It’s Friday, and in about an hour, I’m off to OAK to catch a flight to LAX and spend a weekend celebrating my birthday.  No real plans, except for a quick trip, and probably a lot of nostalgia for the time five years ago when I lived down there.  I really do love LA, even if it’s trendy to hate it; I probably like it more than any of the other places I’ve lived, which makes it seem silly that I own a house in the dreary north part of the state, but that’s another discussion.

I was thinking about the first time I’d ever visited LA, and then realized that I wrote about it in the early days of this site, as one of my very first entries ever.  It’s funny to read it after having lived there, and it seems like it happened a million years and several lifetimes ago.  Like, I remember having to stop and fill up the car near LAX, and pulling into a neighborhood that at the time seemed like some kind of Tarantino-esque inner city gang nightmare.  Now, I realize I was probably in Hawthorne or something, which isn’t far from where I lived in 2008 and is a fairly sedate place to be.

I always divide my life into these discrete eras, like my Seattle era, or my K era when I dated her, or whatever.  And all of the eras are very compartmentalized from each other.  So it’s always interesting to me when different eras have these hyperlinks to each other, like when we visited the place where, ten eras later, I’d live.  Or another example: I lived in New York, and went to this conference in San Diego for a week, back when big companies actually paid for tech writers to go to conferences.  And one night, I drove up to LA to see a friend of mine.  And on the way, I swung through Anaheim, and stopped to eat a late lunch.  There was this McDonald’s right off the main drag by the Disney property, and it was a huge version, designed for giant lunch rushes of tourist busses dumping off scores of kids.  I remember eating there once in 1997, only because at that time, they had the McPizza, and only the highest-volume stores had the pizza, because the prep time of the pizza was longer than the holding time, so you had to move serious units to get it on the menu.  I didn’t get one, and for whatever stupid reason, went back to that specific McDonald’s in 2000 to see if I could get one, but by then, the McPizza was McHistory.

So that one visit for a Quarter Pounder meal deal knitted together at least three eras:  The Seattle/K era, the New York era, and the future 2008 living in LA era.  I did not visit the same McDonald’s in 2008, although I did go to Anaheim and see it when I went to an Angels game.  I was on Weight Watchers and off McDonald’s by then, though.

Another thing I remember from 2000: I was sitting there, reading a newspaper and picking at my fries, when this lady was mopping the floor.  It was an off hour, like maybe 2 or 3, so nobody was in the dining room but me.  This was a redneck woman, maybe someone who was working there either because it was all she could get or it was part of the terms of her parole or rehab.  And she started talking to me about the nomination of George W. Bush as the Republican candidate.  She told me “well, I’ll probably vote for him.  He probably knows the most about the job, since he already was President.”  I did not correct her.  This was the beginning of the next era.

I’ve been obsessed with print lately, which is a real kick in the ass, because I sell almost no print books these days.  I can sometimes get a few people to kick in a buck to look at my stuff on the kindle, but sales of the dead tree counterparts have been absolutely abysmal.  If it wasn’t for the kindle, I’d probably be learning to crochet instead of still picking at this, so that’s a good thing, and I really do like it when people read my books regardless of price or format.  But there’s something about print books that really pulls at me.

I just read this book the other day, by RE/Search, which was essentially a two-hour phone interview of Henry Rollins by V. Vale.  Rollins had some good stuff to say, and it’s always fun to catch up with his projects.  But one of the things that made me really love this project was that it was a pocket book, a little 4x6 inch book, maybe 125 pages, but a little thing that felt good in your hands and just screamed “collectible” even if it was not an ultra-rare numbered limited edition.  There’s a certain tactile pleasure in having a book like this, and I don’t know what it is.  It’s small, and an odd size, not like the usual trade paperback.  Maybe it’s because it reminds me of a diary or a little book you’d get as a kid.  Maybe it’s the fact that it could go in a pocket easily, although I didn’t take it out of the house or bring it on the go with me.  But something about it made me appreciate it more than if it was an industry standard 5.06x7.81” book.  It’s the reason I made the print version of Fistful of Pizza the size it is, although only a couple of you actually have a print version.  (The kindle strikes again!)

