bodymore, body less, either way i ain't skipping breakfast

One exciting way a cockroach gets to enter your home is through your bathtub drain. I feel like this would be such a fun way to visit friends! But I am too big to fit. So instead I watch The Wire and tweet that I can’t tell whether the sirens are from the show or the world. In other words, I am a white person living in Baltimore. The farmer at the 32nd street market showed me a photo of a tree base he’d painted to look like an elephant foot.

Besides living in Baltimore, what I've been doing is looking at the time and thinking "if it is 5PM here, it is 4AM in Thailand." This is fun because you don't need any special uniform to do this, just something that tells you the time and someone in Thailand you love and miss a lot. Been talking to Carrot Cake on Skype and it's very futuristic! She's in Bangkok, where the travel clinics are open weird hours and one whole floor of a seven floor mall is a food court with directions like: "For Islamic vegetarian food, see C4. For Brazilian liquid-based desserts, see H9." I miss her, but I am excited for her adventuring.

In criticism news, Mark Cugini's students think I'd be a miserable relationship partner based on their reading of "Is That It's You." One of them said "It sounds like Mr. Young does not approve of love." Which is strictly untrue: I prove love all the time, with a beaker and a stylish bevy of equations.

More thanks are due this week to the champ-ass* (*like bad-ass except better) Barry Graham for his review of Look! Look! Feathers at The Collaigst. I haven't got the chance to read the rest of the new Collagist yet, but I am really excited for something called "In the Time of the Blue Ball." Here is the first paragraph of Barry's review:

If Mike Young told me he grew up in a suburban castle full of lawyers and lion tamers and medicine men, or that he was raised on the edge of the ocean, the adopted son of a snake charmer father and truck-driving mother whose real parents escaped a cult and left him on the front porch of an orphanage, I would believe him. If he told me he grew up the son of uneducated peasants who drank and gambled and whipped their pets and their children equally, I would believe that too. That how's convincing his prose is. Young writes with authority. His voice and his words and his sentences feel earned, authentic.

Barry, you were so close. I grew up in a castle made of tamed lawyers on the edge of an uneducated snake. My parents were a front porch and a whip. Together we drove every day in a truck to an orphanage, where we gambled away children in exchange for medicine and shares in authoritative cults.

Speaking of cults, I read part of a long thing I wrote called The Age of the Tire Boat in NYC (this was in the Center of Fiction, which had beautiful balustrades) and here is me reading the whole thing for Peter Cavanaugh's awesome audio mag Tulip: http://tulipparlor.com/issuetwo. Thanks, Peter! Other cool peeps in the issue include Gian Ditrapano, Eylsia Smith, Galen Dekemper, Tyler Gobble, Sam Edmonds, Eric F Johnson, and Ted Barrow.

Warning: my thing is long to listen to, thirteen minutes and forty-two seconds. 13:42. But I have conference called with Table Mountain and Mt Shasta and Arnold Schwarzenegger and the ghost of John Sutter, and together we have concluded that "The Age of the Tire Boat" is the definitive Northern Sacramento Valley poem-ass thing. Now that it's written, no one else has to ever write about the Northern Sacramento Valley ever again, especially not me. So, yeah, we'll see how that works out. In the meantime, I have tokens in my pocket that will allow me to go back to the 32nd Street Market next weekend and buy Old Bay flavored hummous.