The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

  • On the Road, on crutches

    I started rereading On the Road. It’s been a while, and even though I’ve read it a dozen times, I always find myself on vacation or living in a different spot mentioned in the book, and the reread mixes with the firsthand to create something new. I have this old orange-cover paperback edition, the 25th anniversary one, that I bought for $2.49 at that old used bookstore at Third and Jordan, the one with too many books in too small a space and a crazy lady running the place. Anyway, I always swear I bought a new, not-falling-apart edition and then realize I was thinking about Orwell’s 1984. (Although even with the new version, I still read my falling-apart paperback I got at TIS in the summer of 92 for a polysci class that was somewhat mentioned (fictionally, of course) in Summer Rain.

    Kerouac was in Denver, of course – that’s how the book starts. And everyone around here is “Kerouac-Kerouac-Kerouac” and/or “Larimer Square-Larimer Square-etc”. Kerouac didn’t live in Larimer Square though, although Neal Cassidy did as a kid, when the place was a wall-to-wall beggar-filled shithole. Now it’s a hip and trendy shopping mall type thing after they bulldozed all of the historic buildings and built martini bars and expensive clothing stores. Still, it’s interesting to hear Kerouac’s descriptions of an old-timey Denver with the same crossroads as the current one. It’s kindof like when I read parts of John Sheppard’s up-and-coming book and dug the stuff about the old Lowry AFB, although it’s all strip malls and condos now.

    Speaking of Lowry, I’ve gotta go out there tomorrow to an arthritis clinic. Yes, the foot is still fucked up. On maybe Monday, after my last shot wore away, it was at about the same point as when this all started. So yesterday was the internist and more prednisone for the next 12 days. Today was a podiatrist at the same hospital, and a deeper shot of cortisone into the ankle. Tomorrow is a surprise, because I booked for like mid-July, and they called today and asked if I could come in. So mostly paperwork, prodding, the same stupid questions, but maybe the rheumatologists there have a better idea on a long-term plan for this shit.

    Until then, I am so fucking sick of telling this story that I just tell people I’m on crutches because I’m an attention whore. Or because of the dotcom crash. Or global warming. Or George Bush personally came to my apartment and hit me in the ankle with a tire iron. The only problem with that is the person might start talking about dubya and not shut the fuck up. The worst part of this is talking to doctor after doctor after nurse after intern after billing representative about what happened and when I was diagnosed and if I can move it this way and if my great-great-grandparents ate shellfish. Imagine every stupid question you’ve been asked in the last ten years, and then imagine being asked all of them a dozen times a week, and that’s just the forms you have to fill out to see the doctor. I don’t know which one of you got all EFF privacy-fucking-apeshit about health care places implanting an RFID chip in your ass to store all of this, but fuck you very much for stopping that technology. If I had back all of the time I’ve ever spent filling out the same stupid form in doctor’s offices, I’d seriously have another five years of my life back.

    Today’s worst moment (other than the giant tentspike needle they put in my ankle joint) was this total bitch of a receptionist who INSISTED I was on an HMO and needed to walk downstairs and get a referral form and then walk backup. I did not have the heart to tell her a) I was in a waiting room full of gimps, all of us with walkers, canes, crutches, wheelchairs, and Rascals. None of us could walk downstairs if a gunman was spraying lead with an AK down the hall. And b) I AM NOT ON AN HMO. THE CARD DID NOT SAY HMO. THE FILE DID NOT SAY HMO. THE PEOPLE AT THE INSURANCE COMPANY DID NOT SAY HMO. LADY, YOU WORK IN A HOSPITAL – GET SOME FUCKING HALDOL IMMEDIATELY.

    The good news is that I can mostly walk now. Oh, I couldn’t get any more Vicodin, but maybe that’s a good thing.

    Sarah’s uncle was here all week, staying with us. He was taking a class at DU – it’s mostly online, but he came in for this crash course where you’re in lectures from 7am-9pm each day. So we didn’t see a whole lot of him, but he’s a cool guy and we got in a good roadtrip to Colorado Springs for an excellent dinner at the Blue Star, and a day trip out to Idaho Springs, plus a quick spin around the DU campus, which is damn nice. Sarah’s sister Liz and brother-in-law Matthew were also in town yesterday and today, and we’re going to a picnic at Matthew’s. They’re on an Ohio-to-LA car trip for some professorly conference stuff at UCLA, but it’s good to see them for a bit. The only thing that I suddenly realized is that I just about have her family tree down, and I will have to re-memorize various titles, like “Sarah’s sister’s husband” will become “my brother-in-law”. Of course, when I told Sarah last week that she has already become Aunt Sarah because she’s been buying my nephews and niece crap, and she sort of freaked the fuck out over that.

    As an aside, I am still not used to the girlfriend => fiancee thing. I mean, I have no problems with being engaged, it’s just when a car dealership or realtor or secretary asks, the first thing that pops out of my mouth is still “girlfriend”. If they ask “married?”, an “almost” sometimes works. Sometimes it’s easier to say wife, and that bothers me less. It’s shorter, doesn’t have the accent, easy to pronounce. Sometimes to fuck with healthcare people, I say partner, and let them wonder if I’m some huge biker dude’s shackjob. We were somewhere, I forget where, and some clerk either said “Mrs. Konrath” or “Sarah Konrath” and we both sort of freaked out. I’m not into the name change thing or the hyphenation. You’re born with a name, you keep it until you die, unless you become a musician or something. It took me long enough to ferret out all of the shit online with my old address, I couldn’t imagine doing it for my name too. Anyway.

