I've been editing poems near constantly for the past couple days, so I thought I'd try to balance things out with a post of just... not poems.  That said, clarity-of-thought is in no way guaranteed.  In fact, it's strongly resisted around these parts.

For all souls who feel momentarily unguided: the most recent stranger has a great free will ( Read more... )

The skinny ( Read more... )

Hey friends.  I'm off to China on Saturday.

If you'd like to follow along with my journeying, check the blog:

http://mightyexpeditions.blogspot.com/

I've started autobiographing.  Writing down everything I can remember.  It's important to me.  There's so much that I've already forgotten, and so much that I haven't ever told anybody.  Some things, as it is with most folks, I could never tell anybody.

Goin' to China in... 9 days.  If you'd like to receive weekly (well, hopefully weekly) updates ( Read more... )

Today marks the first day of Adventure Chess Camp week.  What I first feared would be my most dragging five days has turned into potentially the nicest, mostly because the "Adventure" part involves a bus ride to a different part of the city each day, including spots to swim, hike, and kayak(!).  Oh yeah, and play chess, I suppose.

But let's rewind ( Read more... )

With our buddy Apollo waking up early and shitting sunshine until nine pm or so, the hours of my summer that aren't spent ranching six-year-olds are often given to spinning bicycle wheels across the Himalayan-proportional hills of the emerald city.  But what's a ride without the phat beats to propel it?  Thus, the word on the street.  Er, the songs ( Read more... )

My father is a jealous, control-hungry narcissist.  My sister is a solipsist and an insomniac.  My mother wears her soul to the stark and shaking marrow in her attempts to save us from our neuroses, in her attempts to forget her own.  Tonight I have signed my name.  A loan.  Samuel H Johnston, July Seventh, Two-Thousand and Eight.  Seventeen ( Read more... )

Jayden is the tiny kid who doesn't know anybody at day camp.  He doesn't go to school with any of them, and he's slow at making friends.  I ended up spending a lot of time with him last week during soccer camp, when he decided: "What's scrimmage?  I don't like scrimmage, I just like soccer", and hence made the steadfast decision to spend most of ( Read more... )

I work with kids.  That's my job.  I shepard, entertain, organize, teach, police kids ( Read more... )

I just got word that I placed second in the school-wide annual poetry competition.  Yeah, I know, the judges must've had a screw or two loose, but that's not stopping me from happily accepting $150 (which will go straight into SIFF tickets) and feeling like a 19th century schoolboy with a penny in his fist for a bag of honey-rolled oats.

Following ( Read more... )