Rich Baiocco

100 DAYS: A MARK BAUMER TRIBUTE

here is my tribute video for Mark Baumer, a great poet and activist who we lost back in january. essentially it is a 1-hour compilation from his “crossing america barefoot” vlogs, with a short introduction for context.

if you don’t know Mark’s work, please, im begging you to check it out. i think most people who enjoy my work will love Mark’s, and i intend for this video to give a good introduction to his work for the unfamiliar. (i also interviewed him on Ep 22 of my “plant liker” podcast, so some of you may already know him from that, if nothing else.)

if you already know Mark’s work but you haven’t watched all 100 of his barefoot vlogs in a row, i’m telling you, it’s something else. it’s incredibly moving to watch the full story unfold, and to get a mega-dose of mark’s energy and wisdom all in one sitting. it was a gift for me to get to spend a chunk of my summer working on this video.

hope you enjoy<3

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The footage compiled in this video was taken from Mark’s Youtube channel: http://youtube.com/markbaumerhumanbeing.

If you’re moved by Mark’s work, please consider donating to The Mark Baumer Sustainability Fund: https://www.gofundme.com/themarkbaumersustainabilityfund.

New! Ten Poems by Jessie Lynn McMains. Three dollar ebook from Hello America. Get yours at https://pioneerspress.com/collections/our-new-favorites/products/10-poems-by-jessie-lynn-mcmains

Installment #1 in Hello America’s new 10 Poems By Series.

Reposting this one from @adamgnade

QUESTION. Can anyone help me get the word out about my cassette/audio novella that was released yesterday? I worked really hard writing this thing and want people to hear it. Any help is well appreciated.

https://adamgnade.bandcamp.com/album/life-is-the-meatgrinder-that-sucks-in-all-things-deluxe-edition-2017

Los Angeles, CA

My @wearepioneerspress order arrived while I was traveling, with the nicest note from the lovely Elizabeth. Can’t wait to dig in.

What I Thought: Honestly, I’m at a complete loss for words. This single book blew me away hardcore. My friend, Rebecca, was the one to first show me the work of Adam Gnade and I was totally shocked. The rawness and the realness of the words I was reading made me squeal at some points while reading, because I don’t think I’ve ever read something quite like this before. I was underlining and tagging this book like crazy and I’m so glad that it exists. Agnes’s story was a hard thing to read, rough times are always hard to read, but it was so great. Frances, James, and Tyler were all so different but so connected in ways I couldn’t even imagine. This view of America and society and community, it’s like all the things I’ve wanted to try to say right on the page in front of me. Although it’s short, it’s not sweet. It’s a look at the reality of relationships, the past, present, future, and world from the point of view of people living it, told through Gnade. Adam, you rock dude. This book is truly LIFE CHANGING. Some of my favorite lines… “That’s one thing I’ve learned: People say there are things that can’t be taken from you. Everything can be taken from you. The place you live, your friends, your family, your health, your youth, your sense of self or your dignity, your freedom, your confidence, your spirit, anything. There is nothing in you that’s yours to keep if someone else wants it bad enough. You try to hold onto it but life is (inherently, unfairly) violent.” (31) “As I walked through the house alone I looked at everyone and I loved them all. Who were they? All those kids – drunk, sober, laughing, bickering, smoking, hooking up, arguing. I wanted to be everyone’s friend all at once, to take each one aside and say, ‘Look, here we are; we’re together for this one great thing. Why don’t we all know each other? Who are we in this place and most of us strangers? I’m a nice person. Life is lonely. Let’s be friends.’” (39) “… America is this huge, vast, enormous place where everyone you know lives so astronomically far away from each other. There’s a deep, sad estrangement in Americans.We’re all so spread apart and isolated, living these remote, far-flung lives but we’ve chosen this. Maybe we could’ve chosen differently. I don’t know. But this is what we wanted.”  (36) “I work. I fight. I believe.” (45)

See the rest of the review and interview here.

Get the book here.

Vanessa Veselka, from Zazen

I just finished reading this book the other day and oh my fucking god I can’t stand how good it is.

(via rustbeltjessie)

Here’s a recent excerpt from my dream-journal. The words all came rushing in.

The life dedicated to writing is a life of constant faith. Faith in yourself. Faith in the importance of words. Faith in your reasons for the all the decisions you’ve ever made to serve your art.

