It occurs to me that I make projects like playing checkers…
Moving all the pieces one by one across to the other side, taking turns, rather than pushing one or two ahead really fast… This means that a whole bunch of the checkers pieces reached the end at the same time with a few casualties along the way
With this analogy in place, consider that in the next let’s say two months I’ll push out a revitalized Choogle on podcast feed featuring an hour long interview with Steve, with his experiences in Japan since the 1970s. Like no one can talk like that
Two more podcast on the postcards from gravelly beach feed: one featuring Andrew Mcluhan coming in from a radio station in Ontario reading my poems mostly written in southern Asia and the Middle East and another remixed from recent poetry reading connected to the Vancouver anthology I’m included in (by the way that book should be arriving soon) four poems, moved from video to audio, needs a bit of an intro and outro but not too much
The advocate zine is breaking some deadlock and in a few days the colophon stamp and the address stamp (which I both fear will be a bit too big but we’ll make it work) will arrive, I’ll draw the image for the backside of the page, print out a few more bits and pieces of poetry and glue it all down – maybe
At least do a test print after scanning on the home printer and then hopefully move to a professional printer
The new year card design is chosen, one for the print version and one for a digital version, need to layout with the text and decide what I’m gonna do with the backside (English version in Japanese version separate? And whether to print at home or through a print service or a combination
Then in the tidy up queue is a five or six part series called “social marketing kung fu” that I recorded in May 2013 during a master class workshop just days before I fell ill.
The audio is crappy and it sat lingered for years, I did some edits on it a few years later or a few years ago, wrote descriptions and posted the first few but just didn’t feel right or good and I really didn’t have any interest in trying to “promote” cause it’s not what I do now but it’s still useful for people I know it. now I’m running them through a cleanup tool and if I get the enthusiasm to do descriptions and blog posts and whatever, they’ll go back out 12 years afterwards, incredibly the content is still very evergreen
Then the batch of six Misasa misprints will get postcards written possibly tomorrow and mail shortly after(have glue stick and tape in my bag) and be mailed out to various heroes imperfections in all
The “worth of trees” prose poem and manifesto will get a couple tuneups to the Japanese translation and shared via Ryoko’s tree network (pending) hopefully published in some kind of periodical journal
A spontaneous poem I wrote in Gifu to a poet friend who lives there but was in British Columbia visiting, we’ve never met but we correspond extensively, I made into a three sided A5 on beautiful paper with one little image after a few tuneups, I have three copies, one for the scrapbook, one for Jason and possibly the other for byzantium Bill
I have two more pieces of audio, one a spontaneous riff on a trail probably 15 or more years ago talking about the missing gap going from Europe to Florida, it’s rough but it’ll get cleaned up through the audio cleanup for a little bit and I’m gonna send it to winterkeep in New Zealand to see if he can put it in his remix pile
Then more recently in Noto on the road trip I did a spontaneous soliloquoy about sliding doors and parallel lives and imagine in a mysterious life with a girl I knew for a short while and then a little bit longer but it just couldn’t happen, it’s far too personal to put out directly but being layered into his music and fuzz could make it very interesting
I also have a massive folder of stray street sounds and soundscapes I want to share with him but I’m just gonna start small with a couple pieces of spoken word bits
And then finally the summer road trip scrapbook is gonna get the last of the things glued down, it just hasn’t felt right or fun to work on it with so much other things swirling around but it’s gonna get there, I have transcriptions of diaries from the digital form to print and glue in, the favorites from conversation from the family, transcriptions of postcards and dates to match up from the receipts log to make it all kind of fit
And then I need to get a bigger binder or start on a separate small binder for the caboose margilia for October
Caught up on calendar in a little bit with Ryoko with various Christmas events and preschool events so I really have to keep the pace slow so if I can get this batch of stuff across the finish line and most of these things are really really at that 80-90% mark, I’ll have a little bit of a cavalcade of stuff to drift out over the next little bit
Tomorrow is hospital as is Wednesday and doing the calendar things there’s stuff scattered all across the months including my Santa Claus performances and other preschool things which will be fun but Christmas is “on me” which is cool I’m on it but it means that rocking through the splits of creativity is gonna have to see me through for a while, I think so anyway
The plan for the “one-way tickets” audio recordings could be a really good one to squeeze in the gaps if I can get a workflow where I can go from hitting record to publishing in 20 minute bursts, maybe three sessions Here and there to make something meaningful anyway, there’s a project plan because it’s a project plan for everything
I haven’t even talked about setting up a storefront because I know that letters from Russia and uncle weeds red rock adventure would both make great e-books and the big circumnavigation book is the big thing looming on the horizon but I’m fine doing these little things and just getting some fresh things out into the world, for now, for now
