My Birthday and Henry Rollins

Last week was my birthday. We got so much snow, we were unable to leave the house for the first part of the day and unwilling to leave for the rest of the day.

I received no gifts that day, but I was buried with birthday wishes on my facebook, which is nice.

My father didn't call me. I haven't spoken with him for about a year. This is fairly common for me. I often wonder how I was born to a person so disinterested in my welfare. It was difficult growing up under his tyrannical rule. He tore apart the family several times, and it's at one of those points now. But I don't think it is ever going to be together again. I haven't spoken with my brother in many years. Something like seven or eight. My mother doesn't speak with him either. Neither does my father.

This year I felt like a commercial for an iPad because I "facetimed" with my mother in California. The technology is only 10 years too late, but that's OK. It was interesting to feel closer to someone because I could see her face over a distance of thousands of miles over a hand-held device. 

The next day I received the only birthday card I received this year. It was from my employer, the company, Virginia Eagle.

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I have been working out poetry in my mind. I'm trying to write a book called the Chris Hemsworth Sonnets. Sometimes I think it's genius. Other times I feel like it will not be taken seriously because of how funny it is at parts. I feel like the Glen Danzig of poetry. No one ever knew how to take the Misfits, and maybe the Misfits didn't know how they wanted to be taken. But my cult following is nowhere near as big.

I met Henry Rollins. I said something about Sons of Anarchy and we had a short conversation. We met at a gallery/art museum in DC that was showing old Punk and GoGo artifacts. It was amazing. There are pictures. When Henry Rollins was done DJ-ing and the party was over he walked out alone and waited for a taxi. I said "good-bye Henry Rollins, and thank you." He looked at me like he was trying to figure out if he knew me. He said "thank you" and got in a cab alone. I wish I did know Henry Rollins. I think he would appreciate my writing and my music. People these days have so many buffers around them. I'm not sure how I know as many people as I do.

After that, we met this guy named Jared, and we went to the after party, another gallery-cum-discotheque. The after after party was great, too. But the night was dissolving, so Mary and I bugged out and went to the hotel. 

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My birthday makes me somber. Sorry about this sad post after so long being away. I'm trying to work blogging back into my regular routine again. These flaws and starts are killing my writing.

Reporting on my vegan Thanksgiving.

Yesterday, the News Leader published an article that mentioned (my) veganism. That's really nice of them. Some of the comments on the article are not so nice.

I think my main problem with holidays is that everyone hates each other more than usual on them because they can't seem to grab what they really want: to love each other more than usual. It's as if there is such a huge expectation for everyone and that everyone feels obligated toward one another, something that is never pleasant and seems as arbitrary and ridiculous as dressing your girlfriend up like a squaw on a Thursday and forcing her to roast you a hideously large, genetically modified, flightless bird.

Then there's tradition.
Tradition is an obligation to nostalgia. Nostalgia is just a rosy version of the past. Yesteryear was not all that great. Every civilization has had a strange notion that the golden age was yesteryear, and now we're circling the drain, waiting for the end of the world.

I am a thirty-year-old heterosexual American with an iPhone. The end of the world is far from my mind. I think we are living in the most exciting times in human history. We are relatively peaceful, most of us aren't starving in America, we have time for art and literature and science, and most people I know have a computer in their pocket that can access more information than anyone ever thought would be available to a person born to working-class parents.

So just relax. No one cares how you were brought up or what you think of the way I eat. It's nice to be nice, and now that we all have the luxury to do so, let's! I don't have to kill animals to survive, and I live such a pampered life that I can act on my compassion and follow my conscience. I can live super-healthy and live as long as possible. Science has taught us what causes heart disease and other killers, so now we can avoid them! How great is that?! I'm thankful for all of that. I wish more people would be. If animals have wishes, that's what they wish for, too. Especially hamsters and flightless birds.

I'm also thankful for my girlfriend and her family, who have gone out of their ways in the past to make me feel welcome. They probably felt obligated. I hope they didn't.

Anyway, chill out, people. This holiday season doesn't have to be "the best ever." It doesn't have to match some imaginary version of holidays in Coke commercials or sit-com specials like Family Ties and Growing Pains. If you just act nicely toward one another, we'll all have a good enough time.
I'm also thankful for Indians. I love reading every year about how Thanksgiving is really celebrating brutality and war. Do you remember that episode of Buffy when the spirit of some Indian warrior was terrorizing the Slayer and her friends on Thanksgiving? I think Angel was int hat episode. Joss Whedon is a creative genius.

