The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

  • Fistful of Pizza review at Metal Curse

    I hope all of you had a happy Firestorm, or whatever religious holiday you celebrate this week.  I’m currently reporting from the city where Jeff Dahmer did all of his work twenty years ago, the land of cheap beer and plenty of cheese.  I spent almost a week in what’s left of the land where I grew up, which is now overrun by meth labs and dollar stores.  While it was good to see some people from the past, it will be nice to be back in my own bed tomorrow night.

    Speaking of the hell that is Indiana, I spent some time with long-time buddy and editor of Metal Curse zine, Ray Miller.  There’s a new review of my book Fistful of Pizza up there today: http://metalcurse.com/index.php/reviews/jon_konrath_-_fistful_of_pizza/. If you got a brand-new kindle for the holidays (or an iPhone or iPad or iPod or whatever else can read Kindle books) and you’ve got 99 cents burning a hole in your pocket, go check out the book.

    There’s a new Kindle Fire in the family, and although it is not mine, it looks like a neat toy.  Personally, I will be hauling about ten pounds of dead wood through the airports, and seeing how much of that Steve Jobs bio I can burn through while waiting for flights and trying to avoid airborne contagions.  Good stuff.

  • Comment of the day

    I forgot to post this, but I had the comment of the day in the Seattle Weekly, which is ironic (in an Alanis sort of way) because I used to live in Seattle, and because I try to avoid newspaper comment sections, seeing as they consist of nothing but people bitching about how the War of 1812 was Obama’s fault.

    Anyway, complete story here:

    http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/11/comment_of_the_day_horse-carca.php

     

    TL;DR summary: the paper ran a story about some freak who took some hipster snapshots of a girl inside a horse carcass, and I of course find a Star Wars inconsistency in their story.  Enjoy.

  • Life and death of the Game Boy

    When the Game Boy first came out, I was infatuated with Tetris, still a new disease to me.  I could spend any amount of money playing Tetris in 1989 or 1990, until I had nightmares about falling blocks and that stupid song stuck in my head.  So when the Target stores started putting display units of Game Boys chained to a glass countertop in the electronics department, I’d spend hours mashing that little grey cross and the two red buttons to drop tetronimos on its pea-green LED display.  I lusted after the Game Boy, even though I didn’t even have a home computer at the time, and if I had the money for Nintendo’s portable game system, I would’ve had half the money for a cheap Amiga.

    There’s something pervasive about handheld game systems.  All through the 80s, the systems grew in complexity, starting with those addictive football games that were nothing but a series of rows of LEDs, or the Simon-type games, things that just beeped and bleeped to get you to mash buttons and eat through nine-volt batteries, spending more of your time learning how to put the two terminals of a square battery on your tongue to gauge how much juice it still contained.  I had a few of these games, like this D&D game where you had to move through a maze and not get clobbered by these little LCD sprites, something I got for $20 and played the hell out of until it became boring.  I enjoyed the games, but the cost proposition was too high to fully embrace the format.

    But there was always something intimate about the little pocket games, like a secret drug addiction you could slip into and avoid life.  The console systems, the pongs and 2600s and NESes, always seemed a more public affliction, something you’d set up in your living room and inflict on the entire family.  Maybe it’s because they involved a TV set, and this was a time when there were more American homes than TV sets.  But the pocket systems involved a personal closeness, something that was instantly on, always there, a tiny screen only you could see.

    The mixed curse to these is they only played one game.  When you got the pocket Space Invaders game, it only played Space Invaders.  Sometimes, you could toggle a switch to get a different difficulty, or change your tennis game to play handball instead, but the units were almost entirely dedicated to that single pursuit.  A huge advantage to that is every game had its own controls, its own button layout and size and feel and placement and color.  When you played the aforementioned Space Invaders game, those buttons, along with the unique display elements, the custom LED or LCD panel, were your direct connection to that game; your pocket Pac Man or handheld Galaga had a completely different set of controls and look and feel, and was a different drug entirely.

    (That’s my chief complaint about the Kindle.  I love it, and use it when I travel, but I don’t like that every book has essentially the same look and feel because I’m reading it on the same sized screen and holding the same exact weight in my hand and pressing the same exact buttons, regardless of author or title.  When I read a paper copy of a Philip K. Dick book, the binding and size and font and smell of the pages dictate a completely different experience than when I’m reading Freakanomics. But on the Kindle, there’s some latent similarity in the experience, which bothers me.)

