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general

Procter and Gamble picnics

As always, I was playing around on google yesterday, trying to scouring my brain for a tiny clue to something from my childhood, to see if anyone more afflicted than myself had any related pages on the web. I’m not sure how I found the link, but I managed to find enough info to find a name, a town, and even some pictures, which is a victory in my book. Okay, here’s the story.

When I was a kid – probably in the late 70s/early 80s, I used to go to Procter and Gamble’s huge corporate picnic there, which was held at this place just outside of Chicago called Hillcrest Park. My grandfather and my aunt both worked for P&G, and it was a big deal for everyone to attend the picnic every year. To me and my sisters and all of the other cousins that were my age, this was the chance to ride rides and eat tons of ice cream and other junk food and have a lot of fun. At that time, we lived in Elkhart, which was a couple of hours east of Chicago, so this meant a trip to the big city, and a chance to hang out with all of my cousins, who were infinitely cooler than me.

Back then, P&G corporate was in Chicago, and I think they also made soap and other stuff there, because we’d go to the factory, and the place would smell horrid. The only other thing I remember about the factory was that they had an automat, which is another lost concept in American culture and a pretty nifty idea. Anyway, we never hung out there for long; they’d load us up into a bunch of chartered busses that drove us to the park.

The park was about 60 acres, so it was no King’s Island or anything, but they only did these corporate picnics, so it was just people from the company there. Inside, the grounds were wooded, with pavilions and picnic tables, and a couple of buildings, like a food court, and some restrooms. The elders usually sat around the pavilions and formed these enclaves, where people watched over the little kids and everyone’s stuff, as everyone else wandered around. My Grandpa worked for P&G basically his whole adult life, so he knew a lot of old-timers, and he’d wander around running into those guys and trading complaints about their latest health problems or whatever. My mom usually spent time with all of my aunts, her sisters, trading their stories or whatever. That left us kids to go on the rides, and to eat food.

One of the rides I remember more than others was the railroad. I was really into trains as a kid, and the train was also the ride that you could go on with adults and little kids. The park ran this narrow-gauge train with a real steam locomotive that chugged around the perimeter of the place, through the woods and around the fields. It gave you a good view of the whole park, and passed the sports grounds, which featured a huge outdoor pool that at any time was filled with about 10,000 kids. The train also looped back around and ran right next to the roller coaster before it came back to the station. It was always neat when the timing was right and you were chugging along and the coaster’s cars whipped past right next to you. The train was pretty slow and not exactly a thrill ride, but I always liked to ride it at least once per trip, just to get the lay of the land.

There were some other rides grouped right by the coaster, in a little promenade area. They had a merry-go-round (which we considered lame, but me and my cousins were all like 10-12 years old at the time, so you get that) and a whip-a-round type thing that was marginally fun once or twice, but repeat rides did not reap any rewards. A set of electric bumper cars, the kind with the scraper bar that went across the ceiling, were a fun opportunity for some bumps and always had a long line. There were a couple of coin-op games, a rifle game where you shot at various targets like a piano player, and maybe a skee-ball game. We never played those because I could never shake down the change from my mom and the cost wasn’t included in the picnic.

The big show was the roller coaster, called The Little Dipper. It was a wooden coaster, painted white, with a figure-8 pattern that pulled up 16 riders with a clicky chain and a creaky first hill that dropped off and gave a huge rush, even though now I found out the stats, and it’s only like a 20-foot drop that gets you up to what a car’s first gear does. But the Little Dipper was my first coaster ever, though, so I have fond memories of it. It was a little rough, but at the time it seemed like the fastest, most brutal thing ever. I was reluctant to ride it at first, but then I wanted to get back in line and ride it all afternoon. Once we did get there early enough that we got through the lines three or four times really fast before a crowd built up, and that was absolute paradise.

I have a lot of other good memories of that park, too. I think they had some kind of paper ticket system for the food, and we’d always end up eating an endless supply of hot dogs, hamburgers, and ice cream. P&G was pretty good to their people, and always had random drawings that somebody in our big extended family would always win, which consisted of huge bags of P&G products.

