This week’s excitement was that my iPhone 8 blew up after about a year and a half of service. I’d noticed a bit ago that the 3D touch feature wasn’t consistently working, especially on the left side of the screen, but chalked it off to the fact that iOS has far too many tricky gestures and oddities where if you don’t click exactly at the right thing in the right direction for the right fraction of a millisecond, instead of fast-opening two apps, you delete one, or open the camera, or start playing music, or whatever. And the battery did slowly lose its mojo, but that’s every product with a battery these days, and I have a battery case, so it didn’t bother me.

Well, suddenly the other night, the phone doubled in thickness, like a double-stuff oreo, and the screen split from the rest of the case. The phone still worked, but my immediate fear was that it would catch fire or grenade. I was out when it happened, so I powered down, drove home, carefully fired it up, and then backed it up to my machine. I went to the Apple store (with a paperback book to kill time) and within an hour, they replaced it with an identical model. The swap and restore seems to get less and less painful each time I upgrade, and the only pain was copying over 120 gigs of music, which took a few hours, along with other sync and backup activity.

A few takeaways: before I drove to the mall, it was impossible to get ahold of anyone at the store on the phone. You have to go through a ridiculous phone tree for support; you can’t make an appointment online, at least within fifty clicks. I put the phone on speaker, and after saying “manager” a dozen times, the phone rang for five minutes straight. Once a human answered, mentioning the battery situation got me in fast, though.

The other takeaway is that it seems that as Apple products are in this war to get as thin as molecularly possible, they have developed some serious reliability issues. It’s all anecdotal, and I’m sure Apple’s annual reports to investors show that 99.9% of people have no problems. But I had a brand spanking new MacBook Pro fail, and my iPhone 6s had a slow battery death, and now this. This is timely with the departure of Jony Ive, who was apparently the one responsibility for this thinness race. I honestly wouldn’t mind a phone or laptop a few millimeters thicker, if it meant it would not bend in half under minor use.

(And yeah, “BUY A REAL COMPUTER SHEEPLE.” Whatever, grow up, etc.)

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It’s Sunday, which is always depressing. I’m not sure why half of my weekend is always spent in a dour mood over why I’ve wasted half of my weekend. I also get into this bad cycle of thinking I need to majorly course-correct everything, usually on Sunday night. I need to get off my ass and devote my life to learning (guitar | some programming thing | a writer’s works | obscure history of film | electronics | how to fly a jumbo jet | whatever). I wish instead of Sunday, I could have two Saturdays. There must be some mindfulness technique to fix this. Maybe lobotomy. (Do they still do those? Great, I’m going to fall down a k-hole researching this.)

I was thinking about this, because my Sunday routine used to be much different when I was in college, or just after. I used to make a lot of phone calls on Sunday nights after dinner, usually because that was when people were around the most. And I used to love the phone, to a fault. My long distance bill, back in the pre-cell days when that was still a thing, would end up being a colossal amount, catching up with people across the country.

I also have this strange little gap between maybe three and five, when I’ve already written in the morning and finished my errands in the early afternoon, and I feel some overwhelming need to do something in that time period, but I’m never motivated to do anything. The answer is that I should write more then, but I never can. And doing anything else — taking a nap, playing video games — makes me feel completely unproductive and horrible. I’m not sure if it’s my anxiety of the upcoming work week, or the fact that I never use the phone any more and my only human interaction is clicking a screen that causes my current dread routine. Or maybe I need to eat probiotics. Whatever.

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Not much else here. I fell down a Chuck Klosterman rabbit hole in anticipation of his next book, and ended up re-reading almost all of his output. It sort of amazes me how it feels like Grandland was around forever, but it only lived between 2011 and 2015. Much shorter than The Awl’s almost-ten year run, but same thing — they came out of nowhere, got huge, and died. Meanwhile, I’ve been plugging away here for decades, with no ideas, no traction, etc. Anyway, I read like four or five of the Klosterman books, which led me to reading music critic Robert Christgau’s memoir, which is… interesting. I guess he sums it up himself at the start of the book by saying most biographies are about astounding people or people who have some trick to sell or some story of overcoming adversity, and he doesn’t, but here you go, let’s get into 200 pages of his unremarkable childhood. It’s still interesting to me, but holy shit, people on Amazon hated it. Anyway, we’ll see if I can finish this one up without coming up with the stupid idea that I need to start writing record reviews again.

