I will take a book! I still have Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" sitting on my shelf, and I finished it ages ago. Does anybody have interest in receiving it next?

Oh gosh, thanks so much! That is very kind of you to say. I grinned at a few of your lines as well, especially this one, which resonated with me:

but instead buy a carton of juice for the boyfriend

not wanting to be doctrinaire

about anything, even orange juice.

I have indeed published poems in Maudlin House, Rat's Ass Review, Poetry Pacific, and The Scarlet Leaf Review. I haven't been submitting much lately and have hit a bit of a dry spell in my writing, but I plan to get back into the swing of things soon! I'd love to appear in lit.cat -- it's such a fun publication with mixed media, which I appreciate.

Oh thank you, I will! Your suggestion is welcome; I am teaching a big poetry/writing workshop unit in a couple of months and am just beginning to compile and organize texts!

Phew, I'm crawling back out of the woodwork for this killer prompt. Maybe it's because I've felt disconnected from my local writing community recently and have been doing a lot of rock climbing, but I couldn't help myself.

  This is what it's like to climb into the storm:

  Tilt against the rock, a crucifix 
  shod in rubber. Ignore the thunder—
  uncertainty is why you came. Open
  your mouth when you breathe.

  The rhododendron and pine will be
  gone tomorrow; taste them 
  on the rain today. At the top,
  hook the metal back

  to your waist. Leave the wall clean. 
  Leave your hands raw. Leave your feet
  bare when they return to Earth. The sand 
  is soft in Muir Valley, and the snakes 

  don’t bother with cloudy weather. 
  This is what it's like to toss fear, 
  wet, across the ground where it will 
  run in rivulets with mud and melting 

  clay. Spill it from chest and gut. 
  Trade it for laughter. Grin with
  bright teeth that know what it's like
  to fight gravity.

Man, these Ohio threads sure do bum me out! I was born and raised in Ohio, and I still live here. I'm curious about how much time you guys have spent in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus. I live in Columbus, and the culinary and craft beer scene here are incredible, especially in the last five years. Our neighborhoods are havens for art-- the Short North Gallery Hop scene boasts all kinds of gorgeous work and good food on the fancier end, but neighborhoods like Franklinton and Old North are home to some of the most vibrant artistic and literary communities you could ask for.

I've spent time in Dresden, Berlin, Amsterdam, Seattle, Portland, and NYC, and I don't feel like I miss a ton by living in Ohio. I wish we had better mass public transit, and I wish Ohio had more wilderness and mountains to explore. That being said, living in Ohio puts you within a day's drive of a dozen wonderful outdoor spaces beyond fields and Hocking Hills.

Anyway, I felt the need to say something positive about Ohio. I couldn't stand to live in its rural areas, or probably even in Dayton or Toledo, but the three C cities are vibrant and exciting places to be, despite the bad reputation they get.

Ich studierte Deutsch als NebenHauptfach an der uni. Ich bin nach Dresden gereisen um Sommer Kursen zu machen, and ich habe viel gelernt. Wenn du reisen zu lernen kannst, so sollst du! Es gibt niemand, der besser lehren kann, als die Zeit, die man in Deutschland verbringt.

Ich wünsche, dass ich dir einen besser Rat geben könnte. Leider, mache ich fast nichts Deutsch zu üben. Mein Fähigkeit wird immer schlechter. Ich bin einen English lehrer, und ich habe drei Studentin, die Deutsch studieren. Sie sind sehr talentiert, und wir reden uns oft auf Deutsch. Aber sie haben noch so viel zu lernen. Ich habe noch keine Gelegenheit schwerige Unterhaltungen zu haben.

Danke!

This does not surprise me much, unfortunately. What does surprise me in my day-to-day life is the incompetence of youth who have grown up with nearly unfettered access to high speed internet and a variety of devices. I teach suburban high schoolers from upper-middle class families, and my students are astoundingly tech illiterate. They do not understand, conceptually, the difference between cloud storage and local storage. They are unable to download a file and then locate it later because they have absolutely no grasp of files or folders or where/how to access/sort information on the machine. Hell, they don't even know how to navigate menus to change display settings, sort information differently, or save a Google Doc as PDF. These kids are freshmen and juniors in high school-- they are 14-16 years old, and if I let them, they would spend the entire school day staring at their phones, laptops, and iPads.

-

I had assumed, previously, that being raised on tech would result in a high baseline literacy with the software, but I was wrong. They use their devices all day, but it seems like they use them for such specific, shallow, narrow tasks that they don't pick up any skills beyond how to navigate Instagram and pick up the latest online Jugendsprache. I spend a depressing amount of instructional time either walking them through basic steps to upload an assignment or doing it for them.