I was sad to hear this place closed, though! I always expected it to be long gone, because even back then, it was pretty weathered and beat. But I guess they pulled through until 2003, when less companies were spending the money on picnics, and that 60 acres of real estate was worth more than their draw. The rides were auctioned off, and I am glad to hear that the coaster made the transition to another park. I don’t know what happened to the other rides. Lemont, Illinois will now have a new warehouse, but that doesn’t really make up for losing the park.

I guess I’ve rode a lot of roller coasters since then, but that’s not why the memory stuck in my head. I guess it was a combination of the food (which probably wasn’t that good, come to think of it), seeing all of my cousins, being in Chicago, and just being able to see everything in the park. For whatever reason, this was like my Christmas in the summer, one of those things that really stuck with me.

Anyway, another distant memory solved by google. Now I need to find someone auctioning off another roller coaster like this one, so I can set it up out on my land in Colorado. Any ideas?

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general

Writing about work

I just read Stephen King’s On Writing, not because I’m a huge fan of his writing, but because I needed some kind of kick in the ass because of this writer’s block, and usually looking at some other writer’s process gives me a bit of a boost. The book is about 70% good and 30% “no shit, sherlock”, so I liked it in general. One thing that stuck with me was that he said people like to read about other people’s work. I guess that’s true, since a lot of the stuff I read online involves police blogs and ancient tales of inventing old computers and airline pilots and the like.

My current career probably isn’t that interesting, though. A blog full of details on how I edit pages and check them in to CVS wouldn’t exactly blow your skirt up. But I do enjoy writing about old jobs. And I’m always surprised that most people have never worked in a factory. Maybe it’s because I’m in a blue state, but most people I know here can’t even fathom the idea of working on an assembly line. Yet I grew up in Elkhart, Indiana, where almost everybody works an industrial job. Four of my summers (well, 3.5, really) were spent inside prefab corrugated steel buildings with concrete floors and high ceilings, wearing eye and ear protection, and doing the same thing over and over for eight or ten hours. I couldn’t bear to do it forever, but it was better than working at Taco Bell, and paid two or three times as much.

There’s not much to say about the work. I spent a half-summer before college silver plating clarinet keys. The next two summers were at two different factories belonging to the same company, making and packing plumbing fittings and faucets and stuff. The next summer, I temped a few places (UPS warehouse, a place that painted the boards that go into prefab Target bookcases), and then got a gig working a punch press at an RV factory. Factory work is mundane, but it isn’t that hard. The worst part of it is most of these box-packing jobs are at rate, meaning somebody has measured exactly how long it takes to do each movement, from picking up the box to putting on the sticker, to picking up a part, to putting it in the box, to sealing the box, to putting it on a skid and getting a forklift to take the skid of 768 boxes of 984 parts off to the truck. It’s almost always impossible to make rate, but if you go above it, you make more money. I never did. I was too lazy, and I couldn’t shut my mind off and move my hands in the exact way it had to happen without dropping a piece or fucking up a box label or something.

One time I DID make rate, actually. I had to take a hollow tube, maybe an inch around and a foot or two long, lock it in a special vise, and then drill a bunch of holes in it with a drill press. You had to stop halfway through, flip it over, and re-fasten it for another set of holes on the bottom. According to the rate schedule, you were supposed to raise the drill all the way up and go all the way back down between each hole. Fuck that! I didn’t back that drill up more than two microns each time I moved it to another hole, and was doing parts four times faster than rate. I worked on the machine for two and a half days, and made like 468% rate for like 20 hours. Every full-timer there was pissed as hell, and they shut down the machine and re-rated it. Next time I got on it, you couldn’t make rate if you were The Flash.

Most of the full-timers hated college kids. The first summer at the plumbing parts place, that was actually the factory where my dad worked. The people there were nice, in the sense that my dad worked there since I was an infant, so they remembered me from the company picnics and whatnot. But they didn’t get me. Instead of sitting around talking gossip or whatever, I usually brought a book to lunch, and almost every day, someone would asked me why I was reading. I remember reading the Richard Rhodes atomic bomb book that summer, and everyone kept asking me WHY I would read a book that was three inches thick. I don’t know, it’s not as if the people were bad in any way, they just had different goals. Everyone had to struggle to feed kids and pay bills and everything. People with some tenure bought pools or bass boats or fixed up old Mustangs or added to their houses. Some people put a kid through school, but some had their kids come in at 18 and start work on the line. I guess I got to see both sides of the story.

