014: Who Wants to Dance with Baby '37?

First, COMPILATION.
Sitting here eating a plate of microwaved chicken nuggets, after having Just Donuts for breakfast, wondering if I can somehow just eat one macronutrient per meal, and if so, how much of an adjustment that would actually be.

Me six months ago: MY BIRTHDAY IS GONNA RULE BECAUSE *lists all the movies and tv coming out right now* Me yesterday: Okay so we're gonna cancel Christmas again because your mom got exposed to the deadly virus we could have stopped a year and a half ago? Cool. Cool cool cool.

It's now been my birthday for an hour and 17 minutes according to Central Time. I technically don't turn 40 for another 11 hours or so, but I'd like people to lay the fuck off Brian Eno for being filthy rich. Because yes, he is, but he actually did most of it by creating things. His work with most big-name bands started before they were genuinely big, his work for Microsoft netted him all of $35k (in mid-90s dollars), and he's put out a fucking truckload of work in every medium out there. His NFT comments are about predation and grift. Anyway, I'm going to spend my day eating ridiculous food and maybe tending to my busted-ass car. Ope, one last thing: Keanu Reeves gets to giggle about how stupid the whole NFT thing is and everyone loves him, but Brian Eno is the hypocritical sellout. Okay. Internet has some weird fuckin' lines in the sand sometimes.

Trans Girl Achievement Unlocked: Remove Own Bra Under T-shirt Because It's Cold But Also Bedtime

Starting Christmas feasting the right way: eating a whole sleeve of Ritz crackers and immediately going to bed.

Effectively took a week off the onlines to detox from the stress only to deal with canceling plans due to covid, Wisconsin traffic, getting exposed to covid, Wisconsin traffic AGAIN, and no Dt Mtn Dew when I got home because I can't plan for shit. At least I got some reading in?

Y'all I literally just realized, after something like 28 years of Spider-man fandom, that Doc Ock has eight limbs. Spiders are SUPPOSED to have eight limbs. His entire deal is that he (like most Spidey enemies) is an evil reflection of Peter, but he's also more "ideal". Also, I'm sure that a million billion words have already been written about it, but it makes me happy that so many of his enemies are scientists or in some manner technological. It's such a great illustration of the Great Responsibility dictum.

So not everything is doom and gloom: played DnD with a returning group member tonight whose PC, in her absence, turned into a flying unicorn/spider fiend that shot Disintegration spells as rainbows. She. Was. Thrilled tonight when she "woke up" after being defeated last week.

I have just learned that "no selfies" ("cellphones") in German is "keine Handys" so now that's something you know.

It's 4:30pm and I haven't had anything to eat or drink since 1am and I slept like shit and it's cold out and I think the two days of productivity I had were a scam played by my brain to make me feel even worse today.

In actual work news: I finally got my first submission of the year out of the way, to a chapbook contest that I took some time off from submitting to due to SHEER JADEDNESS. I'm trying to not be QUITE so jaded this year inre: publishing, but man, I'm already feeling tested. Incidentally, I have open submissions from APRIL. This is absolutely the most tedious job in the world, and that's not even talking about actually doing the work of writing.

As a poet I actually read very little poetry, partially because there's so much of it, partially because I'm interested by other stuff, and partially because I hate about 95% of poetry, including a large part of my own.

Sometimes I think about my social media posting from the POV of getting a job, but then I realize that my actual CV is probably worthless enough that I don't need to worry. Relatedly: I just applied to another job. At 2:20am. Hope they don't look at that submission time, either.

One of my favorite things* about the US is that you can drive for nearly 24 hours nonstop in almost a straight line (nearly 1500 miles or 2500km) without an appreciable change in elevation or climate. *this is sarcasm

I'm starting to think the guy who sold me this Fiero might have been fibbing when he said he parked it 4 years ago. 14 maybe.

I gotta say that of all the things that have happened in the past five or six years, the Zoomer rediscovery of IRC through Discord has to be the one I expected least.

I just got an ad for a water faucet. I have never, in my life, chosen plumbing products because of an advertisement.

Love to be woken up by the child knocking over the recycling and shattering a glass jar to be followed up immediately with "I have to go" and them skittering out the door. There's some kind of metaphor in me, mostly nude, cleaning up shards of broken glass, while the perpetrator casually strolls to the train.

Second, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT.
I deactivated my Facebook. I probably would have deleted it entirely if not for the fact that some people I know still use it as their only form of communication. Every once in a while, including this morning, I get the urge to log in and see what's up, but I get enough rage from Twitter. I miss a whole lot of people from Facebook, though, whom I never would have met without it, and I'm not sure that the mental health tradeoff is worth not being there.