    Of course, the big advantage to a one-system-plays-all approach like the Game Boy is that you bought one system, then bought a bunch of cartridges and had a whole library of titles to play.  Unfortunately, it never worked that way for me.  I got the Game Boy Pocket in 1996, a gift from my girlfriend at the time, something I could use to whittle away the hours while sitting in airports on a long and tortuous holiday trip back to Indiana.  The Pocket is an often-forgotten model, an incremental redesign of the original, smaller, using fewer batteries, but otherwise the same unit.  They quickly came out with a color unit, and I felt deceived in that way that happens when your top-of-the-line electronics purchase is suddenly old hat.

    My first game purchase was, of course, Tetris plus, a version of the original Russian plague with some additions, like if you cleared special bonus blocks, you could drop bombs and blow up pieces.  I played the living shit out of that cartridge.  The Pocket used dual AAA batteries, good for ten hours at a clip, and I went through many sets of Duracells for that machine. I spent late nights seized by writer’s block, sitting in bed in the darkness, a single halogen nightstand light trained on the not-backlit LED screen, trying to beat my high score on the little red plastic box.  I didn’t have a home video game system, and this was long before phones with games, so this was a unique addiction to me.

    But I couldn’t really find any other games as prevailing as Tetris.  I think I bought one or two new cartridges, including a Star Wars platform game with horrible graphics; I got stalled trying to navigate through the Death Star and couldn’t go any further.  I also went to my favorite used record store in Seattle on University, and went through their stack of loose and book-less cartridges, trying to find anything interesting.   I found a Boggle game, which was completely useless with no keyboard, and a Mahjongg game which caused migraines because the tiles were so unreadable on the low-resolution screen.  For whatever reason, Tetris was not only the killer app for the system; it was the only app.  Everything else was either too graphics-intensive or needed more CPU or didn’t work well on a cartridge or begged for network connectivity or needed different controls.  Tetris was the One True App for the system.

    Nintendo has gone through two major iterations (GBA, DS) and many minor upgrades of the system, and I never got onboard with any of them, although there were moments, usually during fire sales of obsolete systems or fits of extreme boredom stuck in airports, that I considered it.  But then the Palm came along, and now phones can play games almost as well as the handheld systems.  This is ultimately Nintendo’s doom, just like how the emergence of home computers killed dedicated video game systems in the 80s.  Why spend hundreds on an Atari 5200 and an Atari 800 when you can get an Atari 800 and play games plus “learn computers” and do educational stuff? Never mind that the 800’s games were a slight step behind the 5200’s, or that 99% of the people never did any educational shit on home computers, regardless of the huge revolution that was promised back then.

    It’s the same way now.  Why buy a Nintendo 3DS for $200 and then buy a laptop or iPad for “educational” stuff, when you could just buy the tablet or PC, and play Angry Birds on that?  There are several minor holes to shoot in that argument – I think the MSRP on a 3DS got dropped for the holidays; the 3DS is a better “true” game machine and has better tactile buttons and 3D technology blah blah blah.  But parents don’t shop for toys based on vertex performance of the GPU; they go on groupthink, and that says that if you buy your kid an iPad, they will “learn computers” and become a genius, case closed.

    But there’s something about that tactile relationship to the Game Boy or the older pocket games that Nintendo could exploit, and I don’t know how.  Maybe Nintendo will need to fail, maybe there’s a need for a huge video game crash like 1984 all over again, and another company will have to rise from the ashes to convince people that something other than Farmville is the future to gaming.  But what will that be?

  • The gaps of summer

    I find myself thinking about Summer Rain a lot lately, which is ultimately dangerous, I think.  Next year will be 20 years since the Bloomington summer I fictionalized, and ten years since I actually last set foot in the college town.  I think about the book because it’s a default way of writing for me, fictionalizing my past, and I often wonder if I should write another similar book talking about the other pockets of time in Indiana, or Seattle, or whatever.  I actually wrote a good chunk of a novel that fictionalized the end of my high school experience, and the battle to get the hell out of my small town in Indiana, back in the late 80s.  It’s about 50,000 words, but ultimately plotless and would be difficult to spin into anything useful.