Anyway, some of this stuff came up while I was writing on this new book. I need to capture it a bit better sometime, although there’s no real plot to ten hours of wiring down saxophone keys to plating frames. I spent every hour of every day wishing I was back in school, back with friends, back with whoever I was dating at the time. I drank a lot of Cokes and took a lot of “allergy medicine” to make the hours pass faster, but I still took in a bit of the culture.

OK, I ate during the update today, and now I’m ready for a nap, but I’ve got to get back to work…

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general

bachelor’s weekend

It’s bachelor’s weekend here in Astoria – Sarah’s visiting her family in Milwaukee for a few days, and I’ve been here on my own. That doesn’t mean scores of Mexican hookers having sex with mules and snorting coke off my bathroom floor or anything; it mostly means I’m sitting around getting over this death-cold-flu I’ve had all week, and a lot of PlayStation. It has been incredibly boring, and after five months of having someone to share my weekends with, I’m surprised I was able to do this every weekend without Cobaining myself years ago. I’m so bored, I even went to K-mart and bought a Stephen King book.

In my last post, I talked about getting the glossary ready for a print book. I decided not to do that. It’s a long story, but I basically don’t think there’s any demand, and it isn’t worth the time. I need to work on a “real” book, and it isn’t one. I still have this book of short stories about Bloomington, but I’m not sure that’s going to make it either. I’m picking at some ideas that might make a new novel, a few really vague themes that didn’t make it in Summer Rain, but that if given a new place and a new look, would make for an interesting story. Maybe. I’m still having a lot of trouble figuring out what’s next, because the only advice I get on what to do next is extremely conflicting. All I know is I need the challenge and the pace of writing another book like Summer Rain (except maybe half as long) but some distance from my own life, a completely fictional story. So, we’ll see.

It’s been a great morning, very cool in the apartment and quiet. I still love how my living room is completely silent now, thanks to the Mac Mini. I’ve got it plugged into my stereo so iTunes can serve up all of my music. With my old setup, to update the iPod, I had to boot to windows, then run MusicMatch and this horrible bag-on-the-side solution that totally sucked. Now I just plug in the iPod and it works. And as bad as this sounds, I used to have a copy of the music in Linux and a copy in Windows, and use xmms, which sucked, and it made the whole operation very kludgey. Now I just use iTunes and that’s it. So I’m enjoying the Mac thing a lot.

Sarah’s back tonight and I get Monday off, which is nice. I think I’m going to go for a long walk, think about this book, and get some lunch.

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general

glossary stuff

Have you seen the glossary? Also known as The NecroKonicon, but I think I’m changing the name soon. I am saying this because if you haven’t seen it in a while, it has changed a lot. I’ve been adding a lot more entries, the layout is changing, there are a lot of new pictures, and it continues to grow. I don’t know how many people read it like 2 or 3 years ago and said “oh, ok” and then forgot about it, but I’ve added a lot of stuff since then, so maybe you should check it out.

Also, I am kind of hoping those people who are sort of involved (lived in Bloomington, worked for UCS, whatever) would please leave some comments, or at the very least, email me and tell me some of your stories. I am planning on making this thing into a book sooner or later, and I want to include stories from other people, like in little boxes in the side heads or whatever. I am really trying to finish things up and get this book out – I realize I have said in the past I wanted to do this, and I stalled, but this time I really am trying to remove as many of the obstacles as I can so I can get this book done. I don’t expect to sell one god damned copy of it, but my rationale is that once it is done and published, I will have it out of my way and I can start working on something else.

Not much is going on here. I have a sore throat and have been congested and sneezy all day, plus I am completely brain-dead, which means another cold, which sucks because I just got over one. I don’t know if I get 24 colds a year because I have a weak immune system, or if it’s the fact that I live in a city where people literally shit in the street, but I wish I had something else wrong with me, like say a brain tumor or something, that clearly showed up on an x-ray that a doctor could just easily cut out and then charge me $60,000, because I would rather have to deal with that than having half of my life essentially stolen from me.