I've always disliked Thanksgiving, and I thanked the Indian tribes of the USA every year for giving me a reason. Now I kind of like it I guess. I mean, it's not Christmas or anything.

Some Stuff

I like this little banner.

I am officially sold out of the third issue of Sorry for Snake. Thanks to everyone who bought it for buying it.

I am also sold out of Dearest Children of the Revolution, I am Pleased to Announce my Resignation. A special edition of the chapbook will be out soon.

Also, also, also, Sara Mumolo's chapbook, Brain in a Vat, will be out soon.

Sorry for Snake 4 is out now. There's a contest to get a free copy. For details, email me. To buy one, you can go here.

Tonight is Clay's party. I will go to that. Tomorrow is the last Pegasus reading I know for sure will take place, so I will go to that, too. Sad. I am sad that the East Bay will suffer such a crushing blow with Clay's departure from Pegasus. I will have to start buying poetry online like everyone else I guess. Will Diesel pick up the slack?

I didn't sleep last night.

The sun lit the morning blue, and I realized it was a new day.

I spent the night writing things that have no value.

Sonnet for the Man I Saw Jump from a Bridge in Japan, Who Was Just Like the One I Saw in San Francisco

Sonnet for the Man I Saw Jump from a Bridge in Japan, Who Was Just Like the One I Saw in San Francisco

A man in all black
jumped from a window
and busted his knee
in an ocean of regret

two places like s horse
from a plank like a hapless
pirate who didn't get points
except in his back and the sea

The fallen leaves
look like fallen rats
in gray lake morning
Sundays

when yachts are rented
for funerals and weddings.

Death

I had breakfast with a poet friend of mine, whose name I will leave out. She was mad at me because I have been busy and unresponsive to emails. If I am slow to answer your emails this month, please don't think I am being a jerk. I am a jerk in so many ways, but I don't do it by not answering people. I am actually just slammed like a door on a Jehovah's Witness.

Plus I've got this huge reading that I am doing next Monday. You should come.

Two friends of mine died last week. I am a little broken about it. I am pretty upset that is. We'd drifted apart, but I still feel a loss. My uncle, the only uncle I know, is sick with the big C. He has three months to live. Cliché. His name is Jack, too. Cliché. Life and death are both cliché with capital C's. It's weird to me that so many people I know don't know a lot of dead people. I feel like death is always around me. I used to have a friend in Germany who was a lot like me. His name was Jake. He was American. He was a great friend to me. We both knew a lot of people who were dead. The living people I know who don't know any dead people are probably going to be the next to go. Well, after my uncle Jack, who won't see August. Lung cancer. My grandfather, Jack's stepfather, died of lung cancer. My aunt, his sister, my grandfather's step-daughter, killed herself when I was very young, right before my grandfather died after having not smoked a cigarette for eighteen years. Jack hasn't smoked for twenty-five years. My biggest fear is getting sick in America. When you're in America, no one cares about your pain.

Your pain is something that makes me want to write poetry to understand. My pain is like a sliver or a silver cactus needle. It doesn't really hurt. It's just a foreign thing hiding out in my body that makes me squirm. You like to watch me squirm.

A poet in Washington sent me a youtube video of slugs having sex. In the bar next to the slugs having sex was this video, which is one of the creepiest things I have seen in my life.



I wish things were different in poetry. You have convinced me, dearest readers, to hate Billy Collins. I never really liked him anyway. The more I read what he says about poetry, the more I think that he needs to catch cancer in America.
I don't really mean that.
I mean that he is a bad spokesperson for poetry because he doesn't really care about poetry as an art. I don't think he thinks it's an art, but a masturbation technique. I still agree with some things he's said, like poetry should have an audience that includes non-poetry people, but I hate him now, otherwise. I still don't think he's worth bashing, though.

I am sorry for this long post. I am rambling. I hope that the ambulance sirens outside my weary little flat are not for you, poetasters. I hope they're not for anyone who loves poetry.

HANG!

Men with nooses round their necks
don’t like to work unless

There are other men with nooses
round their necks.

No matter what,
you end up working

For someone’s dad.

You have to get a cleaning lady
because when you die no one will find you.

DESTROY!

Last night, I went to a party at the house of the world's preeminent Joyce scholar.
Not that you'd care.
It was very fun.

I will never find a woman who gives a fuck about the world's preeminent Joyce scholar.
They don't care.
It is very sad.

Life is like that sometimes when it comes to girls and creatures of the night and scholars.
No one cries.
If you die alone.