The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

  • I am back

    I am back.  My luggage is not.  It might be on a plane from Frankfurt, Germany to here, or it might be sitting on some Lufthansa baggage conveyor somewhere in Germany.  I will probably see it this weekend, and it’s no big deal, aside from the inability to wash two weeks of dirty laundry.

    We had a good time in Berlin, although it seemed pretty short.  I am amazed at how modern and well-planned that city seems, yet how there’s so many different eras of history represented.  There’s all of this ancient history, old churches that somehow survived the wars, and then there’s this postwar history, all of the Stasi-era East German bland architecture that’s quickly being gentrified.  And then there’s all of this ultra-modern stuff, the New York-style glass and chrome buildings.  I guess from a city planning perspective, it helps if your city gets mostly destroyed and you can start over.  It’s the reason Japan has ultra high speed internet everywhere and all of the US that’s not in a million-person-plus city has a total disaster of copper wiring that can barely handle 56K modems.

    We ate dinner at the Reichstag, which is the perfect example of this. It was built in 1894, and most famously burned down in 1933. It has since been redone and reopened, and the parliament now uses it. It’s such a strange combination of new and old though, because you’ve got this centuries-old exterior that everyone’s seen in World War 2 books, but the inside of it is ultra-modern, and seamlessly transforms into this all-glass interior that looks like something out of a movie.  Since we had this dinner reservation through Sarah’s work, we got to line-hop and go straight to the top of the building, into this huge glass dome with a 360-degree view of all of Berlin, and a corkscrew pathway twisting up to a cupola viewing deck at the top.  Dinner itself was good, but just being inside this building, and then seeing all of the city at night was phenomenal.

    One of the other things we checked out was the DDR museum, which documented the history of East Germany, and the rise and fall of the Socialist country.  It’s not a very big museum, and when we went, there was a mob of high school kids who didn’t really give a shit, making it chaos.  But they had some very interesting stuff there, and this era fascinates me, because it wasn’t that long ago, just over twenty years, but everything from that era has completely vanished.  It’s like my fascination with old malls: you can easily pull far more information from the Civil War era than you can from a mall that was built in 1978 and torn down in 1994.  The museum had all of these packages from food and cosmetics and beauty products that were produced and sold by the DDR government, these generic packages that were very utilitarian instead of produced by ad agencies. When I was in high school, they churned out millions of bottles of Vita cola, and all of that stuff is gone now.  When I see something in a museum like an old WW2 plane, I have no connection to it, because it was before my parents were born.  But I went to college with people from Germany, had friends in the Army that were stationed over there, and I can clearly remember the existence of East Germany, so there’s a strange nostalgia for me.

    I spent all day yesterday on the return trip, and almost got stuck in Frankfurt.  Our flight from Berlin was delayed by an hour, and we had to get from gate A20 to Z8, which involved a serious sprint across the airport.  We luckily did not have to go through security a second time, and they did customs at the gate.  It did mean I could not stock up on water for the eleven-hour flight, and I got stuck with about 150 Euros that I didn’t get a chance to change or spend.  On the long flight, I ended up doing an editing pass on my book, watching Anchorman, and then watching a ton of other TV shows, including a half-season of Louie.

    So it feels good to be home, although I don’t have that laundry to wash, I don’t feel like sorting through the thousand pictures I took, and I’m not feeling terribly inspired to write.  But I need to get something done, so I should get to it.

     

  • Berlin

    It’s two in the afternoon, and it’s an absolutely wonderful day outside in Berlin, 79 degrees and sunny.  And of course, I’m sitting inside, looking out the window and listening to the traffic at Potsdamer Platz. But I did walk about six miles today, so I don’t feel too bad about it.

    We had a late flight last night from Nuremberg to Berlin, which meant we had a full day to kill in the old city. We checked in our bags and wandered around, going to the design museum and the national museum. The design museum was pretty cool, one of those all-white modern things with high ceilings, no right angles, and twisty spiral staircases that look like something out of a Star Wars movie. The national museum was oddly Nazi-free, and focused a lot on ancient history, giant tombstones from the 16th century, Gutenberg bibles, and lots of the Jesus, in the form of esoteric wood carvings and gold statues and whatnot.  Both were great museums, but I’m now pretty museum-ed out, and don’t feel like seeing much here.

    We got into town late, and caught a cab with an interesting cab driver.  Oh, I should mention the strangest cab ride I’ve had in a while — this was in Nuremberg, and we were going to a dinner, and the cab had a horn in the back seat.  It wasn’t a French horn, but rather what I think is called a “natural horn”, although of course he called it by some German name that was 216 characters long.  I asked him about the horn, just curious if by some coincidence it was made by Conn or Selmer or someone else in Elkhart.  He asked if we wanted to hear him play, and then popped in a CD of what sounded like some Germanic orchestral march music, and then whipped out a harmonica and started playing along the part, holding the metal instrument with one hand while driving on this winding cobblestone road with the other hand.  Very weird.