Oh, I did get some dental work done on Saturday, so maybe that’s why I got sick. I actually got a chipped tooth fixed, and I realized that it was about twenty years ago that I chipped it, and that suddenly made me freak out that something I remember so clearly was two full decades ago. Of course, you tend not forget things like getting hit in the face with a wrench, but still.

Okay, my soup and applesauce are about done, so I think I’m going to go read for a while. If I was clear-headed, I’d work on the glossary, but I’m not.

Categories
reviews

Let it Blurt

It’s hotter than living hell out. It’s been an entire weekend of unrelenting weather, but this afternoon we got a wicked thunderstorm and some rain, so it felt good for a few hours. Now it’s getting hot again and the apartment is returning to swamp-like consistency. I should probably stop bitching about the weather, but the problem is that when the weather is like this, I have nothing else to write about, because my brain pretty much shuts down and all I can think about is moving to Antarctica, or how I can somehow take all of the computer parts in my house and build a bootleg air conditioner that will work better than the stupid portable one I have in my bedroom.

I finished reading this biography of Lester Bangs – I don’t remember the author [Jim DeRogatis], but the title is Let it Blurt and the author is/was this fat kid who went to visit Lester for his high school writing project, and met him at his apartment, and Lester was incredibly nice to him and talked to him for hours, and then like two weeks later he was dead. The book is the best one out there, but it was still a little weird or lacking, and I don’t know if it’s the writer (although he put a lot of effort into it) or just the arc of Bangs’ life. I mean, it seems like he was just gaining steam, and then BAM, and it wasn’t like Johnny Chapman jumped out with a revolver yelling “death to music critics” or something – he just died, and it’s still disputed if it was a drug overdose or a bad case of the flu or some mystery disease or what.

I think the thing with Lester Bangs is that describing him or what his deal was is a lot like trying to explain Devo to your mom, and you can’t really describe it, and it’s the kind of thing you just have to get right in the middle of and dive in without looking how deep the water is. And I’ve read a couple of the Lester Bangs books, and they kick total ass, and you realize how incredible this guy must have been. But all of his books were postmortem anthologies, and the little bits and pieces are good and bad and glued together at the whim of a third-person editor, and every time you read anything, you wish there was MORE somewhere. I mean, imagine Hendrix never released those first few albums while he was alive, and his entire discography was just these fucked-up, spliced together CDs that Steve Ballmer or whoever puts together. You’d get bits and pieces of the same riffs and jams, but would always walk away thinking “fuck, I wish he had some ALBUMS out!” And now, you put in Are You Experienced, and every song fits together perfectly, and every time you listen, you find some little sound that’s new, and I just wish Lester had put together some damn books in his lifetime so we all had that same experience.

The other thing about Lester Bangs is that in reading this biography, he really reminded me of my old roommate Simms, and I don’t know if Simms would take that as an insult or a compliment. I guess they, at least to me, have/had a similar persona, and Simms is totally this kind of guy that you could have a four-hour conversation about everything and nothing and that was a big Lester Bangs trademark, to the point that he had his phone cut off half the time because of huge bills to the phone co. And Lester Bangs sounds like the kind of guy who would go out and buy every Criterion Collection DVD and totally get on top of all of them as far as what was phenomenal and what was shit and somehow relate all of it to Frank Zappa. And I’m sitting here in iDVD, rendering an old video to disc, and the “burn” button is a spinning radiation-type symbol, like a six-piece circle with half yellow and half black, and it totally looks like this button Simms gave me of The Who that I still have in a box somewhere. So Lester Bangs reminded me of Simms, who I have not heard from in forever, but I just called his voice mail, so we’ll see.

