Road Noise

I'm being published in Limp Wrist Magazine, "An ezine with a queer sensibility" I think is how they're marketing it, which should be up anytime now. Last Friday I took part in a reading at OutWrite, my first time reading at that illustrious Atlanta institution. Two of my shorties, which is how I refer to the pagier stuff I write, as opposed to the more massive and, to my mind, holistic performance pieces.

I crave all of it.

Some audio of my spoken word is slated to be carried by another journal later in the year. I'll update as links become available.

Shows, shows, shows: I'll be at Swiftwaters again on May 2, around 9:30pm. It's a women's only campground in north Georgia, and I had a good time at the last one in September. I'm booking my summer tour now, and booking seems to not really be my strong suit. The only show I have to report solidly is Austin, TX on July 9. I'm hoping to be in Albuquerque and Denver on this jaunt too, so I'll update as that works itself out. I'm hoping to drive 4,000 miles in about 10 days. Highways are where the poems are, you see.

Speaking of, I'm going to head up to LEAF on May 10 and mingle with my peers or whatever. Possibly win some money if lightning strikes. Then again, it's an outdoor festival, so lightning would be bad.

Art Amok, usual: 1st and 3rd Saturdays of the month.

Okay, so I haven't blogged here in a long, long time, and that's my own fault. It isn't that nothing's happened. I've written mountains of new work, mostly page-y kinds of poems that get better all the time, and last week I finished a massive and powerful love poem unlike anything I've ever written.

On Friday, JT Bullock had me over to the Florence, Alabama Poetry Slam, which is about an hour and a half out of my hometown (Huntsville) and some of my high school friends were able to make it over for the show. This was extra super duper for me, though I didn't feel like it was my best set delivery ever. The audience was warm and treated me like a rock star, so I guess it was all in my head. I put pictures from the show on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=620488147), which I've grown to like much better than MySpace lately, especially for photo albums.

I spent Friday night hanging out with Carol & Jenny, two of my oldest and dearest friends who I don't get to see often enough. Turns out that asking for Newcastle in a bar in Florence will get you laughed at. Who knew? Crashed at Jenny's place in Hazel Green with her thousand and one pets and my allergy meds and headed back to Atlanta for the Art Amok Slam early Saturday after kicking the new love poem for them on Jenny's giant, gorgeous porch.

Oh, I should mention here that my parents got me a Garmin GPS device for Christmas this year. I kind of chuckled about it at first, looked at it with some disdain (This machine will tell me where to go? Right!), but I'd never been to Florence so I plugged it in and bang -- it took me to the freakin venue's front door. I am now madly in love with it and especially enjoy shouting at it when it wants me to go directions and routes contrary to my preferred routes around town. Not that I'm using it too much around town, but it has a preference for 285 and I have a preference for 20 to 75/85 and Garmin can bite me because 285 sucks.

So, I returned to my house by way of Kavarna, so exhausted that I could barely see straight. I knew I needed to catch a nap before the slam but also that I would need coffee in a bad way when I finished the nap, so I grabbed a large iced coffee with a couple of shots and came home, uploaded pictures, and crashed for an hour. My neighbor Kerstin came with me to Mocha Match, where JW Baz of Chicago was featuring and I was aiming for my usual #4 slot in order to get qualified to compete at team finals later this spring.

Because of the layoffs, the only way I can get to Nationals this year (unless my circumstances change radically and soon, which they could, but planning for that is a particularly Republican way of approaching problems, and I am a Democrat) is if I land on a team, and I have a lot of loyalty to Art Amok, was on the 2006 team, and respect the scene's approach to writing immensely. So it was important to me that I place in the top 5 and get qualified.

Eight people signed up, which is always a bad sign for me because while I usually hit the #4 (or #5) slot, sometimes the judges really, really aren't feeling my work and I can easily end up 7th or even 8th. The mic went out, so we were reduced to shouting our poems from the stage, which in truth is a much more comfortable situation for me.

Round 1, I did Pineapples, partly because there was a poet in the audience who has always dismissed my work, and Pineapples is a newer piece I'm especially proud of for the art of it. It scored well, but I was up against some incredible poets kicking some incredible work and it landed me, you guessed it, in 4th place. There was a cut of four poets after round 1 because the show was running long, so I miraculously made it to round 2, and was slated to go last because of my placement.

