Keep the Customer Satisfied
(26 June - 5 July 2001)
5 July
2001
[from Albuquerque]
-I'm starting to really feel good about the many jobs,
volunteer at HS to
coach debate plan after college. I LIKE libraries, & I like working at
them. &
besides, they're good institutions. & the best way to effect change in
HS kids is to
coach debate, where at least I don't have a state-issued curriculum with a
state-issued textbook.
Groovy. Now I just have to get a novel published & we'll be set.
Shoot!
I have to FINISH it first!
-40k.
-Stop the presses!! Mesco has updated her
site! What's next, the return of Schneider's site? Wow. Though
how she makes
fun of others being low-tech is beyond me...
4 July
2001
[from Albuquerque]
-I've got your independence right here.
-I've been
doing an awful lot
of bowling lately. Which is good, because I'm enjoying it & it's a good
break from
being so darn restless. Last night, with DK & JP, I bowled a 187.
This was
actually disappointing, because in the middle of the game, 6 frames (#2-7) looked
like this:
XXXX9/X. That should yield something better than a 187. But it
didn't.
-A conversation with Mesco reveals that, among other things, Bastille
Day is a good
pastry. Yes, you read that right... don't try to make grammatical
revisions.
-Hmmm...
to delve into first person or not? Ah well, must finish Part One first.
& that's
at least 5 days away, right?
-Mike STANTON is an All-Star? What a load of
garbage. The Yankees continue to be
an utter blight on baseball, & now that they're bitter after getting 0 elected
starters,
Joe Torre has to come & bail them out with 7 selections, including brilliant
picks like
Stanton! Arthur Rhodes is better in almost every statistic, or for gosh
sakes, get another
CLOSER instead of middle relief! At least we'll be hosting the All-Star game,
& winning
it in the first half of the game when 4 M's start, though the 7 Yanks will probably
blow the game
late. Boo.
3 July
2001
[from Albuquerque]
-Time for a little statistics... at yesterday's pace
alone, this novel
will finish by my deadline at 528 total pages. Wow, that'd be crazy.
At the OVERALL
pace (which is almost precisely at 3 pages/day, which includes all the days I
haven't written
anything, & yesterday's twelver), I'd end up at 213 pages, which isn't TOO
shabby, but also
isn't where I want to be. So somewhere in between would be good. I'm
starting to get
really excited again, which is vital since I was scared out of my mind 2 nights
ago that I
wasn't going to finish at all. I have till early August. 35 days, I
approximate, to
get it all (first draft) done.
-Arg. We need a new mouse!
-The
machinations of APDA
are exceedingly slow in some ways...
-I HATE Ticketmaster! They've even
taken over the Journal Pavilion! & who
knew Pavilion only has one l? I didn't till I went there today. At
least I saved
myself the "mailing fee" of something like $5. Because, I guess,
stamps were
recently raised from 34 cents to 5 dollars. Crikey...
2 July
2001
[from Albuquerque]
-In so many ways, yesterday was the longest day EVER.
Wow.
I think we got 48 for the price of 24 in there.
-The problem with writing
ANYTHING is
seemingly inevitable misinterpretation. Even the explanations of
interpretation can be
misinterpreted. Woo, I'm excited.
-12 pages is a good day.
1 July
2001
[from Albuquerque]
-Good golly. I just realized that it was one year
ago today that
I first went to the Grand Canyon (well, first time since I was 4). It all
seems like almost
ancient history in some ways... I feel like so much has wobbled in my emotions
since. Not
to say that I've really fundamentally changed, but that I've gone through a lot
nonetheless.
Including a year of poor physical health, among many many other things.
I finally
realized that my recent breathing trouble & sore throat has been the result of
the visit to
the lake, or more precisely, IN the lake. Other than that, though, things
are just fine.
I have to average SIGNIFICANTLY more pages per day this month than ever
before. I'm
closing in on 100 total, & that's just insufficient. Behind pace.
Here is the
month where it all better pick up...
-Is this an example of not being done with
the past, or the past not being done with me?
After realizing that I was at CTY with Amy Phillips 6 years ago, I started to
wonder about
some of the old folks from there. It's such a weird experience because it's
so tight-knit
& intense for 3 weeks at a time, & then one never sees these folks again,
except at
random intervals like playing frisbee at NYU one day, or who knows what.