It is POURING out. The top foot of my bed is drenched in water from the wind tearing the drops into my apartment. I hope that will dry off in the next hour or two. I also have about 20 CDs I bought in the last week, and I don’t want to listen to any of them. I am listening to Gordian Knot, this prog-rock project thing that is one of the guys from Cynic, along with a bunch of other prog-rock favorites like Bill Bruford and Steve Hackett, and it’s good. But I bought a bunch of stuff to fill holes in the collection, and I was bored of them before I got them out of the bag.

Okay, time to pay my bills and listen to the rain.

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general

Making the Mac switch

This is my first entry from my new machine, which is a Mac Mini. I already wrote about the big switch over on LiveJournal, so read there for the political puling. I’m mostly concerned with getting everything over to the new machine and working. I think web updates are fine, I’m reading mail here, and I’ve got the music collection into iTunes, so that’s good. I still have a lot of adjusting to my workflow, but it’s working well so far. For example, instead of having a bunch of directories with photos flung into them and some half-ass scripts generating galleries, I’m moving everything over to iPhoto. That will make things prettier and easier to deal with, but it’s still a lot of work.

I think the next project might be a print book of the glossary. I am reading this book on the history of Apple computer, and it’s similar in a folklore sense, plus it’s that 8-inch square format that lulu just added to their roster, and I’d really like to do a book like that. I know absolutely nobody will buy a copy, but I mostly want one for myself. So I’ve been picking at the entries a bit. Some will go away – Ray is still convinced I wrote the entire project just to spite him, and so I will have to trim a few things. I also have a lot of ideas for new entries, and those are percolating. I now generally dislike the ones about people and like the ones more about concepts, or old stores or restaurants or whatever that have vanished. Lots of work ahead, I guess. Take a look at the site – I am making edits and syncing them to the head, so to speak, so they are all viewable. I’m also nervous I horridly fucked some pages when I moved the computer, so if you see anything weird, let me know.

OK, back to playing with iPhoto…

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general

AITPL #10

Air in the Paragraph Line #10 is now available! Go to https://www.rumored.com/aitpl/ for more info on it. I got the proof today, and it looks awesome. It has 14 stories, 170 pages, and looks like a real book and everything. It’s weird to see the photocopied, black-and-white issue #9 from way back in 1998 sitting next to the glossy, perfect-bound issue #10 from the present. I almost want to bind up the first nine in a little book and make it look official, but it would be easier to keep looking for good writing and put out #11 with even more stuff, so I’ll do that instead. Anyway, there’s a free PDF preview, and for ten bucks, you can’t go wrong, so please check it out.

Not much else is up. It’s hot, I’m tired, and I’ve been spending time working on the web site and doing other zine-related hustling. Aside from reading the zine, I started working on that new Douglas Coupland book Hey Nostradamus!. Well, I guess it isn’t that new – new to paperback. I like it, the writing at least, although the whole Columbine setting wouldn’t be my first choice. His writing, no matter the bad plot, always slides like butter though. I’ll probably finish it in two more subway rides.

Hot. Hot. Hot. And it’s actually pretty nice outside, it’s just this god damned heatsink of an apartment is like the center of hell. Time for another shower.

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general

Killing Bono

I’ve been reading Killing Bono by Neil McCormick, something I picked up on Sunday at a Barnes and Noble where I was trying to escape the heat for a few minutes. It’s an interesting little book that most people will see as a sort of first-person biography of the band U2. McCormick, now a music critic, grew up in Ireland with Bono and crew as his classmates, and he is still good pals with the quartet. But that’s not what attracted me to the book. Because what this guy did was told the tale of how he was so close to fame – in fact, he even jammed with the band a few times back when they were trying to figure out who played what, and eventually went off to leave the group, then called Feedback and playing shitty Beatles covers through Sears amplifiers or whatever. And it’s interesting to see not only that this guy had so many close brushes with what later became fame in his youth, but that he didn’t become madly famous for being the fifth U2er or whatever. When he didn’t gig with those guys, he got his own JcPenny bass and started his own shitty Beatles cover band, and although they played some second-rate gigs sixty miles out of town opening for a polka act or whatever, he never got the deal from Island or anything else. Instead, he worked a job at a crappy music weekly paper, pasting down headlines while crammed into a tiny office with a half-dozen other people. I really like the never-got-famous biographies, not of the bands who we now see on the cover of Billboard holding up gold albums, but the ones who really tried to get it going, and partied hard and slept on floors and didn’t do shit, and ended up selling insurance 20 years later. For some reason, that really gets me going, and makes me wish I had tried a little harder at getting a crap band going in high school so I could at least fake writing about it.