Been a few months since I did one of these, so let’s empty out the backlog:

• The Story Behind The Song: Slow Ride by Foghat - (Fun fact: Foghat’s first two albums were both self-titled. This was long before Peter Gabriel pulled that shit for three albums, so I think it’s unrelated.)
• Chicago’s World Fair 1934 - A great short (half of it in color) which is neat if you like Art Deco architecture. I’m curious if any of this remains, or where exactly it took place on a modern map. Dubai is having a world expo in 2020 - maybe I’ll save my pennies and check that out.
• Why ‘ambient computing’ is just a marketing buzzword (for now) - I haven’t heard the term “ambient computing” (nothing to do with Brian Eno) but it’s a possible direction I’ve already thought about, so it’s interesting to see someone sum it up like this.
• Out of the Dungeon: In Conversation with Mortiis - The whole dungeon synth thing is polarizing among extreme metal fans, but every five years or so, I fall down a k-hole of Havard Ellefsen’s weird releases. Here’s a good video interview of him without the mask and ears and rest of his persona.
• The Gorbachev Anti-Alcohol Campaign and Russia’s Mortality Crisis - I never realized the Soviet Union had a large anti-alcohol campaign in the late Eighties. (We only learned about them being an evil empire in school.) Interesting theory that the moral crisis and increased death rate post-USSR may have less to do with evil capitalism and more to do with post-prohibition ‘catch-up’ blackout drinking.
• How the SuperPET came to be - The Commodore PET was before my time, and I don’t think I ever saw one in the wild; my history starts with the C-64/Vic-20. Here’s a history of a rare variant with two CPUs developed with the University of Waterloo to run mainframe programming languages. Here’s another link.
• Robert Christgau, ‘dean of rock critics,’ still obsesses over music - Every few years, I waste about three days reading every review he’s written of every album I’ve ever bought, and we disagree on about 90% of them but he’s still somewhat genius.
• First Blood Filming Locations - I don’t even know how I got on this tangent, except maybe I thought it was shot somewhere in Southwest Washington, because it sure looks it, but of course it was shot in Canada.
• Tales of a BeOS Refugee - This is more about early OS X, but any time I see something related to Be, I bookmark it, because good luck doing a google search on it. Fun fact: I remember applying for a job at Be in 1996 when I thought it was the coolest thing in the universe. Glad I didn’t relocate for that one.
• The Real Story Behind Danzig’s Mother Video - I like listening to the first three Danzig albums just as much as I like making fun of Danzig, which is a lot, so I’m a bit conflicted here. I like the bit about the model later insisting it was an actual Satanic ritual and Glenn had cursed her. (Her name is Jill Kethel if you want to look up her workout videos on youtube.)
• The End of the Waffle House - If you went to Bloomington back when I did and you ever needed caffeine and grease at three in the morning, you probably remember this place, which unfortunately closed in 2013 and is probably now a bunch of condos.
• Halcyon Days - A series of interviews from 20-some years ago with many classic game programmers. I got pulled into this because of an interview with Ed Averett, who wrote the bulk of the Odyssey 2 games for Magnavox, a system which most people have completely forgotten.
• Star Raiders reverse engineering - I first read about this in POC | GTFO and I don’t know what’s more amazing: all the weird hacks the original programmers used to fit this game into 8K, or how someone meticulously reverse-engineered the source code.

As always, here’s another plug for you to go get my latest book if you haven’t already.

That tornado last week hit the south side of South Bend. I think it was an F-2, and touched down right across the street from Ray’s old apartment at Irish Hills, which is just a touch east of where Scottsdale Mall used to be. It hit a daycare center dead-on, completely destroyed it. Luckily it was a Sunday, and nobody was there. No other real damage, except a few people with uprooted trees and broken lawn furniture and whatnot. Lots of idiots recording the funnel clouds from a hundred yards away for Facebook likes.