Regardless of
which, CTY has alumni e-mail websites running around & while looking at these
for my time at
CTY, I ran across Sam. Talk about someone I haven't thought of in a
long time.
The kicker is that this girl was one of my first public & most
embarassing crushes...
seemingly the whole camp knew I liked her & it ended up being a disaster.
She felt
sorry for me at a dance & ended up asking me to dance, then realized that I
liked her &
set the record straight about that. The things
we can't forget in this life. I tell you, I don't forget anything.
Makes me want to
go read "Dead Letter" again & throw my hands in the air.
Anyway, the kid's
gone & gotten herself a life, apparently, like we all eventually do. Mind
you, I never
much knew her in the first place: she was cute, smart, & had an interest
in Russian
history. This was the summer of '94, to give you some context. Christ.
Well,
anyway, she just graduated from Brown as a cosci major, from what I can discern
from
her website. & she seems to be
somewhat
happy, despite the difficulties of making choices. But that's just what her
last update,
from April, indicates.
-Anyone notice that the more I work on my novel, the
longer some of
my Intro' entries become?
-Oh, & I meant to mention that I saw
"A.I." on Friday. With DK, the day
it came out, in the afternoon at Rio. I was partially wrong about the movie.
It's not
as hardcore as I'd feared about robots having souls. As DK said,
"there's a lot going
on in that movie". For me, though, it was about one thing. It's
about what a
hazardous curse it is to love.
-There are days on which the enormity of the
human experiment becomes too much for me.
In my awareness of its vast diversity & amplitude, I'm feebled in the
very presence
of so much experience, both wise & unwise. Today is one of those days.
30 June
2001
[from Albuquerque]
-Just like that, it's about to be July. June was
good in most ways,
but a little subpar in the most important one. July CANNOT afford subpar!
At all!
It's time for me to crackdown on myself again!
29 June
2001
[from Albuquerque]
-I dunno what it is, but something seems to be making John
a lot happier.
Which is more than fine with me!
-& then there were three.
-Waffle
House is
always one of the more reassuring places I know of. Even at 3:30 in the
morning, there's
decent conversation with strangers & a friendly atmosphere, a bulwark against
the night.
That's generally a nice little lift.
-Driving back from WH, on 2nd
Street, there was a
whole string of blinking streetlights. Reminded me of Katie's old
"Undecided"
poem (see "Where the Children Play" magazine, first semester last year,
same issue in
which "Fleeting" appeared). Except that it was pitch black, being
4 o'clock.
So instead of flickering, it seemed to scream emergency into the predawn
air.
28 June
2001
[from Albuquerque]
-Today seems like a miscellaneous day to catch up on
things, though what
exactly I'm not sure. Maybe it's just that combination of Nikki leaving for
Rwanda today,
Fish leaving for DC tomorrow, & Lisha & Mesco contributing epic-length
entries in their
daily update pages of their own. Or maybe it's just me trying to get
something redeeming
out of being an idiot lately, see yesterday's grand event. Regardless, DK
& I the other
day had some enormous fun talking to the A.I. Chatbot
the other day, & then Stina & I chatted about such last night.
Basically, I'm
worried that this new film is going to be the indoctrination movie... the last
step in undoing
people's belief in a soul or in anything special about humanity or life.
That's putting it
a wee bit far, but it's all in Huxley, so I don't know why I bother talking about
it.
-Lisha also reminds me about genetic debates, although what SHE talks about
is even more
relevant to Huxley. So I say to you, go read your Huxley! But also
think about why
we have waterskiing dogs when many people cannot eat because of economic
distribution.
Priorities! This is why America is not the greatest country in the
world... it has
dogs waterski while humans starve in its streets.
-Also, from Mesco's
discussion about music
about boys, I'm reminded that Fish declared (a few days back) that "every
song is about a
girl". Needless to say, this sparked massive accusations of the 2 of us
at each
other regarding the others' crackfiendishness. Ay!