I have a pretty mixed opinion on U2, though. I first saw them back on MTV when that live video of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was played almost constantly, because they only had like 12 videos back then. I never got into the band that much, but got Joshua Tree when it came out, and was drawn to it, if anything, because the bass lines were incredibly easy to figure out. It wasn’t a great revelation or a best-ever sort of thing, just an album I liked, listened to for a few weeks, then filed back in with the rest of the CDs. The other main exposure I had to U2 before I got to college (where like everybody listened to them, as some kind of bridge to what was then called “alternative” rock) was that when I dated my first girlfriend, right before I left for school, we spent a lot of time parked in her car, for obvious reasons. And while I had all of this heavy metal shit in my tape deck, and she had all of this more punk-oriented stuff, I think two of the tapes we compromised on were Depeche Mode’s 101 and U2’s Rattle and Hum – both live albums. So I spent many an hour parked in dark areas of Elkhart listening to Bono sing “All Along the Watchtower” while I tried to figure out how to undo a bra strap.

Fast-forward about four years, and we get to one of the reasons I couldn’t stand U2 for years. This is simple: for whatever reason, there are highly impressionable girls who tend to lock onto U2 and make it their main infatuation in life, only listening to their songs and being in giggles about how dreamy The Edge or Bono were or whateverthefuck. And in 1993, I ended up dating one of them. And while we dated, it was not horrible – I mean, she wasn’t carving lyrics from October into her arm or anything, and she hadn’t planned any pilgrimages to Windmill Studios in Dublin, but it was still one of those minor things that tick you off.

And when she dumped me later, I really, REALLY hated U2, and became a real dick about it. You’d think Adam Clayton personally poured sugar in my car’s gas tank or something. This was further reinforced by the fact that after the relationship, I became heavily involved in the spoken word of Henry Rollins, who has a bit about how much he hates U2. So for years, I completely despised anything with The Edge’s jangly guitar and Bono’s vapid vocals.

For whatever reason, though, I ended up buying a copy of Achtung Baby after I moved away from college, maybe 4 or 5 years after it came out. Part of it was that the girl that I based a character on in Summer Rain was totally in love with that album when we were friends, and so maybe it was research. Also, the ex-girlfriend had once sent me a mix tape, and in some sort of horrible nostalgia, I was trying to track down all of the songs on it, one of which was “Acrobat”. And yeah, I ended up adding that album to my list of guilty pleasures, because it’s so enjoyable. It’s almost as simple as their earlier things, but they built out such a thick sound with so many things in the background. It sounds more natural than synthetic, but song to song varies so much, and the little buzzes and beats make it seem so much more filling. And one of the reasons I like the album so much is that it’s got such a happy sound to it, just this total, poppy, it’s-a-wonderful-world sound to it. But then you really drill down into each song, and some of them are so insanely personal, rather than the usual blanket political/spiritual messages, that it’s so god damned depressing, and that totally hits the spot sometime.

Of course, the story ends here, with no great revelation about how I’m now a lifetime U2 fan. Honestly, I haven’t picked up a single album of theirs other than those two, and I don’t feel a need to. I think the moral of that story is that I have so many of these damn guilty pleasures, but it doesn’t mean I need to rush out and buy someone’s complete discography plus singles and bootlegs and SACDs just because one of the CDs has a certain meaning from a certain time.

It’s still hot, by the way, which is why I keep writing these driveling musical commentaries. It’s easier than trying to work on short stories, and far more interesting than a thousand words on what kind of bottled water I drank today. Or is it?

