Immanentize the Empathy
[Milkweed blossom, smelling like heaven.]
A super-short post this week, on account of I am insanely busy.
Late Thursday evening I finished Zig Zag Claybourne‘s excellent Breath, Warmth, and Dream. The story is engaging, the writing poetic, and the reading experience was a delight.
Nothing. Too busy.
Subject: Aliens, Super Powers
Setting: Ruins
Genre: Utopian
[A house finch nestling perched on the edge of its nest, on the verge of becoming a fledgling.]
Several weeks ago, just after hanging fern baskets around my front porch, a pair of house finches built a nest in one of them. A week later there were five eggs. A couple of weeks after that there were four hatchlings. Up until a couple of weeks ago we had three nestlings, and finally, a single fledgling. I like to think the other two youngsters fledged earlier, as I didn’t find any little bird bodies in the area, nor evidence that they had run afoul of one of the many neighborhood cats. And there are currently several house finches around our small property, so at hopefully that number includes my temporary lodgers.
The fledgling in the above photo took off and joined its parents in exploring the neighborhood a few days ago. I have probably seen it at our bird feeder.
Nature finds a way.
Still reading Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Claybourne’s Breath, Warmth, Dream.
Too much chaos in the world right now to focus on creative pursuits.
Subject: Empire, Dragons
Setting: Lost City
Genre: Horror
Sly and the Family Stone, “Sing a Simple Song”.
Sly Stone died a few days ago. He had a hell of a life, but he and the Family Stone left behind a whole lotta good music.
And as I am writing this post, I see that Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys just died. Damn.
[House Finch nestlings in a potted fern, about to become fledglings.]
My birthday was two days ago, and O BOY, is the world getting more interesting as we move farther into 2025. Ukraine took out a sizable chunk of Russia’s nuclear-capable bombers with swarms of off-the-shelf hobbyist drones, Trump and Musk broke up and are performatively feuding, and the financial aftershocks of Trump’s tariff nonsense are hitting the street.
But other than that, things are going great!
I have returned to The Wretched of the Earth and it is once again blowing my mind.
I managed a couple of pages of world-building notes for Cacophonous, as well as a couple of lines of verse, though they weren’t very good. Or rather, interesting ideas poorly executed.
Subject: Undead, Kaiju
Setting: Battlefield
Genre: Fantasy
Alice Coltrane with Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson, “Turiya and Ramakrishna”, from the amazing album Ptah the El Daoud.
Happy birthday to me! For no particular reason, I have decided to to a retrospective of the past forty years, in five-year intervals.
40 years ago, I had just finished my sophomore year at Springport High School. I was learning to program on my new Commodore 64 and made my spending money milking cows, baling hay, and shoveling manure. I think this was the summer that I was hired out to a neighboring farm to help with the hay baling for $2.00 an hour, which was substantially less than the $3.00 an hour I made milking cows on our farm.
35 years ago, I had just finished my junior year at Grand Valley State University and was living off-campus for the first time, in a terrible apartment on the northwest side of Grand Rapids. I worked for a landscaping company, then for a moving company, then for Meijer. My roommates and I were taking classes at a local Shorin-Ryu karate school and playing a lot of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. For my 21st birthday a few friends took took me to Tootsie Van Kelly’s bar in the Amway Grand, where I drank many beers, shots, and mixed drinks, including Ouzo, Guinness, and something called a Blue Motorcycle. Was it fun? Yes! Did I get horribly sick? Also yes!
30 years ago, I was living on the southeast side of Grand Rapids and working at Schuler Books, which was in the middle of leveling up to become Schuler Books & Music. I was an up-and-coming student at Master Lee’s School of Tai Chi Praying Mantis Kung Fu, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.’
25 years ago I was living in a different place on the southeast side and working at CyberNet Engineering, my first “real” developer job, and discovering that, for some employers, the idea of work-life balance was a thing to be roundly mocked and derided. I was now an instructor for Master Lee’s School of Tai Chi Praying Mantis Kung Fu.
