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.

When Whiskey Becomes Coffee--

or Five Useful Responses For The Navigation of Smallish Talk, a Follow Up.

When dealing with the sort of every day interactions I outlined in the last post, there are options. Say you don't want to stonewall someone, but because of circumstances, it's not appropriate or feasible to really get into it at the time (you're at work, they're at work, you're late for something, etc) there are still ways to avoid the bland sameness of "fineness." Here are five responses to the "how are you/what's new" querie that tend to kickstart a friendly banter, let people know you like and appreciate their presence, without rabbit trailing too much.

1) "Well, I'm on the right side of the ground. Everything else is gravy!" Grabbed this from crusty old dudes at the bar. It works better delivered by crusty old dudes, but even saying it as a half-joke has a weird way of re-enforcing a wider perspective.

2) "Kickin' ass and takin' names." This seems like a joke, but depending where you put the goalposts, this can always be true. Perhaps the kicking ass was winning the Lottery and the names you took were those who high-fived you afterwards. Or maybe it was getting out of bed and making coffee.

3) "Livin' the dream, man, livin' the dream." No matter who you're speaking to, it is always appropriate to refer to them as "man" when one is living the dream.

4) "Well, I'm at work, so you know. But, I have a job, so, hey." This is obviously most effective when you're actually at work.

5) "My family just died in a fire and I had to watch the Arsonists laughing eyes as I helplessly struggled against the flames. Nightly I hear his ruthless cackling and all around me seems confirmation that John Calvin was right; and endless hell of predestined torture awaits us all, and I am only futiley counting down the hours until the Bat King flies off with my soul into is torment-cave. But there's a new Italian place down the way and I hear they have a good happy hour. We should check it out."

Universal.

Fast Music For Heavy Fingers or Six Months in a Half Hour

or what happens when we commit to communication

1. Internet Presence/ts.
I just dug through a nearly disused e-mail account to to find a password for a social media network I haven't used in four years. I didn't. Find it. So I had to sign into the New, Improved Version of a site that just won't go away (you know which I'm talking about. it's switched its focus to "music" lately and seems like an unholy marriage of Linkedin and Google Plus any more) and that gave me to the wills of nostalgia and more than a few names I'd forgotten exist. Profiles that haven't been updated and therefore remain locked.
You know, though? After about three minutes it wasn't much hard to click delete on that.

More challenging is/was/will be the 8 years worth of Livejournal. no linking. you'll have to work for that if you want to find all the bouts of self pity, the odd misdirected misogyny, half hearted apologies, and lite-artist-as-a-young-dogisms that simply saying "livejournal" to anyone of A Certain Age implies. Making this whole paragraph redundant.

2. I have acquired another birthday.
You know what I always think I'm going to do? Write some sort of State of the Union*, some three paragraph synopses of the Ats that Here's Where I. This is silly. Not because I never do, or because no one cares (you clicked this link, so I assume you care.) but because I hold off on ALL OTHER CONTENT until I've posted the Big Update. Which is why three updates in June, none in July, a dwindling amount of content even with more to write.
Basically, when people write "I've turned _____ and I FEEL SO OLD" it sounds like a hack's game, someone throwing themselves into a mindset because they think they should. But I also get that it's not always the case that 32 feels just like 31 feels just like 26. Things change, good and bad.** But I'll give you a few more years before you have to endure some smotheringly smug "Getting Older is Getting BETTER!" blog about how spiritually rewarding it is to purchase couches.

3. Seattle is a sentence.
I have not quite lived back in Seattle as long as I lived in Bellingham, but I have lived in Seattle longer than I did in Swansea, and longer than I'd planned/hoped on initial return. This isn't some sort of broken-plans post,  I wasn't sure what I wanted from my hometown as an independent entity, so the result tends to be half boxing match, half dance. A frequent frustration being that much of the work of a grad program in a creative field is making connections. . . which are 8,000 miles away. Ba dum ching. So a sense of starting over that leaves me feel like Now, after an event or two, I feel solidly part of the Seattle lit community. It's a good community, usually. Now that I've done that work, do I want to . . . oh, who knows.
This ambivalence is fairly well amplified by reading through old blog entries from both those previous towns.

4. I quit my job at the Loft.
For three and a half years, I worked at North Seattle Community College tutoring English and Writing to ELL students, immigrants, exchange students, folks returning to school after fifteen years in professions that shut down during the recession. Arguably, this was the most rewarding, edifying ongoing*** job I've held to date. Obviously there were days it felt like work, or I didn't want to be there, but there was never a sense of futility. My co-workers were all engaged, considerate, often artistic folks and whatnot.
However, thanks to the repu-  state budget crisis, there's a spending cap, meaning no raise, no additional hours. Two-three hours round trip for short shifts became the sort of diminishing returns that I couldn't idealize away any more. I quit on good terms and have already felt healthier for having a consistent sleep schedule.