Categories
general

Moleskine, GnR

I finally picked up one of those Moleskine notebooks this weekend, after looking for one locally for a few weeks, and finally running into a stash at a Barnes and Noble. I don’t know why I’ve regressed to the point where I think the right paper and the right pen will make the right words come out or something. I went through this in like ’94 when I was first trying to get started writing, where I thought an expensive fountain pen or a cool little booklet would make the words come faster or something. I’ve since learned that a Mead 3-subject spiral and a Bic pen stolen from work will do the job just the same. If anything, they’re cheaper and you don’t have to worry about the fact that most “journal” journals have margins and bindings and fucked-up lining that means you’ll burn through $20 of fancy-pants journal in the time it takes to fill a third of a college rule 8.5×11.

But I bought one anyway, thinking it would be a good place for the occasional piece of paragraph, since I’m currently using mini-legal pads and post-its and a lot of other shit. It’s not as easy to carry a spiral and write on it in the train. It works well if you get a seat, but writing a note or two when standing is a bitch. And since the days of depressingly writing for pages at two in the morning when alone in bed seem to have passed, I feel a need to make up for the words in other spaces in the day. And as far as Moleskine is concerned, it’s the nicest little journal I’ve seen. There’s some back-story about how Celine and Hemingway and Van Gogh used the same notebooks. I’ve since read that the history is bullshit, and the company basically started making the books like five years ago, but it’s the same kind of little book you’d expect Kerouac or Burroughs to be slinging around in a front pocket, so it has a certain appeal there.

I haven’t been able to do much writing lately, because it’s too god damned hot to even think, let alone think of plot and characters and textures and everything else. I’m still sitting on 104,000+ words of nostalgia that covers my time in Bloomington, but I can’t get nostalgic enough to really start carving that shit up to get it from good to great. I thought about posting a story or ten here, and maybe I will, but first I need to keep cleaning.

I was listening to Guns N’ Roses – Appetite For Destruction – on the way home from work today. I don’t know why, although I’m pretty sick of all 20 Gigs I have on my iPod and I’m too lazy to go buy some more new albums and rip them, because I don’t even know what I’d buy, let alone where I’d store them if I bought them. And that made me think about how strange it was that back then, I listened to this album like every day for about six months, and pretty much memorized it, and I did that with a lot of albums, and now, I can barely find an album I want to listen to all the way through twice. I wonder if music was better then, or if it was some kind of chemical-hormone thing in my brain that made me more receptive to music, or what.

I remember hearing about GnR during the summer of ’88, when I was in the Catskills. My dad’s girlfriend had a couple of nephews that were vacationing there at the same time as us, who were these typical Italian Long Island types, not total all-out guidos, but very machismo and partied a lot and everything. And once or twice, they talked about getting buzzed and staying up late and listening to Guns N’ Roses, but they weren’t like metalheads or anything; most of the time they listened to club dance music or whatever. So I assumed that GnR was some kind of stupid Poison/Bon Jovi bullshit, and went back to my Megadeth or whatever.

Then that fall, before “Sweet Child” and all of that hit the charts, I think Tom Sample, who had gone off to college in Goshen, told me I had to check out the album, and that it was more metal than Cinderella or whatever. I bought the tape from work – I worked at Wards then, and they sold a handful of tapes and CDs in the stereo department, and I would have bought my groceries and tap water there if they sold it, just to get the damn 10% employee discount.

I listened to that album constantly, or at least as much as I could between spins of the new Metallica – …And Justice For All. My first take was that I liked how a band could be so firmly seated between pop like Aerosmith or Motley Crue and still have almost as much of an edge as more “extreme” metal like Judas Priest or Alice Cooper. In a sense, it was almost crossover, but between glam and thrash. It was a lot dirtier and banal than the lipstick bands, with a certain amount of kick-ass edge, but it was still marketable enough to play it on U-93 or MTV. It was also real AOR in the old sense of the definition – Album Oriented Rock. (And it’s sad that I can’t type AOR without first typing AOL and then backspacing… fuck!) It’s amazing how many times I could start it at “Welcome to the Jungle” and 53 minutes and 26 seconds later, find myself at the end of “Rocket Queen”.

