I didn’t feel like writing today. I’m sick. But I did start posting some of the old true stories from “the boot of life.” You can find “A Dead Man’s Party” and “The Record Store Terror” under “Other Writings” on the menu bar above.

Sorry it took so long, folks. To tell you why it took me ten years to bring this thing to a conclusion? It would be more personal info than I’d be willing to share. The main thing is that whatever was holding me down for most of that time? It let go of me. And with the help and editing skills of James S, and Ron, I just published it up to the official chapters.

I have the last chapter, 25, about a 4th written, maybe less. I know exactly what I need to fit in, and having said that, it’s either going to be a very, very long chapter. Or I’ll put two chapters out at the same time like some Guns n’ Roses double album.

If anyone spots any missing words or need for editing in Chapter 24, I’d really appreciate if you’d let me know.

Take care, all. ~Craig

Ok. I was watching the movie “High Fidelity” tonight. With John Cusack. Throughout the movie it’s “your Top this” and “Your top 10 songs about…” etc. My friend Darren recently had a survey on his Facebook page but I never could figure out how to reply to it. (Gonna try later.)

Anybody out there? All you people that register daily? What are your top 15 albums of all time? Comment and think about this. Think about the albums that changed your life. Think about the albums you’ll drag out and listen to over and over and never get sick of. Think about albums where you know every single song, where you can sing each song as if an anthem. Those are favorite albums.

Here are mine (pretty much in order, though I could still tweak it a bit if it came down to ten I could take with me to a desert island. The first five, however, rock-solid the best five of my life.)

Prefab Sprout – “Two Wheels Good” (Steve McQueen)
Deacon Blue – “Raintown”
David Sylvian – “Gone to Earth”
Big Star – “#1 Record”
Ben Folds Five – “Ben Folds Five”
The Pernice Brothers – “Overcome by Happiness”
Camper Van Beethoven “The Third Album plus Vampire Can Mating Oven”
American Music Club – “Mercury”
The The – Soul Mining
The Apartments – “A Life Full of Farewells”
New Radicals – “Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too”
Scud Mountain Boys – “Massachusetts”
Jeff Buckley – “Grace”
The Replacements – “Don’t Tell a Soul”
Van Morrison – “Astral Weeks”

edit: Swapping out Afghan Whigs – “Congregation” in favor of The The – “Soul Mining”
edit #2: Swapping out Husker Du “Warehouse: Songs and Stories” for Van Morrison “Astral Weeks”

Well, I will be moving in with my lady friend (Sarah) on the 12th. We’ve talked it over from every possible angle – right down to “what happens when I bring someone home?” Answer: “I don’t care as long as I know she’s there and I don’t hear you doin’ it.” I made sure to emphasize vice versa on that point.

There are many upsides here for both of us. For me, I will be putting most of my distractions (DVD’s, my desktop computer and the like) in storage and my chief means of entertainment will be writing and reading. I just don’t watch much TV anymore except for True Blood and The Daily Show.

On the downside, all of my favorite bars are in this part of town. One of them being a place called “The Bleeding Deacon” (pictured. Click on any image to see it larger.) So who knows how much of a distraction that’s going to be. All I know is that unlike some lame sports bar, I can’t walk in there with my laptop and start writing. That would be very… unflattering.

Anyway, I had to help someone move tonight but I’m back at finishing the chapter tomorrow night.

The new chapter is nearly done. As I’ve said, I’m in the middle of moving – packing and cleaning, but I need a break from that and once Football season starts that’s gonna be one or to less days a week I have to write so I’ve really been spending as much time as I can on Futon.

The new chapter. I don’t know if I’m going to call it “The Stew-man Cometh” as I originally planned. I’m considering calling it “Everyone’s Having Sex Except for Stewart” but that might be giving too much away with simply a chapter title, and it would one-up “Team Naked” as the chapter that most people read first, just to see what this stupid novella of mine is all about. (Fact. They read that one first. I have webpage statistics.)

Tonight I tried out some of the new material on some regulars at the bar. I pretended to have “this friend named Steve” (Stew) and started telling stories of some of his antics. It went over well. Very well. And several people insisted that I bring this guy in for a beer, that they wanted to meet him. I take this as a good sign, or at least, the best of all possible signs.

