Bendi Barrett

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  • Your Safe Space or Mine?

    Jan 12, 12

    For most gamers I know video games represent a kind of sanctuary. They’re a place to get lost in for a few hours, to take you out of yourself, to challenge you. From the inception of home gaming to the present, gamers have lived under the stigma that people who spend their leisure time gaming are shut-ins, recluses, nerds, geeks, and/or weirdos. Ask yourself which image is more pervasive: the sweaty loner hunched in a basement in front of a glowing screen or the urban professional who gets in a few hours of World of Warcraft before hitting the bars? Despite these prejudices or perhaps partly because of them, hardcore gamers have built tight, insular communities which sometimes reply strongly to criticism or censure.

    Whether you prefer to game with like minded people or you play games to avoid any kind of people, essentially the service you are being provided with is a low-level escapism. A safe and familiar space to inhabit for a time. The idea is that regardless of where you fall into the world (race, sex, gender, orientation, class) there is space in the wonderful world of games for you to feel OK in.

    Sounds simple enough, right? Well, maybe.
    
    Games (console, PC, hell even portables) are increasingly reaching toward using the full potential of an ever more connected society. So much so that major industry players are making predictions like this, which brings us back around to the idea of safe spaces. Back when we were first playing Galaga in the wood-paneled family room, there was no inter-connectivity to speak of. Maybe you had a friend over a few times a month or maybe your weird cousin might demand some play time, but those were pretty much the extent of your interactions with others. But in a world where your consoles are connected to the Internet for the vast majority of your play time what does that mean for the safety and quality of your gaming spaces?

    Even as we move away from the idea of gaming as predominately male [caution, PDF] it’s sometimes hard to feel as though great strides are being made in terms of tolerance and acceptance in gaming communities. Drop into any online game of Call of Duty and you risk hearing angry diatribes and screeds containing virulently homophobic, misogynistic and generally misanthropic language. Stop by the message board of any IGN or Kotaku article attempting to discuss issues of the negative portrayal of women in gaming or the relative invisibility of LGBT people and you’ll likely see the evidence of a brewing flame war. In the first case, it’s almost certainly matter of casual thoughtlessness rather than intentional malevolence: calling someone a faggot or a cunt for sniping you is an incidental slur, a casual insult without intrinsic meaning. Yet it creates a toxic environment that ruins the safe space for other players. In the second case, on message boards around the Internet, arguments are being vehemently made that the complaints and concerns of marginalized groups have no place in gaming reportage and commentary. The argument, explicit or implied, is that a significant amount of gamers (a notoriously, ferociously opinionated bunch) don’t want to be forced to deal with anything that isn’t in their purview.

    A recent example is the debut of Kotaku Core: a new content filter that can exclude any articles that do not explicitly deal with games, thus removing pretty much any social inquiry for those who just don’t want to be bothered. On the one hand this frees the website to write articles about social trends/concerns in gaming with impunity, knowing that those who come to the website for pure gaming news will simply elect not to the view such content. On the other, it narrows one of the few mediums through which those most disenfranchised by gaming communities are able to directly confront the rest of their peers — such as articles like this or this.

    Still, it’s not all bad news. The existence of places like The Border House Blog [found here] — which specializes in gaming among marginalized groups (queer people, people of color, people with disabilities, etc.) — seems to signal some shift toward a more thoughtful gaming community. It is a place where the minority opinion is given full voice and full range to develop alternate narratives about what gaming is and should be.

    We’re approaching a point where interacting with others while gaming is moving from the exception to the rule. For every game like Dark Souls, in which players interact with each other in oblique, non-verbal ways, there is an MMO or a first-person shooter which connects us directly and creates opportunities for casual bigotry. A familiar charge in situations where marginalized groups take offense at the content of games or their treatment by other players is: why can’t you toughen up or lighten up? But why should some be denied their safe space when the world and its troubles loom, waiting for when that hour of Battlefield to be up? We’re all looking for some form of escape or transportation in video games, it’s a shame that the predominant gaming culture seems to have decided that only some of us deserve it.