    I pulled the original Summer Rain manuscript into Scrivener, with thoughts about cleaning it up and doing an ebook version, but it was absolutely painful for me to look at some of that old writing.  It screams “first book” and makes me want to dive into it and rewrite everything, which is the danger.  That’s a huge rabbit hole to fall into, and one without much reward.  I’ve often thought about going back to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, or maybe come back and rewrite it as a book told by a person twice as old as the original character, returning to the town he lived in half a life ago and comparing the pieces of that past with what really happened in his life.  The John Knowles book A Separate Peace was an unlikely inspiration for me, and he frames his book in a similar way.

    One of the things that I ponder sometimes is all of the stuff I left out of the book.  There were a few story lines and characters that ultimately did not add anything to the book and were left out, and there are bits of that summer that I later recall that simply didn’t relate to the rest of it and never made the manuscript.  Sometimes I’ll see something that reminds me of the era, and I’ll then remember it never made the book, and is just a lost, unassimilated memory that I should probably catalog and use elsewhere.

    One of those memories involves driving in a tornado.  I was at the College Mall, before a shift at the radio station, wandering the concourses and hallways with no real purpose except to kill a few hours until I went on the air.  It started pouring rain, which was no big surprise – one of the central themes of the original short story which morphed into the book was how it rained every single time I had a radio show, and I’d spend those lazy summer nights in this shithole college radio station, listening to death metal and watching the rain fall on the downtown in the darkness.  But while I was at the mall, the sirens went off, those air raid sirens that typically denote the start of a nuclear war or godzilla attack.  Someone came on the PA and said everyone had to go to the mall basement because a tornado had been spotted.  This amazed me, because I did not know the mall had a PA system or a basement.

    As everyone shuffled into the basement of this mall, I thought for some stupid reason that it was my duty to get to the station and broadcast news about the tornado.  Never mind that nobody listened to the station, and I didn’t have a ticker tape or news feed or national weather service thingee to give me any data other than what I could see outside my window; I felt some need to get to the station, as opposed to being trapped in a basement with a bunch of strangers.  So I ran out to the parking lot, and drove.  And I got to the station, there was no news, no destruction, end of story.  But the experience of driving in this near-tornado weather was surreal, the darkness and the quiet of the two pressure fronts, punctuated with the sounds of rain dropping like pellets of stone onto my windshield, the low howl of the wind, and the feeling that my little toy car would go airborne at any given time.  It wasn’t enough of a story to become an actual story, but when I see a tornado on the news, that’s what entered my head.

    There was also this entire subplot that I couldn’t get into words about this girl that I tutored who I had a horrible crush on, and who it turns out had a horrible crush on me, and of course nothing became of it, except I spent a summer trying to explain Motorola assembly code to someone who probably should have changed majors.  She also had this absolutely gorgeous roommate, who I never talked to, and then one night had an hour-long spontaneous conversation with her and found out she was a manic-depressive and we shared the same psychiatrist.  And she had broken up with her boyfriend the day before, and was going to Europe the next week, and it was one of those things where I thought if everything was different, I would have had a shot with her.

    Years later the tutor-ee converted to the Baha’i faith, and convinced me to come to a meeting with her.  I had little interest in converting to a new religion, but still had some kind of feelings for her, and agreed.  And I found the Baha’i religion fascinating, how they believe that all religions are essentially true, and believe in all of god’s messengers.  All of the people were friendly, and there was no heavy dogma or evangelical angle.  But there was still the whole belief in a god thing, which I couldn’t do.  Also, no premarital sex was a deal-breaker.

    There’s something psychologically stopping me from writing about these things, and I don’t know how to quantify it, other than to say I don’t care about it anymore.  Bloomington seems so distant, and the present seems so dull, so I feel a need to write about something completely synthesized.  There are a lot of things like that, things that I no longer give a shit about that were once almost religious battles for me.  The Coke versus Pepsi sort of battles in life are things I just honestly do not care about anymore.  That’s not a problem in the sense that I don’t throw a fit when I go to a restaurant and they don’t have my brand of fizzy water.  But does it cause a problem in that all writing needs to be, in some way, about unresolved conflict?

