039: A Fraction of a Degree is a Minute
AN EMAIL IN SEPARATED INTO SEVERAL PARTS LIKE THE HUMAN DEMARCATION OF TIME
First, Tha NEWS.
Welcome to the first ish of SROF courtesy of ButtonDown. We'll probably be here until either they collapse due to capitalism or we somehow miraculously reach 100 subscribers (at which point I'll be charged for the privilege of wrangling formatting for y'all.)
We're spinning back up. Social systems are back on the phone, though I likely won't be get back into a Terminally Online posting schedule for a while. And honestly it's not like I stayed that far away: I made a couple incidental posts here and there out of boredom. But my Outrage Intake was down quite a bit. I dunno that it actually helped my mood, but I did feel less... I dunno. Tethered?
That said, in case you're wondering how my time away was, I went into Half Price Books, read a page and a half of Marie Kondo, got too close to The Trauma, put the book back, and immediately went through the checkout and left.
In any case, I did have A Think about some stuff, mostly in relation to thinking about things more concretely and doing them with intention. To wit: I have started the Bullet Journal for this year--in last year's BuJo, because the whole year took less than 65 pages as it slowly fell away from integration into my daily life.
I've also caught a case of archive desire, and so I'm starting a big project of cataloguing my poetry in a database that is more than just a spreadsheet of what has has been submitted and where. What they don't tell you when you start this job is that you will write poems and then they disappear into the ether from whence they emerged, just with words attached to them. I haven't counted exactly, but I have, at this point, several hundred total pages of poetry that are only barely organized by simply being placed in the "Poems" folder on my Google Drive. Not only do I want to be able to find things better in my own files and workspaces, I want to have a master document that someone can use in the untimely event that I bite it and I suddenly become the next Emily Dickinson. Digging through a drive of unsorted and relatively unmarked (and often untitled!) documents seems like the least interesting part of being a literary executor, if you get my meaning. So yeah, I even bought a book(!) to learn Microsoft Access.
Semi-related, we're doing a big reorg and inventory of the physical media we own. Since streaming is now the de facto form of media consumption, the Disney Vault effect has kicked in and capitalism is doing its damnedest to create artificial scarcity on top of rent seeking, and so it looks like we're going mostly physical from here out. Honestly, this started for us last year when I went looking for a CD/DVD player for the first time in ages (it's a barely-functional Sony without a remote, but it sounds great when it does work) and it's only gotten more urgent with Netflix shenanigans and now Amazon Prime announcing they're putting ads into their service I'm already fucking paying for. So yeah. Also, I've never really liked Goodreads' organizational scheme, and so I'm switching to LibraryThing, which was suggested to me by an absolute sweetheart of a librarian.
Overall, this year is mostly a plan to sort out the past four-ish years of not sorting things out. I'm still thinking about maybe getting some sort of DJ controller, though. Just ignore everything and spend the next 12 months making playlists. Seems as useful in our little glittering dystopia.
Second, INTERLUDE.
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun
~ Pink Floyd, "Time"
Third, CONSUMPTION.
- The Christmas viewing list this year was Mickey's Christmas Carol, A Muppet Christmas Carol, A Muppet Family Christmas, and an assortment of Rifftrax holiday jams. Notably absent this year were A Christmas Story, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and the original How the Grinch Stole Christmas. It wasn't that they're any lesser in my eyes, I just didn't get to them.
- I'm about halfway through the DIE RPG, and I might still get it finished by the end of the year (I have about five hours at the time of this writing.) If I finish, it would be book number 11 for the year, which is down by several dozen in the past five years, but the highest in the past three or four. After that is likely DEATH AND by my dear friend Yarrow Yes Woods, and then I don't know what. Between books I already have, and books I've received for the holidays, I am so backlogged that I might include a real and actual To Be Read list in my future.
- I spent a large portion of the other day watching the marathon stream of Auto Addiction's Nurburgring carspotting videos. It's remarkably soothing as background noise.
- In semi-related news, I've been finishing up single-player content on Gran Turismo 7. It turns out that about a week after I received it there was a massive update to the game, and they added about 25% more "quests" (which is just doing X race with Y car, repeatedly.) So that's been filling up time. Of course, that's not actually all the single player content. There are challenges and more racing leagues and so on and I'll be doing content for this game until the next one comes out. Good thing I got a new driving cockpit from an acquaintence.
Fourth, HUSTLE.
First and foremost is my most recent book, confessions from a drainage ditch, which was released on Sept 1st through Amazon, and is available in ebook and paperback formats. If you haven't picked it up, it's a great introduction to my more concrete and mainstream work.
If you're looking for something weirder, you can check out A Void and Cloudless Sky, a chapbook, which is also available from Amazon, as well as most other retailers. By being a subscriber to this newsletter, you're also entitled to a free PDF version, which you can get here.
If you're liking this whole project and want to support it directly, here is my Patreon. There are lots of little benefits you can get there, from poems written to your specifications to subscriber-only limited-edition chapbooks.
Also, if you like this here newsletter, pass it on to a friend. Not every instance is of general interest, but you never know!
Finally, THE OUTRO.
The kiddo's best friend is in town and they're currently baking cookies. This weekend they've gone on two shopping excursions, gone roller skating, played a shitload of Switch games, and did some coworking/parallel play inre: homework. Been a great time, honestly. One of those shopping excursions netted me a gachapon Gundam to put together. Here's to robots.
Remember that thing I said last time about reflecting? Looking at what worked and didn't? It's okay if you didn't do all the things you wanted to last year. It's okay if your goal this year is survival and/or comfort. You do you, boo. Sometimes you just need to relish the smell of butter and brown sugar coming from the kitchen.