It is the start of a new year — four days into it, really — and I haven’t done shit.  I always have these wise ideas about some post-a-day project, either here, or some great new site that involves posting a story a day or a wiki page per day or whatever, culminating in a total of 365 pages of crap.  And I know that if I did find a concept like that, I’d peter out around mid-February.  That’s why New Year’s resolutions are for hacks, and I never make them.  I’ve got the same set of goals I had five days ago, and I’m still trying to plow towards them.

My excuse for not posting lately is that I’ve been sick with some contagion that completely leveled me for the last week or so.  This was the worst I’ve been sick in a while; I’m used to the usual sniffle or cough, but this virus completely nuked me from orbit.  I got to fly back from Milwaukee with this crap running through my system, and that night, the temp spiked at 103 and I started the 24 hours of Daytona, Nyquil-style, chugging another shot of the green wonder exactly every six hours to max out my dosage.  By New Year’s, I wasn’t eating, my throat completely torn up with white ulcerations to the point where even swallowing water hurt like hell.  I’m mostly better now, but that Saturday night, I thought I was a goner.

And I spent the week before that in Wisconsin.  And it was, well, work.  I appreciate the graciousness of my in-laws, but I never like dealing with family drama, and when it’s not your blood relatives, it’s sort of like watching a reality TV show you don’t want to watch, except you can’t change the channel.  And if we went to the Bahamas every year to do this, that would be different.  But when the temperature dips down to the point where we have to close windows and start wearing jackets here in California, that’s about my fill of cold for the year.

I did get to see John Sheppard for an afternoon, which was cool.  I drove down to Chicago in my rental car, one of those Chevy Malibu things that is nothing like the Malibu of yesteryear, and we went to a diner and then hung out at his place for a while.  His apartment reminds me in some ways of my place I used to have in Queens, except he’s up on a higher floor and has a good view, while I lived on the street and got all of the noise pollution of the Jersey Shore douchebags that hung out in front of our building.  Also, I had a bunch of junk, while he barely has furniture, just a place for the Macbook and a lot of room to paint.

His place, and the semi-lucid nyquil dreamscape of the last week, made me sort of nostalgic for the time at the start of my tenure in Queens, or at least the idea of it, the solitude.  Once it got cold out and the steam heaters started, the street life died down and I’d spend all of my nights and weekends locked in that little one-bedroom, never leaving the house, ordering out every meal and either defeating or being defeated by the computer on the card table, trying to smash out the good word into the keyboard.  I never had people over, never socialized, and had stacks of DVDs to watch and a PlayStation to burn up time, but I really appreciated the isolation, the focus on trying to write.

Maybe that’s just revisionist history, in some sense; I also think that from the time Rumored came out in 02 up to the time Fistful came out in 11, I pissed away almost all of my time.  I mean, I wrote here a lot, got a few short stories done, did a couple of non-fiction projects, but I also feel like I lost my way for almost a decade there, and wonder where that time went.  And now, six months after my last book was done, I fear that I am starting to stumble a bit, and I’ll blink, and it will be 2024 and I will still be chipping away at The Next Book.  That’s scary.

But I am chipping away.  No progress to report, but I’m still maybe halfway through this new one.

Other stuff - I have registered for a comedy writing class at Second City this month.  The end goal isn’t sitcom writing or whatever, but I need to explore a little outside of my wheelhouse, and this sounds fun.  It will probably burn up all of my free time for the next few weeks, but hopefully will be worth it.

I’m also still playing bass, and wish I had more time for that.  I just bought a third bass, and I will probably save that for another post.

OK, gotta go play stone soup with this manuscript and/or go play the new bass.

I am back from my trip to Reno.  I won $100 on a slot machine.  I bought a new bass.  I had a dream about cookies.  I saw a big lake.

OK, first, slot machines - I have a mixed opinion.  I know they require no skill or thought.  I go to Vegas with a bunch of people that have about three PhDs’ worth of math classes between them, and to say they’re involved poker players is like saying George S. Patton knows a bit about mechanized infantry.  They, of course, frown upon the one-armed bandit, as there’s no strategy and you can’t beat the odds.  But usually when I’m at the point when I’m in a casino, I’ve been awake for days and am completely brain dead, and pressing the “repeat bet” button over and over every five seconds is about the only strategy I can mentally afford.  If I’m lucky, I break even.  This time, I hit some mystical combination of symbols and wildcards that gave me something like $106.  I then quit, and moved to a video poker machine, where I turned $20 into $26 over a period of about 45 minutes, which isn’t stellar, but is much better than turning $20 into $0 in four seconds.