It’s weird because I very specifically remember that exact location. I used to drive from IUSB to Scottsdale mall every payday (I’ve told this story a million times) and that drive involves going straight down Ironwood from the school, then hanging a right on Ireland, and driving about a mile to the mall. Said tornado was just to the left of that Ironwood/Ireland intersection. The entire route of that drive is crystal clear in my head — not just the landmarks and the scenery of the drive, but how it felt to make that drive on a Friday morning. I remember very specifically listening to a Helloween live album one morning, and I have no idea why that specific trip stuck in my mind. But when I made the same trip last December, I instantly remembered that morning, for some damn reason.

I’m starting to have a lot of stupid even-number nostalgia lately. Luckily, I have no concept of time and can’t remember at any given point if it’s April or June or May or what. I passed my 30th anniversary of graduating high school. I don’t remember the specific day; I could look it up, but whatever. It was in May, I guess. So there’s a bunch of 30-year marks that hit in the next few months, none of them worth celebrating, but all of them being an annoying little itch in the back of my brain I can’t really scratch.

(I don’t know if my class had a reunion or not. I would not have been able to attend, but I wonder if I’ve moved enough times that I’ve fallen off their list, or they’ve all banned me on Facebook, or everyone’s too busy with their grandkids or posting speculation on a new Chick-fil-A location in Elkhart.)

There’s also a lot of 20-year things coming up, because that’s when I left Seattle and took my big extended trip across the country. I wrote a book (more or less) about this trip, and I often think that it needs to be unfucked and put into context and heavily edited. I just re-read the Chuck Klosterman book Killing Yourself to Live, which is ostensibly about visiting the death sites of rock stars, but is 80% about his own shit knocking around his head during the deep introspection that happens when you take weeks stuck in a car alone to drive across the country. This made me go back and read my trip book (which used to be online, but I pulled it down long ago) and it’s so wooden and horrible and so far off-brand there’s no fucking way I could publish it without a complete rewrite.

Someone is supposedly coming out with a new Commodore 64 for Christmas. This company had a mini-64 which looked cute and played all the games on a modern TV set, but the keyboard was fake, and you had to plug in a USB one. And although I did play a lot of C-64 games, I think the main reason I would want one is to screw around with programming it. The thing is, I can run an emulator on my computer, and this re-release is nothing more than some system-on-a-chip Linux computer that’s running the same emulator, most likely. It will be neat and cool, for like fifteen minutes, and then I’ll get bored of it. And not only do I have that emulator on my computer, and a Raspberry Pi that has that emulator, but I have a real C-64 in storage.

I think one of the reasons that doesn’t interest me as much anymore is the time constraint issue. When I think back to 1985 when I first got a Commodore, I must have spent hundreds of hours a month fucking around on it, playing the same four games over and over, typing in programs from Compute’s Gazette, and trying to write my own games in BASIC. Now, it takes me a major scheduling coup to get more than an hour to waste time on something. That’s why I tell anyone I know under the age of 18 the same thing: either get a $100 guitar and practice scales and modes until your fingers bleed, or memorize every programming book you can find, while you still can remember things. Burn that shit in, because there’s no goddamn way you’re going to memorize anything once you hit 40.

I took the next week off, because the last two months have severely burned me out. No plans or trips, just trying to write and not work. We’ll see how that goes.

Apropos of nothing… I can’t believe they rebooted New Coke because of a TV show. They’re rebooting everything, but owning the biggest marketing disaster of the century proves we now have the collective memory of a goldfish. Ford will be bringing back the Pinto next year, I’m guessing. If you really want New Coke, open a Pepsi and leave it on the counter for a week.

I thought for sure I’d already blogged about it, but I do have a weird tie to the Ford Pinto. On August 8, 1978, a trio of teenagers were killed about a mile from my house in Elkhart when their Ford Pinto was rear-ended by a van and exploded. They could not escape from the car because the bent-up frame pinned the doors shut. The fuel tank also had a defect which later got the cars recalled; the girls’ parents would get a recall notice six months after their kids died. Elkhart County would sue Ford for homicide; they lawyered up with James F. Neal, Watergate prosecutor who was later known for defending John Landis in his helicopter issue trial and Exxon after their Valdez problems. Anyway, Ford got off. I don’t remember any of this (I was in the second grade) but one legacy is that there are a series of emergency pull-offs on the side of US-33 near Concord Mall. (The accident was caused when the girls stopped in the right lane to check if their gas cap was still on. The van driver had dropped their cigarette and was trying to find it on the floor.)