    Anyway, last night’s cabbie was a younger Muslim guy, maybe a college student, and very clean-cut and sort of preppy looking.  He had the nice model of Mercedes cab (it’s funny that the US only gets the high-end M-B cars, whereas they make a whole range of cars here, and you see many total piece of shit Mercedes vehicles, like little diesel econoboxes that are closer to my Yaris than a luxury ride.) and we drove from Teigel with the moonroof open and a cool breeze from the city night filtering into the back seat.  You could immediately tell we were no longer in this ancient castle city, as we cruised on the ultra-modern autobahn and saw the lights of the big city.

    He started asking us about where we were from, and we mentioned California, and he said “the Dr. Dre California?”  When we said we were from San Francisco, he asked us if that was where all the gays lived; he didn’t say it in a negative tone, just curious.  We said yes, and mentioned that Silicon Valley is there, too.  The talk went to politics, and Sarah asked him his opinion on Obama, and he said that many people don’t see him as much different than George Bush, which was interesting.  His main thing was that Obama continued what he called the “holocaust” against Muslims with Guantanamo and the various wars, which was a different take than I was used to hearing.  I mentioned that the President was only a third of the national government, and although Obama promised to stop these things, he was largely powerless to do so.  He immediately started asking about the Supreme Court and I thought it was interesting that a German knows all of this stuff about our government, but if you mentioned Angela Merkel to an American, there’s a 99% chance they’d ask what TV show she was on.

    We’re staying in a Hyatt near Potsdamer Platz, and I got a slow start today, mostly because of fighting with the hotel WiFi and my Mac.  I’ve had astonishingly bad luck with internet connectivity on this trip, and it seems most hotels have simply handed over their WiFi to a major vendor who then gouges you for something like 3 to 5 Euros per hour for a spotty WiFi connection.  When I fired up my iPhone to check out the prices on 3G, it turns out that international roaming charges are something like $1.50 a minute voice and $20 per megabyte, meaning there’s no way in hell I’ll take my phone out of airplane mode.  I’m currently paying $18/day for wired Internet in the room, and doing internet sharing to feed the other wireless iDevices.  If I came back again, I’d probably look into getting some MiFi adapter that supports a pay-as-you-go account.  Domestically, Virgin Mobile supports a $99 device with a really cheap pay-as-you-go data plan, but it’s CDMA and mostly useless in Europe.  I think there are cheap GSM solutions, but I don’t know which provider you’d use on this end.  The other option would be an international iPhone plan from AT&T that would enable tethering, but the two problems with that are that I don’t travel overseas enough to justify the international plan, and if I switched to a plan that enabled tethering, I’d lose the grandfathered-in unlimited data plan I have now.

    So I spent the day walking around the city.  I hit all of the usuals: Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, Checkpoint Charlie, the Holocaust Memorial, and a decent excursion into what used to be East Berlin.  All through the city, there is a dark brick line on the ground that traces the old path of the Berlin Wall, and in a few specific places, there are pieces of the concrete wall left behind for tourists to snapshot.  There’s actually pieces of the Berlin Wall all over the place; every shop hawking post cards and t-shirts has chunks of concrete sealed in lucite or on keychains, all purporting to be pieces of the original barrier built in 1961 to divide the city.  There are concrete blocks in cafes, outside of museums, next to currywurst stands, on sidewalks, and in parks.  And back in the states, it seems like every military museum has their own spray-painted chunk of the barrier, as if it somehow invokes the ghost of Reagan in a major “up yours, commies”.  All it gets from me is a major eye roll, like when the same museum has a foot-long section of “WTC steel” which may or may not be a piece of rebar from Home Depot.

    There’s a strange park next to this cluster of buildings by our hotel, this chunk of corporate glass-and-chrome towers housing Daimler, Sony, Deutsche Bank, and other businesses.  This huge strip of green was full of businesspeople eating lunches, and I sat on a park bench and worked for a bit while the cleaning people went over our room.  I’ve got this next book, still untitled, sitting on my Kindle, and I’ve been combing through it for errors.  It felt nice to sit outside this business park and chip away at it while a gentle wind blew past.  I’ve still got a ton of work to go on this, so I need to get back to it, but it’s a great day to do it.

    So I’ve got tonight, then tomorrow we have a dinner at the Reichstag, and then the big fun flight from Berlin to SFO.  We leave Berlin at three and get home at eight, but that’s really thirteen hours.  And then I work on Thursday, which should be interesting.

  • Nuremberg

    It’s my second-to-last day in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg, and it’s something like seventy degrees outside, but I’m in the hotel, looking out a huge window at the sun, listening to birds chirp, and editing a book I hope to get published by June, although I just realized that’s in eleven days, so given that the book doesn’t even have a title yet, I should start saying “by summer”.

