(A side note: my elbow is rapidly healing. I still have a fiberglass cast, but the doctor has me spending less time in it, and I anticipate being back to my two-handed typing and right-handed mousing within a week or so. I’m enjoying such an input method as we speak, but I don’t think I’d make it through an entire business day like this.)

My high school had its 20th reunion last weekend. I didn’t go, mostly because if I had the money and vacation days to travel during the heatwave season, it probably would not be to Indiana. But part of me regrets not going, and looking at the pictures and various reports on Facebook and whatnot make me feel somewhat bittersweet about not going. I generally don’t think about high school that much, at least not in an Al Bundy “those were the greatest years ever” way, mostly because they weren’t. And aside from Larry, I don’t keep in touch with many people from high school. Turns out that “friends forever” slogan people used to write in your yearbook isn’t legally binding or anything. Pretty much everyone I knew in high school vanished after May of 1989, and that reflects more my lack of social skills during my pre-18 years than anything else.

One of the emotions that’s dredged up by the necessity to look back at this era due to the passing of a big fat even number is that of jealousy. Am I jealous that I’m not raising three kids with no spouse on the salary of a forklift driver? No. But for whatever reason, I’m somewhat jealous of the people who were able to forge long-lasting relationships from this era in their life, because I wasn’t able to do that. At the time, I suffered from all kinds of depression and confusion based on my inability to run with the A-list crowd, even if that group was doing nothing of any intrinic value by going to football games and homecoming dances. It’s a grass-is-always-greener thing, and after high school passed, I was able to beat down these feelings by replacing them with something better, by actually doing okay on a college campus, and putting it all behind me. But the reunion somehow touched on these unhealed scars, in a very subtle way. It made me wish I would have done more socially in the late 80s.

The other weird side effect of this is that I wished I would have done something more extraordinary in the last 20 years, so I could have gone and “shown them” somehow, in a keeping-ahead-of-the-Joneses way. I guess a lot of people wish they could go to their reunion with a supermodel on their arm and seven or eight figures in the bank. A sort of “I was a geek you treated like shit back then, but I flew here from my bungalow in France on a Lear jet, and you’re still on the dirt farm” moment. But I have done a lot of stuff in the last 20 years - I’ve lived in many cool places, I’ve written books, I’ve traveled to almost every state, I’ve made some money, gotten married, bought a house, and managed to do a lot more than punch a clock at an RV factory 5200 times in a row. Maybe some people from my class would look at my list of achievements and say “shit, he’s done a lot more than work as an assistant manager at the Concord Mall Jamba Juice and spit out a half-dozen kids.” But then I also think that if I told most people I graduated with that I climbed K2 with no supplemental oxygen and donated the proceeds to landmine victims in Cambodia, they would be more proud of the four or six rugrats they sired, and what I did would be insignificant. Maybe this is a conversation I’m having with myself, but it’s the way I felt 20 years ago, and people don’t change.

As an aside, people do change, at least physically. One thing I was astonished by when looking at the pictures of the reunion was how some people have radically changed, and others look identical. Many guys got bald and fat, many of the cheerleader types look a bit more haggard. Years and kids and tanning booths have taken their toll. And some people that were pretty much below the radar back in school have really broken out, and look 100% better. I don’t know where I fall into that spectrum. I feel a lot better these days since I lost weight, but then I remember that I weighed even less in 1989. But I had those glasses. Either way, I’m sure a majority of people from my graduating class would not recognize me.

Another emotion stirred by the past is shame. I never even thought about this until a therapist brought it up a few years ago, but I feel pretty stupid about 95% of the stuff I did back in high school. When I think about that era, it makes me wish I had a time machine and an endless bucket of mulligans to correct a lot of the stupid shit I did back then. And yes, life would be different if I would have stopped playing D&D and started lifting weights Rollins-style and focused on getting laid or getting into MIT or whatever else, instead of focusing on trying to find the newest Metallica import cassette single or more chrome for my Camaro’s engine or whatever else consumed the most of my energy back in 1988. And when I think about catching up with people I only casually knew two decades ago, the thought of every girl I obsessed about and asked out and got turned down creeps into my mind, and it’s a pretty self-defeating mental pattern. The counter to this is I did a lot of stupid stuff when I was a kid, because I didn’t know any better.