Facebook continues to be a lot of fun. If you want to friend me please do so. I post there with much more regularity than here. I just woke up In the middle of the night. 2:45am Central, and when I couldn’t get back to sleep, my first thought was to post something to Facebook.

I joke with friends that I have 216 Facebook friends, of which I actually know 50 of them. The rest are you guys. But it’s been kind of interesting because I’ve made new friends through famousboot.com and people friending me on Facebook. Some people are just hilarious and/or their observations on life are fascinating. Sometimes their comments to my status updates are so hilarious that my real life friends start asking me who they are. (“I don’t know, actually. I think he’s someone that reads my website. ”To which they inevitably reply: “What website is that? Wait, some stranger?!”) I wont name any names but you guys are great.

Anyway, I think I’m gonna find a beer or a few Xanax and force myself back to sleep before I end up staying up writing till dawn. Poe and other maniacs did that. They didn’t hold day jobs and generally went insane regardless. I need to sleep and I have no idea why I awoke.

I am enjoying writing, though, for the first time in I don’t know how long. When did I write that last chapter? That’s how long it’s been. Another love of mine? Reading. I’ve been doing some of that lately. And let me tell you friends, I haven’t cracked a book since I found the Internet circa 1993. The Internet became my book of all books.
I “listen” to a lot of books. But actually held one in my hand and read without multitasking, driving, or doing anything else?

I had an ill-fated affair with a coworker recently. She slept with absolute abandon. So I’d wake up at 9am and she’d generally sleep until 11am, defending herself against all my attempts to play. So finally I grabbed Steve King’s “The Stand” off of her bookshelf. (It was that or Koontz.) And I read a hundred or so pages. It felt wonderful turning those pages. Not as wonderful as the “playing” but alas, that gossip was still travelling the office long after we had called it quits after a month or so.

G’night, folks.

Well, I’m back at the shitty Sports Bar again… again in flip-flops, again with a huge haystack of unwashed curly hair, again with my laptop. And AGAIN, I don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks of my appearance or that I’m sitting in a bar with a laptop.

I did the same thing last weekend. I intended to get the chapter completely written and sent out to ten totally awesome people that have offered to help me edit it. Then my life got turned upside down.. again. I swear to God, sometimes I don’t know which way is up. I think I have things figured out and that my life is going to be fairly normal and stable for awhile and then…

The landlord calls and asks me if I want to buy the condo or whether I’m moving out on September 20th – the end of my lease. I’m sorry? What? I live in a very nice loft, an apartment/townhome, not a condo. NO CONDO. But the realty group that owns my townhome decided to give this “rent shit” up and just outright sell them as condos. And me? I didn’t get the memo. There’s no way I’m buying the place so I guess that means I have less than a month to pack and move.

I made considerable progress both packing and cleaning this last week thanks to friends and family. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I could move into a new apartment but instead, I’m 90% certain I’m moving in with Sarah from ‘she hates my futon’. Aka. My oldest friend, Michele, who I’ve known since we were sixteen years old, dating, and working at Six Flags together.

Michele is not Sarah. She just thinks she is. On a number of occasions she’s tried to draw parallels between her and Sarah, accused me left and right, but it just aint the case. Now I’ll admit. When you hear the “The characters in this story are purely fictional and are not related to real people living or dead….” When you hear that or read that. It’s just legal bullshit. Every writer steals personality traits from their friends and grafts them onto characters. Sometimes writers steal entire people. Take Larry David and Seinfeld as a good example.

Michele. I did not steal you. But I will move in with you. If you get another female roommate that would rock. I’ll change my name to Jack Tripper and we’ll have “Three’s Company”.

Anyway, regardless of packing, I’m going to get this chapter out. I am NOT waiting until October because my landlord forgot to tell me that my apartment is now a condo.

