Please Don't Let Me Quote Pink Floyd Again/2015 in Review (two)

It's my thought that years, like decades, are best reviewed with a bit of hindsight. Just like 2010 felt like the last year of the '00s, despite the regenerative rituals and retrospectives, Januaries often feel like the long walk out of the last year.
Any sort of accurate hindsight doesn't tend to start for me until March or April, at which point the full stuff of current years renders reflection superfluous. Still, in the interest of head-clearing, communication, and a throwback to the days when transparency meant connection instead of liability, I always feel compelled to year-in-review.

So. 2015.
A) "A tough year of hard decisions that ultimately has spurred a lot of personal growth and has me set up for much more."
B) "If I could pay to watch 2015 die in a fire, I would."

Depending on my mood.
Let's start with the good, the potentially exciting, or the highlights:
Soliana Monillas: The day before 2015 ended, my Uncle Status was upped by one, as Amara had Soliana Brynn Isaac Monillas. Zion is stoked to be a big brother, and I'm stoked for more Uncle Time. Any year that neds this way has lots of good to recommend it.
ZAPP. So I'd already started to re-acquaint myself with the Zine Archive And Publishing Project, attended some meetings, helped recruit some writers and readers for the Xenographic series, and become loosely re-involved.
This year, however, both Emily Van Der Harten and Kathryn Higgins, who'd been largely steering ZAPP's fundraising/space-finding/still existing efforts both stepped back for various reasons. After talking to them both, doing some soul-searching and self-assessment, I decided to step into the position of Managing Director (informally, I prefer "Team Captain") of the Zine Archive and Publishing Project.I'm working with some great people and the hope and plan is to get ZAPP into a new permanent physical space this year.
I may write more about this later, but on a personal level, I am very excited- and challenged- by this. It will be a better use of my organizational/curatorial skills than co-running 2-3 literature events at a time to no particular end. It'll also help me build new skills in the non-profit field.
Freeway Park. In 2014, we played our first handful of shows, had fun and started to coalesce our sound. In 2015 we got tighter, wrote better songs and played shows in Bellingham, Olympia and San Francisco as well as Seattle nearly monthly. The Makeshift show in Bellingham, Charlie's birthday show at Rendezvous, San Francisco, and the gig at the Highline were particular highlights. Right now we're working on our first official recordings, which we hope to have out first half of 2016. Personally am working on being able to harness the shots-fueled, beer-fist swinging energy of live performances into a bit less comic (or booze-dependent) intensity.
And I really want to sell you a "People in Seattle Love It When You Travel." t-shirt.
Writing. I've been back writing for Nadamucho, I had a goal to write six short stories and have them all submitted out by the end of the year and that didn't happen. But I did write a few that I think have promise. And in addition to having The Third Best of All Possible Outcomes come out on Shotgun Wedding, the newer poems and writing are things I'm pretty happy with. But such things are ephemeral, we'll see how I feel when I check back on them. Either way I'm stoked to have some stuff to work with.
2015 was also the year that Graham got an I-phone. That is neither here nor there, but it's definitely a thing.

Okay. The rough chuckles.
There were plenty of them in 2015. From the supersweet pest invasion that marked the beginning of the year in my apartment (at a time when Rachel was dependent on the space for her air b'n'b biz) to my friend and Co-worker Beau Martin's suffering a stroke that will take a long time for him to recover from (it's going pretty well, he'll be home with his folks soon) to multiple of my friends and family spending time in the hospital for various reasons, there was a reason that my motto for 2015 became let the bad times roll. . .because at some point, that's just what seemed to happen. This at least gained some catharsis in the event Bummed Out, which could be accurately described as my first time curating a "club night." It struck a chord with a few people, and may go quarterly.
Which would be a weird "making a shitty year into art" move, but I'm rarely opposed to such moves.
The roughest for me personally was ending my 4.5 year relationship with my girlfriend in June.
The reasons for this, and subsequent social fallout, is best left off social media both for our privacy, and desires to move forward. I'm sure if you're curious and haven't had one or both of us give our interpretation of events, you know where to find us. I believe I made the right decision, that it's already better for both of us, but that doesn't mean it was easy, or casual or didn't make me incredibly fucking sad.
The one other thing I will say, is that in the event of such a momentous life change it's really easy to take a long view (especially when said event occurs mid-year) that places every event in the context of The One Event. Everything that happens being somehow related, directly, or indirectly, to The Thing and How It Was Handled. where the first half of the year was all building up to this, every argument or bad day was another brick in the wall,  that subsequently every instance of progress, (or regress) was a direct result of said thing. Which is reductive and stupid; while there was a lot in the first half of the year (and last half of 2014) that played into things, there were also lots of decent-to-great times. Likewise, while the remainder of the year can sometimes feel like aftermath-and-regrouping, there's also lots of stuff, good or bad, that would have happened either way.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm also trying to be a bit less dramatic in my self-narrative.