I finished my book, Foundation. I enjoyed it, but not quite as much as I had hoped. I have trouble getting into sci-fi for some reason, with the exception of Kurt Vonnegut, who does it a little differently anyway. I am almost certain I sent mine on. It sounds like maybe galen has it? If not, it's in my box of books, because I still lack a book case!

EDIT: Yep, just checked my old messages. Galen received it a while back. But I just remembered I got a second book too. Sorry, I guess it's been a while. The second one was American Gods, right? I read that one as well, and it's definitely sitting in my box of books.

This was such a fantastically fun song, and I enjoyed the quiet, intense focus of each of you. What's your group's name?

Brand new leather built blisters that bubbled

and burnt, glistening wet like a fresh tattoo.

It took miles of massaging before the stiff soles

learned to hold my feet like a lover.

-

I have sat for hours, a gargoyle polishing his pedestal

with wax and horsehair, rubbing brown salves

over cracks left by the desert winter air

and milky streaks of saltwater rich with lime.

-

In turn, my boots have guided me blindly over brick roads

and terracotta roofs. We’ve scaled sandstone towers

and dangled above canals washed in red light.

They carried me home quietly when it was time.

-

When my toes touched the rain, I emptied my pockets

before a small-mouthed man with dry-ice eyes and a beard

denser than rubber. He tore skin and stitches, transplanted

a new tar-black body onto a worn face.

-

The hospital floor is pale green.

My boots glow warm brown.

Swollen lips part under fluorescent light.

Some souls can’t be replaced.

There has been an update on this discussion in that Michael Render, who has been promoting Bernie's campaign, spoke with Coates about Bernie and reparations. My favorite bit of commentary from Render is:

The fact that blacks have to even justify the case for reparations is shameful. The fact that only 1 candidate is being called to task is Bullshit. Especially when that candidate is the only one with policy proposal that directly effects the black community if elected

I agree that the lost nuance can be recovered. I'm actually all about the secularization of mindfulness and meditation. It can remain an extremely valuable spiritual practice full of variation and nuance without being tied to anything mystical or supernatural, which is not my thing. I too notice daily benefit from my practice, and a lot of my day-to-day practice is based on the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, but I still would not really call myself a Buddhist.

Great-- thanks for the heads up on the spider plant. Maybe I'll move tillandsia to a happier, more solitary place. I could put it into its own little open teardrop globe or probably something that allows for more air.

Good idea to plant a more future-minded terrarium. But I won't likely make another big one for a while-- I'm running out of good spots in my small, mostly-windowless apartment.

it from a leather webwork I built

Well that may be getting a little ambitious for me!

Thank you!

Thich Nhat Hanh's "Peace Is Every Step." It's the most recent in a long line of similarly-geared books I've been reading. I'm making a sincere effort to integrate more mindful thinking and behavior into my daily life. I read and read and read about it and then seem to forget to really apply it.

Great! Maybe I'll take it outdoors some day, but probably not until after I have a home instead of an apartment.

Hey thanks! Yeah I learned right after I finished it that Hawthornia is not a great terrarium plant. The nursery was really cleaned out after Christmas, so I took the only remaining succulent of appropriate size. I'm going to try to change it out ASAP for something else, maybe a Kalanchoes, per another person's advice.

I am looking forward to experimenting; I will look into the species and references that you linked, thanks again.

I've been listening to Daughter's album "If you Leave" and eagerly awaiting their new album. This is one of my favorite tracks:

I feel like my literary idol shifts from year-to-year. Kurt Vonnegut will always be at the top of my list for inspiring 14-year-old-me to pursue a career in literature and education. After I read Slaughterhouse Five, I devoured the rest of his work.

I recently read Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, and I thought it was incredible. It launched me into reading a whole series of eastern texts. His description of the river, the stone, and the interconnectedness of life made me pause, put the book down, think, and read it several more times.

I've also been reading a collection of Wallace Stevens, and I'm regularly shocked at the novelty and difficulty of the images he describes. I wish I could write so imaginatively!

I have been reading "Essential Readings" of Thích Nhất Hạnh. I have been reading a lot of eastern texts like this one over the last six months, and so most of the ideas in the book have been pretty redundant for me. However, the middle chunk has blown me away. He discusses the Buddhist concept of "emptiness," which I have failed to understand for a long time. But he uses wonderfully understandable language, and I feel like I finally have a meaningful understanding of some concepts I have been struggling with for a while.

I have been listening to Noah and the Whale's first album, "Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down." It's an uplifting album, which is a departure from what I usually listen to, and a change that I think my soul really needs this month.

I'm a huge Front Bottoms fan, I hope you enjoy the show! Their concerts are such a joy.