    
    
  • What I Believe

    Jan 09, 12

    I’ve been struggling recently to try and define what it is that I believe. I figured that it might be nice to get it all down, to interrogate myself on what it is that makes me tick. Though this list is subject to change, the current results are as follows:

    I believe that there is (currently) no higher authority than human authority. I say currently in order to leave room for what I have no firsthand knowledge of: the existence of god[s], non-human species, etc. but recognize that these variables have little to no impact on the mandates of my existence; I neither expect a religious conversion nor welcome the arrival of our non-human overlords.  However I understand how important religion is to theists and recognize that some of the kindest people I know root their kindness in faith. I think that where kindness comes from is largely irrelevant, but that we are good to each other is paramount.

    I believe that we are all born equal into a profoundly unequal world. As such, I think the social, political, and financial structures of our society (capitalist, American) are not designed with this fact in mind. For example, I cannot believe in bold-faced claims of equality in a country where the quality of state-mandated education is decided largely by zones (where residential proximity to a certain school makes that school your default educational setting) which are themselves decided by political and financial motivations. I have witnessed firsthand how such a system can be winkled and grifted until the result blatantly deprives those within. This is only one of the many failures of our society, a society in which even some of the most disenfranchised are so reluctant to welcome changes.

    I believe that everything is temporary. I think conceptions of eternity are rooted in fear of death, fear of change, and that such thinking has roots in religious dogma. There is not, to my knowledge, any scientific or logical approximation of forever. As such I’ve chosen over time to reject such thinking. Our bodies, our relationships, our hatreds, our loves, our jobs, our…everything, must have room to change, to grow, and to expire. That said, I am a creature of nostalgia. I remember and I savor and I regret, maybe this is a bit of hypocrisy, but I think that everyone is entitled to a few hypocrisies.

    I believe that sexuality is one of our foremost forms of expression. I was once told, when I was younger, that my preoccupation with sexuality would dim and fade with time. I remember the grave impression I got upon first reading Foucault’s [a notable french theorist] “The History of Sexuality, Volume One” that revelling in sexuality was a trap of modernity, that freedom could not be attained by this preoccupation. Yet I find nothing illuminating about the repressive antics of current and former generations, hiding in closets and behind bedroom doors. The proliferation of sexual information on the Internet has revolutionized the sex and sexuality of many people who would have otherwise been in the dark. The existence of college courses in frank discussion of the issue of sex has elevated the discourse and produced keen critical lenses by which to see the world in new and unusual lights. I look forward to an era that is post-sexual shame though I know that there is too much repression still to fight in order for me to see that world in my lifetime.

    I believe in quiet moments. I think that slowing the mind’s interminable racing for a second, or a minute, or an hour is essential to a healthy understanding of oneself and one’s situation. I think that ultimately that is what writing is to me. It is a space by which to find some semblance of quiet, to plunge the interior depths and report the findings.

    
    
  • On the importance of (“Alternative”) Black Authorship

    May 24, 11

    In the sixth grade everyone I knew suddenly, seemingly simultaneously knew all the lyrics to Puffy’s (as in Daddy, as in Diddy) “All About the Benjamins”. It was a frightening, confusing genesis. A hive mind had developed within the barely pubescent minds of all my friends. Not only did I not know the lyrics, I hadn’t even heard the song. It took a solid week of practice and rote memory before I could successfully fake my way through the opening lines, spitting on command and realistically pantomiming the rest.

    I wish someone had told me then — though would I have believed? — that in a few years the memory would amount to little more than a dispassionate shrug. By high school I had embraced outsider status in dozens of ways and music was the least of them. I was a gay poetry lover and writer in a high school with a disappointing graduation rate and zero arts funding. I didn’t have very many idols, but among them were Allen Ginsberg (whose poetry is adorning my t-shirt as I type this) and Gregg Araki (whose queer art-house films I watched in my darkened bedroom at obscene hours). Precious few of the people who had defined my artistic direction and subsequent impulses were black. Though I am black, almost no black people formed the Greek chorus that sang to me when I sat down to write or think or dream.

    The problem, as I saw it then and have learned to see better now, was with the nature of black artistry. It seemed that there were two major forces in the shaping of the black arts: The Church and the Street.

