058: My Name is Ricki and I Only Eat Convenience Food
First, Tha NEWS.
That title is a true story in more ways than one. One of the things that happened since we last talked, and probably the biggest, is that the hearing for my name change happened! My name is now legallly and actually Ricki! I have hated my deadname since I was six years old. I'm me now! I wonder who I have to get ahold of at the Minnesota State High School League to get my State Speech records changed.
The other truth is that I just ate ice cream for lunch, before which I had ice cream for breakfast. This newsletter may be how my spouse learns that I ate rest of the ice cream. I've also had entirely too many store brand pop tarts. This is despite the fact that there is a boatload of slightly-less-convenient food that I'd rather not make, including but not limited to: mac and cheese, ramen, three different kinds of sandwiches, chicken nuggets, popcorn, and said spouse's Chinese leftovers. It's incredible how my brain will see even the slightest bit of friction in the way of an End and decide that the easiest Means is the only one. Which is of course why I'm a poet: it's so much faster than writing prose to stab the reader in the heart. (That's you. Your heart.)
Anywho, there's not much on the work front today, as this month has been busy as heck, requiring a lot of recuperation, driving, recuperation from driving, legal logistics, and other stuff.
Oh, and the news of the world. I've spent a lot of time languishing, crying, worrying, etc. And not writing. This Scalzi post explains it. (Indeed, it's the thing that made him a Known Quantity to me.)
Second, INTERLUDE.
Hungry will this pale thing
Follow me into the sea
~ Acid Bath, “Graveflower”
Third, CONSUMPTION.
Spending way too much time playing Diablo 4. I promised myself I wouldn't get involved. And then I did. And then my free game turned into buying the expansion. And I'm probably going to buy the next one, because I'm a sucker.
- I have taken a break from trying to read fiction by reading Love Letters: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Y'all. Letter writing. More in a sec after the business stuff.
- Not exactly a something I'm consuming, but a while back I switched to Linux on my desktop instead of Windows, largely for the customizability. One of those customizations is including audio effects processing into my speaker output, so I can equalize it and make up for the fact that my normal desktop speakers are extraordinarily shitty (literally the cheapest powered speakers Logitech makes.) It's nice having detail again in the music I listen to, instead of muddy low-midrange slop. Nice snappy snare drums again!
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.
I think I've mentioned it in this newsletter before, but letter-writing is such a lost thing to the world--this part of it anyway. Used to be that letters were the only way of communication. It also used to be that the post in London came up to four times a day. (FOUR!) Streams of paper going hither and yon, written by hand (though likely often typed) carried by people in silly hats, carrying love, death, promises, debts, and idle chit-chat so long as you could afford the stamps. Now we have text messages, email, video chat, and so on.
That's been written about a lot. What struck me lately is the loss of the records of things. If I saved a piece of paper, it stayed saved (probably.) It's questionable about what data will outlive us. Will we get books in the future on the love letters between anyone at all? The whole thing has thrown me into a bit of a loop while I'm trying to detangle my own thoughts of personal archival. To wit: there is no hard copy of literally dozens of my poems. Some may exist in the files of my professors somewhere (though this is likely presumptuous of me; I doubt many professors keep anything but the most exceptional work), and I've made a couple chapbooks for my Patreon, but by and large if it's not in a book above, it's on a drive rather than in a file cabinet. What happens when I kick it? Would anyone know who Emily Dickinson was if her family had destroyed all her papers and unpublished work? Hunter S. Thompson kept every letter he ever received, as well as a carbon copy of every letter he SENT. What sort of ego does that? Who creates a personal archive like that, let alone starting when they're like 16 years old? I am in awe of those people, at the very least.
So much for all that. The point is that the detachment I feel is different from the detachment I felt writing notes in high school (so many notes) or writing on my mom's electric typewriter before I went to college and became an inveterate computer-toucher. I've tried taking up the letter-writing habit again from time to time, but like so many of my other interests, it took too much work, too much effort. Hell, this here email here often feels like too much effort. That's not to disparage you all. (I love you.) That's the part of my lizard brain that wants for nothing but food, sleep, and procreation talking. It's always a tension between simply surviving and thriving, I think, and most of the time I'm looped into survival and preserving my brainpower for... something. What? I dunno. It's sort of like holding those Elixirs in a JRPG... I might need them later, even though I'm on the final boss!
Where was I going with this? Oh right. Letters. Archive.
What it comes down to is having a tangible thing, I think. It reconnects people. I held this envelope that you held. There's that handwriting I remember. Look at this ink. And then years later, other people get to make those connections, too. It becomes things outside the words themselves, outside the communication. People talk about the art of letter writing, and they usually mean composition, but also the simple object carries meaning. Email and text messages are just the content (which can be amazing) and while a record may be made of their routing details, so much less exists around them. They're purely functional. Flirting is different in handwriting.
And that's what it's all about, innit?
Anyway. Lord knows how long I've kept you here. I'm gonna maybe find something substantial to eat. (It will probably be a spoonful of peanut butter straight from the jar.)