All the pennies fit into a one-gallon sandwich that was roughly a 6" x 6" x 6" cube.  I hauled that in a blue FoodMaxx canvas bag.  The plastic grocery bags that I had all had holes in them.  Even if I doubled up on the plastic bags, I didn't want to risk the pennies from falling through and spilling out on the hot pavement outside of the store.  Knowing my luck, that would've happened.  No sense in crying over spilt pennies.

I lugged the heavy canvas bag into the store, ignoring the strange glances that people gave me.  No one walks into  a grocery store with a loaded canvas bag.  With my beard modestly trimmed, no one assumed that I was a terrorist planning to bomb the meat department and called the cops.  I've been shopping at this FoodMart since my college days in the early 1990s.  All the clerks know me as the guy who usually comes in with a gym bag after working out at the 24 Hour Fitness next door.  They didn't give me a second glance when I made a beeline to the Coinstar machine.

This was my first time "recycling" pennies through a vending machine.  Whenever I had a surplus of pennies in the past, I rolled them up in paper rolls and took them down to the bank to deposit.  If you go into a bank today with rolls of coin, they may very well call the cops on you.  No one likes coins in the age of debit cards.  I followed the directions on the screen and started dumping the pennies into the tray.  I spent ten minutes listening to the rattle of pennies falling down into bucket inside the machine.

I'm a short story writer.  While waiting for the pennies to be counted, I imagined writing a scene with an old man, probably short and bald, hunched over the tray of pennies he hauled in on his hand cart like a paranoid gambler at a slot machine, watching people come and go through the nearby entrance, and then something weird happens.  I like to write about old people since I understand them better and they tell me interesting stories that no one else wants to hear.  I'm not sure what the weirdness would be if I wrote that into a story.  When I got home and took the elevator upstairs, I found a brown lizard blending in with the brown floor tile that hissed at me as I tapped my shoe next to it.  I've seen a lot of weird stuff inside that elevator over the years but that was the weirdest yet.  Maybe they're connected somehow and someday I'll write that story.

The Coinstar machine took everything except a Canadian penny that I put back in my pocket.  I had a grand total of 3,711 pennies, seven dimes and one nickel.  After a 9.8% service fee, I had $34.15 USD.  I thought I had like twenty bucks at the most.  That was more than enough for groceries.  I handed the print out to the clerk to pay for my groceries and received the remaining change.  I still have a smaller jar with bigger coins at home that I might bring in if I need the money for groceries next month.  As for the Canadian penny, I tossed that back into the empty penny jar.  I'll see it again in another five years.

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I woke up from a dream a few days ago where I was riding a train and typing away on a manual typewriter before being thrown off the train and the typewriter being drop kicked behind me.  That's a weird dream.  Dreams that I want to remember tend to slip away like ether into the nothingness.  Dreams that I don't want to remember tend to linger about like Chinese food left in the kitchen wastebasket over a hot weekend.  The train dream decided to stay.

Naturally, I posted that summary to Twitter to start off my day.  I was then invited to post my dream on Freud-It, a Twitter-related dream analysis website where people can offer their own opinions.  The nice thing about the Twitter community is the niche websites that can tell you something about yourself (TweetPsych and Twittascope, for example).  I didn't post my dream on Freud-It because I got my own blog for dissecting my dreams.

This dream was inspired by the Christmas Day terrorism incident where a wannabe terrorist tried to set off his underwear explosive on a plane arriving at Detroit.  (First the shoe bomber, now the undie bomber, and, since I have seen too much Tokyo splatter movies, the bra bomber will be next.)  The initial reports said firecrackers were lit on the plane.  I can imagine a string of Lady Fingers firecrackers being lit by some prankster.  When I was a little boy, my brother threw firecrackers at my bare feet to see me dance, and was soon in a world of hurt with our mother coming out the front door and a sheriff patrol car pulling up behind him.  (This was in the early 1970's when the sheriff deputies would take people behind the local convenience store to beat out a confession and were regard as more dangerous than the Hell's Angels living down the street.)  When I told my family about the plane incident, they immediately expressed the desire to toss the guy off the plane without a parachute.

I have never flown in a plane.  I have taken the Caltrain commuter train between San Jose and Mountain View, and the Amtrak train between San Jose and Sacramento.   When I took Amtrak to Sacramento, I would take my laptop with me for the 3.5 hour trip to either write or watch movies.  These days I travel light with a notepad and pen to write and my iPod Touch to watch movies.  When I had my dream, I had a manual typewriter.

Typewriters weren't unusual for me.

