Report #7: In A Lonely Place

I intended to write this months ago, but the coronavirus outbreak has disrupted many of my plans. As an essential worker, I’ve spent much of the first half of the year stuck in a painful grind. While others receive unemployment checks larger than my regular checks, I’m forced to risk my life so that assholes can buy mulch for their gardens, or use their time off to build their fantasy patio decks. What it boils down to is I’m overworked and unable to do the things I enjoy. Because of this, I’m not expecting to get any writing done this year. While it’s great to see people rising up, both the rent strike and the protests have added an extra layer of tension. One bright side of this pandemic is that everyone looks more attractive when they wear a mask. You can really see people’s eyes. Many people have beautiful eyes. So much expression can be captured in just a glance. Health-wise, I’ve had to postpone the surgery I was hoping to have that would remove the benign tumor over my clavicle. But my blood pressure, after being heavily medicated, has returned to normal. Weirdly, I wake up with numb hands. This might be because of one of the medications I’m taking.

Two notable deaths occurred during this period: musician Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and poet Michael McClure. The first time I saw Genesis in person was in 2015 at the California College of the Arts. Genesis gave a lecture that invigorated my creativity. At the time, I felt at a dead-end poetically, but something Genesis said helped me come alive: “You should never limit what you use.” It was a reminder that everything, all mediums, texts, and experiences, can be used as the raw material for creating something new, even poetry. As for Michael McClure, his books Antechamber & Other Poems and Jaguar Skies were two of the first poetry books I ever owned. When I lived in the Bay Area, I saw him read with Diane DiPrima at a warehouse space in Oakland. He read some of Julian Beck’s poetry. I thought he’d be ancient, but it surprised me how youthful McClure looked and sounded. I'll forever be impressed that he was friends with both Richard Brautigan and Jim Morrison.

The only art I saw these past months happened before the lockdown. I was able to go to Jayne County’s Bastet-themed show at the Marlborough Gallery. County’s Bastet show comprised of two-dimensional anthropomorphized cat paintings. The cats were a cross between Egyptian gods and extraterrestrials. Some of the cats had multiple breasts, but almost all of them had long rope-like penises. Some of the penises split apart like a multi-headed snake. That same day I also saw the Jean-Jacques Lequeu’s show at the Morgan Library and Museum. His profiles of buildings seemed grand and fantastical, while other drawings, such as the nun exposing her nipple, had an unexpected sexual and visceral flavor.

I’ve had many wonderful dreams lately. One stood out: I was staying at a cabin that was said to be haunted. It was also a museum and had glass cabinets with rare items in them. The entire cabin was dark, but there was a fire in the fireplace in the bedroom. The bed was like something you’d see in a fairy tale, large and puffy. I got in the bed and watched for ghosts, but didn’t see any. After some time, I heard the front door open and a bright light came through the doorway. My friend Emma emerged from the door and said my name. I remember her shaking my hand. Behind Emma was a group of punks who came into the room ready to party. I wasn’t that upset about the invasion of privacy, but then I saw a former friend (and known abuser) sitting at a table drinking a beer. He had an unusual amount of facial hair, almost making him look like the wolfman. “You have to leave,” I said to him. “I don’t want you here.” He protested, but I repeated myself several times. Suddenly, the table he was sitting at moved by itself, flying across the room. “The ghosts?” I thought to myself. All the punks and partygoers stepped back. “Did you see that?” one asked. “Are you telekinetic?” another asked. “Yes,” I said, lying. “And if you all don’t leave now, things are going to get really bad. Have you ever seen the movie Carrie?” At that point, everyone left the cabin and I went back to bed. That’s when I woke up.

Lastly, I’d like to share links to online projects I’ve discovered these past six months. A man named Dan Bell has me captivated with his YouTube series devoted to dead malls. One of my poet mentors, Sparrow, has started a podcast with some of his friends called Baffling Combustions. They have some great episodes on Thoreau and Blake. My friend Jason Dinges (of many Portland grindcore bands) has started a podcast series for “strange tales” called Lost Rhetoric. In the first episode, Jason talks with his father by telephone about a UFO encounter in Virginia. Another podcast I listen to religiously is Lydia Lunch’s The Lydian Spin, where she interviews punks, artists, and countercultural icons who might not be spotlighted elsewhere. It’s an important historical document. And I would also like to make note of this post made by surrealist Merl Fluin on her blog promoting the often neglected surrealists of color.

