Today’s entry consists of excerpts from my journal when I was living alone in Brussels in fall of 2002 working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, supported by a grant from the Flemish Academy of Arts and Sciences. I’m inspired to paste them in because I got an email from a fellow Frank Zappa and SF fan from the UK, a guy called Gamma. Gamma sent me a picture of himself licking his poodle; poodles being an important symbol in the Zappa canon. I met Gamma in 1979 when I went to Seacon in Brighton to hawk my just-finished novel White Light.

N.B. This picture is of Gamma, not of Rudy Rucker.

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Soft wah wah wah of flashback to 2002…

After I came home on Friday I bought a portable CD player and a couple of solid powered speakers, got the whole package for about “100, from a Maghrebien (which is what they call North Africans, as in “Ah, Sylvia, ma petite Maghrebienne,”) guy who only had about twenty objects in his store; I would have gone to the “Palais de Electricité” across the street that seemed to have bit wider selection, but they were closed and I really wanted to hear that warm friendly mellifluous Zappa voice, rather than going home to a Friday night all alone, and with no plans for dinner out. I’d already bought two Zappa records two days before in Leuven, where I’d also seen a CD/powered-speakers combo for about the same price as these. Dear Frank. It was so good to hear him. The speakers are great. I wonder if my neighbors are going to mind the noise, it’s hard to judge.

This morning I did Yoga for a half hour to Zappa, it was great, so much better than doing Yoga to the dippy yipping & drum machine that’s on some of the Yoga CDs we hear at our studio back home. I really worked out on “Disco Boy.”

Bought a third Zappa record. I can’t really justify buying anyone else. It's a low-priced sampler disk, Son of Cheap Thrills, I play it a lot. I’ve gotta get Cheap Thrills as well. They’re only “10 each, unlike his normal disks. Rykodisk just put them out to help hook people in the FZ universe. They have some songs I never heard on his late albums I never got. “Whets New in Baltimore” has this great soaring, lush, romantic guitar solo. Unlike his “greatest hits” compilation Strictly Commercial, I can listen to this more difficult but rewarding disk over and over. I’m still doing yoga to Zappa almost every morning. A high point of each day. I finished reading the Neil Slaven biography of Frank that I picked up here.

Frank really let the news get to him in his later years, obsessing over the evils of the Reagan-Bush admins and the televangelists. Watching C-SPAN whenever he wasn’t working. I always want to fight the trap of having my mind run by the news, of being eternally in reaction to what the Pig is putting out, as then The Man owns my mind as surely as if were agreeing with Him. It’s an effort not to let the news eat me, of course, as it’s comfortable to read the paper every morning, or catch the TV news, and people talk about that stuff to you.

Listened to Zappa's Joe's Garage a lot today, picked that up in Rotterdam, they had endless open stores, the town like a free port shopping mall. Though at first I thought the album ( a double CD no less ) sucked, it's growing on me. Like funnnnngus. Can’t get “Catholic Girls” outta my head. And this woman Terry Bozio does some great lines in “Crew Slut.”

Writing this I’m listening to Zappa sing a beautiful doo-wop song called “He’s So Gay.” With the great Four-Seasons-style soprano in the background singing the descant. It’s not quite clear if the song is homophobic or gay-friendly. “He’s so gay. He’s okay. Maybe later we’ll all be gay.” There's a good video of it on Zappa's DVD, Does Humor Belong in Music.

I read a great book of linked short stories, kind of a novel, Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women. Made me want to write a memoir. She gets so deep into her characters' minds, its amazing.

Saw the new movie Sideways this weekend, it was really funny, much better than I'd expected from the previews — a couple of guys visiting wineries? Hilarious, and all about love and growth.

Then saw one of the Ten Worst Movies ever, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Now I'm a big Renee Zellweger fan, I think she's cute, une jolie laide (a beautiful ugly), and for me Down With Love was the wonderful apotheosis of those Doris Day comedies I enjoyed in the early Sixties. And the first BJ [hmmm] movie was an unexpected pleasure. But this one … well, I can't do better than the SJ Merc reviewer who said something like, “there's a fine line between being an attractively plump bumbler and being a fat idiot.” But at the end, yes, BJ gets her man.

Reviewing…gosh, I fall instantly into the patois, the standard words of commendation or castigation.

Has there ever been a movie that Peter Travers of the Rolling Stone didn't like? One thing about coining blurbs, it gets your name out tehre.