    This dichotomy seemed to take up so much of the spectrum of black work. In music, Hip-Hop was writing pandering odes to the latter while Gospel fussily concerned itself with the former and R&B uncomfortably sandwiched itself between the two. I refrained from reading James Baldwin because of how I’d heard that the church influenced his writing, while I loftily avoided the plethora of books pouring out of the urban-drugs-sex-and-gangsters scene.

    My imagination has always skewed to the fantastic, so the worldliness of black art was a source of considerable disappointment. It took a deeply impassioned college professor to convince me of Baldwin and properly introduce me to Toni Morrison. Now I rank them both highly as writers, luminaries, and orators of their respective times.

    I realize now that a fascination and investment in the realities of black culture, formed in part at church rallies and on street corners, does not damn any particular work. Still, the world is so much bigger than these places.

    When I think about myself in the sixth grade I wonder what I would have done with a talent like Janelle Monae. Someone who has shown a voracious appetite for influences beyond the rhythm-and-blues standards and whose vision transcends the categorical. What would I have said about Saul Williams, whose poetry opened parts of my mind. Once I got my hands on his work I spent months poring over a handful of clips online and reading everything he had published up to that point. What would I have said about Basquiat and his vivid, chaotic worlds? Of George Clinton? Of Octavia Butler? Of the hundreds of other musicians, artists, filmmakers, and writers who have committed to making work that stands out boldly from the ranks of their peers.

    Black “alternative” authorship, meaning black artists whose work is vibrantly realized and create non-standard narratives, is vital to the creation of black authors. My work, in poetry and prose, has almost always set me apart from my black and heterosexual contemporaries. The charge has always been, “why don’t you make something more relatable?” I wonder how many times Janelle Monae was told that before she opened her song “Violent Stars Happy Hunting” with the line “I-I-I-I’m an alien from outer space.” I wonder how many black teenagers have deeply felt this sentiment.

    It wasn’t until I allowed myself to become familiar with the breadth of black writing that I realized how far I fled from it. The protagonists of my stories were always created  in a vacuum of race because I couldn’t see or acknowledge the complexities in black communities. It took years for me to understand the damage done by being pushed to the margins of of the black community and it has taken a conscious effort to rediscover the art that was lost to me. Yet had I known, sitting in that class in the sixth grade that the legacy of black authorship was so much bigger and more diverse than anything in my purview, I wonder who I would have become.

    
    
  • How to be a poet*

    May 04, 11

    Learn a language.

    Unlearn your language.

    Wake up early in the morning and stand in the grass and look out onto the street.

    Find a word you love and say it to yourself 100 times.

    Wonder.

    Go to the library and look around.

    Make yourself sick over love.

    Smile.

    Take a deep breath and then take another.

    Lift weights and then relish the soreness in your shoulders.

    Move.

    Buy something and don’t tell anyone.

    Believe in _ _ _.

    Go to a restaurant alone and eat quietly.

    Make a list of your favorite things and abstain from them for a week.

    Read something wild.

    Write the initials of your middle school love on separate sheets of paper and feed them to a fire.

    Call your sister.

    Call your brother.

    Answer the next phonecall you get.

    Pay attention.

    Collapse yourself.

    Breathe.

    Eat jalapeños out of the jar.

    *full disclosure: being a poet is the same as being a human, except with a more acute attention span.

    
    
  • I have straight friends, too

    Mar 23, 11

    Some of my best friends, people I have known for years, have made the choice to be heterosexual. But what does that really mean? What are the ramifications of deciding to engage in carnal dealings with the opposite sex? Well, it means that it’s pretty safe for them to walk down the streets of most American cities and towns together, it means that they probably don’t have to think twice about disclosing their sexual proclivities to a new doctor, it means that they can wake up every day knowing that their right to love is implicitly protected and that no one is trying to change that.

    In all seriousness: I love my friends and I don’t have to love them despite their sexuality. I would never use anyone as an example intended to mask the ugliness of my rhetoric, because what kind of friend does that? Let’s take a look at the highlights, shall we?

    Sarah Palin has gay friends, or at least a gay friend.

