Not saying I'm glum...

but the writing practice I found myself working on today was an obit for myself.Aside from the fact that it's not an upper, as I couldn't conjure up 105 years of satisfying adventures, some research that ended  the toxic part of toxic masculinity or the cure for coronavirus in the fluff under my couch, maybe I'd recommend it as a way to learn what my turning points are.

my essay "The Shoe-In"

Note: I sort of regret not actually trying to befriend this chick, mostly because I let embarrassment define my life  back then. On the other hand, given my more typical pattern of trying to hold on too tight, maybe this was a flash of wisdom.The Shoe-in

In Which We Try To Stage A Virtual Reading....

Got dressed up today to put "The Happiest Place On Earth" on video to promote "Dozen"(Sometimes I wish I could get attention for work that's a little bit more...post-collegiate, but that's another topic.)
My brother was very patient with creating a fifteen-minute video file on his phone, but we can't figure out how to disseminate it.( Don't have a camera on my PC...partially by design, and partially cause  I'm just not good at setting up things.)
Really thought that would be simpler.
Hope it sounds OK and everything so the next post isn't "The Day We Shared That Ugly Video"
Here isa review of Dozen,  in which your correspondent failed to get a shout-out again. Going to be outlandishly positive and pretend to think that maybe my style is so deft that I make it look so easy, it's like noting the exact moment a flower springs up.(Jon Lovitz voice) Yeah, that's the ticket.(/Jon Lovitz voice)

It's one thing...

reading about the "ambivalence" in Revolution your whole life.  It's another to know how it feels(well, sort of. Don't have a London estate, and don't really think the teachings of Mao factor in much this time)
But I feel like I understand:
When you talk about destruction,
don't you know that you can
Count me out?(in?)
More than I ever have.
Because I don't really like people tearing shit up, right? I am a Democratic Socialist, who also shops as a diversion from time to time(Which is a contradiction, but, given the amounts in question, only a gotcha if you are stuck on socialists being brawny Russians standing in line for carrots/bluejeans)
But I also don't think that:
the people that do this are the worst criminals we've got,
or that there is a secret verse that's like
"And God saw the Target, and beheld that it was good."

My Darkest Carrie Bradshaw Moment(So Far)

A note on the title:
In case there’s anyone reading this that remains uninitiated, Carrie Bradshaw is a columnist who often kicked off her writerly musings by writing that “she couldn’t help but wonder” this or that…hers were cuter, like “Is Sex Better Without Commitment?” or why is breaking up so hard to do.(as a student, I actually tried to write this one, in my then-ceaseless quest to not be “typecast” as a disabled writer—I did attempt to be rigorous and talk to people in the psychology department, but between the relentless innocence I tried to project then, and an epic fabrication scandal in my journalism department at the time, I think they thought I was fucking with them, quite frankly.) Not quite “it’s funny now,” but I can totally deal with the fact that kind of voiceless, bright but slightly inhuman pablum never saw daylight under my byline, not least because, even more than now, if someone tried to explain having chemistry with someone they didn’t like to me at nineteen or twenty, they might as well have talked to their dogs.
But here are the things about people’s response to the soft opening (that’s what he said) of the United States that I Couldn’t Help But Wonder:
Do people really love tubing and stuff that much? Doesn’t look that fun even without the threat of death.

If our government were more generous to its citizens and less equivocal in its messaging, would people be chomping at the bit this much?

Do they not understand that some of the people we have to worry about don’t look sick at all, or do they think youth and abledness give them a pass?

Are they perhaps, and this may be the darkest speculation, beginning to feel that these momentary pleasures are the best they can hope for?(sometimes I can get this, especially given the world the twentysomethings were born into, went to school in, graduated to.) even in my own life, I can’t be sure if my problem was that I’ve been too future-focused, or that the future I planned for wasn’t mine, but Rory Gilmore’s.

10 Reasons Why Electronic Diallers Are A Bit Like Strong Vegetables...

10. Sometimes I really don't want to deal with them.
9.  I can see that sometimes, and for some people,  they might be a good thing.
8.  I work my way through them very slowly.
7.  But I don't actively avoid them, as I did when I was younger.
6.  There is a lot of hype about how good they are.
5. When you say you struggle with one, everyone says "You haven't tried MY version yet.(although, of course, there was no recipe for HubDialler as there is for Brussels sprouts)
4.  There are some I've adjusted to, though I prefer ice cream.
3. they are both geeky topics found in small corners of the internet
2.  Hopefully, they both build healthier bodies, if you include the body politic.
1.  Any day I do more than gag on one is a win.

Sometimes It Feels Like I Grieve All The Time....

even my working through my disability stuff feels like this, too, really.(I'm so good at survivor's guilt that I have it already, not even being sure if I'm really a survivor or not. Part of it is habit/)
I also grieve that we have a leader who quotes death toll numbers as if he is talking about seating capacity in an arena or some shit, and my state has a weak-willed governor that's like "The olds and Indians, eh? Open for business."
I also grieve that I can't just look toward the next administration that might be coming and sigh with relief that now the adults will show up and now  can settle back.(Not that Tanahesi Coates would read this but if he did, he would see in that yearning traces of the Dream that gets broadcast on television all the time, and that even we white people don't really live, either, but that we got closer to, probably, than someone in W.  Baltimore.)
there is a book I got to review, but the ending was so happy that it made me sad because a happy ending looks like a vanishingly small prospect for me.