017: Wading Through the Rubble of Ideologies
PROLOGUE
I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. ~ Audre Lorde
First, COMPILATION.
Inbox zero. It helps that a large segment of them are Chip Zdarsky newsletters, which are like popcorn: tiny, flavorless, and utterly devoid of nutritional value.
You know it's gonna be a good one when the first thing you say out loud is "This is not my mess. Not my circus, not my monkeys."
Not watching. I know what happened, I know who ran it, I know most of all nothing will happen.
So I just had the second half of my tasty edible, I'm gonna brush my teeth, and I'm gonna go to bed as a bowl of jelly. I can be disappointed tomorrow.
Ptooooo. Into the void.
[note: sometimes Winkie posts on my Facebook and IG] My name is Winkie and I am a Deaf dog. Something you may not know about me is I LOVE to play fetch and catch! It is a valuable workout for me to keep my herding dog physique and keep my brain making happy chemicals. Sometimes if I don't play I even have trouble sleeping at night and I keep Mom and Ricki awake by poking them with my snoot untill they let me out in the dark so I can run run run while the spooky coyotes yell spookily and make Mom and Ricki worried for me. But I always come back afte rmy run because I can't hear the spooky coyotes! ANYWAY. BALL. I make Ricki (or Gramma, or Papa Dan) throw the ball and sometimes Ricki has to put ice on her throwing leg because I guess it hurts sometimes. I'm glad everyone loves me so much that they'll throw the ball until it hurts, because I will TOTALLY chase it until I flop over. Hopefully it won't be too hot this weekend for throwing. Ricki says "over a hundred." Is that a lot? Is that hot? I hope not, because I have very thick furs.
A reminder that today is a national holiday in the US (observed tomorrow) because the We the People officially didn't include a vast number of people until almost a hundred years later, and 150 years after that, those same people are still fighting to gain and keep the rights to life, liberty, and both property and pursuit of happiness in whatever form it might take. Juneteenth for us white people should be a reminder of how much we still have to do, and that the work of freedom means more than words on a page. Much love to my friends who celebrate, and I hope we can keep getting better in the face of... all this. *gestures at world*
Blizzard announcing they're getting Dragonflight out before the end of the year is not the slam dunk they think it is, considering they've released flop after flop, entirely abandoned their esports, have a very VERY public workplace abuse scandal still percolating (including a huge organized labor push), and their most recent release is a nakedly greedy 6-year-old reskinned gacha game with odds so stacked against the player that it's the worst rated game of all time on Metacritic. This is going to be the biggest flop. Especially since they're charging EVEN MORE for it than the last expansion.
There's a song on the new Rammstein called "Dicke Titten." You know, Big Titties. Still got it, guys. Still got it.
Alright. I'm out to mow the lawn. This is the closest I get to farming while on the farm. I mean, if we don't include the garden.
Put in a new adjunct app at Columbia yesterday. We'll see if this one goes anywhere. *sigh*
Just ate an edible and I'm laying in bed. I'll be angry tomorrow. The supreme court will still be there. They have lifetime appointments after all.
I have been in bed for about 9 hours. Less than 4 of them have been sleep. This is just peachy.
I MADE A FUCKIN TART YALL
The sun is coming up. It's not dawn, but it's definitely brighter. Remind me to never move to a pole. Just too much of everything.
Remember kids: what makes you different is your power, and accepting that difference and the difference in others is the way we can all overcome all this. The status quo wants us to carve each other up; that is how it remains the status quo: it has no united adversary. Be that adversary. Be militantly accepting and celebrate the breadth of life and what is possible. That's not to say be docile. Love fiercely. Be proud that your collective strangeness makes you a threat to a system built to produce conformity and unquestioning drones. Read people who are not like you and learn about the world. It's much bigger than those in power want you to believe. We can do anything.
I hate it here.
[note: Most of these posts were several days apart. The flow and juxtaposition are both amusing to me.]
[note 2: Dextra has graduated brain school! To any of you that helped support her in this time, thank you. It means the world to her, and by extension, me.]
Second, WHAT A MONTH, EH?
