018: I Can't Dance
Prologue
Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets. ― Jacques Derrida
First, COMPILATION.
Day 1474 of Spironolactone: I am become Sweat, the bringer of Salt.
Painsomnia. I don't know what I did to my back but it ain't happy.
I need a work from home job where I never have to see another person and ideally rarely have to communicate with anyone. Just give me some work and a timeline and I'll probably get it done, and ahead of schedule if no one fucking bothers me. It doesn't have to be hard, or even necessarily interesting, but as long as I don't have to talk to a single person at all, I'm down. This includes management, incidentally. Give me work and I do it, probably in the amount of time is should take, and to the best of my ability. I will not work any faster if I'm interrupted, but I can sure go slower. Just. Leave me. Alone.
I need someone who is good at these things to make a gif of Backstreet's Back but replacing street with pain. Because back pains back (alright)
Saw Noam Chomsky get referred to as a tankie today so that's an unfriending and enough of the Internet for me. I may not agree with him on everything, but at least I've read enough of him to know his stances.
Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?
Every time I think I'd like to DJ I recognize I, myself, have no interest in dancing and therefore no idea how to do popular DJing. I just want to subject people to awkward, undanceable music while they do other shit. Similarly, I do not like poems about nature and the non-human experience, and so I end up constantly standing outside the party, watching everyone else have an inexplicable good time. Which is to say, I do not understand the appeal of anything at all, ever.
Me, perfectly stone sober: I just remembered I showered *yesterday.* Wait no, I just changed underwear. All good.
I'm really starting to wonder how many family members T-mobile thinks I have with the amount of email I get about adding a line.
Halfway through Shoresy and it's exactly what I wanted.
Ended up finishing Shoresy and it's pretty okay boys n girls. Laser focused on its premise, and pretty okay.
Goodbye house! Goodbye mailbox! Goodbye pile of broken wood!
Oh good I was hoping for some kind of sacral/sciatic neuropathy today. Really batting 1.000, age 40.
Second, DECONSTRUCTION.
I didn't really have a place to go with this particular newsletter, but I'm currently listening to David Bowie's Let's Dance (that's the one that Stevie Ray Vaughen played guitar on) and it's making me think about two separate but connected things I've noticed about myself lately.
The first is the undeniably '80s place that the album inhabits, which is both forward- and backward-looking. The '80s were a weird time to be alive as it was largely a retrofuturist place to be. The explosion of technology led to a short evolution in music in both the dominance of the synthesizer and the larger place guitar effects took among virtuosos like Vaughen and others. The other part, the backwards-looking part, is that the music leaned heavily on older styles like early rock-n-roll in the style of '50s/'60s groups like Buddy Holly, the Ronettes, and early Beatles, but also even further back to blues artists that influenced Vaughen like Albert King. So what you ended up with on Let's Dance was a very particular and sterile funk/swing production from Nile Rodgers and Georgio Morodor, with Stevie Ray Vaughen being all Stevie Ray on it, and Bowie being a weird soul chameleon like usual.
But it wasn't just the music. The art, the clothing, even the architecture reflected periods before--remember, this was released in between two Indiana Jones movies and just before Back to the Future, which threw Boomer culture back into the spotlight (if it every truly left), and Tim Burton's Art Deco-drenched Batman.
The whole thing makes me consider how much of my own work might be of this retrofuturist nature. Just kidding, I'm not wondering: it's "all of my work." Working on a cyberpunk project in 2022 is, y'know, about 30 years too late. But hopefully there will be something in it that all this earlier nostalgic mining won't include, which is something new, something more postmodern than simple regurgitation (and hopefully nothing so egregious as a wormy white kid from California "writing" "Johnny B. Goode".)
The other thing is specifically the guitar-heavy nature of Let's Dance. Both Nile Rodgers and Stevie Ray Vaughen are/were masterful players. And putting a pretty straight dance and funk player in Rodgers up next to Vaughen, whose primary influences were the aforementioned Albert King and Jimi Hendrix... it's an interesting interplay and makes me think about rut-busting in my own work; this time, though, I mean my guitar playing. I've been mostly stuck in the same routines of playing, and not really learning anything the last few years. So maybe it's time to learn something new there. I've always been awed by good country playing, from way back with Chet Atkins and Buck Owens all the way up to more recent players like Brad Paisley. Maybe... maybe it's time to learn how to play in a major scale. In my 25th year of playing guitar.