20 years ago I was living in an apartment on the northeast side, which was in a house owned by a friend and occasional co-worker. I had recently quit my job at BBK Studio and was working as a contractor for Waterfall Productions, just about to be brought on board as an employee. Master Lee was training me and senior instructor Rick Powell to teach Iron Shirt Chi Kung to some of our most dedicated kung fu students.
15 years ago I was living in my current house on the northeast side, and working for PeopleDesign, the new iteration of BBK Studio. Rick and I were teaching an Iron Shirt class to a group of about ten students, three mornings a week, out of From the Heart Yoga, the studio owned by Rick and his wife Behnje.
Ten years ago I was working for my present employer and living in my current house. Caffeinated Press was just getting off the ground. Rick and I were still teaching the Iron Shirt Chi Kung class. Thus my average week included about seventy hours of work-like activity.
Five years ago my partner Zyra and I were enjoying our first summer living together, and also the first summer of the COVID lockdowns. We were also entertained by our new kitten Poe, who we had adopted from a farm in the Upper Peninsula. Zyra and Poe still live here, so we must have done something right.
And now here is me, 56 years old in 2025, still in the house with Zyra and Poe and our second cat, Pepper, who we adopted from the same farm where we got Poe. I am in my eleventh year at my current employer and things continue to go reasonably well. With a little luck, I will get to post a few dozen more of these annual updates.
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And suddenly here we are in June! As seems to happen with every year now, as I age the days drag but the months fly by.
The past three weeks have been the first normal-paced weeks for me this year. Work projects had sucked up all of my free time and mental capacity, and the current polycrisis – climate change, wars, politics, the ongoing COVID pandemic – is, to say the least, distracting.
And since I have a little free time, I am celebrating by filling it back up with literary work.
Since late last year I have been part of the Grand River Poetry Collective, headed by Grand Rapids Poet Laureate Christine Stephens-Krieger. There are two parts to the collective: Publishing books of poetry by Grand Rapids poets, and promoting poetry to the community.
We have published one book so far, Melissa Wray’s Small Gestures. We have close to a dozen more books in various stages of completion, and hope to have some of them on shelves by the end of the year.
We are also participating in the Grand Rapids LitFest, which runs from June 16 -22. This is the first-ever literary festival in Grand Rapids, and an event which is long, LONG overdue.
And now on to the monthly question.
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for June 2025 is:
What were some books that impacted you as a child or young adult?
Wow. This is a difficult question to answer.
No, I take that back. It is an easy question to answer, but a difficult list to pare down to blog post length.
I think the first books which affected me were those dealing with animals and the outdoors, either as protagonists or as subjects. From the moment we moved to the farm after my mother re-married I dove into books about rural life, the great outdoors, and the (very much glamorized) life of the farmer.
Books like My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford, James Herriot‘s All Creatures Great and Small, and the great animal adventures by Jim Kjellgaard. Then there were the foraging books by Euell Gibbons – Stalking the Wild Asparagus and Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop.
All of these were books about being in the outdoors, persevering through hardships, and being around animals. Great stuff for a young kid newly arrived on a farm. But I was also a nerd and a bookworm, so the realities of the the rural life were not all that great for me in the long run. And being surrounded by incurious people, both at home and at school, meant that inspiration became escapism. And that pattern continued until I left the farm for college in 1987. So it goes.
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May was a pretty good month for both reading and acquiring reading material. A brief illness over the Memorial Day weekend allowed me more quiet time, and I took advantage of it by binge-reading the excellent Kraken Rider Z books. This was the first time I binge-read a series in at least a decade. Highly recommended.
[Baby House Finches in a nest in the middle of a dense fern plant in a hanging basket.]