I fell in love with an IBM Selectric typewriter when I was in the principal's office at kindergarten, watching the little gray ball spin to put black letters on the paper.  (This was the meeting where my parents were informed that I was mentally retarded and I would spend many years confounding my special ed teachers by blowing out the evaluation tests at the college or genius level.)  Long before computers started showing up in the local stores, I was checking out the various models of typewriters.  I had a half-dozen typewriters when I was growing up and later gave them up when wordprocessing became practical in college.

After my mother died of breast cancer in 2004, I went through a period of reclaiming my childhood by possessing objects that would trigger positive childhood memories, like Lava Soap and Johnson's Baby Shampoo.  When I decided to get serious about being a writer, I ordered a manual typewriter from Amazon.  My Dad thought I went off into the deep end when he asked what was in the box that we picked up at the post office.   But being the writer of my childhood meant having a typewriter.  I later got an electric typewriter that I still use to compose the rough drafts of my short stories and novels.

If you're on a train with a manual typewriter, the repeated click-clack sound of the keys striking the ribbon to put ink on the paper could be mistaken for firecrackers and perhaps more annoying than a crying baby.  Today's train conductors will not physically throw people off a train—moving or not—for fear of a liability lawsuit.  I was coming back from on Caltrain one Friday afternoon when a young couple were drunk like stunks and wanted to get naked to have sex on the train.  They didn't get that far but they were crawling all over the seats and each other.  The train conductor called ahead at the San Jose downtown station to have the police waiting to arrest them and physically remove them from the train.  The train conductors of yesteryear wouldn't hestiate to manhandle someone off a moving train into the wilderness or murder outright if that was necessary.

What does my dream mean?  Who knows.  Or, as the second rabbi explains in A Serious Man, "Who cares?"

On a related note, "The Red Book" by Carl Jung is becoming a surprise bestseller this holiday season.  Handmade and printed in Italy, the 416-page book weighs in at nine pounds and has a $195 sticker price (available for 37% of at Amazon).  This book of dream interpretations has been never been published until now.  What's the difference between a Freudian and Jungian dream analysis?  I have no idea.  When I took psychology in college, I got an "A" for the course because I was interested in applying psychological principles to the user interface design of software.  I was never interested in what made people tick or why they loose their marbles.  Although as a fiction writer, I'm not above poaching a Freudian/Jungian metaphor for my own purposes.

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When I went out yesterday to run errands, I noticed immediately that there was something wrong with my car.  The radio antenna was gone, leaving behind the naked screw mount and rubber gasket.   Nothing else was missing.  The windows were intact.  The factory radio with the country music cassette tape stuck inside was still there.  All the empty plastic water bottles that would draw a small fortune for a homeless recyclable collector still on the floor behind the front seats.  Only the radio antenna was gone.

Without the antenna, my radio reception disappeared when ever I drove under a metal roof or concrete overpass, and become scratchy when driving under a power line.  Very annoying.  Unlike my Dad's truck radio that gets two stations (country and talk), my car radio only gets one station (talk a la KGO Radio).  Silicon Valley haven't had a decent country radio station since the venerable KEEN went off the air in 1992 because the land underneath that radio antenna was worth more than the radio station.  Picking up a new radio antenna was added to my list of errands.

I went to Fry's Electronics and Best Buy but they didn't have any simple screw-on radio antenna, which was surprising considering how much custom audio equipment they sell for cars.  When I worked at the Old Spaghetti Factory in downtown San Jose during the mid-1990's, the assistant kitchen manager showed off his two 18-inch speakers, the power amp and a half-dozen car batteries that filled up the trunk of his 1975 muscle car.  That combination alone cost more than what the car was worth.  He cranked up at the volume of a Mexican mariachi band.  At the time I lived a mile away from the restaurant and I could still hear the music playing when I got home at 1:00AM.

I ended up getting a plain silver antenna at Kragen Auto Parts for $16.  My original antenna was similar to that but in black.  I wasn't happy with the color or the price.  Antennas weren't a designer item like everything else for cars these days.  I was more concern about the antenna mount being exposed to the elements that would lead to a corrosion problem with the trunk lid if I didn't get a replacement antenna.  I got enough problems with the car without having that.

After attaching the new antenna, I took a close look at the parking stall next to my car.  No car has parked there for the last three years.  I found cigarette butts on the left and right sides of the stall.  For the past few months, I been finding empty beer bottles and take out trash around my car.  On a few weekend afternoons, I found a car load of teenage gang bangers hanging out and probably waiting for a friend who lived in Building M.  I filled out an incident report at the apartment complex office, and was reassured by the managers that security would keep an out for that empty parking stall at night.