In my quest to do anything except write to force myself to eventually write, I bought a new bass guitar at a pawn shop in Reno.  It is an Ibanez and it’s red and has P/J pickups and an incredibly thin and fast neck.  The pawn shops in general were slim pickings, a bunch of beaten Chinese Fender clones and the occasional Squier for $20 below list price.  But in a place with a giant wall of assault rifles, I found this single bass hanging, and once I felt the low action, needed to buy it.  I talked them down $50 on the price, and then it was mine.  I’ve probably played it ten hours since I’ve been back, and I’m very happy with it.  I’m still obsessed with this game Rocksmith, and started buying all of the songs in iTunes, because I’m not well-stocked in Pixies and Black Keys albums.  (This game is very heavy in bands beginning with “The”, including -White Stripes, -Strokes, -xx, -Horrors, and probably ten others I forget.)

When in the hotel, I had this incredibly detailed dream involving baked cookies, and then woke up and there were no cookies.  S took this as a cue to bake a batch of cookies yesterday, and I’ve eaten so many of them, I think I’m going to puke.  They’re good, and that’s the problem.  I have to go to the dentist later today, and I think instead of brushing my teeth just prior to my cleaning, I will eat as many cookies as possible, so I know I’m getting my money’s worth.

Although I have not been writing, I’m on the verge of publishing John Sheppard’s next book, and someone just asked to use one of my pictures from Germany for a book cover.  Coincidentally, my last book used a picture from the same trip.  And I had a similar dream experience in Berlin, although it did not involve cookies.  We’d landed in Berlin after a hellish day of flights across Europe, and got to the hotel well after dark.  We set up camp in this Hyatt, and I went to bed with the drapes closed.  My dreams involved a massive suite of a hotel room, with a wall of glass overlooking a terrace that stood at the top of this massive and modern city, like a scene from a movie.  When I woke up, I pulled back the drapes, expecting this incredible cityscape, and found our room actually looked out at a concrete Daimler office building that was only a few feet away.  The rest of the Berlin trip was great, but that single post-dream moment was a huge letdown.

I mentioned a big lake.  It was Pyramid Lake, and I was going to start talking about it, but then did a wikipedia check, and it turns out that every fact I was told about the lake by one of S’s relatives was half wrong.  Like, I was told it was a freshwater lake, but it’s not.  And that it was the filming location of T_he Ten Commandments_, but it was actually The Greatest Story Ever Told.  So, I guess I don’t have any stories to tell.  I took some pictures, but I’m finding I have far too many pictures of desert wasteland, probably as a result of owning 40 acres of it.

I am itching to get another book out, even though the next one is only half done.  Part of me wants to take a bunch of my choice photos, and put a bunch of my archived tweets on them in Helvetica, and release a hipster-esque book, but I know nobody would buy it.  Maybe I will anyway.

It’s two days before thanksgiving, and I find myself in a deluxe suite at a casino in downtown Reno, which is roughly like staying at the standard room in one of the third-tier off-strip places in Vegas, but it’s not bad. Reno’s like a 1970s Vegas, one you can traverse without a car or fear of heatstroke, one where all-you-can-eat buffets are still a novelty. If you need a social and economic barometer to the climate here, this hotel has a free wifi connection that did not require me to provide an email address, retina scan, or colonoscopy to log in. It didn’t even ask me to check a box saying I agreed to their terms. That’s saying a lot, although I don’t exactly know what.

I ate dinner at a strange Basque restaurant that looked like a tavern in a gold mining town, where a heavily tattooed woman didn’t even ask for our order, just started bringing out trays of food. We’re here to see relatives, my wife’s relatives, but also to escape the ghetto and enjoy a few days of different scenery, a different bed, a different set of cable channels. There are no real plans, aside from the usual caloric marathon, and I will probably end up at every pawn shop downtown, looking for that elusive vintage Fender bass that someone’s accidentally priced at twenty dollars, which will never happen.

I haven’t been writing lately, but I’ve been playing bass almost constantly. I’m not any good, but the fingertips are toughening, and I feel like I’m more serious about it this time around. During my first tenure on the four-stringer back in the late 80s, I don’t remember ever practicing like this. I log the hours, use a metronome, play the scales, do the chromatics, stretch the fingers. F to A#. 123-234-456-654-543-432-217-1. Over and over and over. I’ve been playing Rocksmith, playing on Songsterr, playing through an instructional book. I want a new bass, but I’ve told myself I have to keep at it to justify the purchase. Until then, I cycle through eBay incessantly. This holiday will mean four days away from it, which seems like four days too long.

