Lawnmower in Long Sleeves (Poem)

If you go far enough back in my life’s tree,
You’ll see with each home I inhabited, I mowed.
Eight years old, pushing ol’ gassy up 83 degree hills
In cutoff t-shirts and 10 bucks a pop. Sweat on a promise:
Bag it in the front. Don’t mind about the back. Acorns
Popped like sling stones against my ankle. Cicadas ground
To paste. From the ground we grow, and to the ground we return.
I strung up a hammock between two trees and drank lemonade,
The dryads cultivating mushrooms. That old oak still grows
Thick with children.

I was a late mover-outer, Millennial with a trench coat (before
Columbine; before Matrix.) with that wan tinny I’m taking it back
Smirk as a twisted boy, I would mow like a minesweeper
In sandals and socks while mom worried I’d cut my toes off–
Bradley, Tom’s neighbor did that. Big toe off, pop, but I never
Saw him sway while standing: maybe he didn’t need it that much.
He never played basketball in the dark again. The ravages of war.

From Book to Table: Creating a 5e Supplement or Campaign

When your hippy typewriter breaks.

I’ve been a little light on the employment of late. Having just graduated with a Masters in English and Rhetoric from JAXState, my daily dose of applications have kept my nose down and hopes up. While I work to find work, on the other hand, I’ve been watching up on the veritable explosion of third party modules and campaigns found both within the 5e setting and without. While I’m not currently able or willing to put time or energy into developing my own TTRPG–whuff–I have the solid foundation for creating my own content. My own module.

Here’s how I’m going to do it.

A Capsule Update

I’ve been sick for a while. I’m talking about this to everyone and anyone who will listen. Ask my gf. Ask my brother. Ask last semester’s classmates. It’s a sickness that effects my brain. Where I have good days of minimal pain, and bad days of near complete forgetfulness, where I’m fighting to focus and get anything done. And those days where I have near complete forgetfulness are the ones where I’m congested, with a little cold, and my whole head seems to shut down. Just a simple, stupid cold makes me nearly incapable of basic function.

I had a great introduction laid out for my book, where I’d talk about real life complications while writing it; how, in the book, the story starts with a broken tooth and ends with a wooden one. Just like in real life, where my book began with a tooth operation (the reason for my initial tooth writing in the first chapter), and ends with the removal of the tooth and a long line of suffering. It would have been a great full-circle thing, a great anecdote to the complexities of how real life spatters into fantasy and science fiction. If my sickness had ended with the removal of that tooth, it would’ve been perfect.

It didn’t end. In fact, removing the tooth sent a whole new wave of bacteria into my system, punching forgetfulness and memory issues back to full throttle–something I had on lockdown since the beginning of November. Strange how you think you have a handle on something, in fact are nearly certain the issue is understood and workable, and then–nope. It isn’t the tooth anymore. It’s the bone, or the sinus cavity, or an abscess that isn’t draining. Or something even deeper: autoimmune, immunodeficiency, viral meningitis.

Yesterday was a nightmare. I woke up at 11:00 after having watched too much television the night before, took my diabetes medication, drank kefir and had a green drink for breakfast, checked my blood sugar: 195. Strange, given I had a salad for dinner the night before, hummus and broccoli and carrots for lunch, and a donut and coffee for breakfast. This meant I was fighting an infection. Again. Maybe the same infection.

Classes have started; day one was Tuesday, and I blankly stared at the syllabus on Wednesday, trying to understand what was expected of me for the semester. Hell, trying to understand the assignment for homework, due Thursday (today). I tried to read a short story, finished, realized I remembered nothing about it except it was by Octavia Butler (because I had been given that information when I was in a more receptive state), and that it was uploaded in an easy-to-convert-to-sound format and sometimes the fonts were shifted, the spaces between words longer than one. And the rims of my vision sometimes pulsed with my heartbeat because pus is putting pressure on your brain, on your eyes, the doctor said. Sometimes I can not see much at all, sometimes pictures move when in periphery, or seem to, because of the shifting sphere shape of my eyes. Straight up terrifying. What do I do? The low-grade migraine that flowed from the back to the front of my head, coupled by the pain in my jaw that I thought was an infected tooth now radiating from an empty socket, sending me into agony while trying to stare at a computer screen.