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Books I’ve been reading:

• John Doe - Under the Big Black Sun

• James M. Cain - The Postman Always Rings Twice

• Dashiell Hammett - The Dain Curse

• Djuna Barnes - Nightwood

• Jean-Claude Michel - The Black Surrealists

Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:

• Deli Girls - Deli Girls

• Daughters - You Won’t Get What You Want

• Rowland S. Howard - Pop Crimes

• Tears for Fears - Songs From The Big Chair

• Daryl Hall - Sacred Songs

Movies I’ve been watching:

• The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, 2014)

• Are We Not Cats (Xander Robin, 2016)

• Dead End (William Wyler, 1937)

• Society (Brian Yuzna, 1989)

• Dogs Don’t Wear Pants (Jukka Pekka Valkeapää, 2019)

Report #6: Cure For Pain

The last six months have been difficult. I started working full-time and overnights, which has cut back on my creativity. I hardly have time to do anything anymore. I even have trouble finding time to go to the doctor. I go to bed at nine in the morning and wake up around six in the evening. The only benefit I get from this is that I no longer have to deal with customers at work. I’ve been feeling very short-fused too, so this is probably a good thing. My health problems persist, and I’m now seeing three different doctors. I was told my aorta is dilated by thirty percent. My blood pressure is ridiculously high, so much that each doctor has to do a double-take on the numbers. The new medication I’m taking for my hypothyroidism seems to be helping. This has all been very scary. My uncle died of a heart attack last year, and I don’t want to follow in his footsteps.

On a brighter note, last month, I finally released my second ebook, Brandon Freels vs. The Reality Principle. It consists of twenty-three prose poems. I wrote most of them in New Orleans, but some are from when I first moved to New York. The cover image is a collage I made several years ago while visiting Kevin Sampsell’s collage night at the IPRC in Portland. I released this ebook as an ePub and with it re-released my previous book, Seven Nightmares, also as an ePub (instead of a PDF). Both can be downloaded on my website.

Also in writing news, this summer Rob Mcleenan asked me to write a non-fiction piece for his blog, My (Small Press) Writing Day. At first, I was hesitant, but I found the experience fulfilling. Not long after, I was asked by an editor from Reality Hands to answer some interview questions for their website. In the interview, I was able to revisit some of the same ideas I wrote about on Mcleenan’s blog. Unfortunately, it appears the editors of Reality Hands shut down the website before my interview was posted. It’s a shame too because I enjoyed the writing and design of that website. If you want to read the interview, I’ve uploaded a PDF of it here.

On a sadder note, my friend and mentor Steven Dalachinsky passed away in September. I first came into contact with Steve when I was in high school. I had been writing letters to Hal Sirowitz and Hal decided to introduce me to other New York City underground writers. Steve was one of them. Eventually, my friend Kris Hagner and I published a xeroxed broadside of one of Dalachinsky’s poems. We were teenagers but Steve welcomed the venture. He humored us. As I got older, in my twenties, Steve and I would lose touch on and off but he’d always come around and send me a collage-postcard. I’d visit my parents and get all these collages he’d mailed me.

I met Steve in person for the first time when I moved to New York in 2013 with Allison. He was feisty and fierce yet very personable. The first time we met, he spoke about taking me to The Stone to see some jazz. He patiently listened to my relationship woes and when I, unfortunately, had to leave four months later to escape Allison, he gave me a list of poets and artists to meet in San Francisco when I got there. When I returned to New York two years ago, Steve was reading everywhere. He was prolific. He was so ingrained in my understanding of New York, I’m not sure what New York will mean to me without him. I’d run into him and Yuko at readings, noise shows, avant-garde music shows, and art shows. He always knew what was happening. He was in so many worlds. I will miss him.

As for highlights, one for me was seeing Brad Abrahams’ documentary about the painter David Huggins, Love and Saucers. Huggins believes he lost his virginity to an alien named Crescent, and his paintings document his encounters with her and other aliens. Huggins’ paintings are nocturnal and intensely libidinal. Many of his works include nude alien women, sometimes mounting him, or at other times having him suckle their breasts. I also saw Gee Vaucher of Crass speak at the New York Art Book Fair and caught Francis Bacon’s monumental work Three Studies for a Crucifixion at the Guggenheim. Lastly, I was very proud to have one of my involuntary paintings included in the Involuntary México show in Mexico City. The show was held in the Hidalgo Station of the Mexico City subway, which I found curious considering my piece that was included was taken at the Ralph Station in Brooklyn. From one subway wall to another.

