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, August 27

The Learned Elders of Rojonekku Process Initiation

There are plenty of Halls of Fame in this world, where someone or some entity decides who is the absolute ultimate of some sort of specific genre of human being, and there will be plenty more, especially with the internet age, where everyone is an expert on everything. When I had my old Confederate Mack website, there was a Hall of Fame on there, and the funny thing is, about half the people that ended up being in it, I probably don't even think half as highly of anymore. But being I am full of shit, and inside the internet, I can't stop myself from trying to make something similar, with my own crooked bend to it.
A few years back, I had conjured up this plan to have a panel of people whose opinions I didn't hate to build a list of the 500 Most Aweswome (although awesome isn't the best word for it) Living Human Beings on the Earth, with them all having to still be alive. And I actually started the process a number of times, but it'd always get hung up on whatever method I established with all my nonsense parameters because something would go wrong. It was too much to try and do. I still find stacks of notecards every now and then with names of famous people and oddballs and freaks and strangers listed on them. I keep all my old notecards to use the backsides, and then the empty spaces, and it ends up like a graffiti wall just with one bad handwriting tagging it all up.
Well, in that time since the Confederate Mack site died, I started taking in delinquent and wayward teenagers and teaching them bullshit I had gleaned from older redneck dudes back in southside Virginia as well as from reading way too many used book store kung fu ninja manuals. That's actually what the Rojonekku name came from, as I dreamed about a handwritten manual with that on the top of every page that had detailed notes of all the kids who had come through my back roads training camp, years upon years of this shit. And it was just a dream, but about half of what I saw written has come to be.
What this has all built up to is I wanted to create a collection of humans to look up to, the Learned Elders of Rojonekku, for these kids, some of whom still under my thumb but many have ridden Greyhound buses to strange places in Arizona, Montana, southern Indiana, New Hampshire, three of them outside of Cornelia, Georgia, two in the Flomaton, Alabama/Century, Florida area, plus assorted others who went this place or that but ain't heard from but every so often, and usually they're another four or five states in an opposite direction from the last time I heard from them. Hell, one of them lives in some place in Canada called Medicine Hat. But we keep in touch, usually through post office boxes, and I've wanted to create a collection of living human beings to be considered a sort of Hall of Fame of Humanity, but only comprised of the living.
Well, what I've decided to do - and let me just say up front that this is a completely ridiculous and overblown notion of mine - is slowly build up through my standard convoluted mathematically stifled process, a collection of the Learned Elders of Rojonekku, ultimately consisting of 100 people.
But of course, knowing that my impressions and opinions change like anything of a natural order does, I can't just pick out 100 people and leave it at that. So what I've decided to do is every six months, go through a long-winded and unnecessary process of elimination where 80 hand-picked individuals are whittled down to a final five that go into the Learned Elders of Rojonekku. I do this every six months for ten years, and if no one dies (highly unlikely), then I have my list of 100. And of course people will die, so after that point, I'll just repeat the process every six months to fill at the most five empty spots. Hopefully, at some point, I can hand this project off to one of the past kids who've come through Rojonekku training, either here in the camper or over in Schuyler where we have four trailers back in the woods on some property a friend of my dad's has access to that nobody really claims otherwise in his family, yet somehow somebody's paying the taxes on it.
So just to lay it all out, here's how the process will go each time through. I'll start with 80 individuals of various types, and face them off, one-on-one, matching up people with similar backgrounds or infamies or whatever. Those will go down to 40, which will be rematched up in one-on-one semi-appropriate match-ups, to go down to 20; and then 20 to 10. Those final ten will match-up again to go down to a final five, all of whom will be inducted into the list of Learned Elders of Rojonekku. Will it mean anything to them? Of course not. Most likely none of them will ever know. Most likely nobody else will care. But I'm gonna do it, just because.
Those that get inducted into the list, I'll try to write up some sort of small biography of them to throw together on this here useless ass blog, as well as to print in a zine format to mail out to all the Rojonekku boys. Those are the ones that I really want to entertain with all this anyways. Hopefully all those boys in all those far-flung places they settled will start their own little back roads training camps, and it'll spread, little by little. And all the unwanted teenage kids who end up under these various training regimens will have our list of Learned Elders, and a handful of crinkled little zines to hand around and read and brainwash themselves with in emulation. Kids need great elders to emulate. We don't respect those who have conquered cultural quandaries before us like we should.
Why do I feel compelled to do such things? Only God knows why, yet I am God manifest upon this Earth, not a sign of self-deification but we all have that potential and all too often choose to cloud it up with electronic muck and material chains. Let these Learned Elders we eventually cipher from the billions of beings scampering across the surface of this Earth rock be representatives of the Godliness inside us all.

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