One of my writer friends just turned 40 and bitterness was getting the best of him. His novel had sat in limbo with agents and editors for years and he was losing hope. We would sit and talk about self-publishing versus indie publishing versus holding out for the majors. I’ve always been of the opinion that we should do everything we can to get our work out there. To try all the avenues. Walt Whitman self-published the most American of all books, Leaves of Grass, and we could do worse than to follow his lead. But let’s argue about publishing another time.

A fews ago it occurred to me that we had been friends for a few years and I had never read his collection of stories. To me, that’s like living in the same town as your chef friend and never eating at her restaurant. So I ordered his book, tweeted “Vow to never get so bitter I won’t read my friends’ books” and after it came in the mail I finished it in two weeks.

I don’t believe in coincidences. Two days after I told him I finished his book he announced on Facebook that he had signed a contract to publish his first novel in 2017. “It’s been a loooooonnnng time coming,” he wrote. He’d been writing hard for at least 15 years, trying to publish a novel the entire way.

So if you’re out there fighting rejection, and self-doubt, and losing hope…don’t. Don’t lose faith. Your day will come.

What a Beautiful Face: A Neutral Milk Hotel Fanzine

Quiet Monday. Worked on the book all day and then a man came out from the city to fix the furnace. (No go, the circuit board’s busted from when the basement flooded. It’ll be another week without heat.) After he left I did the evening farm chores then stood out by the fence-line and watched the sunset—blood-orange, then magenta, galactic swirls of silver and crimson and violet. A warm night, not a breath of wind. I put the chickens up and let the rescue pitbulls out into the field and went back inside to work on the book, and then the wind came up. It blew slow at first, then hard and cold and unrelenting, and suddenly the trees were lashing and dropping what’s left of their leaves and the branches were creaking and it was cold. A ten-minute changeover. T-shirt weather to goddamn icy. You could see the snow in the sky.

When I saw the way the weather was headed, I opened the barn again and threw another batch of brome and corn to the sheep and goats. Gave the ducks, pig, and chickens more feed. Then the garden: cut three buckets of salad greens with Jessie’s sickle; pulled a couple hundred radishes and turnips to put up for winter; picked the last of the calendula to dry in the front room. 

Now I’m back in the farmhouse and the storm’s rolling in fast. Man from the furnace company said we’d have snow by midnight. Weather report says it’ll drop below freezing by 2am, then into the 20s by morning. After that our winter starts early.

Later this week Will Potter gets in from DC around the same time Jessie Duke and her boys arrive from the West Coast. I’m planning on quilting the windows up and doing jack shit for a week besides cooking endless meals for them and drinking red wine and hanging the fuck out. Earlier this year Jessie went full Kerouac on us and since she did that it’s been a solo go. Quiet days. Weeks where you don’t see anyone. I’m okay with solitude on a limited basis but I’m pretty excited to have people back here.

Time comes when you’ve been alone in the country long enough you start gettin’ buggy. You go a little wolfish. Which isn’t bad when you need to survive but sometimes you get sick of being independent. That’s when you need to pull the pack together. Get social, or as best you can.

That’s a problem when you’re geographically isolated and when the people you live with are gone for long, extended periods of time. It’s easy to slip into that grim animal way. You stop shaving and you don’t talk much (except to yourself) and you let the food run out and turn off the heat (if you can afford to have it on in the first place) and you survive on the bare minimum because you can and because you’re tough and because no one’s watching. It makes you feel capable, healthy, vigorous. It’s that “strenuous life” of Roosevelt you’re told is the hallmark vitality. But here’s the shit-side of “rugged individualism” … it doesn’t fucking work. Or it works for some people and it might work for you (for a while) but there’s a point where you need to dial it back and find some fellowship. You know this already: We’re animals, yeah, but we’re pack animals and that second word in the phrase is important here. 

There’s nothing sadder than a lonely dog. We’ve all seen them chained in suburban yards forgotten by the kids inside who aren’t quite kids anyone, who, instead of wanting fresh air and the knocks of true life, sit in front of the TV, the light of Halo in their eyes, controllers in-hand, jerking their wrists to the sway of the blood splat. 

We’ve seen dogs in back rooms, in kennels, in cages. Last time I was in New Orleans I went around with a girl from the animal rescue and we caught dogs who were still—so many years later—wandering after Katrina, displaced in sandy, desolate neighborhoods. Alone in the ruins.

