I don’t really feel like writing in this, but I feel I should. Lots of other stuff up, not enough time to mess around.

I started writing down books I’m reading. A list of what I’ve read sofar this summer is here. At some point, I’d like to make a better page with reviews, buy links, dates, etc etc but I don’t have time right now. Reading the books is work enough.

I’ll be in Indiana in a week and a day. I’m getting a bit nervous for too many reasons to list. I’m also writing about Indiana again, but I’m not that nervous about it.

OK, back to work.

It is so hot here, I’m afraid the computer will start melting at any moment. I just filled the bathtub with cold water and sat in there for a while. That’s not bad; it would be better if my laptop worked in the water.

I’ve been piddling with a short story about when I worked as a computer consultant back in Indiana, in the student labs. A lot of weird shit happened on a daily basis, and I didn’t think much of it at the time, but it was really like being in the army or something, we had so many different people working on different things. And every night I worked in the library, it was like Saving Private Ryan, only I didn’t have a gun or anything. So I think there’s enough there to get a few thousand words on a page.

My friend Andrea is in town briefly, and we got together for lunch at John’s Pizza and later for dinner at one of the Indian places on curry row. She’s got a very atypical appreciation for the city that I can’t fully explain. Most people (myself included) who go to a different place try to explain it by comparing it to another point of basis. For example, I might (and did) say, “Alamosa’s about as big as Goshen. But they’ve got a Safeway like one from Seattle.” But A has seen enough cities in enough different eras to appreciate it from a different angle, so that’s cool. She keeps bumping in here during other trips to Montrel or Sweden or whatever, and it’s always cool to see her. I wish I could convince more friends from way back to pop through the city and hang out, too. I don’t really have a great motive to brainwash them into thinking New York is the greatest city in the world or whatever, but it’s always cool to see people, and New York draws more people than Elkhart or something.

Too damn hot. I’m going to watch a few more episodes of The Osbournes. Marie gave me a tape with all of them, and last night I saw my first couple. I love Ozzy and have for years - I saw him back in 96 at the Tacoma Dome, but have been playing the tapes for years before. It’s a cute little show, and usually I avoid shit that everyone and their uncle thinks is neato and trendy, but this is an exception. It’s pretty good stuff.

Maybe if I keep my feet in a bucket of water, I’ll feel cooler…

I’m back. I’ve been back for a week, I just haven’t been in the right state to get back into this. It was a long trip and everything went great, but it was also the kind of thing that made returning to New York difficult, and I’ve spent the last week not really able to work on anything.

The good news is that Rumored to Exist is out, and it’s at Barnes and Noble and I got my first six copies in the mail last week. It looks incredible, and having the book in my hands as a real book and not a bunch of laserprinter paper feels great. But I have no idea how to tell people about it, and I am not the salesperson type. So please check it out, and read it online, and tell other people or mention it on your site or whatever else you can do to help. I think people will really enjoy the book, it’s just a matter of getting it to them.

I am oscillating between two writing projects, and I’m not sure which one will take. The first is called The Device, and it is a time-travel story I wrote a while ago that I’ve been trying to get into a book for a few years now. The other is another book about Bloomington, something that takes place after Summer Rain and basically fixes a lot of things that were wrong in there. I’m not sure which one will happen, but I’m sortof gravitating toward the Bloomington thing, and I plan to visit there when I’m in Indiana in two weeks, so that might be the catalyst for the whole thing.

I’ve been reading a lot lately, mostly because it’s too damn hot to do anything but sit in one place. I’m working on this book by Joseph Heller that talks about his early life, his childhood. He grew up on Coney Island, a Russian Jew during the depression. His dad died when he was five, so everyone worked a million odd jobs to get by. But the way he describes the neighborhood, the boardwalk in its heyday, is the kind of writing I enjoy. I go to Coney Island maybe once a year, and it’s pretty much a shithole now. But there are these little glimpses of a more majestic past that intrigue me. I wonder what it would be like to live there, to have the ocean as your backyard and have all of Brooklyn and Manhattan in front of you. I’m only 50 pages into the book, but I’ve always been a big fan of Heller’s since I found a battered copy of Catch-22 in my parents’ books. (My parents were not literary by any means, but it must have been my mom that bought some of the grocerystore paperpacks that I eventually stole years later - stuff like Fear of Flying, The Terminal Man, and The Godfather.)

I saw the movie The Bourne Identity this Saturday, in a rare trip to the theatres. Since they closed the old Steinway theatre, so the “talk through the whole movie” crowd has moved to the multiplex where I usually go. That means I pretty much can’t go to movies like Men in Black and I either have to go to a really late show, or to a movie that I know no adolescent Queens boys would like. And that’s fine, but it means I go less. Anyway, Bourne was a good movie, and had one of those prototypical Robert Ludlum thrillride suspense plots. As much as you want to make fun of me, I think Matt Damon’s a capable actor, and handled the lead in this well. Good action took place with the beautiful background of Europe. I realize I’m saying nothing about the movie itself, but it was worth a watch, and I enjoyed getting out of the house for the evening.