Also, I have some kind of resentment about the fact that pretty much everything I did as a kid that made me an outcast is now somehow hip and trendy and cool now. I got my balls busted on a constant basis for being into science fiction and computers and being a geek in general, and now all of that is somehow cool. Christ. I spent a fair amount of energy trying to de-emphasize how much I was into this shit, and I should have spent the 80s going balls-deep and spending every waking hour studying assembly language and sealing unopened Star Wars toys that I bought wholesale in a vault somewhere, anticipating the eventual arrival of eBay. I would be a millionaire.

Had to work last weekend (yes, even with a broken god damned arm) and I don’t work this weekend. I allegedly have a three-day weekend coming up next weekend, and a four-day weekend after that. And now I have a large black cat standing in front of my monitor, lobbying for a second breakfast, so I better get out of here while I can.

Nostalgia has been such an overruling force in my internal dialogue lately. I think part of it is that I never feel like I’m doing anything in the moment I’m in, but much later, I idealize that piece of my past. I wrote Summer Rain in an overwhelming fit of nostalgia for my time in Bloomington while I was holed up in a studio apartment in Seattle, and now I miss my time in Seattle in some odd way. I thought about Seattle a lot while I was in Denver, mostly because Denver has mountains like Seattle (no water though) and it has a similar style of architecture, plus shares all of the same regional chains that make me think back to jet city. Like I never thought I’d be back at a Red Robin, but I ended up there all the time in Denver. And I spent a lot of my time in Denver trying to figure out what the fuck I was doing and how I’d ever make friends and meet people like I did back in Seattle. And now I miss Denver.

Another big sentimentality time-suck is facebook. I don’t have the fly-to-the-bugzapper attraction to facebook that many have, mostly because I don’t see the huge benefit to it. Yes, it does pull people out of the woodwork, but it also limits updates to a brief line or tiny picture, which I guess is why it’s so popular. But here’s the scenario that happens almost weekly: I hear from someone I haven’t been in contact with since high school. Sometimes, it’s a person who I hung out with daily back in Elkhart, someone who I was not best friends in the world with, but a person that was part of my daily routine back then. They drop off the face of the planet for 20 years, and then they show up on Facebook. We do the mutual ad, I see their pictures, we say hi, and… that’s it. Maybe at most, there’s a round of catch-up, “what have you done in the last 20 years?” email. And that’s pretty much it. Oh, and then I get endless updates on daily minutiae, like posts on what they had for lunch or how their kid crapped their pants at the K-Mart.

I don’t know what I expect to happen. I guess the kicker is that some of these people are folks I could never find back in the pre-2.0 days of the internets. It happened in expanding circles of contact: maybe 5% of the people I knew back then showed up in the dark days of university email accounts and shell accounts; maybe a couple percent more got in contact during the AOL boom. A few more were found in the early myspace days. And now these huge waves of people who never even touched computers are now all over facebook. And part of that is driven by the fact that my 20th reunion is next year, and everyone is hopping onboard to see what the hell happened in the last two decades. But those original dozen or so people back in 1997 with text-based email accounts were the ones that would swap dozen-page emails with me every day, talking in depth about life and about their connection to the world, while now the people I run into on facebook do little more than post a ten-word update on how they brought their kid to the swimming pool, or something else inane,