Well.
That's a lot. If you  made it this far, congrats. You get a cookie, the metaphorical salutation kind, not the actual, delicious kind.

In short, yes: 2015 has been hard. I got lots to work on, both internally and externally in 2016, but I can say with cautious confidence, that I'm starting '16 way better than I started '15, and hope to be able to say the same next year.
And hope that for you as well.

2015

has started fine. the new year brings with it a blog-pressure to write! write! write! all! about! the things, but i have handily already done that. futurelists may happen in the future, which is happy to turn into the present at an alarming rate.

Top Ten of 2014

10. A noticeable achievement in killer robots.
9. King street station clocktower in the fog.
8. The time a pop star/rapper and we were all outraged, or calling the outrage what it was: something we disagreed with because it seemed to indicate an attitude we disapproved of.

blooorrrrrghphmampharrrrgleshupdtreeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuugh! poi poi poi nooooggggheeeeeephrelmoppskj!!! amph!

7. Krangovers: the specific shame and sickness one has after being up all night creating TMNT memes.
6. A very important Tweet.
5. Inappropriate levels of__ expressed by falling on the floor with a microphone in hand.
4. 86ed.
3. A punch in the gut, a slap in the face, a growing fear for ones life every time the news comes on. Huddled around a working phone, desperately refreshing, in hopes to hear something good.
2. A five-page long dictionary of ambivalent definitions every time someone 'revolutions.'
1. Pizza by the slice in lieu.

this is the only 2014 list there is.

You know it's a certain kind of day.

a joke like this provides comfort.

carry on.

Three Ticks Away From Another Renewal

The last day of September should mean something besides a sweatshirt.
The last afternoon clouds, shredded by a setting sun or God's wrath, whichever comes first.
The last of an old lease, clothespiles, the floor, the futon, paperpiles, the breakfast table,
the lamp table, the desk, the bookshelf, bookpiles, the bookshelf, the lamp table, the floor.

The next bus on the last day, full ebola.
The next bus on the last day, masked riots.
The next bus on the last day, late

late
late.

The last stop of a new old season should be something besides calendar page loss. I used to send flares up for apartment changes, the gathering of things, the significance of pizza on an empty floor in a room full of boxes, songs chosen for long laughs, cheap looks. So much peperoni, gathering in corners.

The next day, a first day.
Another three months til the moving trucks, if that,
the last bus of the first day, rolling cartons of torta.
the last bus of the first day, hiding cider in to go mugs.
the last bus of the first day, fist bumps with gloved strangers.
the last bus of the first day, just found twenty dollars,

the last bus of the first day,
late
late
late

late, but rolling.

Trains and Tall Buildings 2: Growth as a given?

So it's official. Seattle is the USA's fastest growing major city.* Bigger than Boston, DC or Denver, edging up on cities like Memphis and Detroit, which have traditionally been thought of as far more important, flagship metropolises, while lil' ole Seattle was content to corner away up near Canada, with its fish and its rain and odd bursts of quirky architecture.
At least, that's often  how it got sold to outsiders; there's always been an internal struggle in town; people in Seattle want it recognized as an incubator of culture and ideas, but also want it for their own; best-kept secret with arts and culture and food and on a comparable level to** New York or wherever, but . . . ours.
(This spreads to the rest of the Northwest, and you have your Olympias and Bellinghams and Anacortes and Centralias cultivating relationships with the rest of the state in ways roughly analagous to how Seattle's had it's will they/won't they affair with the U.S. and world)