Lots of movies lately, lots of books, and lots of heat. It will be nice to go to Indiana in the beginning of August only because I will have an air-conditioned car.

Gotta go finish my Big Mac…

I’m packing it up and getting ready to head out. Tomorrow, I fly to Las Vegas, pick up a car, and drive to the Hacienda, which is out by the Hoover Dam. (Not to be confused with the old Hacienda, which was imploded a couple of years ago.) Then on Sunday, I drive to Alamosa, Colorado and hang out there for four days. I stay at a Best Western, and basically just see my land and check out things. Then it’s back to Vegas for two nights at the Tropicana. Should be a decent week.

I think I broke my toe last night, though. I’ve had a lot of misery with my feet over the last year - gout, pulled muscles, and flat feet - so this really sucks. I had my suitcase out, my hardshell samsonite, and I put it in the hallway to air out. I forgot, and when I went to get a drink of water in the middle of the night, BAM! I just thought I stubbed it, and it was OK all day, but when I got my shoes off tonight, it was pure murder. The middle toe is all purple right now, like a ring of purple. I am not going to a doctor, because aside from the fact that doctors can never fix anything, I know that there’s nothing you can do for a broken toe except tape it to the neighbor toe and load up on pain meds. So I got some tape, and I got my little “bootie” from when my gout was killing me, and I got some Tylenol, and it’s fine. I think it will be decent for walking if it is taped up; the middle toe isn’t that important. But when your big toe is messed up, you are fucked. I learned that the hard way last year.

Not a lot else, just packing. I hate that I never know what music format the rental car takes. Ideally, I would just pack MiniDiscs and a cassette adaptor, but now some cars have a CD in them. So I pack a mix of CDs and MDs, or I end up going to a Best Buy or WalMart and buying a bunch of CDs while I am there. Last trip, I ended up listening to the same BT album over and over and over, so I need to be more careful about what I pack this time.

I should get out of here. Not sure if I will update while I am gone, but I might be writing some kind of story or offline journal of the whole trip, depending on my mood. Anyway, see you in a week…

Okay, so this daily journal thing slips away from me sometimes. A lot’s been up in the last few days, and I’m getting ready to leave for vacation on Saturday. Actually, I haven’t been getting ready, and that’s a problem. I will probably throw a bunch of crap in a suitcase an hour before I leave for the airport, and then end up in the middle of the fucking desert without a single pair of shorts. But, that’s why they invented Mastercard.

The big news - the book is done, and available. Go here and check out the page. You can view the whole thing from the publisher, and I also installed a message board, so ask some questions about it. And of course, buy the damn thing! It’s only $16 this time, and it’s a fairly easy book to read. You don’t even need to read it in order - just open it to a random page.

I don’t have copies of the book yet, but they are allegedly on the way. They will probably show up next week while I’m out of town. I still haven’t sent out a huge email yet telling everyone about it. I might wait the 4-6 weeks until it shows up on Amazon, because that’s where most people buy it from.

I found an incredible grocery store near where I work. I grew up in the midwest, where there was a Kroger’s store every mile, and each store had a few million square feet of floor space with every food imaginable. But in New York City, the grocery situation sucks. I’m sure it’s the lack of space, plus the markups, high costs, and the fact that everything has to be trucked in from far away, and it’s all run by the mafia. So the Key Foods near my house is in horrible shape, the kind of sanitary conditions you’d expect out of a Russian prison shortly after World War II. There are no choices in foods, the refrigerators are tepid, the freezers are covered with ten years’ worth of frost, and the cashiers give you so much shit, it’s a crime that they also ask you for money for the food. And for some reason, after you get such shitty service, there is a fucking tip jar at the cashier for the bagboy. Most of the time, I end up bagging the stuff myself, and if they do bag it, it’s all wrong. Plus, there are almost no 24-hour grocery stores in NYC. Compare that to Safeway and QFC in Seattle, who had an incredible variety of foods, great cashiers who knew me by name, and they were always open!

Anyway, I went to Safeway when I was in Washington, DC a bit ago, and it depressed me so much that I decided that I was either going to leave New York, or move to Jersey or something, where they had real stores. And then after a few weeks, I thought I was just nuts. Then the other day, I went to this Morton Williams store on Bleecker and LaGuardia, and the place might as well have been a Safeway. Well lit, air conditioned, very modern looking, wide shelves with lots of choices, excellent produce, large freezer cases and open fridge areas that were actually cold, and clean. And the cashiers were nice! I bought a sandwich and some sliced watermelon while I was there, and it was incredible. I can’t begin to explain how such a hospitable oasis in a desert of pure corruption and filth made me feel.

Enough with my insane rant, I need some lunch.