  • Dream Scenery

    Last night was an evening of NyQuil dreams, a single dose of the caplets right before bed to mask up a touch of a cold I’ve had for a few days.  I woke with memories of strange dreams, including one where I joined a medical marijuana co-op that was like one of those CSA services that gives you a box of produce every week.  The first delivery was a huge tupperware box of what looked like bright green stems of asparagus, and I didn’t know if I needed to dry them out or maybe dump them in the food processor and make a soup.  The box came with some attached literature, a pamphlet that I thought might contain some usage instructions, but it was all of this mumbo-jumbo about how the herb was small-batch artisan crafted from the finest genetic strains.  I tried chopping up a stem into small pieces and chewing on it and a handful of dentyne cinnamon gum, but it tasted horrid.

    I wish I kept better dream journals, but it would involve a substantial change in my morning routine.  It was somewhat easier to do when I lived alone in an apartment the size of my office.  I could take two steps and travel from bed to computer, fire up an emacs window, and dump what I remembered before it quickly faded away.  Now the computer isn’t even on the same floor as the bed, and by the time I get up, go downstairs, feed cats, do everything else, I’m fully awake and the dream is gone.  It’s too bad, because I get some great fragments of stories that way.  I re-read Rumored to Exist recently, and was amazed at how many stories started as pieces of dreams.

    What fascinates me, when looking at all of my dreams, is the location or setting.  When I was trying to remember this pot-CSA dream, I scoured my brain looking for details, and vividly remember what the apartment looked like.  It wasn’t anywhere I’d lived before; I think it was an amalgam of my last New York apartment, turned sideways, and mixed with one of the sets from Boogie Nights.

    A dream’s scenery is like any memory – you don’t know why some stick and some don’t.  A lot of my dreams take place in my old house in Edwardsburg, where I lived from about age 1 to 7, but I’m almost always an adult in the dreams, and they aren’t period pieces where I’m looking back at the mid-70s; they are in modern time or the near future, with just the setting retained.  Any time the dream involves multiple stories, like if I am falling down stairs, it’s my old house in Elkhart.  I’ve lived in a dozen other places since then, and I’ve lived away from Elkhart for twice as long as I lived there, but those are the constant sets, the stages always used by my mind.

    I don’t know if it’s a function of time I spent there or because it happened at a certain point in my mental development cycle, but that’s somewhat understandable, dreaming about things I know.  What baffles me is when I have dreams that are in settings that I’ve never seen, or don’t even exist.  Another part of last night’s dream was that the President decided not to live in the White House anymore, and built his own mansion outside of Chicago, where he’d run the government.  And I swear the mansion was one of the sets in the movie True Lies. Later in the dream, I was walking around outside, and I definitely know the scene took place in one of the instant-play levels of a Need for Speed video game I haven’t played since 2007.  How did my brain decide to use that for the dream?

    I don’t know a lot about dream theory, and it’s a k-hole I don’t want to fall down today, but there’s this theory called emotional selection, which basically says that our brains construct and then test scenarios that are then developed into thought patterns our brains integrate.  Dreams can have bizarre content because of these tests.  I don’t know that this “means” anything, like that because I dream about my old house, I have a fear of lumber or something.  And I don’t feel that having some deep understanding of my dream cycle will unlock some boss level in life, or make it so I can suddenly read 8000 words a minute or only sleep 27.6 minutes a day.

    And with that, I now have a thousand wikipedia articles to read about this, starting with this one and working my way south.

  • Instant Obsession

    I’ve had this sudden obsession with analog film.  It started when we saw the movie Super 8, which made me google super 8mm film, and then start pricing the stuff.  It’s insanely expensive – something like $20 a roll, which is roughly $10 a minute.  The cameras are cheap, practically free on eBay, with some going for twenty bucks.  But you also have to buy a projector to see the stuff.  And you have to get it developed, which involves mailing it away to Kansas or something, waiting ten to 20 days to find out you filmed 90 seconds of darkness or cat hair flapping against the gate.  And editing it involves a knife, tape, and far more patience than I could ever muster.