I readied a dose of $4,000/mo potassium powder, drank maybe .50 of product, felt better. Wanted to write. Wanted to do homework. Needed to get work done. I don’t have time for this, I thought, fell into the couch and watched some escapist scifi on Amazon Prime. Tried to have conversations with my brother online, slurred words coming from someone sober for months, my own damn mouth, wondering again what the hell is wrong with me, again, expunging that wonder in words to silence from the other side. Realizing, again, six doctors, two EarNoseThroat specialists said this is likely stress-related, and then some small-town allergist decided to give my face an x-ray to maybe see if something was going on up there. Yes, something is going on up there.

They’re calling it chronic sinusitis, or sinusitis that continues after four weeks. It’s been in my head for nearly a year now, perhaps two. My nasal cavity is clear as a whistle, always, but when I get congestion I fall to pieces. Sometimes something drains and my eyes roll in the back of my head from the sensation, like springing a leak where water shouldn’t go. Nurses tell stories of sepsis, people dying from sinusitis of late without really knowing why, “feeling” good one day, dead the next. I have a tremor in my neck, my hands that won’t go away. My ears sing like crickets some days, or cicadas the next, or a tintinning ocean tide. This is an orchestra of sick, perhaps of death, a death bloom of infection that grows and grows. I begin my third bout of antibiotics tomorrow.

Yet, this is another journey for my book to explain. Another parallel degradation of myself, burned into my main character as he trods toward the climax. This is a climax that may never happen, where my journey disrupts the flow of words by ending before the book does. Last semester I worried I won’t finish my finals if I can’t get this under control. This semester I worry I won’t see July.

What is July but a marker of time? I joked to a friend that I lived longer than Jesus, that this was my Jesus year of 33, and at least I have that accomplishment. Perhaps only just. Perhaps not. And what are accomplishments but markers of time spent?

And even this, this post, this discussion, is my strange way of pushing forward. I only realize that now, subconsciously everything planned out before I realize: one class requires short stories, and last night I worried I’d have nothing to write. Nothing at all. And I worried I’d sit for days in front of a computer screen and write nothing, all stopped up like a wine cork pushed too far in the bottleneck. This is not nothing. It’s about nothing. The fear of nothing. The fear of whole, abstract existence. The fear of not finishing. But why? But why is a good question.

Despite all the strangeness of this sickness, my conscious self and subconscious self are so in tandem I find joy in the simple understanding that still, I create.

The Differences Between Podcasts and Audiobooks

Let me tell you a little story. I grew up in the midwest. I grew up in a medium-sized industry town in the middle of Illinois. It was a place where the majority of people worked blue collar at the plant or were businesspeople or whatnot. The writing scene–the creativity scene–practically didn’t exist. Granted, we had a great liberal arts college with all sorts of brilliant professors, but those doors were closed to me growing up.

Despite coming from a long line of engineers and farmers and accountants, I found my niche in writing. I needed a way to communicate my creativity, so I wrote my thoughts down. In seventh grade, I wrote a story that involved all my friends. Five friends doing awesome things. Kinda like Animorphs (if anyone remembers them). In 8th, I won the city competition for two-page story. In high school, the relationship with my first girlfriend suffered due to my love of writing.

I also played every sport you could imagine, was heavily involved in Boy Scouts, and acted in plays: all of which attributed to my well-roundedness. Being extroverted also helped me connect with just about everyone. I’m an unconventional writer in many ways.

Enter podcasting. Enter video blogging. Enter audiobooking. It shouldn’t surprise anyone when I looked at the possibility of reading my own stuff–or creating a storytelling podcast–and said, “Hell yeah. I can do that.”