The first two poems that came up were relationship-oriented, and they scored very well. I had considered doing Freedom, but was preparing myself to try to kick the new piece that had only seen the audience of Kerstin (on page. Not even page, on the computer screen) and Carol & Jenny in Alabama. It would have been a very nervous experience to do it in that setting, and possibly quite painful for my ex-girlfriend, who was there as well.

The third poet up kicked out a political piece and the judges went crazy, launching her into first place. This was great in so many different ways, and I got up and rocked Freedom like I'd written it or something (that's a joke) and the room erupted. I ended up tying for first with the poet who came immediately before, and politics won the night.

For the record: that's the first time I've won a slam since early 2003, and it felt frigging great. Maybe it'll happen again in another five years.

On Sunday, I decided it was time to put the new piece, Shout Rainbows, in front of a real audience, so I took off during a storm that was spawning torrential rain and tornadoes throughout the southeast and drove up to Greenville to catch Baz's next set and kick it out. It was really well received, we all had some food and a beer after the show, and then I headed back on blessedly rain-free roads, arriving home around 1:30 Monday morning.

All in all, about 16 hours of highway time this weekend, and it was a fabulous three days of poetry in three states. I'm loving this life, I just need more freelance clients to get my bills all squared away. And the new poem... wow. The new poem makes me happier than I can say. It's like nothing else in my catalogue, and I can't wait to get it out there in the world.

For the time being I'm off the road and pretty focused on getting some freelance writing gigs to pay the bills. This is the worst time of year to try to do anything productive, particularly new projects, so we'll just call this the late-fall hiatus.

I've sent a number of pieces out for publication and will post (with links) if they see the light of day. I'd really like to bulk up that side of my portfolio, and frankly so much of my work veers away from "performative" that it's kind of silly I've waited this long to prioritize it. I'm maintaining a catalogue of new work on my MySpace page and the feedback from peers has been pretty good.

This being home all the time thing is weird. I've been sick for a week now with a really rotten cold that is finally abating, but otherwise I've set up my schedule more or less like this:

Wake up between 7-8 via the doggy alarm clock
Handle Newshoggers.com posting for a couple of hours
See if there's any poetry in me that day until about 11:30 or noon
1:00, head to local cafe. Work on freelance stuff & freelance web site until 4
Come home. Doggies, dinner, news, etc.
Social or television or more writing in the evening (usually a combo of all three)
Bed between 11-12, read a bit, sleep.

I'm reading Flannery O'Connor's short stories. What an amazing writer; what amazing voices she captured.

Lately I've been talking a lot with Amy Weaver (Dallas Slam superstar) about Slam and tours and so forth. We may try to do something together in the southeast in the spring. It's great to have another creative brain to mindmeld with. We're both apparently taken with the idea of writing and performing one-woman shows, and while she's killer on a Slam stage, she feels less certain about full sets. I'm spotty at best in 3 minutes, but I kill in 30. A good complement of strengths when we're talking shop.

Again, with this cold I'm pretty mellow at the moment. It moved from my head into my chest yesterday, which initially was really cool, though I briefly lost my sense of smell last night with another bout of congestion. I went looking in the bathroom for something that might re-open my sinuses, found some Mineral Ice muscle pain rub with menthol in it, and couldn't smell it. I've had it a long time, so I tracked my housemate down and said, "Hey, is this so old that it's lost its smell?" I had my nose in it while I was saying it. Handed it over and she literally jumped when the aroma hit her. I never did smell it. Today is better, and I'll probably hit the neti pot a couple of times to clear out what's left. My back is killing me from the coughing though. Oh illness, why do you taunt me?

Another crazy weekend with the Unicorn Petting Zoo.

Friday night was the book release party at Charis for the new anthology "Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution", which features Karen G. of Cliterati and Art Amok and Katz of Athens Boys Choir. Alix Olson edited, and flew in for the event.

I struggled with an oncoming cold and hormones flooding in from the first cycle my body bothered with since layoffs were announced in August. Hey, at least I don't have to worry about pregnancy. I spent much of Thursday flat on my back, and Friday too. Popping Karen's wellness pills every couple of hours. Knowing I had shows.

I dragged myself to Charis, where the Alix, Karen, Katz show was terrific. In the Q&A I asked a question about how to do this for money and Alix and Katz offered very good tips from their own experience. I really don't think being queer is quite the obstacle for me that it would be for the author of "Cunt Country", but I could be wrong. Afterwards, I was able to speak to AO for a minute, who said additional cool things and accepted a copy of the record.

