026: Ach, I'm Bad at This

First, COMPILATION.
Ptooooo. Into the void. x5 (yes, x5)

And that's enough internet for today.

Well. Lynyrd Skynyrd is officially out of original members.

I am enjoying the hell out of WBC highlights. This year there are so many solid teams, and there's a great story with the Czech Republic team, made up of doctors, firefighters, teachers, and other amateur guys who are just excited for a chance to play against Shohei Otahni. God I love baseball.

Me, age 11: ugh oatmeal is gross
Me, age 41: Oatmeal allows me to eat without my gallbladder making me double over in agony, so I guess we'll learn to love it.

Just went looking through my Memories for today, and I'm strongly considering just memory holing the entirety of the start of the pandemic. We learned nothing. Nothing at all.

It's never the day of Daylight Saving that gets me. It's always the next day. For those keeping track, that's today.

I have a new Ridiculous Contraption Weapon. FF8-style gunblades are out, Bloodborne Whirligig Saws are in.

Currently upset that I'm not supposed to physically pick up two of the three cats until May for risk of tearing things. My little goblins NEED LORVE.

Namastrash: the possum in me sees the possum in you.

The hardwired smoke detector in the stairwell has been chirping for nearly a week. It is right outside our door and echoes all the way down the stairwell AND all the way down our front hall, and it is slowly chipping away at my sanity. I have to actively tune it out. Between that and the downstairs neighbors apparently taking up smoking again, it's been nearly impossible for me to sleep. These things on top of my already precarious mental state, Nat's inability to be even remotely quiet in the mornings, and Dani's switch to regular daytime hours mean I'm getting 5 solid hours if I'm lucky these days. I just had four holes punched in my body and an organ removed. I should be sleeping, like, all the time.

There's something I find uproariously funny about Bono literally turning into Macphisto, his caracature of a washed-up nostalgia act lounge singer. What with his shitty book and his new easily listening album of 40 of his old songs and his Vegas residency.

I drove around for over half an hour looking for parking. That's the ONE drawback to this neighborhood. If you get home after about 5:10pm on ANY day, good luck. Pack a snack. You'll be hiking.

Welp. Car got towed. (Probably.) Fucking brilliant.

And so, five hours and $175 later, I have my car back. Something I learned is that people, from every gender, race, and class, have no fucking CLUE what they're doing the moment they walk in the impound office, and almost all of them don't even bother to look at the city's website for processes, documents, whatever. And then they start shitting on the people at the counter for it. It costs nothing to be nice, people. Go in, sign your name six times, pay your fee, and leave. It's not hard. Just shut your goddamn mouths for half an hour.

Me, listening to Queen's album Jazz: You know, it's interesting how many people think System of a Down are "weird." (I'm not saying Serj is as good as Freddie, but there sure are similarities between the two bands.)

I don't know what really caused it, but Dani just decided we were unpacking all the LEGO just now. Which is to say, this is the first time since we moved to Chicago in 2017 that all our non-storage "working" LEGO inventory has been unwrapped and accessible. Will I be using any of it? No idea. But it's there.

The long national nightmare/hyperfixation is over. I have beaten Bloodborne 100%.

Second, THIS IS INDEED A DISTURBING UNIVERSE.
April is the cruellest month. By which I mean April is National Poetry Month. One might think that it would be a promotional slam-dunk for those of us in the poetry world, but you know what? April sucks. In the northern hemisphere, anyway. It's sloppy, the temperature jumps around like a squash ball, and most of all, it's National Poetry Month, the month of the year where everyone in the US pretends to care about poetry to the point that normal poetry stuff gets drown out. I wish there was a way I could say this without sounding like an insane person. (Spoilers: I am an insane person, and none of what I say makes any sense.) I guess an analogy would be something like... April : poetry :: October : art featuring black cats. (Oh, there's another good one--the kiddo is taking the SAT today. April!) Good luck getting a word in edgewise, is what I'm saying.

It also sucks because I know so damn many poets that I can't reasonably give them all the credit they deserve without forgetting someone, leaving someone out, or taking an entire newsletter just to list names and still somehow managing to do those first two things.

So hey. Go read some poetry. Good poetry. Ideally from poets who are still alive. Give them money, lots of money because lord knows no one does.

Third, CONSUMPTION.
- I finished Bloodborne and I think I can happily say that it is my favorite game I've ever played. Something finally beat out Final Fantasy VII.
- Moved on to the next From Software game, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Aside from having the silliest name in a long time, it's a pretty okay game. It's absolutely gorgeous visually and sonically, but I feel like I'm still just mashing buttons half the time. It's also probably the most outwardly violent game I've played since Dead Space. Blood sprays and assassination and mutilation. I haven't been fully squicked out by it yet, but I've come close.
- In March I read three books by poet Aaron Smith: Blue on Blue Ground, Appetite, and The Book of Daniel. I first read his book Primer while I was in grad school, and I've gone on to encounter him in a couple different situations (he's co-editor of Court Green, for example.) I identify pretty strongly with his work--our experience as different facets of the queer community is as much a uniting factor as it is an alienating one. But most of all, he says quite plainly things that I can only seem to get at obliquely.
- Next up are books by my professors and peers Tony Trigilio, George Kalamaras, and Mary Ann Cain. More on those when I have actually read them! (I also bought a copy of Mrs. Dalloway while in Fort Wayne without realizing I had Mrs. Woolf's entire body of work in ebook form. Ah well. At least it matches my copy of Orlando.)
- This is the single best dive into Magic lore I have ever seen. People work incredibly hard on this game, and people love it just as much. Seriously, watch this. It's what it's like living with my brain, both intellectually and aesthetically.

Fourth, PROMOTION.
The Traveling Mollys reading! I start around 42:30, but everyone has great stuff to share. (General blanket CW. Some of those pieces get heavy.) Thanks again to Nina and Al and Rachel and everyone involved.

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.

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. And everyone gets access to my fancy-pants Discord server, were we have thrilling conversations about taxes and critically-acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV!

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.
My dad died in March. Sorry to hit you out of the blue with that, but yeah. We ended up making the trip up there, only to have the services all moved to the Saturday after we were scheduled to leave on account of a blizzard. So we drove about 1400 miles round-trip to hang out with my brother in his apartment and play Magic and Mario Kart, and have birthday dinner with my partner. So I still managed to do the things I really planned on doing while up there: seeing family. Dynamics will likely be shifting in the future, but that's about all I can say there.

I'm not super busted up or anything, to be clear. My dad was who he was. (See that thing I said above about Aaron Smith's work.) It's unfortunate that I had to miss seeing friends, but all in all... death is a part of life. It is neither to be feared nor celebrated. It just is.

Like April.