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.

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.

2013: Internet Stats

in 2013, I posted 58 times on this blogspot. This is down by five from 2012, when I posted 63 times, and down by 18 from 2011, when I posted 86 times on this blog. 2011, so far, is the record for posts-per-year since I started writing here (instead of Livejournal(!)) in late 2007, when blogging still seemed an artistic and expressive form instead of being Crucial to Maximizing and Maintaining a Strong Internet Presence.
The most read post this year was my Next Big Thing Interview in February, right before the release of FJGTPL. The second most read was when I wrote about the end of the Greenwood Lit Crawl, which makes me happy, since it was a piece of communication I put some work and thought into, and is perhaps my favorite of the informational blog posts from this year.
The month with the greatest number of posts (nearly a third of them from 2013) is April, due to NaPoWriMo. I still mine that repository of near-finished poems and half ideas for inspiration or pet rocks worth polishing.
Most of the traffic came from instances where I posted a link to this blog on Facebook, though some reroutes from SPLAB and Wonder And Risk came a close second.
I make no promises about whether this year will continue a downward trend in posting habits, or will reverse it. But this is the information as it stands. Deduce what you will about my life from it.

Leftovers from 2011, part 2 of 1 (or maybe 3)

in 2011, there were songs. Oh yes. and there were bands. and there were songs by bands and bands banning songs they used to play and I didn't so much make a list of "the best of" because I am still hearing songs that came out in 2011, and probably will be, well into 2017, because that is how music works. Rarely does anyone simply immerse themselves in "the now" in a way that doesn't also make them look a little bit silly. Here are some songs that I heard a lot of times in 2011, most of them on purpose. I'll bet you could get a good buzz on if you made a drinking game out of the ones that I'd already posted at some point, and forgot about. Most of these are just sound, but there's a couple videos.



Mogwai's album from January is still good 90% of the way through (that opener is a snooooze) and should not be relegated to any sort of bins. This song sparked my interest in actually checking out Mogwai for real, since people had been assuming that I already liked them for years.



The Obits are one of those bands that deserve a bigger following, but most of their fans listen to no new bands except the Obits. They will never write a hit, but they have a lot of cred, and sometimes they write things that sound like hits from a weird alternate-universe mashup of 91-93, 1980, and 2001, just after "fell in love with a girl" came out. "Moody, Standard, and Poor" is a good record.



I assumed Blue Sky Black Death were from Bristol, or France, or Latvia because of their gorgeous instrumental beats/melodies. Guess they're from Seattle. Huh.



. . . of course, everyone and everyone and everyone's mom who knows that Shabazz Palaces are from Seattle because HOLY SHIT SHABAZZ PALACES EVERYONE! EVERYONE! SEATTLE HAS RAPPY TYPES! EVERYONE!



"lana del ray" "odd future" "___________"



Brielle moved to Chicago this year. Go, Brielle, go!



I was gonna do a whole double-entendre thing about this band being called The Men, but realized it would be labored and hackneyed. If they were just called "Men," though, that'd be awesome.

(see also, a few posts down, the Thee Oh Sees clip for the continued up-bubbling of punk/psych/garage from various bits of the nation)



Chuck Klosterman pissed this band's fans off. I won't post a link, I'll just say that Klosterman's gotten fuckin' lazy in recent years, and tuneyards fans are touchy folk. Less people need to write about how a Feminist Woman Artist writing about rough fucking is a Statement, and more people need to write about how it is awesome.



Stay weird, Annie.



One night, after working 13 hours combined jobs, a little drunk off beers from work, I wanted to listen to something funny and aggro and weird and didn't feel like FOTL (I know, RIGHT?!) and so I loaded this video up to play this awesome song by these awesome rappers and the internet in Rainier Beach is so slow that it never played and I was angry at 3 a.m. and put on an episode of "Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia" but it woke up my housemate, who had to work at 8 a.m. so I had to turn that off as well. Marty has since gotten the internet fixed.



Momma's gonna buy you a mockingbird.



This song can play from start to finish three times in a row, starting at Westlake Station and ending at Northgate Transit Center. The sheer fucking amount of times this has soundtracked the sunset over Lake Union, or the roll out at rush hour by exit 173, or the absolute lack of any view at all.

Leftovers from '11 (part 1 of 1, or maybe 3)

or the Less Vague, Less Angsty Version

This post went missing for a while and could probably use editing/adding to. But as much as I love reflecting, I'd much rather start looking forward. still, there's a certain gnawing regret everytime I SAY I'll do a big wrap-up post and don't, so here you go. . .

