Microdosing Monday (Tuesday 5/14/24 edition)
Monday’s back, and who amongst us has the energy to cross days off the calendar anymore? My calendar still says it’s April, and it’s given up on reminding me of the things I’m supposed to do.
Last week was fun. We hosted that first Fuck It Friday Free-For-All Zoom reading. Wish you would have been there to join the eight of us that took turns reading, or telling a story. We’ll do it again next month, which Friday TBA by next week.
And the Hardcover copy of my recent novel The Dead and the Desperate, released last week from my publisher Roadside Press. If you’ve a preorder, they’re making their way for autographs (hilarious, I know) then back out to wherever you are. If you haven’t ordered one, my god, what’re you waiting for? $25 for a hard back book that could be passed down to your future generations. Sure, you could have leather bound copies of Twain on your mantle, but trust me, Samuel Clemens could never write the books I’ve written.
Here you go. I got a new fun neuro-divebombed story for you. On my way somewhere recently on a warm day, I decided to pop in to a Dollar General and treat myself to a cold Gatorade. Three minutes in the store, and I come back out to my car sitting in its spot, still running. Yup, I left the keys in and the car running. I’m about three years away from assisted living at this point. If you’re neuro-chaotic too, I know you understand.
Plus, I left my THC vape pen in the car, and it melted into the stickiest substance this side of glue. Sticky substance and ruined weed pen laughing from my car’s console. But what do you do? Weep with the lilies or leap with the willows, life happens the way it does. And I haven’t even told y’all about the toolbox that got stolen from my car at some other point last week. Look, I miss them tools like an old friend that’ll never come back around, but just like the panhandlers I befriend on the regular, I reckon it was needed by someone else more than I needed it.
But for the best news of the week, Rusty Truck published two of my brand new poems. Both of them protest ones. Both of them poems I’m proud of. I’ll try to post a link. My gratitude to editor Scot Young and to the Rusty Truck. (Trying to post a link and it kept fucking up. Sorry. No link.)
This week, writing, writing, writing. Need to finish a piece for my column The Sweat Stained Review over on A Thin Slice of Anxiety. Need to work on my poetry collection and keep working on the memoir of my time at Jeep and in the UAW.
Got a trip planned to southern Indiana and some friends are getting hitched on Saturday, so I gotta get one of my two button up shirts ready.
Books I’ve loved the last week:
-American Television by J.I.B. (Spartan Press) this book is certainly one of the most pertinent collections of poetry we’ll read all year.
-These Are the People in your Neighbourhood by Fredericton, New Brunswick poet laureate Jordan Tretheway (Roadside Press) a collection of 80 or so poems written for and dedicated to residents of the town of Fredericton. The book serves as a beautiful collage of people that you might find in any city. Maybe your city. And there’s other poems to Fredericton in the back. The color photos of watercolour paintings from artist Eva Christensen that are interspersed in the book are breathtaking. Beautiful book.
-Bad Teeth by Debbie Kirk (Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books) a collection of selected poems from her early chapbooks that’s blunt, raw, and so unflinching in its debaucherous honesty that legendary rock bands couldn’t hold candles against Kirk’s raging fire.
Be kind when you can this week. The world is cruel enough, that I don’t ever want to add to it.
Love,
Dan
Ps. My brain was too scattered to put the pieces of this together, so it took two days to make sense.
Today (5/14) is the late poet Roque Dalton’s birthday. Here’s a loaf of bread tattoo I have in honor of his poem “Like You” I think that poem is the universal best, and most beautiful poem ever written.
A lot of people have asked me lately, who my literary agent or publicist is. So, this is the answer I’ve been giving them. This is a page excerpt from a recent reading chapbook I made.
There’s 15 or 20 movies or documentaries that I watch at least once or twice a year. This is one of them.
Here’s your funny for the week. The funniest memes are sometimes the most honest.