First, Tha NEWS.

Travel! Again! By train! Again!

One of the planned exceptions to being on the farm this year was having to travel back to Chicago for a bit less than a week for transgender purposes and by the time I did the scheduling it was too late to get a reasonably priced plane ticket. In fact the price was so bonkers I got a room on the train and still saved almost $150. The experience was, bar none, the best travelling I have done in my life.

The room I got was technically what they refer to as a “roomette” and it has two seats that fold into a bed, as well as a fold-away upper bunk, but no private bath or shower or anything like that. It’s literally the minimum amount of space for two people to comfortably sleep, and effectively no more. But it has its own door, its own climate control, its own lighting control, seats that are much larger than coach, and, if you want it, room service so your (included!) meals are brought to your room rather than spent in the dining car. (I chose the dining car for both my meals and it was Fine. The food was actually really good for what I was actually expecting having had food from the lil cafe in the observation car.)

There were two problems: it was expensive as hell, and the train was four hours late. To talk about the latter first, apparently they lost one of the engines literally between the first two stops and it took several hours to sort out, plus—fun train fact—the BNSF engine they got to replace ours is significantly slower than even your standard Amtrak engine. Downtime + slower engine = super late. I wouldn’t have minded so much if not for the fact that the Empire Builder is almost always late. I’ve never had one arrive anywhere on time. It’s annoying as hell.

As to the first point, even if you take the cost of the included meals out of the picture, it’s several hundred dollars per room (and per person after that room is rented by a single passenger!) for something barely qualifies as private. I loved the experience, but this may be the only time I ever do this. So many of the people I met on the train we there because they were train nerds, or they were doing a family vacation, or what have you, and so maybe that was justified to them, but man. Japan will always have us beat when it comes to just moving from point A to point B.

So after my various deeds were done in Chicago, I drove my Fiero back to the farm.

What? The Fiero is done? Well. Sorta. Once it got up here, it blew the transmission line I was going to replace anyway, but thanks to my spouse and their friend, the suspension got (mostly) rebuilt and the cooling system got (mostly) refreshed, and it made it the 700+ miles to North Dakota. It’s now in the Awkward Teenager phase of project cars, where it looks mostly grown up, but you’re never really sure when something is going to crack and leave you broken down in a Denny’s parking lot. Like the transmission line that blew and caused a $200+ repair, so I could replace the thing later with $50 worth of parts and a few tubing bends.

But now I’m back on the farm doing various work tasks, like reformatting my website. Yep! You can check out the new hotness here. Truth be told it’s just a new Wordpress theme, but I really needed to clean it up some, bring it into the 2010s at least.

I’m working on sort of a Personal Timeline of Witchcraft for 22 CARDS but I don’t think I’ve gotten it anywhere near complete yet. I consider myself a bit of a chaos magician that has turned toward a more witchy orientation through my gender transition, and a number of interactions, both in private and in public, have made me want to sort of trace my own evolution in it. The biggest thing, outside of the grand self-mythology, is to figure out how I’ll be presenting in it a black-and-white printed book. Graphic design is my passion or something.

I still have four and a half of the actual 22 Major Arcana poems to finish, and I have skeletons for a couple. The unfortunate thing is that these ones are proving a little more “stare at the blank page” at the moment. I’ve done a couple of the Ephemera pieces while my brain percolates on the others, but it definitely feels like I should be able to open up my skull and stir my brain a little, just to jog things a bit. But things are coming.

This is why I’m not a novelist, incidentally. Those people can sit down and thousands of words pour out. I struggle with a hundred.

Second, INTERLUDE.

The executioner is, I believe, very expert; and my neck is very slender. ~ Anne Boleyn

Third, CONSUMPTION.

• New Metric out a couple weeks ago. I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic when I say it’s their best since Pagans in Vegas. (As much as I like “Doomscroller” in particular, the Fomentera albums didn’t really do it for me overall.) They really nailed the synthpop on this one, which has always been my favorite mode of theirs. “Time is a Bomb” into “Crush Forever” really stands out to me.

• Have you heard or seen NINE INCH NOIZE? Why not??? Go! Now! Do! (Especially Parasite (strobe/photosensitivity warning), which completely reinvents an already killer How to Destroy Angels track.)

• I’ve mentioned Jerusalem a few times here previously, but not much about the actual book itself. The first volume, I think I said a long while ago, is mostly more of a picaresque, that is, a collection of short episodes that more or less travel forward as a narrative. The second volume is dubbed “Mansoul,” and so far it is a more-or-less direct narrative story, following one of the characters from the first volume in his journey through the afterworld and its fourth-dimensional aspects. (It’s not really a spoiler to say he dies at one point, it’s mentioned early in I think the very first chapter of the book that he has a near death experience as a toddler; this is just the telling of what happens during that experience.) The ideas presented within it about how time works are interesting, though there are a couple bits I find a little silly—the concept of a combined “was,” “is,” and “will be” combined into a single word gets unnecessarily distracting, but other than that it’s so far an interesting… magical fantasy? I think? Genre is hard to pin down on this one, considering the time hops and whatnot. Anyway. Still enjoying it. You might also.

Fourth, HUSTLE.

Books available:

• THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT - a serial poem influenced by 20th century sci-fi and cyberpunk, dealing with love in the age of mechanical reproduction. Novelist KB Wagers called it “a delightful electrical tangle of words and feelings.” A Kindle version is available.

• confessions from a drainage ditch - a collection focusing on growing up rural and how those experiences carry forward, both helpful and harmful. A Kindle Version is available.

• A Void and Cloudless Sky - A chapbook akin to an EP, short and experimental, and containing some of my favorite work. Musician and editor Mer Yayanos says it’s “packed with highbrow references and lofi phrases that beg to be verbalized, to be invoked.” [Note: this is my only “traditionally published” work, and I get no money from it until I hit like ten sales a year. But you get a pdf for free, just for being subscribed to this newsletter! Grab it here! It’s a beautiful object, if you’d rather have a physical copy, though.]

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.

Usually this is where I put some kind of message of hope, or at least friendliness, but I must admit this time around, I’m just tired. The government has announced that I am, by nature of being trans, a terrorist and enemy of the state, and worthy of hunting and killing. This is in addition to the fact that I’ll shortly be in the confines of a state that recently voted to make my peeing arrest-worthy. So at this point, I’m just… I’m trying not to make things worse in my brain.

I had an appointment with a new meds manager yesterday, and I think I’m finally gonna get treatment for my ADHD. I have a regular therapist appointment tomorrow. I’m just trying for an even keel. I have a music project I’m working on. I have a podcast to edit. The garden still needs a layout. The lawn still needs to be mowed. “The dog still poops on the lawn,” to quote Hall of Fame pitcher Bert Blyleven.

Sometimes all you can do is survive in the face of uncertainty and fear and still keep singing.

See you on the next one.

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