If I go back, it will likely be in a lurking capacity. Most of my quippery (literally all of the COMPILATION section) goes to Twitter these days, which weirdly has less engagement than FB, but feels more fulfilling in some way, by making the shouting into the void seem simultaneously more and less relevent in the overall stream of shouting.

I thought I was going to replace the socialization with other platforms, TikTok mostly, but I just can't be arsed to keep up with the doomscroll there, as much as I love the For You algorithm. It's weirdly well-tuned, to the point that it's giving me creators who look and sound like my partners, or their siblings, or finely tuned science content, or any other hyper-niche thing that I find interesting. It's one of the few times I haven't really been bothered by a platform's non-linear feed. Like, I actively avoid places/features that try to moderate the content I choose to follow for me. TikTok, it absolutely should be mentioned, is the same Web 2.0 shit as FB and Twitter and every other platform, wherein creators are exploited to sell ad revenue. But TikTok seems far more heavy-handed about nuking creators who argue with them about it. Hank Green did a Youtube video about it, which I find both hopeful and dangerously naive (Hank and John both cling to market capitalism in a way that makes me uncomfortable directly recommending them to anyone) and I'd love to see a platform that actually gave a shit about its creators in any way at all, one that was truly administered by the users. Anyway, I'm getting a little into the weeds here.

Overall, my attempt to thin the media I consume hasn't really had the effect that I was hoping. I haven't been reading or writing any more than I was before I left Facebook with the hopes that those words I fed to Zuck would end up on a page instead. Now I have a new theory: the problem is somehow endemic either to me and my brain juices (possible due to ADHD) or the world in general (possible due to the world in general.)

Writer John Scalzi has written many words on this, and I'm just going to link to his two posts because he said it all better than I can. (Do note the dates on the respective posts, one is a lot more hopeful than the other.)

Do I know what I'm going to do from here? Not really. But I've been working, ever so slowly, on the biggest project I think I've dreamt up so far. I've been making a playlist. The whole project itself is probably late to its own genre, but whatever. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Hopefully I'll have it done this year. There's still 339 days left.

Third, CONSUMPTION.
- Last time out I mentioned Mastodon's new album Hushed and Grim. I finally picked it up and lemme tell ya, it rips. Atmospherically it fits in with their older work, but the arrangements are still treading the water between metal and '70s prog rock. More of Brann Dailor's vocals, but also more of Troy Sanders', which I love. As much as I like Brann's voice, Troy is The Sound of Mastodon in my mind.
- Been reading Virginia Woolf's Orlando. It is very funny while also being exactly what I expected. These two things are not a dichotomy, but maybe they are.
- I started the most recent season of Letterkenny last night. Here's the thing about that show: it's really fucking good. It's so good that my stupid brain automatically shifts into the accent after about fifteen minutes of exposure, and it won't go away. Just a masterclass in snappy writing where every character is eloquent as fuck while still retaining the individual quirks and voices that make them, y'know, individuals. It's the sort of writing certain other quip-happy writers could learn from (lookin' at you, Whedon and Sorkin. (Isn't it weird how a show known for its diverse cast with community writing input is more realistic than the hypercontrolled Singular Genuis writing?))

Fourth, PROMOTION.
This is the part where I talk about my book, A Void and Cloudless Sky. The book is up for sale on Amazon and BN.com, as well as Bookshop.org! The best deal is with Mr. Bezos, but Bookshop actually lets you support your friendly local bookstore if you want.

Do you want a FREE Advanced Reader Copy? All I ask is that you review it on either/both of those sites and/or Goodreads. Let me know!

And as usual, if you'd like to support this whole endeavor more directly, you can check out my Patreon, where I post poetry, notes to poems, the occasional essay, and whatnot. At upper tiers I even write poems FOR YOU!

If you like what I do here and don't have the scratch or the inclination to do the above, please share this newsletter with you friends. I like making words wiggle people's brainjuices.

Finally, THE OUTRO.
We're moving. Not leaving Chicago, of course; this city is too good in general, and we don't want to upset the kiddo's education any more than the fucking mayor already does. I love our location, but we've finally outgrown what we have. I mean that literally. We have a teenager and between three adult-sized people with multiple crafty hobbies among them, not to mention three cats, we just don't have the space in a one-bedroom apartment. So we're gonna move. Maybe farther north. Maybe farther west. We don't really know yet. Our lease isn't up til the end of April, so the actual location is still up in the air til sometime in March, most likely. Til then, it's working and packing. And lots and lots of time trying to figure out what actual rest is. Because whatever I've been doing since Thanksgiving doesn't seem to be it.