I wish I would have kept a journal when I went to high school. Okay, it would have taken more time to carve out the daily entries from the stone tablets way back then, but there are times I wish I had greater memory of day-to-day activities, even if it’s just so I can write another crappy book that’s based on part of my life.

I’ve been thinking back to the past in order to recycle some crap in my head into a new book, and I’ve also been reading threads on SomethingAwful that are absolutely drop-dead hilarious, and I wish I could do something similar. One of the recent threads was about experiences in working at grocery stores, and it contained some of the most hilarious stories about irate customers and general mischief, the sort of thing that is so damn funny because you know there’s no way you could make that stuff up.

And thinking back, I have a lot of funny stories from my days of working at Montgomery Ward back in high school. I worked in the paint department, mixing paint and unloading pallets of boxes of cans, each weighing about ten pounds each. Over the years, I managed to work in almost every department of the store, filling in to get extra hours and unloading trucks at 6AM during the summer for the extra money. I didn’t socialize much during high school because most of my classmates were dicks, so I spent most of my time back in the paint department, huffing mineral spirits and carving wooden paint stirrers into punji sticks and potential ninja weapons.

The general idea of working in a retail store puts you at risk for many encounters with the criminally insane. I don’t know who is responsible for it, but long ago, someone came up with a saying called “the customer is always right,” and that bit of mistruth will make any job behind a cash register sheer hell. There are people who cannot remember how to add two and two who can somehow instantly recite that bit of propaganda. I mean, I would think the small amount of brain matter it would take to store that phrase would also be enough to comprehend why it is impossible to put a lawn tractor on the roof of a Chevette and drive it home, but I’ve seen that one happen.

Monkey Ward was a step up from Target or K-Mart and akin to Sears in their paint offerings. They had their own brand of paint (which was actually superior to almost all other paints, because Wards owned a chemical company from back when it was part of Mobil Oil, and they made an incredible paint for a steal of a price) and we custom mixed it to one of 768 or 863 colors on a chart. We also sold all the fixins’ as far as brushes and drop cloths were concerned, and there were a few bins of wallpaper. But we were peons and jerk-offs, not trained interior decorators. I don’t know how you’re supposed to tell, as there is no accreditation program or professional degree for decorators. You can’t just go, “oh, he has a PhD from Rutgers in wall coverings, he knows his shit.” So I guess price is the only real gauge, and when you’re paying ten bucks a gallon, you aren’t getting shit in the way of design help. Most of the time, people came to me and said “four gallons of #221 in semigloss” or whatever, and I slung that shit out like I was making chocolate shakes in McDonald’s. I’d take their money, tape a can opener to the lid of the shit, and tell them to come back soon. If they got really crotchety about it, I carried the paint to their car, mostly because it gave me a chance to check out the ladies of Housewares on the way back in. But then I quickly forgot the home project in question and went back to seeing what I could break by putting it in the paint mixer.

About once a week though, I’d get one of Them. They would come in with a piece of tile, a scrap of carpet, some wood off of a door frame, a few slips of paper, a magazine cover, and who knows what else. They would then slap all of the shit down on the counter and say “what looks good with this?” I would refrain from saying, “my dick would look good on it, you wanna see?” and tell them that I was, despite my professional appearance as a 16-year-old jagoff who could barely tie his tie plus an ugly maroon paint smock that had more paint explosions than cloth visible, not a professional decorator. My car was six different shades of bondo; I couldn’t match my ties to my shirts, so I bought all white shirts and all grey ties; the biggest thing I’d ever painted in my life were the Led Zeppelin runes in four-foot high letters on public property. And when I told them that they were up shit creek and I would not hold their hand while they compared each of the 863 colors twenty two times to all of their samples, they looked as if I told them I’d just told them I was selling their house to the Viet Cong.

The paint department lived in Four Seasons, which held a mix of different merchandise, depending on the time of the year. In the summer, the lawnmowers, tractors, and weedeater paraphernalia rounded out the area, with kiddie pools and lawn furniture and the barbeque grills. When fall came around, they moved to snowblowers, plows, and tire chains. And as the season started (usually after July or August), the Christmas trees and lights and toys made our department the default playground, as shoppers dumped their cold virus-saturated bumdles of doom in our aisles the terrorize the shelves and convince us all that breeding was a bad, bad, idea. As the defacto toy department of the store, we also had to field the calls and inquiries about the Big Thing of the year. Cabbage Patch dolls made a comeback one year, and we got exactly four of them from the Franklin Park warehouse. In a strange bit of irony, we got all black Cabbage Patch dolls. Even though these insane screaming mother robots were willing to crack someone in the fucking head for one of these dolls, they would dodge into our store, look at the four remaining items in stock, mentally think “I’m not givin’ mah kid a black doll” and then rush back out to look for a “REAL” cabbage patch.