PS: While I’ve been writing this I’ve been listening in on a conversation between two construction workers down the bar. They’ve been talking about how cool it is for women to “Put em on the glass.” Anyone know what they’re talking about? I do, and it is pretty hot. But I doubt it would ever occur to me to ask a girlfriend “Hey, while you’re standing there would you mind putting ‘em on the glass?”

PS PS: Speaking of bewbies. Would you believe or do you remember? At one point in myboot.com history I dared women not to put em on the glass but to show me their tits. I knew another website guy that did the same thing and a bunch of people replied. I was curious to see if it could happen on myboot.com and um, I’m as perverted as the next guy. A bunch of women did reply. Nothing on the glass. But there was an Aussie that was beautiful regardless of her state of undress. I had an image of who Elizabeth was in Futon in my head. The Aussie bombshell replaced that image in my head., and I may have to go back at some point and do some revising.

I just wanted to give an update. Getting the website back up and promising to finish the novella were not idle threats, nor a passing fever. I am writing. In fact, today I’m writing instead of watching football. How about that? And I’m having fun too. I had forgotten how fun writing can be. How do I forget stuff like that? It’s like a week or two back I bought a can of A&W root beer. I don’t know why. It just ended up in my hand. And I drank the thing and I was thinking to myself “I like root beer. I’ve always liked root beer… so why hasn’t it occurred to me until now to drink some?”

It took me over ten years to remember that I really like writing. Man I’m a dumbass.

One more thing — on Friday I decided to travel over to the rocketship playground and get some pictures. In the nosecone of that rocketship, I did indeed mess around with someone many years back, so I guess you could say it has a place in my heart – or a place in loins. You know what I mean. Anyway, I drove there only to find that they’ve torn it down and replaced it with some newfangled rocketship. I guess it’s true what they say. You can never go back.

I took some pictures anyway. I Googled pictures of other rocketship playgrounds but I can’t find one that looks like it. Even if I could, I don’t want to appropriate someone else’s picture. Ok, maybe I’ll just appropriate for just a second here. Here’s the best photo I found.

I’m somewhat proud that I’ve worked very diligently on the website and posting the old chapters of “Futon” recently, yesterday and Friday night. They’re all up! Each one has navigation to the next (PS: if you’re a WordPress Pro let me know. I need HELP!).

Today hasn’t been so productive though. Despite what you’ve read about me/Craig in Futon, these days I’m a huge Football (and Baseball) fan. So with the football season winding down, on Sundays I am glued to the TV. Rather, most of the time I’m glued to the LCD computer screen left of the computer. My Fantasy Football team is beating my coworker Holly’s team by 102 to 52 as I write this. She still has two players playing later tonight but it’s her Defense and her Tight End. In other words, I have totally p0wned her. I’m looking down the nose of an 8 and 3 season so far. I rule!

I haven’t been very productive today for another reason. Read the last post. My friend and coworker Sara introduced me to the HBO Series “True Blood” which was like introducing a moth to the latest, most powerful Coleman lamp. ZZzzzt! I’ve been downloading episodes of that series like… I don’t want to give you an analogy.

Still, I have been going back and re-reading what I wrote more than 10 years ago. I’ve had many revelations going through the chapters, things I’d like to change, and plenty of things I never noticed. From the things I’ve never noticed department are all of the references to specific songs and music. Yes, I named a chapter after Prefab Sprout. “Two Wheels Good / Steve McQueen” is my favorite album of all time, bar none. But what I never noticed is that because of my love for music I make reference to songs repeatedly. Not just repeatedly, but in my opinion maybe too much.

Even before I’ve finished this novella there could be a movie length soundtrack.

• The Human League “Human”
• The Zombies “Time of the Season”
• Corey Hart “Never Surrender”
• Stevie Nicks & Don Henley “Leather and Lace”
• Steve Miller Band “The Joker”
• Prefab Sprout “Bonny”
• perhaps something from Jonathan Richman?
• perhaps one of many Ramones songs starting with “1-2-3-4!”

Oh well. I will address that later. I just want to keep up with this workout of writing every single day. I’m aiming for the finish. Not unlike, as soon as this back of mine gets back to normal, I just want to do whatever I need to do to make it stronger. As workout people say: “strengthen the core.” Damned straight.