I mean obviously a lot of that is tied up in the above, but also, like, the things above are the only non-reposts on my Facebook. How weird is that? It's not! Depression, it turns out, is a hell of a thing. Also, outside of being depressed, I've been busy with not-Facebook activity, mostly driving. Which is to say, I'm driving a LOT these days. It helps that the partner's car is a Toyota hybrid that gets a zillion mpg, but also, being in the middle of nowhere means everything is at least 8 miles away. Sometimes more, in the case of specialized health care like neurologists.
The news in general has been dragging a mental anchor for me pretty much all month, though. From the insurrection hearings to the SCOTUS to the Highland Park mass shooting, it's all been a lot. (Highland Park is actually a pretty fair distance from my apartment and family in Chicago--there are several communities in between--but it has still shaken the community pretty hard. It'd be great if we could get some good gun laws in this country!)
This has all been on top of the very real interpersonal stuff I'm dealing with in my immediate life: the weather, caring for multiple people with varying levels of disability, attempting to maintain composure through it all. Working on both physical and professional projects. It all gets very tiring.
That's not to say nothing's doing. On the Patreon front I made three posts this month--two poems and a note--and I should have another notes post coming tomorrow. I've also managed to make a bit of progress on THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT (have I mentioned that? that's my next big project) and I keep doing small things around the house. Today I moved a chair and a shelf out of the garage in the not-so-wee hours of the morning. Things like that. And I have been mowing now and then.
The thing is that what should be a pretty pastoral existence isn't, but, well. Hell is other people.
Third, CONSUMPTION.
- completed the essays section of The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, edited by Roxane Gay. I have been in the midst of a slight professional conundrum due to it, but hopefully I'll have that sorted out soon enough. I have the poetry section left, which I'm planning on tag-teaming with...
- Queering the Tarot by Cassandra Snow. This is a book I've been wanting to get into pretty much since it was released, and I finally got a gifted copy from a sibling-like-entity. The premise is that the traditional tarot has hundreds of years of cisgender, heteronormative, binary meanings in it, plus a large amount of Christian symbolism and mysticism that might not hit with everyone, meaning-wise. And since tarot is a tool, this is another way of looking at it.
- next up on the list is two books by Junji Ito, Uzumaki and Gyo. After that is... I don't know. I just bought Maggie Nelson's The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, but I don't know if that sort of heaviness is what I need right now.
- I have finally listened to Meshuggah's newest album, Immutable. When I picked up the CD, the clerk said he wasn't real impressed by it, but I think it's a good, solid Meshuggah disc. "Light the Shortening Fuse" specifically is maybe a "stereotypical" Meshuggah song, recalling the Chaosphere days, but I'll be damned if it doesn't rip.
- Been watching so much Great British Baking Show that I'm making fuckin' tarts, y'all. I made custard for the first time ever! And it was tasty. We're working backwards and just finished up the 2018 series.
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. In addition to those online locations, you can ask your local indie retailer to order a copy for you if they are serviced by Ingram. (Most retailers of new books are.) Ask your bookseller!
Do you want a FREE Advanced Reader Copy? All I ask is that you review it on the aforementioned 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.
One of the main projects of my time up here is to help organize my partner's studio and dig through the archive/inventory that has piled up and lemme tell ya, as an artist, one of the most rewarding part of being involved with another artist is looking through the sheer amount of awesome work they do, squirreling away castoffs, and getting inspiration for your own work. If you don't have you an artist pal/partner already, get one.
It makes all the difference to have the right people around you, and it's nice to remind yourself of why you are yourself around. What is it that you do to relax, to connect with being you? Do that more. I'm serious. Take time for you. For me it's mostly playing guitar and photography. To the latter, I bought a Realist stereo camera at an estate sale not long before we moved apartments in April, and I've been attempting to put it through its paces. I've taken a full roll of indoors shots with it, and I'm planning on doing another roll outside sooner or later here. And then I might finally bite the bullet and get into processing my own film, so I can figure out how to view the fucking pictures I've taken. The stereo format is just weird enough that it's a bit of a hassle. Because I can never do anything easily, can I?