    Lots of baseball coming up. Sarah got free club seats from work for tomorrow’s game. It’s against the Devil Rays, and provided none of their players shoot their wives or knock up any 17-year-olds in the next 24 hours (which is probably like even money in Vegas sports books) it will be interesting. We also have tickets for the Yankees-Rockies game on Tuesday, although Sarah can’t go because of work. I am reluctant to go dump the spare ticket on StubHub because then I might end up sitting next to some total joker for nine innings. (And no, this one won’t go extra. I’m guessing 24-3.) If you have a good pal that is not a total social leper and needs a seat, I would be willing to work a deal. (Like a hefty discount if they’re willing to not be an annoying fuck and/or take the bat to the head if that happens again.)

  • Rockies – Astros

    So I just got back to seeing the Rockies-Astros game. Rather than try to write this up in any cohesive way, you get a bulleted list:

    • Coors Field is really nice. It does remind me a lot of Miller Stadium in Milwaukee, except if you’re sitting right of the plate, you see a giant mountain range on the horizon.
    • The stadium is literally one block from my apartment. I cross one street, cross another, walk a block, cross a street, there’s the north entrance.
    • I had to gimp in on the cane, but for whatever reason, that meant I did not get searched, while I watched a group of schoolchildren getting wanded.
    • Aside from the typical hot dogs and cracker jack, there’s a microbrew attached to a semi-nice restaurant. I went there (because buying a bunch of to-go carryable food and a gallon of Coke in a giant bucket is a lot less fun when you have to carry it all in one hand) and I got a spicy buffalo and cheddar bratwurst. It wasn’t bad.
    • My seats: extend the line from third to home in that direction, and I was 15 rows up from the wall. If you’re sitting down, the dugout is immediately to your right (I mean right across the aisle immediately) and half of your field of vision (to the left) is the net, but everything to the right is a really good view of the field.
    • Walking down all of the steps to my seat was absolute murder. I knew two things: I could not under any circumstances go to the bathroom, and I would most likely be killed when trying to get out if I stayed the entire nine innings.
    • Over half of the attendees were either geriatric or pediatric.
    • I left the house and it was 60, so I wore a jacket. When I got to my seat, it was very hot and sunny, so I dropped the jacket and cursed the fact that I would be getting horribly sunburned. Seven minutes later, a cloud rolled in, it looked moments from a t-storm, and it was 60. Repeat this 297 more times.
    • The game starts. I am amazed at how young NL players look. When I was a kid, the Astros looked like giants. Now they look like scrawny punks you’d see loitering outside of a 7-Eleven.
    • They seem to change the ball out an insane number of times. I read somewhere it’s because of the humidity. They keep the fresh balls in a humidor.
    • One of the first Colorado hits is a massive home run. Based on what John Sheppard has told me, I assume there will be about 28 more home runs this game, due to the altitude.
    • …Well, except there is a freakish windstorm, and there are bursts of 20-25 mph winds going right at home plate. Hank Aaron could hit a full-on slam to the back wall and have it end up behind the umpire.
    • Because of said winds, at least ten pop fly balls go up, behind the batter, over the net, and land within 20 rows of me. In good health, I probably can’t catch a pop fly if the ball’s painted orange, so I’m somewhat scared shitless since I can’t walk or run, I don’t have a glove, and it’s cloudy out. And given my luck, I absolutely know I will get beaned, and some other fuck will take the ball away from me.
    • Of the women from age 20-40 ate the game, 95% of them have the same exact haircut.
    • There’s a group of grumpy old men a few rows in front of me, all of them taking score on paper. At least one of the vendors knows them on a first-name basis.
    • I really want to root for the Rockies, but they’re fairly pathetic. Houston scores four runs in two innings; the Rockies can’t even hit the ball, and it’s their stadium.
    • A group of women in their early twenties sit a few rows behind me, at about the 5th inning, and they will not shut up. Their overly loud conversations were about the most inane things, and they were so stupid I don’t even remember. But when certain Rockies players came to bat, they would SCREAM AND SCREAM their names. Their first names, only. It was not based on most popular players – I think it was largely based on who they wanted to fuck. I would have assumed they worked at a tanning salon or something. But later I deduce from their excessively loud conversation that they are third-year medical students.
    • The game got worse and worse, and I promised myself that if the Astros got ten points ahead, I would leave.
    • Here’s where it gets interesting – Lance Berkman is at bat for the Astros. He swings, and loses his bat which HITS A BEER GUY IN THE BACK OF THE HEAD. Beer guy hits the deck, Coors is everywhere, and the crew of white-haired old ladies that check your ticket stubs freak the fuck out. They try to stop the game; cops are all over; paramedics jump out of nowhere; everyone is standing up to see if there’s anything cool to see. (The game does not stop, BTW.) One of the old ladies took the bat, and everyone in the section starts chanting “GIVE HIM THE BAT! GIVE HIM THE BAT!” I mean, if you get clocked in the head with a bat, you might as well get to take it home and put it on the bookshelf as a conversation piece, right? Also, everyone in the section started chanting for Berkman to apologize to the guy, and he didn’t. So everyone booed, and only because of the fact that nobody outside of our section could figure out what the fuck was going on, there was no riot.
    • I decide maybe I should root for the Rockies.
    • It looks like it’s about to pour rain, and I feel a drop or two. I also realize that it will take me 45 minutes to climb the stairs to the main level. See above comment about being trampled.
    • Top of the 8th. 6-4 Astros. There’s no way they’re going to pull out of this one. I get up and leave.
    • At home, I get on MLB.com. THEY PULLED IT TOGETHER IN THE LAST INNING AND WON 7-6!!! FUCK!!!
    • From now on, I am not leaving a baseball game, even if it’s 28-1 at the bottom of the ninth and the stadium is on fire.