Gang bangers been trying to get into the complex for a while now since nearby apartment complexes been overrun by rival gang bangers.  I often see them driving by in their 1970's era cars—cool gang bangers drive souped up Honda Civics—in front of the complex, flashing their gang signs to people who don't care about them.  The complex management has maintained high standards for people moving in, cleans up the gang graffiti the day after it appears, and run out trouble tenants when they become a nuisance.  There's an informal neighborhood watch since everyone watches what's going on from their balconies and from inside the buildings.

A few hours later, while making a cell phone call from my balcony, I noticed a car load of teenage gang bangers pulling into the parking stall next to my car.  One of them even got out to buy ice cream from a passing vendor.  I couldn't believe my luck.  After getting the license plate number and description of the car, I went down to the office.  One of the managers called the security company and the other manager ran off the gang bangers with a stern lecture.

Did these gang bangers steal my car antenna?  Maybe, maybe not.  However, since they had all four doors opened wide with cigarettes in hand, they probably did leave behind the butts in the stall the last time they were here.

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I had a pleasant surprise this afternoon when I received an email that my short story, "The World's Best Coffee," is slated for publication in The MacGuffin (Fall 2009 or Winter 2010).

The hard part was restraining myself from stripping down to my undies and running around the neighborhood like Homer Simpson.  (My brother did that one year when he got too drunk on his birthday.  Being the president of the home owner's association made him very recognizable in his undies, and he hid in the hallway closet when the police showed up.)  After the euphoria of having a short story accepted for publication wore off, I started looking details of this submission.

With two dozen short stories written during the last three years circulating in the slush piles, it's difficult to remember what's what and where's where.  After reviewing the story and checking the submission tracking spreadsheet, I realized something that I didn't know until today: I wrote a MacGuffin story that I submitted to a magazine that specializes in MacGuffin stories.

Well, d'oh!

A MacGuffin is an object in a mystery story that everyone wants but isn't what everything thinks it is.  The Maltese Falcon is a classic example.  My short story is about a cup of coffee that is stolen by a guy being chased by the woman that the coffee was made for through the shopping center, and, after he finish drinking the coffee, he discovers that the woman has his wallet that had fallen out at the coffee shop.  When the woman hands over the wallet to the police officer, she sees the man and points him out as the creep who stole her coffee.  In short, it was never ever about the coffee.  Not really.

This short story was like many of the short stories that I have written: a real life situation provoked a "what if" question that lead to an interesting conclusion.

I ordered a medium mocha with whip cream at Peet's Coffee in Santana Row one weekend morning when a guy stepped in front of me, picked up my mocha, and ran out the door.  There's nothing you can do when the store and shopping center is crowded with people, and who in their right mind would file a police report over a cup of coffee.  After the store made another mocha for me (mistakes and theft appears not to be that uncommon), I started thinking about the obvious question that came to a writer's mind: "What would happen if someone did follow the guy out the store in pursuit of the stolen coffee?"

The basic scenario came together when I went over to the bookstore to look around and drink my replacement mocha.  I wrote out the basic scenario on a notepad when I got back to the car.  The notepad later became a 1,000-word short story, and The Macguffin was the fifth magazine that I submitted the story to.  I ended up writing the perfect story for the perfect magazine without ever deliberately thinking about either one.

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The previous weekend (May 16-17, 2009) was long and crazy.  I went up to Placerville, CA, to attend my nephew's wedding to his girlfriend nearly two years after having their son.  What was supposed to be a quiet trip turned out to be an interesting adventure.

On past trips where I took the train from San Jose to Sacramento (where my Dad lives), I  took along my MacBook or iPod Touch to keep me preoccupied during the three-hour ride each way.  This time I went low tech by packing a writing pad and a book.  I wanted to unwind from the electronic ball-and-chain that marked my daily existence.

The book was "Small Favor (The Dresden Files, Book 10)" by Jim Butcher.  Chicago's wizard for hire, Harry Dresden,  finds himself caught in a war between the summer and winter courts of the faeries, the fallen angels of God, and the different factions of the crime lord's empire.  Of course, everyone wanted him dead or deader.  The snappy dialog, fast pacing, and sudden plot twists made for an excellent read on a long train ride.

While I was reading the book, my mind was churning on my current and  future writing projects: the final chapters for the rough draft of my first novel, the final editing of my short story collection, gathering ideas for a planned second novel, and considering ideas for an unplanned series novel that's been demanding my attention.  If I wasn't stuck on a three-hour train ride with only a book to focus on, my head might've exploded from the excitement of so many ideas floating around.

I realized since then that I'm at a major transition point as a writer.  The rough draft of my first novel is nearly finished, and editing for the first draft will start after a three month break.  The collection of two dozen short stories and a novella will be ready to shop around in a month.  Although I only have one story published and another story pending publication so far after three years, I'm confident that more of my short stories will be accepted for publication.  I'm also excited about two new novel projects that I'll be writing side by side.  I'll be moving from being a lazy writer to being a busy writer within the next two months.

