Everyone can tell you
an apple a day keeps the doctor away
but what they won’t tell you
is you have to throw them pretty hard.
**
Thanks to Lei (http://thefrustratedpoet.wordpress.com/) for the nudge.
Still alive
*
Here’s some music I did with a friend a year ago and forgot to plug anywhere, whoopsie!
https://thebirdsiheard.bandcamp.com/album/finally
If you are poor and want a free download code, send me an email.
“One with the land”
Today on a walk
in my new neighborhood
North Berkeley
At sixteen hundred hours and twenty minutes
I watched a group of young boys
age three to maybe eight
play a game of war with sticks.
It was a kind of game I had played as a boy
and I’m sure every generation of boys before me did the same.
There was no anger or hurt feelings in the children,
they were smiling and having fun.
But here the teams were chosen based on race.
(team white was outnumbered)
The youngest looked for bigger sticks
but couldn’t bring himself to be too far from his big brother
because he didn’t really know what was going on.
Parents were on their phones
eating cheese
sharing their traumatic experience of having heard a helicopter at night.
(Berkeley. Verb – to make oneself feel better by telling a stranger how they should live their life.)
I wanted to Berkeley the shit out of them.
My social crime today is having not done that.
The crime is cowardice.
I considered making a little video of the children in the park as proof
but that’s really, really creepy
so I did not.
Humans,
children are watching.
Also, pretty sure aliens are also watching
but that somehow has managed to just slip under everyone’s radar.
How convenient for the aliens……
I’ve been social-distancing too long.
Now if you’ll excuse me I must muster the courage to go on Nextdoor
and fail at finding a non-triggering way of saying “you’re a bad parent.”
Black Lives Matter.
Today we topped the list of most confirmed infections.
We did it, guys!
We’re number one!!
Feels great. Feels… like I have fluid in my lungs.
*
Be safe, all.
I’m so sick of beans…
**
I’m going to be going live on Twitch playing some old songs and a few new
at 7:30 PM PST
https://www.twitch.tv/poetrobot
WE NEED MORE BEANS.
These are the thoughts that repeat over and over
despite my girlfriend reminding me
we have a ten-pound bag of beans.
But what if there are no more beans, sweetie?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
What if this is the end of beans?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
I’ve touched my face nine hundred thousand times.
In the name of conservation, I’ve eaten leftovers that will likely send me to the hospital
which is all kinds of stupid, but the leftovers have beans in them
and I’m not wasting any goddamn beans.
This is why everyone is hoarding toilet paper…
Bad beans.
**
I’ve just realized that there’s a little emoji robot
analyzing my tone and presenting me with an AI mood ring glimpse into my day.
(Just installed Grammarly)
It says my tone is
Disapproving
Sad
and Confused.
Touche, robot.
**
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to make a quarantini*
and start an indoor bean farm.
* a quarantini is a regular martini but served with black olives because all you thought to buy at the store were black olives and now there are no more olives.
Oh God, we need more olives.
Organized an online game night with some friends.
Caught up with some folks on the phone.
Tried to stay as calm and normal as possible.
Later, my closest friends, my girlfriend and I will spend several hours
yelling at each other on Skype, accusing one another of being an alien
and trying to shoot people out of an airlock (“Push the Button” Jackbox 6)
digitally.
My friend’s dad, who is a doctor and a scientist
said that consuming alcohol can potentially lower bacterial and viral body loads.
I don’t know what any of that means, but what it feels like
in my heart of hearts
is that for the good of all my friends and loved ones
I have to get very, very drunk
and jettison my friends and loved ones into space
digitally.
**
A few weeks ago
when it was still okay to hug people
my friend Jeff bought me a microphone
trying to get me to take up music again.
Astute bloggers may have noticed
I very briefly posted a message yesterday
about how I would be playing some songs on Twitch
and then deleted that post very quickly
due to some unexamined shame/confidence issues.
Now, I have nothing but time to examine/confront
said shame/confidence issues.
So won’t you join me,
Saturday March 21st at 7:30 PST
for a little Quarantine Concert?
I’ll be playing some old songs on a dusty guitar
maybe a few new.
Hope to see you there.
Stay safe everyone.
Strick66 asks: “Where did you go? If I may ask.”
Good question, Strick.
TLDR answer: Taking care of my grandparents and generally trying to hide from America. (Not in a cool “Snowden” way, more of a “I HAS ANXIETY” kind of way.)
The long answer:
For the past eight years I have been taking care of my grandparents. In the past few, it required a lot of my attention and energy.
Taking care of two people with varying levels of dementia in their nineties is hard. Doing that and trying to take care of myself was more than enough.
I left the blogging space around the time Donald Trump got elected. Comedy/humor culture was already changing, but it was becoming more apparent, although still only a suspicion, that people in the country were speaking two different languages. Identical words meant entirely different things to different people.
It may come as a shock to some readers, but I don’t aim to offend people with my writing. Accidentally hurting someone’s feelings sucks.
(Huge tangent alert!!) Some humorists have a very defensive, or outright aggressive response to people reacting negatively to their work. I believe this is a reaction rooted in the horrible feeling one gets when
I felt then and feel now like the window for acceptable humor has shifted, and in a lot of ways it has narrowed. I don’t think this is a bad thing. Part of what we are saying is “no more sexist jokes, racist jokes, homophobic or transphobic jokes.”
