RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.

Wednesday, April 30

MNZ: Trains May 2008


I will not front, I buy a motherfucking magazine from time to time with pictures of fucking trains riding around. The articles suck (although one time there was a column on how bad graffiti was on freight trains, and they had example of good graffiti, albeit wrong, and one was a memorial to Bob Marley, as they described it, except it was really ODB with an "RIP ODB" underneath), but I like looking at pictures of trains. Basically, two things will probably happen in my life as I get older. If I somehow screw up my family, instead of ever paying a dime of child support, I will disappear, become a hobo, probably use my genetic disposition to maintain this position in life and help unlock any repressed racialism and class hatreds I have worked hard to keep from growing in my mind due to my born lot in life. Or, I will maintain things, continue to improve our collective position, and end up being one of those weird old fuckers who has like a model train set-up in his attic or shed or some shit, except I was brain-fucked by the '80s, so mine will be goofy and have graffiti and little immaculately constructed cardboard ghettos with homeless people and burned up Matchbox cars and completely ridiculous stupid shit like that. And I will spend all my free time out there, since in that choice of the train fork of my life, I will probably not drink anymore by then.
Anyways, American government hasn't invested shit in trains or train tracks, other than to subsidize shitty Amtrak's shitty operation, so now that diesel fuel has gone the fuck crazy, and we are almost completely dependent upon trucking to haul our foods around, a fucking can of tuna fish has gone up like twenty cents since Christmas. I even noticed that the bread thrift store's nicer breads, which have been $1.49 a loaf for as long as I've gone to that particular store the past few years, just bumped up to $1.59. When the price of the day-old bread at the bread thrift store is jumping a noticeable amount, you know shit is fucked.
Another part of the problem is how investors, since real estate is all screwed up from predatory lending habits, have bought into commodities futures like wheat or rice or oil and that's driven the price of all those things up. Actually, that's supposedly a big cause for the high price of oil. So it's good to know that we've come to a point where capitalism's free market bullshit is driving the price of common necessities up so that regular people have to struggle and foreign people will starve. Now maybe somebody will slit some of these fake ass pseudo-changing throats before too long.
Oh yeah, there was a guide to tourist trains in this issue, so I can pretend me and the wife will take the kids to ride a scenic passenger train through the southern tip of West Virginia until I actually look it up or call their number and find out it's like $2000.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Beyond the Middle East crap, what's driving the cost of bread and other foods is farmers changing over to corn production to get in on the ethanol subsidies. Not free market at all and it's really screwing people in the 3rd world.

Raven Mack said...

They've had a series this week in the Wash. Post about high cost of food and shit, and it was either yesterday or today but they talked in length about the switch to corn from wheat (also how farmers are able to still get wheat subsidies and not even grow wheat), and how that move has been because of ethanol to compete with gas, but since gas prices have gone up so much so has ethanol which means even more farmers are likely to switch over to corn, which also is the basis of tons of food because of the Sec. of Agriculture under Nixon I think who got farmers to grow all this corn every year instead of rotate crops like they had previously, leaving a giant corn abundance, which caused them to R&D a thousand uses for corn like corn syrup and all that other shit. So now, a majority of the processed foods you eat are heavy with corn, but corn price is shooting up, as is wheat because supply is less (and many countries who used to export a lot of it started closing exports last year, which led to a bumrush of places where it was free market still, like America).
Basically we are fucked, but it is a long line of fucked decisions for America. It's extra fucked that people elsewhere will probably start starving, not because there's a lack of food in the world, but because they can't afford it. I see they are asking richer countries to donate food relief money, which is kinda weird because it's like, "Let's sell these people this shit until they can't afford it, then let's support them a little till they can afford to buy it again."
I don't know man, I'm getting more paranoid by the week.

Anonymous said...

At this point, I think that nuclear and additional drilling in the US are the only way to go.