To be clear, I don’t wish to be back in Indiana 20 years ago. To quote John Dillinger (you know, Johnny Depp): “There is absolutely nothing I want to do in Indiana.” There’s a reason that line got more laughs than anything else in that movie, and it’s not because Indiana is that interesting of a place to hang out. But that’s the kicker to nostalgia - it adds this draw to things that are otherwise not that compelling. The boxes of crap I loaded into my storage space when I moved - old pictures, journals, papers - are all essentially worthless to anyone, but they are strong touchstones into the past for me, which is why I pay $40 a month to rent a small cube of space in an Oakland warehouse to forever stash that stuff. (Along with extra furniture, seasonal bric-a-brac, and empty boxes from electronics, stored as a hedge that they might die during their warranty and/or go to eBay someday.) I haven’t been to Indiana in two years, and I haven’t been to Bloomington in seven. I still think about it, but like I mentioned, it’s mostly because what I do day to day now is so uninspiring. And I have too much mental time in my hands due to my car commute. I think the difference now is that I don’t see myself dwelling in this long enough to deep-dive into book research. I was kicking around the vague idea of writing a fictionalized account of my time in high school, but there’s not enough energy there for me to get very excited about it. I have roughly 65,000 words of a novel there, but it’s too disjointed and it’s just not that interesting yet. It’s like the book of short stories I wrote about Bloomington - that book is 90% done, but it’s too hard to do the last 10%, because as I read through the stories, it feels like nothing compelling is in there.

Also, it’s the 4th of July today, and it’s odd that I have so many updates in this journal on 7/4. And although I never explicitly plan anything on the fourth, it seems like something always happens, be it moving across the country (1995) or getting stranded in Chicago when I tore the exhaust off my car accidentally (1991), there’s always something odd going on. This year, we are going to hang out with A, bringing some food, and trying to find a place to have some kind of picnic that hopefully is not overrun by baby strollers.

I know I just talked about the folly of nostalgia, but the other night I found myself googling my old address on Mitchell Street in Bloomington. Long-time readers (both of you) know that 414 S. Mitchell was my home base from 1991-1993, and also the backdrop of my first book, Summer Rain. Anyway, I found out three interesting things. The first is that the house is on google maps street views, so you can see what it looks like.

I also found a picture of a woman in front of the 414 side of the duplex, and it looked pretty much the same as when I lived there - same grey paint, crappy trim, etc. But it turns out the picture was from 1979. I emailed the person and it turns out he and his wife lived there from 1976-1979, and the house was in pretty much the same shambles as when I lived there. The big difference was that then it was a true duplex, basically two apartments with many bedrooms each, and living rooms. When I lived there, the house had been de-duplexed and cobbled together walls re-divided it into maximum room space with no living space, so it could be run as a boarding house with maximum profits. I always wondered what the house configuration was like in the past.

Further googling showed me that the new owners (“new” - I think they bought it in 1992) have re-duplexed the place and tried to fix it up a bit. (Listing here) It’s now painted this hunter green color that looks like a travesty to me. There is a blueprint of the 414 side (I technically lived in 416) and it looks like they turned one room into a living room. I also found someone on craigslist trying to sublet for the summer. That room is directly above my old one; the kitchen is the one by my room, and it looks like it has new appliances (in 1992, ours were from like 1947) and cabinets. It’s odd that they are asking $450/mo. I paid $177/mo back in the day. Also, I totally forgot about this - I tried to sublet for the summer of 1992, and I plastered fliers everywhere saying I’d rent it out for the entire summer for $100, or five cases of beer. Everyone that looked at the place thought that price was highway robbery.

Speaking of robbery, I got Grand Theft Auto 4 last night. It’s interesting - a little different than I thought. The other GTA games have this cartoony, unrealistic feel to them in some ways, which makes the whole thing seem like much more of a parody. But in 4, they really tried to get the audio and small details to be more realistic. If you pop your car onto the sidewalk at full speed and hit a fire hydrant, it knocks over and sprays water everywhere. Hit something too fast, and you will fly through the windshield. Look at someone the wrong way on the street, and they will give you shit, with plenty of profanity in their tirade. The cops are pricks. The subways are slow and delayed. There’s too much traffic. People are trying to hit you up for money. In other words, a complete New York experience, minus the smell. It is weird, because they have really mapped out a good chunk of the city. It is not 100%, more like a Reader’s Digest version, but all of the landmarks are there. Of course, they’re all renamed. Queens is Dukes. Brooklyn is Broker. Astoria is Steinway. Manhattan is Algonquin. Long Island City is East Island City. Tribeca is The Triangle. The Lower East Side is Lower Easton. Chinatown is Chinatown. I am still stuck in Queens/Dukes (history repeats itself) until I do more missions, but it’s funny when I’m driving and I think “holy shit, this is the way I used to walk to Best Buy…” I got lost once, and then realized I was at Fulton Street in Brooklyn, where I bought my last pair of Nike high-tops. The stores there are run-down and gaudy in the same exact way as the real thing. My old apartment is not there. The beer gardens are. I wonder if my place at Seward Park is there. Anyway, looks like I won’t be writing the great American novel for a few more months.