I prefer the first two albums as well, but I think that there are some real gems on the new album. "Cough it Out," "Historic Cemetery," and "The Plan" make me smile and sing along as much as any of their songs. It's fun to hear their sound evolving, but I think the biggest reason I haven't fallen in love with this new album is that Brian's lyricism seems to lack the straightforward hilarity, honesty, and insight that I feel like it used to have.

Just finished Taiye Selsasi' "Ghana Must Go." Selasi worked for years under Toni Morrison, and this is her debut novel. While her writing is very different from Morrison's, it has a captivating, powerful life of its own. I thought the book was wonderfully written and a gripping portrait of what it is to struggle with a trans continental identity.

I hope you do give the next book in The Dark Tower series a try! I thought it picked up big time after the first book and that's one of my favorite book series.

I'm reading "We Need New Names" by NoViolet Bulawayo right now. I just finished Selasi's "Ghana Must Go," which I loved. So far I am not a big fan of "We Need New Names," but there's still plenty of time for that opinion to change.

At first I thought this thread was going to vague question from Pablo! I plan to use my skills for what I would call good.

My skills are writing, rhetoric, and people skills. I'm finishing a degree in English and professional writing, and it probably goes without saying that I love to read and write.

I tried my hand at a professional writing position and spent a summer working for a marketing company. I was writing company blogs, product descriptions, social media posts, and filler text designed for SEO. I made good money there, and they offered me a full time position after graduation if I would keep the part-time job for the rest of my degree, but I declined. I learned that everything about marketing, sales, networking, and, to be honest, capitalism in general, feels slimy to me. I got to do a fair amount of networking and meeting with current and potential clients. I'm a very outgoing person, and I make friends everywhere I go. I thought that I would have no trouble applying to people skills to networking and business, but I was wrong. It all felt like such a charade in which everyone was just trying to turn everyone else into dollar signs. I found that while I'm great with people and love socializing, I have difficulty faking a genuine conversation if I'm not sincerely engaged. Nobody was getting hurt, and we did honest work helping the businesses (most of which were pretty local) expand their web presence and grow into bigger markets. But still, I couldn't get over the feeling that everything, at the end of the day, was about money. It felt terribly un-fulfilling and, to my taste, maybe a little bit evil.

So I am now training to be a teacher, and I'll be starting my official student teaching within a year. I am a private tutor to high school and middle school students on the weekend, and I work in the writing center as a consultant and teaching assistant at my university. It is very fulfilling work, and I believe in my ability to make a lasting difference in the lives of individuals, even though I know I'm signing up for a lifetime of underpayment and under-appreciation. I don't think I'll ever feel comfortable working for a corporation. A lot of people are perfectly comfortable working in that kind of setting, doing what they love, and making great money. More power to them! I kind of wish that I had the attitude. But since I don't, it's nice to not have a nagging feeling that I might be selling my soul, screwing someone over, or doing meaningless work.

My all time favorite show is Battlestar Galactica. Unfortunately, I think they just took it off of Netflix. It's still totally worth the time to download it and give it a go. It offers fantastic character development and thorough exploration of much of the human condition, enabled through the sci-fi genre. My favorite sci-fi writers utilize the genre to create situations that would never present themselves in more realistic fiction, and Battlestar does that for sure.

Ja natürlich! Das wird viel Spaß geben. Lassen mir wissen, wenn du mit der Schule fertig bist.

Ach so! Das hab' ich auch gemacht. Ich studierte bei der Goethe Institut in Dresden, und die Sprache war auch mein Nebenfach an der Uni. Ich habe derzeit fast keine Gelegenheiten Deutsch zu sprechen. Ich freue mich, dass du auch Deutsch studiert hat!

  My mother told me I'm so much more serious 
  Than I used to be. She said it's some kind of sad. 

  Waking up takes longer than it used to before 
  My body betrayed itself.
  Now my mornings settle in slowly, my bruised bones 
  Waiting for their cells to to get used to the poison,
  My black and bitter coffee cup warming too-smooth knuckles
  That are never quite hot enough, no 
  Matter how burnt my angry, red tongue. 

  My new-found gravity, I wonder, did it come naturally
  With seeing and feeling too much around me too deeply:
  A product of growing?
  Or did it come more darkly, borne in my blood
  A piece of my chronic disease, unwanted, settling 
  Deep between my toes, above my knees?

  Or was it both? If it's time that my own system did steal,
  It quickly accounts for the new rending that I feel.
  My breakfasts are topped off with too-ripe tears,
  My baseball mitt neglected, catching only frozen fears-
  My wheels rolled twenty to sixty too Goddamn fast,
  And the thick souls of my shoes assure me that it'll last.