    I’m staying in the old part of town, which is all inside a giant set of castle walls, the kinds of things with bricks like the kind they build pyramids out of, with parapets and archer slits and giant arches and the whole nine.  If I was really into fantasy and Tolkein, this would be far more interesting, as would the 17 medieval-looking churches in the area.  It is pretty stuff to photograph, but when my mind wanders, I’m not thinking dragons and elves.  I’m mostly wondering what got destroyed by allied bombing, what got repaired, and what’s brand new, or at least post-1945.  Sometimes, it’s very obvious; you can see a building that’s totally new, and its neighboring buildings are new from the second floor on up, and it’s obvious a bomb hit right in the middle of them.

    I’ve done a lot of walking. On our first day here, I walked to the Nazi parade grounds, which is where Triumph of the Will was filmed and all of those huge party rallies were held in the thirties.  A good chunk of it is now apartments, but they kept the remains of the never-finished congress hall and turned it into a museum.  It’s all in German, but you can get one of those English headphone things.  It’s fairly creepy, and focuses on trying to explain how the propaganda took hold in the country, and then how the Nuremberg trials happened after the war.  There was plenty of creepy Nazi stuff, and endless irony that the hall where the great Nazi congresses were to meet is now largely used as a storage facility.

    Nuremberg isn’t a tourist destination, and English isn’t as prevalent as it was in Berlin.  The place also has a small-town feel.  It actually reminds me a lot of when I visited Stratford, Ontario back in high school, I guess because of all of the old-looking architecture and the fact that a lot of the town’s just working and doing whatever instead of busking tourists.

    Even though the city isn’t huge – somewhere around the size of Oklahoma City – it does have a full underground subway system.  I bought a day pass for just under 5 Euros yesterday and took a quick trip around the U-Bahn.  It’s Germany’s newest train system, and has 46 underground stations.  Like all German trains, it’s ridiculously clean and incredibly sedate and orderly.  And like other German systems, the ticketing is practically on the honor system; there are no turnstiles or gates.  You’re expected to purchase a paper ticket when you use the system, but nobody was checking them and no machine stopped you from just walking downstairs and onto a train.  Maybe the cops spot-check people, but I didn’t see this happening.  I think I gave some train system ratings on a 1 to 10 scale system, and the U-Bahn here probably rates in the low 9’s, with Berlin being a high 9, the main difference being that the Berlin system will tell you when the next train is coming.

    Lots of diesel cars and VWs here, which made me start thinking about Summer Rainduring yesterday’s walk. That book starts on the Friday before Mother’s Day in 1992, meaning we just passed the 20-year mark, which made me think way too much about it. It’s strange to wonder if twenty years ago I’d ever imagine myself 4500 miles away in Europe.  It’s strange to think about it even now.

    Anyway, this book awaits.  There’s some kind of freaky festival tonight, the blue night festival, and nobody can seem to explain it to me.  When I ask someone, the explanation usually goes something like “there is this, how you say, acrobats, and in town square, there is, you know, man running, and with blue light on the buildings, you know?” which leaves me even more confused.  We fly to Berlin tomorrow at 8:30 at night, and then have three days until we return to SFO, at which time my sleep schedule will be completely fucked.  I’m hoping for an interesting evening with these blue lights or whatever it is.

  • London

    I’m now in Nuremberg, after a rough travel day yesterday. Here’s a general brain dump in bulleted list format on my short stay in London:

    • I thought London would be a lot like New York, except darker.  I actually liked London more than Manhattan for a few reasons:
      • It isn’t as dense or vertically packed, or at least didn’t seem like it to me.
      • Many of the buildings are pretty new, like New York, but the old buildings are ancient.  I don’t know how any of them survived the blitz, or if they were partially knocked out and then repaired, but there’s some impressive architecture to be seen.
      • There’s a lot more green in the city, and some pretty astounding parks.
      • The city seemed much cleaner. Part of this could be some massive restoration program prior to the Olympics, but I saw nowhere near as much graffiti or general deterioration as Manhattan.
      • Cars are all but banned in the city.  They are allowed, but you need some kind of special “green” pass, meaning that aside from taxis and delivery vehicles, the only cars I saw belonged to the ultra-rich.
      • There seemed to be a lot more money.  Part of that could have been where we were staying, but I saw so many people driving super-high-end cars.  I remember walking down a street, and every single car I passed had a six-figure (in dollars) price tag.  And this was parked on a public street.  When’s the last time you’ve seen someone park a Ferrari on the street in New York?
      • I didn’t hear a car alarm the entire time I was there.
    • That said, the city was insanely expensive.  I didn’t notice this at first, because I was like “hey, entrees are only like twenty bucks here!” but that was twenty pounds, or like $32.
    • I found London insanely polite.  My experience in New York was always that people were insanely impolite, but that was the price of living in a big city.  For example, when I was in New York and riding the subway on crutches, if I asked someone for a seat, the typical response was “go fuck yourself”.  In London, the Underground gives out buttons that pregnant women can wear so that others will give up their seats for them.
    • The food was generally pretty good.  Both Yelp and OpenTable are fully operational there, so we managed to get into some decent restaurants.  I did not have fish and chips while I was there, which is a shame, but I did have pretty decent Indian food twice.
    • I saw the changing of the royal guard at Buckingham, and I totally don’t understand any of the procedure, but found it interesting.  Of course, I don’t pay taxes there, so maybe I would have a different opinion of the large amount of overhead needed for tradition.
    • I went to the Imperial War Museum, which was decent, but not massive.  The big takeaway there was that I know so little about post-WW2 British military history.  The general collection was divided into WW1, WW2, and post-WW2.  I was trying to think of what that entailed: Falklands, Iraq, Afghanistan, …?  Turns out they have been in a few dozen military actions – basically, every time another bit of decolonization happened, there was another “war” or whatever you want to call it.  (“Emergency”?  “Conflict”?)  There’s also the Northern Ireland business.  Bottom line, I have a lot of reading to do.
    • We went to the Tate Modern and saw their Damien Hirst exhibit, which was pretty interesting.  That twelve-million dollar shark was there, floating in formaldehyde, as were the split-in-half cow and calf, the spin paintings, and the butterfly room.  The Tate Modern itself is pretty impressive – it used to be a power plant, and looks like one of those gigantic turbine facilities that some commando team has to blow up in a World War 2 movie.
    • 288 photos.  I’ll try to weed through them and post them to flickr when I have a real internet connection, which might not be until after I return.

