022: A Suture Wriggling to the Surface

First, COMPILATION.
*sighs in Cassandra*

"I gotta quit this band and start a music career!" MST3K Turkey Day is already paying dividends.

Currently working on par-baking pumpkin pie crust. Literally my first time ever making pumpkin pie. Let's hope this works out. I mean, I was winging it on the tart this summer and that came out AMAZING. Of course, there I was following a single recipe. I'm currently using a modification of Claire Saffitz's crust recipe (mostly using a lazy-ass method) and the filling recipe on the side of the fucking Libby's can. So far everything SMELLS right, so that's a start.

Dinner accomplished. IKEA meatballs (and plant-based meatballs (not the veggie ones)), Stove Top, mashed potatoes, Pillsbury crescent rolls IKEA gravy. Yes, lazy, but tasty. That pie tho. Soon. Sooooon.

Ha ha ho ho a perfectly wonderful day for a psychiatry appointment, what with an incredible case of the morbs and the child's own mental illness hitting an inflection point. I really need this, I do I do.

So, as my monthlong experiment with Tinder Gold is coming to a close: Not a single femme person swiped on me, every dude that did was repulsive, and nobody *I* swiped on seemed to be interested. So either I'm gross physically or my personality is somehow off-putting. Neat. Third-largest city in the country, none matches. I can't help but feel a little sad.

Thought about trying that meme avatar AI app, hit the paywall, and bounced. This keeps happening. [note: this is not an invitation to talk about AI art. let's stop that argument before it even happens.]

My body has felt like a trash heap the last couple days. My hips and lumbar are tight, my reflux has been bad, my neck cracked last night and my entire upper back hurts. Most of all I just haven't felt rested. I've been doing things regardless; baking, playing games with friends, getting groceries, etc. But man, I just want to hibernate til St. Patrick's Day.

Literally woke myself up saying the sentence "Okay, who's next on waffles?" out loud. Yes there was a reason, no I'm not telling you.

Second, A TILT-A-WHIRL OF INSOMNIA.
I've been hammering out podcast episodes. It's a lot of tedious listening. In addition to my troubles sleeping lately, it does things like make me forget I still had edits to do until I remembered in the middle of that second sentence. So pretend there's a two and a half hour gap here. That's not to say that I'm not enjoying it, of course. One of the benefits of freelance work is that you get to choose who you work with, and on what. So I'm lucky in that I get to listen to a lot of friends and kindred souls-types. It's still time-consuming.

Unfortunately, that consumption has taken up a lot of the brainpower I would be devoting to writing. Which, as I type this out, feels like a cop-out or excuse, but a lot of writing is, in fact, an undistracted brain. Which is hard enough with my brain--putting more work on top of that isn't really helping much. The other part of that is that I haven't really been reading enough, which any writer will tell you is a surefire way to have a blockage.

Also my cat has taken to climbing into my lap probably half a dozen times a day, which is new. He's a good 12 pounds, so as you can imagine, this puts a damper on doing literally anything else.

I'm trying to lay out some plans for next year to actually get some work done on this dang project though. Getting there. Some people can weaponize their addiction and ADHD, into a thousand perfect plans, but not me. How's it Axl put it? "I used to do a little but a little wouldn't do it so a little got to more and more"? Which is to say, I never started heroin, and I don't really intend to start Getting Shit Done, either, or I'll be even worse than I am now.

I did get a new desk, though, so I have drawers to hide shit in now.

Third, CONSUMPTION.
- I have been bullied--sorry, peer-pressured--into getting No Man's Sky for PC and it has absolutely nothing to do with how much sleep I'm not getting.
- I've been listening almost exclusively to my Tidal Daily Discovery Mixes, so there's nothing I'm really mainlining at the moment. I've piled a bunch of stuff into a playlist to look into more fully later, but like so many of my piles, who knows if I'll ever get to them.
- Oh wait, the new Metallica single came out. It's okay. The album isn't coming out til April, but the song itself is basically exactly what I was expecting given their recent work and live sets. ...and just like that, I'm listening to Master of Puppets again. Whoops.

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 your friends. I like making words wiggle people's brainjuices.

Finally, THE OUTRO.
It's the first full week of December, and somehow the second week of Advent. (Not somehow, it's the same scheme every year.) People who have known me a while know that Advent is, in fact, my favorite cultural season. Not because it's winter, because fuck winter, but because it's my syncretic version of the traditional northern Europen pagan winter festivals. It's Yule, it's Saturnalia, it's Wassailia, etc. It's a time of celebrating the year previous, and the anticipation of the year anew. It's a time of resting and feasting, while at the same time being about darkness, death (and rebirth), and anxiety about survival. Perhaps no time of year is more suited to the pendulous nature of living.

And of course, my birthday smack dab in the middle of everything, on the longest night of the year. Someone should write a poem about it. (I did. I'm someone. It's in the chapbook.)

I won't mince words; there's a lot about this past year that I would have liked to have done differently. But that is the weird grace of this time of year: we get to look at next year as an attempt to better things. But first: rest. That's an exhortation to you, specfically and personally. Take this time to rest, to recollect, to prepare for the coming sun and the coming year. I very, very rarely quote the Bible, being the agnostic that I am, but one specifically always resonated with me: Luke 2:19, "But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart." This is specifically from the New International Version, which is what the WELS uses and I grew up on, and this makes a difference specifically for the diction. It's the specific choices of "treasured" and "pondered" (and to a lesser extent, "in her heart.") There's always time for quiet contemplation, but especially now. Rest. The world will still be here, and some things are bigger than you think.