wish you were here

In San Diego. We’re going to be leaving in about an hour or so.

Yesterday we saw the tail end of Alix Olson’s set and saw all of Pamela Means. There was one girl there with a leather bra-thing on, except her boobs were hanging out and she had electrical tape over her nipples.

Axis went okay. There were quite a few people there, and it was good that the poets came out to represent. The recording came out decent, too. It just sucked that the way the room was set up made the performance a little more of a challenge because it’s hard to be on a big P.A. over some loud breakbeat music.

We might be stopping by Redlands on the way home. That’ll be interesting.

This is funny.

You look good because of where you are and what you choose to do. Location and agenda have a powerful effect on what others think of you. Your context enhances you. Once you figure this out, you can use it to get what you want. Your simple explanations sound like poetry. Your audience swells as more people discover you and they all stay until the end. You stand as proof that the messenger is just as good as the message. Even if you’re just telling the world how great you are, people are willing to buy it.

Tonight we’re performing at the Axis Cultural Festival. I have no idea what this is going to be like, but we’re supposed to be doing 20 minute sets. Right now I don’t feel either way about it, I’m just ready to get out of town, even if it’s for a couple of days.

I shouldn’t have performed at the Jitter’s reading last night. I’m tired. I don’t think tonight’s performance is going to be up to snuff. But we’ll try. My brain’s pretty fried at this point.

Even if I just see the beach for a couple of minutes this weekend, I’ll be happy.

Dang. Now Robert Palmer’s gone. Past all the cheezy 80′s videos was a great voice. Ack. Feels weird.

Yes. This is all the stuff running through my head since Nats, courtesy of Daphne Gottlieb. (via Uncle Andy)

It’s been nice just to let lines come out this week. And to just read Louise Gluck’s First Four Books of Poems and let things soak a little. I think I’ve just been trying too hard.

So Monday I’m going up against Uncle Andy in a head-to-head haiku. This won’t be one of the haiku I’m doing, however:

Was a cute barista
at Starbuck’s today–
good reason to sell out.

So we made a deal to write some haikus while we’re both out of town this weekend and only use those for the match. Which means I have to be sharp while I’m in San Diego. We’ll see. More than likely, I’ll get whomped, but I’d rather get whomped by Uncle Andy who’s good at haikuing.

It’s good to be excited about going to poetry on Mondays again. Especially now with new people coming out who are going to give the rest of us some heat on the slams.

I used to have a thing about holding the mic in your hand when you do a (memorized) piece, but I found last night that it can be a pretty liberating experience.

I think for now I’m just going to read for awhile and try not to write anything unless it comes to me– at least for this week. I’ve been trying to force a lot of things in my poetry lately and it’s stifling my urge to work on the novel. I want to start over on the novel, take the good stuff that I like, and just see where it goes. I haven’t lost anything in my head about it, but it’d be nice to just have it all come out like the stuff I was working on last year.

And right now I’m workshopping the first novel a chapter at a time, so that’s going to be a project to polish while I go back into the agent search.

Plus I’m just being really hard on myself as a writer to push myself to be better. I don’t really know if it’s working or not.

So like, the only thing I got done today was a haiku. Fuckers.

Though after acoustic open mic I walked around the Adult Superstore with Andy K, Sheila, and Marissa, and talked dildos and debated the asthetics of some of the movie covers. I thought about buying something, but I’ve been spending too much money lately as it is, so I’m taking a break for awhile and just buying food and groceries.

Yeah, going to a porn store made me feel really lonely. Not because of the other people that were there. I’m at the point in my life where going to a porn store isn’t an act of desperation, it’s just what people do. But there was just something about looking at all that plastic– that strange, detatched, almost antiseptic vibe to it. Maybe I didn’t want to buy anything because I’m not really looking for what the little machine cocks could do for me. I wanted to feel skin– not necessarily a penis– but I wanted to feel a man’s skin. A shoulder.

Right now, I’m driving around with no car insurance. Basically, my father was on AAA, and the insurance was in his name, and my brother and I were supposed to go in last week to change everything around. Yeah, so dammed fun.

But I just went over to the website and got my own membership, and did an insurance quote. They’re supposed to be calling me in the next few days– preferably tomorrow.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been feeling really tired. I’ll wake up fine, and then around 4 or 5 o’clock I’ll feel the sudden strong urge to want to take a nap. I hate it. Make it go away.

Fuck it. I think I’m going to try and get some work done at Roma.

I’m trying to figure out exactly what I’m going to be doing with both of these blogs I have now.

This one, hosted on Blogger, lets me be a (lot) freer with the code. However the LiveJournal has the possibility for a higher readership.

Such is the bread of an everyday life, I suppose. Or something.

Or I could just do the multiple personality thing. Unlike real life, I can ramble in different places– that way I’ll have absolutely nothing to say to people offline.