I have been looking for free MP3s - not the kind you get from Russia because of a loophole in the international copyright treaty, but the kind that unknown bands hand out so you will get into their stuff. I am sick of every one of the 6885 songs I have in iTunes, and I want to look for new stuff, but I realize I don’t know how to do that anymore. And I don’t want to keep buying crap from the past that has been re-re-re-remastered. I have no idea how this could be done, but I would LOVE to write a script or program that scraped the names of all of the bands in my current library, and then gave me a huge list of stuff of theirs I don’t have, stuff by related artists (like those big flowchart books) and stuff that I might like based on that. Does Amazon have a web service that does part of this? I don’t know. But it would be cooler than shit to have that script, so I could run it and it would produce a big giant web page with links where I could either buy (or preview) the CDs on Amazon or iTunes. It would also be nifty to put this in some giant Web 2.0 bullshit that makes charts and graphs, but I just want the info.

In a fit of stupidity (I have many of these), I got on iTunes and bought every song I could find that a Rockies player uses for their walkup music. Three things surprised me about this. One: the Rob Thomas song “Streetcar Symphony” is something that they played before games, and twenty years from now, I will be listening to that and thinking “man, remember 2007” because it is such a strong association. Second, I really hated Brad Hawpe’s walkup song, Nickelback’s “Rockstar”. But now that I have listened to the entire song, I like it. Third, I had no idea what the fuck reggaeton was prior to going to baseball games. Since every other player is Dominican, a ton of them use Don Omar or Daddy Yankee songs for their walkup. And now that I’ve heard “Salio El Sol” a thousand times when Yorvit Torrealba bats, I find that I actually like reggaeton. I mean, I feel like an idiot if I’m listening to “Gasolina” in my car while I’m driving around El Segundo, because I think someone’s going to pull up to me at a light and think “what the fuck is that esse’s problem?” And I have no idea what other reggaeton I would buy, because it’s one of those genres where there are endless numbers of greatest hits compilations, and all of them sound like some dude just pressed ten buttons on a Korg and spit out the song.

That’s all. Go to http://twitter.com/jkonrath if you haven’t already, to see how that experiment is going.

I was at Ralph’s yesterday. Ralph’s is a grocery store, and it turns out it’s part of the Kroger empire, but nonetheless it is a huge and fancy grocery store, and that’s saying a lot because it appears to me that southern California takes their grocery stores very seriously, and even the shitty places have a produce department the size of a Las Vegas casino. So Ralph’s puts to shame the old Astoria C-town, and I don’t even think Ralph’s is the best of the stores out here.

Anyway, I’m at Ralph’s, and over the musak, I hear a song I know I know, and after a moment or ten, it comes to me: it’s the Chick Corea song “Charged Particles” from their album Beneath the Mask. And that was suddenly weird on so many levels. I mean, I first got into that album in the summer of 1992, and listened to it end-to-end thousands of times that year. And then when I was writing Summer Rain, that was the one disc I could always put in and get back to that point in time. And not only was it completely burned in my head, but it was also an enjoyable album to play when I was trying to write. And then, 16 years later, I hear it playing over the PA system of a grocery store, while I’m trying to pick out a brand of ketchup.