  • XMLHTTP and dress shirts

    I redesigned the front page of rumored.com, so go check it out. If you’re bookmarked rumored.com/index.html, that won’t work anymore. I won’t bore you with the details – just go to rumored.com and tell me what you think, or if your browser dies a horrific death. The style stuff is not done, and might never be, but I spent forever getting the rollover and image stuff working. It uses Ajax do to the random image thing – I have wanted a simple project that uses Ajax, so there you go. It was still a major pain in the ass to get working. I will eventually get more of the site’s pages reworked, but it’s a slow process. I also want to rewrite my photos page, because it sucks, and I also want an easier way to get all of my photos up and to ditch flickr.

    Okay, here’s a question that I’m sure I will not get an answer to. Last year, I went to a Men’s Wearhouse and bought three or four dress shirts. The dude there measured my neck, measured my arms, and said “here’s your shirt”. I tried them on in the store, but it’s possible I was high, or maybe the torture of the place made me say “fuck it, whatever” and throw a credit card at the dude. But the bottom line is that I have these shirts that mostly fit my neck, and the sleeves are about right in length, but the shirt basically looks like what Tom Hanks wore in Big when he shrunk back into a kid. Seriously, the armpits are about down to my waist, and the sleeves hang like they belong on a wizard’s robe.

    So today, in a fit of stupidity, I took every single dress shirt I owned, threw them on the bed, and then tried them on, one at a time. I took notes and the fit and general status of each shirt, wrote them on an index card, and stapled them to the hanger. After a few hours, I found that the shirt that fits me the best is from Target, and I bought for like eight dollars. Second place is a shirt from the Gap, which fits me about like those pants MC Hammer used to wear, prior to getting busted by the IRS. In a distant third is a $50 shirt that looks like something you’d wear parachuting.

    My first question/thought was to take all of these shirts to a tailor and ask if they could be ripped apart or hemmed or whatever the hell a tailor does. Does that work? I don’t know. I’d be willing to pay like $20 or $30 a shirt to get that done, if only to avoid the next option.

    The next option: buying a bunch of shirts from some store that has sizes that fit my disproportionately large neck. Look, this shirt problem is not because I have a giant gut. These shirts fit fine over my almost-giant gut. It’s that the entire shirt industry’s crazy idea that if you measure someone’s neck, you know exactly what the rest of their body is like. And they figure that if I have a 20-inch neck, I have an 87-inch chest. I thought maybe if I went to Saks or Nordstrom or something, I could throw money at them and get an odd-sized shirt. And of course, it’s the absolute worst time of the year to buy any mens’ wear.

    So yeah, dicking with XMLHTTP and worrying about dress shirts: it’s been an exciting week. I do have tickets for the Rockies game tomorrow, so that will be interesting. And then we have a huge spate of various family coming in to town, so lots of fun, and I’m sure there will be lots of eating at fancy restaurants.

    Oh yeah, speaking of fancy restaurants, we went to this place on Saturday, and I have totally forgotten the name, but it was a Japanese/Mexican fusion place that was absolutely incredible. One of the appetizers was this little sterno grill type thing, but with a stone on it, like one of those black stones you see in a zen fountain you get at Brookstone’s. And it came with kobe beef, little chunks of it, raw, and you threw it on the grill, counted to five (or ten, whatever), and then ate it. Also for my entree, I ordered this Indian tandoori chicken, and it was probably the absolute best Indian food I have ever had, ever. And it was a Japanese/Mexican place. It also had a very cool interior, a huge curved bar with like three bottles of everything ever made that could get you drunk, and we were barraged by staff members asking us if everything was okay or if we needed anything. It cost way too much, but it was good.

    And now, lunch.

  • Larry’s dad

    Larry’s dad died the other night. There are a lot of very heavy things running through my head about that. First, Larry’s dad died. And I feel bad for Larry and his whole family. I mean, if anyone could deal with a situation, it would be Larry; I think if he lost three limbs from a freak case of gangrene, he would still be riding around on his motorcycle a week later using a broomstick and some duct tape to shift gears, as if nothing happened. The dude has seriously seen Papillion far too many times to really be affected by anything short of a close nuclear strike. But I do feel bad for the rest of his family. And while a lot of us seem to be either dealing with or avoiding our parental units, it seems that Larry had a genuinely decent relationship with his old man, and that makes the whole thing a damn shame. So my thoughts and condolences go out to the whole Falli clan.

    To a lesser extent, the whole death thing really fucks with me. As an atheist, I don’t believe in many of the stock things you’re supposed to say at this time, and I really feel like a vegan at a hog roast. In some way, death doesn’t bother me, but it bothers me that I can feel that way when others are truly affected. And others have mentioned that they thought at some point later in life, I would have a schizoid episode and the grief of 40 years’ worth of funerals would all hit me at once, and maybe that’s true. I don’t really know.

    There’s also the issue that I have a dad the same age as Larry’s, and he’s not exactly running triathalons these days, and sooner or later, I’m going to get the same phone call in the middle of the night. And that used to be an abstract concept, but now it really fucks with me. Even more, I am 23 years younger than my dad, and my doctors are bitching about my blood pressure and cholesterol, and the whole thing makes me think I should eat nothing but wheat germ and vegetable shakes and buy a treadmill and put it in front of my computer, because seriously, I’m going to snap my fingers twice and I’ll be 60. Fuck.

