standardkink: 2020

I’ve been a bad blogger the last few years, but look, I’ve been very busy. At least I shared photos! But then I was heartbroken to discover that somehow this little blog has become unlinked from the Instagram account I was using to update it. That’s why my last several years of posts are all just ghost posts now. I’m trying to figure out how to fix it, but I am a bad blogger, not a web-internaught, so - you know - this process is going to be terrible.

In the meantime, just know to watch this space, because we’re living through a pandemic and possibly the last democratic election America will ever get to have. It seems like someone should be writing about all this shit as it happens. And not on your social media, which is so ephemeral and combative that it doesn’t even ever feel like anything but anger bubblegum.

In the weeks and months to come, I’ll be here. I’m not promising to be helpful or useful or enlightening or - let’s be honest - even interesting, but I’ll be here. And maybe I’ll even figure out where the hell all my pictures went. It’s like my past has disappeared. I’m basically the boringest version of Jason Bourne.

Watch this space.

P.S. Have you listened to Fiona Apple’s latest album. You outta.

I heard the most marvelous line of poetry today.

The poet Tracy K. Smith was on a podcast I listen to and I was listening to it in my car about 7am as I sailed down the curvy ribbon of road that leads over the bluff at the eastern edge of Marina, where I live, down and out into the Salinas Valley, which was looking particularly yellow and green and sprinkle-ry this morning.

She read from her poem “Charity” and it struck me intensely and I have been thinking on it all day because I have loved deeply people like this, but have always tried hard not to be like this. The this I am describing is this:

Hating what I carry but afraid to lay it down. Stingy. Angry. Doing violence to others by the sheer freight of my gloom.

Aside from the precision of the expression of the idea being described, the word freight rather than weight, is what makes her such a good writer.

You can read the whole poem here.