Catching Up On Some Blogging

I bin on the wick biz tip and all adig in't.

But, happy as I am, at the same time I feel like I have neglected some really important things, like setting up a reading tour in March. Like setting up a screening of 60 Writers/60 Places at AWP. Like sending doing the blog.

One thing I would have written about is the awesome Literary Death Match that Opium brought to Baltimore. Todd Zuniga is a really good hoster. He's formal in his tailor-made suit, but casual in his demeanor such that the audience gets laid back. So it was fun, and it was the right amount of impromptu in the impromptu snow.

Mike Young came to it. He read at it. Was it the best poetry reading I've ever seen done? I've seen a lot of them. I think it was the best. It passes my populist test, meaning I think even my ma woulda liked it. She wouldn'a know what was all up in it, but Mike was convincing as heckle.

Jen Michalski did a read before him. Hers was, as Anthony Burgess would write, "horror show," which is to say, great, evocative. It was about Heidegger's notion of what is a thing as he writes in his essay "The Thing" which can be found in the book POETRY, LANGUAGE, THOUGHT. He says, "A thing is a thing insofar as it things." Jen's piece was happy about how things get smaller and you put them places, like in a room.

Mike's piece cannot be capitulated so neatly. It was about love, though, and from the air pulled love sentiments that made love actually.

And if you want to know the whole truth in part, the impromptu part that I liked best was that one of the judges's moms got snowed in so the babies had to be sat motherwise, meaning that Carolyn Zaikowski, who came with Mike Young to the show, got to be the judge in the first part of the match. She wrote these poems on the spot that were really funny. Her name again, Baltimore, is Carolyn Zaikowski. She is okay. She goes to Naropa. Apparently she writes non-narrative novels. I'm not wicked sure that is accurate, but I'm sure her name is Carolyn Zaikowski and she is the drummer in my band, The Random Incident. She also plays keys in her own outfit, called Carolyn Conspiracy. She lives in Massachussetts or whatever it's spelled.

There's more to it than that, though. She and Mike kept asking if I was talking about "the Ipad, the new tablet computer from Apple." She and Mike kept singing about how everyone was going to die from STDs, so we should all make love. We hung up poems in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore. We did a professional photoshoot at the Safeway. At the vegan expo, we ate the food.

People are like, make every word count. I'm more like, make none of the words count.

I could hyperlink junk, and maybe I will, but maybe if you're interested you can just Google whatever.

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FLASH: Submissions for books will open again soon.

FLASH: I'm going to migrate platforms to a submissions manager called submishmash. They seem like good people, dig?

FLASH: I gotta go to the doctor!

FLASH: I'm starting a cooking show and I'm either going to call it "Culinary Genius" or "Cooking with ARob." Cast your vote below. It's going to be on the Internet. The first episode will feature Kevin Sampsell. The second episode will feature Heather Christle.

FLASH: More announcements to come, but I gotta go to the doctor!