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.

Saturday, June 11

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - May '11 #9: "Institutionalized" by Suicidal Tendencies


There is an abandoned mental hospital in Staunton that I've been wanting to break into and scope out forever, right by the Frontier Culture Museum, probably like a bunch of other people. I wonder what it is that causes us all to want to vibe in these old sanitarium buildings where the mentally fucked were chilling. The dude this particular hospital was named after was the same guy who had come up with the whole eugenics idea that the state of Virginia had employed way back in the day, and in fact this dude was fairly inspirational to the Nazis, which is probably why the building sits there decaying as opposed to being fixed up as a museum to madness. From talking to one of the dudes who works at the Frontier Culture Museum one time, I guess that abandoned hospital was for paying customers, voluntary folks, whereas the old public free one where you got put when you were so fucked civilization wanted to lock you away to either get better or not disturb the rest of us, that one got torn down and actually is where the Frontier Culture Museum is now located. I guess it was a mental health farm, and the dude said sometimes up by the 1850s American house, you can hear kids laughing in the yard a lot of the times.
I've been surrounded by some literal madness lately, outside and inside, and I was thinking on the changes in America, how there used to be sanitariums around run by the government, usually state ones, but then they sort of got their funding clipped in the '80s under Reagan, so you had cities shipping their homelessly demented on Greyhounds off to other places somewhere else down the line (this was notorious on the east coast for contributing to Richmond's huge mentally ill homeless population, because RVA was considered to be better equipped with nonprofit groups than most other eastern cities), and people were fucked. Then Reagan got Alzheimers. Kinda funny when you think about it. Now they pull his carcass out all the time as the Noble Warrior of Right Government. Fuck people.
At one point I was having a long series of recurring dreams about this railroad tunnel me and my man D-Mo went into up near Waynesboro that they're gonna turn into a hiking trail or some shit, but I was imaging this underground world where another shadow society was going on, and Reagan was still alive but still looked young but he had grown his hair long yet had no facial hair. I somehow ended up being part of his tribe, like helping him try to win the underworld elections, and he had told me one time that he had no facial hair because he made himself an Indian when he came to this underworld. And I would catch him looking at my beard all the time, except there were no electrical lights anywhere, just candles and barrel fires and shit, so it was always that dancing flickery light.
My man D-Mo in these recurring dreams had joined up with the other tribe, that I didn't know so well, so we were stuck in this underground shit, but didn't really kick it together too much because we had become parts of rival factions. I kinda realized D-Mo was sort of brainwashed by his side, which got me to thinking maybe I was brainwashed by my side, so I had this plan that we'd both kill the dude running for underground President in each of our groups, since they were the two big groups (there was also a third group of people who were aboveground homeless people who only came into the tunnels at night through the carpet factory on 810). Then me and D-Mo would climb back out the hole and go back to the regular world. Except then I thought about the fact that in the timeline of the dreams, we'd been underground for four or five years, so my truck was probably gone from the side of the road. Then I'd realize my family hadn't seen me in four or five years and had probably gone through the entire spectrum of freaking out, mourning me, and then moving on. This part would always freak me out and I'd wake up. So I never got to kill longhair Indian Reagan in the underground world on the other side of that old Claudius Crozet railroad tunnel through Afton Mountain.
STEAL "Institutionalized"
NEXT:
Mas grandes exitos!

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