Podcast Friday

A series of Pod Poems for your evening enjoyment...

Poem #1 - Weblog Therapy

Poem #2 - Swallow

Poem #3 - Sea Breeze

JS-MSM

I talked to the writer from the Minnesota Women's Press about a month ago. She was asking about women and blogging for an article she was writing. The resulting article is here. She got details about me wrong, and I think I sound like a goofball in the begining (doing what she does for a living, I know the difference between making someone's quotes sound better and making them sound worse), but I like my ending quote and I think I actually said that.

I was talking about my blog brothers.

I couldn't exactly say this to her:

I like it when I get time to write. Write what I want. Here. Not what I get paid to write. Out there.

I remember when we used to finish one another's ideas. Here. A few years back. My favorite thing was to bake words with my blog brothers. That was then, before blogging required that every post be a well-formulated thesis--an entity in and of itself--flawless and final in it's daily decree for the masses to imbibe and link to. That was before pundits mattered.

Then, we jammed some. I might throw out an idea. Half baked. Not baked. Raw. Uncooked. Kind of embarrassing, but all our asses were hanging out anyway. Who cares. And someone would grab it. Gary often. And he'd throw in a handfull of chocolate chips, or he'd mean to anyway, but usually it was coffee beans. Gary was never good at telling those things apart. And then Mike would go off on the thing. And I mean off. Just off and run with it. Jesus. For the love. He would ramble and gamble and put in "print" things that'd make us say, mostly, "Oooooo. Eeeeeks." And how the hell are we supposed to download that, freak? Then Frank, you know, he'd toy with Mike, usually with a joyful zest, but Frank, man, you don't know, he can go off, you just don't see it much, well more now than then. Frank, he'd take it and recap the ingredients so far and then flip the thing right over. Just turn it over. Til you said, OH, I thought it was a pancake, but it's a bison burger! HA! where's my syrup? So Tom would come along, and by crap if he didn't take the damn burger and mold it into the finest fucking filet you've ever seen--and we're going, "Shit, we made this pancake-burger and look at Tom's filet with all that red juice, see he did it again." At which point Marek would walk in and just sit down on that piece of meat. I mean just sit the hell down on it as if he were planting his behind in a leather-backed office chair. As if that's what you do every single day with a fine piece of filet--you just sit your ass on it. And if we were all truly blessed that day, Rageboy would rouse himself long enough to come fuck up the whole works by using the creation as high-gloss latex paint, not as food at all, and we'd go--HA! It's all colors now! And then we'd start all over looking at the entire room, not just the frying pan.

My blog brothers. We made lots of things together out of posts back then.

That would have been a really long quote.

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The Business of Shelley

Touched by an angel--or a burning bird--I have been fortunate enough to have Shelley Powers doing the redesign for the Sessum homepage. Right now it lives here on Shelley's server. But it should be uploaded soon to our world at sessum.com or gesproductions.com -- depending on how much you feel like typing.

It has been a pleasure to work with Shelley and see our world the way she sees it. The sessum world, as you can see, is a multi-linked place and it has been a hard one for me to organize. I think Shelley's simple, organized, yet elegant design brings structure and light (love the halftone look) to our scattered homes on the web.

Thanks Shelley for everything!

Why the Good Lord Gave Us Servers

To stick Chris Rock's Ass Beating video clip on, which has been going around by email in all it's hysterical and multi-meg glory.

What? I had to keep it someplace safe.

Happy To Report...

That the original viral (think mad cow) bovineunite.com site was not the brainchild of Chick-fil-a, as I had anticipated, but instead, of the Maryland State Lottery, or an agency thereof. Tonight this intro page went up.

WTF?

I'm like ready to mooooove to MD.

A Standing O.

Mega kudos for new beta and startup Simply Hired. Search results were on target for writing jobs around here. The blog is nicely done. They're adding features at the speed of Flickr. They've even got a LinkedIn connection for weaving that web of influence. Now THAT'S making use of a social network.

They even have personality:

And while our code reviews may have all the tenderness of an alien probe on your favorite South Park character, we manage to get along with each other pretty well. In fact, we enjoy playing practical jokes around the office with such enthusiasm and regularity that our HR department operates pretty much in a continual state of abject terror.

My My. I'm begining to feel all dot-comish this month. There's a lot of this new energy zipping across the net. It's a beautiful thing.

Thanks, Ev.

When I Die...

I want to come back to wood s lot's blog.

Only sorta naked -- you'll thank me later

Proud to be among the panelists for blogHer's personal bloggers' panel. I remembered saying something I liked about blogging naked, so I searched my archives. This was a good one from 2003.

There is, it seems, a constant undercurrent of rumination in the blogworld over how much we say about ourselves, how much we tell, what we show, how far we go, what we don’t disclose, what we hide, where we pull up.

In other words: how public should we be?

I’m noted for being a blogger who’s pretty public, open, honest. I think I am. I hope so, because practicing being real in my blogging has helped me become moreso in my offline life… One feeds the other. I gain insight from the things I say here, insight that helps me be more real with myself.

My archives are testimony to me, they are me looking into my own rear view mirror, thinking things like: “What was I THINKING?” or “Wow, yes, it was like that,” or “I can’t believe I wrote that out loud…How many people read it?” The pattern of re-examination informs me. I grow because of it.

