It’s been so damn hard to write; I don’t think I’ve ever had writer’s block this bad. I think during Rumored it was almost this bad, to the point where I got anxiety attacks just by sitting down at the computer and trying to start a writing session. It’s worse than that now; I get migranes before I even start typing. And I don’t have a half-written book in front of me that requires attention. Now, I just have the blank page, and any half-baked idea or outline I have for book three usually gets destroyed within moments. I’m not really sure how I will get through this, mostly because I’m not sure what kind of writer I am, and what kind of book is the next target. I know that sounds stupid, but it’s true.

I do have some almost-done projects that will keep me moving for a bit. I am starting to pay more attention to the glossary and I think I will eventually make a printed book out of it. Right now, I’ve just been doing dumb stuff to the layout, but I’m on the verge of editing stuff, and taking care of the pain in the ass stuff to get it published. I don’t think a god damned person will buy a copy of this, so I’m essentially paying a few hundred dollars to have my own printed and bound copy, and to give away a few copies to other people. I also have a book of journal entries from 1997 that I’ve been editing, and I think that will eventually make a good book.

Nothing else is going on. I’m nursing a cold, so I feel horrible. I should get back to dicking around with the glossary.

Not much is going on here. The Zappa book I am reading is Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa by Kevin Courrier. I’m about 200 pages into it, and I like it so far. I think in some sense it fails to be critical about Zappa’s shortcomings, but it does give a different perspective than Zappa’s first-person biography, which is the only other book I’ve read about him.

I’m not interested in reading about Zappa because I am the sort of person that has memorized every single song of his. Rather, I am interested in how he created this whole monster, the way he started making very confusing and confrontational music and brought it to a worldwide cult status of attention. I wish I could do the same, and it makes me jealous in a way because music and performance is such an easy to comprehend format for people. It has such a legitimate place in society, it is easy to distribute and easy to perform live, and it can be a very active performance or a more passive thing to enjoy. I feel the literature’s downfall is that in order to enjoy it, you have to sit there with a book in hand and get through 200 pages of it. The bar is so high for entrance to it, that it’s hard to get a large number of people interested. I wish I would’ve asked my parents for a guitar when I was ten, and then played it for hours every day. It makes me very confused and depressed about what I am doing, and what I should be doing, not to mention that I just put this book out and I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever done and the only legitimate feedback that I got was that I should go back to writing stupid first-person stories or that I should find a psychiatrist and make them read the book so they could “cure” me.

Of course, the only answer is that Rumored is the right direction for me, because I don’t think there’s any legitimate value in me writing another book like Summer Rain or some kind of Cometbus ripoff stories like Air in the Paragraph Line. I think there are a lot of popular writers out there that are selling lots of books writing coming-of-age, punk-rock, brat-pack stuff. And I think my only tangible skill is to take what they do and destroy it, satirize it, blasphemize it, and take their bold statements on society and laugh at them. I feel more people, or at least some people, should see this and enjoy it as the opposite of these books that are easy to hate. Rock and roll was created because people didn’t want to listen to “Who’s that Doggy in the Window.” I don’t want to read Wally Lamb. I’m sure others don’t want to, either.

I guess a lot of Rumored was the beginning of an experiment to find my own form and technique that isn’t just a story about a boy and a story about a girl or whatever. The way I structured the book was an attempt at changing that, and it didn’t work as well as I wanted, so the next book will pick up on the flaws in structure and story. But it won’t change with regard to tone and content. It will still be obscene, and dark, and violent, and funny. (It may not have any puke jokes, since that pretty much threw everyone.) I don’t want to go down the road that Burroughs did with cutups and stuff. I am finding less and less value in Burroughs as I continue. (I now find almost no value in Kerouac, and I’ve always disliked Ginsberg, both as a person and a writer.)

Anyway, I have an idea for a book, but I can’t talk about it. But I think it might work. I’m going to take notes on it all weekend. I think I might do NaNoWriMo again in November, and write a draft then, but I will continue working on it after them. I’ve come to realize that writing fast is not my forte, and it’s better that I take my time and nurture my thoughts a bit more, so I can come up with stronger writing.

