It’s easy for the days, weeks, and even months to blend together these days. I mean, it has never been difficult for that to happen for me, but now even more so. So I, uh… MAY have skipped another month posting here. Oops.

In case you already forgot May, we had some unseasonable weather, including a week that had a snowstorm, hailstorm, rainstorm, and windstorm.* Of course, now that warm weather is here to stay, it’s time for haircuts.

Meanwhile, we’ve kept morale up in self-isolation by ordering take-out once a week, oft rotating between our 2-3 favorite local Asian restaurants, as we would like for all of them to stay in business. Pad thai makes excellent takeout, and I recommend it to everyone.

Oddly enough, I’ve gotten back into sudoku, thanks to a youtube channel named Cracking the Cryptic, and some pleasantly British narration. But right now, I’m going to get back into some leftover Chinese takeout.

*And if you count a 70-degree day soon following a snow day as a “sunstorm”, we had that in the same week too.

Usually around April I make a joke about how T.S. Eliot was wrong, but I think this year amidst all the Coronavirus shutdown, it is actually the cruelest month for once. It’s hard to not be constantly worrying about it, and I’m certainly not immune (ha) having written up both a Coronavirus FAQ and Coronavirus and Chill humor column. Most recently, I got a little personal with a column on Following your dreams.

My dream*, of course, was to be a writer. And with April being National Poetry Month, I’ve been writing. Perhaps more relevantly to you, I took the first few months of the year to submit a lot of poetry, and so April saw a few of my poems appearing in Verse Virtual, Sparks of Calliope, Reapparition Journal, and Ponder Savant. It has been nice to see some of my poetry elsewhere, although I still miss reading for the small crowd at my local poetry mic every month before the pandemic hit.

So, monthly poetry and comedy nights on hold, and weekly boardgame nights on hold. But I’ve been playing lots of boardgames with my partner, which I recommend for those of you self-isolating with someone you like. For those of you who are not so fortunate, videogames are also a tremendous balm in these troubled times, and I will say that my two absolute favorites, Warframe and Path of Exile, are both 100% free** to download and play on PC. And if you do end up playing one of those on my recommendation, feel free to drop me a line and I’ll hook you up with some free stuff from my stash in-game.

After all, the month could use a little less cruelty.

*Well, my metaphorical dream. Literally, my recent dream involved me visiting the “Museum of Haste”, where a moving walkway zipped me past the exhibits at 20 mph before slamming me into a wall. But I don’t think that’s anyone’s lifelong goal.

**And like, actually free for all content, not like mobile game 5 minutes free and pay to keep playing or MMO first dungeon free pay for access to the good stuff.

Usually, Daylight Savings Time spurs me to complain about time. But not today, Satan.* Today I’m feeling like I’ve pretty much mastered time.

Daylight Savings? I never changed my clocks since six months ago, so suddenly all of my clocks are correct again, with no effort on my part.

Leap Year? No problem. I’ve actually managed to acquire a transcript of the meeting that took place at the Time Institute, so my latest column explains why we have Leap Year. There may even be an Easter Egg in the column, if you’re a particularly detail-oriented Lord of Time.

And most excitingly, my poem “Chronomancy” is the featured piece in the latest issue of Red Planet Magazine — the feature rotates every issue, so go read my poem while it’s still available online!

Meanwhile, I hope you all stay healthy, wash your hands, and don’t lick too many doorknobs.

*Why complain about time to Satan? Well, he rules hell, and after Zeus killed the time god Khronos (who was also his dad! but to be fair, if you don’t want your kids to murder you, don’t eat them), he dragged Khronos’s remains to Tartarus, aka the underworld, so technically the remains of the time god are now under Satan’s dominion.

I have always had a love of portmeanteaux. Some might even call it an addiction.* I create new portmanteaux frequently, often to the chagrin of those around me. For nearly two decades now, I have been using “Probportunity”, which I would love to catch on in the common parlance. It has what are, to me, the two essential traits of a good portmanteau:

1) You know immediately upon reading or hearing it what two words it is combining, and why

2) The resultant portmanteau is useful in a situation which many people frequently encounter

Today I ended an email with the valediction “Thankspologies”, which I think is even more useful, because often I find myself in the situation of needing to express my appreciation for someone taking action that is only required due to an oversight I may have made. So feel free to start using that; I’d love for that one to catch on too.

Also, I should mention that last weekend I was awarded 2nd place Best Humor Columnist 2019 by the New England Newspaper and Press Association. A little over a decade ago, writing this same “The Pun Also Rises” column for a different newspaper, I also won 2nd place Best Humor Columnist from NENPA. So it’s possible I’ll have to accept that I’m just second-best.**

But that was last year. Maybe my latest column about romantic failure will be the best thing you read all day.

*I know, I should join a supportmanteau group.

**This may undercut my description of my writing as “second-to-none”. I wonder if potential freelance clients will be impressed if I say my writing is “third-to-none”?

…I should probably have updated sooner. I guess if there’s a year for hindsight, it’s 2020.

This has, obviously, been an exhausting year already. As others have pointed out, we’re now six months into January, between environmental disasters and political disasters and so forth. It’s a lot, and I encourage everyone to take care of themselves, because as we learn from the airlines, in case of low pressure, put your own mask on first*.

For me, that’s now being in two boardgaming groups, tonight just back from playing Concordia, which is still one of my favorite games I don’t own for the way it all meshes together. Reminds me a bit of Endeavor or AoE III in that regard, which are two games I quite like and do own. On the videogame front I’m still quite enjoying Slay the Spire, which recently added a new class.