    And now I must go write.  I walked ten miles today, all of that before lunch, so I have more stories to tell, probably in another annoying bulleted list.  Stay tuned.

  • Things I Found In Storage Today

    When I moved to Oakland in 2009, I rented a storage locker in this old warehouse that always reminds me of that scene at the end of Indiana Jones, and has the smell of a place where the Ark of the Covenant is probably packed away and forgotten. I’d been shuffling around boxes of stuff I didn’t use on a daily basis but couldn’t just throw out, and we moved into our first loft, I needed to stash this stuff somewhere.

    Since high school, I’ve moved to Bloomington, back to Elkhart, to Bloomington again, back to Elkhart for a summer, back to Bloomington, to Seattle, to Washington Heights in Manhattan, to Astoria, Queens, to the Lower East Side, to Denver, to LA, to South San Francisco, and then to Oakland. Each time, I accumulated more zines and more books and more papers, and then sold books and donated CDs and junked electronics. Every once in a while, I wonder if I still have a copy of XYZ or if I ever kept this and that magazine or printout. While I like our attempt at an ultra-sleek open-concept loft, I also liked when I would run into one of these questions at ten at night and could just go to The Pile Of Boxes and start digging, rather than find an opportunity to drive over to the storage place, climb four flights of rickety stairs, and play the reverse-Tetris game of pulling things out of this tiny four by eight room.

    Today I went after one main thing, and decided to go stem to stern through the unit to confirm or deny a few other things.  This is not a complete inventory, but here’s what I found:

    1. The George Foreman grill.  (The stated goal.)
    2. An original issue Darth Vader Collector’s Case, in “well-played” condition, containing about two dozen figures, ranging in condition from fair to “buried in back yard for an entire Indiana winter”.
    3. A large box of photos with no negatives which have never been scanned, ranging from childhood pictures to a bunch of Polaroids I took on my cross-country trip in 1999.
    4. A wooden box I made in junior high, containing a bunch of pin-on buttons that were at one time pinned to the collars of various jackets, most of them being of Iron Maiden.
    5. A folder full of every story and poem I wrote in the 7th and 8th grade.
    6. A mimeograph of a typed script for a talent show I co-MCed in the sixth grade.
    7. A certificate from the Daughters of the American Revolution awarded me for some unknown history project in 1983.
    8. A set of six Western Digital EIDE hard drives, ranging in size from 6 to 160 GB.
    9. A printer paper box full of zines, including all of the masters for Xenocide 1-5 and Air in the Paragraph Line 1-9.
    10. This picture:

    That is all.

  • Bigger, Faster, Dumber

    I did something the other day I haven’t done since July of 09.  I rode my bike.  Not a lot, maybe a mile or so around the neighborhood, a quick shakedown cruise after wiping off three years of junk from the frame and hitting the chain with some oil.  I’ve been away from the little Dahon because my last bike ride resulted in a broken arm.  And of course, we managed to close on our house a couple of days later, which meant I got to sign my name 40,000 times with a broken arm, which I’d recommend about as much as spending six or seven hours in the Oakland hospital ER.

    Anyway, the bike ride is part of the latest attempt to get my shit straight with fitness.  After this latest health scare that wasn’t, I took stock in my situation, and things have been slowly slacking off since I started working from home, and the numbers at the scale have been getting progressively worse.  I haven’t had to run out and buy elastic-band maternity pants, but my absolute lowest weight during Weight Watchers was 168 at the start of 2009, and I’m currently sitting at 183.  Compared to the 250 or so I was at back in New York, that’s still not bad, but I wouldn’t mind getting back into the 170s.

