Down With the Sickness

Oo-wa-ah-ah-ah🎶

For those of you too old to know the song reference in this title, here.

Fever, in the morning

If you’re a regular reader or subscriber of mine, you’ll be perplexed as to this post. Normally, Mondays are pieces about Popinations. You know, the ‘series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews.’ And they’re also normally sent to you between 9 and 10am my time. Well, I did have a good outline set up, complete with placement of images where they’re going to go between my writing bits, and so I made the innocent plan to write it out Saturday and edit it Sunday and have it ready for you today. Unfortunately,

Some combination of my hobnobbing with a large crowd at Friday’s Blue Dime Cabaret show, the brutal temperature outside here in Colorado, and any number of other factors, including stress, managed to render me incapacitated all weekend. It’s not Covid, though, so that’s a good thing. Just The Crud That Hits When It’s Too Dang Cold And You’ve Been In Public Too Much. Or, as the Scottish call it, The Dreaded Lurgy (tm).

Fever all through the night

So here’s what I’ll do: I’ll work on the Popination this week, as soon as I feel recovered, and have it ready to go next Monday for you. I’m pretty sure I’ll still be able to bang out a fight analysis for Wednesday’s Fight Clip Club, and we’ll just have to see how I feel between health and family coming out to visit this weekend, if I can get Friday’s vocab word done. I do have a good idea for it, which I think might catalyze some discussion, but I won’t jinx it. For now, though:

For those of you too young to know the song referenced in the above subtitles, here.

I heard it’s cold out, but her listicle melts

I’ve noticed that most of your favorite pieces of mine tend to be the ones that are more on the personal story side of things, so before I go back to bed, I thought I’d sling y’all a list of the things I’m up to these days. More details, no doubt, in future essays, but for now here’s a wee listicle:

• The department at DU at which I am an adjunct faculty is on the quarter system, not the semester system. So my Winter quarter began last week, and I’m teaching two courses, all online. One is an undergrad course for leadership and communication students called Art & Interpretation, and the other is a graduate level course for the Professional Writing students, called Children’s Literature. I’m liking both so far—the students are enthused and the material is interesting in both.

• The Children’s Lit class is especially in my wheelhouse, as I have been an enthusiast of the genre for most of my life. I began doing regular story times at the big public library in Boulder when I was barely more than a kid myself (famously the youngest person they’d ever hired to do such a thing), and, under the tutelage of amazing children’s literature mage Judy Volc, learned so much more about the genre and the presentation of such than I ever would even in college.

This is the only picture I can find of me as a teenager doing story time. This was a big Dr. Seuss event, and I do wish this one showed more of my way out there Goth style outfits I’d regularly wear. The jerkoffs worried about drag queen storytime these days would lose their minds if they saw half the outfits I’d wear as a storyteller.

• I have begun a Saturday Shelfie series over on Notes—have you joined in? I’ve put in two snaps of book stacks already, and I think my partner might join in.

• I’m going to go visit a friend of mine from grad school at the end of the month, and I’ll be a tasting at a bunch of Wichita breweries and we’ll be recording our monthly podcast in person, so that’ll be fun. I’ll be sure to bring you back some good Popinations from that.

• I’m in pre-pre-brainstorm mode for 4 (count ‘em, four!) collaborations on Substack! I won’t give you details, because everything’s in very early planning mode, but vaguely I will tell you that I’ll be talking language with a linguist; exploring the zeitgeist through a pass-around prose poem; conversing about the connection between mental health and art; and going on a tavern-based storytelling adventure with a Manhattanite.

And finally, for those of you either too old or too young to recognize the song reference in that last subtitle, here ya go. Yer welcome.