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Mike from Minneapolis. Sincerely. (I tend to go by MH Rowe)

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This song can be used as a flotation device. How are you, is it still summer where you are.

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Summer 2016: back to short hair and beard, mostly by accident rather than design. I tried to trim my own hair and ruined it, a pitiably rookie move since the last time I regularly cut my own hair was more than a decade ago at age 21. So I had to have a professional correct my mistakes, and short was the only way forward. And the beard happened cause I stopped stopping it from happening. We'll see how it goes. This is now a fashion blog. I like how the light in this picture brings out my need to keep taking selfies. How about you, you good?

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I haven't been finding/making enough time for writing recently, but I have been writing jokes cause a friend and I thought it would be fun to get on stage and try our hands at standup. I tried it once years ago. It was pretty fun. Also, I recently got a non-academic, full-time job as a technical writer and the oncoming financial security makes me feel disbelief, amazement. Still unsure what feelings to have other than relief. I'm typing this on my phone in the park, and certain birds keep diving and disappearing under the surface of the lake only to reappear across the way. I love reappearing across the way. It's one of the best methods of reappearance.

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update

Today at the Humane Society there are two Angora rabbits, one named Joan Jett and the other named Stevie Nicks. There is also a cat named Johnny Rotten. It is an unusual alignment of rock stars. In a different category, there is a cat named Xerxes, who is partly shaven and had to have corrective eyelid surgery. The lower part of his eyelids was turning inward, scratching his corneas. Finally, there is a cat named Atticus. He meows quite a lot. These names are in lieu of pictures. This is a new version of the internet.

[5oil]

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This is one of those videos that the internet, through long practice, has habituated me to think I should reblog and append the words, “It’s me.” 

But it isn’t me. I am neither the dog or nor the woman nor the brick wall. I’m not the chair or the vegetation. I’m also not the ambient sound or the glasses. I’m not the hesitation or the disappearance. And I’m especially not the strawberries. I’m not even the reblog. I’m not here. This isn’t happening. I had pizza for lunch, though. 

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No one is safe in the anthropocene. Or, everyone is "safe" in the anthropocene. It's all about who's in charge of recognizing injuries. Look at me, I'm rambling again. I love this cat.

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It's been many years since I did so, but I haven't gotten my hair cut in months. I trimmed the back myself a few days ago to evade some buildup that was tending mullet-wise. Other than that, I am really enjoying long(er) hair. And what is the point of a blog if you can't occasionally declare to relative strangers your deeply vain enjoyment of growing your hair out? It's not that I think it looks incredible. It's that it looks almost exactly the way I'd like it to look. I'll grant you that the distinction I'm drawing here may be so academic that it's a little silly and evasive. But no one told me to be serious. No one told me not to evade. I do tend to have tall hair. Last semester I caught one of my students doodling a picture of my head in his notebook and seeing how he chose to depict my hair was revealing. It wasn't quite a caricature, though. It was real. Just not something you'd ever see in the mirror or a photograph. Hello there, I thought when looking at the picture, I should get a haircut or just keep going.

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how to keep everything light and fun

First, get born. Planet earth is an ideal place for keeping everything light and fun. 

Second, try to make friends. Human companionship is essential for lightness and fun. If it seems hard to make friends at first, try having nice qualities. However, keep in mind that personal grooming and an attractive personality are not as important as paying people small but consistent sums of money to pretend they like you. Buying them beer counts.

Third, pick a hobby. No one cares what hobby. You just need one. It could be building stuff, or breaking things other people build. It could even just be yelling or playing the trumpet. Hell, you might not even need a hobby. There’s no guarantee anything that is usually counted as hobby-like will appeal to you anyway. Remember that joy is often associated with needless striving and low-level panic at the suspicion that you’re doing something wrong even if you’re not sure what. Maybe your hobby could be your obsession with keeping everything light and fun. 