I’ve had a lot of weird thoughts lately about the past, especially since I have been doing nothing but shredding old papers and packing up boxes of zines and books and finding old ticket stubs and letters and notes. Part of me has always been a completist, and I thought I needed to keep absolutely all of that shit. And sometimes that’s true - every time I try to trim down my zine collection, I wonder if any of the authors are going to end up on an FBI terror watchlist. And part of me thinks that if I kept every damn thing I touched in 1992, it would have been much easier to write a book about that year. But part of me recognizes a need to let go of that shit, and I ended up throwing out a lot more old stuff this time around. I probably won’t need a copy of every shitty death metal zine I traded with back in 1993. Yeah, “it might be valuable someday”. Price out the cost of a storage space in LA and then talk to me about value.

My first week of living in LA has been interesting. I am the master of noticing small differences, especially those that have to do with grocery stores or fast food. But so many things amaze me. The plants are incredible, almost entirely tropical. It’s closer to Hawaii here in many ways, with the palm trees and other huge, broad-leafed green foliage. There are so many collections of odd things in one place. We live near a wetlands, and when we drive through it at night, we hear all of these frogs croaking. The other day, I saw a dude out in the swamp flying an RC plane. We went and saw the canals of venice. I see all of those old, old-school cars, old VW bugs and muscle cars, with totally pristine sheet metal, no salt on the roads or rough winters at all. There are more fast food chains than you could possibly imagine - everything started here. The Indian joint a few blocks from here has a $7.95 all-you-can-eat buffet, so we checked it out today. I don’t know if Denver’s food was so bad, or if this place was incredible, but I’m going back at least once a week. And it’s in this odd little house where no two corners or windows are the same, and everything’s painted up in garish colors, and it looks like something that belongs in a college town, but it’s here. It’s all so interesting and bizarre and new, and I don’t really believe I live here, but I do.

Speaking of which, on Monday, I fly back to Denver to be there as they pack up our house. I will have a night in what’s mostly our old setup, our regular bed and stuff, and then a night in a hotel. After that. who knows how many days until the truck gets here, then a day of unloading confusion, and several days of arranging and organizing. At least I am very close to LAX. When we went last time, it was a sub-$20 cab ride there.

I went to Staples yesterday and blew $250 on a new desk and chair. I now have part of an office, and don’t need to sit on the floor and type. I also got a new keyboard that purports to be spill-resistant. I got that at Fry’s, which is a bizarre California institution itself. It’s basically like an old-school Best Buy where they sell every single possible electronics item, including parts and pieces and oscilloscopes and everything else. We went to the one in Manhattan Beach, and found out that each Fry’s has a theme, this one being Tahitian. So, it was a huge geek store with the occasional tiki torch or fake palm tree. Very interesting.

I forget what else. Still sick, but maybe it’s going away. I wanted to go for a walk, since we are allegedly right by the ocean, but I measured it the other night, and it’s two miles away. Funny, every apartment in the neighborhood says it is “just blocks from the ocean”. Yeah, 20 blocks.

I’m currently consuming two food items of great nostalgic value.

The first is the Hormel roast beef and mashed potatoes microwave meal kit. (It probably has some other more markety name, but I threw out the package already.) It’s a vaguely oval plastic tray with a peel-off lid, and it’s one of the most perfect meals ever designed. It needs no refrigeration. It’s a hot meal. You can put it in a backpack easily. It is hearty. It only contains 3 grams of fat. And it’s the kind of meal that I could eat regularly without getting bored of it.

My first memory of eating these constantly was when I worked at the Wrubel Computing Center in Bloomington one night a week. I’d trudge across town from my Colonial Crest apartment to the 10th and the Bypass building. It usually took an hour to walk there, an hour to walk back, the weather was usually shitty, and for the entire shift, maybe one person would call with a problem. On the walk, I was armed with the Konrath walkman, the Konrath black leather jacket, and a backpack of food, and usually a book to read. (I think I was working through Henry Miller’s Rosy Crucifiction trilogy for a good chunk of that semester, although I also remember re-reading The Grapes of Wrath in there, too.) Almost nobody was in Wrubel after five on a Sunday night, except for the machine room operators like Robin, who spent most of his night changing tapes and talking to me about Jimi Hendrix or chili. So I ate many a Hormel meal kit at a desk while bitnetting people on an outdated Mac IIsi.