    So part of this new quest has been getting a Fitbit, which is a tiny little thing you clip on your belt or pocket.  It has an accelerometer in it, and works as a pedometer, recording every step you take, as well as recording how many flights of stairs you climb.  This info is beamed back to your computer wirelessly, and then back up to the mothership, where a freaky web 2.0 site enables you to track other stuff, like food, exercise, and all that jazz.  You can also wear the tracker to bed and it will record your sleep time and efficiency, graphing the number of times the cats wake me up in the middle of the night.  If this thing also tracked the number of words I wrote and the amount of money I spent every day at Amazon, it would pretty much be a total solution.

    The fitbit solution is interesting, because it quantifies everything.  The only reason I ever went from 250 to 170 was from being held accountable for every piece of food I shove in my piehole, but when you make something very quantitative, it’s easier for the geek in me to deal with the whole thing.  It’s like sitting at a Jira bug tracker and seeing the number of defects that have to be resolved before a ship date, and not just some vague emotional conquest that may or may not be working.  Fitbit also heavily gamifies the whole thing, awarding badges for passing certain goals, and enabling you to add friends and compete with others.

    The first thing I learned is that I walk a pathetic amount during the average work day.  The arbitrary goal is 10,000 steps a day, and unless I do anything out of the ordinary, I’ll average around a thousand.  Add in a trip to the grocery store, some trips to the dumpster, and another errand or two, and that goes up a couple of thousand. But I’m not burning enough, and I’ve been making more of an effort to get off my ass and go walking after lunch or after work.

    The other thing is that my eating has drifted heavily from the WW regimen, and I need to get that shit straight.  One of the neat things about the Fitbit is that if you’re entering your food, it’s keeping track of your calories in and calories out.  So you can set a goal of how many more calories you want to burn than consume, and at any given point in the day, you can see if you’re eating too much and need to run around the block a few times, or if you’re starving yourself and you need to go eat something.

    I’m trying to heavily change what I eat, not eating processed stuff and eating smaller meals through the day.  I work ten feet from my kitchen, so I don’t have any excuses about the inability to prep food.  The hard part right now is retraining myself to know what I can eat and what I can’t.  I went through this before, because left to my own devices, I’ll just eat ten thousand calories of carbs and fat, and I know that the one thing that keeps me mentally together is protein consumption through the day.  So there’s a learning curve on figuring out the routine.

    Oh shit, I just found out you can track ANYTHING on this site, and add your own custom trackers.  So I just added one for writing, to track words written a day.  This should be interesting.

  • Another Hundred Things

    My wife’s sister had twins in February, and they live in Davis, so we’ve been making visits to help them deal with the onslaught of human shit invading their house on an hourly basis. She’s going to have to start dressing them in different colors or something, because I can’t tell them apart, which probably makes me a horrible person.  Both parents are English professors, and they are surrounded by a dozen PhDs at any given time, so I am the only person who can explain to these two what the designated hitter rule is and why it’s a travesty, which I have.  You gotta start young.

    (There’s not actually a lot to worry about, since the closest AL team to Davis is the Oakland A’s, and by the time these two are little league-aged, the As will probably have moved to Portland or Las Vegas or Puerto Rico or wherever someone writes them the biggest check, and good for them for getting out of that horrible stadium.)

    So I am going to London and then to Germany next month.  I have done zero planning for both trips, aside from buying the relevant book for each.  What should I see?  What should I do?  What should I eat?  All I know is I will probably be doing a hell of a lot of walking, and I plan to take as many pictures as possible.  The flights will be a bitch – for both of the overnights, I am in the middle of one of those six-person rows in a 777, which probably means I will have two morbidly obese people having total flesh-to-flesh contact with me as they ooze out of their tiny coach seats.  I am very excited to take my DSLR camera over there.  I’ve never been to London at all; I’ve never been to Nuremberg, but have been to Berlin.  But Berlin was in 2006, and I’m sure the entire thing has changed since then.  Anyway, suggestions welcome.

    I am also going back to New York in June for a brief work thing, which will be interesting.  The work part is good, but I just find myself with some odd nostalgia for the place, which will of course dissipate the first time I get pissed on in a subway car or have to deal with a cab driver or take a nice whiff of the garbage and dead fish aroma.  But yeah, it is weird for me to think about some random year, like 2002, and think about the time I spent in that Astoria apartment, or hiking to the subway, or sitting at my old desk, hacking away at FrameMaker docs while finding ways of covertly getting my coworkers to open up sodomy images unsuspectingly.  (Pro tip: create a Windows CD-R with an autorun that opens up goatse and then write “Half-Life beta” on it.)