The happiest moment of my life was in 2003 when I lead video game tester working 60 to 80 hours a week, taking two programming classes at San Jose City College, and being a lead teacher in the children ministry on Sundays.  Most people thought I was insane back then but I enjoyed the adrenaline rush of being busy.  Can I edit the first draft of a novel and write the rough drafts for two other novels at the same time for a year?  Absolutely.  It'll be like juggling three flaming torches while standing in a pool of gasoline and a zombie chewing on your brain at the same time.  Difficult, fun and terrifying.

My Dad and I never made it to the wedding ceremony due to bizarre traffic conditions.

The only way to get to Placerville from Sacramento was eastbound Highway 50.  As we approached Dolardo Hills, traffic came to standstill with four lanes being funneled into one lane.  We naturally assumed that some idiot bureaucrat at Caltrans decided that he had nothing better to do than foul up traffic for a day.  We once drove up to Sacramento about 12 years ago where Caltrans was doing roadwork at the 580/I-5 intersection on the day before Thanksgiving (the most busiest travel day of the year) that took us five hours to travel two miles.  When the state of California decides to screw up something, they do it big time.  Then people wonder why the state budget is a mess.

We watched cars drive backwards or turned around to drive the wrong way on the shoulders to return to the nearest ramp, other cars merged to the right because the lanes opened up only to merge left again a few miles later, and drivers of bigger vehicles exercised their Californian-given rights to muscle their way into lane changes.  Of course, the CHP was nowhere to be seen.  We later learned that a FedEx truck had crashed at 5:00AM that morning, the diesel fuel spilled and caught fire to cause the surrounding aslphat to melt and burn one acre of grass.  If that wasn't bad enough, the truck carried 600 one-gallon containers of pesticide.  That combination made for a fine mess.  All four lanes wasn't reopened until 3:00AM the next morning after the toxic mess was cleaned up and the damaged lanes repaved.

We arrived at the Sequoia Restaurant in Placerville about 90 minutes late, missing the wedding ceremony at the cemetery across the street but not the reception dinner (which my Dad thought more important).  I found out that my nephew's grandfather on his mother side of the family passed away last week in Nevada when he took his car in for an oil change,walked across the street to get a coffee at the casino, and dropped dead in the street for no apparent reason.  My uncle on my Mom's side of the family passed away three months ago from lung cancer after spending a lifetime smoking like a chimney.  I felt old dancing with my niece even though she only six years younger than me, and her resemblance to my Mom who died from breast cancer five years ago was unnerving.  Seeing my brother and his ex-wife dancing together for the first time in 20 years was interesting.  Since I left my camera in my travel bag at my Dad's place, I used his spare camera that I later found out was broken and none of the pictures turned out anyway because of the dim lighting.

As a writer, of course, I was cataloging the small details of everything around me in the back of my mind to use in a future story.  Since I haven't actually published anything that my relatives could accidentally find in the front of a bookstore, they have no idea what it's like to have a writer in the family who observes and recycles the stories floating around.

Coming home on the train the next morning was interesting.  I was sitting in car two when I smelled something burning, which I thought was coming from the cafe car behind me.  The conductors had everyone moved out of the car because of an electrical fire in an utility closet.  I sat down in the cafe car at a table facing the window.  A technician came on board at Oakland to look at the closet, but the car wasn't separated from the train and remained shut down for the rest of the trip.

A decade ago I was riding the train home when debris on the track severed an air hose  underneath my seat that slammed against the underside of the car like an angry snake.  The train came to a slow stop, the engineer replaced the air hose in ten minutes, and were on our way.  That was fun.

I wrote out in very general details the outline for the last seven chapters of my first novel.  Since the last part ended with a shooting rampage, I didn't want the outline to be too specific about the post-shooting circumstances that my characters will find themselves in.  Comics writer Mark Sable was detain by TSA at the Los Angeles airport because he was carrying the manuscript for "Unthinkable," a comic book series about 9/11 and terrorism.  Apparently, TSA wasn't aware that comic books have writers and not all comic books are about superheros in tights with cool utility belts, and were suspicious of him going to a New York City for a comic book convention.  Even though he took the extra precaution of mailing his materials home, he was still subject to extra screening on the return trip.

While train security is not as strict as airline security, the possibility of someone looking over my shoulders and assuming the worst was still a real possibility.   If an episode of The Love Boat where a husband-and-wife mystery writers are overhead discussing various ways of killing people was made today, the writers would've probably been shot dead by the crew.

Maybe there's a reason why I don't travel much these days.

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