Just filling folks in on the latest weirdness.

Got a call from my ex two days ago — her father had been found dead after what appears to have been a heart attack from shoveling out of the storm last week. He died in his house and wasn’t found for a week.

As you can imagine, everyone’s pretty upset. As you can imagine, it arouses all kinds of conflicting feelings in me.

I won’t go into the details, but Mel had a fairly complex and dysfunctional relationship with his family. This is just the final act.

So if I continue to be a little withdrawn for a bit, you now know why.

After reading through the comments, I think I’m going to go with columns only for the manuscript.

It does mean excluding those columns that refer directly to specific poems — but since there are over 100,000 words to choose from, I suspect I can pull something reasonable together without them or after editing them.

I may expand the topic area from just “A Life In Slam” to “A Life In Poetry” to increase potential readership, but we’ll see. Since the column focused on slam and performance poetry issues, it shouldn’t be an issue for slam readers, and it may attract non-slam folks.

In other news, my poem “Man At The Pharmacy” was just accepted for future publication by Breath and Shadow, an online zine dedicated to writing by people with disabilities. Although I’m always reluctant to claim that status, reading the guidelines for the zine made me think about the number of poems I’ve written related to my struggles with bipolar illness — so I went for it.

Disability with this condition is so hard for me to assess, y’know? Clearly it does hamper my abilities in many ways, and God knows the severe episodes, both manic and depressive, shred my life. The cognitive therapies I use to maintain daily are a chore as often as a blessing. But I go through periods where I barely notice it except for that shelf of pills in the kitchen.

Sleep apnea is, in some ways, a more chronic disabling condition. The years when I was untreated were terrible. I can’t sleep anywhere without the CPAP device. And despite the treatment and the pills, I still have many nights where I can’t sleep, and that’s a major problem.

So…anyway. There it is.