    In my mind, New York has this small, tangible quality to it, as I only remember the bits and pieces surrounding a narrow view of the past.  Like I think of Times Square and Penn Station, and how you could walk from one to the other in a few minutes, and in my mind, it’s almost the same as the walk from my front door to my parking spot.  But in reality, two and a half million people are between those two points, a densely packed chunk of an island with dozens of levels and layers of subways and trains and streets and sidewalks and offices and lofts and apartments, with wall-to-wall tiny stores and bodegas and locksmiths and cell phone stores and landmarks and all of that seems to fall from my mind.  I remember the last time I went to Manhattan, I stepped outside at night on Fifth Avenue, and at an hour when everyone should have been asleep or parked in front of their TVs, there were more people criss-crossing and walking than four minutes after the last out at a World Series game.  The height of the buildings and the bustle of the crowd and the noise of the car alarms and taxis laying on their horns overwhelmed me.  When I lived there, and in my memories, I turned all of that off, buried myself in my headphones and walked fast from point to point.  But when you’re in the middle of it… oh, man.  I do miss that, although I just want a small taste, and probably couldn’t hack a week there, let alone any long period of time.  How did I survive eight years there?

    I may have mentioned to some of you that I had a health “thing” which of course was bullshit.  I had what I thought was a bad sinus infection that went on for a few months, and after a couple of rounds of you-just-snorted-anthrax antibiotics, I still had problems.  So I fought with my insurance company for a month and got a CT scan of my head, which revealed… nothing.  So I guess it’s just allergies.  But getting a CT scan of my brain definitely freaked me out, especially because I got a CD of it and have it sitting on my computer now.  And if you look, I do have a cyst in one of my sinuses, which is harmless and something like 40% of us have them, but when I first saw that, I was certain that was my death, a big, fat, c-word getting ready to tap into my brain.  It’s not, and there’s nothing else wrong in the scan, aside from my teeth, which of course contain more metal than a god damned terminator robot.  But still, the week between getting the CD and seeing the doctor was not exactly calming.

    The mortality trip is a k-hole that I don’t like to fall down.  Everyone my age has parents that are checking out.  Every one of my aunts and uncles on my dad’s side is either dead or has some kind of cancer, except for my dad, and you don’t need to be a statistician to lose sleep over that one.  But it’s not something I can focus on.  All I can do is write as much as I can write, and try to not eat shit and get some regular exercise.  It’s been nice enough outside that I have started walking again every day.  And I bought a kettle bell, mostly because Joe Rogan won’t shut the fuck up about them on his podcast.  I used to lift free weights, and thought this was similar, but I did the DVD workout the other day, and an hour later, was like “why the fuck is the back of my upper thigh so god damned sore?”

    I am continuing work on the next book.  I also have a number of old books that were never released as proper books that I’ve imported into scrivener, and I wonder if I should polish them up and release them.  The current list goes like this:

    • Air in the Paragraph Line #1-7
    • An “essay” book of some of my favorite blog posts
    • The story of my 1999 road trip across the country
    • This collection of short stories about Bloomington

    All of these are “done”, but would require covers, formatting, editing, and names and blurbs.  The big issue is that none of these are part of the big picture plan, the direction I’ve been going with the last couple of books.  And if I had time to work on these, I would work on the next book.  And the big fear is that I will spend weeks and weeks getting this crap done, and it will sell exactly zero copies.  So, tell me if you’d really like to see one of these see the light of day.  For now, they’re all severe writer’s block day alternate projects.

    Speaking of, gotta go write.

  • A hundred things I wanted to mention

    No, literally. I can’t write a thousand words about one thing, unless it’s “hey, remember the Magnavox TV (x1000)”, and everything within the next 18 months will just be a list, so here is a list.

