Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Tag: memories

  • Assault on the Aerie of the Asbergers

    We went out yesterday for lunch at this Burmese place (which was thankfully not renamed a Myanmarian place which would completely screw up the GPS, which would probably tell us to drive 5,427 miles on I-90, take three left turns, then drive 5,426 miles in the other direction) and I can’t tell you much about…

  • Desks, a viewport into the mind

    As a writer, I spend a lot of time at desks.  And I have some strange obsession with the workspaces of writers, which is why I always seem to be snapping pictures of my desks.  And every time I go back and look at it, I can tell the era and the project and the…

  • Wirth nightmare

    I don’t remember learning BASIC – I think the start of my programming career just happened.  I mean, they’d herd us off in small groups to the grade school’s two Apple II’s and one of us would be the typist, and we’d enter 10 PRINT “HELLO” and someone would always type 10 PRINT HELLO and…

  • Mandatory gym class

    I was talking to Tom yesterday about something – I think how my body is physically falling apart as I reach the 40 year mark, and I somehow started thinking about how I was forced to take a gym class in my freshman year of high school to meet some bogus Indiana PE requirement.  I…

  • Wine, whine

    Here’s something that comes up occasionally when googling myself, something that I do when I can’t write, which is pretty much constantly, especially when I wake up at five AM to write and I’ve only slept about four hours the night before: I once worked on the Wine software project, in the most trivial way,…

  • A cautionary tale of incompatible formats

    In 1998, I got a new credit card in the mail and after thinking about how many photocopies I could make for $1500 or if that was enough to buy like one sixtyfourth of an acre in some deserted forest, enough to build some kind of treehouse-esque unabomber shack, I suddenly realized that I had…

  • random.yahoo.com is better than any Ouija board

    I don’t know why, but I suddenly remembered that random.yahoo.com used to be an obsession of mine.  I mean, this was back when there were only like 800 web sites and 680 of them were under construction and had one of those stupid animated GIFs of a construction worker or bulldozer, but it meant that…

  • The Internal Locus

    I’ve spent all morning picking away at some automatic writing that has to do with 2008, which is always weird.  I mean, it’s weird to write nostalgic writing about a period that’s two years ago, and it’s more weird to talk about it here, when you can just click on a link about three inches…

  • Spring sprung

    There’s this day that’s absolutely ethereal to me, when the winter cold vanishes and the summer heat isn’t here yet, and the air is crisp and feels good, and it’s always a time machine to past eras when this brief ripple between seasons occurs.  And it’s happening right now, but just for a few hours,…

  • Cash for gold city

    I mentioned before that my great Midwestern tour this holiday season was a two-parter.  We spent a week in Wisconsin with Sarah’s family, which I’ve done every year for I think five years now.  But this time we also took a few more days and drove out to Indiana to see my family.  I haven’t…