5. Now I work at a bar.
It's a good bar. The amusing nightmares of past bars can go ahead and remain in the past. When people say "I bet that gives you a lot of material!" the answer is "Sure, but only for the first year. Then it's a job-- you writing a story about data management?"
I like my co-workers, it's close to my house, I make close to three times as much per hour as I did helping newcomers to the country learn the language.

6. Rachel and I are still very much a thing, but are not engaged or married or living together or whatever your conceived "next step" is 
You are reading this most likely because you clicked on a link from another site. Believe me, you'd know if something big, good or bad, happened that way. Because internet.

7. I am slowly cutting down the number of literary events for which I am responsible.
Because I'd like to write my own things again, from time to time. A longer post on this balance may be forthcoming, but that's the sort of thinking that got us to this long, list based post in the first place. Never say Probably. Now I will take a bus to West Seattle, which is and is not the same place at all.

*by which I mean Graham. The UNION FOREVER!
**More specific and illuminating insights can be found in the self-help book aforementioned blog post nets me a deal for. Did you also know that change is sometimes hard, but often worth it?
*** So not including one-night gigs reading poetry, or the time I got paid by Southbank Centre to take pics of graffiti and send them to London, where they got made into postcards.****
****Yes, that was a brag. I still think that was pretty cool.

#22: A Stenographer Describes A Witness Using Only The Margins of Her Freshman Composition Notebook

Hammered out of sleep or lack
Hammered out of tire gravel
Hammered out of sprained ribs
Hammered out of new cartoons

Struck from the record for insolence
Struck from the record for rambling
Struck from the record for irrelevance
Struck from the record for pomposity

Worn and drawn from smokey oak
Worn and drawn from his father's cloth
Worn and drawn from coughed jokes
Worn and drawn from catastrophe waffles

Recorded for posterity
Recorded for tweny bucks an hour
Recorded for an archivist's morning
Recorded for fun

Sliding out of the stand like a snake toward an apple
Sliding out of the stand like brick upon oiled brick
Sliding out of the stand for lack of coordination
Sliding out of the stand like dissipating clouds
puffed through all this woodwork, dissappearing up
his own words, freefalling, freefalalalalaing, this
won't be the last he sees a courtroom door.

Fall Checklist: Returning to School (for Job not studies)

2012/perpetual edition.

* Smell of rain on concrete, generally.

* The gears in your head slowly shifting from drunk-wrangling to grammar-wrangling sorts of intelligence.

* The part where the Rock Dude who works for student services remains compellingly all-purpose. Zeppelin hat, DK t-shirt, crystal castles hoodie. This figures continued existence in spite, or because, of dubstep, etc.

* Being glad that the one barista still works there-- at nearly three quarter's worth of experience, she is closest the campus cafe gets to simulating the coffee of the outside world.

* New teachers, no sleep. Old teachers, all sleep.

* Reflecting that it hasn't changed much since I was a student, that I reflect that every year.

Civic Duty

1. as much as it pains him to say, after a long history of confidence, he does not know who to vote for in the next election. every single speech sounds like a commercial. 2. she knows a lot, has always, knows whom she'll support, supports who she knows, has always known, will always know, is happy to tell you. 3. It doesn't matter much, the peanut butter sandwiches will taste the same as he drips blackberry jelly on his snap-down shirt and wonders why no one takes him seriously. 4. with face scrunched, head shaking, he punches out a ballot, fills in a card, hits the screen. all at once, because no one's sure how this works any more. 5. So now this reporter wants to know will you vote? With hindsight, with hindsight, with hindsight.

Feb '11/this ends here/has ended/trouble with tenses.

Things that I realized/did/experienced in February that were not related to readings, as such:

1) starting a blog post and getting distracted and starting it up again twenty minutes later is a good way to forget all your awesome ideas.

2) sitting on the floor in the middle of your living room, trying to write things (of any nature) while the universe and your family cavorts around you is less than optimal. the reason this sitting occurs in this place is because of the necessity of physical wires for the internet.

3) roy williams is capable of high levels of support, fun-having, charm and unobrusivity, all at once.

4) my dad know everything about seattle's history and still wants to learn the new stuff ("why don't we swing through georgetown-- where exactly is all the stuff supposed to be happening there?")

5) planning for a class that you are going to teach requires actually planning for a class you are going to teach.

6) having a cute new baby around means people bring your sister food, which you can steal.

7) a broken phone screen is a pain at first, but then, liberating.

8) lists are the lowest form of communication.