    “Molotov” Mitchell, a columnist and self-proclaimed ‘zealot’ with WorldNetDaily (an organization who will pop up again shortly) has gay friends. One of whom he mocks in shrill, exaggerated ‘gay voice’ up until the last self-effacing, point-making moment. I’m sure his gay friends are cool with that. Also, with this:

    Wherein (for those of you at home keeping score) our man, Mitch, applauds Uganda for considering legislation to make homosexuality a capital offense and casually dismisses any comparison to Nazi Germany or any other murderous political regimes. Fresh.

    Last — and most currently — but not least, Victoria Jackson, former SNL cast member and current crusader for righteousness and unkempt hair.

    Anyone expecting Ms. Jackson (also a columnist for WorldNetDaily — do they pay extra for anti-gay speech?) to wax emphatic about biblical law and be done with it will be disappointed here. She also makes it a point to explain that homophobia is a “cute little buzzword of the liberal agenda”. She takes time out to bash Muslims and complain about Glee trying to “turn kids gays”. All this before coming to our favorite Conservative Christian Buzzword: Gay Friend(s) [at 5:33]

    So let’s review what we’ve learned: any negativity directed toward the LGBT community can be completely offset by saying that you have gay friends.

    It’s like a magic pill. Or an anti-bigotry deflection shield that (supposedly) runs on the complicity of queers everywhere.

    
    
  • Bobcat Poem

    Mar 21, 11

    bobcat poem

    if he mauls me
    then I bleed, and

    there are no pixels
    to render the redness whole.

     

    (this poem, written on August 27, 2008, is an import from an older blog.)

    
    
  • Hyperpop 2

    Jan 19, 11

    The Hyperpop series started with a freewrite in a journal under extreme time constraints. The idea was to get as many concepts and as much language down in as short a timespan as possible. The series has maintained that constraint. They are written in subways, in cars, on planes – in any place where time is short and ideas are rampant.

    Hyperpop.2

    Hellacious sweetmeat, son of a sinner, eye of some ungracious storm. Be my unilateral decision, my deciding electorate vote. Spindle sperm and faith, treble and arterial spray. Bless my wounds in nightshade neon, vending machine supplicant. I need this nearness, this all is intractable evidence ━ these sloppy sounds of sick on sick, wet sick, warbled over ice like disco butter.

    But I digress, pressed as I am against this filthy wall covered with pen marks, pleasure votives, the diacritical philosophies of a horny, hapless cellist. Cellophane pressed against my mouth, counting the molecules in the moisture. My lover means to kill me. My lover hasn’t succeeded yet, but love means letting him try.

    God is not good, god is good at. The distinction is my chapped knees, and grotesque hairdo, huffing bathroom paint and the plastic peony fresh of toilet bowl cleanser cakes. I know, I know, this part is where I’m penetrated. Where I confess that love also is a suicidal need to rend. But Ginsberg help me, this doesn’t feel transcendental. This bathroom stall confessional has lost its punk rock charm, its ironic ire and menace-eyed grace; I’m on my knees in a puddle of piss and my lover means to kill me.

    But it’s not all bad, my delicate merciless, my covetous machine. We can make up the difference in penny alms and mealy-mouthed apologies. You can pull out the knife, the narrative, the epistemology and lay them lengthwise. You can examine me with your libidinous litmus test, green means two fucks and salvation, white means strangulation at high noon.

    Love is aways a question of forever, you say through a knife-toothed grin, then ask: pine or cedar, dark earth or white fire.

    
    
  • Recommendation: Memories of the Decadence

    Jan 11, 11

    “At the beginning of the Decadence it was easy. Although we were bored, and though everything had been done before, we were seized with a peculiar sense of potential. Our anomie had something optimistic to it. This was the golden age of our decline.”

    Hari Kunzru’s short story Memories of the Decadence is bound in the cycles and disappointments of fads and ideologies. Kunrzu moves through phase after phase of a society’s shifts in fixations: fetishes become search engines which become hierarchies which become…

    The prose moves quickly and coolly through sex and violence, compulsion and restraint, showing little empathy or investment in the wildly swinging needle of the social barometer. Ultimately the piece sends a message about compulsion and direction and boredom. The dangers of culture, if you will.