(I’m pretty sure I wrote a short story about this, although it’s probably horrid. One of the things I tried to describe was the feeling of being isolated in this strange envoronment where I had to walk through a sterile, all-white machine room to get to my desk, and it always reminded me of something out of 2001. There was a very specific smell to the environmentally-controlled space, more than just a clean air conditioning smell. I recently ran across the same smell when I was in a hospital getting an X-ray or MRI or something, and it was one of those instant time machines that I always babble about.)

I must have bought my Hormel kits at the Marsh grocery store up the road from my apartment. And that’s the drawback to these Hormel things: not all stores carry them, and that adds to the nostalgia. I don’t think I saw the things once the entire time I was in Seattle, because if a store carried Hormel, they had the cans of stew, and maybe chili, and that’s not the same. The Duane Reade drug store by my old place in Astoria would stock them, and every time I went there, I bought all of them. Last night, I saw them at a SuperTarget, so I bought a half-dozen of them. I feel like Mel Gibson’s character in Conspiracy Theory, who always had to buy a copy of Catcher in the Rye every time he saw it.

The other food item on my desk is the 8-ounce glass bottle Christmas edition Coca-Cola. Those of you who knew me back in college knew I had an unhealty obsession with Coke. I collected bottles from around the world, I read books about the company, and I had one of the earliest web sites about the beverage. I had this shrine of cans and bottles from China, Japan, Italy, Greece, Poland, France, and a dozen more countries. And of course I drank the stuff every day.

When I moved to Seattle in 1995, I was in a really weird place. I had friends at my job, but I spent a lot of my weekends alone, going to movies by myself, going to malls and looking at stuff I couldn’t buy because I was broke. I didn’t have a TV, and I was basically living on changing phone companies every few weeks, and selling CDs I got from Columbia House. I didn’t even know how I would try to date, and by halloween, it was getting dark at like 4

every day. I was feverishly writing Summer Rain and thinking back too much to my days in Bloomington. I didn’t want to go back, but I wished the present was different.

I used to drive to Southcenter Mall a lot, just to look at stuff and look at people, and that got even more interesting once the xmas season started. Malls used to have a hypnotic effect on me, and I enjoyed going even if I didn’t need or want anything. (This isn’t true anymore, for a million different reasons, which can all be summaried as “I’m getting old”.) I was going back to ELkhart for the ‘95 santa day, and had to gather up a few presents for the family with that month’s check from MCI thanking me for the switch. And when I was at Target, I saw they had a bunch of six-packs of Coke, in little bottles, with Santa on the label.

There’s debate about Coke in glass, and Coke with cane sugar, and I don’t care anymore about the non-HFCS version, but I do love a beverage in a glass bottle. This has become a big fad as of late, and many hipster doofuses in New York were paying top dollar for Hecho en Mexico Coke. But back then, aside from a trip to Europe or Latin America, the only way to do glass was the xmas bottle. I picked up two six-packs, one for the shrine, one for the fridge, and drove back to my tiny little studio apartment at 7th and James.

I’m almost certain I probably drank that whole six on that Friday night. I used to stay up all night writing, and listening to the same six CDs. I had one of those Kenwood 6+1 CD players (this was long before the days of MP3), and of the 6 always-loaded writing CDs were the soundtrack to the Naked Lunch movie, the first Tori Amos album, and the first two Nine Inch Nails albums. There were also two new age or jazz albums, maybe some Windham Hill artist like Shadowfax, or Chick Corea. All stuff I’m half-embarassed to listen to, but it worked, and I’m not in the “I’m more metal than you” mode anymore, so fuck it.

Anyway, I got another six-pack from Target last night, and just drank one. It reminds me of that whole Seattle xmas season, listening to one of those Windham Hill solstice albums, looking out into the darkness outside my patio, the big sky gone black, the Kingdome and the SoDo neighborhood just past the ribbon of I-5. I don’t get nostalgic about event-driven Christmas celebrations anymore, the opening of presents, the driving to grandma’s in the snow. But those little touchstones of nostalgia are something I always enjoy, and it’s even better when it’s something I can pick up for a few bucks at Target.