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Books I’ve been reading:

• Kenneth Patchen - The Journal of Albion Moonlight

• Benjamin Péret - Mad Balls

• Steven Jesse Bernstein - I Am Secretly An Important Man

• Bessel van der Kolk - The Body Keeps The Score

Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:

• Don Cherry - Brown Rice

• Pharmakon - Devour

• Joe Jackson - Steppin’ Out

• Sonic Youth - The Destroyed Room

Some publishing notes:

• Three prose poems (“Art,” “Blood,” and “Spirit”) appeared in Neutral Spaces Magazine no. 1.

• My prose poem “Epic” appeared on the Paintbucket website.

• Three prose poems (“Magic,” “Jump,” and “Bomb”) appeared on the Five:2:One website.

• Three prose poems (“Rules,” “War,” and “Double”) appeared in Fearless no. 68.

My Writing Day

Originally appeared on Rob Mclennan's blog My (Small Press) Writing Day.

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Timestamps are approximate.

4:30 am. Since I’ve started working overnights, I’ve found it hard to tell when my days end or begin. As my shift comes to a close, one of my co-workers asks me how I got such big calves. I find his question curious. Why do I have big calves? What’s with my body anyway? I write his question down on my iPhone. At the moment, I use the Drafts app for these one-liners. In the past, I used the Notes app. As you’ll see, technology plays an important roll in my writing life. Maybe it is because of the immediacy, or maybe because of the convenience.

5:00 am. I get on the R train at Prospect Avenue and transfer to the A train at Jay Street-MetroTech. On the train, I see a woman on her way to work wearing see-through high heeled rain boots. I will probably never use this in a poem or a story, but I make a note of it. I feel like much of my writing life is spent collecting and arranging fragments. Sometimes I’ll spend weeks just collecting until one day I’ll try to mash them all together like a Kurt Schwitters or Max Ernst collage.

On the train ride home, a drunk man at the back of the car starts harassing people. An older homeless gentleman gets on with a shopping cart and the drunk man starts hooting and hollering at him. The homeless gentleman says, “Oh no,” under his breath and rolls his eyes. “Hey, hey, are we at Broadway Junction yet?” the drunk man shouts. A train car full of people and no one responds to him.

6:00 am. I get off the train at the Ralph Avenue stop and start walking to my apartment but I get sidetracked when I see some weathered signage. I take a photo of the signage. I’m part of a group on Facebook called Involuntary Painting, so when I’m walking around the city I’m always looking for some misshapen blob of paint or some tattered sign to photograph. The key to understanding involuntary painting is that it must be unintentional.

I go to the bodega by my apartment and order my usual sandwich, the Broadway Special. I’ve had this sandwich so many times that I don’t really know what’s in it anymore. All I know is it has a lot of turkey and some melted cheese. The cook teases me. He says it’s too early and that I should be eating breakfast.

6:30 am. I enter the apartment and Wally, my housemate’s dog, barks from inside her room. I eat the sandwich and fall asleep. I have a dream where I’ve woken up in San Francisco. In my dream, it’s night and I’m in the backyard of my old house, a place nicknamed Bay Area 51. I walk up the stairs and enter the house through the back door. Inside its pitch black and empty. There’s no furniture. I stumble my way into what I believe is the living room. My old housemate Tasho is there. He whispers something to me in the dark. Then we see some car lights flash on the wall and hear the voices of the rest of our old housemates. It’s almost as if we were all called back to that house by some kind of magnetic energy.

2:00 pm. Wally’s barking wakes me up. He barks at the front door as the neighbors go up and down the stairs. My housemate has gone to work. It’s just Wally and me. I walk to the bodega again. There’s been a shift change and it’s a new cook. I order a cheeseburger and fries for lunch. I take my laundry to the laundromat.

4:00 pm. I’m at my computer, looking over my writing notifications. I have several weekly writing prompts set up in the Reminders app. This keeps me writing. The older I’ve gotten, the harder it is to stay organized and focused. These notifications help. They range from simple goals like “write a poem this week” or “write a diary entry in Day One” to more project-based goals. I don’t always complete my goals, but it’s good to have them.