    But the story (perhaps it’s more of an alternate-world sociological text than a story though) is a better advocate for the author’s cleverness than I am:

    Read it here (at the author’s blog) or here (in the 2011 Pushcart Prize collection).

    
    
  • The Year in Gaming Choices

    Jan 01, 11

    In 2010 I was shot into the depths of space with a faulty spacesuit. Oxygen vented hard from the rupture and within seconds I was choking for air. What seemed like only moments later I was burning up in the atmosphere of some nameless planet. Luckily my grisly death had a happy ending: I was revived by a shadowy organization and given the means with which to hunt my killers and reap bloody vengeance.

    As the violet-eyed Commander Hyacinth Shepherd I made decisions that influenced the people around me and the futures of several alien civilizations. Shepherd was a hard, but fair leader who romanced a dying alien assassin while plunging into certain doom (again) to get the job done. The game in question is Mass Effect 2 on the XBOX 360 and PC, soon to be released on the PS3. Players in Mass Effect 2 and its predecessor are given the option of choosing the gender of their character as well several other more cosmetic decisions. That said, Shepherd was one of my favorite digital avatars of the year and according to post game statistics collected anonymously by Bioware, I was in the minority of about 20% of players who decided to send a woman to save the universe.

    If that number seems discouraging, it need not be. Simply being provided the option of choosing the gender of my hostile alien killing savior represents a cultural leap forward in gaming. As Bioware was blurring the lines of game play between third-person shooters and RPG, they were slowly (but firmly) insisting that choice is as important as a solid narrative. Elsewhere in Dragon Age Origins, a stellar late  2009 release, my male elven rogue was courting a trained assassin named Zevran (maybe I have a thing for dangerous men?).

    Then, to my surprise, handsome (I think) rogue invited the assassin into his tent where they made love (in understated PG-13 fashion). I found myself grinning as madly as if I’d just been bedded.

    What is important about that moment and about the idea of extending gamer choices beyond the staid tradition of manly men rescuing belabored princesses, is that increasingly games are embracing the complexities of player identities. A teenage girl playing through Mass Effect 2 for the first time can choose to create a reflection of herself in Commander Shepherd and blast through the bad guys without being forced to default to a male persona. A young queer gamer can decide to pursue same-sex relationships that are represented as equal to their heterosexual counterparts in Dragon Age Origins. In Fable 3, another 2010 release, same-sex households are as enthusiastically loving and needy as straight ones.

    As a vigilant proponent of complexity and diversity its refreshing to see moments like this enter the notoriously closed straight male court of video games. Yet even more progressive work is being done elsewhere.

    Choice of Games (www.choiceofgames.com) has created a handful of multiple-choice adventure games that extend player choice nearly indefinitely. Using their javascript programming language, called Choicescript, they’ve crafted games where choices about gender and orientation come standard and equity is more or less assumed. These games reflect the richness of player identities and use that complexity to deliver an experience that is the richer for it. In one game my vampire player suffered through a torturous same-sex relationship with an earnest confederate soldier while in another my courtier seduced a king and sneered at his lessers at court.

    The central pleasure of all these moments was in feeling like the decisions I made were my own, not ones that I was forced into by necessity. It felt like a few game developers had finally stopped to consider an audience beside the teenage male demographic. It was a brilliant year for gaming and a fantastic year for choosing what I wanted.

    FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m currently working on a text adventure using the Choicescript language.

    
    
  • When the Rapture Comes

    Dec 22, 10

    When the rapture comes

    We’ll be sitting down for breakfast. Cozy
    as two men in their last days, fresh
    from yesterday’s fight. The orange juice

    will have expired and the oranges rotted,
    you will complain: “You let everything go
    to waste in this house.” And I will agree

    in my head but scoff aloud, accuse you
    of whatever I’m of a mind to yell – a fight
    is never about which words you hurl;

    it’s about threatening blood, rupture,
    and unsettling in for the long haul.
    A fight is about where the bodies fall.

    “Fuck your oranges!” And I mean it, you stay silent
    and you mean it. The dance requires this
    distance in our gaze, a little ice in the air.