The Nintendo was the sure kick in our collective balls, and that one happened twice in a row. The first time, we got two shipments of four; one in October, and the other on December 24th. We got approximately 427 million phone calls about it for three months straight. I started answering the phone “Montgomery Ward, we have no Nintendos, this is Jon, how may I help you?” 50% of the time, the people would still ask us if we had Nintendos. That remaining four that came in on the 24th was probably a mistake, but when they showed up, I had the front desk page over the intercom that we had them for sale, and they were gone in 20 minutes. Of course, the next year, you’d think they would order 200 dozen of them per store and make up half the company’s profits on game consoles, so they gave us exactly six of them. And twice as many phone calls. And every person that called would ask me, “Do you have any of the TAPES left?” “Do you have any Intendo TAPES?” “TAPES? TAPES?” THEY ARE NOT FUCKING TAPES! THEY ARE CARTRIDGES! THEY CONTAIN A ROM CHIP! NO MOVING PARTS! NO TAPE! NO MAGNETIC MEDIA! IT IS NOT A GOD DAMNED 8-TRACK! “Um, so you got them Mintendo Tapes or not?”

Christmas music was on a loop. It played about 5 hours or so, because there were many times I heard the tape three times. We opened early, we stayed open late, we had extra hours and mad dash sales events and special sales and I usually got a couple of 40-hour weeks, even with school. Our only escape during the day was to go to a boarded-up, cigarette-infested, paneled back room that was our break area, or go out in the mall and fight every fucking degenerate to get a spot in line at the pretzel stand for a lunch of corn dogs and soggy fries. It’s almost sad that I now miss the food at that place, especially considering the number of years it took off my life.

I should talk about this more, because I haven’t even started to discuss the people I worked with. As an aside, this isn’t the stuff I’m researching for a book - I have found a great new idea and I’m working on it, but this is just a way to get the cobwebs out of my head. Anyway, ER is on in 15, so I better get situated.

I uploaded a “preview” of Dealer Wins to lulu today. If you go here, you can download it for free. I say “preview” because on lulu, you are supposed to upload a PDF of a chapter or whatever as a preview, and then people can buy the full PDF as an ebook. Well, the full PDF of the book in press-ready format is 23 megs. I made a crunched-up PDF that’s only about a meg and a half, and made that the preview. So the preview is the whole book, although the photos are all lossy-compressed and dithered and a bit blotchy. They aren’t bad, though. Anyway, click that link and download the preview if you want to look at it without buying it. But you should buy it, of course.

I still haven’t been writing much of anything, other than writing about not writing. I’m at the start of a cold and I tried to avoid eating any sugar all day except for a Coke or two, and now I have a tremendous headache. Yesterday on the train coming home, I tried to think of things besides writing that I really wanted to do to keep busy, things I wanted to research. One was that I wish I could find a lot more information on making my apartment more liveable. Like, on one hand, it would be cool to do more things to make the place soundproof, or put down some nice rugs or different art or whatever, to make it a better environment. Or I always think I should throw out this desk and get something that is really ergo-oriented that would make it more productive to write. And I wish I could find things to make an apartment more efficient, as far as storage or whatever. But most of the sites I find are Pottery Barn sort of bullshit. I’m not interested in buying more things to have more things; I would, however, buy better solutions that would replace things and make the space more usable.

The other thing is I want to plan out my travel schedule for next year much better. I would really like to go back to Hawaii again, but I’d also like to do a lot of other things. Like, I’d love to go to Tucson and visit the Pima Air Museum. It’s across the street from Davis-Monthan AFB, better known as “the boneyard”, or the big place in the desert where old planes go to rest and eventually die. Some new planes go there for temporary storage; older stuff sits in formation, with crew chiefs occasionally scavenging parts to keep other jets current. And some planes are destroyed, which sucks, as I’d really like to buy an old B-52, either for my own personal use, or just to convert into a house out at my place in Colorado. Anyway, that might be an interesting long weekend, and I’d like to think of a few more of those and line it all up in advance.

Blah, this headache is killing me. I think I may nuke it from orbit with some Tylenol PM and go blotto.