"Built Like That" was the first spoken word record I ever heard, back in those heady early-Asheville days, and while AO isn't someone I typically point to as an inspiration, I can't deny for a second the impact that hearing a full-length record of energetic spoken word had on me. Up to then, I really didn't know that poets recorded.

On Saturday, I felt much, much better, and Lash and I loaded into the Yaris after my traditional Kavarna start up - coffee, iced coffee if warm out, plus pastries for the road (how I wish there was a Kavarna on the other end of each of these drives) - and took a pleasant drive into West Asheville. The leaves were incredible as the altitude rose, and it was such a pretty and optimistic day. We stopped by Frankie's salon, just down the street from the bookstore where our show was to be, and then ate at the famously hit or miss Westville Pub. It was a miss that night, but Westville is like playing the lotto. Sometimes you scratch off for a few bucks. Mostly, you lose a little but nothing you'll notice in the big picture. Besides, Asheville is all interesting dudes and beautiful women, so even a crappy meal is chock full of eye candy.

The show did not draw a crowd. Later, Frankie, Cyndy, Lash, and I decamped to a new spot called The Usual Suspects, operated by this woman I had the most amazing crush on when I lived there and she was the head person at the Cherry Street Pub. She's still impossibly beautiful. I adore Asheville and all of its denizens.

Greenville's where it's at in this story. The deets of Asheville are this: My friends are the best people on Earth and that's how it is. Magic happens in proximity to them and that's also how it is. Their dogs are sweet too, and when they cook breakfast you're unlikely to be hungry for a long, long time. I didn't want to leave, and in fact got a little inwardly focused on the whys of the night before, but Lash and I piled back into the Yaris at 4 to pop down into Greenville.

I should mention, more for me than for you, who aren't reading this anyway (I know. I have a stat counter enabled. Don't even play) that the light as we descended was the color and apparent texture of molten butter. It was the "magic hour" that filmmakers kill their budgets waiting for, and it made this luscious expanse of hills and valleys almost unbearably beautiful. Wherever my eye wandered took my breath away. It was perhaps a dangerous drive for that. And as the term suggests, within about an hour it was gone, and we were back in the flat part of America.

I should start by saying that Greenville is where my time as a Slam poet ended. It was in March of this year, and the day after the Southern Slam Queen competition I woke up and realized that I wasn't enjoying Slam competitions and didn't want to do them anymore. That I needed to find a new approach and learn to love this thing I do all over again. The concept for the album followed close on the heels of this.

So there was something special about this show that earlier on I hadn't been looking forward to. Kimberly Simms has also been an important figure in my life for some time now, and a fine friend to have as well. I'm always thrilled to see her, and I was extra thrilled to congratulate her on her recent wedding to her long-time boyfriend. I was nervous by the end of the open mic, but I got up there and rocked Batman. Oh, and everything else. Lash jumped in on Freedom and My Anti-Everything, hitting every mark perfectly and the audience reacted exactly the way I like it to. I'm working on eye contact these days, reaching out instead of hiding, and it worked really well. I'm trying to settle myself down and, for instance, when I point to accentuate a line in Freedom, to point at someone and look at them as I deliver the line.

These things aren't hard for most people, but I treat eyes like they might be loaded and work hard to avoid the crosshairs. It's a task. Every piece of this is a learning experience and a challenge and a spiritual pursuit, and that's why I love it. If it were easy, it would hardly be worth doing.

And I rocked the mic in Greenville, which is what I needed after a few audience-less shows. Got paid, sold some merch, had a lot of sign-ups on the mailing list, etc., etc., grabbed a beer with SilDag, then Lash and I (you guessed it!) piled into the Yaris and drove home to the music of Laura Blackley.

What a fascinating month this has been. Next up: Columbia on Tuesday. On Wednesday, I begin the process of querying colleges, and I will document that here as events arise to warrant it. But mostly I want a usable record for others of what works and what doesn't, because as far as I know there is no book called "So you want to be a performance poet", and I'm lucky enough to know most of the people in America who do this for a living. I have a lot of support as I set off on this, and perhaps my adventures and mishaps will be valuable for others if they should choose to follow suit.

Not that my way will be the right way or the only way, but more to the point: my mistakes will certainly provide insight. For instance, I sent a kit to a major festival that happens next year, but failed to include a tech rider outlining basic things like set length. This was a week ago, so it's not like I've heard that I'm out or anything, but I think it's a big omission. Probably fatal. I'll know better next time.

Now, to sleep.