    That had me thinking about Polaroid, though.  We had one when I was a kid.  I was the 135 child, that old format camera, and all of my baby pictures were on slide film.  Monica was the 110 kid, the next low-end Kodak format.  But by Angie, it was Polaroid, instant pictures.  This all seems lame now that any expectant mother’s got ten video cameras and a quartet of iPhones trained on her junk from first contraction to ejection of placenta, but back then, a Polaroid was as instant as you got.  My memories of 1976, her birth, are forever stained in the rusty sepia tones of a deteriorated  Type 600 integrated film image.

    During my trip across the country in 1999, I became infatuated with Polaroids again.  I’d heard they now had a disposable camera, and I became hung up on finding one.  This was right before digital photography became cheap, and I took pictures on the long trip with a 35mm film camera, a cheap point-shoot I got in 1993.  But I stopped in every mall on my crawl across America, looking for one of those damn things.  They must have just discontinued them, and I finally gave up and bought a standard Polaroid camera and a couple of packs of film, only to find the disposable at the next Target at which I stopped.

    The Polaroid was interesting, but I got bored of it fast.  I liked the oddball size of the portable version, but in some ways, the Polaroid was the worst of both film and digital.  It was insanely expensive per shot, very hard to work with anything but the most perfect light conditions, and almost any picture taken had a certain flat, lifeless quality to them.  There’s also something about the plastic Fisher-Price cased cameras that scream “I’m an idiot” when you’re walking around snapping pictures.  (I’m sure now it screams “I’m a hipster!” – same difference.)  The camera went in a closet when I arrived in New York, after I burned through the last few frames of film, and I don’t know what happened after that.  Either I gave away, eBayed, or threw out the camera years later.

    Polaroid suddenly went out of business, or stopped making the film, and the 10-shot packs of expired 600 film started selling for $60 online.  Some group tried reverse-engineering the formula to restart production, and they did, with so-so results.  I was in a hotel in New York last year and this woman was taking pictures of her kids with a Polaroid.  I asked her if it was old film or the new stuff, and she said it was new, and that it seemed to work fine.  I heard mixed results online, that some batches were streaked or splotchy, but the snapshots she was holding looked decent.  Not $21.99 for 8 shots decent, but I don’t have kids, so how do I know.

    What I don’t understand is that some other instant film still existed.  I think Fuji made their own instant film, and I think still does.  Is that a different format or cartridge?  Also, I think they make large Polaroid film, like 5×7 stuff for pro cameras.  I could google this, but I’m sure I would get a wikipedia page that contained nothing but chemical formulas and no actual information.

    What’s interesting is Polaroid now makes a printer that works on instant film.  You bluetooth to this little thing about the size of a pack of cigs, and zap a digital photo, and it spits out an instant print of it.  I think the prints are only about 2×3, probably not cheap, and it doesn’t work on an iPhone.  (It does use USB though.)  Now I’m interested in checking one of these out.  I have no idea what I would do with it – probably take a dozen pictures of my cats, then throw it in the closet.  But I get infatuated by technology like this, and I’m not sure why.  It’s the same reason I’ll waste days googling Commodore 64 stuff, even though I know my phone is a thousand times faster and easier to use.  That doesn’t stop me from reading an endless stream of articles about people writing ethernet into their 8-bit, 30-year-old computers with less memory than my watch.

  • Force

    I’m trying to force myself to write daily, not just the fiction writing, but some kind of post here, to keep the momentum going, but also to get out of my system this sketching, the rote description of the past and the present, which isn’t the kind of writing I do for stories and books, or at least it won’t be anymore.

    That thing to the right, by the way, is the Claremont resort, where we went for Thanksgiving.  The inside reminds me of the hotel in The Shining, although it’s been so long since I’ve seen that flick, it might look completely different in comparison.  Other things I am reminded of include the extended family of Carter on ER, and all of the various athletic clubs I’ve visited in the past. I also feel slightly insulted that they haven’t nagged me about a membership yet.  I figured I would have been spammed to hell and back to pay a monthly fee roughly the same as my mortgage payment to use the tennis courts and rub elbows with the 1%.

    So, force.  I never get stuff done.  I have a huge collection of books with the first 15% written.  Lots of books on the shelves with a bookmark at the page 43 mark.  I have this bad habit of skipping around, too.  Like if I have 20 chapters to edit, I will edit the first, second, get bored, skip to the last one, and then start playing video games.  A couple of years ago, at work, I started forcing myself to do stuff from start to finish.  It has convinced me that I never could have written a book in the analog days of the typewriter.  But I sometimes get results when I power through stuff like that.  It’s harder to apply to creative work; sometimes I can create, and sometimes I can’t.