One project I’ve been neglecting is my irregular reports that I send out through Tiny Letter. I have the newest one outlined already and I spend the next several hours writing the text. For me, the reports function as a substitute for a blog. I write about the art I’ve seen, the events I’ve gone to, the places I’ve been, and my life in general. For organizational reasons, I compose all of my projects in the Ulysses app.

5:00 pm. Wally comes into my room and messes with his blanket. Eventually, he settles on just sitting in my doorway.

5:30 pm. My writing gets interrupted by a call from my boss. He asks me if I want to work full-time. I say, “Yes, of course.” He says he didn’t want to take Ashley’s word for it and wanted to speak with me first. He says he’s working on it and he’ll get back to me later.

5:50 pm. My boss calls back. He’s updated my schedule. I go full-time starting Monday. By now, I’ve just about finished a draft of my newest irregular report. Another of my writing notifications is to do some free writing. I use the Flowstate app for this. With the Flowstate app, you have to keep writing for a certain amount of time or the text will disappear. I do several five-minute writing exercises. Mine often read like semi-automatic texts. Much of my regular writing is done through association and collage, so these free ramblings are a nice change of pace. I haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with the finished pieces.

6:30 pm. I start watching Swamp Thing, which I haven’t seen in maybe fifteen years. At some point, I stop watching it and start listening to Marc Maron’s podcast. He’s interviewing Geena Davis. They mention The Fly and for some reason it reminds me of Swamp Thing.

9:30 pm. I don’t work tonight but my friend Tooth is performing nearby at a secret venue called The Glove. I walk up Ralph Avenue, stopping to get a half-pint of whiskey, and head to the location. I run into Tooth on the way in. He’s headed out to get some beers. Four or five bands play. Some are punk, some are electronic noise projects (like Tooth’s). I notice the guitarist for one of the punk bands is also the co-owner of the best bookstore in Brooklyn, Better Read Than Dead.

2:00 am. On the way home I stop at a bodega near the venue and get a steak burrito. New York burritos are very mediocre compared to San Francisco burritos, but they are okay drunk food. I get home and my housemate is awake. I just got health insurance and she asks me if I’ve made a doctor’s appointment yet. I haven’t. Wally is happy we are both home.

3:00 am. Still kind of drunk, and with a migraine coming on, I try to work on my writing a little but it feels uncomfortable. Then I try to read a few poems from Ariana Reines’ new collection A Sand Book. I’m too drunk to concentrate. I put on a documentary about UFOs and pass out.

Report #5: Isle of Life, 1888

I didn’t go out much these past four months. I couldn’t afford to see Killing Joke, but I was able to see their frontman Jaz Coleman speak at a bar in the Lower East Side. When asked if he thought civilization was coming to an end, he cleverly responded, “Civilization hasn’t even begun!” I saw a fascinating show at the Superchief Gallery of Sarah Sitkin’s Body Suits. The wearable suits were made to look like another person’s naked flesh. I tried to share some photos of the show on Instagram but Instagram found them offensive and removed them. I went to the Frida Kahlo show at the Brooklyn Museum and saw another kind of bodysuit, Kahlo’s decorated corsets. I also caught the Alice Farley Dance Theatre at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, with their ethereal, inhuman costumes. Lastly, there was the Leonard Cohen tribute at the Jewish Museum. My favorite piece was The Poetry Machine by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. It was an old organ you could play where each key was aligned to a different speaker. When you hit the key it played a recording of Cohen reading a poem. Each key had a different poem. You could hear him read one poem by pushing just one key, or you could hear a chorus of Cohens reading different poems all at once by pushing multiple keys.

More important to me than the art I’ve seen are the two visitation dreams I had this summer. The first involved my parents and my step-grandfather Lyle. I was on a swampy island with Lyle and he kept talking about having electrical problems at his home. He lived in a collection of elevated trailers, all connected by wooden walkways. In the middle of the trailers, there was a tiny patch of land higher than the rest where all the electrical cords went. I helped Lyle fix his electricity by turning everything off and then on again. When it was time for me to leave, I got on a boat that reminded me of the Staten Island Ferry. It was night, and on the boat I ran into my real-life friend Captain Shirt. Shirt said, “I thought you were leaving in the morning?” He was right. I wasn’t supposed to leave until the morning. I called my father and asked him if I could stay overnight at my parent’s place. My father said I couldn’t and that I had to leave the island now. Then he hung up on me. When I tried calling again, he wouldn’t pick up. For some reason, the boat was traveling to New Orleans, and I remember Shirt said, “Maybe you could spend a day in Amsterdam?” When I woke up it occurred to me that everyone in the dream except for Shirt was deceased, and I immediately thought of Arnold Böcklin’s painting Isle of the Dead. I Googled the painting, and at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry was an image of Arnold Böcklin’s painting Isle of Life. This piece was painted in 1888, and, as those close to me know, 1888 is my recurring number.