I think too many bloggers get trapped in a catch-22 over self-exposure, though. They start out with a few self-telling, honest, often painful posts, and suddenly put pressure on themselves to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth in all manner of all things on their blogs. Some of us who tend toward very public expression of very private places begin to feel an unreasonable responsibility for 24/7 exposure. Even begin to resent blogging. And who wouldn’t.

Perhaps pure-personal-truth-telling can be sustained, but does it need to be? Who puts the pressure on—-our readers or ourselves?

Unless we’re going to live here, naked, all of us, with a real time voice recording of the goings on inside our heads and hearts, we can’t sustain the open-wound model. And we shouldn’t have to.

At the same time, I’ve cycled through the next part of the honesty phase many times. The next phase is where I pull up. Don’t really have anything to say. Start thinking of deep dark secrets to reveal because the need to name and share these things is still present, but I’ve already told you most of what I want to tell you about the place I’m in.

Generally from there, I gravitate toward humor and absurdity, because that is a universal language. And even in those things, my state of mind is revealed to you.

We don’t need to share everything, you and I.

The important part for me is not writing about those edgy, private, risky places. It’s writing from those places. I have said that before. When deeply personal and volatile things—-real or imagined—-are going on in my life, my inclination is to share them here. But not always. What I do, when life issues are too close to the bone to share, is use the energy and passion and, yes, even panic and pain, to drive what I write here.

You see, so, it’s not writing about the events, it’s letting the associated emotions wash over you, digging down into them, and then writing from that place. Stepping down, as Cixous would say.

So maybe this post is my way of saying to those who have been wondering whether or not they’ve gone too far--those who are anxious about what they’ve written, not written, who knows, who doesn’t—-that you can use that very angst to power your writing. Even when you’re not writing about your current state of mind and heart, we can feel when you’re writing from it. Every single time.

Well, that’s how I do it. Or try to.

Outsource to Hamsters

Here's the thing about our hamsters--they work all night. While we sleep, they run the wheel, carry bedding from one place to another, pee outside the cage, and then get back on the wheel and run some more. I was just falling asleep typing and I thought, man, if I could give m hamsters a little analysis capability, we would make the perfect team--like connect their wheel to a keyboard and teach them (by zapping when incorrect--hell what do I care the bitch ate 13 babies) how to type often used phrases over and over again. They could easily seque into a career as a Spam Hamster, making money as they go. Spamsters for short. This new breed--we could engineer them to be perfect at what they do. While we sleep, the Spamsters use their wheel time to spin spam blogs out like butter.

i think it can work. I am half alseep. My eyes are closed. You should know that.

lucid

I had to drive to a client meeting today that was all the way up toward Cumming, which, if you know where kennesaw is, well then you know that is a bottom-line stinky commute, picturing the Pepridge Farm man saying, "You can't get there from hea." And I'm driving and driving and thinking and mostly looking for landmarks in Alpharetta, which, if you know anything about Alpharetta and me, you'd know that the place scares me. Not because it's a "bad area" but because it's a baaaad area. It's affluent and well kept and actually perfect, except that it feels tenuous and not real and like the dead people are just under the roots of the grass waiting to spring to life and eat you like a hamster baby.

That's how Alpharetta feels to me.

I ate a jalapeno cheese burger at sonic. Okay, it rocked pretty well but it was $3.29. And I ran all day and not til 8 did I get to eat dinner, which was a Checker's burger George brought me, which only cost like a buck and tasted better than the Sonic burger.

So that was pretty much my day. It included too much meat and a long drive through a pretend town.

Brain Closed for Maintenance

Too many ideas. Blew a circuit. Called the head janitor. Kombinat has 24 hour support. I should be up and running shortly.

Carpe Crap

Seize the crap.

J. Maybe Elvis Downsized By New Pope...

Takes Helm at Kombinat!, the world's first public domain corporation. Allied to help with PR strategy and tactics at Kombinat! - using the patented "First 100 Days of a CEO" quickstart executive blitz learned during Sessum's days at The Agency to help Elvis transition into his new role.

During the first 100 days, Elvis plans to: "basically implement our growth strategies across the entire global business landscape blah blah blah."

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Bonus Poem! To Be Real

Tonight's bonus pod poetry reading: To Be Real, honoring...

Step Down

Tonight's pod poetry reading is: Step Down.

Crazy Reverb

This evening's Pod Poetry Reading is Crazy Reverb.

on comment strike

you people and your no commenting -- i'm on strike.

my pretty roses

I got a dozen roses from my husband today. They are so beautiful. I cried.

Oooops, she did it again.

No, she hasn't eaten them, but she has HAD a new litter. She took to her nest about four days ago, and I glimpsed some pink in there yesterday. We are all holding our breath and walking on eggshells. George jokes around in the kitchen--"Somebody sneezes in this house and the hamster's like..." [he mimics Coco devouring her babies]. I say, "Stop it--she's just being, what do the call it in the hamster forums?--"merciful."

blahahaha.

Hopefully this time Coco had all the pre-planning required to refrain from eating her young.

I told ya'll what Jenna said after viewing the carnage first hand, right?

"Wshew. At least I'm not a hamster baby."

Amen.