I'll totally cop to completely mixed feelings about the growth. I'm glad I live somewhere where not every single college grad is trying to cut me out of my bartending gig*** because nothing else is available. I'm glad that some of Seattle's ideas around fair payment and environmentalism can't be held up as economic hindrances. I'm glad people have jobs, and frankly, I think tall buildings are cool.
There's been a sense of quiet optimism over the last 20 years, so it's hard to see the current building and growth frenzy as some sort of triumphant turn around. As long as I thought about it, Seattle was a cool place to be, city parts, nature parts, family parts, rock and roll parts, lakes and weird retrofuture architecture. It still is all that, but now it's way harder to pay rent.
That said, some of us remember, or have parents who remember when that wasn't always the case. Seattle's seen some lean times. The 1970s are well before my realm of memory, but in a global sense that's recent. That we're in a boom time is neither something to be taken for granted, nor something that will always be the case.
As such, it makes sense to me that some of the most vitriolic anti-growthers**** are transplants, often here well under ten years. They never got to see this sign every time they left and entered the city.

*not sure how they measure "majorness." I think that means a city over 100,000 people. There are plenty of small farm communities that through annexation and development have jumped from 2,000 to 25,000 all over the country.

**or you know, a cheaper, acceptable version of said things. 

***only every third college grad. I'm also a college grad, and that line does smack of hypocrisy. maybe I'll write the blog post about why I'm at least breaking from trying to thrust myself into academia. (hint: I can pay the bills better and I like the work just as much, if in a different way.)

****this post may make it seem like I enthusiastically welcome our new luxury-dwelling amazon programming overlords. Anyone who has walked with me through Capitol Hill knows this isn't true, but the things I think are bullshit, the ways to address this sort of crazy growth, the multiplicity of dualities, these are things for their own Trains and Tall Buildings posts.

2 of 4.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day! Listen to this Irish Music:

here's some new stuff, with the addendums to follow:

Lord and Savor

Tell me about this weird moment, he said, chewing an elongated piece of intestine. He gnawed and gnawed. Tell me about this epiphaaaneeeee smack smack smack smack gulp, this new revelation that you—spit—know. I love beef jerky. I love it. I suspect, however, that much of it is actually pork.
The ceiling fan continued its one-per-minute rotation.
But tell me, young sir, young miss, youngling, what is this thing that happened in a second and is now gone but has changed the way you feel about everything? Tell me, and talk into this tape recorder, then we will let your parents go. It is the plan.

The sun was grey and dusty and the two stared out the county courthouse windows for a long time. The child also chewed a stick of jerky, and eventually said that it was when he saw the ponys, he knew he wanted to be a cowboy, and the man knew that this meant absolutely nothing, and that he was not, in fact “the one” by any stretch, the prophecy would have none of him, just some fucking kid, and his parents had been beheaded for nothing.

Sword and Labor

We unfolded the sign over the bridge over the freeway near the university and the residentials. “FUCK YOUR WAR” it said. The anticipated military parade didn’t arrive. The city council members who’d voted to fire on Everett did not pass by. They were in a hotel talking tunnels.

But everyone has their war. We hadn’t taken into account the use of metaphor in self help books. The passing subarus became alcoholics, the passing jeeps filled with self doubt. At some point a Dairigold tanker crashed into the Betty Paige house and everyone fighting a war against sexual repression just lost, all at once. We were trying to roll the sign up again once we saw what was happening but it turned out that our war was with prudent withdrawal, which was also why the walls of so many vaginas collapsed and we had nothing warm to soften us. Also, the bridge. They warned us this could happen.

January: Grinding to a nub!

Progress and loss.
The broken record on linear time: december feels like a year ago, this month feels like it just started.

"It is good to rejoice in our commonalities."