    —-

    I went to the doctor yesterday. My foot got all better after predisone, and after a ten-day course, I stopped, and then the foot got worse and once again looked like a canned ham with toes. I went in and they decided to give me a cortisone injection in my ankle joint. This involved first giving me a couple of shots of lidocaine, and then pulling out some fluid, and then the actual injection. Because I go to a residence clinic, this meant the tiny exam room was filled with my doctor (a resident), an attending, a med student, and a nurse, plus a big old cart of supplies. I had to sign a waiver before they could give me the shot. The med student asked me a barrage of stupid questions that weren’t entirely stupid, but made me think she read about five paragraphs about gout in college and now for the first time had a real live case on the table. So yeah, the “do you eat shellfish” stuff was annoying, but maybe that helps in the long run, and she won’t misdiagnose her first real gout case in the wild, like 80% of the docs who have stared at my feet in the last decade.

    When I’ve had the same procedure done in my toe or my knee, it was by a solo orth surgeon or podiatrist, and the banter consisted of nothing but “okay, here we go”, followed by many jabs of needles. This time, there was a whole mini-lecture of shop talk, with the attending saying “you want to go in shallow into the meta-subcarpal-lingual-inner-whatever and then turn to the left”, which was weird. The injection itself was not bad, at least not as bad as the inter-joint toe injections I had before – I was pretty much confessing to war crimes I didn’t do during that one. But any injection that first requires other injections is not that fun. This time, they used one needle apparatus and multiple syringes for the draw and the shot, which means I only had one hole in my ankle. It also meant I looked down and saw this giant piece of hardware stuck in my ankle for no reason.

    I think the oddest thing is that when he was pushing fluid into the joint space and sort of jockeying around my ankle to get more in there, I had this really intense sensory memory experience. The injection, or the way he was pushing, felt entirely like one of the large-bore intramuscular allergy shots I used to get in my arm. And for a split second, it was like I somehow mind-melded with some ancient memory of being in the Elkhart Clinic in 1980. In that millisecond, I remembered all of these distant facts of the place – the hospital smell of the air, the bell in the elevator, that paging bing-bong sound in the office, the chairs, the cotton alcohol rub, the downstairs lobby waiting room. It was all so strange that all of that hit me at once, as if I touched an alien obelisk and was suddenly infused with the knowledge of another planet’s cultural secrets. I always thought smell was my strongest sense, but having my inner cells pushed around by a few moments by a liquid infusion seemed to trump that.

    Anyway, the shot did good, although it was not as magic as I would have liked. I also got two prescriptions to try, and I am now on colchicine, and hoping it won’t make me shit my pants in the near future. I also got my blood tested – see previous discussion on cholesterol. I know I have high cholesterol. I know I can’t radically modify my diet without becoming a basket case. I know I could not have any of these problems if I ran five miles a day. I can’t do a treadmill on crutches. So there.

    I think I’m starting another blog of technical stuff. I always run into a problem when I’m coding or writing and spend half the day researching it, and then find the stupid answer, and six months later, I’ve forgotten and need to start all over again. So I should be writing these down. And since 90% of the ruby on rails docs I find are consultants who do just this in an effort to scare up work, maybe I should do the same.

    Okay, busy day. Gotta get on it.

  • Street views

    Google maps has a new feature, I think called street views. The deal is that they drove around this truck with a dozen cameras coming out of it at every angle, and circled around the streets of various cities, shooting digital images. Then they stitched it all together, and in a google map, you can click a thing and see a panoramic image of the street, as if you were standing at a point and looking around. It’s a very interesting project, but I’ve found if you’re oddly nostalgic and possibly a bit homesick for things of the past, it’s absolutely depressing. I put in the address of my last apartment in New York, and I can totally “stand” on Grand Street and look up and see our old deck and our window AC unit jutting out of the living room. Luckily, they do not have maps of Seattle or Bloomington.

    I’m not really homesick or anything. It’s just that there is enough distance between me and New York that it has become an abstract concept. And Denver has not taken on enough of an identity yet that I have dreams in the middle of the night and I see this as home in them. (Actually, the house where I grew up in Indiana always seems to be the default stage for my dreams, and after asking around, I guess that’s not too unusual.) I think being crippled for the last month has put a damper on a lot of my plans to explore the city. But it’ll figure itself out. I have a lot coming up in the next couple of months, so that’s cool.

    Yes, I’m still a cripple. I finished taking my course of prednisone, which all but cured the foot. And when it was done, it gradually reversed course, and I’m back where I started. I will call the doc when they open and try to get this figured out. In the meantime, I have been drinking a lot of tart cherry juice. The stuff is absolutely horrid by itself, but I mix it with Sprite and it isn’t bad. Cherries are supposed to cure gout, and it’s easier to drink an ounce of juice than it is to eat a pound of cherries.

    We drove to Evergreen this weekend (the town, not the college). It is amazing how you can get in a car in downtown Denver and drive for 45 minutes and be in the middle of absolutely nowhere, on a windy little road going up the side of a mountain, with drop-dead views of the Rockies and running rapids and wild buffalo and tons of trees older than this country. In New York, if you had a car, within an hour you’d be lucky to make it to the Jersey side of the Holland tunnel. We’ve been taking a lot of drives like this lately, and they’re always awesome. The only problem is that we’re debating where and when to buy a house, and it’s tempting to buy some really cool log cabin/ski lodge looking thing on the side of a mountain somewhere, but spending two hours a day commuting would not be good. I really want to buy a dumpy place in town, the worst house in the best neighborhood, and then fix it up. Then later, maybe get a place in the hills. I’m becoming disillusioned with the 40 acres, especially since there’s no water and no trees and it would be a constant struggle to do anything there, and meanwhile there’s all this land full of giant trees and roaring water up here. So, who knows.