    1. I gave away more books this weekend than I have sold in my life. I hope this is a good thing.
    2. I have a CT scan of my head on my computer, and I can scroll through it and see what the inside of my head looks like at any given plane. This is more strange than you could imagine. There’s a sense of mortality to it, I guess.
    3. I once had an endocrinologist who looked like Mike Brady and his entire desk was nothing but a vast collection of crystal figurines. It seriously looked like eBay shit the entire crystal figurine category on his desk.
    4. I’m going back to Germany next month. I’m actually going to London first, then Nuremberg, then Berlin. I have no idea what I’m doing in any of the the three cities, except “taking pictures”, and probably getting some kind of gastrointestinal malady.
    5. I’ve had some strange preoccupation with updating the firmware on one or both of the wireless routers I have sitting around the house that are currently doing nothing. I keep thinking they could get turned into a media center or phone switch, and then I remember I hate dealing with linux and have better shit to do with my time.
    6. A company has made a replica of the Commodore 64, except it is a Mini-ITX PC inside. See above comment about linux, and I think the thing, once fully-equipped, would cost as much as a decent Mac laptop.
    7. None of the ceilings in my condo are level. I think the entire building, which is made out of cast concrete, has a certain amount of slope to it, so that like, for example, from one end to another laterally, there’s a one-inch difference in height.
    8. I got this new entertainment center installed, and had a very brief flashback to the summer I spent unloading furniture off of trucks at Montgomery Ward, mostly because the smell of new furniture has that artificial chipboard processed wood formaldehyde odor to it.
    9. Toward the end of Jonathan Lethem’s book Chronic City, he mentions one of the characters is from Bloomington and used to swim in the granite quarries as a kid, and if I had his email, I would have told him I loved the book, but IT’S LIMESTONE.
    10. I am already done with baseball season. I have no patience for bad pitching.
    11. I need to buy a new pair of shoes, but I hate the fact that New Balance shoes no longer include those stay-tied laces, and the only place that I can find that sells them that isn’t storing customer credit card numbers in a plaintext file on the desktop of some Chinese computer is on Amazon and is charging like $24 in shipping for a $2 pair of laces.
    12. All food that is extruded is arguably better than other food, which is ironic or possibly easily explainable by the fact that the human digestive system is essentially an extrusion system.
    13. I think everyone is a hoarder, but doesn’t think they are, except for the people who are minimalists, and I think every person I’ve known who is a minimalist is also an alcoholic.
    14. I have a macro lens for my camera now, but its mostly shown me that every thing in my house is covered in cat hair.
    15. My childhood would have been far less interesting with wikipedia.
    16. My article, “List of drugs to take on the MTA subway while masturbating, in order” was recently rejected.
    17. I wish duotrope had a checklist that I could use to filter the list of markets that don’t get bent out of shape when you use the word “fuck” in a story.
    18. I guess I’m not a huge fan of pasta, and that’s extruded.
    19. I’m tempted to wire up something to my toilet that posts to my facebook timeline every time I take a shit.
    20. The Safeway near my house in Emeryville always smells like really bad weed. I don’t know if it’s the cashiers or the patrons. Maybe both.
    21. I’ve been obsessed with experimental noise/ambient/electronic bands lately, especially ones that have free crap I can download online.
    22. I’ve also been obsessed with either making a chapbook or making a combination book and CD, although I don’t have any good artwork for a chapbook, and nobody buys print books anymore, and I don’t know what I’d put on a CD, although I’d probably spend a week fucking off in Garage Band if I found a print-on-demand place that did combo book/CD projects.
    23. I wonder what happens if you tried to explain to a creationist that maybe god created the universe, but god was created by a massive expansion of a singularity.
    24. I have this strange urge to take my entire twitter feed and put it into a print book.
    25. I still have no idea what pinterest is or does.
    26. I saw the movie The Hunger Games this weekend, but I mostly went because I’m addicted to eating an entire bag of Reese’s Pieces during a movie. I probably would have went to the newest Tyler Perry movie, provided they sold Reese’s Pieces.
    27. I’ve been spending a lot more time reading 4chan lately. It’s probably the most motivating thing I do with my time.
    28. I am 89,000 words into my next book and still have no idea what it’s about.

    Okay I wanted to write a hundred things, but that’s not happening.

  • Happy 15th Birthday, Wrath of Kon

    Back on April 11, 1997, I had a stupid idea.

    I used to write in these journals, spiral notebooks, every day.  I started doing that in 1993.  I never wrote stories, and it wasn’t a diary either – it was some strange mix of both.  But any writing I did there was trapped forever on paper, unless I transcribed it, which I never did.  So my thought was to move some of this to the electronic world, to create a public web page where I posted some of these entries.

    Jorn Barger coined the term “blog” on December 17, 1997.  They didn’t become popular for a few more years.  Livejournal started in 1999; so did blogger.  This diary project of mine was born before anyone knew what the hell a blog was.  I’m certain some other site influenced me to do this, and I didn’t pluck the idea out of thin air, but I don’t remember what I was reading on a daily basis back in 1997.

    I did everything in emacs back then: email, book writing, usenet news.  I bugged my friend Bill Perry for some elisp help, and he wrote a little thing that would let me hit a magic key combination and open up an html file with today’s date as the filename.  So I’d hit Control-x Control-j, and the file ~/www/journal/html/041197.html would magically appear.  I then hacked out a C program that I could run and generate an index of all of these pages.  There was no database, no themes, no CMS.  This was five years before wordpress was a gleam in Matt Mullenweg’s eye.  It was rough, but it worked.

    So on that Friday, I posted my first entry here.  Back then, this project didn’t have a name.  I called it “the journal” for a while.  It eventually got the name “Tell Me a Story About The Devil”, which has its origins in a Ray Miller story.  The name “The Wrath of Kon” is a more recent change.

    I always hated the word “blog”, though.  There was this whole journal or diary movement in the late 90s that everyone has forgotten, and all of a sudden, blogs were “invented” in the early 2000s.  That meant I had a good five or six years of entries, when all of a sudden, everyone and their mother was a “blogger” and started getting book deals and money thrown at them.  So yeah, I was bitter.  But I kept at it.  Now, I don’t give a shit about the term “blog”.  I have bigger fish to fry.

    There have been many changes over the years.  My Rube Goldberg mechanism would break on January 1st every year, and I slowly duct taped more functionality to the system, adding a bit of CSS, a comment system, and eventually ditching the entire thing for wordpress.  The page originally lived at speakeasy.org, and moved to rumored.com/journal in 1998.  I eventually dropped the /journal part.  The content also slowly changed, moving from diary entries to stories to news to travel reports and back again.  I never had a solid theme, but I think that prevented me from painting myself in a corner.  I think if I originally would have only blogged about the books I read or a quest to collect every Atari cartridge, this would have died a long time ago.