    When the rapture comes and finds us rank
    and rubbled, surveying the bruised peaches
    for an unscathed dessert, god will shrug

    and every man woman and child will descend
    as the fruit basket rises up past the telephone wires
    and the tops of buildings up into the waiting sky.

    
    
• Tweets

  Tweets

  Profile
  • Welcome to the average Tuesday for a depressive.

    May 21, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
  • I feel like my spirit is leaking out. Super slowly. I’m exhausted for no reason and can’t write shit. Also, I hate my twitter avatar.

    May 21, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
  • Random Access My Junk

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  • .@Drakonskyr Cuz’ god is a wacky mother of 6 from Brooklyn saying, “If you [insert sin here] I’ll kill ya’!” #Webseriespitch

    May 21, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
  • @Drakonskyr Suck a dick in a patch of dirt and call it real estate. Isn’t that one of the seven deadly sins?

    May 21, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
  • @Drakonskyr Stuck in Ithaca for a job, eh? A big score? Just one last one, then you’re out for good…?

    May 21, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
  • @Drakonskyr crazy! Is he in California or were you on the East Coast?

    May 21, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
  • I don’t mean to suggest that only gay men do the anal, but we’ve got a bad rap in the culture. Short story: y’all are perverts, too.

    May 21, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
  • My twitter feed was a little anal heavy for a minute there, and none of those involved were gay men, sooo…

    May 21, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
  • .@SeanWegmann and the Happy Hostage #Webseriespitch

    May 21, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
  • .@SeanWegmann I was at Dairy Queen last night, were you the reason the cashier was smiling like someone in the middle of a manic episode?

    May 21, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
  • WEB SERIES PITCH: There’s a hair in my food. PLOT TWIST: I cooked the food myself!

    May 21, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
  • Nearly just lost my shit to the “Plush” video (Stone Temple Pilots). What happened to my youth? Who stole my dreamy-eyed innocence?

    May 21, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
  • RT @DanielNester: Notes on Beyoncé http://t.co/Z8ONx4XxKm

    May 21, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
  • Why waste time being proud of celebrities when you could be doing something for yourself that you could be proud of?

    May 20, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
  • Gettin’ brave, shooting for the big markets.

    May 20, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
  • Listening to Cherchez LaGhost on repeat. Beginning to transcend humanity.

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  • @Drakonskyr your tumblr has officially become the sort of thing used as evidence against serial killers.

    May 18, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
  • I’ll tell you a secret: I don’t give one solid fuck about today.

    May 18, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
  • Guys, seriously, I can’t figure out how to do anything. Email me instructions.

    May 16, 13 from Tweetbot for Mac Reply, Retweet, Favorite
• Publications

  Publications
  • A list in progress

    PRINT

    
    

    A Rain of Dust, Sein Und Werden, Summer 2007

    (Fiction)

    
    

    Jerking Off, Snapshots of Last Friday, Living Will, and Theophany 

    Rainy Day Magazine, Spring 2008

    
    

    Recipe for Korean Barbecue, Stretching Panties, Vol 3 (2011) 

    
    

    When the Rapture Comes, Glitterwolf Issue 3, Forthcoming

    
    

    ONLINE

    
    

    from Nearly Naked, Sein Und Werden, Winter 2008

    
    

    A Moral Dispensation, Sein Und Werden, April 2011

    
    

    WWTFD, Windowed.org, April 2011

    
    

    Diagram of the Carnal Male, Stages of Possession, PANK Magazine, May 2011
    

    • PANK Interview, July 2011

    Ars Poetica: New York, Escarp.org, May 2011

    
    
• Attributions

  Attributions
  • Because Sharing is Caring

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    - The swanky power lines photo is called "Power lines at sunset" by Benjamin Miller. It was downloaded here and was modified using Photoshop in full compliance with the license agreement. 
• About Me

  About Me
  • I am a poet, writer, blogger, and occasional provocateur stationed in the Northwestern suburbs of Chicago. I am a proud graduate of Cornell University's (2008) Creative Writing program and a co-creator of the blog experiment: Wake Up, Rod in addition to a half dozen other zany schemes.
    
    I am currently working on my first chapbook tentatively entitled Hyperpop.