    Speaking of roaring water, there was this bizarro hail storm yesterday. It was 100% clear, then around noon, the sky got pitch black and there were all of these close lightning strikes. The sky opened up, and this hail started. It looked like someone was pouring coarse rock salt over everything – the parking lot across the street and the cars in it were completely covered. There were these pings on the glass, like someone was throwing rocks at the apartment, and the street turned into a giant river with this influx of water and ice. See here for some pictures of it.

    I think I’m ditching flickr, and I’m trying to figure out what features are lacking from my shitty php scripts in my photo dir. I know, many. But I should work on that instead of giving yahoo money. I have been brushing up on my php these days and I have a few mock projects that are going okay. Nothing usable, just portfolio fodder. But the more I learn php, the more I realize I could never do it for a living. I dunno.

    Okay, I need to get working.

  • Random stuff

    I’m not awake and have no coherent train of thought, so I’ll just hit you with a bunch of random stuff.

    I know panhandlers probably don’t read my journal (maybe they do, now that all of these places have WiFi) but here’s a tip: don’t try to panhandle someone on crutches. Just sayin’.

    I’m seriously thinking of creating a zine or website or something that reviews burrito carts here in Denver. I haven’t eaten at one yet, but there are a fuck of a lot of them at construction sites and near all of the factories north of here. The hipster doofus demographic has barely been tapped here, but I know it’s going to explode in the next year.

    I watched all of the UK version of The Office. It was good. I usually loathe British comedy, largely because of the people who worship it. (Similar things: JRR Tolkein, Comic Books, Boston Red Sox, wine bars, REI, poker.) I am now watching Weeds, which isn’t bad, and has funny stuff in it. (Oh, add pot to that previous list.) The only thing is that in Weeds, the youngest kid looks absolutely deformed. And it’s weird, because the same thing was true about the youngest girl in Nip/Tuck. Maybe those two should hook up. It would be weird if they did, and their two Mongoloid genetic sets combined to create the next Angelina Jolie. (Come to think of it, take a look at her dad some time.)

    I’m still trying to rate the unrated songs I have in iTunes. I already did this once before, but then I fucked up my computer in January. So I have like 2500 unrated songs, and since I only listen to my rated songs on shuffle, I sort of need to get the shit rated. Unfortunately, I don’t like to spend my time writing and playing the “hey, wow, every Jethro Tull song except for Aqualung really sucks, but I better listen to ten seconds of each one before I give them a one, just in case”, because I get obsessed with the iTunes shit and I don’t write. (Case in point: it has taken me 27 hours to write this far into this post.)

    I missed a cooking class because they sent me the wrong time in the confirmation letter. We missed a maid/cleaning appointment because we left a key at the front desk, and the girl at the front desk “didn’t know what to do with it” even though it was taped to a letter saying to give it to the cleaning people. I missed (but rescheduled first) a shrink appointment because I couldn’t walk that week. So there’s a lot of rescheduling going on here.

    (Aside: the class I missed was this knife skills class. I kind of want to show up in all camo and whip out a giant two-foot-long Rambo knife and start on some kind of schitzo Red Dawn rant, like “yeah my dad offed a lot of VC in ‘Nam with this shit. It has that extra tang on the side so when you stab someone in the lung, the gash won’t close and the ‘Cong gets a sucking chest wound and sepsis.” This would probably get more of a reaction in SF or NY though – I’m sure it happens like every other class here.)

    I just realized that the clocktower two blocks away and about 10 degrees to the left of center at my monitor actually tells correct time. All this time, I’ve been either hitting the dashboard for a clock, or turning around and looking for one on the wall. Fuck.

    I got Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories or whatever it’s called. I played the fuck out of the original Vice City like five years ago or whenever it came out. This one is I think the same map, but different story, and it’s two years earlier. It doesn’t seem to be as immersive – not as much going on, the songs on the radio seem to repeat themselves more, etc. I don’t know if it’s because the game was a rush job, or if I’m just high. Maybe both.

    I just realized there’s no fucking way I could get a government job or something at one of the local aerospace places that require a piss test, since I’ve been swimming in Vicodin for weeks. How long does this shit stay in your system? Maybe I should go check rushlimbaugh.com.

    (I probably shouldn’t make fun of him for his drug habit, because fuck – it is pure heaven. If I had his money and the balls to do the doctor shopping and online ordering, I would be taking fifty of those fuckers an hour. It’s not like going off of them is like not eating candybars if you really like them – it’s like going off of air if you breathe it a lot.)

    I can walk now, BTW. Not 100%, but yesterday I didn’t wear my ankle brace, wore normal shoes with orthotics, and didn’t use a cane or crutches. The main problem now is that after not using the foot for like two or three weeks or whatever, the toes are really weak, and the arches (or lack thereof) aren’t used to being pushed up by the orthotics. So I’m not 100%, but I’m more than 80%. We were able to walk to this market/coffee place/sandwich cafe that’s a few blocks south. I forget the name of it, but I should link to it a million times because I really like it there. Our neighborhood is nothing but loft apartments and bar/tavern places fed by the ballpark crowds, so they started this market so people could shop in the neighborhood and not have to drive to another neighborhood to run to Safeway for a loaf of bread or some toilet paper. They have a very nice space, and it reminds me of Speakeasy back in 1995, before they got stupid, and without the computers. Anyway, they are just getting started, and I wish I could do something, like grow a bunch of corn on my land and sell it to them.

    We got some corn on the cob last night, and fuck it was good. I don’t think I could eat it constantly, but it’s just one of those “summer’s about here” foods that reminds me of picnics and nice weather and school being out and so on. Lots of butter too, but now it has to be that Smart Balance shit. I have to get on a diet, and the problem is, I need to get on like 19 different diets at the same time. I have been searching and saving diets of foods you should eat for gout, weight loss, depression, blood pressure, etc. And I think that when I put all of the lists next to each other and cancel out everything, I will be left with just water and iceberg lettuce.