Good lord. Just - just - back in from DC. Wasn't able to do LEAF, but K'ville on Friday was awesome and they even got me to do an encore. Copperhead Red handled video camera duties, and a more loving audience just doesn't exist. Great crew up in Knoxville.

I drove home after the gig to save $$ on dog sitting and stayed home Saturday with the pups, getting prepped for the DC trip. It's the Ganymede Arts Festival's first year, and I didn't know what to expect.

I stayed with DC rock star Michelle Burleson, and she took me to this awesome bar in Alexandria called The Evening Star where we hung out with a bunch of her friends and drank exceptionally good wine. I ended up buying two bottles of Jim Jim Shiraz. That stuff was tasty. I'll be mentioning it to my local awesome wine bar, Kavarna.

What to say about the show... Okay, first things first: the Ganymede crew is terrific and the space, an older building converted into a theater on Church Street, right off of 17th around R, is gorgeous. As mentioned earlier, the festival is in its first year, so they're working kinks out. The other booked poet was a no-show, as was - unfortunately - the audience. I did my set for about 10 people who were so enthusiastic about it that it felt like 100. No complaints at all. The stage was set up so beautifully, I can't wait to watch the tape that Michelle shot.

10-hour drives are quite a thing. Mostly I listened to Bitch's newest album, Make This, Break This, which after such a long and concentrated exposure, I can only describe as a masterwork. I've long believed that what I really need is a fiddle player to walk around behind me and punctuate my day-to-day life with jangly music, and the final track on the album - a 9-minute montage of voice mail messages set to fiddle - really had that effect.

North Carolina is out of water. The drive today was exceptionally wet, but I passed the Neuse River Basin/Watershed area in North Carolina not long after I exited I-95, and it was dry. I think this is Google Map's picture of it in better times. Now it's a big marsh, at least what's visible from the highway. Tragic, tragic. I guess things aren't any better here in Georgia, but maybe today's rains are the beginning of more. NPR in Charlotte said NC is down more than a foot. Bad things.

I can't decide whether to go to sleep or locate some food. I'm really fried after 10 hours on highways.

Lots of fun to be had in the beautiful little town of Montevallo. The Slam crew there is just great, headed up by the ever-awesome Hardestys, who are some of the kindest hosts around. Eclipse Coffee and Books, where the Slam happens, is a terrific little cafe venue that serves everything from sandwiches to whiskey, so really, how can you go wrong there?

It's been quite the weekend. After I returned from Alabama yesterday, I got together with a bunch of former colleagues over at Kavarna in Oakhurst and we drank great wine into the late night hours. I'm really digging that place. The staff is friendly and quirky, the food is good, the coffee is excellent, and wow the Malbec we were drinking was fantastic. One of the employees had a good tip night and bought a copy of the Petting Zoo, which was really phenomenally cool.

Tonight I'm off to catch Bitch and Athens Boys Choir at the Red Light Cafe. I haven't seen Katz in ages, and really miss his face. And Bitch, wow. Life needs more fiddle, always.

The shows were phenomenal. I've never had more fun on stage than I had the last two nights, both times digging fully into pieces I'm really jazzed about and skipping entirely the stuff I'm not. Who cares about the pieces I'm not feeling? Certainly not me.

I've given myself all the permission in the world to do this however I want, and this weekend's trial run of that approach could not have felt better.

Amy Lashley has worked up music to accompany Freedom and My Anti-Everything, and it's awesome. Having a foil on stage for a couple of pieces is lovely, and since she has to tune for a minute it gives me a chance to chatter with the crowd. I have a tough time, would like to be wittier and weirder and funnier, but between pieces is still pretty tough terrain for me.

Last night felt a lot like slaying a dragon. I've had such mixed experiences at Java Monkey, usually being overwhelmed by nerves and sometimes totally bombing a piece. I chose Java Monkey for one of the early shows on purpose. I had to take care of that before I could go forward.

I was fortunate to have one of my slam parents in the audience, Frankie Bolt from Asheville. She and AJ Geil were instrumental in getting me involved with spoken word back in 2002 as key players in the Slam Asheville scene. I felt honored to rip my work and have the crowd roaring along for her to see.

Karen didn't come. I was surprised by how much that hurt, and barely slept last night while I pondered her distance. I've worked toward this for so many years, and maybe it's unrealistic to think that despite the breakup she would be supportive of my endeavors as an artist, but I guess I hoped. And it didn't happen. It stings. So many of my moments of disillusion with the relationship flowered from attempts to begin to do my own thing with my work. She was always so negative about my desire to tour and explore the possibilities. It didn't surprise me that she didn't come out last night but it hurt all the same.