Over the weekend, Seattle Playwright's Collective mounted the fourth of the Medicine Ball series, in which I pick some poets, Dan Tarker picks some playwrights, they write to a theme, and the audience votes on which artform is superior. We started about 2 years ago, the voting thing has always been pretty tongue-in-cheek (winners get 2 buck chuck, losers get warm PBR) but it tends to be a hook that gets more folks in. Slams, etc. This time the Playwrights took it by 5 ballots over the course of a three day run.
The Medicine Ball is consistently different from all the other things I've been involved in putting together-- essentially it's introducing poetry into a theater context. In the past we've done staged readings, this time it was full staged, costumed, propped. Though it's a bit strange to be involved in such a conceptual way in such a physical undertaking ("hey guys! here's some poets! poets! write a thing, send it to these guys. see you at the show!") each time out the dialogue between playwriting and poeting seems to get more nuanced. Especially as we've got people hopping sides-- Robert Lashley wrote an incredibly powerful one act, and playwright Craig Kentworthy sent in a strong, multifaceted poem that worked on multiple levels (kind of funny they were working from the same prompt. Hmm.)
This time we also incorporated visual cues from local artists, specific word cues, and let the writers see the faces of the actors they'd be writing for. Interestingly, this led to the most serious Medicine Ball to date. There was plenty of humor, sure, but the overall tone of the night was contemplative, desperate, and punchy. I could go on about the specific choices made by writers and directors (though I gotta drop a shout out to the way Dan turned Ryan Johnson's surrealist pastiche into a helpless shrug on the ubiquity of oppressive masculinity) but ultimately, I was just stoked on the evening as a whole, and occasionally forgot I was even involved. That's one of the better parts of organizing, when you can just enjoy something as an audience member.
Of course, you get reminded reaal quick when it's time to strike the set. . .

I'll see your "do what you love" and raise you one "that's why they call it work, kid."

So lately a variety of people have posted this article about the culture of unpaid arts and academic work, and while Slate is increasingly becoming about as reliable and readable as Salon, the article (which was originally posted on Jacobin, natch) nicely articulates a lot of frustrations I have with the culture around writing, arts organizing, and "getting involved." The writer does a decent job of balancing practical and philosophical concerns, and while the author (wisely) doesn't propose a practical solution to the free-work/dismissal of labor problem, I like the ways-of-thinking suggestions in the last paragraph.

Because while a lot of the internship/volunteer/lowpay positions came into existence because of economic realities surrounding pursuits of artistic, spiritual, or intangible value, they are increasingly re-enforced by a sorta beatific, pie-in-the-sky mentality truly available to only a few. The human soul needs to be nourished, but folks tend to nourish the body first. So unlike nurses and mousetrap-makers, most people with any type of say, humanities degree, won't always have a market for their work.
I think the do-what-you-love-and-it-isn't-work paradigm ironically creates a self-love/self-loathing hamster wheel for artists, writers, designers, researchers, who don't feel they have any "real" skills, yet also see themselves as elevated by "pursuing their passions" after years of having their professors tell them to. (or you know, years of following the blog of an oil heiress who decided to quit her job and "make a living" selling necklaces made out of chicken feathers while practicing a self-invented form of yoga and tutting disapprovingly at those in the "rat race.")

There's a longer discussion here with regards to ideas about what it means to be "serious about your art" that tends to get caught up in these pinwheels as well.

At this point I've made an evolving, uneasy peace with ways I pursue my art, ways I pursue my livelihood, and how often the two do or don't intersect. Every individual has to do that on their own; I sort of figured on getting a Creative Writing Degree that bartending, or record store working (ha!) was going to figure heavily in my future.
This is why I roll my eyes at the precious snowflackes who complain that they just "aren't being fullfilled" or feel like they "just, you know, want something more. . ." from their work. I mean, if a job sucks, yeah, get outta there, go for the promotion, etc. but sometimes work is just, you know, work. And that's fine.
Necessary, even.

January 5th, 2014

Rachel and I went to the catholic church where we met three years ago and then to Lindas. Rituals.

On the last day of 2013

I sent my sister back to Chicago, ate Taiwanese food, was correctly diagnosed as needing some coffee, had a beer in the oldest bar in Seattle, helped Rachel clean her old apartment, shook some drinks, poured some champagne, got paid, took a shower.

not in that order. all the blogging cleanup of 2013 and the subsequent looks forward happen by January 7th, or they get skipped this year.