Of course the caveat to all this is that Bowie considered Let's Dance to be the beginning of his "Phil Collins years." So it's probably worth being cognizant of the ability to fall into even worse ruts.
Third, CONSUMPTION.
- Shoresy. A friend described it as the anti-Ted Lasso and I don't know how true that is, but it's definitely the anti-something. It's an exercise in humanizing several of the "villains" of previous episodes of Letterkenny (which I also I highly recommend if you enjoy wordplay comedy) while being both similar to and distinct from its parent series. We went from watching half the series to "just one more" to finishing it pretty quickly. And as they're standard sitcom episode lengths, it just flew by in a single evening.
- A Goofy Movie. A solid fixture of my childhood/teen years, and I haven't watched it in years. It's having a bit of a renaissance these days, so I figured it would be a nice thing to watch with some nieflings around. I also went into it this time knowing how rough the production and release was (short story is that Michael Eisner fired Jeffrey Katzenburg at Disney and the movie was basically produced as contractual obligation, and the budget reflects that.) Still enjoyable in its slice of '90s-ness, and rough for being the movie that they wanted to kill but wouldn't die.
- Two upcoming events this week. On Thursday my good friend Hallie Nowak is doing a reading at our haunt Hyde Bros. Books in Fort Wayne, IN. If you happen to be in the area, do please check it out. On Friday my partner Danielle is doing a lil Instagram thing with her colleague Kim Hopson on some of the realities of being disabled artists in a world of grind culture.
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.
I've started to look forward to going back to Chicago, by which I mean the literal logistical part of it. Ironically, one of the things that I'm trying to come to grips with is how little I've accomplished in a practical way while I've been on the farm. I've done things, of course, but very little has gone according to plan. I spent yesterday playing Magic: the Gathering with my brother and trying to rest my brain, and I think maybe I've done that. As long as the weather mostly cooperates the next two weeks, I should be able to get SOMETHING done. I think.
Even if I don't, though, I'm trying to give myself some grace. I am myself a disabled person, in a house with two other disabled people, both of which are often less capable than myself, and I'm here to help. It's important to keep your purpose in focus.
And maybe I don't actually know my purpose, but I think that purpose is helping, and I think I'm doing that, just not in the way I thought I might have been. It's okay.
Everything is going to be okay.
Day 1474 of Spironolactone: I am become Sweat, the bringer of Salt.
Painsomnia. I don't know what I did to my back but it ain't happy.
I need a work from home job where I never have to see another person and ideally rarely have to communicate with anyone. Just give me some work and a timeline and I'll probably get it done, and ahead of schedule if no one fucking bothers me. It doesn't have to be hard, or even necessarily interesting, but as long as I don't have to talk to a single person at all, I'm down. This includes management, incidentally. Give me work and I do it, probably in the amount of time is should take, and to the best of my ability. I will not work any faster if I'm interrupted, but I can sure go slower. Just. Leave me. Alone.
I need someone who is good at these things to make a gif of Backstreet's Back but replacing street with pain. Because back pains back (alright)
Saw Noam Chomsky get referred to as a tankie today so that's an unfriending and enough of the Internet for me. I may not agree with him on everything, but at least I've read enough of him to know his stances.
Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?
Every time I think I'd like to DJ I recognize I, myself, have no interest in dancing and therefore no idea how to do popular DJing. I just want to subject people to awkward, undanceable music while they do other shit. Similarly, I do not like poems about nature and the non-human experience, and so I end up constantly standing outside the party, watching everyone else have an inexplicable good time. Which is to say, I do not understand the appeal of anything at all, ever.
Me, perfectly stone sober: I just remembered I showered *yesterday.* Wait no, I just changed underwear. All good.
I'm really starting to wonder how many family members T-mobile thinks I have with the amount of email I get about adding a line.
Halfway through Shoresy and it's exactly what I wanted.
Ended up finishing Shoresy and it's pretty okay boys n girls. Laser focused on its premise, and pretty okay.
Goodbye house! Goodbye mailbox! Goodbye pile of broken wood!
Oh good I was hoping for some kind of sacral/sciatic neuropathy today. Really batting 1.000, age 40.
Second, DECONSTRUCTION.
I didn't really have a place to go with this particular newsletter, but I'm currently listening to David Bowie's Let's Dance (that's the one that Stevie Ray Vaughen played guitar on) and it's making me think about two separate but connected things I've noticed about myself lately.