That's the only negative of the weekend. Today Frankie and I drove to Milledgeville and toured the Flannery O'Connor home. Frankie's a fan, and I've read nothing by O'Connor. I bought a biography, her collected short stories, and what looked to be some writing on her faith. I look forward to kipping into them, after some sleep. Tonight, movies and popcorn before Frankie returns to Asheville & her lovely girl in the morning. I'm so glad I got to share last night's show with her.

Picked up the first 100 copies of Happy Rainbow Poems from the Unicorn Petting Zoo today! The art came out pretty well, the audio transferred appropriately, and now all that's left is SHOWS!

Damn man, I can't even believe it all.... And I have no idea if it's good. That was one thing I realized as I drove home listening to it. Is it good? No clue. Not objective. All I can do is eviscerate my own work the way everybody does with their own creative work, so others will have to let me know if I did good. I got through a single listening of it, just to make sure everything was how it should be, where it should be, and threw the Derrick Brown back in the player.

But here is what I know is true: I did something, and I did it with the best of intentions. I made something. I captured something. I cleared out the old so there would be room for the new. That's quite something, actually.

I spent the weekend in Asheville, my old ancestral home and the place where my soul really comes alive. Actually, I was in Canton, where my friends Frankie and Cyndy recently purchased one of the most beautiful homes I've ever been in. Classic, terra cotta pipes, slate roof. Opening onto a horizon of mountains.

Humans have always equated high places with God (think Mt. Olympus, the Himalayas, or, for that matter, heaven). I wrote a lot about God and mountains. And pineapples.

My life is in a very echo-y place these days. As in, words and themes repeat themselves in fast succession. Synchronicities abound. So... I'm listening to Derrick Brown's album Greatest Slits on my way into Asheville, which includes a poem called 1918. Later, as Frankie is giving me the tour of the house, I asked a question about the terra cotta pipes and she paused, gave me a look, and said, "1918". When it was built. Terra cotta. Duh.

Or... I have dinner with Frankie and go on a little riff about how much I'd love a job in Asheville, concluding with "Throw me a bone, Asheville! Throw me a bone!" Later, back at the house, she and Cyndy were discussing the new job of a friend of theirs who has left one restaurant with the word "bone" in the title to work at another restaurant with the word "bone" in the title. I'm not saying any of these things are individually meaningful, but the rapidity of the process in my life certainly feels significant.

Or... (yeah, I could go on and on) later that night, after Frankie and Cyndy had crashed, I stayed up and wrote for a while. At the end of it, I wrote a few really fertile lines like:

Love is that can of pineapples
collecting dust in the pantry
that you always thought you'd bake
into some complicated recipe
but you don't like to bake
and the headlines about diabetes
have put you off of sugar entirely....

Just an idea, but one that I was kind of feeling before passing out. In bed, I kept wanting to turn the light back on to jot down the related ideas that were zinging through my brain, but they were so strong I knew I'd remember them. In the morning, I woke up in a spectacularly sunny bedroom in time to see Frankie pulling out to go to the grocery store. When she returned, she had an assortment of fruit, including a big tub of... yeah, you guessed it.

And I ended up with a really bad ass poem called Pineapples, by the way. I'll be banging that out in the live shows, and my attention is gradually turning in the direction of a book.

But before I get entirely ahead of myself, Happy Rainbow Poems from the Unicorn Petting Zoo is complete as of today, Monday, October 1, 2007. Because I drove back today instead of last night, I don't have it in my hands tonight, but I'm picking it up at noon tomorrow. TOMORROW!

Nats was more fun than I could have anticipated, and incredibly fulfilling in so many ways. I'm at that place in the breakup where I'm not sure how people are going to be; my ex is very loved (and rightly so) in the community, and I'm always the one who hangs back. "Reticent" is a fair word for me. But put me in a hotel filled with my people and that goes right out the window.

I connected, and with a lot of people. That's a feat in itself. I'm always really taken with art that addresses the desire to connect and the ways in which we miss or, weirdly, hit (the film Half Nelson comes to mind), so when I get to live those rare moments where the restraints fly off and I can authentically be around people, I feel like I've won the lottery.

There was a lot of processing about the breakup with the distant family of people I trust because they're loving and uninvested. Those people will probably never see this, but they know who they are just the same. It's funny how I become almost wracked with gratitude when I come away from these experiences. Not gratitude towards the people, but for everything. For all that is, and my little part in it. That's what I love about Slam poetry. The work is so often lovely, but the people. Man, the people just open up the shell I live in and it just falls away.