    I’ve also found that if I time myself, start a timer with 60 minutes on it, disconnect the internet, and force myself to either type in a buffer and get word after word on the page, or stare at the screen and do nothing, I’ll eventually start moving forward.  I guess if I burn through an hour on the timer and do not get word one on the page, that’s at least more of a victory than if I sat in front of the tube and watched an episode and a half of Chopped.

    I have this book essentially done, but all of the stories need to be renamed.  I thought about going on fiverr and paying somebody five dollars a story and doing it that way.  I hate coming up with titles.  Was it Emily Dickinson or e.e. cummings who never titled anything?  I also thought about pulling a Peter Gabriel and naming my next six books Jon Konrath, except I’m sure that would somehow fuck up Amazon and all of the books would overwrite each other in some last-one-wins scenario.

    I also wish Amazon listed stuff alphabetically, because then I would name it like locksmiths and bail bondsmen come up with names, something like AAAAAAA.

    What else?  Closed on the house.  Bought two pair of glasses for an insane amount of money.  I am now farsighted enough that I need a second set of glasses just for reading.  This is the beginning of the end.

  • The Third (and Fourth) Eye

    I don’t know if I believe in luck or fate or karma, but of course my glasses had to break the day before an eye appointment.  I’m working off of a migraine-inducing old pair for today, and trying to figure out if they can temporarily fix the old ones, because even if I buy a new set today, I have to wait until they can deorbit a space telescope in order to appropriate the correct size lenses to fill my prescription.

    (And no, this isn’t a matter of just getting a replacement screw and a tiny screwdriver at the drug store.  I have more tiny screwdrivers than a restaurant has silverware.  And the spring-loaded hinge itself actually snapped, and does not appear to be a serviceable part.  I’d need an entirely new temple for it.)

    Glasses have always been a huge pain in the ass for me.  I first got fitted for them when I was in the first grade, so I officially became “that kid with glasses” first. I got my glasses at the Elkhart Clinic, which is like a very small step up from that place where you donate your old frames and they give them to kids in Haiti.  I have severe astigmatism, so my glasses always had freakishly thick plastic lenses, until they came out with high-index lenses, at which time they went from freakishly thick to abnormally thick.

    I spent a lot of high school and college going back and forth on contact lenses.  They didn’t used to be able to correct astigmatism with contact lenses, and they didn’t make a disposable lens in my prescription for a long time.  The cleaning regimen always bugged me, and I could never make it a full 20-hour day in college with a set of soft lenses, so I never stuck with the regimen, and always returned to glasses.  And looking back at some of the frames I had in the 80s and 90s, they were all truly horrendous.  Someone must have told me at some point that a bigger lens was better, or that a small lens would cost a dollar more or something, because I always got these lenses that were roughly the size of a small dinner plate.

    When I was in Seattle, I tried again with contacts, and the optometrist introduced me to Torek lenses, which are designed to correct for astigmatism.  I remember the first time I wore the new pair, driving from downtown Seattle to Factoria, and everything was astoundingly clear and corrected.  Glasses don’t give you true 3-D sight; they just present a 2-D corrected portal, which means everything in your peripheral vision is not corrected.  But with Torek lenses, everything looked clearer than it ever did, probably since before Kindergarten, before my eyes started going south.  Unfortunately, they did not have disposable lenses yet, and Torek lenses are even harder to put in your eyes, because you can put them in upside-down.  I also had all of the extended-wear issues, especially since I spend all day in front of a computer.

    I think they now make a disposable Torek lens for my prescription, but I have so many allergy-related eye issues, I’m not sure I would be able to withstand them.  I also thought about lasik surgery (it’s hard not to in New York – every subway car has an ad for it) but I got the initial consult, and my corneas are too thin.  There is a new procedure where they essentially implant a tiny contact lens under your cornea, but that doesn’t correct astigmatism.  They have a torek version of the implantable lens, but it hasn’t passed FDA testing, and flying to Canada to pay $10,000 for an essentially untested surgery on my eyes doesn’t seem like the best idea.