The second visitation dream had my friend Ronny Burke in it. Not to be confused with the surrealist poet Ronnie Burk, this Ronny Burke was the guitarist for the Oakland band Mansion. The dream opened with me at work in some kind of department store, but the building was only geometrical shapes and didn’t have a ceiling. I was alone, finishing up whatever job I had to do. It was very dark, with only the moonlight to see by. Ronny came walking down one of the aisles and stopped when he saw me. We looked at each other for a moment and he began walking toward me with his arm stretched out and his index finger pointed at me. As he approached me, his finger touched me. “You real?” he said. Yes, I told him. “I’m dead, aren’t I?” he said. Yes, I said, then I asked him if he remembered anything. He said something next but I couldn’t understand him. I looked down at my iPhone to open up my Camera app. I wanted to get one last photo of Ronny. But when I looked back up, he had started floating in the air, seemingly against his will. Then his body started to fold in on itself like it was being pulled into a small invisible hole. He didn't seem to be in any pain. I took a picture, and after he completely disappeared, I looked at the image. At first, it was a picture of Ronny, but then it slowly transitioned into a picture of a forest.

In July I went back to Portland to assess how much of my storage unit had been pilfered. Much more of it had been taken than I thought. It even appeared as if the thieves came back a second time and removed the hinges on the door to get inside again. Sadly, I failed to find a pendant my father had given me that contained some of my mother’s ashes. While I was in Portland, I also visited the Portland Art Museum. My favorite piece there was Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s The Bell, the Digger, and the Tropical Pharmacy. I don’t know much about the politics behind the piece, but I enjoyed watching an industrial machine destroy a building from the inside out. The slow build-up with the shaking walls reminded me of a kaiju movie. Before I left the Pacific Northwest, my friend Nova and I took a trip to the Ape Cave in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. I was surprised at how dark the cave was, even with flashlights. The cave was made by a lava flow and much of it took an hourglass shape. The ground looked like mud, but it was stiff and hard. The walls were wet with white slime. It was an eerie experience. Afterward, Nova and I drove around trying to get a view of Mount Saint Helens, which erupted almost forty years ago. Eventually, we drove down a road that disappeared under a wave of large rocks. We assumed this had happened during a recent flood. Some signage had been torn down and was very weathered. Nearby, we found a small creek but the rocks proved difficult to traverse. An opening in the trees gave us a view of the mountain. We were much closer to it than I had even realized.

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Books I’ve been reading:

• Sun Ra - This Planet is Doomed

• Dominique Laporte - History of Shit

• Ariana Reines - A Sand Book

• David Kalat - A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series

Movies I’ve been watching:

• Subconscious Cruelty (Karim Hussain, 2000)

• Permanent Green Light (Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley, 2018)

• King Kong vs. Godzilla (Ishirō Honda, 1962)

• Vigil (Vincent Ward, 1984)

• Possum (Matthew Holness, 2018)

Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:

• Cube - Decoy Street

• Two or The Dragon - Prelude for the Triumphant Man

• Sadness - I Want To Be There

• BlueBOB - BlueBOB

• Hogg - Self-Extinguishing Emission

Some publishing notes:

• My prose poem “Celsius” appeared on the Misery Tourism website.

• Four of my prose poems ("Face," "Trains," "Mythology," and Flaneur") appeared on the Surfaces website.

• My prose poem “Arms” appeared in the twentieth issue of Reality Hands.

Report #4: Baby, Take Your Teeth Out

A few weeks ago, thieves ransacked my storage unit in Portland. It looks like they took all my old X-Men comics and a bunch of dated electronics. My sister sent me some photos of the unit and in one there’s a blanket my mother made me when I was a toddler sort of tossed aside. I guess it’s easy for strangers to trample your memories. The last few months have been kind of rough. One of my crowns came off. I don’t have any dental insurance. Hell, I don’t even know how to find a dentist. The crown still hasn’t been put back but the tooth doesn’t hurt. For me, not having any health insurance has become a consistent source of anxiety. Over the last four years, I’ve had a large lipoma over my right clavicle that I need to get checked out. I guess, if it was going to kill me it would have already. The last time I saw a doctor was back in 2013 after I escaped an abusive relationship. They said my blood pressure was incredibly high. Six years on, I’m still nervously waiting for my first stroke or heart attack.