People
The Big Stories this year: Rachel "Not Drugs" Hug and Zion Monillas at the beginning of the year and the passing of Aunt Betty and Nana near the end. Rachel, being the girl who I am boyfriend to, was introduced to me by mutual friend Star, who was pretty sick of my vague, glum pronouncements about not getting any/meeting rad girls. In an effort to solve at least one of those problems, on the 2nd of January Star brought Rachel and I together under the roof of St. James'Catholic Church. It took a few months to convince Not Drugs that I'm not a total waste of time, but we've been together for a while now and its going well. She is super awesome and my girlfriend and gush, gush, etc. I'll stop before you get sick.
Zion Monillas is my nephew. He is almost One. He has lots of dark hair and was birthed by my sister Amara.
Nana and Aunt Betty's passings happened within a month of eachother, making for a lot of funeral in little time. Both are tremendously missed.
Roy Williams visited in February, bringing a slice of South Wales with him. good week.


Writing and performing
So, while I did take a few solid stabs at things like National Poetry Month and other such productivities, this wasn't as great a year for new hot brilliance. That said, I did something like 15 readings around the state, so that's at least an event a month. Highlights include the first (and heretofore only) Muxbo Symposium, the Claustrophobia kickoff and Cheap Wine and Poetry. Not Drugs and I launched the Claustrophobia Readings Series, somewhat in limbo at the moment as we ponder forward movement with it.
Now the Host of Works in Progress at Hugo House.

Living
In 2011 I've had three different mailing addresses, and four living spaces. This is as stressful as it sounds, though I gotta shout out my friends for helping me out when I needed it.
I bottommed out sometime late '10 on doing Really Cool Internships For Free For Great People. . .
still, working/finding/searching for work has largely been a series of discouragements or ego bruises. Interviews, a week-long tenure as a canvasserI don't interview well. I still work at The Loft, tend bar at Orcas Landing (scroll down) and occasionally pick up extra tutoring shifts.

Travel
Korea! See posts about it from earlier this year.

Aging
I am 30 years old now. completely different, exactly the same.

To be continued? Posts about Twin Peaks, about Being In A Relationship, about Politics, about writing with little time to do so, fighting monsters, creating more interesting ways to reflect on years. . .

My Year In Lists Part 2.

Without a doubt the finest films of 2010 were:

3-- The Duel. This adaptation of Chekhov's tale blends atmosphere and romance in a re-telling to compete with the best Shakespeare adaptations.
2-- Winter's Bone. This tale of crime and family in south-Missouri meth country builds tension throughout and features amazing understated performances that lend an authenticity to what could have been an excercise in stereotypes.
1-- Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. Debbie Gibson shines in this eco-fable wherein Mankind's great fears are unleashed upon it. Thrills abound, but never detract from the underlying metaphor. Oscars for sure.

My Year in Lists Part 1

List number one isn't so much a list. It's sort of a list. But not entirely. That's the sort of day i'm having, so, dear reader, fuckin' deal with it.
I tallied the total and over the course of 2010, I did 14 readings. Which is like, one and an eight per month. Or something. Granted, two were at residencies where I lived (one at Warm Beach house on the deck, one here in brighton) and a couple were at Gusta's Your Hands Your Mouth readings in B'ham.
Still, that's still a solid amount, especially considering I didn't do any tours or have any new shit I was trying to make people buy. This is sort of a form of bragging, but it is also a way of feeling less generally unaccomplished in the face of various successes (both deserved and un-) around me. I tend to hold it's better to compare yourself against yourself than others. Because there's always someone doing better.
The last reading I did in 2010 was at the Lights Of Christmas coffee shop. Trying to explain the worlds-collide nature of having performance poetry at a christmas-light display in North Snohomish County is too much for right here (and would rely on way too many simplifications) but I successfully wrote some borderline-uplifting stuff that I don't hate and people dug the reading.

other than that my fave readings were: Portland: Beer and Cookies Cabaret. . . oh man. so many chocolate chip cookies and sessions lager and a film about robots and comedians and country music. Eva Suter can throw an art party.
Swansea: The Crunch . . . need I say more?
Seattle, U-District: New Crompton w/Deerseekingheadlights, My Printer Broke We broadcast this on chatroulette and there was dissonant sludgefolk and sweet noise and songs about cats.


There are way more that roughly tie these, but I don't want to screw the economy of reading-status with inflation.

The other thing I did artistically, and perhaps most significantly, was start to visual art in an official way again. Also, verb words. Look at the pics here.

maybe next year there will be some longass post about a new book (or at least chapbook) that someone else is putting out (a goal of mine) or Conspiracy Agogo's east coast tour or my new found life as a regional-humour standup. The future, like they say, unwrit.