The Long and Short of It
Kurt Vonnegut died, as I'm sure you all know by now. bleah. Good day for it, though.
I'm featured in Bloom Magazine along with arielblue and some other B-tangle literati, in an article about poets/poetry in Bloomington. Pick up your copy today! Glossy!
I think I'm reading in Greenwood on Saturday. Need to firm that up. Maybe reading at Knightridge too, if I get back in time.
I also am most likely picking bushels of morels Saturday morning. DEFINITELY NEED TO FIRM THAT UP!!1
I'm on the poem-a-day kick for National Poetry Month. That's actually going pretty well. I hope to post the results at some point.
Tangientially (although it inspired some poetry, so it fits), I was at Kel's the other night getting spazzed out on Easter candy and wathcing a PBS documentary on Jonestown. Man, Jim Jones was so progressive! (And addicted to Phenobarbital. And preached a lot while wearing aviator shades -- which made him look like Hunter S. Thompson imho.) It's sad that that experiment ended the way it did. I also found some audio online of the last recordings (there were many) Jim made at Jonestown, convincing everyone that they were done for so come on up to the vat and have some FlavorAid. Really chilling stuff.
Doomsday cults have fascinated me for a long time. The fine line between deep devotion and batshit crazy, and the inevitable downward spiral always follows a similar path: faith drawn from desperation always leads back to desparation, and faith in a better life to come always leads followers away from the here and now, toward a utopia that is, truly, too good to be true. Also, following a batshit crazy guy in the first place is in general not a good idea. If they had been able to stay in San Francisco, the Peoples Temple probably would have continued to thrive. But once they got to the village in Guyana (and had no further use for a leader really), things fell apart fast for Jim. Isolation. Paranoia. Drug addiction. Days-long loudspeaker rants. No sleep. Then the media and a senator show up asking questions and interviewing people. Honestly, I'm surprised Jim didn't go completely Colonel Kurtz on them. But it should be noted that "mass suicide" is something of a misnomer. Many children died by injection, not ingestion, of poison. And many adults died that way too ... or by gunshot ... including Jim himself.
1978 was a long time ago but it's still a terrifying, incredible story.
So there you go:
Vonnegut dead
Poetry for me
Mushrooms
Jonestown
Easter candy