I used to walk the side of that road occasionally, especially when I worked at the Taco Bell there. That stretch of road had incredibly high concrete curbs on the shoulder, and no sidewalk to speak of. Occasionally, there would be a dirt trail, or maybe four or five concrete squares, none of them anywhere near level. The shoulder was always filled with debris: pieces of exhaust, flat tires, nuts and bolts, and rough gravel that looked like landscaping rock. I remember trying to ride a bike on the shoulder to a doctor’s appointment in the summer of 1993 when I was home. I had a flat tire within the first mile, had to turn around and push the bike home.

…Fell down a horrible Rush k-hole while Sarah was in Japan last week. Watched the 2010 documentary for the tenth time (or whatever) and then the new one, Time Stand Still, which was problematic for me. It’s a good documentary, but it’s so sad. And it makes Neil look like a bit of an asshole for wanting to quit, and maybe that’s true, but it’s bittersweet. Part of me thinks they should have hung it up after Test for Echo, after Peart lost his wife and daughter. I personally didn’t like the studio albums after that point, and although the live albums are interesting, they’ve released so damn many of them this century. (Seven, for those keeping track, plus various live sets and tracks on reiussues and box sets and whatever else.) Anyway.

Was thinking about this, and an odd factoid: I’ve seen Rush live three times, in three different states, in three different decades. (1988: Chicago; 1994: Indianapolis; 2002: New York). So I haven’t seen them 167 times like some of the people in the documentary, but that is an oddity.

I think I mentioned I was insanely busy with work, and that was true - I think I had to work like 20 days in a row, usually a dozen hours at a time. I know this because my work VPN cuts out and makes you log back in after twelve hours. Anyway, that’s done, so I’m back to average busy for a minute, and I take off the first week of July, but have no plans. It depends on the weather; maybe I will go hike somewhere, or maybe I will just sleep.

The weather got super hot for a week (in the 90s, which is very unusual here) and then it dropped back down to normal, 60s/70s and no rain. I’ve been walking outdoors pretty much exclusively and have cut out the mall stuff for the time being, which is good, because it’s been getting incredibly depressing. I should be taking pictures, but I haven’t. I have the same roll of film in my Vivitar that I put in there while away on vacation (and come to think of it, I brought it through security a couple of times, so it might be fogged now) and my digital cameras haven’t been out since Vegas. I keep thinking about buying a new DSLR, but then I remember I’m not using the one I have.

Went walking around Alameda today, the old location of the Navy base, which is all either abandoned or in the middle of redevelopment. Today I walked an area just above Seaplane Lagoon, a flat paved rectangle on the water, maybe half a mile long and a quarter-mile deep, nothing but cracked asphalt and seagulls smashing oysters on the concrete piers. There’s a large open area just east of where the airfields were. The airfield is fenced off completely, a “nature preserve” that is slowly melting back into the environment. I saw a parade of import tuner Fast and Furious types in lowered Hondas with blacked-out windows and those farty-sounding mufflers driving circles on the square miles of pavement at the edge of the base. There’s also a bunch of distilleries and wineries using old hangers and airplane maintenance buildings, and their parking lots were filled with people out for a Sunday of relaxation and tastings. At some point, I should formally research all of this, where things were, what’s zoned for what, what’s under construction. And bring a real camera. Maybe a project for my week off.

I was listening to Van Halen’s greatest hits on the way home, and let it play too long, and now I have the Van Hagar song “Poundcake” stuck in my head, so I need to go work on getting that unlodged.