-Speaking of crack,
also, or drugs
of any ilk, I wonder what Vet's up to right now. Anyone remember the 50
pounds of fine-cut
heroin story? Howie Epstein, noted bass player for Tom Petty & the
Heartbreakers, was
arrested on I-25 in 'Burque yesterday for speeding, then for stealing a car, then
for having 3
grams of black tar heroin. Please note discrepencies from a Vet-like tale:
1, black
tar vs. fine-cut & 2, 3 grams vs. 50 pounds. Now, keep in mind that said
bassist
(& companion) are in deep Sununu for their drug infraction, seemingly in
deeper Sununu for
that than the grand theft auto. Again, how much would Vet's alleged friends'
stash
ACTUALLY have been worth? Something to briefly ponder, in the world of
waterskiing
dogs.
-Finally, also inspired via Mesco, the 8's. She speaks of blinking
8's, but I
want to talk about the license plate I saw about 4 days ago... it was all 8's.
Seven of
'em. It looked like this: 8888888. Except they were all red,
filling the
yellow plate. Incredible. It looked utterly spooky & seemed a
testimony to the
intelligence of the guy in the car. Unless, of course, THAT was a stolen
vehicle trafficking
heroin as well.
-Oh, & from Lisha again, she used the word
"ginormous"!
I'd never heard that word till Madeline's friend Brooke (who lived in the
room next door)
used it so often. Apparently it's spreading...
27 June
2001
[from Albuquerque]
-I tend to have less figured out about this novel than I
think.
Not substantially less, but less. The novel's writing me as much as
I'm writing
it.
-Today I hung out with Megan & Fish. That was all good, all great
in fact, before
we went & got ice cream. There was bowling & lunch & I always
forget how much
fun it is to hang with Megan, but I'm always reminded again. Great. So,
anyway, we go
& get ice cream, which was good (even though I paid because Megan & Fish
COMBINED beat
me in the 3rd game - but only by 10 pins), but backing out of the Baskin-Robbins
parking lot was
not so hot. I rammed the Kia's back tire straight into the Baskin-Robbins
sign pole.
Yippee. I thought it might be okay, despite the jarring shock of
hitting the sign, but
notsomuch... basically, I dented the back door of the car, bent the tire-bar out of
position
(now it doesn't close) & made myself feel like a total fool. I also swore
a whole lot
in front of Megan, Fish, & this idiot woman in a red pickup who wanted us to
"get out
of her way" as we were surveying the damage. Anyway, no one to blame but
myself &
boy do I feel stupid. Much like I felt when I careened into the road in San
Diego or when
I got ripped off by that con-man at Waffle House last summer. These events
create such
massive mind-games with oneself. What could I have done differently?
How could I
have changed the outcome? We briefly debated going to Dairy Queen instead of
BR, for
example... that would have been sufficient. Clearly, me paying more attention
would have
helped all-around (that's the real mental killer). Also, we have the
geography of the BR
parking lot, which places the sign actually IN the parking lot. My Dad was
lecturing me on
the ills of telephone poles (assuming it was that kind of pole) when I told him
that if it WERE
a telephone pole, I wouldn't have hit it. So now I have even less money than
I thought I
did & feel so damn stupid.
26 June
2001
[from Albuquerque]
-Happy Birthday Mom!
-I'm so tired right now, but I
have to write...
not just obligatorily, but I really FEEL compelled to write; it's that deep-down
compulsion
stemming from inspiration, but it's frustrating when I can barely keep my eyes
open.
-I felt the early warning of a sore throat yesterday... if I get sick for
what, a 5th
time this year, I'll just give up. What a lousy year for my immune
system!
-"The space between what's wrong & right is where you'll find
me hiding waiting for
you.". Or perhaps more importantly, "It's not going to stop, till
you wise
up.".
-Life is nothing more than the swirling of hello & goodbye.
I could add
even more quotes, like "It's hard to say hello in a goodbye world."
Or even
the entirity of the Beatles' seventh song on "Magical Mystery Tour".
There's
nothing here to say that hasn't become cliche long ago, & yet it's still
profound.
Introspection, My Worst
Friend* (Current)
Ye Olde Archive (Past)
Tell me this is not the end...*
*-lyrics from an as-yet unreleased song, "The Same Old
Frontiers",
by SWClayton.