    Another Jethro Tull song just came up.

    I tried adding a blogroll to the side bar using the blogroll service, but it’s a stupid ponzi scheme, i.e. “Totally free! (Unless you don’t want our stupid crap on your web page or any other advanced feature, then you need to pay us.) I always have crazy ideas about doing shit to bring more readers here, and I thought the whole blogroll thing would do that, or at least add some kind of cross-pollination, but the more I think about it, the more I realize it’s stupid and full of some kind of fake-politic MySpace bullshit. Or whatever.

    Similarly, I thought I should start reading Digg and participating in it. I honestly don’t have much to read these days on the computer, as I’ve become disillusioned or pissed off with most of the stuff out there. So I signed up for Digg and got all psyched up, and then I realized how pathetically stupid it is. I mean, when a story on a new PlayStation joystick degenerates into whining babble about how we need to get out of Iraq, it’s pretty much past the point where I ever want to read anything on the site ever again.

    You should be reading my million dollar ideas blog (link at right). I should just keep adding to that until I have a book, and fuck this other stuff.

    I need to take a shower.

  • Ankle thing

    I went to another set of doctors yesterday about this ankle thing. They think that it’s an attack of gout, and not a sprain. The more I think about it, maybe that’s true. I was sick for a week and severely dehydrated; there was a cold snap the night it happened; it’s red; I’ve had gout before. What is differrent about this is that it’s up in the joint of the ankle, and not in a toe. )

    Anyway, they didn’t shoot the ankle full of cortisone, which is what I’d prefer, but I guess it’s not easy to do. Instead, they put me on Prednisone for the next ten days. At first, I thought they were going to put me on it forever, which I would not want to do at all. I guess ten days is fine, although the second I can jump up and down and walk with no braces or crutches, I’m stopping. I’ve heard nothing but horror stories about pred, and I don’t want to gain 200 pounds on a starvation diet or whatever else. The good news is that the swelling in the foot went down like 75% overnight. The bad news is that I slept about 75% less last night, even after taking sleeping pills. So this could become problematic. I’m also going through all of the usual gout cures – ate a bowl of cherries, drinking cherry juice and a shitload of water, putting on an icepack now and again. My goal is to be somewhat functional by the weekend, or at least on just a cane.

    Yesterday was my first good writing day in a while. This weekend I totally figured out how the second and third thirds of the books could happen – it all came to me in the shower, so I hobbled out, dried off, and wrote about eight pages of notes. (I always get my best ideas in the shower. Probably over half of Rumored to Exist was thought up in the shower. I need a waterproof computer in there.) So Monday was a day of not much progress, but a lot of shuffling and moving and outlining and that sort of thing. Yesterday was my first 2000-word day on this book since New York. And today was a quick 2000 words. If I could write 2000 words a day, five days a week, I would be much happier in life.

    The only weird thing about my plot is that I totally thought of it and wrote it, and then that night I saw The Departed and some of the plot was similar. I mean, the story, the characters, the setting, all different. But just the outline, the way the pieces come together, bore some vague resemblance to what I was doing. This didn’t piss me off – I take it as a good omen. Truthfully, I rip off so many little things from other books and movies here, it’s not even funny. Like I rip off the idea from Total Recall that in the very beginning, a character tells the protagonist exactly what’s going to happen for the rest of the movie/book, and then you forget all about it, and then at the end, you realize, “Hey, that dude at Recall tells the whole story five minutes in!”

    I actually watched Total Recall yesterday, just because I haven’t seen it in a while. It’s weird how it is both really good and really bad. I mean, Ahnold can’t act, and he always makes that same “AAAAGH” sound constantly. All of the characters are very stereotypical, and some of the sets and effects are very hokey. On the other hand, this was like the last big-action movie to be done without any CGI, which makes it one of those weird delineating marks. It’s like the last Ford car with a flathead engine, or the last year of the Harley with the Shovelhead engine. So it looks shitty, but it’s nostalgic. And I guess the thing about the movie is that it has this really twisting plot, and even after you watch it, you say “wait, was it all a dream?”

    Anyway, I should get back to it…

    P.S. Random Colorado observation of the day: often, a sealed package of food or condiment or whatever will somehow become super-pressurized by the time it gets to 5280 feet. Like, I have this little package of carrots and ranch sauce, and the thing of ranch sauce is bulging at the seams. Typically, I don’t think of this and open it, and ranch sauce explodes all over me. I think this also happens on airplanes, or maybe they package the salad dressing at a lower temperature or whatever.

  • Target cart

    We went to Target the other night, and when I hobbled in on crutches, the greeter kid said “would you like a motorized cart?” Fuck yes, I would like a motorized cart! So he gave me one of those little Rascal things, with a basket on the front. It was not the best thing in the world – it had a weird squeak that slowly vanished as we added more junk to the cart, the reverse gear didn’t work, and it had two speeds: ‘dead stop’ and ‘go, dammit’ – but it sure beat hopping around a Super Target on crutches. I was a bit worried that I would get strange stares or the evil eye, for being a largely able-bodied individual using up the cart for the invalids. I did have my air cast and this little velcro booty thing, since I can’t wear a shoe, so I guess I had a small visual indicator. But I know I hate it when I see people using the carts and their only handicap seems to be terminal laziness. Anyway, I had fun with it, and now I want one, but I’m sure that by the time it shipped and showed up at my door, I would be 100% healed.

