I’ve become incredibly opinionated in these middle years, and I’m less afraid than ever about letting that be known.

I suspect it’s going to lose me some more friends, as it already has.

I’m torn: I’ve always been good at diplomacy, but it seems less useful to me these days. I don’t want to be known entirely as a grouch or a curmudgeon, but I also know that that role has value in a community.

The older I get, the more I think of myself as being on some “heyoka” path — the cursed and necessary being whose skewed vision is crucial to the understanding of the un-skewed vision; the exception that proves (in its original sense of “tests”) the rule.

Hubris? Maybe. Maybe; perhaps probably. I find myself less and less interested in how I am seen and thought of. I can only do what I do.

at Gotpoetry was pretty good. A small crowd, due no doubt to the holiday, but a nice set by Brett Rutherford that included some of his Cthulu mythos work and other spooky stories (the one about the haunted sex toys was particularly nice).

I did have to speak to the crowd after an incident in which a poet loudly insulted a couple of patrons from the stage for being “rude” because they were ordering a little too loudly for his taste, and it threw off his concentration.

Arrogance.

What I told the audience — and him of course — was my point of view on these things: first, that too many poets have been tortured and killed around the world for us to be pissing and moaning as much as we do when something discomforts us in our pursuits. Fucking trivialities. Grow up.

Second — and maybe I was too harsh speaking as a host but I don’t care that much, frankly — I said that we are not owed attention, but we must earn it — and if you aren’t getting it, perhaps it’s because your poetry isn’t earning it for you. (I mean that, too; the audience’s duty to be polite has to be balanced by our effort to communicate with them.)

Rough and likely unnecessary. I did qualify it by making a point that I wasn’t saying it directly to him or about him, but about all of us. I doubt it made that much difference to him one way or another. I’m not even sure he was listening at that point. He almost nver listens to anyone else anyway, which is the greatest irony of all, even if a completely predictable one .