Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Tag: memories

  • The pros and cons of storage

    I went to my storage locker the other day, to drop off one of those plastic tupperware bins filled with old 8-bit computer pieces and a half-dozen MiniDisc players in varying states of decay.  I have this locker that’s about 4 by 8 feet and maybe five feet high, on the top floor of an…

  • Thoughts on a random picture: The Turismo

    I have a million pictures in iPhoto.  (Really, 18,035 as of this morning.)  I will never use them for anything, but I spend a lot of time looking at them, dredging up nostalgia that never makes it onto these pages.  So I thought I’d visit that a bit. This is a picture I took in…

  • City Lights Run

    On Memorial Day, we decided to run into “the city,” although I hate sounding like one of those bridge and tunnel types that refer to San Francisco as “the city,” because I happen to actually live in A city, but not THE city.  (More annoying than this: the show So You Think You Can Dance…

  • The Retail Race to the Bottom

    The Borders by my house looks like a food warehouse two years after the apocalypse started.  I went a few weeks ago, when the sign dudes stood on the corner with the “ALL TITLES 40-60% OFF”, hoping to snag an armful of good science fiction, because I’m going through this phase where I’m trying to…

  • World War Z

    I just finished reading World War Z, which means I’m like three years late to the zombie party, right? Well, fuck you. I was like fifteen years early. I was memorizing the locations of balconies and gun-selling sporting goods stores in shopping malls in case of a Romero-like outbreak that would require me to hole…

  • Strange Nostalgia for Lost Electronics

    I get a lot of shit for the “museum of obsolete technology” I have in our storage locker right now, the electronic toys I’m paying $30 a month to not see.  But I’ve pared down almost all of that inventory now, and it’s down to a single C-64 and 1541 drive, and a Sony Magic…

  • Rare reports of tongue discoloration

    I’m sick.  Strep throat.  It happened suddenly, this urge to drink a gallon of water every five minutes, then a difficulty swallowing.  I didn’t wait for it to play out, and got in to a doctor right away.  They’ve had so many cases of adult strep throat, they were out of the test kits, and…

  • Snow White and Enduraflex

    I watched a documentary a bit ago on the Baltimore Colts marching band, which I guess continued to exist after the Colts left town for Indianapolis in 1984. (It was part of ESPN’s “30 for 30” series. I find that even though I don’t like or understand all sports, I love pretty much any well-done…

  • OV-103

    I don’t know how I remembered it, and managed to do the time calculation correctly, but last week, about five minutes before it happened, I suddenly realized it was the day of the last Discovery Space Shuttle launch.  And my Roku box now has the NASA channel (which will be essentially useless after this mission,…

  • The Curse of Ancient Writing

    Something like 87 years ago, my friend Ray Miller had a zine.  A zine is like a tumblr account, except it’s on dead trees, and instead of pictures you take of yourself with a cell phone camera, it has words on it.  His zine was called Metal Curse, and it was essentially a way to…