(Almost) Thirty Years On: March 1997

The mind is elastic, as they say. Sometimes you end up misremembering things, or you're absolutely certain something happened in this order when it actually happened differently. If you look at the timestamp I wrote on the very first page of The Phoenix Effect, it says 3/7/97, 10:30pm. I almost always timestamped my longhand work, something I've done since the early days of the Infamous War Novel back in 1984, so it's not as if I was making it up.

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Back to normal

Today marks the last of five days in a row of my oddball day job schedule as the person whose job I was covering has come back from their three-week vacation. It's taken a lot out of me and I'm sore and exhausted most of the time, but I survived intact. The trick was to purposely not run myself ragged at top speed every single moment.

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Early morning wake-up

It's another few days ahead of waking up at stupid:early AM for the 4am shift start. I can certainly still do it at my age, even if I don't get enough sleep the night before, though I pay for it later that day once I'm off the clock. But I keep telling myself: if I can make it through the first couple of hours when I'm solo and prepping the front end for doors open, then I'm all set for the rest of the shift when the rest of my team comes in.

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(Almost) Thirty Years On: February 1997

I spent most of the next month or so taking my time thinking about how to approach the futuristic sci-fi story idea I'd had in my head for the last couple of years. While True Faith was a step in the right direction, there were two things wrong with it. One, it felt like a swing and a miss; it had its moments but it felt too derivative and weak, like I wasn't allowing myself to expand on the ideas and push boundaries.

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(Almost) Thirty Years On: January 1997

As mentioned previously, I'm continuing with 1997 as it's the first full year of my stay at HMV. Even though I'd technically started in late September 1996, I kind of consider those first couple of months a trial run, getting myself used to the job while at the same time dealing with a lot of personal change. Once that disconnect from the recent past was made permanent, I had a clean slate to work with, and I wasn't going to squander it.

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Clarity

As I get older I find myself seeking clarity more and more. The problem with doing that when I was younger was that I was still stuck looking at that in terms of extreme opposites: I'm either Totally Locked In or I'm Completely Disconnected. I either have All The Feels or I'm Cynical and Don't Give a Shit. I knew that wasn't want I wanted, bur nor did I want to keep pretending that I could find a happy medium where I could be all at the same time.

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Back to work

Okay, I feel much better now. I managed to survive six early starts in a row by way of keeping my energy levels to a minimum. No going above and beyond unless absolutely necessary. Knowing when to say no or not having the ability to take on yet another Thing To Do and letting them know about it. And not pushing myself at home, either, other than sitting down and working on the…

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Thirty Years On: November/December 1996

The last few months of 1996 were infinitely better than that of the previous year...but at the same time there were still some massive bumps in the road that desperately needed repaving. The signs had become obvious in November when I'd begged off hanging out with certain friends simply out of exhaustion. I was still getting used to the fifty-mile commute and literally doing a ton of heavy lifting of boxes for the store, and had told them I'd been too tired to go out on the town.

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Thirty Years On: October 1996

I'd say for the first month or so of this new job of mine, I took the same somewhat longer route to work as that was the easiest. That would change within a few months of course, once I got used to the area and learned several of the backroads. I also remember briefly contemplating finding a place closer to the store.

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Vin Diesel: You Embarrass Me!

ALT: Vin Diesel: You Embarrass Me!

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Fly-by: blog schedule might be a little wonky

For the next week or so I will be doing all 4:30am opens at the Day Job as the head bookkeeper will be on a few weeks' vacation. This means that I will be exhausted most days and may or may not have enough time to update the blogs. Boo! I'll try to update both of them when I can, but don't be surprised if you only see one entry a week for a little bit. Sorry about that!

welcometobridgetown.com

Thirty Years On: September 1996

The answer to my job frustrations lay in a newspaper want-ad my mom saw in the Sunday paper in the early half of September. A new record store was opening in the recently opened new mall in Marlborough -- out in the middle of nowhere yet perfectly placed where I-280 and Route 495 meet, two major highways in the state. Solomon Pond Mall had been built earlier in the year and was still bringing in new tenants when the HMV chain chose to open one there.

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Dave Kendall RIP

Dave Kendall deserves all the props in the world for coming up with one of the most inspirational and influential shows in MTV's history: 120 Minutes. He'd been a writer for music magazines and the UK press as well as for the music channel, and had suggested creating a two-hour show that showcased the great independent music out there that deserved a closer look.

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Thirty Years On: July/August 1996

I spent most of the summer of 1996 not quite in stasis but not quite moving in any specific direction, to be honest. It was more of a 'waiting for something to come along' that I was slowly getting used to. I'd kept my promise to myself not to once again fall prey to becoming stuck in one place I wasn't entirely happy being in out of necessity; instead I made it a point to look for new jobs outside of the area.

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Getting through

This past week has been a bit tough. On the home front, we've been dealing with weird weather that's been stuck in the mid-sixties with 85-95% humidity for a full month without a break, which means high pollen count, and which also means that my sleep patterns have been interrupted by serious sinus and ear congestion waking me up unless I take a few Benadryl before lights out.

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Thirty Years On: May/June 1996

The summer of 1996 was full of unexpected changes. The biggest one being the one other time I ever ragequit a job. The radio station gig ended one sunny morning when I was due to head over for a shift, only to be told that my hours would be cut to a few on the weekends. My evangelical boss didn't just cut my hours but said I'd only been hired until she could get someone else for weekday mornings, …

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Thirty Years On: April 1996

I'd like to think that by April 1996 I'd gotten settled enough back at home. I'd come to the conclusion that my plan to move back to Boston might take a lot longer than expected (what with my crippling debt and all) so I chose instead to refocus on what I could change at that point. I'd gotten the frustrations of 1995 out of my system and started looking forward.

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Meanwhile

Another Independence Day has come and gone, this one not much more than a footnote here in our otherwise quiet neighborhood. We had some stray firecrackers going off a few days early (once at 3am, annoyingly) but due to Karl the Fog's consistent presence in the evening these past several days. There wasn't much to see from our new abode other than a few flashes of underlit fog.

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Finding a writing process

[NOTE: The below is mostly from my 750Words entry from yesterday, but I felt it worth sharing here.] We were talking the other day about Your Name -- one of my all time favorite movies -- and how, when we went to see it in the theater in Japantown awhile back, I was reminded of just how perfect…

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Thirty Years On: March 1996

By this time I'd been working not-quite-fulltime at the radio station, doing the morning shifts from 5:30am to noon, and also on Sunday afternoons to prep the religious programming on the AM station that still ran from dawn to dusk. I was on my own for the most part until the GM came in and nitpicked any slight errors I'd made.

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Thirty Years On: January-February 1996

I remember how I started 1996: two friends and I had gone out to see Jumanji at a local theater on New Years Eve -- and that, by the way, was also when I saw the teaser trailer for Independence Day for the first time and thought 'HOLY CRAP I need to see this' -- and followed it up by heading over to someone's house to play pool in the basement.

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Back to Bridgetown

It's been a while since I actively sat down and reread the trilogy, so it feels a bit strange to be back in Bridgetown after focusing on Beam City (the city in Theadia) for so long! I'm not going to complain, however, because I've always loved it here. It's one of my favorite created worlds of mine and I'm always glad to come back and visit every now and again.

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Starting the next remaster (finally)

To be honest, I should have started this much earlier in the year, but it is what it is. Starting today, I'm starting in on remastering The Persistence of Memories, the second book in the Bridgetown Trilogy. If I play my cards right, I shouldn't have nearly as much of a problem with this one, as I recall having little issues with this one other than maybe a few edits and touch-ups, and it should drop by the end of the year.

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