The first is the undeniably '80s place that the album inhabits, which is both forward- and backward-looking. The '80s were a weird time to be alive as it was largely a retrofuturist place to be. The explosion of technology led to a short evolution in music in both the dominance of the synthesizer and the larger place guitar effects took among virtuosos like Vaughen and others. The other part, the backwards-looking part, is that the music leaned heavily on older styles like early rock-n-roll in the style of '50s/'60s groups like Buddy Holly, the Ronettes, and early Beatles, but also even further back to blues artists that influenced Vaughen like Albert King. So what you ended up with on Let's Dance was a very particular and sterile funk/swing production from Nile Rodgers and Georgio Morodor, with Stevie Ray Vaughen being all Stevie Ray on it, and Bowie being a weird soul chameleon like usual.
But it wasn't just the music. The art, the clothing, even the architecture reflected periods before--remember, this was released in between two Indiana Jones movies and just before Back to the Future, which threw Boomer culture back into the spotlight (if it every truly left), and Tim Burton's Art Deco-drenched Batman.
The whole thing makes me consider how much of my own work might be of this retrofuturist nature. Just kidding, I'm not wondering: it's "all of my work." Working on a cyberpunk project in 2022 is, y'know, about 30 years too late. But hopefully there will be something in it that all this earlier nostalgic mining won't include, which is something new, something more postmodern than simple regurgitation (and hopefully nothing so egregious as a wormy white kid from California "writing" "Johnny B. Goode".)
The other thing is specifically the guitar-heavy nature of Let's Dance. Both Nile Rodgers and Stevie Ray Vaughen are/were masterful players. And putting a pretty straight dance and funk player in Rodgers up next to Vaughen, whose primary influences were the aforementioned Albert King and Jimi Hendrix... it's an interesting interplay and makes me think about rut-busting in my own work; this time, though, I mean my guitar playing. I've been mostly stuck in the same routines of playing, and not really learning anything the last few years. So maybe it's time to learn something new there. I've always been awed by good country playing, from way back with Chet Atkins and Buck Owens all the way up to more recent players like Brad Paisley. Maybe... maybe it's time to learn how to play in a major scale. In my 25th year of playing guitar.
Of course the caveat to all this is that Bowie considered Let's Dance to be the beginning of his "Phil Collins years." So it's probably worth being cognizant of the ability to fall into even worse ruts.
Third, CONSUMPTION.
- Shoresy. A friend described it as the anti-Ted Lasso and I don't know how true that is, but it's definitely the anti-something. It's an exercise in humanizing several of the "villains" of previous episodes of Letterkenny (which I also I highly recommend if you enjoy wordplay comedy) while being both similar to and distinct from its parent series. We went from watching half the series to "just one more" to finishing it pretty quickly. And as they're standard sitcom episode lengths, it just flew by in a single evening.
- A Goofy Movie. A solid fixture of my childhood/teen years, and I haven't watched it in years. It's having a bit of a renaissance these days, so I figured it would be a nice thing to watch with some nieflings around. I also went into it this time knowing how rough the production and release was (short story is that Michael Eisner fired Jeffrey Katzenburg at Disney and the movie was basically produced as contractual obligation, and the budget reflects that.) Still enjoyable in its slice of '90s-ness, and rough for being the movie that they wanted to kill but wouldn't die.
- Two upcoming events this week. On Thursday my good friend Hallie Nowak is doing a reading at our haunt Hyde Bros. Books in Fort Wayne, IN. If you happen to be in the area, do please check it out. On Friday my partner Danielle is doing a lil Instagram thing with her colleague Kim Hopson on some of the realities of being disabled artists in a world of grind culture.
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.
I've started to look forward to going back to Chicago, by which I mean the literal logistical part of it. Ironically, one of the things that I'm trying to come to grips with is how little I've accomplished in a practical way while I've been on the farm. I've done things, of course, but very little has gone according to plan. I spent yesterday playing Magic: the Gathering with my brother and trying to rest my brain, and I think maybe I've done that. As long as the weather mostly cooperates the next two weeks, I should be able to get SOMETHING done. I think.
Even if I don't, though, I'm trying to give myself some grace. I am myself a disabled person, in a house with two other disabled people, both of which are often less capable than myself, and I'm here to help. It's important to keep your purpose in focus.
And maybe I don't actually know my purpose, but I think that purpose is helping, and I think I'm doing that, just not in the way I thought I might have been. It's okay.
Everything is going to be okay.
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