Solidarity of readers

Plus, book giveaway winners.

Greetings from San Diego!

I went back to the boxing gym and this morning I feel like I spent the night being dragged around by a speedboat. My body hurts in places I didn’t know it could hurt. Last night was no picnic either. It was like someone flicked a switch on my sweat glands and my hands hurts worse than they did on day one.

I haven’t been to House of Boxing since before Thanksgiving and my body has gone soft. There’s a reason why the boxing gym is full of young people and not old fuckers like me. I’m going back tomorrow.

Yes, it’s resolution time. Time to get back to old routines and establish new ones. I don’t have an actual list of things I want to do differently in (checks notes) 2025, but I have thoughts.

The American political system has me feeling like a buoy on the seas of fate: slapped around by the waves while anchored in place. The faces change and things stay the same. As I’ve mentioned before, last year I made the mistake of thinking I could donate my way through the election, targeting blue states where the races were competitive. Maybe it helped in some places, but mostly it didn’t do jack shit. What a waste of resources.

This year my mantra is less money, more action. What can I do to make things better?

Well, lots of things actually.

This week I donated blood. A simple, straightforward step that helps save lives. It’s my fifth time donating blood since the pandemic.

Last weekend I participated in a Books Thru Bars San Diego event. The mission is to send donated books to incarcerated individuals around the country. Books Thru Bars coordinates packaging events to do just that. I went to Groundworks Books at UCSD on Saturday with twenty or so other volunteers.

We read letters from people who are incarcerated, searched through the donated books to find a match, responded to the letter, and packaged it all up. The whole process can take 15-25 minutes per package. Sometimes the people requesting books are very specific and don’t share much about their situation. They want to read about edible mushrooms or how to start their own business and that’s it. Sometimes the people share quite a bit more about themselves.

As luck would have it, I opened a letter from a chatty punk rocker with a wide range of interests. Toward the end of his letter he wrote:

I’m punk rock in my heart.
I’m punk rock until I die.

Man, I needed to read that. The next packaging event is January 18, 2025 from 11am-2pm. Books Thru Bars SD needs books, but also supplies for postage and money for shipping.

In 2024 the organization sent out 1,284 packages, with each package containing 2-3 books. That’s great until you remember there are 2,000,000 people incarcerated in this country.

The biggest hurdle, it may surprise you to learn, is the prisons themselves. Many have restrictions on the types of books that can be sent. Books must be new, or softcover, or come directly from the publisher, and so on. It’s all so arbitrarily draconian. It’s not like these people are going to use the books to plot their escapes, although one person wrote they’d like to learn about computer hacking.

You and me both, brother.

Small Press Nite #8

Once again, Small Press Nite is hosting a killer line-up of readers at Book Catapult with Adam Deutsch, Anna Vangala Jones, Cora Lee and Kevin Mahoney and I’m not going to be there for it. If you’re in San Diego and you don’t have plans on Saturday January 11 at 7pm, now you do.

MFTU book giveaway

Congratulations to loyal MFTU readers Jamie Gadette, Shaun Cowan, Keven Alexander, Matt Herlihy, Betsy Marro, and Travis DeVore. You are all winners of the MFTU Book Giveaway! I will be in touch with you this week to discuss your prize options and will send out the books by the end of the week.

Thanks for reading and stay safe—especially if you’re anywhere near the Eaton Fire in Los Angeles.