When we get back, a month of 2012 remains. I am maybe halfway through the next book, still untitled, still chipping away. I didn’t bring the book with me, didn’t bring my computer with me. I’m chipping away at this on my iPad, with my little bluetooth keyboard, which actually works well. I might try to free-write some of the crud out of my subconscious into the little screen while I’m here, and maybe something worthwhile will land here.

I’m avoiding the casino, not that much is happening down there. It’s very quiet, almost nobody around. A skeleton crew works the floor and the front desk, bored kids stuck in town, acting far too nice and being far too helpful. I think we paid $40 a night to stay here. It’s newly renovated, very modern and corporate and not at all like what you’d expect from an old Johnny Cash song about the place. Most of Reno has that look to it, that sense of despair, the motels with weekly and monthly rates, the beat places that will loan you enough money to do your laundry if you sign over your car’s pink slip. There’s a lot of “the dream is dead” if you travel a very short distance from the neon of downtown, but of course the scenic view of the river from the deluxe rooms screens that away a bit.

Anyway, it looks like it will be an interesting turkey day.

Usually when I fall into a deep nostalgic k-hole, I’m thousands of miles removed from the actual event.  But tonight, It’s more like a few hundred yards. I’m back in the Lower East Side, in a hotel room that’s a matter of blocks from my last home on the east coast.

I’m here for a work thing, and don’t have much time to dawdle, but staying in my old neighborhood and working in my old work building (albeit in an office on a different floor) means I’m tripping over threads back to my past constantly. I mean, the hotel I’m staying in is this hipster thing that doesn’t even look like a hotel on the street, the kind of place with a shower with the outer wall being all windows and a square sink and a toilet that’s a high-gloss black and bathroom walls that look like a zen retreat.  I don’t think it existed when I left, or maybe it was just steel beams and scaffolding, one of the million construction projects I ignored on a daily basis.  But when I go downstairs and walk outside, I’m back on the old Ludlow Street I used to traverse on a regular basis, looking at the Wholesale Candy, the Delancey McDonald’s, the Tenement Museum.

(What’s funny, and another strange irony, is that this hotel sits caddy-corner from the cover of the Beastie Boys album Paul’s Boutique, an album that’s been on more than a few minds lately.)

I left New York in 2007 like the American Embassy workers left South Vietnam in 1975.  After my eight year run here, I was so eager to get the fuck out of dodge.  Sarah had a job in Denver, and we went out there and bought a brand new car and got a brand new apartment and then flew back here for goodbyes and the final orchestration of getting all of our furniture into boxes and moving trucks.  I never thought I’d return to New York, let alone miss it.  And I wouldn’t say I miss it, but it’s not something to completely dismiss, either.

I’d lived in the Lower East Side since 2005, but the exact date’s hard to pin down.  I mean, I had my shithole apartment in Astoria when I met Sarah, the place with bedbugs and a collapsed bathroom ceiling and a heater that only worked well in July.  She had this huge two-bedroom place in a high-rise co-op, a building with a doorman and a balcony and a wall of windows that looked north and air conditioning.  So the occasional nights of extracurricular activities became consecutive nights, especially during the summer of 2005, and then bags of stuff went from one place to another, and by fall, I was all in.

I had a lot of fond memories of living in the neighborhood back then.  We knew our time was up in the city and talked about some west coast escape plan almost from the beginning, but part of the deal was that we’d see as much as we could before we ditched the city.  I’ll never feel like I scratched the surface of this city, especially since restaurants are like cockroaches here: every one you see means another dozen you don’t, and they’re continually dying off and being replaced.  And I wasn’t entirely happy with my work situation at that point, but I could now walk home after each day.  And after a long day of hacking at TPS reports, spending ten or fifteen minutes of strolling through Chinatown with some good music in the headphones usually meant I’d show up at the front door without any worries anymore.  While my house in Astoria was more like a constant hostage negotiation situation, the apartment in the co-op was a nice oasis in the city, a comfortable place to crash and look out at the green grass of the park four stories below us.

