Poetry reading in Muncie. This weather is crap. 7 Things (from Dan Bailey)

So, how awesome are poetry readings? Pretty awesome. And they're even better when you're performing in one. And multiply that awesome-ness by 50 or 60 if you include some of your friends who read equally awesome poetry. What should this tell you? I'll be performing at a peotry reading in Muncie. At Motini's. January 7th from 9:30pm until somebody passes out drunk or falls over from excessive bad assery, which will probably be around 11.

Here's the current list of performers:

Joe Betz
Dan Bailey
Nate Logan
Joey Minutillo
Peter Cavanaugh
Jess Degabriele

I wish I had links for Joe and Jess... but I don't. Why not make one up? I could imagine Joe Betz having a really sweet blog, but I just don't know the web address. Either way, you need to come out if you're in the Muncie area. And if you aren't, make a road trip. Do something violent on the way, like ramp over a billboad while cops chase you, Duke's style.

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At least all of this rain isn't snow. I can't remember the last time I had a rainy Christmas. It's warm, too. I'd imagine this is what Christmas is like in the Northwest, only without running on the beach throwing wrapping paper into the air.

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Dan Bailey, world's coolest person, posted up a list of seven things about my past that I'm contractually bound to post.

1. When I was two, I cut my thumb open on a glass bottle. It required two stitches. My mom said I cried a lot less than most toddlers. This means A.) I'm not a pussy, and B.) She could be lying. She isn't, though. The scar is still on my left thumb. After 20 years, it hasn't shrank. It's a small scar, but probably looked huge on a two-year-old's thumb.

2. The first time I smoked hashish I wanted to disappear. I was with a good friend and his girlfriend. I remember he cut off a small sliver of tan Pakistani hash and balled it up with some pot and packed it into a vaporizer chamber. I took a few hits and didn't feel anything. After the vaporizer got back around to me a fifth time, it felt like 50,000 ants were as slowly as they possibly could up through my feet, my thighs, my chest and my neck, until they all covered my brain and died at once. I walked around a table in the basement for an hour without stopping. I was spouting off random baseball trivia and I recited my old address in Chicago over and over again. 2918 North 73rd Avenue.

3. Every time I see somebody join a religious group on Facebook, it upsets me. Doesn't the name "1,000,000 Christians worship God" sound really redundant? Just like the phrase really redundant.

4. Whenever I heard creation stories back in Sunday school, I always imagined God standing in a factory by himself, surrounded by baskets full of limbs and eyes and hair and penises. He'd walk around the room, grabbing handfuls of parts, assembling them on a shitty old workbench. All of the worst people who're born with defects came at the end of the day because he was tired and just trying to fill his quota for the day.

5. When I was five, I got in trouble twice for swearing. Both times for saying "Fuck." The first time, my mom was trying to wash my dity hands with scalding water. I screamed fuck, and had to stay in my room until my dad got home. He spouted off a huge list of words that I was never allowed to say, even though I've probably said them all 10,000 times. The second time, I told my cousin Scott to "Suck my fuck." My sister and oldest cousin tried to tell on me, but I derailed their attempts when I buried my own head in the sandbox.

6. I've only been on an airplane one time. It felt like we were taking off forever.

7. During the sixth grade, my cousins would spend the night at my house every once in a while. One night, it was raining really bad, and the wind was blowing like 60 miles an hour. I was scared, and made everyone go in the hallway and cover their faces with pillows, just in case all of the windows blew out and impailed us with glass.