#hola internet

[joecarriestheteam]

Since school isn't a thing for the next couple of weeks I'll probably spend more time on Tumblr. I got tons of new followers so if you want to like this post I'll check out your blog. We can become internet friends and talk about bands/tvshows/reasonswearen'tdoingwhatweshouldbe.

[queer-and-sunny]

Idk if you watch Sherlock but if you do do you have the link to the new episode? Because I have been writing an essay all day and got locked in my room and the Internet shut down till i was done (it was like 6 pages) and didn't get to watch it and currently can't find it anywhere...... Thanks if you can help no problem if you can't

I just went onto the bbcone website and watched it on there, I’m not entirely sure if it’s up still or not. If you don’t live in the UK (I don’t) it won’t let you watch it because you don’t live in the right country or whatever crap. BUT. I found something awesome to get around it. It’s called Hola Better Internet (I think) download it. It’s good. It made it so I was able to watch all the Doctor Who and Sherlock episodes early!

[fuckyeahbosnianrainbows]

Omar Rodriguez Lopez taken by Enrique Fabela at VL2013

[damndanm]

I used to be a poet.

For over a decade, I woke up every morning and spent an hour or more writing. Line breaks, rhythm, imagery, sound—every morning for a big chunk of time, I lived there. I sent out my work and published and read and talked about poetry with my poet friends. Then it all stopped.

It didn't happen all at once, but here it is: I haven't written a new poem that I've edited and taken to the neighborhood of done in about two years. During that decade-plus of daily writing, on the rare occasions I went more than a day without writing, I'd get cranky. Obviously cranky. It was not uncommon for my wife to respond to some shitty remark I'd made by asking if I'd written in a while. At some point, even the cranky went away.

I think about writing every day, but I don't write. There's a whole host of reasons why, of course. I kind of fell out of love with poetry is what I've told people, but really, I lost the drive you need to try to publish and try to make something happen with this thing that rules your life. Similar emotional territory; very different incentives.

I'm telling you all of this because I gave up living in this space, too. It's been a full five months since I posted anything here, and three or four since I've read through my dashboard. I miss you nerds and your wonderful, nerdy lives. And I miss your involvement in mine. It's not just here, either: over the past six months (or more), I've removed myself from just about every relationship I have (save the marital/parental, 'natch): I can't remember the last time I even looked at Facebook or even called a friend on the phone. And I've come to realize that my giving up writing poetry and my abandoning this space and generally being a recluse share a common element. Here's the story as I see it in my think meat:

In the winter of 2009, I intentionally checked out of everything for a couple months (including my job and this lovely place, too) in order to build a website for a personal project. I fell in love with the process. Like, really in love. In lurve. There's a scene in The Comedians of Comedy where Patton Oswalt is talking about the time he and Bryan Posehn and David Cross and Bob Odenkirk and everyone else who ever guest starred on Mr. Show were first in LA, figuring out how to be comedians, collectively obsessing about comedy. He says of that time something along the lines of, "You just have to spend a couple years completely obsessed with the thing you want to be, or else you're just not going to be any good." Grad school was that for poetry. The last couple years have been that for code.1

And now, two-plus years later, I have a completely different career than I imagined for myself when I spent two months making a site to house other people's poems. I write front-end code every day and I get paid handsomely for it. But getting to this point meant I had to put my head down and obsess. Which is partly why I never actually do write poems, even when I think through lines or whole poems or plan out a series of poems while I'm washing my hair in the morning.

There were some lean months between then and now. Most notably, the last several. Moving across the country with a toddler and having all of your possessions smashed in the process really puts a strain on your finances and a panicky fire in your belly. Especially when the company responsible for the smashing has an iron-tight "general handling" clause in their contracts and after several months of back-and-forth with a mediator and lawyers and more fun of that sort they're allowed to only honor less than a third of your claim. 

I'd been doing pretty well freelance before we moved. The idea was that I'd keep doing that after the move and Erin would do some full-time toddler wrangling2. It would mean a drop in gross household take, obviously, but we'd swing it. And we would have, had we not been starting in such a sizable hole.

So, long rant short, we've been a bit skint of late. More broke, really, than we've been in years, perhaps not since college, when you're essentially required to be broke. We burned through our savings almost as soon as we got here, making weekly trips to Ikea to replace each and every stick of furniture that was no longer ours with some lesser, flat-packed equivalent.

So I've had my head down. I've been burning through projects, launching sites, hunting down new clients, writing bids, doing all of the things one does to climb out of a hole. And it's worked. Things are looking up. I'm looking up. My head is up. This morning, I swear to Robert Creeley's dusty eye socket, I even wrote a poem.

Time to get back to it, folks. Is it cool if I still play here?

1Around that same time, my daughter was born, which added to the incentive. Nothing will inspire you to just fucking earn like having a kid. Well, maybe a drug habit or being a person with a pretty good work ethic or, you know, a solid education or whatever. I don't know, if you're into that sorta thing I guess. And not into the whole breeder thing. What were we talking about?

2The move from full-time upper-management to full-time toddler-wrangler has it's own host of side effects beyond financial ones, but that's a whole other post and probably not mine to write.