First, Tha NEWS.

Writing on the road for this one. Which is to say, the railroad. Taking the train up to Minneapolis/St. Paul to see Florence + the Machine and then continue on north to the farm. It's that time of year.

Travel is weird to/for me. I find myself often at odds with the Sagittarius stereotype of Always Down to Travel. Certain pop astrology apps and accounts love to push that narrative, that I should love just grabbing a ticket and going anywhere. And in one sense, they are correct... I do rather enjoy being places. I very my dislike going places. Liminal spaces and all that.

This morning, while I was walking around Union Station (wearing a mask: COVID is still real and now we've even had reports of measles at O'Hare...) I believed I coined a new horrible dystopia word for a concept that's been around for a long time: travel capitalism. You know how you're at the airport or you forget your toothbrush at the hotel or you're at a music festival or inside the zoo grounds or whatever and you realize you need something? And there's one source to get that thing? And it costs way, way to much, and you know you're getting gouged, and the retailer knows you're getting gouged, and you pay for it anyway? That's travel capitalism. It's the monopoly of being past security. Hudson News revels in this shit. Travel capitalism, or, as I've shortened it, trapitalism.

I'm sure there’s books and studies and all that shit, about how the campus bookstore was the only place you could get your textbooks, or how the only gas station for miles also has the highest prices on everything. I think the special difference here is that it's not some bizarre new place, it's everywhere you've already been. I had a slice from Sbarro for breakfast. I bought a bottle of Mountain Dew from a standard convenience store. If I'd walked outside of the station, I'd have paid half as much for either, but there I was, already inside and far nearer to my eventual train gate. Once you're past security at the airport everything is phenomenally more expensive. They just got you over a barrel. It's great. Really savoring this $4 bottle of soda. I can't wait for Lolla to see how much water costs this year.

Trapitalism.

Anyway, here I am between Portage and Wisconsin Dells in Wisconsin (where else would Wisconsin Dells be?) trying a new mobile setup. Or, I suppose, new in this particular case. Using the tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard rather than my laptop for this sorta thing. I found a reasonably-priced (ie, free) text/Markdown app and so now here I am. I used to use the lappy for all my computing needs up at the farm, but I'm switching gears to a slightly more modern mini PC there, and then I'll just use the tablet around the house or out and about. Just making it easier to keep track of all my crap, you know? And I'm not even sure I need my laptop anymore considering both its age and its screen size... It's only a few inches larger than my tablet, and those extra pixels aren't worth much when the goal is portability, not other -ability. I can type, and I can play Magic, and that's about all I need it to do. The less I have to carry for any individual task, the more space I have for other tasks.

Under normal circumstances, I'd simply put the following in CONSUMPTION, but I think it's noteworthy enough to actually call it out on its own: I finished reading Jack Spicer's be brave to things. I have been on this book for over a year, I think? Most of the book is poetry, but the last three works are plays: "Young Goodman Brown: A Morality Play," a version of The Bacchanal called "Pentheus and the Dancers, an Adaptation," and a four-act version of the Troilus and Cressida myth, called, appropriately, Troilus. The uncollected poems that make up the first two-thirds of the whole text are... not as good as those found in my vocabulary did this to me. But the plays are very good, especially Troilus, which Jack spent many years working on and, I think, considered his magnum opus. So much of his work is creative works of criticism, if you can call them that, where he discussed the themes at least metadiscursively.

For example, the usual Greeks and Trojans appear in the play, but their metacommentary is from within their dialogue with each other. There are no specific, directed-to-the-audience soliloquies in the manner of Shakespeare, (who did a famous version of the story) nor is there the traditional Greek chorus and antichorus, as is the case with his "Pentheus." Here, one character stands in for both devices: Zeus. Numerous gods feature in the play, of course, but he is the only one seen in person, with lines, and he addresses the audience directly and plainly, reminding you that the whole story is actually about him. There is humor and tragedy and love and weariness and gender and so much wrapped up in a play that is ultimately pretty short for being four acts. The stage directions are rare but important. So much material is given, but so little is dictated. It's a wonderful play. It took me maybe an hour to read in total... I confess I took a small nap in the middle. Because I'm on a train.

In the working world, I'm reading as a part of the open mic for this month's Traveling Mollys, but beyond that I'm in a bit of a lull, largely related to the fact that I'm in that transition between Here and There. (I couldn't help but notice how much of the center section of Troilus ended up being heavily influenced by the story of Persephone--which is also compared to the story of Eurydice, which is also compared to the very story of Helen... a lot of women abduction or otherwise defection in the play, as if the whole thing about defections...) I've been told the farm received 16 inches of snow over the weekend, but it's already melting. I'm expecting a swamp of bog-ian proportions. A bog of swampy proportions. The wettest of wetlands. A perfect time to Stay the Fuck Inside. And so I will.

