day calendar. I forget when they actually did that, but I remember writing the Gregorian to Julian crap in Pascal about 15 years ago, and I seem to remember something about the Mayans using ten-day weeks, but maybe I just made that up, I’m not sure. Anyway, I’ve been slogging through a cold all week that hasn’t done a lot to my respiratory system, but has made my eyes all runny and gunky and crud-encrusted, and it’s made it impossible to focus on the screen for too long. To add to the mix, I’ve got this differently-resolutioned tablet PC that I use in bed, and today I got a new LCD panel at work, and it supports higher resolution, hence tinier fonts. So my eyes have felt about ready to explode all week, and I think I might just sleep all weekend, except for the thing about wanting to write.

Wanting to write: I am still picking away at this book, or ideas about this book. I hate the story I have written so far, but I read all of my random notes are really incredibly funny. So I need to spend more time on getting that stuff to work out, or drink a bunch of Robitussen, or something. But mostly, I need to get more time into this thing. I wish I could work out some kind of short stories from this material so I could put them up here and get some reaction, but everything’s in too much of a jumble right now.

I had this intensely realistic dream this morning that I was riding in some bike race around the city, and I had it planned that after the first ten miles, I would be right at the front of my apartment and I could stop to get a drink and go to the bathroom. So I chugged this entire 64-ounce glass of cold water, and then I went to the bathroom to pee, and I pissed for a moment and then started urinating pure blood. The dream continued and I was trying to clean up this blood, and then I woke up and it was about six in the morning, and I really had to pee. Let me tell you, that was the scariest piss in my entire life, because I was 100% certain I would start bleeding and need to rush to the ER to get a new set of kidneys installed. But all was well.

A few weeks ago, I had another very vivid dream in which I went to this gun place in Florida  and I was going to take an AK-47 class. When I got to the classroom, there were 4 or 5 other dudes, and… Saddam Hussein! He was secretly being held at a prison outside of Tampa, and through some kind of federal work-release school tuition program, he was allowed to take classes, so he took this gun course. I was really scared to even look at him or say anything, because I was certain if I somehow disrespected him in some subtle way, a couple of Iraqi expatriate goons would jump out of an alley some night and destroy me ten times over. But, surprisingly, he turned out to be a really cool guy. He was cracking a lot of jokes as the instructor taught us how to field-strip the AK-47, and he even gave me his mini-butterfinger bar from his Lunchables when we all stopped for lunch break. At the end of the class, I got him to change my answering machine message to freak people out. It was a pretty abnormal dream.

That said, I’m about ready to hit it. I haven’t been taking any Nyquil lately, but I might just dose up a bit to make sure I sleep in tomorrow morning.

I went to New Jersey yesterday, in an effort to see something other than my job and my apartment for once. It was okay. I’ve been trying to sleep without Tylenol PM lately, and went through the whole week without taking any. By Friday night at about 11

, I was pretty much dead, and fell asleep. That meant I woke up way early and spent the morning reading in bed. After that, I went to Neptune for a grilled cheese, then hopped the subway down to 34th street. Then I got a ticket and got on a PATH train to New Jersey for the trip to the Newport Mall.

I know a lot of people go to NJ every day, but it’s still a rare novelty for me to take the PATH. It’s a completely different train system than the MTA, with different cars, different announcements, little paper tickets, and fairly clean train stations that look much more modern than the century-old New York system. I only go to Newport maybe once a year, and it always reminds me of when I first lived in New York and found it a really Big Deal to go out there.

I guess part of it is that I never go to malls anymore unless I’m in another city on vacation, and I have this strange obsession with them. Even when I am not buying stuff, when I’m not shopping, I still used to love to go to malls and just walk around and look at people. I grew up working in the Concord Mall after years of riding my bike there as a kid, and then I spent a lot of college going to the mall in Bloomington to do my laundry, go to Morgenstern’s, shop at Target, and just walk around the place. In Seattle, when I didn’t really have any money to do anything for the first year I was there, I would always drive to different malls, trying to find new ones to check out. I know that all sounds strange and pathetic, and I know a lot of people think the mall is the death of society and the symbol of homogenization of our culture, but I guess I see it differently. A mall is a huge open space that’s always static, the perfect place to go during the winter when you can’t walk around outside, but strolling a mile or two indoors might get things going. The culture of the mall is very relaxing, at least to me, and it always seemed futuristic in the sense that so many different wares are presented in this single modern building, the next step toward just having a teleporter that magically made corn dogs and new CDs for you to consume.