    I’m currently not healed 100%, but I think I’m making slight progress. I can walk on one crutch for short distances, which helps in carrying stuff around the kitchen and whatnot. I’m sleeping well, but that’s the drugs. The air cast is starting to really bug me, probably from having a hunk of plastic strapped to the same exact place for days. I wish my particular model had an air bellows to add more cushion to the inside.

    I started writing again yesterday – I have not been on schedule and I need to be, to regain my sanity. I’m working on this third book I was on all of last spring. I’m still struggling to get the second of three parts started. I have the beginning, and I know the ending, but how to arrange things evenly through that middle part is the catch. I also don’t know how absurd I can push things before they make no sense whatsoever. So, we’ll see.

  • A cripple again

    So, I’m a cripple again. I managed to sprain my left ankle, maybe on Thursday. I say maybe because it’s another one of those weird injuries that happened in my sleep because my ankles and legs are all fucked up. I have extremely flat feet; every podiatrist that has ever looked at my feet has said they were the worst they’ve ever seen. My last podiatrist has been practicing for over 60 years and he told me that. One time when I was in the ER for another foot problem, they paged all of the residents on staff to come and look at my feet, they were so fucked up. I’m surprised nobody has photographed them for publication in some journal. Anyway, flat feet mean that when you run, you get severe shin splints. It also means it’s very easy for your foot to slightly twist and hit wrong and fuck up all sorts of ligaments and muscles. And I’ve found that sometimes even when sleeping, the position of my foot can be a little off, and when I wake up after six or eight hours of that, the ligaments are all jacked up.

    So I woke up Thursday morning, and that’s what it felt like. I don’t know anatomy, but there’s a chunk of soft tissue at the base of your ankle, where it meets the foot, at the outside edge, and that was tender. So I wrapped my foot in tape, and limped around all day. I didn’t think much more of it, because this happens to me maybe two or three times a year. And maybe once a year, I will go to a doctor or the ER or a clinic, and they will look at it, and say “damn, you’ve got seriously flat feet”, then tell me it’s some kind of soft tissue damage, and I should tape it, take a bunch of tylenol, and it will be OK in a few days. And it usually is. And I’d rather save myself the $400 and eight hours of exposure to TB and screaming kids and not go to the hospital and just follow their advice. So that’s what I did. And Thursday night, we had to go to Walgreen’s for something else, so I bought one of those stupid velcro and nylon splint things that wrap around your ankle.

    By Friday morning, I could barely walk. It felt like the splint thing did more damage than it helped. Luckily, I am crippled often enough that I own a cane, so I was able to hobble around a bit more. We even went to dinner that night, and that was nice. As an aside, here is my major major fucking pet peeve about having a jacked up ankle. When I am on a cane, EVERY. SINGLE. FUCKING. PERSON. I see asks me every fucking possible detail about why I am on a cane. EVERY FUCKING TIME. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to know myself. I’m sick of telling the story exactly two times after I tell it. And there is no story. What really amazes me is that show House has been on the air for, what, two or three seasons? I watched the first season before I got bored of it, and in that entire time NOBODY asked him why he was on a cane. NOBODY. Yet I can’t take an elevator or go to a restaurant without some mouth-breathing idiot asking me detailed questions about my medical profile. Today’s lesson: if you see a disabled person in a chair or on crutches or with a walker, DONT ASK THEM WHAT IS WRONG. Help them with a door, tell them to have a nice day, ask them about the weather BUT SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT WHY THEY ARE A CRIPPLE BECAUSE IT IS NONE OF YOUR GOD DAMNED BUSINESS. If you get to the point maybe where you are about to have sex with them, then you can ask, otherwise SHUT THE FUCK UP. And for those of you women riding public transportation, GIVE THEM YOUR SEAT YOU STUPID BITCH. You probably do stairmaster for an hour a day, but think you are too precious or entitled to give up your seat for two minutes to a person who can’t stand unassisted. And to people who think I am just overreacting, let me tell you this: THE ENTIRE TIME I EVER RODE THE MTA WITH A CANE, ONLY ONE PERSON GAVE UP HER SEAT FOR ME, AND SHE WAS LIKE 79.

    Seriously, I am going to start telling people like that a Greenpeace protestor or Hillary Clinton campaigner knocked me over and broke my ankle.

    Anyway, we got home Friday night, and my ankle was fairly fucked. So I took a bunch of pills to sleep: Gabapentin, Tylenol PM, and Tylenol-3 (Codeine). I slept about two hours, and it felt like someone had parked a truck on my leg. I then spent about two hours trying every combination of pillows and supports, none of which could put my leg in a position that didn’t hurt. But I was still in excruciating pain, and had to crawl to the restroom, since walking wasn’t working anymore. I also really wanted to sleep, but like I said, I had taken enough drugs to knock out Rush Limbaugh, and I was so awake, I could have flown a plane. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I woke up Sarah and told her we had to go to the ER.

    I always hate the ER, because when you show up, even if you had ten gunshot wounds and were holding your severed arm in your lap, they still make you wait six hours, and then they ask you 50,000 stupid questions. (“So Mr, uh, Kornath, do you smoke”/”just sew back on my fucking arm already!”) The ER here was a completely different experience. The people were extremely nice, very efficient, and had me checked in within the time it takes you to get your food at McDonald’s. There was nobody in the waiting room, which is weird because I thought on a Friday night/Saturday morning at 3:30 AM, there would be scores of gangbangers or something. It was just me and Sarah in chairs, watching a Star Trek rerun from the original series, which I don’t 100% enjoy to the point that I’ll rush out and buy the DVDs, but it was entertaining enough, and it wasn’t the Jesus channel, so there. I also got a wheelchair when I got out of the car, and it had a million different adjustments and leg holders, so I spent forever fucking with that and considering maybe buying or renting one in the future.