I was sick over the Memorial Day weekend, so didn’t get out and about as much as I usually do when I have an extra day. Instead, I took care of projects around the homestead, including rearranging the basement to clear the mess created when we had to move everything to install a sump pump and drain tile. I also made progress on the big water runoff remediation project outside, which I hope will eventually make the sump pump redundant.
Zyra and I also planted more vegetables in the garden, which is about a quarter larger than it was last year, thanks to a day of lifting and moving heavy things.
Now that I think about it, much of this spring has involved lifting and moving heavy things.
While crashed out on the couch this weekend I finished Kraken Rider Z and read all of its sequel Kraken Rider Z: Thunder Kraken. One of the authors, Dyrk Ashton, is a friend I met at ConFusion back in 2015 or 2016. The Kraken Rider books are of the Progression Fantasy subgenre, and are the first of the kind I have read. I liked them! Dyrk and his co-author David Estes are excellent writers and I got the sense that writing the books was a lot of fun. And given the nature of progression fantasy, reading them and experiencing the characters as they levelled up, was quite satisfying.
My writing is still in a sort of lull, though I did jot down a couple of small piles of words which, when assembled in the right order, might become poem fragments.
Subject: Music, Fae
Setting: Small Town
Genre: Science Fiction
Prince, The Loring Park Sessions 77.
[A hawk, having just caught one of the robin fledglings from our back yard.]
Not much to say the week. I was crazy-busy and also got sick, so there wasn’t much to do other than try to stay awake and watch the country continue its rapid slide into fascism.
I found the time and energy at the end of the week to work in our backyard garden. That was when I heard a sudden commotion from the local robins, and looked up to see a large hawk had just caught one of the local fledglings. Better luck next incarnation, little fella.
Jack Hirschman. William Gibson. Dyrk Ashton and David Estes.
Nup’m.
Subject: Robots, Super Powers
Setting: Ocean
Genre: Literary Fiction
Robert Plant, “In the Mood”, from his album The Principle of Moments.
[A Robin fledgling perched on an unused tomato cage in the middle of a patch of weeds next to the foundation of a small garage.]
Spring has definitely sprung here in West Michigan. After a week off from work I am re-acclimating myself to the daily grind. Work was busy, as was life, and everything was made busier by the schedule disruptions of a new crown on one of my teeth, a meeting of the Grand River Poetry Collective, a meeting of the Ann Arbor Science Fiction Convention, and a severe thunderstorm which blew through Thursday evening, which brought almost four inches of rain in an hour as well as several tornadoes.
But other than that, everything was business as usual.
I read Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, and am now going through Jack Hirschman’s Front Lines, which I am quite enjoying. This is me making up for not having the mental capacity to enjoy poetry during National Poetry Month.
I just started reading Kraken Rider Z by David Estes and Dyrk Ashton. I know Dyrk from ConFusion, and have previously read his excellent Paternus Trilogy, so I have high hopes for this one. A hundred pages in, and it is pretty good!
Along with a return to reading poetry, I am writing a little more than usual, which is not difficult because anything more than “none” is more than usual.
Subject: Spiritual Beings, Kaiju
Setting: Small Town
Genre: Technothriller
Simple Minds, “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”, from the soundtrack to The Breakfast Club. This was the #1 song in the USA this week in 1985.
[A partly-cloudy sky, reflected in the water of a bog at the edge of Loda Lake at the Loda Lake Wildflower Sanctuary.]
I was on vacation last week. I worked on projects around the house. I read a lot. I took some naps. I walked in the woods. It was a good, quiet time.
I picked up Jack Hirschman’s Front Lines and Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems from The Book Nook in Montague. They are my current porch-sitting reads, and they are most excellent.
I didn’t accomplish much other than a single poem to close out my most recently-filled journal. It has promise.
Subject: Portals, Empire
Setting: Ruins
Genre: Horror
Ringo Starr, “It Don’t Come Easy.”
Please, remember peace is how we make it
Here within your reach if you’re big enough to take it