Tangent within tangent alert: What I think has a lot of comedians up in arms is that the culture is also starting to say “No more sexist jokes. No more enforcing the gender binary with “women be like SDKJFHAK” and “men be like ASKJANCSJBASNCAK” material. This is also a good thing, but it should be understood that this is the premise of many comedians’ careers. It’s how they make their living, and is a legitimate threat to their livelihood. It would be like telling a pop musician, “Okay, no more C Major chords. The kids get upset whenever you play a C Major chord.” (Tangent over!)
I didn’t have the chops to keep my IRL responsibilities in order and pay close attention to the shifts in culture to stay reliably and consistently funny in a way that was up to my standard. I felt like I would write something that I would regret in a few years time. Looking back at some of my older pieces, I feel like if I were to publish them today, they would not be received nearly as well as they did pre-2016.
There was a part of me that wanted to devote more energy into writing longer pieces of political satire, but again, I had a lot going on, and to “do it right” would have taken more than I could give. While I don’t agree essentially anything with the current administration’s direction, I’m not willing to speak in a way which will ensure that its supporters won’t listen to me. Scorched earth criticism of Trump, however merited, doesn’t seem to change anyone’s mind nor does it encourage anyone to look at the plight of the other. Additionally, I think there are enough voices out there doing that.
To me, the joy of writing is finding ways of being succinctly understood, and connecting with a wide variety of minds and perspectives by way of a single idea, or a verbal image; even better, to be understood by the minds of those with whom you are in direct opposition. I think there used to be a larger space for critiquing social/political issues founded in duopoly or bureaucracy, but in my own experience of the past few years I’ve felt a tremendous pressure to “pick a side.” It felt like I would have to choose between being heard by half the people in a disingenuous way, or authentically by no one. At the same time, I couldn’t bring myself to continue writing escapism-based, inane concept jokes about anthropomorphized animals in light of all the dramatic shifts happening around the world. It felt wrong, like a tacit endorsement.
So the dilemma was this:
In a situation where there’s so much noise and yelling
and you know you won’t be heard in earnest
do you yell and make as much noise as everyone else
or do you stay quiet and save your energy for something else?
Walking away from writing completely was probably not the best overall move I could have made, but it was the best move to make for me at the time. If blogging or forming a career as a writer was my top priority, I might have stuck it out and kept going, but it wasn’t. My grandparents did a lot for me when I was a boy. They raised me for several very formative years, and it only felt right that I be there for them.
If you’ve played through OK Boomer: The Game, (found here: https://poetrobot.itch.io/ok-boomer-the-game) you’ll see some reference to end of life care. You gotta write what you know, right? Caregiving is tough. It was a lot like having small children, but they’re 140 lbs and can turn on the stove.
When my blog started gaining readers, I made a conscious decision to try to keep my personal life out of the content. I would throw out anything that pushed past sixty words because I didn’t want to take up any more of your time than was necessary to get to the chuckle parts. As my grandparents got older and needed more help, it became impossible to keep up the pattern of escapism which helped me produce. I didn’t want to write about my grandparents in a humorous way because it wasn’t funny to me, or them. I don’t like mining my life for material, and I honestly assumed that my readers didn’t care. I didn’t really want you all to care about who I was. I wanted you to like what I was writing in spite of who I was. I hated myself. I assumed you would too, given the time.
Thankfully, I have grown. I had/have a great support network which was able to lift me up when I was falling. Caregiving has been the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my life. Most of the time it was a struggle, but I wouldn’t trade that time for anything. Changing adult diapers and helping someone from a wheelchair to the toilet every hour or two? That’s the easy part. Playing it cool when you realize the person you’ve been living with for eight years, who helped raise you, can’t remember your name or how you’re related? Medium. That’s the medium stuff. The hard parts are still ongoing, (and old habits being hard to break, I’m not really ready to jump into them here) but being a caregiver makes you strong enough to endure.
It might take me some time before I’m ready to write about certain things, but understanding how isolating and difficult caregiving can be, I’m happy to share whatever I can. If you are a caregiver, know one, or think you might become one in the near future (spoiler alert, you probably will at some point), and you have any questions, I’ll do my best to answer them. Or just ask me anything. F#*& it. I’d like to try connecting and communicating with you all on this different level as I work on my next interactive fiction project which will hopefully be done by Christmas. Don’t worry, it’ll be silly, casual and attempt to solve none of society’s problems.
Thanks for the dynamite writing prompt Strick,
and yeah, sorry for just plopping back into existence with no explanation like some bad ex-boyfriend.
Love you guys
Hello Friends!
I have some click-bait for you.
https://poetrobot.itch.io/ok-boomer-the-game
I made it myself
As it turns out
studying poetry and creative writing in college
was not as lucrative as one would hope
and home-boy finds himself wishing he had “lurned 2 code.”
So here’s the first of hopefully many adventures in self-education
using the most basic technologies, an HTML “choose your own adventure” story
capitalizing on the latest fads on the Internet.
Look at that.
I turned 30 and immediately tried to sell out.
…by making a free-to-play game…
Okay, add “business” to the list of things to self-educate upon.
I’m illustrating an educational cartoon
Just like the Isaac Newton apple/gravity fable
Except instead of Newton
It’s an ISIS child soldier,
A drone strike replaces the apple
& instead of the theory of gravity
The baby embraces secular representative government
& petrodollar based capitalism.
While it may seem like crooks run the world
a gentle stream of justice shall flow through Gotham
Once Batman gets a sweet, juicy tax cut;
because nothing deters crime
like blingier batarangs
& an increased susceptibility to medical bankruptcy.
A Narcissist Writes Letters, To Himself 