Finally, think of everything as a zero-sum game. One of the more powerful tools that helps to keep things light and fun is the belief that your light and fun life openly saps the possibility of lightness and fun from other people’s lives. If you feel light and fun and you see others looking dim and dismal, then you can make the reasonable assumption that lightness and fun have happened to you. If this assumption feels unreasonable, then perhaps the light and fun has already been drained from your life by forces unknown, working against a backdrop of vague menace that propelled you toward the panicky pursuit of lightness and fun in the first place. Really it’s not so bad. I had a good weekend and maybe you did, too.

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My parents’ new cat, Grady Blue, likes to hide in boxes. If you are familiar with domestic cats, this fact won’t surprise you. What may surprise you is that this morning, when I woke up at my parents’ house, the power was out. More surprising still is that at some point later, my dad came downstairs and handed out small packages containing space blankets–the crinkly foil type–to me, my brother, and sister-in-law. He encouraged us to use them and stay warm. The most surprising thing of all, however, was that I then I went up to my parents’ bedroom and my mom was in bed with a space blanket already draped over her, obscuring her almost completely in tinfoil. I’m sad to be leaving these crazy people in just a couple hours when I begin my journey back to the Midwest. Both moms and cats like to hide underneath things to feel safe. The parallelism of these two pictures will stick with me forever.  

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This song has shaken me so deeply over the past fourteen hours that I cannot express coherently how wonderfully perfect it is. The drum track is incredible, Lee Moses’s voice is capable of being torqued all over the fucking horn section, the horn section is screeching, and the little guitar licks are trebled all to hell. I’ll take it. I’ll take a thousand of it. Why had I not heard this before? I hope the end of 2015 is as good as it seems like it might be. I’ll be in NYC for three days starting on Sunday and then heading into the Pennsylvania wilds to see my tired, loving parents. I hope I can play this song on the car ride. I’ll leave part of my heart here in the Midwest, though, so I can pick back up where I left off.

[deadthany]

I thought I hated ketchup but I had some today and kinda liked it EXCEPT that I also managed to spill it all over my dress and tights and now I smell like ketchup and I hate it again.

[theteej]

Thoughts on Trump

I want to echo what some friends and scholars have been saying with thoughts of my own re: Trump.

1) Trump is NOT Hitler. Stop that. I am absolutely, positively uninterested in the idea of Hitler being a unique evil that cannot be repeated, but I am even MORE weary of the bogeyman of Hitler applied to every situation. No. Trump is not Hitler. He does not use armed thugs to intimidate people and government into cowering at his commands, he has an ambivalent relationship at best to the armed forces, and despite his incredibly dangerous, xenophobic rhetoric, it is not genocidal. This is not a means to dismiss or diminish the violences he is encouraging; it is a profound encouragement to contextualize them.

2) Trump’s rhetoric is neither new nor spectacularly different than pre-existing American discourse. STOP saying that this is newly alarming, or “un-American” with a gasping, pearls clutched voice. It is profoundly American to see violence as a fundamental part of the nation. It is profoundly American to enact immigration restrictions and deny people entrance based on markers of difference. Let us not forget that initial citizenship and immigration requirements were restricted to “free white persons,” that Chinese people were expressly banned, and that quotas were established on less ethnically acceptable groups in the early twentieth century. Which leads me to….

3) Much of the critique of Trump’s immigration policies is grounded in an idea of the naturalness and “common-sense” legitimacy of the American nation-state. Imagine, for a minute, what all of the anti-Trump hand-wringing over the “traditionally free and welcoming” immigration policy in the United States looks like to Native Americans, who have systematically become minoritized strangers in their own indigenous lands? Or to African-Americans, who themselves are the product of undesired immigration and subject to disproportionate inequality and death? Or to many Mexican-Americans, whose families pre-date the establishment of illegitimate and stolen land borders across their homelands?

4) Further, let’s not pretend that real, daily violence is not enacted against Muslims daily in the name of liberal American values. Drone strikes, “collateral damage,” air-strikes on missed targets (like the MSF field hospital recently admitted) do untold damage and death to Muslim targets daily. Let’s not be selective in our outrage here.