Now, being back here is a total mindfuck.  I walked to the office tonight, just to see the sights, and then met up with one of my California coworkers for some dinner.  We went to Spring Street Natural, one of my old favorites, and then wandered up to Times Square to descend right into the belly of the beast.  It’s always interesting for me to look at the city and see how things have changed.  The big chunks are still there, and it’s always good to see when something’s survived.  But it’s also fascinating to see what’s transformed.  The big Virgin Megastore where I used to spend hours shopping for DVDs is now a Forever 21 clothing store.  The Tower Records where I’d dump endless money into CDs is now the MLB Fan Cave.  Name a random failed business and it’s either a Duane Reade, Chipotle, or a bank.  K-Mart is still a K-Mart.  The Howard Johnson’s where I ran up a $1200 bar tab one night on a first date is now a Sunglasses Hut.  It’s all changed, but it’s the same city.

So, after a ride on the N train back to SoHo, heavy flashbacks and rumination of 2006.  It’s not that I want to return; I’m sure on Wednesday afternoon, I will be ready to get the fuck out of here again.  But it’s like seeing your old neighborhood on TV, or in the movies.  I remember when we first got to Denver, a few weeks later, when we were at the movies and saw our old home of New York for the first time, at a distance.  It reminds me of that, except I’m here, in it, jay-walking and cursing at tourists who block the sidewalk like I never left.  I’m living in the hallucination, albeit briefly.  It’s a strange feeling.

I am back.  My luggage is not.  It might be on a plane from Frankfurt, Germany to here, or it might be sitting on some Lufthansa baggage conveyor somewhere in Germany.  I will probably see it this weekend, and it’s no big deal, aside from the inability to wash two weeks of dirty laundry.

We had a good time in Berlin, although it seemed pretty short.  I am amazed at how modern and well-planned that city seems, yet how there’s so many different eras of history represented.  There’s all of this ancient history, old churches that somehow survived the wars, and then there’s this postwar history, all of the Stasi-era East German bland architecture that’s quickly being gentrified.  And then there’s all of this ultra-modern stuff, the New York-style glass and chrome buildings.  I guess from a city planning perspective, it helps if your city gets mostly destroyed and you can start over.  It’s the reason Japan has ultra high speed internet everywhere and all of the US that’s not in a million-person-plus city has a total disaster of copper wiring that can barely handle 56K modems.

We ate dinner at the Reichstag, which is the perfect example of this. It was built in 1894, and most famously burned down in 1933. It has since been redone and reopened, and the parliament now uses it. It’s such a strange combination of new and old though, because you’ve got this centuries-old exterior that everyone’s seen in World War 2 books, but the inside of it is ultra-modern, and seamlessly transforms into this all-glass interior that looks like something out of a movie.  Since we had this dinner reservation through Sarah’s work, we got to line-hop and go straight to the top of the building, into this huge glass dome with a 360-degree view of all of Berlin, and a corkscrew pathway twisting up to a cupola viewing deck at the top.  Dinner itself was good, but just being inside this building, and then seeing all of the city at night was phenomenal.

One of the other things we checked out was the DDR museum, which documented the history of East Germany, and the rise and fall of the Socialist country.  It’s not a very big museum, and when we went, there was a mob of high school kids who didn’t really give a shit, making it chaos.  But they had some very interesting stuff there, and this era fascinates me, because it wasn’t that long ago, just over twenty years, but everything from that era has completely vanished.  It’s like my fascination with old malls: you can easily pull far more information from the Civil War era than you can from a mall that was built in 1978 and torn down in 1994.  The museum had all of these packages from food and cosmetics and beauty products that were produced and sold by the DDR government, these generic packages that were very utilitarian instead of produced by ad agencies. When I was in high school, they churned out millions of bottles of Vita cola, and all of that stuff is gone now.  When I see something in a museum like an old WW2 plane, I have no connection to it, because it was before my parents were born.  But I went to college with people from Germany, had friends in the Army that were stationed over there, and I can clearly remember the existence of East Germany, so there’s a strange nostalgia for me.

I spent all day yesterday on the return trip, and almost got stuck in Frankfurt.  Our flight from Berlin was delayed by an hour, and we had to get from gate A20 to Z8, which involved a serious sprint across the airport.  We luckily did not have to go through security a second time, and they did customs at the gate.  It did mean I could not stock up on water for the eleven-hour flight, and I got stuck with about 150 Euros that I didn’t get a chance to change or spend.  On the long flight, I ended up doing an editing pass on my book, watching Anchorman, and then watching a ton of other TV shows, including a half-season of Louie.

So it feels good to be home, although I don’t have that laundry to wash, I don’t feel like sorting through the thousand pictures I took, and I’m not feeling terribly inspired to write.  But I need to get something done, so I should get to it.