I just ate Chinese food, and I’m ready for a nap.

I’m so tired. I was out late last night, and I haven’t caught up yet. I also had to drag 40 lbs of laundry to the laundromat and back today. Every day, I want to start enforcing strict hours on when I write. And every day, I get home from work, do two or three things that have to be done, look at my watch, and it’s 12

and the alarm’s going off in another few hours.

I got a new Zappa book that’s pretty incredible, but also pretty huge. It’s hard to haul on the subway, but worth it. I’ll review it when I’m done.

Phone call…

I watched about half of this new show Boomtown last night, which was mildly entertaining. There are far too many police dramas on TV right now, but its little gimmick is that it is nonlinear from multiple points of view. It makes people think they are smart, and it’s slightly easier to get caught up when you start watching late into the program.

Anyway, on the show, one of the cops had this list of things he wanted to do in his lifetime. I didn’t catch the setup to this, but it’s something that I see in many other journals. For some reason, on the subway ride to work today, I thought about how great it would be to make a list of 100 things like this, and then a year from now visit the list and see what had been done. Then I sat down at the computer and came up with like seven things. I guess I have a few more now, but my list is very testosterone-centric, and I’m not really into the whole Mountain Dew Xtreme Sport kind of thing, that’s all I could think of. There are a lot of places I want to visit, but there aren’t a lot of “humanitarian” sorts of things, or the typical ones like having a kid or getting married. I need to think about this list a lot more before I publically put it out there.

I also think I should put out a list of 100 things that I’ve already done that other people should put on their damn lists. I mean, I’ve stood at ground zero of the first atomic bomb explosion, flown in a biplane, petted a lion, gambled in Vegas, been to the top of the (then) tallest building in the world, wrote a book, shot an automatic weapon, and touched a moon rock. I don’t know what use this list would be, but it would be interesting to actually write this all down.

Nothing else is going on here; I’ve had a huge headache all night, and I’m stuck on this one battle in Final Fantasy X. The TV is all crap tonight, and I can’t really get into a book or some writing. I think I will see if there are some Star Trek reruns on now.

It’s been good weather for this Peter Gabriel soundtrack to the movie Rabbit-Proof Fence. I have no idea what the movie is about, just that it is Australian and has to do with two aboriginal girls. But the soundtrack is very dark, detailed, and somewhat ambient. It’s the perfect thing to have in the player when I am writing, and since it has been cold and pouring rain outside, it fits that climate well. I almost hope the weather is like this all weekend so I can put this CD on repeat and keep the words flowing.

I’ve been keeping steady with this Vegas story, but it feels like the more I write on “documentary” stuff like this, the more I harm myself for writing anything like Rumored again. It’s very difficult to think of following this book, especially since opinion on it has been so strange and mixed. I know I can’t go back to writing first-person, coming-of-age kinda-biographical stuff like Summer Rain, even though I essentially have another book up on blocks right now that deals with that. Sometimes I feel like I’m back to 1994 again about what to do with my writing. It’s very depressing to think about it.

I still have a stack of copies of Rumored to Exist sitting on my bookcase, awaiting the post office but I don’t know who to send them to. If you’re reading this and you don’t have a copy and you think you could somehow con a couple of other people into buying one, mail me and I will send you one. I’m not going to send them to every idiot who writes me like they are a free sample of nutrasweet gum (remember those?) but I would like more people to check it out.

Did they ever have an Apocalypse Now video game? Do you think it would cost a lot to license that shit from Coppola? I just found out that Take Two, the company that did GTA3, has an office about two doors down from me. I could swing in there, talk that shit up, and just sit around sketching up crap on a whiteboard and then sending it off to Korea or whatever to get coded. Who wrote the engine for Medal of Honor Frontline? Shit, I should look some of this stuff up on google.

OK, I’ve got time to kill until the new ER, so I’m gonna play some games.