JJ Krupert Dec 2017 number three "buildings and bridges"

Back in the day when the person who is now my wife was just someone I was seeing, a good idea for a date for us was get an 18-pack of Budweiser and drive in any particular direction out of Richmond, where we lived, just getting out to the country. I tended to go hard back then, so it didn’t take long to get elbow deep into an 18-pack, and generally this might have been mix-n-matched with other thangs. More than once in our early dating did I end up slurred beyond self-control, sometimes entirely debilitated into blathering incomprehensible fool. She hung with a number of early militant feminist art types back then as well, thus Ani DiFranco was never far from being at hand. Thus, I have strong blurry memories of being all fucked up and slouched over in passenger seat while she – perhaps angrily, perhaps not – started blasting Ani DiFranco driving us back from wherever we were, or me back from wherever she came to retrieve me from my own chaos. Back then, after I had fucked up us dating the first time round, I sort of held a grudge against all Ani DiFranco music – coming from the Ugh zone. But now, after all this time, the old shit has sort of sunk into my brain as a warm memory of transitional times: disappearing back into the country, eventually finding family, eventually even learning to not make myself all fucked up to deal with how out of place I felt (feel?) in this world.

This is weird counter-balance to the G.G. Allin of last sharing Krupertdom, but they fit together in the enigma of existence. I am good with both those parts, but also glad that I actually live IRL somewhere between the two now. I do not want to be as trapped in own doom as Allin was, but also don’t need to be stuck in the assigned patriarchal roles culture wants to assign me to. I am not that dude, not either of those dudes actually.

Of course none of this matters – not my opinion on the space I occupy as human, or even these words still barely dribbling through the digital viaduct, because external judgments will always be applied, and even enforced, militantly. The self-medicated degenerates and the progressive reformists both are militant about their right and wrongs, with little room for grey area tolerance. All I can do is whatever it is I do, which is still – though not all fucked up and slouched over – mostly unplanned and somewhat incomprehensible. Life is never what you plan it to be, and yet somehow the signs were always there.