Of course, by the time the fall semester progressed, almost everyone loved Guns ‘N Roses, including all of the jock types at my high school. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” got played at dances, and “Paradise City” was blasting out of every mommy-and-daddy-purchased 5.0 Mustang GT in the school parking lot. I got a little sick of the radio songs, and found myself fast-forwarding to “It’s So Easy” after putting in side A of the tape. I zipped around the popular stuff for a while, then gave up on the album to spend more time working on that new Metallica opus, or whatever new tape of the week I was digesting.

Going back to the album now, I still hate the radio songs, and I think that sums up the main problem with a band like this. Because face it, if W. Axl bit it in a horrible car accident today, the news networks would be playing a five-second clip from “Sweet Child”, not the infinitely cooler “Rocket Queen”, or something more obscure and Stonesy like “Locomotive” or “Double Talkin’ Jive” from their double album. But those are the kind of tracks I love, the kind of bluesy, textured songs with depressing lyrics where Rose goes from the screechy catcalls to the lower, gravely lyrics that show the holes in his soul, topped off by the wailing guitar that Slash always delivered. When I was still using MiniDiscs, I had an 80-minute blank filled with my custom all-time, all-star G’NR album. I cherry picked the best of the Use Your Illusions, and fed in the top stuff from Appetite, and it was exactly 79:54, but I wanted both versions of “Don’t Cry”, so I had to settle for the eerie alternate lyric one and call it a day.

Actually, I’ve found myself listening to Buckethead’s Population Override a lot lately. It’s also solo guitar-god stuff, but this album is less goofy set pieces and whatever, and more Satriani-style compositions. It’s actually really good to write to, and it’s on right now. And hey, he played in Guns N’ Roses, too, on that abortion of a world tour a few years ago.

OK, time for a cold shower.

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Ten years of unhoosierdom

I was just thinking about this the other day, and I realized this weekend marks the ten year anniversary of when I packed up and shipped out of Indiana for Seattle. It’s a nice round number, which is the only reason I thought about it, but it is pretty weird. I guess ten years seems like an eternity to me, and it doesn’t seem like that long ago that I left. On the other hand, living in Seattle does seem like forever ago to me, and my whole time at 600 7th Ave and working at Spry seems like another lifetime.

Lots of other little flashbacks remind me of things, but it’s more about Seattle than Bloomington. We went to Newport mall out in Jersey city yesterday, and that little area right around the PATH train station looks so damn much like Bellvue or Redmond, the east side of Seattle. It’s all of those office commercial buildings with mirrored glass outsides that look like airport motels, plus the subtle roads and open skies. It looks just like the area surrounding the Bellvue Mall, the building I used to work at in Factoria, and all of the other stuff around I-405 in Seattleland. And sitting here in Sarah’s apartment, looking out toward the skyline from a few floors up with lots of sunlight from a couple of big windows, it almost reminds me of the time in my place in Seattle, except it’s not raining and there’s no Kingdome anymore. But sometimes the weather’s just right and it makes me think for a half second that I should go down to that ’94 Ford Escort and take a drive up I-5, and then I remember I made my last lease payment on that thing 7 years ago, and all I’m driving is a MetroCard these days.

Ten years… I still haven’t written up a suitable story for that cross-country drive. I wrote a story for this Bloomington short-story book that probably will never see the light of day, but it covers all of the events up to me leaving, and not the actual trip. I drove nonstop, by myself. I went through so fast, there was no real vision of a trip, as much as there was a huge blur. It rained a lot in part of Montana; I blew through all of South Dakota in the darkness. I stopped at Devil’s Tower at about 2AM, technically on the 4th of July. I don’t remember Wall Drugs, but I do remember a few other gas stations with slot machines and nothing else. I listened to every tape I packed at least five times. For every meal, I stopped at McDonald’s, because I didn’t want to hunt around for some other alternative 19 miles off of the off ramp. Montana was really shitty, 12 hours of uphill and curves, almost no roadstops, the few around were no more than barns with a single gas pump that was overpriced and so low-octane, you could safely drink it. Then I crossed into Idaho, and it was all downhill, all beautiful. I regret not taking the trip slower, spending some time and money exploring the nature, taking a few more pictures, relaxing for a couple of days before I reported for duty for my first real job. But I regret a lot of things, and I made it here, so who cares.