    I think my nearsightedness has largely stabilized in recent years.  But I think I’m slowly getting farsighted, and find myself taking off my glasses to read fine print on things.  I don’t know if that will mean bifocals or dedicated reading glasses, since I spend all day at the computer.  I also think they can fix farsightedness with a laser.  But I will need to throw more money at new hardware.

    I also don’t know what frames to get.  When I look at frames, they all look virtually identical.  It’s like when I watch one of those Heidi Klum fashion reality shows – I have no idea what looks good or bad.  And I absolutely detest that geeky looking glasses are suddenly “in”, and fashion models are wearing these nerdy, thick black frames.  This means that if I choose a pair like this, they will go out of style roughly 500 milliseconds later, and I’ll be stuck with them for another year or two.

    At least this is my chance to catch up on my large-print Reader’s Digest reading.  My eye doctor caters to the glaucoma demographic, so their reading material is limited.  It’s always fun to go somewhere where I’m the youngest person there by a good two or three decades.

  • Insomnia

    I’ve had horrible insomnia for the last week or so, the kind where you are dead tired and quickly fall asleep, then wake up 90 minutes later and spend hours completely alert, playing the “if I fall asleep now, I might still get x hours of sleep” game, where x is always too little.  And of course, playing this game is like moving your mouse every 58 seconds to keep the screen saver from ever starting.  If I was smart, I’d get out of bed, sit down here, and try to get some writing done.  But in the moment, it seems too imperative to get every second of sleep on the board I can.

    This sleep famine is my fault, sort of.  I got through the fall allergy flare-ups by taking benadryl every night before bed, and Diphenhydramine is a cruel mistress.  (That’s a potential short story title, too.)  I stopped taking it at night, and went to occasionally taking the not-as-fun Claritin for the allergy symptoms.  The first few nights were the worst, because my dreams went sideways.  On benadryl, I’d have these ultra-groggy completely insane visions of Abraham Lincoln and Helen Keller operating the Subway sandwich shop on the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker to finance their speed metal band, in which I was auditioning as their road ileostomy technician.  These were replaced with dreams of being awake and wondering when I would go back to sleep, interlaced with actually being awake and wondering when I would go back to sleep.

    My sleep hygiene has been much worse, and I expect a couple more bad nights before I will be so tired at night, the whole thing will right itself.  But it had me thinking about when my sleep cycle became such a struggle.  It used to be a fierce symptom of my depression, back in high school and the summer before college.  I had a job that summer that required me to be at the plant and ready to silver-plate band instrument pieces at 6:00 AM sharp.  The plant had summer hours where they started that early to avoid some of the summer heat, which doesn’t totally make sense, because if you start at 6:00 or 10:00, you’re still there at noon, when the sun is the worst.  But I got in this bad habit of staying up late, going to Perkins to try to write, scribbling these depressive manifestos in spiral notebooks until midnight, one, two in the morning, and then having the alarm go off at whatever unholy hour to get me through a shower and to the factory at six.

    I wish I still had those notebooks, because it would be phenomenal to peer into that completely unchecked depression and see what was happening in my head in the summer of 1989, and how I recorded it.  I felt that I had a suboptimal high school experience; I made it out, but I never dated, never had the social experience I thought was standard, and it was over and done with, and could not be redone.  I knew I had college in a few short months, and I’d be able to get a mulligan on everything and start over in a new town, hopefully with a new group of people who didn’t adhere to the same bizarre taxonomy of social castes.  But I know I did not, could not focus on that at the time.

    I had this feeling that something was fundamentally broken, but I didn’t know what.  My parents sent me to a shrink in my senior year, which itself was a somewhat alienating procedure, because nobody in a 1980s Indiana went to a therapist for anything, unless it was a court-mandated thing after your 25th DUI.  I went through the motions of this, and finished however many 50-minute hours, maybe 12 or 16, at which time the HMO insurance company considered me cured and stopped paying for more sessions.  I had a certain sense of relief from this conclusion, a euphoria that I was “cured” and could put it behind me and move on with life.  That lasted a couple of weeks, and then I entered the darkness again.