The plans this spring are actually relatively low-effort. It's honestly mostly just maintaining sanity and stability. I have no big projects to complete. I have no major repairs to make (other than maybe getting the Harley running, rather than just put back together.) Which is probably for the best. The last few weeks have been fraught, as you may have noticed by having eyes or ears, but especially in Rogers Park as ICE have returned, and a college student was murdered at the beach, and now Neo-Nazis are rallying outside our alderperson's office and calling in death threats against her. I recognize there's so much shit going on in the world (oh also now it's illegal for me to pee in Idaho), but it has felt doubly weird in RP. (Cops were doing yet another helicopter ride last night in the neighborhood, too. Not a Pinochet-style one, but still annoying enough to the people who live there.)

There's an attitude that I keep seeing online that keeps trying to downplay problems some segments face while others are in mortal danger in Palestine and Iran and elsewhere--some variation on "You should be lucky all you're worried about is gas prices and not bombs"--and it just feels like a flattening of the problems in the wrong way entirely. Like, no, my life is not in immediate danger, but it is in long-term danger. It's like saying, and I recognize fully the crassness of the comparison, but hyperbole gonna hyper, "You're lucky you only have cancer, this guy's liver climbed out of his body and stabbed him with a butterfly knife." Like all these things suck and are real problems for the people that have to deal with them. Triage helps with this. It's not a competition, and some people absolutely need more urgent care, but to pass off other people's real problems as inconsequential? What side are you on, bud?

Anyway. Nuts to all that.

I have a concert tonight to see an artist I have loved... LOVED... for 17 years and have never gotten to see live, we have a fantastically eclectic group of scientists coming back from the moon after having named a crater after one of their late wives, I got to hang out with a very sweet friend almost all day yesterday, I have a new podcast episode to edit, and I started a new musical project over the weekend. The world is an enormous place, and I am in no position to save the whole thing. But I can help do my little part to save my little part. And that's keep on doing The Work. The Work is actually simple: what do you love? That's it. That's The Work. Keep doing that. Keep defending it.

Second, INTERLUDE.

“Show me how to run away from an abstract quality and I’ll sleep in your arms forever.”
~ Jack Spicer, Troilus

Third, CONSUMPTION.

• My Gran Turismo 7 season has officially ended as I have two months of not being at my PS5. Honestly, it's probably fine. I was getting bored to the point of falling asleep during races, even those with real people. (It's not that I find the game boring, it's that I've played it a lot in the past few months and need a mental break to come back fresh.)

• Since I've finished be brave to things I now have Jerusalem vol. 2 to finish. I'm not exactly looking forward to getting back into it. I will, because the book is great, but woof. It's going to take a little bit of a memory jog.

• I picked up Donika Kelly's newest book, The Natural Order of Things, which I'm super excited for. Kelly has written some of my favorite poems and both of her books so far have been excellent.

• Assuming I'm able to finish those two things, I also should be getting a copy of the newest Magic: the Gathering book in the mail in the next few days. I only bought it because of a sweet-looking edition of the card Command Tower. But I might actually read a Magic book. Probably not, but maybe.

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.

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. All paying subscribers receive access to all content I post there, for as little as $1.

Finally, THE OUTRO.

Well. I've now gone to see Florence. I took one picture, total:

It was, without a doubt, the most technically proficient show I've ever seen. (Had I ever seen Nine Inch Nails in an arena, that would probably win, but that hasn't happened, so.) The sound was very good, even for the notoriously garbage Target Center. The integration of video into the performance as a part of the design rather than incidental was solid and on par with the sort of things NIN is famous for. And of course, the Witch Choir was proper spooky.

A longer review is coming on Patreon probably next week, but I think it's enough to say here that I spent the first four songs crying, at which point I ran out of available fluids in my body, so I spent the rest of the show basically staring dumbfounded, bewitched, and/or transfixed. There are, indeed, a few things I'm not sure about how they pulled them off. But yeah. Great show.

Now after another day of travel, I'm back at the farm, slowly unpacking and putting the last bit of this here newsletter together. I don't know what's ahead for this spring, not really, and so we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Oh, and we just got four astronauts home, just fine and exactly has planned.

Human beings are neat, and capable of so many things.

Even you. Especially you. Talk soon.

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