There are some issues with doing a perfect little book like this.  Lulu has a pocket size, which is 4.25x6.87.  The problem is that it’s Lulu, which means fulfillment is just a little bit off, and price is higher.  Createspace supposedly does custom trim sizes as small as 4x6”, although custom sizes are only available from amazon.com (which is fine - it’s not like a brick and mortar shop is custom-ordering my books.)  The only issue with that is POD books are always priced per page, regardless of their size.  So if you had a 40,000-word manuscript and you put it in a pocket book, it’s going to cost way more per copy than a 6x9” book with the same font size, since there are going to be more pages in the pocket book due to fewer words per page.

Another thing I wish you could do is have some pages color, and some black and white.  You can make a whole book color, but for a hundred-page book, you’d have to make it $13.99 to break even.  (You can make a hundred-page black and white book $3.99 and you’d still make a quarter per book.)  I would love to have a book that had eight color plates in the middle, but the rest black and white, but that’s not possible with print on demand.

I don’t even have ideas or projects for this crap; I just think of sizes and colors and formats and wish I could do something with them.  Like, I’d love to do either a DVD or a CD that was encased in a book.  I don’t know what I’d put on them — maybe some kind of spoken word experimental garbage.  Createspace has POD CD and DVD offerings, but they don’t have books or booklets.  It doesn’t matter, because I don’t know how to record a book on tape that doesn’t sound like hell, and I don’t know what I’d add to a book in color, other than pictures of my cat or something.  But it always has me thinking.

2001:

• Went to Las Vegas
• Rented a Corvette
• Stayed up until 4
  playing casino war at the Circus Circus, won $250
• Front row seat to see George Carlin at the MGM
• Went to take a piss at a urinal, and standing next to me was Charles Barkley (no, I did not look)

2004:

• Went to Las Vegas
• Saw Mitch Hedberg, Dave Attell, and Lewis Black
• Rented a gigantic suite at the Stardust
• Shot 100 rounds of belt-fed ammunition through a full-auto M-249 machine gun
• Jumped out of a plane at 16,000 feet.

2013:

• Night before: got takeout from P.F. Chang’s.  Rented I Love You, Man.
• Drank NyQuil.
• Went to a Weight Watchers meeting.  Gained 1.4 pounds.
• Got a six egg white omelet and fruit salad for lunch.
• Went grocery shopping.
• Practiced bass 90 minutes.
• Slept through the football game.
• Made vegetarian tacos for dinner.

Disclaimer: I will actually be going to LA next weekend for my birthday.  I hope I am not sick by then.

I am 42 today.  Don’t feel a day over 72.

I’ve been going to Denny’s every year for my birthday, since I don’t know when.  I think it must have started when they used to give you free lunch for your birthday, but when I started hanging out with Bill and Scott, who both share the 1/20 birthday, they’d stopped the free meal deal, and we continued to go out of habit.  There must have been years that I didn’t do this, although it’s hard to remember when.  I think in 1994, I was deathly ill with pneumonia and didn’t go.  In 2007, I was in New York (which didn’t have Denny’s); I usually went to Vegas, but went in February that year, so I missed it.

Denny’s used to have a certain power over me, like it was a strange touchstone in my life.  I’d go there to write, scribbling in the notebooks late at night while a high-calorie breakfast for dinner congealed on the plate, lubricated with copious amounts of Coca-Cola caffeinated beverages.  I don’t know that I ever got much quality writing done there, other than journal entries bitching about the day or talking about the weirdo waitstaff and regulars.  Maybe I got some editing done, scanning over printouts of books with red pen in hand.  But it was mostly a ritual, like going to church or something.

I suppose there were enough late-night hijinks there when I was in college.  Whenever Ray was in town, that’s where we’d end up, or when me and Larry needed a place to eat at two in the morning.  Elkhart didn’t have a Denny’s, and Perkins was the 24-hour place of record.  But in Bloomington, Denny’s pulled me in.  I never went there to study, or read, but many a conversation started on a VAX computer was finished at one of the booths at that place over a cup of what purported to be coffee.

Denny’s also had a certain allure when I lived in New York because they didn’t have them. There are a thousand 24-hour diners in The Big Smear, not all of them the usual pancakes and bacon places.  There are Greek diners and places with Italian food and Falafel joints and Mexican diners and who knows what else.  (Every possible cuisine is available in New York, all cooked by Mexicans and Guatemalans in the back.  That fine Italian restaurant in Little Italy featuring the fine food they could only make in Italy?  Cooked by Guatemalans.)  But that strong association as being part of my writing culture, tempered by my time in Seattle hacking out these books over an All-American Slam, plus the grass-is-greener effect of the distance, made my pilgrimages to other cities that contained Denny’s seem that much more powerful to me.