There’s nothing sadder than a lonely dog, that pleading look in their eye that says, “Remember me? I’m good too. Don’t forget me.”

We’re like that too but we hide it. Humans are good liars. Dogs are not.

So you visit that scraggly pal of yours out in the trailer on his 20 acres in rural Montana Wyoming Saskatchewan Kansas Upstate Virginia Alabama and you know something is wrong but he plays it tough or she says “whatever” or they shrug it off and show you the string of rabbits they shot that morning all by their lonesome and you know they could as well have turned that 20-gauge on themselves. But they or she or he tells you stuff’s okay and you get in your truck and drive off, back down the dirt road, out past the graveyard, then onto the interstate where everything is black and grey and smooth. But that lingering thought … it finds you. It hits you when you’re in the fast line with the new Panopticon record on, when you’re trying to think about nothing but the change between Austin Lunn’s plaintive mountain folk in “The Long Road Part 1: a Last Fire” and the sheer blackmetal squall of  "The Long Road Part 2: Capricious Miles.“

You/I didn’t ask to help but you/I should’ve. You should’ve asked to help and I should’ve and you should’ve asked for help and I should’ve asked for it too. It works both ways. You have to reach out to your people when the winter blues come calling, whether it’s you that needs it or them. We suffer in silence and we play it stoic and that’s pure self-sabotage. 

There’s this thing Jessie and I used to say when we lived in San Diego and life was so much easier: "Better for the book.” That was our go-to when the easy went a little pear-shaped. If shit got bad (and it was never bad) it was “better for the book." 

I stopped using that line when my books started coming out but I think I internalized it and shrugged off adversity because it was a better story. When things start getting hard every year around December 7th (that’s today) I get in this half-survival half-better-for-the-book mindset and that pulls me through, but sometimes I get tired of acting tough. Sometimes I want a little ease and warmth and fellowship.

I used to say "your friends will be carry you home.” That was my motto. I believed it, but I don’t know if that’s an end-all, be-all. Really, it seems like this: you will have friends and they will let you down or maybe they’ll come through in flying colors but the point is doing it together is always better than doing it yourself no matter the outcome, no matter whether togetherness means you win or fail. See, we get this arrogant, snarling confidence sometimes and we think we can ride with that but we’re deluding ourselves. We’re weak. We’re flesh. We need the people around us just as much as they need us. We can’t do this alone. Don’t fool yourself. Don’t get taken. Reach out and if you don’t find anything, keep reaching. I’m just as alone as you and I’ll do the same …

I turn 39 in a few days. There’s a freedom associated with turning forty, but this slice of a year before that looming milestone feels heavy with expectation. What I didn’t accomplish is a theme that I’m trying to make good on, with loose-end removal at the top of an already unwieldy to do list. There’s a failure mode I’m rigged for; I constantly feel like a venture capitalist’s investment: not as good as my most recent win (because that’s already past the moment it’s happened), but measured by the next great weighted possibility. Valuation as value. 

This is no way to think.

I’ll tell you a secret, then: Advancing age doesn’t assure self-realization or enlightenment, even when it forces self-awareness. And there’s no step function here as you cross decades, and much like being a parent, it’s manual-free (although some books and other writing come close). That makes me part cautionary tale and part work-in-progress. But maybe, what has been hard earned, little bits of revelations after repeated falls and their bruises, can pass to you simply, kindly. At the very least, they’ll sit here as a reminder to me.

1. Your body is completely normal just like it is. It’s hard to believe this, given Instagram and the porn you’re streaming, but filters only exist in photography. Real life has cellulite and gray hair, fine lines and some extra weight around the middle. Spines curve, heels need sloughing, pubic hair grows, and everyone has acne or freckles or sunspots. Your scars are precious. They tell more interesting stories than hermetically sealed selfies. You’re important because of them. That said, maybe you want to change things up. You’re thinking of surgeons, conflating permanent physical change with reinvention. That’s OK, but do you a favor. Give it six months. In that time, get a haircut. See a dentist. Wax. Start jogging. Go blonde. Or brunette. Or purple. Get (a little) Botox. Buy some better fitting pants. Or bra. Read six books. Volunteer. Change your job. Learn a new skill. Sing to strangers. Move. Dump the asshole telling you you’re anything but a beautiful, exciting creature. And after that, if you still want to change your nose/breasts/labia/hairline, then do extensive research, get third and fourth opinions, confirm the safety with your GP, and for fuckssake, don’t be cheap.