New York City doesn’t have malls, of course. You’re supposed to go from store to store in the rain and sleet and shop from an even more limited selection that’s marked up 400% because the place has to pay an insane rent to keep the store going, and you’re supposed to like it. I don’t care about the shopping aspect, seeing as I just buy everything I need online, but the giant open space aspect is something I miss. There are malls within a dozen or two miles of NYC, but without a car, most of them are not reachable. I know that seems silly, seeing as we lived in Elkhart and would drive to South Bend to shop all the time, but a Target store four miles away from me here is practically unreachable because it’s not on a subway line.

I got out to Jersey City, and the first thing I notice off the train is the faint perfumy smell of whatever they use to clean out the stations. It smells almost exactly like some kind of baby powder air freshener that was in my mom’s old station wagon in the summer of ‘93, when I had to borrow it every night and drive to my third-shift job. So in addition to memories of the summer of ‘99 and when I first explored the PATH, I also have memories of Indiana twelve years ago as I walk up the tile-lined tunnel that empties out to the street level.

The area around the Newport Mall is that sort of generic suburban commercial genre of architecture, with lots of five or ten story office towers covered in mirrored or emerald glass, belonging to anonymous insurance companies. It’s a drastic change from the buildings-everywhere look of Manhattan, where everything is a hundred years old and brick, instead of late Eighties corporate expansion modernism. It reminds me of the east side of Seattle, or the north side of Indy, or any outlying part of a major California city. The transition from Penn Station to the open air surrounding these buildings always astonishes me. It also makes me think that I’m some kind of weirdo, the only person who actually enjoys being around office sprawl architecture instead of the look of New York City.

You have to walk through an office building to get to the mall, and then you’re in a typical Simon mall. Simon owns a bajillion malls in America, including College Mall in Bloomington; Northgate Mall in Seattle; and Newport Centre in Jersey. I can tell I’m in one of their malls the moment I set foot in it, just from the arrangement of the stores and the look of the common areas. It seems like every one of their malls is a wormhole into some other part of my past, which is another reason I like to go there.

I didn’t actually spend a lot of time at the mall once I got there; I was mostly interested in the trip, in killing a few hours to get out of the house and do something different. I made a couple of laps of all of the stores, walking through the three stories and looking at the shops for anything I might need or want to buy. I did spend some time at Sears looking at power tools, but didn’t really think it would be worthwhile to spend a few hundred bucks on a table saw and then haul it home on the PATH. I also went to the pet store and looked at the dogs, wishing I had a big house with a yard so I could get one or two of them. Mostly I just window-shopped, then got bored and headed back to Manhattan, so I could go to Best Buy and blow some money on new DVDs.

I had a state tax check burning a hole in my pocket this weekend too, but I dumped it into E*Trade and bought some stock. Despite the fair amount of stupid discretionary spending I’ve done this year, I’ve actually managed to sock away some cash. I wonder if that trend will continue. (Probably not, especially when I start thinking about vacation again.)

Made tacos tonight, for the first time in a while. Sunday turned into taco night for a while, a worthwhile tradition. I just finished reading a book about the post-Soviet expatriate bubble when capitalism briefly flourished and everyone bought lots of Russian bonds at 220% interest and drank thousand-dollar champagne like it was kool-aid, until the bottom fell out in ‘98 or so. I have a stack of other books to read now, I need to find out what is next. It’s good reading weather, dark and cold outside, the perfect conditions for bundling up in bed with a good book…

I just finished snaking out my tub drain with an $8 auger I bought at the National Wholesale Fernandez store next to work. (It is so nicknamed after a coworker who has far too strange of an attraction to the place, buying made-in-China snack food by the cubic ton.) I extracted a good five years’ worth of male pattern baldness in a greasy, black, slimy turd hanging off the end of the corkscrew tip of the low-tech endoscopy tool. I hope this means my shower will drain in under an hour from now on, but I’m expecting many repeat performances, so I’m glad I finally made the investment.

Speaking of roto-rootering, I just ate an immensely hot Indian meal from the local delivery joint. They are pretty bipolar as far as how they spice the food. Sometimes, the vindaloo is about as spicy as a mean cinnamon applesauce, and other times, it’s eternal damnation to a weekend on the throne, after you drink a gallon of milk to kill off the burning in your mouth. I never ate Indian food at all before I got to New York, except for maybe Simms’ experiments from cookbooks. For whatever reason, Bloomington had no Indian restaurants when I was in school, and I don’t even know why I never found any in Seattle. It’s possible that my whole digestive malady during those years, plus my white-bread childhood, made me avoid anything spicy. Now, I actually like the stuff.