Now, all of the old routines are dead.  I force myself to write when I write, and not when the rabbit’s foot is properly balanced next to the lucky pen and track 7 of the magic CD is playing and it’s exactly 9

at night.  And I don’t eat Denny’s anymore.  The healthiest thing on the menu there is like 47 weight watchers points.  And it doesn’t help that their owners are assholes.  The dream is dead.  I’ll skip Denny’s from now on.

But yeah, 42.  My head’s a mix of “you’ve got to be more than halfway through this by now” and “you need to put the past behind you and get shit done.”  I think the latter voice is what I need to listen to right now.

I always used to explore on Saturday mornings, driving around Seattle to find some new magical diner to eat that would cause my writing output to double or make me run into the perfect woman, except I’d always end up at Denny’s or at the movie theater at Mountlake Terrace, because I didn’t own a TV and would just go there and watch three movies back-to-back. But I was somewhere in the middle of the peninsula, not sure where, and I went to this weird little used bookstore/antique shop/cafe, in this creaky white victorian house. There are essentially three kinds of antique stores: one is where the owner is a hoarder, with fifty years of inventory and has totally maximized their space so there’s junk on top of junk on top of junk. The newest thing in the store is older than you, and it might be interesting to look in there, if the dust mite infestation wouldn’t kill you. Then there’s the Pawn Star type of places, where they know the value of everything and only have the most profit-margin-friendly stuff out there. They know exactly how much everything costs, so there’s never a surprise and almost never a bargain. And then there’s these ones by sort of far-left revisionists, the etsy arts and craft sorts, who label everything in that weird sorority font and it’s all fun and neato. And this place was definitely in the latter category.

The place smelled like my grandmother’s place, sort of equal parts of flea market, rosewater, and old people farts. I was starving, probably from driving for hours trying to make up my mind, and I ordered the only real thing on the menu, a panini sandwich. The only cooking apparatus in the place, other than a coffee machine, was the panini iron, a glorified Foreman grill. The thing I remember most is that the girl working was an absolutely beautiful redhead, pale skin, wearing a tight but proper dress. I couldn’t tell if she was a teenager or not, if she was a freshman in college or a junior in high school. This was about the time in my life when I could no longer tell the difference. Now, it’s completely splayed, and I can’t tell if someone is in college or 30 of 15. Last night at the movies, I saw a girl and could not tell if she was 22 or 15. She was with a friend who looked 15, but I just couldn’t tell.

I was so desperate at the time, the thought of dating a teenager wasn’t far-fetched. I had a hard line at 18 of course, but I was 25 and going on three years of absolute celibacy, nothing past a failed first date, and every woman I met was in her thirties with chronic complications and high expectations.  The idea of finding some girl who was 18 and would be impressed with a college degree and my own place and a new car had some merit. But it made me think of when I knew girls in high school that dated “older guys.” I did not get that at the time, because I could see the upside to the girl, in a Fast Times sort of way, but I didn’t know why the guy would date a 14-year-old. And then later, I realized it was a combination of statuatory rape and the pure townieism of Indiana.  And none of this mattered, because I’m sure that I was giving off the serial killer vibe and she probably dialed 91 and was waiting to dial 1 while she nervously made my shitty panini sandwich and I looked at all of the garage sale pieces of junk on shelves.

But I remember that book store, because it was the type of “book store with no books.” Like the used books were just the dregs of what wouldn’t be bought at any other store. There were some good used book stores — some great ones in the U district — but this place either had an owner out of touch with reality, or didn’t get in the good stuff, or couldn’t afford it. And I think maybe it was the former, like a person who only stocked poetry books by DH Lawrence rip-offs, and dust mite-infested penguin classics that were probably bought at estate sales by the pound.

I can’t remember the neighborhood, which bugs me.  I know if I visited Seattle again, I’d start driving instinctively, and go from my old apartment to some random Vietnamese restaurant without thinking.  But where was that book store?  What happened to it?  Is the redheaded teenager-or-not still in Seattle, or did she have ten kids and move to Kelso and become a professional hoarder?  Is the old victorian house now a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop, or the parking lot for a Qdoba?  I can drive myself crazy thinking about stuff like this.