A Few More Sentences - 01

Not exactly grind culture

Boozhoo, indinawemaaganidog! Aaniin! That is to say hello, all of my relatives! Welcome to the THIRD EVER PAID SUBSCRIBER ONLY EDITION! of An Irritable Métis. This one is not a photo essay, though the next one will be. Maybe you aren’t a paid subscriber and you’re wondering why you’re seeing this? It’s because the way it’s set up you’ll get to see it … up to a point. To see the rest, you have to become a paid subscriber. It still feels a little greasy, this whole notion of trying to “add value” for paid subscribers, but whatever. If you’re someone who really digs this newsletter but just can’t add more expense to your existence, I get it. Just contact me and let me know, no questions asked, and I’ll hook you up. I want a community here, not customers.

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On That Note: Just this week I found a couple requests for comped subscriptions in my Spam folder. It’s the first time I’ve looked there in forever and I don’t even recall why I was poking around there in the first place. I don’t know why some messages get flagged as such when other damn near identical ones don’t (especially direct responses to these emails) but who am I to speculate. When you consider that all of these so-called “tech geniuses” running things are really the worst kind of people who should be jettisoned into space, is it any surprise nothing ever works like it should? My point is if you’ve asked and have not received, keeping bugging me.

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The header image displays the opening lines to the Preface of my first book, One-Sentence Journal. From there it goes on to tell the story of how the dedicated practice of writing those sentences led to turning some of them into short poems; what inspired that second, transformational step, and how they came to be collected in a book. It’s hard to imagine it’s been almost ten years now.

I’ve kept up the practice with varying degrees of dedication ever since then. It wasn’t always a daily thing, especially from 2019 – 2020, when I devoted myself to a practice of daily actual poetry writing instead. I never entirely stopped though, even if sometimes months would pass from one dedicated stretch to the next.

This past November 1st I decided to re-dedicate myself to it for a couple reasons. It’s a good practice, at least for me, and most importantly I like doing it. Back when I was first doing them I would occasionally post a selection of them and people seemed to dig them. So I’m doing that again, right here. On the first of every month, give or take, I’ll post a month’s worth of sentences capturing my day-to-day observations. Some may become poems, or maybe not. It’s possible I’ll never do anything with them again. But maybe it will be interesting for you as readers to see behind the curtains a little bit, this process, and maybe think about writing your own. Just remember, for every good one you’re going to write a bunch of garbage. That’s no reason not to do it. I mean, just because you inhale a pizza now and then doesn’t mean you’re going to give up on efforts toward “clean eating” are you?¹