As far as writing goes, I started 2019 off with a bang. I’ve had more writing published in these first few months than in all of 2018. My plan is to have a new PDF ebook out by the end of 2019. It’ll primarily be made of prose poems I wrote while living in New Orleans. The working title is Brandon Freels Versus The Reality Principle. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to shake up my writing a little by focusing on some third-person flash fiction. I’ve been writing exclusively in the first-person for twenty years, and it seems to experiment with a change in perspective might do me some good. My goal is to have fifteen of these flash fiction pieces written by the end of 2019 and then make a PDF ebook out of them in 2020.

Honestly, the snow made it hard for me to get motivated to go anywhere, but I did go to a few art shows and events this winter. There was the Leonor Fini show at The Museum of Sex. I was impressed with how transgressive Fini’s delicate drawings could be. In one she had a woman fucking a deer, and in another a man eating a turd out of a woman’s ass. I went to the Whitney Museum’s Andy Warhol show and finally got to see one of his oxidation paintings. I attended a lecture by Pam Grossman about Remedios Varo. The lecture focused on Varo’s connection to the occult and how she saw art as a form of invocation. At the Museum of Modern Art, there was a Joan Miro exhibit, but it was mostly just pieces they pulled out of storage. They did have his Portrait of a Man in a Late Nineteenth-Century Frame on display, which I’d been wanting to see. There were also these two collage pieces incorporating rope into the composition. Both works disturbed me. I didn’t find them visually appealing, but they bothered me so much, I felt it was important to acknowledge them. While it’s great to have all these big museums accessible to me now that I live in New York, in the future I’d like to visit smaller, more contemporary galleries. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know.

One of the highlights for me over the last few months was seeing the Lou Reed Drones installation at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Lou Reed’s amps were set up near the pulpit of the church in a semi-circle, then his guitars were placed against them. There was a man, a conductor of sorts, adjusting the guitars to create different levels of feedback. Other avant-garde musicians, including Laurie Anderson and John Zorn, played freely throughout the church, improvising over the feedback that Reed’s guitars made. I’m not sure what attracts me to this kind of music, but I also spent two days at this year’s Ende Tymes Festival. Each night contained a wealth of performers doing their own variations of drone and experimental music. Most of it was what a Portland friend used to call pedal violence, where an artist would string a number of guitar pedals together to create a wall of chaotic sound. But other performances were more delicate, like two musicians playing long-form drones on their clarinets. I went to the previous year’s Ende Tymes Festival too and was fascinated by a performer called Nonhorse (I only recently learned their name). Nonhorse impressed me with the way he “scratches” tapes on old cassette decks. To scratch them he pushes down on the spindle that holds the reel. It's almost like how a turntablist scrubs a record. 

On a different note, I was pretty excited to learn that my new apartment on Chauncey Street is only a few buildings away from where Ralph and Alice Kramden lived in The Honeymooners. Apparently, Chauncey Street is where Jackie Gleason grew up.

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Books I’ve been reading:

• Quintron - Europa My Mirror

• Melissa Broder - The Pisces

• Mark Fisher - The Weird and Eerie

• Jean Ray - Whiskey Tales

• RW Spryszak - Edju

Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:

• Crash Worship - Asesinos

• Controlled Bleeding - Rest in Peace

• Einstürzende Neubauten - Tabula Rasa

• Sun Ra - The Antique Blacks

• Mike Daily - Kevin Sampselliana Pt. 1 and 2

Some publishing notes:

• My prose poem “Hello” appeared on the Punk Lit Press website.

• My flash fiction pieces “Why I Left” and “Doggone” appeared on the Soft Cartel website.

• My flash fiction piece “I’ve Got a Gun” appeared in the third issue of Alien Buddha Zine.

• A PDF of Race Traitor #13-14 is now available online. It was published in 2001 and includes responses I made to a surrealist inquiry. Keep in mind I was in my early twenties when I wrote these responses.

• My prose poems “Tulip” and “Calligraphy” appeared on the Misery Tourism website.

• My prose poems “Lull” and “Birds” appeared in the twelfth issue of Deluge. Also featured in that issue is a story by my friend Kevin Sampsell.