062: It's Designed to Break Your Heart
First, Tha NEWS.
Work-wise I've made a bit of a breakthrough for the 22 CARDS project, as in what the non-CARDS parts will be. I've gotten a few pages done on that, and a few poems as well. It's also submission season, so I'm trying to figure out if anything is worth sending my stuff to this year. Every year I think "surely this will be the one" and every publisher writes back "don't call me shirley." And yet. This is largely part of why I self publish. Not only do I get more money in my pocket with arguably the same amount of sales (hey go buy a book down in section 4!), I don't have to sit on pins and needles with my work out and waiting to see if someone deigns to choose it when they have someone like Kaveh Akbar in the hopper, too.
You may have heard that Windows 10 is at its end of life. It's true. You don't have to stick with Microsoft if you don't want to. Linux is a fairly mature and mostly user-friendly experience now, if you go with the Ubuntu or Mint distributions. If you remember using an Apple II or DOS system, you can run Linux. If you have an iPad or Android tablet, chances are pretty good it can do everything you want it to besides bleeding-edge high-end gaming. There are ways I've seen to keep W10 for another year (or more) if you're willing to spend some money. If you're stuck because of gaming or professional reasons, there are some ways to mitigate the ways it sucks. In any case, I've managed to switch both my writing world and audio workflow over to Linux. Some people in the Free and Open Source Software (or “FOSS”) world are intense and it can seem daunting, but I'm never going back to Microsoft, that much is for sure. (And honestly, from what I can tell, the move from Win10 to 11 is probably a parallel in effort from Win10 to Ubunutu.)
And of course, a Mac is an option, if you're made of gold and piss liquid platinum.
In addition to ditching Windows, I've stopped using my Hotmail(!) account and all Google products I don't have to use to accommodate others. All my email, all my files, all my calendar stuff, moved to Proton. Yes, it costs money, and yes, there's the same issue of having all my ducks in one basket, but at least Proton doesn't know what my ducks are, and never will. (There's some knock-on effects like VPN stuff that I'll be taking advantage of as well, but the main thing was getting my stuff out of the scrape-able bins.)
Second, INTERLUDE.
“Mattingly! Get rid of those sideburns!”
~ The Simpsons, “Homer at the Bat”
Third, CONSUMPTION.
It's October so that means a bunch of Type O Negative. October Rust and all. Haven't taken the time to get the guitar out to tune it to B and make whale fart sounds with it though.
Playthrough of Final Fantasy is cooking along. I'm into the Air Castle or Floating Fortress or whatever the hell they call it, and I don't think there's much left to do but head for the end game. I mean, and kill WarMech.
Making slow progress through be brave to things, Jack Spicer's previously uncollected poems and plays. I'm looking forward to the plays, but that also means getting through the early poetry and like any 20-ish year old, Jack was trying too hard. I get it. But there's still flashes of brilliance in there, and that makes the journey worth it.
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.
October is winding down, which means so is baseball. Tonight is the last game of the American League Championship Series; whoever wins tonight goes on to the World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers. The teams are the Seattle Mariners, arguably the most fascinating team in history, and the Toronto Blue Jays, the most fascinating team in Canada by default. The Mariners have never been to the Series, the Jays won two years back-to-back, 1992 and 1993. Why watch sports when I'm a nerd? Because I'd rather watch that than hour after hour of true-crime, or network TV copaganda shows, or the real world horrors that I get the other 20 hours of the day. Sports have rules. Order. History. You might get the occasional sales gimmick, but by and large baseball's pace of play, statistical bookkeeping, and rare bursts of genuine athleticism lead to a nearly distraction-free distraction. And so tonight I will, ideally, be watching the Mariners go to their first World Series ever.
If you live in Canada, I'm sorry. I love your guys. But they cannot win. We cannot have an all-blue-and-white-uniform Series.
If you've never watched a game, and you happen to have Fox Sports 1, I really recommend you watch tonight. All you really need to remember is that there are three outs per team per inning, they have to touch all four bases in order, four balls is a walk and three strikes is an out, and it's been this way for 136 years. You're probably gonna see grown men in gussied-up pajamas shirtless and crying tonight, because they did the thing they've been trying to do their entire lives.
Think about what you would do if you finally did The Thing You Always Wanted to Do Since You Were a Kid. That's gonna happen tonight. And there's a whole world around it that wants you to do everything but take some time to watch an ultimately meaningless display, to do something productive with that time, to consume. But just... watch the game. Get to know the rhythm. Ignore all the advertising and just focus on the guy throwing the ball and the guy trying to hit it. It's a really simple thing when it comes down to it, but so much joy, community, and even art comes out of it. (If you really want to be a crazy person, learn how to keep score.)
There's so much out there that demands your attention. But in baseball, sometimes something happens that you'll remember for the rest of your life. I've never bought a dish soap that I remember like that. I've never had a car loan that made me excited. 60,000 people have never cheered anyone on for their choice of supermarket. For all the noise, and the numbers, and the jabbering voiceovers in the broadcast, it's just a guy throwing a ball, and a guy trying to hit it. That's it.
May your week be as simple. Thanks for being here.
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