Personal

...the way I hate cheap beer. In the right setting, nothing beats a cold PBR in a can. Plus, I was tagged. First the housekeeping. The rules of this meme are:1. Let others know who tagged you.2. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.3. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.4. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged. And now, eight things: 1) My MOS in the Army was 63B1P, which means I was a light wheel vehicle mechanic/paratrooper, which means I jumped out of airplanes that…

  Jason Carney After reading Tony Brown's latest Zero Point Zero column, "Kicking an Addiction", a couple of things jumped out at me about my own writing that I've always known but kept buried in one of the more remote closets in my brain. Much like the speaker in Buddy Wakefield's poem "Convenience Stores," I'm addicted to novelty. If I can't be unique, can't take a unique tack on a subject, I don't see it as worth tackling. For me, that idea of "novelty" always manifested itself in my tendency to write from my own perspective, distilling my own experiences into…

WKRP Talk about a one-two punch!  I was out in Cincinnati yesterday for my job and, as I'm heading into my first meeting, I get a text message from Salomé that India didn't make it into the NEST program. BODY BLOW! I wasn't completely surprised, though I'd been holding on to the slimmest of hopes that maybe she'd snag their final spot in a last-second decision by the board to push the boundaries of the program by accepting a less-than-perfect applicant, spurred on by an impassioned speech by the social worker who was initially convinced she was a shoo-in. (Too much Boston Public…

Nuyorican Performing your poetry onstage isn't like riding a bike at all, unless you're talking about the part where your foot keeps slipping off the pedal and it bloodies your shin. I used to hate that! When I decided last week to hit the Nuyorican for last night's slam, I figured it'd be a fun, low-pressure show where I'd be able to comfortably continue my slow return to writing and performing. When a wave of nausea and jangling nerves hit me around 5:15pm, I was tempted to change my mind and go have a drink instead. Nevertheless, I stuck to my plan, walking…

Countdown Keith Olbermann Special Comment on Libby Pardon Keith Olbermann on Bush, Cheney: "Which is the ventriloquist and which is the dummy is now irrelevant." As cable news talking heads go, Olbermann's always been one of the more interesting ones, but in a time where the Daily Show typically offers the most incisive news coverage on TV, his "Special Comment" here is a refreshingly impassioned but level-headed statement that is as much a call for Bush and Cheney to resign as it is a "wake the fuck up, people" call to Americans of all political persuasions, including the apolitical. Objective…

Talk To Me Poetry Slam Roger and I were joking on Monday about his first chapbook (Of Revolutionaries and Romance I believe it was called), the existence of which he denies and if Lynne ever wanted to really get at him, she'd pull from the vault and sell reprints on Ebay. Preparing for tomorrow night's slam at the Nuyorican, I opened my old poetry archive folder that has stuff of mine from 1997-1998, my first season on the slam scene, a lot of which was read once or twice and retired, deservedly so. Most of it didn't even make my own first chapbook,…