Speaking of reviewers, my old friend Kenneth Turan of the L. A. Times is giving a reading from his colllection of movie reviews,Never Coming To A Theatre Near You at Capitola Book Cafe tonight; I may well be there. Kenny was my roommate in college for three years at Swarthmore. Nobody could retell the story of a movie like him.

A new edition of my book Infinity and the Mind just came out.

This has been my best-selling book over the years, it must be into two or three hundred thousand copies by now. I still get email about it all the time. If you want to know about infinity, my book's still the one to read.

About a year ago, David Foster Wallace tried to write his own book on infinity called Everything and More. I like Wallace's fiction a lot, but I thought his pop science effort was very weak, in part due to poor editing, in fact I wrote a perhaps overly harsh review of it for Science magazine. It was kind of fun being a sternly disapproving member of the establishment for once — normally I'm on the other side of that fence, like when I'm in the fiction-writing world. I also feel a bit of remorse, as Wallace is, after all, such a great writer, and deserves encouragement. But he especially should have done Cantor's continuum problem justice, and he should have mentioned Cantor's interest in the Absolute Infinity of theology. As an outsider who's been thinking about infinity forever, when I saw the establishment-cosseted Wallace show up and flub the topic, I kind of flipped into the mode of a hard-bitten old surfer hollering at a barney who invades the old guy's fave break.

I got a copy of Half Life 2 from Marc Laidlaw, my old SF pal who now works for Valve.

Un-freaking-believable. Everything's dirty and scuzzy, farewell to the goody-goody VR of the 1990s, all bright plastic-shiny polygons.

They've got water working pretty well, too. Physics — you can pick up barrels and crates and throw them.

The scientist's voice is recognizable by San Franciscans as that of Dr. Hal Robbin, unctuous and knowledgeable.

So Rudy the younger was here today and we pissed away quite a bit of time, and then we drove down to Borders, driving like maniacs, still in the game world, and when there was an announcement over the store loudspeaker system on the patio we pulled out our virtual machine guns and opened fire on the tower, from whence surely the Combine forces were about to lay down a withering barrage. Kill or be killed.

It's really ill how the game takes over your mind.

When you're addicted to something there's two kinds of time: (a) when you're using, and (b) when you're waiting to use.

I waited to play Half Life 2 for a few hours, and now I just sat down to look at it, just for a second, and I've been playing it for three more hours. I'm in this air boat going down the filthy canals of City 17.

But now, really, I'm gonna stop for awhile.

I found a walk-through by Jim Diddo a.k.a. Devolution online that helps, too. I found it by Googling the words “Half Life Cheat”. I need the help because I get stuck in these icky places, like inside a power plant half full of water, no enemies around, just me alone in there, the hum of machinery, it's a beautiful day outside but you can't go out there, you have to dive under the filthy water and find a valve, a barrel, an outlet.

What fun!

Here’s a picture of a carved scrofa semilanuta (half-wolly sow, or, pig with a mohawk), symbol of Milano — the name may actually come from seMILANuta. One guy at my talk had a mohawk, the city scrofa rep.

Taking off near dawn, lovely views of Europe. Wayne Thiebaud has done a series of paintings of the Sacremento River delta like this. Oddly enough there was an earthquake in Milan the evening after I left. Synchronicity: I was standing in the Piazza de Jorge Luis Borges the afternoon before I left, and when I went to pick up my car at SFO, the couple in front of me were named Borges.

And here we are back in the Bay Area, these are fractal river channels in the mudflats near Sweet Home San Ho. I always kick myself a little on air flights for not looking down at the land more. It’s so amazing.

The GG Bridge of course.

We went for Thanksgiving dinner at my friend Jon Pearce’s; here's a view of some of the assembled guests, including dear Sylvia on the right. Note son Rudy (CEO of Monkeybrains) and his friend Penny on the lower right.

And here’s Jon and his little family: Ben, Ronna, and Laura left to right, a shot similar to the Meet the Beatles album cover except it’s out of focus. Jon was my office-mate at SJSU; we've been getting together for nearly twenty years.

Jon and me, sober as judges, but looking drunk, a kind of temporal inertia. Back in Kentucky and Virginia, Thanksgiving was always a day for Wild Turkey. My father liked to drink on Thanksgiving, too — I used to have a big pang of missing him on Thanksgiving, but now it's been so long since he died (ten years), it's more like I'm missing the memory of missing him. Time piles up such an endlessly thick blanket of forgetful snow.

After dinner Jon asked me to read part of the first chapter of Mathematicians in Love out loud, which I enjoyed doing. It’s good to be home.