054: 70 Feet is 21.336 Meters
First, Tha NEWS.
They finally made a Fantastic Four film with Galactus's goofy hat.
Normally I'd put that in the CONSUMPTION section, but this is genuinely newsworthy to me. I am ridiculously behind in Marvel content. I think the last new thing I saw was the first three episodes of LOKI season two. It's not that I'm not interested in the stories, but the big Phase 4/5 flip to intended-to-be-binged long-form has burnt me on so much stuff. I just can't take a whole day to watch one thing, even if I want to. Is that necessarily a problem with the MCU? Nah. It's definitely a me problem. I appreciate the fact they can apparently competently do this and keep enough people satisfied. But that's really only part of the issue.
The other part, and it's something that I think has probably been talked to death in The Discourse and The Fandom, is that they just... stopped the Kang the Conqueror storylines when Jonathan Majors got cut. It's not like Marvel hasn't recast characters. Hell Thanos was, what, four different guys? Red Skull was two. Rhodes/War Machine was two. Spider-man has been like a dozen (if you include the multiverse versions.) Ultron was recast for What If...? Just move on! I was looking forward to that shit! Jonathan Majors was good at his role, but you can't tell me he was irreplaceable. So what did they do? They made Robert Downey Jr. into Doctor Doom and made him the villain of the rest of the phases! Come on.
Anyway. I've liked the period stuff they've done with the MCU. And I'm glad they're not wasting half the movie explaining how the Fantastic Four got their powers. We've seen it enough. (Like I've said about Batman: how many times do we need to see Thomas and Martha die? Other things do motivate ol' Bats, you know.)
This had gotten weird. Sorry. Actual news stuff.
THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT is now just over a month old. It has nearly hit the sales numbers that confessions from a drainage ditch hit in a year and a half, and it seems to have a longer tail, by which I mean it didn't spike and then that was it. Sales have been trickling all month. I attribute this partially to Bluesky having an actual organic reach (lord knows I don't get more than the same seven views on my Facebook.) At some point next month I'll actually put some money into advertising.
Speaking of confessions... I'm getting closer to finally doing an audiobook version. The experience of doing the gallery recordings for Elle's online gallery really convinced me that hey, maybe I can actually do this. I'm hoping to have it done by the end of the summer. Obviously this isn't a very firm timeline, but it's better than "eventually," which is where it has lived for the past year and a half.
I spent part of this evening looking over my grad thesis manuscript, Hydrology. It has been rejected by publishers approximately 20 times. I had the assistance of half a dozen known poets, plus over a dozen peers, in developing this stupid thing. I got my degree with it, but the thing is that I know there's something wrong with it and can't quite put my finger on it. Did I pad my page count? Is it organized wrong? I don't actually know, and since publishers are extremely disinterested in commenting on their submissions anymore, I have no idea. The form letter "We thank you for trusting us with your work and look forward to seeing picked up elsewhere" isn't exactly a help either.
I want to be clear: this is not bitterness speaking. This is genuine professional confusion. I might... I might have to actually hire an editor. I probably won't, but I might. I really want to get this thing out there, because it has my all-time favorite poem I've written in it. At the same time, maybe I just make some cuts and send it. I dunno.
Been working through 22 CARDS some more, and it's really starting to take shape. Really finding itself, I think. I like the little bits of different personalities from poem to poem, the way some of them get revisited, the way some are genuinely me some don't feature any narrator/narrative at all. (If you want more of the background on how I've envisioned this project, you can become a member of the Patreon and read this post.) I still haven't envisioned the back half of the working title, ...AND X POSTS, yet. It feels to me like it should be something akin to Moore/Gibbons's "backmatter" for Watchmen, a different but related comic, metadiscursive "history" ephemera, that sort of thing.
Second, INTERLUDE.
This took considerably longer than I had anticipated.
~ Alan Moore, Watchmen
Third, CONSUMPTION.
WE'RE GOING LITERAL THIS TIME
I tried some Loaded Tacos Doritos today. I am a huge fan of the regular Taco flavor, so I figured I'd give em a shot since they were on sale. Not half bad. I explained to the spouse today that they remind me of a regional pizza franchise's taco pizza, in that you could even taste the lettuce and green onions and tomatoes without the wilting. Said to the partner that it was a very Willy Wonka-like experience wherein the snozzberries tasted like snozzberries. Not as unsettling as Jelly Belly jelly beans though.
Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream. SO MUCH OF IT. Elle's dad likes to get whatever people express a like for when he goes shopping and he just overdoes it. It's his undiagnosed neurodiversity, I'm sure, but I'm thankful for never having to worry if I'll be out of ice cream. It's a trait I do tend to share, hyperfocusing on foods, but I also mix it up a little more often because the other part of hyperfocus is boredom. Anyway. It's amazing I'm only gaining as much weight as I am. (Not having a gall bladder probably helps in this regard.
Elle has started eating fish again, which means more opportunities for places to stop and eat. Y'all, I ate at a Culver's for the first time in, I think, 15 years. It was a competent bacon cheeseburger. Not great, not terrible.
You know what I, a white people, think gets unfairly maligned? White people taco night. Because I housed four of those dang things in one sitting at my mom's last weekend and I still felt hungry and so I had a single strawberry slice and then felt full. I know none of this makes sense. Just go with it. Tacos are lit.
Speaking of fish, fish in the last like three weeks than I have in years. Now, granted, this is a story for another time (like the OUTRO), but I do not, under most circumstances, eat fish--or really anything else that comes out of the water, now that I think about it. But dang if I don't think I have (occasionally) been missing out.
I think the biggest thing I miss about being out here on the farm (food-wise, obviously I miss my cats and the rest of my family and my video games and my Eames Chair) is being at least 20 minutes away from pizza, and over an hour from a delivery pizza. How am I, an American, expected to live like this???
Fourth, HUSTLE.
The new hotness is THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT, which you can get here. It’s a serial poem based in Philip K. Dick, JG Ballard, 20th Century cyberpunk, Jack Spicer, and, well, me.
confessions from a drainage ditch was released in late 2023 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.
There’s my chapbook, A Void and Cloudless Sky. By being a subscriber to this newsletter, you're also entitled to a free PDF version, which you can get here. If you want a hard copy, it’s available 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.
Finally, THE OUTRO.
When I was in my early teens, certainly before I could drive, but after my brother got old enough that my dad could convince her to let him take said brother across the border to Canada, we went to a lake way the fuck up north in Manitoba called Manigotagen. My dad and grandpa and brother and I drove (ballpark) seven hours and 375 miles to this damn lake, roughly two hours of which was on unmarked gravel roads in like 1995 where contacting anyone was literally impossible and then we spent a week camping on a lake that is, and I am not exaggerating, 70(!) feet deep. Like a majority of its "banks" are sheer granite and it just DROPS INTO NOTHINGNESS. My grandpa's boat was a 14-foot Alumacraft from like 1956 with a motor of about the same vintage that mostly ran on a lake that was, again, 70 feet deep. You know what we ate for that entire week? Walleye that we caught. Lunch, dinner, and a couple times, breakfast. You know what I only barely tolerated before going on this trip? Fish.
Walleye. 14+ meals. I was done. (It didn't help that my brother got carsick about 45 minutes into the trip out of there.) I'll only eat it if it's shredded, breaded, and fried on a fuckin' Filet-o-Fish now. Or something approximating it at home. I've managed to avoid it for almost 30 years now. Fuck fish.
Except I just had fishsticks for lunch. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.