What would be the fun in that? Where would the learning be? What are we without curiosity?
Stay safe out there, babies.
Inbox zero. It helps that a large segment of them are Chip Zdarsky newsletters, which are like popcorn: tiny, flavorless, and utterly devoid of nutritional value.
You know it's gonna be a good one when the first thing you say out loud is "This is not my mess. Not my circus, not my monkeys."
Not watching. I know what happened, I know who ran it, I know most of all nothing will happen.
So I just had the second half of my tasty edible, I'm gonna brush my teeth, and I'm gonna go to bed as a bowl of jelly. I can be disappointed tomorrow.
Ptooooo. Into the void.
[note: sometimes Winkie posts on my Facebook and IG] My name is Winkie and I am a Deaf dog. Something you may not know about me is I LOVE to play fetch and catch! It is a valuable workout for me to keep my herding dog physique and keep my brain making happy chemicals. Sometimes if I don't play I even have trouble sleeping at night and I keep Mom and Ricki awake by poking them with my snoot untill they let me out in the dark so I can run run run while the spooky coyotes yell spookily and make Mom and Ricki worried for me. But I always come back afte rmy run because I can't hear the spooky coyotes! ANYWAY. BALL. I make Ricki (or Gramma, or Papa Dan) throw the ball and sometimes Ricki has to put ice on her throwing leg because I guess it hurts sometimes. I'm glad everyone loves me so much that they'll throw the ball until it hurts, because I will TOTALLY chase it until I flop over. Hopefully it won't be too hot this weekend for throwing. Ricki says "over a hundred." Is that a lot? Is that hot? I hope not, because I have very thick furs.
A reminder that today is a national holiday in the US (observed tomorrow) because the We the People officially didn't include a vast number of people until almost a hundred years later, and 150 years after that, those same people are still fighting to gain and keep the rights to life, liberty, and both property and pursuit of happiness in whatever form it might take. Juneteenth for us white people should be a reminder of how much we still have to do, and that the work of freedom means more than words on a page. Much love to my friends who celebrate, and I hope we can keep getting better in the face of... all this. *gestures at world*
Blizzard announcing they're getting Dragonflight out before the end of the year is not the slam dunk they think it is, considering they've released flop after flop, entirely abandoned their esports, have a very VERY public workplace abuse scandal still percolating (including a huge organized labor push), and their most recent release is a nakedly greedy 6-year-old reskinned gacha game with odds so stacked against the player that it's the worst rated game of all time on Metacritic. This is going to be the biggest flop. Especially since they're charging EVEN MORE for it than the last expansion.
There's a song on the new Rammstein called "Dicke Titten." You know, Big Titties. Still got it, guys. Still got it.
Alright. I'm out to mow the lawn. This is the closest I get to farming while on the farm. I mean, if we don't include the garden.
Put in a new adjunct app at Columbia yesterday. We'll see if this one goes anywhere. *sigh*
Just ate an edible and I'm laying in bed. I'll be angry tomorrow. The supreme court will still be there. They have lifetime appointments after all.
I have been in bed for about 9 hours. Less than 4 of them have been sleep. This is just peachy.
I MADE A FUCKIN TART YALL
The sun is coming up. It's not dawn, but it's definitely brighter. Remind me to never move to a pole. Just too much of everything.
Remember kids: what makes you different is your power, and accepting that difference and the difference in others is the way we can all overcome all this. The status quo wants us to carve each other up; that is how it remains the status quo: it has no united adversary. Be that adversary. Be militantly accepting and celebrate the breadth of life and what is possible. That's not to say be docile. Love fiercely. Be proud that your collective strangeness makes you a threat to a system built to produce conformity and unquestioning drones. Read people who are not like you and learn about the world. It's much bigger than those in power want you to believe. We can do anything.
I hate it here.
[note: Most of these posts were several days apart. The flow and juxtaposition are both amusing to me.]
[note 2: Dextra has graduated brain school! To any of you that helped support her in this time, thank you. It means the world to her, and by extension, me.]
Second, WHAT A MONTH, EH?
