so.. tell me again what you do?

2013 closer to June than last time

The blog? You want to know what the blog is about? Ummmmmm. Well, I used to think it had to center around something but I am officially letting it off the hook for that as of sometime in the last few months. So here’s the deal as best as I can put it: I write weird shit. Some of it I try to organize into “books” or “projects” but most of it is just whatever it is and I miss LiveJournal as a place to put whatever and facebook grows more tiresome by the day.

Hour.

So I think this blog might be about anything it has already been about and it might be about almost anything else too.

I have not formulated a commenting policy because most comments I receive are really bad attempts at linkspamming but generally I aim to keep abusiveness to– well, I will not tolerate abusiveness at all. Mainly any conversation here will be civil or it will not be left up and I will determine what goes up and what stays up and what does not according to the best principles of compassion that I can muster. I like consistency well enough but compassion is way more important to me.

Does any of this help?

2013 almost June

This about box is somewhat out of date insofar as:

the URL is what it is going to be and will remain that way for however long I can be persuaded to register it every x years which is probably a very long time depending on economic conditions;

I am not currently referring to myself in the third person but that personhood is for me not particularly stable in the grammatical sense at the very very least so by the time I thoroughly update this I might be back to calling myself Erik or I might refer to me in some plural form like we or they or I might have struck upon something more enduringly useful than grammatical persons;

I am fairly certain I am not going to have a career in music or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I have begun to comprehend that any single lifetime may not last long enough to do everything and so I am strategically and purposefully narrowing my efforts to some one or two things or even three if there becomes a place in the rotation for another but I only know so far that the first thing will be writing so I am doing that right now although in my spare time I will still play and I will still breathe the tunes going through my head when I wake up in the morning into my cell phone’s voice memo box hoping I can still make out the rhythm when I replay them three years from now when maybe it will be time to move on to thing two which music may turn out to be;

I really have nothing to say one way or the other about growing up as I am not at all decided on just what process(es) the phrase is supposed to denote and so am thinking of losing the obsession with whether or not I am or will be grown up at some point but however that may be I doubt I will become any less strange in regard to most common-sense developmental stages of life from here on out.

Here are some facts because some folks like facts.

  • I was born near Tacoma WA in 1962.
  • I lived in Marietta GA from 1964 to 1983ish.
  • I lived in Atlanta GA from 1983ish to 1987.
  • I lived in Seattle WA from 1987 to 1996.
  • I have lived in San Francisco CA since 1996.
  • I was told I was a girl when I was born and I did try to believe it.
  • in 1997 I transitioned to a male-ish appearance and presentation.
  • I do not claim any particular gender at this point:
    • woman does not define me well but I tend to like women very much.
    • man does not define me well and men tend still to confound me not to mention piss me off.
  • I spent at least one semester each at Emory University and the Atlanta College of Art.
  • I attended Southern Polytechnic State University when it had a slightly shorter name.
  • I have an AA in Liberal Arts or something from Seattle Central Community College.
  • I have a BA in Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington, Seattle.
  • I have a PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley.
  • I wish I were still in school but teaching freaks me the hell out.
  • I am a survivor of
    • Christian fundamentalism
    • intergenerational abuse
    • incest
    • rape
    • therapeutic indiscretion
    • pharmacopoeitic seduction
  • I am currently disabled by what is called mental illness.

There is more but I am writing an autobiography so that I can stop spamming my own profile pages. My philosophical and social and artistic approaches to whatever are better detailed in the data than here in the metadata anyway.

2010 I do not remember

Erik has moved this blog here and there around the blogosphere but it has always remained a forum for amiably vexed relations with language and its precipitates. Keep an eye on the URL; it is likely to change back to eriktrips.com whenever Erik can scrape together the funds for domain hosting at wordpress or when he finally feels that the server he is building under his bed is secure enough to turn to face the internet.

Erik himself is an overeducated poet who currently counts his place as among the invisibly disabled although he has managed to publish a book fairly recently. The question remains rather open as to whether any disposable income will result from the effort, but that was not the main motivation for writing it to begin with.

In addition to the interjections that appear here at the approximate rate of one per month except in November–when he tries to step things up a bit to meet the “write a [large bloc of text] month” that has become customary at that time of year in certain corners of the interwebs–Erik is also working on a monstrous autobiography that tries its best to say everything possible about this sprawling, incomprehensible wreck of a party that we have all been compelled to attend to entirely without our permission: life, in other, more sensible words.

Erik hopes you find something congenial here and invites you to join the conversation even if it progresses a bit slowly at times. He is working hard to find enough compassion for himself to let it be that not every ambition be realized but he is still not convinced that the sun has set on his music career. He does realize he should probably write more than one song a year if it is to amount to anything at all.

We never grow up here although we may be growing old.

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