For you, I recommend comedy. Naturally, I am biased towards my own stuff, so whether you want to keep hope alive in the new year, or just appreciate some terrible puns, I’ve got you covered. Also as mentioned in the latter column, I got to see the hilarious Maria Bamford perform the other week, and she was absolutely phenomenal. I believe the vast majority of her set is in her newest special “Weakness is the Brand“, so if she’s not touring near you, consider viewing that on the Internets at your earliest convenience for high-quality comedy.

* “You should probably put your mask on, but, y’know, no pressure…”

I am not generally known for either being particularly spiritual nor excessive displays of sentimentality. But this week I found myself thinking about the holiday*, and how some people take holidays very seriously and the word itself is derived from “holy day”, but I’m not big on holidays and don’t think they’re more important than any other day. But that’s because when I stop to think about it, I believe every day is important.**

Perhaps that’s hitting me harder than usual this week because I lost a friend and artist who I had plans to make a book with. But even without the worst of mementos mori***, I try to tell those I love that I appreciate them on a regular basis, to enjoy every day and appreciate the joys of gaming, eating tasty food, performing, or just spending time in good company. I’d say today is an appropriate day to appreciate what you have, but my whole point is that *every* day is an appropriate day to appreciate what you have.

In lighter news****, if you’ve been on the Internet in the past few months, you might appreciate my poetic take on OK, Boomer.

*Thanksgiving, the one on which Christmas declared war.

****Apparently Zippo also makes flasks.

I realize that doing anagrams is precisely the kind of thing that makes people say, “Seth, you have too much time on your hands*”, but in this case it actually paid off for me, since my efforts were recognized by the incomparable Eric Idle. For a kid who grew up watching a lot of Monty Python, that was a pretty great day. The Bitcoin Rap in my previous post also topped 1 million views, making it by far the most popular rap song I’ve ever worked on. I’m currently** working on another rap song on my own time, albeit one which will likely have an audience many orders of magnitude smaller, but I’m still happy with how it’s turning out.

My latest columns are about the Land of the Free, and how Absence Makes the Heart Go Launder.***  And on the boardgaming front, it’s time once again for our annual Alphabetic Boardgaming Challenge, currently in its 12th year. All in all, quite enjoying a lovely fall in the Berkshires, trying to create as much happiness as possible within this tiny bubble to counter the awful world-on-fire-ness writ large about which I can’t do much.

*Technically, as I wear no watch and carry no cellphone, I very rarely have time on my hands.

**Technically, currently I’m blogging, having finally dispatched all freelance work on deadline. But after this, I plan to record some verses before I sleep. In the unlikely event my producer/beatsmith Don Vito is reading this, hey Don, vox coming soon!

***Technically, it’s not actually about absence, just laundry. But I’m a sucker for a pun title. My document default names should be “Pun-titled Document”.

As a freelance writer, I write on a wide variety of projects, ranging from punching up speeches and scripting ad copy, to ghostwriting business thinkpieces and memoirs. Naturally, I prefer* the jobs that require humor or rhyme, but even with those jobs, sometimes ghostwriting means I cannot share my involvement. However, I am pleased to share that sometimes I get hired for the perfect project, where I not only get to put all my talents to use, but I’m allowed to say I worked on it, and am really proud of the result.

Bitcoin Rap Battle

Life otherwise continues apace, with lots of gaming, tasty food, and regular humor columns — here’s my latest:
Course Catalog For Returning Students

*I mean, I prefer being humorous and rhyming, but sometimes I prefer the big ghostwriting jobs because they pay more, and I’ve done enough of them that I’ve gotten pretty good at them. Still hard to beat “write funny raps” though.

Well, August was WordXWord, which went weawwy* well. I not only got to perform some new pieces to an appreciative audience, but got to collaborate with some other excellent artists on some unique performances. I realize hearing about all that now that you can’t see it isn’t super-fun, but one of my recent columns is basically a poem anyway: “The Funny Part”

On the gaming front, I’ve continued to enjoy Great Western Trail, but the inability to use other players’ buildings reminded me of one of the first worker placement games (and still one of my favorites): Caylus. While many other worker placement games have been made over the years, I think the Provost mechanic still remains unique to Caylus, and it was a pleasure to revisit it.

* Sorry, too many W’s and I suddenly turn into Elmer Fudd. Luckily I’m not competitive so I don’t get too many W’s.

A year or two ago I wrote a poem about the ubiquity of politics and how it’s impossible to go through your day without having it cast a shadow over everything. Part of me very much wants to get away from that, and I’m sure you want to get away from that too, which is why I write columns about fun topics* like why I’m not married and how I lost hot water and injuring my shoulder.

But also sometimes I write political columns like this song parody The Governor Down In Georgia, because I feel like lately things are getting a lot worse in this country for people who aren’t straight white christian men. And I feel like it’s incumbent upon me to use whatever tiny megaphone** I have to advocate for those whose freedoms are being taken away. Here in the “Land of the Free”, we have more people behind bars than any other country on earth — both in terms of raw numbers, and per capita. Private prisons exacerbate this problem, because private companies exist to profit, and so when locking up more people leads to profit, more people will be locked up.

Maybe this should be a poem instead of a blogpost. I guess WordXWord is in a few weeks, but I get exhausted from doing political poems. I’ve done so many. And this blogpost is not funny, but at least it has links to funny, because it’s important to take a break from the politics and breathe***, right? So, maybe just click through and enjoy some columns for now. But at some future point, speak up for people who just want to live their lives and are being deprived of life or liberty because of who they are rather than what they do.

* I should mention that I have no idea what fun is, as anyone who has ever invited me to a concert or party will confirm.

*** It was only after I typed this that I realized “I can’t breathe” springs to mind, reminding us that for some people it is literally impossible to not be dealing with politics at all times, because politics means fighting for their right to live without being caged or killed.