2. Give money and apologies freely, without expectation of return.

3. The first rule of negotiation is to know the wants and needs of the other party as well as you know your own. This is useful in business, friendship, and romance.

4. Eat vegetables and/or fruit at every meal. Less meat. Wear sunscreen. Wash your face and brush your teeth before you go to bed, even when you’re wasted. Get your teeth cleaned twice a year and an annual physical. Drink three more glasses of water every day than you do now.

5. Read books, listen to music, and see the world. This is education.

6. Question the judgments that pop in your head. You won’t stop judging, but when they arise, ask yourself why you feel the need to scrunch your face up and say shitty things about someone else. It’s almost always because you’re observing behavior that you participate in and wish to eliminate, or vice versa. Use it as a mirror.

7. Meditate.

8. Everything is a choice. Rewrite every “I can’t” with “I don’t want to” and watch your power return and your bullshit leave.

9. Get a dog. 

10. Don’t be afraid to surround yourself with people that are smarter than you. Cultivate friendships with people that give and take in equal measure. That will help hold your mess until it’s time to break out the shovels, and with gentle, constructive concern, get to digging you out of it. Do the same for them.

11. Sexuality and gender are fluid. We are what we are, when we are. You are perfect in your identity, so hang in there if you’re not yet in a safe place to live outwardly authentically. I promise, you’ll find good people in your tribe who will open their arms and hearts to you, and until then, reach out to kind strangers. We’re here for you.

12. Everything in moderation: The cigarettes, the benzos, the booze, the yoga, the cleanses, the wanderlust, the seriousness, the glib, the coke, the Cheetos, the therapy, the indoors, the outdoors, the smoothies, the flirting, the sex, the pizza, the kale, the anger, the crushes, the makeup, the breakdown. This life is nothing if not rich and nuanced. Too much of any one thing - including your reporting of it - makes you a dull asshole.

13. What is good and what is familiar are two very, very different things. Learn the difference.

14. You are Whitman poem with Vonnegut humor and a Bradbury fantasy, Miller sex and Carver longing. Multidimensional and mercurial. So is everyone else. Because of this, there will never be “one” person for you. That myth will kill you, robbing you of new tastes and touches and sounds along the way. Don’t hold your partner to unattainable, unfair expectations that are flimsy fronts for your own work or loneliness. Don’t give up your friends and confidants. Say things frankly and without fear. Ask kindly for what you need and want. Listen to the same. There aren’t rules for relationships besides the ones you write and keep together; build something unique. Marriage and monogamy and kids and mortgages aren’t the only way through these woods. And when you change, and you will, talk about it. You’re going to have crushes, fall in and out of love with people that aren’t your partner, have great ideas and terrible ones. It’s only when it gets actionable and outside your agreed upon code of conduct that it’s a problem. Share your concerns early and openly. Process with an open mind. And if it’s really time to move on, see growth instead of failure. (And yeah, in all but a few cases, biology and neurochemistry will reveal and render that grass on the other side of the fence the same goddamn shade.)

15. Yes, you’re spending too much time on social media.

16. No one is keeping track of your flaws like you. They’re all too busy keeping track of their own.

17. Pay attention to the present, future, and past in the same ratio you handle a car. For the most part, stay in the moment. Every so often, look ahead to see what’s coming and in the rear view so that what’s behind doesn’t sneak back up on you.

18. You’re hurting yourself as much as you’re hurting others with that slut shaming. Knock that shit off immediately. Sex is a great, wonderful thing, but don’t be so one note about it. Intimacy comes in many forms between consenting adults. A healthy (not to mention fun as fuck) sex life incorporates that rich variety. 

19. Work hard. Put on your comfortable shoes and the pants you don’t mind getting dirty, and fucking hustle. It might not be the thing you love, but stop seeing dead-ends. Trust me, you can spin pretty much anything. Ask your bosses for more and different responsibilities. Think strategically. If you want to jump to something that “moves” you, start it as a nights-and-weekends side piece until it has legs of its own. In 90% of situations, work experience is going to trump education. I know you’re scared, but the only thing that separates you from the next big thing is how many hours you’re willing to put into it. Four more years are going to pass, whether or not you dig into this. Dig into this. You’ve got it.