Three days to go before flying out of Charlotte. I'll be staying with an Atlanta friend who moved to Kentucky not too long ago, the girlfriend of a LouderArts (NYC) poet, and one of her friends. I met the poet last year, and he's a really gregarious, humongous personality (from NY? Really?) all full of happiness and warmth. Apparently it hasn't always been so, but Nats has a way of bringing that out. His girlfriend sounds very cool on the phone, and the cost of the room is suddenly in the "very affordable" range for all of us.

Before I go, I have to:

• Replace my porch light so the dog sitter doesn't kill herself being dragged down dark stairs by the beasties, and
• fix the leak that opened up in my kitchen sink this week.

That's aside from the normal laundry, packing, and cleaning that go on around trips. I do hate coming home to a dirty house. I might also need to take Kitty Paw to the tire store and get a slow tire leak fixed.

I spent last night in the home studio, which was very productive. I might have completed the 10-minute demo for Unicorn Petting Zoo (I'll know later today) which means that I'll also spend some time at Kinko's tomorrow getting CD labels tweaked and printed.

Oh, so much to do... But happily there's a marathon of The 4400 on today, so whenever I need brain rest, there it is.

Off to do productive stuff.

Weeks ago, when I purchased airfare and made reservations for Nats, the host hotel was completely sold out of rooms at the National Poetry Slam rate. I've been calling the hotel intermittently to see if any teams had canceled extra rooms or anything, but no dice.

I booked a room at a Clarion not far away, and was about 24 hours away from canceling my Hyatt reservation when... a poet friend IM'd me at work to tell me that a team was releasing a room. I called the Hyatt, and the woman on their reservations line made a little gasping noise when she found that, yes, unlike all the other times I (and I'm sure others) have called, they did in fact have a room from Tuesday to Saturday at Nats rates.

That's poetry karma for you--just when you're about to be resigned to things not quite going the way you thought they would, bang!, somebody doesn't need the one thing that will make everything awesome and you get word just in time.

And the cool work-related term of the day: Wiki Markup Language. Yeah, I get to administer my team's Wiki. Which means I have to learn how to code a Wiki. Which is really, really awesome.

Changes to the site, like a new background scheme, addition of a Contact page, and of course a Google account for the Unicorn Petting Zoo.

Soon: tracks. Yay!

I'm finally getting really excited at the National Poetry Slam. I've located a roommate, have reservations at two hotels (including the host hotel, where I'm holding out for a longshot chance at a Nats-discounted room), airfare is booked, and I'm planning to spend the weekend before the big show finishing up the audio recording for the Unicorn Petting Zoo.

I'm also producing Kathleen Delaney's album, which at present means that I'm taking the audio tracks from some very cheesy porn and pulling out moans to build soundscapes for some of her tracks. Oh, the poets of erotica. Hopefully it ends up being vulnerable, silly, and just a little bit hot.

It's been such a difficult summer, but I seem to be getting back on track and towards where I want to be. Austin will be fun and rambunctious, and I'm overdue for both.

Having spent the last couple of months occupied with the breakup of my partnership, determining whether we would still be living together (we are for the time being, but I don't think it's sustainable long-term), and trying to focus on several house projects all at once, I've also battled a good bout of depression. On my birthday in May, my grandmother died.

At the end of May, the stove in the kitchen stopped working and it took weeks to get an electrician in to track down the wiring issue that was blowing the breaker. Turns out the wiring issue in question had melted the terminal block and wiring in the stove, so while it was completely toast, I was grateful that it didn't burn the house down. In late June, my tenant told me the air conditioner at my rental property wasn't working.

Thus has the great bulk of my savings vanished. This didn't help the depression.

I'm coming around to accepting that the Unicorn Petting Zoo will, at least initially, be released as a CDR with a Kinko's-printed insert. I'm not crazy about this approach, but I just watched nearly $2500 flow out of the accounts where I'd been stashing the album fund. It's very sad for me. I believe that poets are entitled to have a very professional looking product, and God knows I work hard enough and save hard enough to make it possible. But life intervenes. Circumstances change. Adaptation is a necessary component in all things.

As hard as it is for me to accept, my sinus-congested voice is my voice. I have chosen to prioritize my kitchen and my tenant's well being over my desire to have a glossy, jewel-cased, printed disc. These were the right choices, and now the job is just to get my head turned around and do my thing.