• I don’t have anything new going on, because I’ve been swamped at work since I’ve been home, and probably will be for the next month. Thank godzilla the baseball season already ended for me a month ago.
• I fell down an insufferable k-hole last week and ended up reading a conspiracy theory page about how John Denver’s death was faked. I don’t remember the exact reason why, but the author had an incredible number of reasons, some theories implicating the NTSB, a map and a series of diagrams, etc. I’m not going to link to the page because I’m sure it would just cause trouble. I’ve found that even if you 100% agree with people this far gone, they will say you’re wrong. It’s like expecting to win an argument in the comments section of a small-town newspaper.
• Since I’ve been back, I’ve been re-reading a bunch of different music books. I have no idea why. Actually, I think it’s because I watched that Netflix docu-drama The Dirt.  So I re-read that, the Nikki Sixx book The Heroin Diaries, Our Band Could Be Your Life, the first Chuck Klosterman book, and I’m reading the David Byrne book now. This is apropos of nothing; I am not planning on writing a music book. I’m just bored.
• I first read The Dirt during a horrible bout of food poisoning in 2005. I ate some warm mayo from the Quizno’s on St. Mark’s (long since gone, as is everything else there) and became horrifically sick for three or four days, couldn’t hold down water, super-high fever, hallucinations — good stuff. My now-wife-then-girlfriend came to my apartment for the first time to give me gatorade since I couldn’t get out of bed, and she left me with a copy of the Motley Crue book with me for some reason. So I read the 400-some pages in a fever dream, and somehow remember flashes of it, but not the whole thing. Reading it now made more sense, but it’s pretty dated, and the band went through another complete cycle of fall-apart/get-together/quit since then. (Or maybe two, I don’t keep track.)
• There is a new Elephant Man book out, and I bought it, because apparently I have to read every book about Joseph Merrick that comes out. This was written by a genealogist who is distantly related to the guy who ran the freak show Merrick was in. It was much more about the genealogy of his distant relatives and completely avoided talking about any of his medical prognosis. So I didn’t find it that interesting and only skimmed it, which I hate saying because the author was very thorough with the research.
• There were some interesting bits in the book though, about Victorian history in general, which I should know more about, but of course I don’t, because lazy. One thing was a line about how the religious school system back then was designed to give god as hope to the lower class so they would ignore the insufferable misery of the economic system. That puts the Indiana public school system’s slow slide into parochialism into perspective. The other thing was they had a long run on the anti-vaccination movement of the mid-19th century, which is also timely.
• I am still writing but I have nothing anywhere near complete. I have two untitled books like Rumored that are in the 90,000-word range but need serious work and some kind of structure or flow or whatever. Also a short story book that’s maybe 60K words, same thing. And then another 300,000 words of… stuff. Hard to pull this all together.
• I have been hemming and hawing about writing a book about malls. I have a blank manuscript, a general outline, and I know what I’d write about. But each time I try to get started, I get a few thousand words down, and it feels so wooden and boring, I can’t do anything further. And aside from the fact that this is so off-brand that only three people would read it, I would get an endless amount of shit from the “NO YOUR WRONG WALMART IS AWESOME” crowd, or people who have somehow forgotten that K-Mart was always a shitty store. I don’t want to argue about it, so I don’t care.
• I have been avoiding malls as much as possible, but the weather has been bad here, so I have been walking there on weekends. The most upscale mall I go to, Stoneridge, is a bit of a mess now, and very depressing. The big Sears closed, and Simon is in a zoning fight to tear it down and build some kind of “activity center” thing there, with a movie theater, gym, upscale grocery, and a few other retail spots. Probably a good idea, but who knows if it will happen before the next crash.
• I also should probably avoid retail groups, but I can’t. I also can’t stop reading this Elkhart group, which is humorously bad. Every single post about anything ends up becoming about how Elkhart needs a Chick-fil-A. Every time they raze an old decrepit building to leave it a vacant lot (i.e. weekly) someone chimes in that it’s going to be a Chick-fil-A. Never mind that CfA has no plans to expand in Indiana for the next two years, and posts a list of all future store openings, and even if it were expanding, there probably isn’t enough traffic in Elkhart to support it, it’s still posted about fifty times a day. And I’ve yet to see someone spell it correctly.
• The JoAnn Fabrics in the Concord Mall left. I think Kay Jewelers did too. Also the Fitness USA across the street couldn’t negotiate a lease and closed. I think it’s now down to under 20 stores. Still not sure of the end game here, but when your mall is 75% vacant and the highest-traffic thing is a pizza-by-the-slice place, that’s not good.
• I still have not sorted through my Vegas photos, and haven’t been that enthusiastic about it. I don’t think anyone uses Flickr anymore, so I’m not sure what the point is. I post one-offs on Instagram, so I guess that’s good enough for now.
• A tornado’s rolling through northern Indiana right now. Hope you folks are in your basements.