    So.  15 years.  1149 entries.  I think the last time I was able to calculate a word count, it was something like 650,000 words, and Infinite Jest is something like 460,000.  I did a book that collected the first three years, the Seattle entries; I keep thinking about a book that collects some of the best essays of the last dozen years, but I’ve got something on all four burners right now.

    Anyway, here’s to fifteen years.  I don’t know many other sites that have been around this long.  I wonder where things will be in 2027.

  • Goodbye, iUniverse

    My first royalty check

    No, iUniverse isn’t going out of business.   (Well, maybe they are – I haven’t checked.)  I’ve just decided to pull my books from iUniverse.

    I’ve done three books with them, and the idea of print on demand radically changed my writing career.  I mean, I have not made millions from it, but prior to the advent of PoD, I thought the only way I’d ever hold a printed copy of my book in my hands would be if I wrote a million agents and publishers and found one willing to print it, or if I payed thousands of dollars to fill my garage with a short print run, or maybe if I went to Kinko’s and printed my own copy.

    Someone told me about iUniverse back in 99 or 2000, and this was around the time Summer Rain was close to done.  It was an incredibly revolutionary idea back then, this thought that I could get real copies of my book, and get them in Amazon and other book stores, and even have it so brick-and-mortar book stores (remember those?) could order copies through Ingram.

    There were a couple of issues with PoD back then.  One was cost.  Summer Rain was incredibly expensive compared to the per-unit cost of offset printing a few thousand books.  There wasn’t the setup, and you didn’t have to produce a bunch of books at once and then warehouse them, which was awesome.  But selling a paperback book for thirty bucks was never easy.

    The stigma was the worst part.  Back in 2000, everyone looked down at PoD as hackneyed and just another extension of vanity presses.  The party line was that real writers don’t self-publish, and you weren’t shit unless you had a book deal.  The irony of this is that the proponents of this attitude are the same people who can’t shut the fuck up about the kindle revolution.  (You know who I’m talking about.)  To some extent, this didn’t matter to me; I had a copy of my book on my shelf at home, and friends could buy it and read it, and people enjoyed the work.  That’s all that ultimately matters to me, but there was still a nagging feeling in the back of my head when the “real” writers talked shit about self-publishing.

    I also didn’t have high hopes that PoD publishing would reap all of the rewards that getting a book deal with a Big 6 publisher would.  There was a lot of PoD backlash from people who dumped a book onto a PoD publisher, and then bitched and moaned when it didn’t take off.  I never saw iUniverse as anything more than a printer, and didn’t expect them to do anything more than fulfillment.  But some people thought you would just upload your PDF and your book would suddenly take off like a Dan Brown release.  Truth is, PoD involves just as much hustle as printing off copies yourself and trying to sell them one by one.

    So, why am I dumping iUniverse?  A few reasons:

    • When I first started, there was almost no initial setup fees – I may have paid some trivial amount, like a hundred bucks, but it wasn’t much.  This fee went up and up, and after my third book, Lulu came on the scene with no setup fee, and that was the end of the line for me and iUniverse.  Now, their most basic package is $899, and the “Book Launch Premier Pro” is a whopping $4499.
    • All I really wanted was fulfillment and distribution.  iUniverse tried to differentiate themselves with all of this “value add” stuff that was mostly useless.  I have no need for bookmarks, press releases, book signing kits, or other crap I could get online for a dollar.  (Vistaprint is your friend.)
    • Without asking, iUniverse decided they would create e-book versions of my books and price them the way they wanted to price them.  And they made it damn near impossible to remove those versions.  So while I made a new version of Rumored to Exist for the kindle and priced it at $2.99, they made a crappy version and priced it at $3.99.
    • The per-unit pricing was too high.  Summer Rain was $29.99 on iUniverse.  The lulu version was $14.99.  The createspace version will be $13.99.  My profit is roughly the same on all three.
    • All of the processes at iUniverse are antiquated.  To find out your royalties, you have to wait for the next month’s statement.  To pull a book from publishing, you have to write them a god damned letter.  Ugh.
    • One of the things iUniverse had over createspace was that createspace is part of Amazon, which meant you wouldn’t get into B&N or brick-and-mortar stores.  With iUniverse, you could get into anyplace that used Ingram’s database.  In practice, 99.99999% of my book sales are through Amazon.  I don’t know if I’ve ever sold a book through a brick-and-mortar store.

    So I wrote a letter to iUniverse and pulled my books.  (Seriously, a letter?)  There are currently only three books on there: Summer Rain, Rumored, and Tell Me a Story About the Devil, which is a journal archive from 97-99 that none of you ever bought.  The first two are already moved to Amazon/createspace.  The last one can die on the vine.  If you’re really desperate to get any of the iUniverse editions before they go away, I think you probably have a few days to grab them.  But the newer versions are not only better, but cheaper.

    Next up will be hemming and hawing about what to do with all of my books on lulu, and if they should also get moved.  I should probably stop screwing with all of this and actually write new books, though.