5) Even further, let’s not pretend that we don’t ALREADY live in a violent police society in which black people are denied inherent humanity, seen more likely as deserving of death, and are constantly scoffed at for their demands that their lives matter. To focus on Trump’s rhetoric as dangerously new misses the incredibly violence that blacks and other POC live in every fucking day.

If you want to truly ‪#‎bebetter‬, yes, be appalled at Trump, but resist the easy move to make him exceptionally bad, or different from the very matrix of toxic privileges and oppression that structure our society, our nation-state, our settler existence, every day here.

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I’d dance with you to this.

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Chillin' with this killer on my lap.

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There is a kind of dance song that feels like it’s not quite for parties but instead about being alone in a crowded room. It’s the kind of song you dance to and feel like you’re dancing with memories as much as the people around you in the half-light of any good party. Kiiara’s “Gold” is an excellent example of this phantasmal genre: it’s a kiss-off but sounds like it’s about a ghost. Maybe that’s best for exes? Probably not as a rule, but I don’t know. 

Anyway, chopping a song into pieces with whatever digital program chops songs into pieces is--for some reason--a very attractive feature in pop music. While, on the one hand, the stop-start feel at the beginning of “Gold” is the essence of glitchy dance tunes, it’s also classically rock-and-roll. The basic structure since the 50s has been the backbeat, so there’s something very traditional about the syncopation at the beginning of this Kiiara song. That sample is fucking 1000% gold. (I don’t know when “glitchy” entered the vocabulary of music criticism, but it sounds so perfectly nervy and nervous.) 

I danced to this song alone and then with a friend last night. And I think I will do so again today. I turned 33 recently, too. What a strange, quick year it’s been. I want to hear this song on New Year’s Eve and welcome 2016 with a touch of sad swagger (as all years ought to be greeted).

[carrieabigstick]

Carrie Lorig @ Tagvverk Journal

The Book of Repulsive Women

I wrote a 24-page sonnet / an essay called “The Book of Repulsive Women.”

In it, a body doesn’t need a cunt to be a Stoned women / just a wound.

In it, a woman who can’t see the body she performs with goes on a tour with her first book. She eats / she doesn’t.

In it, she is feeling + illness. She is the sea.

In it, she can’t be straight.

In it, a body refuses forgiveness and fucking Bread Loaf and men who tell her how to read / perform my poems / who ban her from bringing poems longer than 30 lines to class.

In it, I’m worse than a corpse I’m alive.

In it, I’m worse than a corpse I’m dead.

In it, Mary Ruefle is wrong / we are surrounded by people dying. It is not rare.

In it, Emily Bronte says Fuck You, I’m real.

In it, ALL READING IS BLOOD.

I wrote a sonnet. I’ll never write a sonnet.

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I read Carrie Lorig slowly and carefully and over the course of long periods of time. You should do so as well, but at the speed that suits you. Or maybe you should do it at a speed that doesn’t suit you. Speed is distance over time. Time is just space. So speed is just another way of remaining rooted, thoughtful, open, and vulnerable. Perhaps it’s not. I love and admire Carrie Lorig’s poems, at any rate (speed, space). 

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Thinking about my perpetual lack of financial security right now is filling me with genuine fear and panic. I need to get out the house. Metaphors of being trapped start to literalize when you feel panicky in the basement apartment of the green house where you live in south Minneapolis. I could go get a drink alone. Or go grocery shopping. One is less wise than the other, though both involve spending money. Money is not wise. Spending money makes me feel like I'm incapable of thinking. I own too many books, and 2015 is the fastest year I've ever experienced. I have so many dear friends but right now feel ludicrously alone. Which is silly because a friend spent the morning and afternoon working with me here in my place. Ok, I'm leaving. Grocery shopping it is. I took a walk in the park earlier and saw a kind of bird I'd never seen before. Also it was surprisingly warm out. I think I'm pretty hungry and that this is contributing to feelings of panic. Many things contribute to feelings of panic. That's what makes them things.