What's Happening?!

It's about high time I posted something since my last post was in... October. Whoops. Well, there goes my marketing plan. Just kidding, I don't really have one of those. I know I probably should but I don't really care. I just want to make my art, write my writings, do my thing.

On that subject, March 1 starts my Akron Soul Train Fellowship, where I will spend a very busy month creating an original work of art, which I can loosely describe at this point as a poetry/blackout poetry/flash fiction chapbook. I also have an interest in collage art and screen printing so there will likely be elements of that involved too. I hope to find a tasteful way to combine all of these elements but I guess we'll see.

As for the topic that will be the focus of my writing, I don't really have that either. I am going to see where my inspiration will take me, but if you are familiar with what I do, it will probably be a combination of existential angst, political rants, dark humor and general weirdness/absurdity. If that sounds interesting to you, there will be a couple of opportunities for you to get a firsthand account of what this will be all about.

On March 2, I will be kicking this whole thing off right with a party, which I thought would fun to make a Happening. If you are not familiar with what a happening is, well, time to do some reading. Or you could just watch/listen to this lecture by Happening Artist Allan Kaprow:

If this sounds like something you'd being interested in  and  you live in the Akron area, I would love to you see you there:

https://www.facebook.com/events/2470934783132054/

If this isn't really something you'd likely do, but you are into poetry, hate right-wing propaganda and have always wanted to tear apart some books and scribble in the pages, I am having a Blackout Poetry workshop on March 10. It does cost $15.00 but materials are provided and it's at a coffee shop so you can get your caffeine fix while you stick it to the man! If that sounds like fun, please check out the facebook invite for more information, and be sure to get your tickets on Eventbrite:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1157145331088578/

Tribute to My Tom Petty Tribute

This is not the blog post I expected to write, but it's the one I needed to.

Last night, after taking a solid two hours to finish my tribute to Tom Petty that I started over the weekend, the website froze and I ended up losing the vast majority of it. I'd swear I saved it several times, but alas... I think it is going the way of my Scott Weiland tribute.

It sucks. I had some pretty great anecdotes about my life that related to my Tom Petty fandom in a way that was lightly humorous but sensitive enough about the man's passing that his fans would hopefully, really appreciate. I was emotional but not sentimental. Basically, I followed the standard personal essay rulebook, and it all really came together.

Part of me wants to start working on it again, but I just don't think I have it in me to ever actually try. I had these pent up emotions about this guy I never met in real life that I just needed to release, and now it's just gone forever.

Don't worry, though. I think this is turning out better. Like, not better in the technical, "I'm a college graduate" sort of sense, but, in a, you know, I don't know... That thing. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about.

I don't want to give you the wrong idea. While my Tom Petty Tribute nowhere compared to the actual Tom Petty, or truly could give justice to him as an artist, as far as this blog is concerned, it was like the absolute shit! Not absolute shit. Or maybe? Something, it was definitely something.

The Control Room

Photo illustration courtesy of Geralt on Pixabay.

Sitting here at my computer, listening to conversations going on out in the yard below and back though the french doors, from the kitchen, which sits across the semi-lit gulf of dining room that separated me in my study from the conversation I had just momentarily parted from.

Scrolling down through my music, I hit upon Wilco, and have a sort of moment of Zen as everything all around me connects through the music I play, and I feel slightly outside of it all, on a parallel plane, sitting at the helm of the control room of the universe.

I play "Radio Cure," which feels in my gut the right song for that exact moment, the thoughts all swishing through my brain floating on my office chair on the waves of a deep red lake of Merlot, the wine class sky distorting the world outside in a sort of hazy otherworldly blur, and I smile, the notes of the song falling all around me, like a misty rain, warm in my sunlit face, closing my eyes as I look up in the vast open eternity beyond the illusion of blue skies and clouds... The song climaxes, the hairs on my arms standing as the rush of sonic pleasure runs through me,"Our distance has the way of making our love understandable" soaring...

My mind drifts back to my physical surroundings, the dark of the night, the fluttering voices broken by the occasional outbreak of laughter. I let the album play on, grab a handful of cigars from the humidor on my desk and absorb into the rushing current.

Updatably Updated

It has become my habit to listen to two albums on Sunday mornings, Breakfast in America by Supertramp and Paranoid, of course, by Black Sabbath, among whatever else I am feeling at the moment. I am currently on the B Side of Paranoid, "Electric Funeral."

I'm not even sure where to start, to be honest.

I suppose, it would make sense to start with the biggest revelation and work my way down. Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable way to structure this. Go!

While things on a macro level are crazy and fucked up, in my own little bubble, transparent though it is, I have actually accomplished some shit.

On literally the last night I could register, I found myself filling out this online form for this thing. It seemed like a good way to spend $15.00 that I had no hope of ever seeing again, so with my wife's encouragement, and the encouragement of close friends and family, I applied for a fellowship with this new locally-based organization, dedicated to the arts.

And then the unthinkable happened.

Email.

Bafflement.

Holy shit. It was actually happening. I was actually going to be an Akron Soul Train Fellow!

Thank you Amy Mothersbaugh, Nancy Brennan, and Natalie Grieshammer as well as the Board of Directors. I am so excited to be part of such an amazing project.