    It takes so much effort to remember this period, partly because it was over twenty years ago, and partly because in a few years, so many points of my life would quickly become digital and more fully archived.  I have no emails or digital photos from the summer of 1989; I know I wrote a lot of letters to people after I left for school, but I didn’t type them and didn’t keep carbons.  I can’t look at my account history at Amazon.com and see what dreadful self-help books I may have been reading back then.  I kept a calendar and sporadically wrote down events as they happened, the days of concerts and meetings and orientations, when fees and dorm applications and deposits were due.  But this causes me to construct a false reality, that maybe emphasizes the wrong points, or misses others entirely.

    This is, of course, not the stuff to think about when it’s 2:57 and your alarm goes off at 4:45.  And also don’t think about how you could bomb yourself out with some sedative or benzo and sleep like a baby, except you’d be out completely until ten or eleven.  Think about how to disassemble and reassemble a car engine, piece by piece.  If you miss a step, start over.  Or think about the emotions you will feel at 4:45, how you’ll wish for another hour, another five minutes in your high-threadcount womb.  Sometimes that works, too.

  • Cambodia, Thanksgiving, Debt

    So my contribution to small business Saturday was a trip to Spectator Books and a copy of the new book of Spalding Gray journals, which has been an interesting but difficult read so far.  I saw Gray in 1998, on one of my trips to New York before I moved there.  It was at PS 122, which is this old school that got converted into a tiny black box theater, and the show must have seated maybe a few dozen people.

    This small of a space for a long-form monologue was so intimate it was almost uncomfortable.  I mean, I’ve seen Rollins ramble on for four hours in a thousand-seater, and while he draws you in, he’s a little thing on a big stage far away, and no matter how intimidating he might be, there’s this separation between performer and audience.  In this little room, we were all sitting in chairs on the floor, and he’d work the room, moving from place to place on the stage.  That meant there were several times where he would stop and look right at me and talk for minutes at a time.  He wasn’t looking in my direction; he was looking AT me and talking TO me like if I was in someone’s living room at a party and someone was telling me a story.  This destruction of that performer-audience barrier gave me this unnatural, albeit brief connection to him, which made his suicide five years later a solid blow to the gut instead of just another famous-person-dies story.

    Thanksgiving has come and gone.  A came up and we went to the Claremont for dinner.  Last year we cooked, and that was a real marathon; this year, A talked about hosting, but her landlord just died a few weeks ago, so that added some weirdness to the mix, and we decided to go out for dinner.  The Claremont hotel is this hundred-year-old resort in the Berkeley hills, with a phenomenal restaurant that has giant bay windows where you can see the water and the bridges in the distance.  It was crowded as hell, the hallways filled with people like a MASH hospital filled with triaged victims, and they herded us off to a huge banquet hall set up as an auxiliary buffet.  I got many calories, although I chose roast beef over turkey.  I also did not say a prayer to the jesus, so I guess that makes me a secret muslim or something.  I think I did mention jesus once or twice, as in “jesus christ, this cornbread and chestnut stuffing is incredible.”

    I also have not mentioned the house drama in a while, but on Wednesday night, we signed our papers and are out of escrow on the purchase of our new place.  The loan gets funded and the sale gets recorded on Monday or Tuesday, but it’s otherwise done.  We have lived in this house for a year, so there’s no moving to be done, but this will most likely trigger several trips to Ikea.  We went on Friday, and looked at various entertainment centers, but didn’t buy one.  Maybe next weekend.  Right now, our “entertainment center” is a bookcase on its side and some cardboard boxes packed full of DVDs.

    The one roller coaster event with regard to the house close is debt.  We spent a year paying a mortgage on the old place and rent on the new place, and for next month, we will have neither.  But we went from having six figures of debt, to having absolutely zero debt after the old place closed, to having even more debt now that the new place is mortgaged up.  None of that is credit card debt, and we have two paid-off cars and no student loans, but it is an interesting anomaly.

    I finished another pass on this book, the follow-up to Fistful of Pizza.  There’s still no title or concept, and I feel like it could double in size and still be too short.  I also took a quick look at the zombie book I was writing for nano, and I feel like it could be salvageable if I gave it another month of work.  Unfortunately, the next month is cratered with end of year junk, doctor’s appointments and an extended midwestern trip.  But maybe a trip or two to the Goshen Wal-Mart to watch people fistfight over Xboxes will give me the creative spark I need to get this one over the top.