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.

Tuesday, May 25

(7s) Recent Force Battles For Control Of My Soul #7 - White Trash Genetical Heritage vs. Strange Electronic Musics


Look, I will be honest, this is not even a fair battle. No amount of musical expression, no amount of electronic clutter inside my mind, no amount of nothing from everywhere could ever trump my goddamned insides. Not like my pockmarked liver and cluttered intestines and hop-skipping heart and grey matter gone black from broken axons brain type of insides, but my straight up deep down inside every molecule type insides. I was born this man I am, and the new job has been strange, because I am navigating a world of responsibility and pretending I know what I'm doing. I actually flew to Florida related to work and we had a big Sunday dinner at fancy restaurant sponsored by our hosts, collaborators in a ginormous fucked up project, where entrees were $25 on the low end, and they had multiple forks laid out, and everybody who knew what they were doing was laying a cloth napkin across their lap in different manners. I will not front... I do not understand all this. But at the other end of the table was a Ukrainian lady who was my parallel counterpart at the Florida research lab doing what we do in Virginia, and she spoke broken English and was mostly quiet. As was I, although I guess my English is more warped than broken. But I had a very valuable moment of lucidity sitting there waiting for my $28 bison strips with grilled squashes and sautéed wild mushrooms... even though I am no other country immigrant, this world I am trying to navigate is very foreign to me. I do not know its customs or mannerisms or anything really. I mean, I guess I could know them, from seeing it in movies or on PBS cooking shows about manners or something, but I don't deep down in my molecules know them. I am of the earth, which is, if you haven't been paying attention, full of trash for the last hundred years. I am born of the light-skinned wretched of the earth, more inclined to get drunk as hell, be hungover the next day, and the only thing that keeps me from passing out under a table from the sweats is the delusional perverted thoughts that run wild through my brain during that moment of intense wet dehydration. I was born to somehow get brand new pairs of pants hung on barbed wire, or accidentally hit the concrete barrier at the gas station in a new ride, which isn't even "new" so to speak so much as new to me. Hell, I'm lucky to have a car from this decade most years of my life (for the record, three of my 37 years, I've rocked a ride from the same decade I'm driving through at the time).
Yet this has helped me immensely. Because even though I don't know how to act right in those prim and proper situations, or remember to cut my hair more than once every two months, being I'm not from that world, I am hungry, and full of a pitbull work ethic. I can do 17 things that would be menial to someone who knows how to swirl red wine around in a paper thin glass goblet, and in a third of the time it would take them to get started. I was born hungry, and those small high dollar portions of the good life will never satisfy that deep down in my molecules hunger. So as long as I can channel my immigrant thinking into a positive direction, to hold down the button-down job, then I can live the American Dream.
But at the same time, that hunger inside of me from birth... from before birth really, often times it needs to be fed with reckless nomadic wanders into shithole territories, sleeping on hotel mattresses that would look like disco balls underneath one of those exposé news shows black lights, and burn down all the bridges I’m sick of looking at, crossing back and forth for too long a stretch of my life. This is how I’m wired. Nothing can ever change that, and nothing can ever block that.
On my right forefinger is a crude, splotchy ahnk I gave myself when I was 17, sitting in my dad’s trailer living room. And there are times when I am navigating this brave new world I’m trying to belong to, at least during the work day, and I catch people’s eyes trying to figure that out. Why is it there? It is a leak of my inside molecular structure, right there in the opening, that no long-sleeved shirts or hair clippers can hide. And being to the rest of the upwardly slanted American world, I am not a bonafide foreigner of obvious immigrant status, I’m sure they question my presence in their world. As do I. But whatever. Civilization’s stacked enough bricks and paved enough paths through the wilderness that a man can burn a hell of a lot of bridges and still not be stuck on an island. Or in a prison. All that other electronic new-fangled cluttery is just prison bars or electrified fences trying to keep me penned up. But I’m too wild inside to stay still forever, plus I can’t ever have nice shit, always breaking it or busting it or half-assedly fixing it back together, so my type of stuff doesn’t properly transmit all that new age fencing charges like it’s supposed to anyways. My internal structure trumps outward controls. You can take the boy out of the cursed yet somehow perfect genetics, but you can’t take the cursed yet somehow perfect genetics out of the boy.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The new job? You working in nueroscience? I'm thinking you must be a technical writer!

Raven Mack said...

I am one of the primates they test explosions upon. So far, it hurts.

A DC said...

Loving this series.