025: Pushing the Big Red Button

First, COMPILATION.
Reading glasses age:

Welp. Surgery consultation tomorrow. Yeeting the gallbladder, it seems. Time to start eating like an adult, I guess.

Y'all did you know that Def Leppard actually were a metal band? For one album?

Started playing Need for Speed Heat, and lemme tell ya, even Fake Florida is a swampy mess. Just slimy. Not a single alligator yet, though. Weird.

I legit have no idea what's going on with my body today. It's a combo of tension and migraine, but the pain itself is, like... splotchy? Does that make sense? Like it's not easily located and there are... holes? in it? Like the pain itself is familiar, but the sensation of it isn't? Which is weird?

So today, after having been awake and ambulatory for about two hours, my neck just... shifted out of place. Just sitting at my desk literally doing nothing, and *thunk* instant pain. And I've been unable to get it back in. All. Day. Every day is just a little bit worse.

Ptooooo. Into the void.

Today has been very trying on me for not getting into literally pointless slapfights on the internet. So many people getting hung up on: statistics in wizard poker, baseball player salaries, the ethics of having "females" in your band name when only one member is female, and so on. Really testing that "necessary" clause of true, kind, and necessary.

Just woke from a very strange dream that was half Twin Peaks, half Watchmen, and half This Island Earth, but ended very poorly for everyone.

Happy Panic Attackiversary! Still taking meds! Still haven't sorted out the brainjuices! STILL FUCKING EXPENSIVE TO SIMPLY EXIST.

Ah, mobile doesn't give a shit which feed it's set to again. The Bad Place experimenting strikes again!

Third, CONSUMPTION.
- Started playing Bloodborne again for the first time in a long while. Most of the muscle memory is still there. Re-unlocked the DLC in-game and need to figure out what to do from here. Grind for a little while, get used to controls again, then keep pressing through the new stuff. And then maybe old stuff? I dunno.
- Related above, I finished NFS Heat to the point that it's just collecting cosmetic shit, so I'm done with that. Kinda enjoyed the storyline this time (fuck the police, even the "good ones"). I hope the newest one goes on mega-sale sooner than later. It's in Chicago Lake City!
- This video by musician Benn Jordan about the weird conspiracism around tuning standards.
- The newest album by Screaming Females came out and it is a fuckin' banger. Like I genuinely can't think of a band I've been happier to find in the past half decade. The entire front half of this album rips, and the second half is at least good if not great. It's probably going to be to 2023 as Dance Fever was to 2022 for me.
- Watched the new season of Letterkenny. Still super solid.

Fourth, PROMOTION.
Under normal circumstances, this is where I have my book and Patreon links, but I'm going to forgo those this time in favor of getting out the word on two readings I have coming up this month that are still (so far) unannounced:

3/13/2023 at 7pm Central - I'll be taking part in the Travelling Mollys Reading Series, which is so far still a virtual reading series, and will also feature UChicago professor and poet Rachel Galvin. There's also always an open mic portion, and so if you would like to take part in the action, be sure to keep your eyeballs peeled for my next newsletter, which will have links for both this and the next event.

3/30/2023 at 7:30pm Eastern - Hyde Bros. Booksellers in Fort Wayne, IN. Hyde lost their owner and my good friend Tasha Bushnell late last year to her third bout of breast cancer. Her friends, family, and colleagues are finally getting together to have a public celebration and wake in our own particular idiom, reading poems of our own that she had a hand in in some way, as well as some of her works that we've collected over the years. It will be weird, and funny, and sad, and happy, and all the things plus more. (I have a strong feeling I'll be reading my serial poem "Hypersigil", which is very personal to me and Tasha was the Ezra Pound to my TS Eliot on it.)

Again, more deets in the near future on both of these. The former is a series I've been looking forward to being included in for literal years, and the latter is something that will bring some beauty out of the void left by Tasha's passing.

Fourth-and-a-Half, A DIFFERENT PROMOTION. THIS IS KIND OF A BIG DEAL FOR ME.
I do actually have one thing to mention about the Patreon: starting tomorrow, all Patrons, regardless of tier, will have access to a fancy Discord server run by yours truly. Do you want to chat in ways that are less like broadcast than email newsletter blasts? Yell at me for my incomprehensible references in the newsletter? Tell everyone about the coolest book you just read? Come join. While you're there, consider the upper levels, which get you all sorts of other posts, a periodic hand-assembled chapbook, and/or your very own poems.

Finally, THE OUTRO.
Black History Month comes to an end today, and I opened up the month with Saul Williams, so it only feels fitting to close it with Lucille Clifton. This poem is not the poem the got me into poetry--it is the poem that showed me what poetry can do, and I feel like it's one that teaches me every time I hear or read it.

won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.