Now that I have the new book done, things have gone back to normal, and I can get back to my regular routine of dental horror stories. I went in Saturday for a session that ended up being fairly pain-free, except for the fact that the TV set was tuned to the VH1 top 20 video countdown. Maybe I’m getting old, but I guess I am totally out of touch with what kind of music is on the radio these days. It’s bad when you watch a half hour of videos, and the best one is by Velvet Revolver. Anyway, I got my crappy, always-falling-out temporary crown replaced by a nice, new, expensive, firmly adhered crown. When they had to take out the old one and the assistant went after me with a medieval-looking pair of pliers, I got a little freaked out, but then I remembered there are no nerve endings there anymore. A few minutes later, I was on my way, my tongue constantly running over the new, glossy porcelain. The bad news is that I have to go back next week for another root canal and some kind of involved dental cleaning that will probably resemble some kind of North Vietnamese torture technique.

That said, I don’t seem to be creating much of anything these days. Maybe I should end this entry and find something better to do.

I am happy to announce that I have finished my fourth book, which is called Dealer Wins: Misadventures in the New Las Vegas. (Click that link to go to my pitifully underdone web page for the book, which I am trying to finish as I overindulge in fun-size 3 Musketeers bars.)

The book is a collection of my travel stories about Las Vegas, plus a handful of new essays about various Vegas-related stuff. It also has a ton of black and white photos that I took. The stories and photos are the same as those on my travel site, but I heavily edited the stories. This isn’t a guidebook, or a tell-all “I worked as a stripper” or “and then we buried the prostitute in the desert” sort of book. It’s just me and my observations on the place, and hopefully you will find it funny and interesting.

It is currently available from lulu.com. Their price for the book is $9.99 plus shipping, and it’s 150 pages perfect-bound, with a nice color cover that I designed myself, using my own photos. I think it’s the best cover design of all of my books. I do have an ISBN (1-4116-1460-7) and it is listed in Books in Print and distributed by Ingram, which means it will be listed in all of the online stores (Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Wal-Mart, etc.) But it won’t start to show up for 6-8 weeks, and the bad news is that the MSRP of the book is actually $12.99, so you pay more for the same thing. I know a lot of people are well-rooted to Amazon, because I am too, but you can buy this for three bucks less and get it months earlier.

And while you’re there, you can also get the new edition of Summer Rain, or pick up one of John Sheppard’s books. I am going to order a couple dozen, so if you want to buy one in person, I will sell them for ten bucks. I also, for the first time, am offering review copies to anyone who will post (on the web, at some googleable site) a review and/or some linkage back to me. So contact me about that.

I finished and submitted Dealer Wins, the Las Vegas book, last week. I’m waiting for a proof to approve, and apparently the USPS tried to deliver it yesterday to my office, but since nobody was there, they got a slip. Or maybe they didn’t, I’m trusting the USPS web site on this one. Anyway, I might or might not get to actually see it tomorrow. I’m pretty happy with how it looks in the PDF, and the pricing turned out about as good as I could have hoped. It will be available on the publisher’s site right away, and be on Amazon et al in like 6-8 weeks, or whatever. It’s kindof stupid because it will actually be $3 cheaper to order from the publisher, and I make like 40 cents more and it’s faster, but I’m guessing most people will wait until it is on Amazon.

This, like other books I have done, doesn’t really feel done at the end. It seems like finishing a book is a qualitative thing, and it’s more a matter of “I’ve looked at this 937 times and I’m sick of it” rather than “it’s end-to-end complete”. I mean, it’s not like building a brick wall where you can just say, “it’s this tall and this long and this thick and the cement is dry - it’s done.” When I send a book out, I always feel like there’s something missing, something I didn’t do with it. And usually, by the time I actually look at the finished product weeks or months later, I like it. So we’ll see.

I have no idea what I am doing next. I have a book of short stories about Bloomington that I want to finish, but I hate them all and I absolutely can’t motivate myself to work on that. I would like to write another book in the vein of Rumored to Exist, but I don’t even know where to start. I actually had a good start on one, and I guess the notes are okay, but it was a false start and I really need to think of something new.

I haven’t done much else this weekend. I did go to Best Buy with the intention of blowing several hundred dollars on CDs. I ran the gauntlet, going from A to Z twice, picking out everything I wanted, and I think I only ended up with like five things, and two of those were remasters of Queensryche albums that were very low on the “buy someday, but in no hurry” list. I mean, I even got a George Lynch solo album, I was grasping at straws so much. I don’t know if I was just in a bad mood (which I was) or if Best Buy has no good music anymore (they don’t - but at least they are cheaper than Virgin) or if I simply don’t know what I want in music anymore. I still want to push to get the music collection above a thousand at some point. It’s roughly 75 away, and it’s getting there, but won’t happen by the end of the year or anything.

I’m bored. I’m tempted to go into Manhattan and shop for books or something, but I have a pile of books taller than me to read, and I should think more about this whole writing thing.