I should probably write something about the fact that Hunter S. Thompson killed himself on Sunday. It was weird to hear about that, although I agree with the concensus that he’s probably overdue by about 30 years, with all of the shit he’s pulled in his lifetime. It’s strange, because HST is in many ways a huge influence on the work I’ve done and the path I chose with some of my fiction, but I didn’t choose to do the kind of journalism he did. And while he had a couple of really great books and some pretty good moments in his articles, his body of work is also pretty small when you discount the volumes that are nothing but reprints of his articles and letters. And there’s Rum Diary, which was a great book, but totally not his style. Compare that to someone like Burroughs or Kerouac or Steinbeck, and it makes you wonder what the role of media stuntman really leaves behind. Years from now, only the Johnny Depp caricature of the man will remain, and nobody will remember his interaction with the media regulars, the politicans, or the sport coaches. All that will be left will be a few books that don’t entirely add up to the life he lived.

I’m sad to see him go, but if he had his reasons, it’s his life. I mean, the rumor is that he was having health problems, with a broken leg, some hip and back surgeries, and a lot of time with his ass in a chair. Maybe it got worse, maybe a doctor told him he’d never walk again or he’d need another painful surgery or seven. I don’t know why he put the .45 through his head, but if he felt he didn’t have another ten volumes of investigative journalism ahead of him or twenty years of twilight in a wheelchair and didn’t want to live a life of shitting and pissing into plastic tubes in a hospital bed, well that’s his game.

The livejournal group for HST has other thoughts on the matter, and they’ve spent the last few days whining the most inane babble about Thompson’s death. Most of it goes like this: “D00D, I’VE BEEN READING HUNTER FOREVER, SINCE LIKE 2003 AT LEAST, AND I DID MY SENIOR PAPER ON HIM, AND OH MAN, WHAT A LOSS OF A VOICE FOR OUR GENERATION! I MEAN, FUCK CHIMPY BUSH AND AMERIKKKA AND NOW WE DON’T HAVE DOCTOR GONZO TO HELP US. OH DUDE, PASS THE BONG MAN. HERE’S A 47-PAGE TONE POEM I WROTE THE OTHER NIGHT AT THE SKATE PARK ABOUT HOW I FEEL ABOUT LOSING THE GREATEST MIND SINCE THAT NIRVANA DUDE.” Basically that, about 478 times a day. I should unsubscribe.

I ordered another laptop bag. I think I’ve bought three since Christmas. I can’t find one that fits right and holds the laptop and feels comfortable. I have this Ogio one on the way, and it looks a little bit better. I had a Trager bag that was perfect, but after about a million miles and four years, every strap and zipper and buckle was broken or fucked, and I gave up on it. I think Toshiba makes some “solutions” for carrying the damn computer, but that basically means they got some cheapo company in Korea to make Jansport bag knockups they could price up at four times their value. Meanwhile, my 15-year-old IU backpack is holding up fine. Too bad it doesn’t hold my laptop.

OK, the new Wired is here, so I have to go read that and make fun of every other page.

It’s Friday. Half of my bookcase ordeal is over. I bought two bookcases from Target, and had them delivered to work, since I am 100% certain that any package left outside my apartment during the day would be stolen. Yesterday, I took home the shelves and hardware for one of the bookcases, and today, I slugged home the long side boards. Despite my totally ripped and muscular apperance, I’m not exactly in shape, and after hauling home that shit, I felt like Jesus carrying the cross or something. Okay, Jesus had people throwing shit at him, but he didn’t have any stairs, turnstiles, or New York subway riders to deal with. I got the damn thing home and assembled, and it’s now next to my dresser and full of books. I have pretty much all of my books off the floor now, and have another new bookcase to spare, so I’m pretty happy and ready to rush out and buy a shitload more books.

I’m slightly sick today, in that limbo of almost catching a cold where I want to sleep for days and eat nothing but soup and Gatorade. This is caused by the rapid swing of climate here in New York, and my heater’s lack of reaction to it. This happens so much in the winter that I know a good dose of vitamins, a lot of orange juice, and many naps will make it clear up in a day or two. It’s a good weekend for sleeping and doing nothing, too. I have to go to the dentist tomorrow to get a new crown fitted, but other than that, I’m hoping to sit around and read and play with the new computer and do little else. I’m slowly learning more neat new tips at tricks about the Tablet PC and about OneNote, the Microsoft program that’s designed for free-form notes and scribbles and other organizational doodling. I’m actually trying to figure out a good way to post OneNote pages straight to this journal, so you’ll go here and just see a page of images that look like my notebook page. I don’t really want to do that every single day, but it would be nice to do sometimes, like if I was trying to explain something that begged for a drawing.

I am still thinking about books and book ideas, and I’m back to the concept that I should write a book in Summer Rain’s style that covers all of my consulting experience back in the golden days of computers, from 1991-1995, basically. Every time I read Bukowski’s Post Office, I think I should do a book exactly like that, but about all of my old days in UCS. Well, I’d change the names, glue together the events a bit, and focus on the funny and ironic events. I need to start taking some notes on this and see if I can do it or not.