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.

Friday, January 22

Friday Love/Hate

I love college basketball season cranking up officially in my attention span. My two regional conference allegiances are the ACC (childhood favorite) and CAA (being I went to VCU), and both are a clusterfuck of anybody can win it this year. UVA has actually jumped out to a 3-0 start in conference play, and that's wins over actual good teams and not just battling to the top of the bottom feeders, though this can't hold true long-term. Still, they've made themselves viable and worth watching, and who knows, maybe they can even earn a chance to play on Friday or Saturday in the ACC tournament this year.
The CAA, considered once again by many to be one of the best mid-major conferences, is crazy. Everybody is beating everybody, and little old white ass William & Mary for the most part has sat at the top of the heap, though they did lose this week at VCU. VCU has not performed as well as they did the past few years when Anthony Grant was head coach, but Larry Sanders still has a posse, and I may actually spring for full CAA tournament tickets this year instead of just the final two days package I got for me and my oldest kid last year. Those small conference tournaments are the best, full of energy that floats through the shitty old second-tier arenas they book for their season ending showcases, to whittle themselves down to one single team qualifying for the NCAA tournament. You gotta figure, even in a down year, the ACC is going to get at least four teams, and likely five, six, or seven into the tourney, whereas the CAA is gonna be lucky to get even one at-large team other than their conference tournament champion into the Big Dance. I am already geeked for the CAA tourney at the Richmond Coliseum, and it's not even February.
What I need to be doing, once I start getting paychecks regularly again, is take the kids to see Monika Wright play at UVA, since she's one of the best womens players in the country, and get these kids fired up about athletics a little more. My oldest is tall already, and I know she's dedicated to ballet (four hours a week of classes, and wanting more), but she need to be out there bouncing that damn ball around every now and then.

I hate the senselessness of mass murderings and news covering and all that. They had an octuple shooting scene two counties over, a few miles from where my uncle and his family live. Turns out, three of the eight victims were family of a chill dude I know here in Charlottesville. And three of the eight were high school students, around the same age as my cousin who goes to Appomattox High School with those kids. It's not that big a school, nor town, and is most famous for being where Robert E. Lee signed the I Quit papers for the Civil War PPV. Wasn't even half a year ago that they had quadruple killings in juggalo-related crime in Farmville too, and the mass media swooped in like vultures to do their "Small Town Tranquility Shattered By Violence" pieces, as if motherfuckers in central Virginia don't have internet or cell phones and we still ride buggies to work at the sawmill. Well, those types show up, see what they want to see in the senseless crime scene still taped off with yellow, then bolt out with their word counts and video of high school kids crying and hugging. But the thing that freaks me out, and I'll admit I'm way too sensitive about shit like this sometimes, is it's real people. That's a dude I know's real aunt and uncle and his high school aged cousin and her boyfriend. The news just pushes the body count, and we all go, "Wow, that's crazy, some guy killed eight people in Virginia," until next week when we go, "Wow, that's crazy, some guy killed five people in Wisconsin," and on and on until somebody ups the ante like that kid at Virginia Tech, and then everybody stops and soaks in the constant media attention because we've pulled in a big body count fish this time, let's all gawk at it for a while. The whole time, most folks, even the ones wearing stupid ribbons or putting magnets on their cars, have absolutely zero thought about the fact it's real people. Real folks stopped living and they have relatives and friends and co-workers and a town, and that shit just got fucked up seriously, leaving holes that no one is around to see or get any news coverage of by the time the people involved are able to process the fact that hole now exists. For all the fake community we claim to have built with the stupid fucking internet, we are all for the most part pretty shitty at helping or even looking at our for real neighbors. But keep laughing at lolcats, all the way to hell. If we're not gonna turn around, let's at least keep picking up the pace to accelerate our doom. Good things we have smartphones to occupy us along the way.

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