    We got a room, got a table, got all of the vitals taken, and after a while, the doc came in and bent it and felt it and looked at it and said it was a sprain. I should restate that everyone was incredibly polite and helpful and asked where we relocated from and how we liked Denver, and apologized for the wait, and on and on. It was weird. It was like anti-New York customer service. Anyway, as for the foot, there was some worry that it was a septic joint, because it was very red. But my skin is ivory-white, and if you put a piece of paper on it, it will leave a red mark, so it wasn’t a rash. That didn’t stop them from giving me some antibiotics and writing a bunch of shit on my foot with markers. They also gave me Vicodin, which is pretty much pure heaven. Once it kicked in, I was in this totally lucid state, and was babbling on about ideas for the million dollar idea blog, although I remember none of them now.

    I got home with an aircast, a set of crutches, and 15 Vicodin tablets, which I am carefully rationing. I was able to sleep on and off through the weekend, and now I’m about caught up. The crutches are a huge pain in the ass. They’re very hard to use – you use completely different sets of muscles, and maybe if I had trained for the gymnastics events in the Olympics, it would be fine, but walking from the bed to the kitchen is about like running two miles at top speed for me, and the altitude doesn’t help, either. Doing something like using the toilet is very difficult, and taking a shower is impossible. (I did yesterday and it almost killed me. And I’ve still got all of this marker shit on my foot.) I couldn’t put any weight whatsoever on the ankle, although now I can put a tiny bit on there.

    This is all incredibly depressing. I think everyone thinks it’s goddamn hilarious that I was down for a week with the stomach flu, and now I’m going to be out for however many weeks with this, except I don’t think it’s funny at all. If I believed in god, I would blame him, or maybe blame myself for something I did in the past to bring this on. When you alternate your day between being goofed up on pills and being in total agony, and your big project of the day is to get out of bed and walk ten feet to take a shit, you start to get really weirded out. And of course, the most beautiful two days of weather happened when I was bedridden. I’m sure when I get walking, it will snow out. I’ve been having a very bad spell lately anyway, because I’m not writing, and I’m not getting any of the stuff done that I said I would when I moved here, and the days seem to just vanish. And now I’m into this whole thing of one medical problem after another, and I’m only 36. I need to live twice this long to retire. I think that after I get this ankle working, I will quit trying to find a job, quit writing, quit every single thing on my plate and make it an 80 hour a week job to just go to physical therapists, go to gyms, eat an absolutely impeccable diet, go to allergists, see shrinks and doctors, and do absolutely nothing except obsess about my health, 24 hours a day. Because it seems that if I do any less than that, all of this shit happens.

  • Best cheeseburger ever

    I had the best cheeseburger of my life yesterday. As I mentioned in my last post, I have been sick with some kind of stomach flu. I thought I was almost over it, but it continued on all weekend, and I had a hard time eating anything because of this crippling nausea. And before you say “why didn’t you try some ______?”, go fuck yourself – I tried every single thing known to modern and ancient medicine, plus seven others. It was bad because, if you google stomach flu, you’ll see that there is basically nothing you can do but wait it out, which means if I did pay $800 to see a doctor, he would say “there’s nothing you can do but wait it out”. So it’s been a very rough week. And then yesterday, I felt good enough to actually leave the house, drive to Safeway for another 60 gallons of Gatorade, and stop at McDonald’s on the way home.

    And I know you’re saying “why the fuck would you go to McDonald’s? [Insert knee-jerk screed on how evil fast food is]” Well, it’s funny that I can be so nauseous that an ounce of applesauce would make me retch, but a hamburger is fine, but it’s true. So after not eating anything more than bananas and jello for a week, I had two cheeseburgers, and they were absolutely THE. BEST. EVER. The ketchup tasted like an exotic spice ten times more expensive than plutonium, and I couldn’t believe meat and onions could taste so good. So I’m back on solids, albeit at much smaller capacities, and I’m ten pounds lighter, but I’m sure that will be back in a week.

    Laying in bed or on the couch for a week has been strange, only in that there are times I don’t exactly know where I am. Andrea mentioned in her journal that she finds it odd that I am not in New York instead of Denver, and sometimes I feel the same way. I get these weird bits of locational nostalgia, because I haven’t settled in here yet. Like I was sitting in bed the other day with the windows open and a nice breeze blowing in (despite the fact that our floor to ceiling windows only open like four inches. REMEMBER THE CHILDREN!) Anyway, I just got this very distinct recollection of when I lived in Colonial Crest, after Andrew left, when I had the place to myself and used to sit in bed, listening to Brian Eno, looking out the window at the clone building across the parking lot, thinking about writing but never doing anything. I just remembered I published a story about this in issue 10 of the zine.

    There are also these odd, surreal moments that happen when I’m sitting at the computer with this huge parking lot in the background. Yesterday it was sunny and beautiful, and then two minutes later, it was dark as night, and giant stormclouds were tearing across the sky. Because of the altitude, clouds that are at like 6,000 feet for those of you in the plains states are at about twelve feet here, and it gives this eerie landscape, like the sky is about to open up and alien ships will jump out. Instead, it poured rain like I hadn’t seen in ages. It rained in New York, but it always got diffused a bit by the buildings, and there was never a wide open area where you could see so much of it at once. (In Seattle it rained a lot, but you’re between two mountain ranges, so it’s very broken up, and there was like one thunderstorm there in the four years I lived there.) I tried to take a few pictures of this, but they probably look like shit.

    Okay, I need to go work on other shit now.