Love, limbo, poetry, and poker.
Tonight is my last night in Austin, TX., and I am sad to be going. I love
flightviolation very much, and it will be sad to not see her anymore. Our relationship has always been a string of 'Goodbye's' and not knowing when we will see each other again, though honestly, that is my relationship with everyone in life -- my closest friends, either those I've met on the road or those who stay in Chicago, my mother, who will always be my greatest anchor, and every lover I've had since ... since ... Yeah, I don't know. Maybe "Crazy J" from 2004. Wow. Haven't thought of her in a while. But still, I wonder what it means that I haven't lived in the same city as my girlfriend in four years.
Tomorrow will be my return to limbo. Since embarking on my nationwide tour, I've had no home and very little stability. Besides a few boxes of books, all my belongings fit into my '04 Sentra. I have a Wii but no television. An office chair but no floor.
People tell me they envy my lifestyle pretty often. I tell them they're crazy. Keep your health insurance. Keep your stable paycheck and your friday night drinking buddies. Though my agent has direct deposit, the majority of the time I get paid by a half-filled hat. Won't you miss summers drinking with friends on North Avenue Beach? Cruising down Lake Shore Drive with your girl?
Tomorrow's a 14 hour drive to St. Louis. I'm an alternate for NACA Nationals, a conference where schools come to pick performers. Even as first alternate I'm unlikely to perform, and will be simply paying money to give away merch and swag to prospective activity boards. Though I can't complain: Travis keeps booking me more and more gigs and negotiating more and more money for me.
brazencaucasian and
dansully will both be there, as will Isis, Abyss, and
mikemcgee.
Starting next week, I start my serious poker training. The money is really intense: it's easy for a marginal winner to make $45-90 an hour with relatively low risk. If I was playing even slightly above average, the money becomes very significant, somewhere in the ballpark of $80-150 an hour. That's lawyer-esque. Though I hate material accumulation, the promise of an easy lifestyle has put my other projects, including poetry and the textbook, on the back-burner. That kind of makes me sad, that my art is being wrecked in favor of cash. Though I've known about that trade-off for a long time. My agent openly admits that I'm too left-wing and not entertaining enough for conferences.
I recently decided not to travel to the podslam.org invitational, cutting my ties with that community even more, because I thought it was unfair that out of the 16 poet line-up, only 3 of them weren't black. Of course, I was chastised for openly calling a racially unbalanced slam "unfair," but you've got to be a fool to think that race doesn't play a huge role in competition.
EDIT: I'm going to WOW and getting a suite with Ed. See ya'll in Detroit!
flightviolation very much, and it will be sad to not see her anymore. Our relationship has always been a string of 'Goodbye's' and not knowing when we will see each other again, though honestly, that is my relationship with everyone in life -- my closest friends, either those I've met on the road or those who stay in Chicago, my mother, who will always be my greatest anchor, and every lover I've had since ... since ... Yeah, I don't know. Maybe "Crazy J" from 2004. Wow. Haven't thought of her in a while. But still, I wonder what it means that I haven't lived in the same city as my girlfriend in four years.
Tomorrow will be my return to limbo. Since embarking on my nationwide tour, I've had no home and very little stability. Besides a few boxes of books, all my belongings fit into my '04 Sentra. I have a Wii but no television. An office chair but no floor.
People tell me they envy my lifestyle pretty often. I tell them they're crazy. Keep your health insurance. Keep your stable paycheck and your friday night drinking buddies. Though my agent has direct deposit, the majority of the time I get paid by a half-filled hat. Won't you miss summers drinking with friends on North Avenue Beach? Cruising down Lake Shore Drive with your girl?
Tomorrow's a 14 hour drive to St. Louis. I'm an alternate for NACA Nationals, a conference where schools come to pick performers. Even as first alternate I'm unlikely to perform, and will be simply paying money to give away merch and swag to prospective activity boards. Though I can't complain: Travis keeps booking me more and more gigs and negotiating more and more money for me.
brazencaucasian and
dansully will both be there, as will Isis, Abyss, and
mikemcgee.
Starting next week, I start my serious poker training. The money is really intense: it's easy for a marginal winner to make $45-90 an hour with relatively low risk. If I was playing even slightly above average, the money becomes very significant, somewhere in the ballpark of $80-150 an hour. That's lawyer-esque. Though I hate material accumulation, the promise of an easy lifestyle has put my other projects, including poetry and the textbook, on the back-burner. That kind of makes me sad, that my art is being wrecked in favor of cash. Though I've known about that trade-off for a long time. My agent openly admits that I'm too left-wing and not entertaining enough for conferences.
I recently decided not to travel to the podslam.org invitational, cutting my ties with that community even more, because I thought it was unfair that out of the 16 poet line-up, only 3 of them weren't black. Of course, I was chastised for openly calling a racially unbalanced slam "unfair," but you've got to be a fool to think that race doesn't play a huge role in competition.
EDIT: I'm going to WOW and getting a suite with Ed. See ya'll in Detroit!