I mean obviously a lot of that is tied up in the above, but also, like, the things above are the only non-reposts on my Facebook. How weird is that? It's not! Depression, it turns out, is a hell of a thing. Also, outside of being depressed, I've been busy with not-Facebook activity, mostly driving. Which is to say, I'm driving a LOT these days. It helps that the partner's car is a Toyota hybrid that gets a zillion mpg, but also, being in the middle of nowhere means everything is at least 8 miles away. Sometimes more, in the case of specialized health care like neurologists.
The news in general has been dragging a mental anchor for me pretty much all month, though. From the insurrection hearings to the SCOTUS to the Highland Park mass shooting, it's all been a lot. (Highland Park is actually a pretty fair distance from my apartment and family in Chicago--there are several communities in between--but it has still shaken the community pretty hard. It'd be great if we could get some good gun laws in this country!)
This has all been on top of the very real interpersonal stuff I'm dealing with in my immediate life: the weather, caring for multiple people with varying levels of disability, attempting to maintain composure through it all. Working on both physical and professional projects. It all gets very tiring.
That's not to say nothing's doing. On the Patreon front I made three posts this month--two poems and a note--and I should have another notes post coming tomorrow. I've also managed to make a bit of progress on THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT (have I mentioned that? that's my next big project) and I keep doing small things around the house. Today I moved a chair and a shelf out of the garage in the not-so-wee hours of the morning. Things like that. And I have been mowing now and then.
The thing is that what should be a pretty pastoral existence isn't, but, well. Hell is other people.
Third, CONSUMPTION.
- completed the essays section of The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, edited by Roxane Gay. I have been in the midst of a slight professional conundrum due to it, but hopefully I'll have that sorted out soon enough. I have the poetry section left, which I'm planning on tag-teaming with...
- Queering the Tarot by Cassandra Snow. This is a book I've been wanting to get into pretty much since it was released, and I finally got a gifted copy from a sibling-like-entity. The premise is that the traditional tarot has hundreds of years of cisgender, heteronormative, binary meanings in it, plus a large amount of Christian symbolism and mysticism that might not hit with everyone, meaning-wise. And since tarot is a tool, this is another way of looking at it.
- next up on the list is two books by Junji Ito, Uzumaki and Gyo. After that is... I don't know. I just bought Maggie Nelson's The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, but I don't know if that sort of heaviness is what I need right now.
- I have finally listened to Meshuggah's newest album, Immutable. When I picked up the CD, the clerk said he wasn't real impressed by it, but I think it's a good, solid Meshuggah disc. "Light the Shortening Fuse" specifically is maybe a "stereotypical" Meshuggah song, recalling the Chaosphere days, but I'll be damned if it doesn't rip.
- Been watching so much Great British Baking Show that I'm making fuckin' tarts, y'all. I made custard for the first time ever! And it was tasty. We're working backwards and just finished up the 2018 series.
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. In addition to those online locations, you can ask your local indie retailer to order a copy for you if they are serviced by Ingram. (Most retailers of new books are.) Ask your bookseller!
Do you want a FREE Advanced Reader Copy? All I ask is that you review it on the aforementioned 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.
One of the main projects of my time up here is to help organize my partner's studio and dig through the archive/inventory that has piled up and lemme tell ya, as an artist, one of the most rewarding part of being involved with another artist is looking through the sheer amount of awesome work they do, squirreling away castoffs, and getting inspiration for your own work. If you don't have you an artist pal/partner already, get one.
It makes all the difference to have the right people around you, and it's nice to remind yourself of why you are yourself around. What is it that you do to relax, to connect with being you? Do that more. I'm serious. Take time for you. For me it's mostly playing guitar and photography. To the latter, I bought a Realist stereo camera at an estate sale not long before we moved apartments in April, and I've been attempting to put it through its paces. I've taken a full roll of indoors shots with it, and I'm planning on doing another roll outside sooner or later here. And then I might finally bite the bullet and get into processing my own film, so I can figure out how to view the fucking pictures I've taken. The stereo format is just weird enough that it's a bit of a hassle. Because I can never do anything easily, can I?
What would be the fun in that? Where would the learning be? What are we without curiosity?
Stay safe out there, babies.
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