I am working on some ideas, but the basic gist of what I plan on doing involves spending the first half of the month-long residency writing a new chapbook, and the second-half doing the art and design for it. I'm really fascinated by screen printing, so I might do something with that. My big event at the end will be a chapbook release party, hopefully with live music and lots of wine.

In the meantime, in addition to keeping writing plenty of new poems just because, I am also working on finishing some short stories because I have two short story collections in the works, Auto and Bastards, and I am also trying to finish the first draft of my second novel, The Ash People.

It's actually not as bad of a workload as it sounds.

Auto contains some of my best-known, previously published stories, including some from my out-of-print first book, "Greasy," "A Hipster Confession," and "The Opossums," one that has been self published as a single, "The Day the Music Died," and one that was published by a literary journal, "Truck Shop." For this new collection, I am writing two new stories, which is why it is delayed from my original goal publishing date. Anyways, it is my first priority and will be out soon, I just have to finish "Highly Evolved" and "Xennial," which like the rest are fairly personal first person narratives, fictional stories based on my life, hence Auto. These two stories really round out the collection well and make it feel complete.

Bastards, for the most part will be new stories in the vein of dark humor/satire. The only old stories in it are "Starving, America" and "The Bananamen Prophecy," the rest are all brand new, with titles like "Snowflakes," "Bukake," and "The Balloon Man."

The Ash People is kind of a combination of the two styles that I write, realism and dark satire, which gives it an interesting texture that I think you, my readers, will enjoy a great deal.

Anyways, expect me to post more often. I am going to stay busy writing and making art, but I will try not to be so busy that I neglect this website, which I have kept going for a quite a while now. There might be lulls every now and again, but, at least for the foreseeable future, I will keep on keeping on with it.

Non-Sponsored Content

Roll that beautiful bean footage...

Nashville Skyline is a rainy summer morning kind of album. I turn it up kinda loudish and walk across the dining to the sun room where I begin this short residence in front of my computer.

These past months, I haven't purposely been avoiding this... activity, but, just the same, the other day, it hit me like an epiphany that I had not done it in forever. After taking a few days to contemplate the absence, I have come to the conclusion that taking a break is a healthy thing to do, sometimes.

Sometimes, it's more important to focus on living your life for a while, and just taking it all in until you realize you have gained not only some bounce in your step, but also a new sense of clarity, and you remind yourself why you do what you do.

I'm sure it's not my longest break. Through the years, I have taken breaks, and I have always managed to come back to this blog, all in good time.

Good things are happening in the world of Gabe Gott. It's better that I keep them to myself now, but when the time comes, you'll be the first to hear from me.

Divided We Conquer? A Meditation on Society in the Over-Share Age

Originally, this week off was to be solely designated for finishing my second novel. Then, of course, I became hugely distracted by my Strat and just kind of went with it. Playing guitar is probably the best way that I've found to relieve stress and find my sense of self. Kind of a mental health sort of thing, you know? It's good to have a stay-cation every now and again to remind you about what's important.

Writing and music are both important parts of my life, there is no doubt, but I just need to let things unfold naturally, and just focus more on writing how I write and playing guitar how I play guitar, producing the works that I produce. I have actually started to feel pretty comfortable doing these things how I do them, so I am just going to go with it, for better or worse. Naturally, my job is also important to me. Not just as a means to make ends meet, though, because I feel like I have finally found a company that will give me a chance to prove myself. When it all comes down to it, the thing that is most important to me is my life with my wife, our starting a family, or rather, starting a new branch of this large extended network of family I was both born into and have built up over the years, and the prospect of that, as much as we both want it, is also very nerve-racking with what is going on in the world today, and especially in our own country.

We, the individual parts of society, just don't see ourselves enough as one collective entity. We become too localized into our own lives, and our grievances--some real, some imaged--that we forget that, like any body, if any one part of us is weak or suffering, then we all are weak and suffering. We are supposed to all be branches from the same tree, but we have lost insight into what makes us us.We really just need to sit down and decide what it means to have the trait that we conveniently named after ourselves and then gave a meaning to that we have no hope of attaining if we expect too much from nature and each other and expect too little from ourselves.

We need to try harder to respect each other. After all, if we can't at least agree to do that, then why do we think we can accomplish anything else meaningful? If no one else's input is valuable, except those whose agree with our own opinion, then how do we expect to learn anything from someone who's had different experiences with life, having developed different ways of thinking about things, and can maybe even provide some perspective on our own lives---helping us find the things that we all share?

Those are the things that make it worthwhile to agree to disagree, at times, while also expecting more of ourselves, and holding each other to the same standards that we hold ourselves. If we let our standards be too low, then it is our own fault that we end up a certain way. There are some things that are worth hoping for, and that does include peace, but peace doesn't come without mutual respect.

I always wished that my kids would grow up in a world that was better than the way that I found it, but the prospect of that, right now, seems pretty dim. Hope isn't entirely lost, but we take it for granted that much more each day, and each day, that much more of it is lost. How long will it be until we have none?

Let's not find out, let's aim higher. In order to hit our mark, we all have to be trying equally as hard, and helping those who need the help, when they need it, and not ask why, but ask, instead, how are you? That's the kind of world where I want my kids to live, and while I am sure it is idealistic, there is nothing wrong with having ideals. What else should we be aiming for?