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.
So I dropped a new book called Life in Chaotic State... Then Silence, which is a collection of renga poetry I wrote in monthly batches on twitter. The feature renga was done October of 2018 during a three-week period where I rode the Amtrak from the east coast down south, out to California, had a week-long residency there, did a haiku slam in Oregon, then rode the [t]rain back through the upper midwest and Chicago, back down to Charlottesville. It's a pretty great book in my opinion, as are the other ones. All are available on Amazon, or from me in person.
Additionally, I'm offering up signed copies of the new book (along with a few select older titles), where you can purchase it directly from me, received it signed, with a tanka poem inscribed in it as well (since I'm doing those on postcards as part of my patreon as well), and I'll tuck a recent copy of Sovthern Gothicc Fvtvrist zine in the envelope as well. Cost for this is $12 (plus $3 shipping).
This past Sunday I had to drive my eldest and their
friend to DC to fly to Asia. There is a long stretch of United States highway
15 – the same highway I grew up along mostly – that once you get past the
Wal-Mart Supercenter and distribution zone by the interstate, and the couple of
subdivisions sprawling from said interstate’s diamond exchange with 15, it
turns to dilapidated farmland along the Blue Ridge foothills, and is straight
as fuck, so you are tempted to go a thousand miles an hour but you also know
police lurk like copperheads in the bushes, waiting to strike and inject
poisonous revenue tendrils into your already depleted financial body. As I was
fighting the urge to go a thousand miles an hour, and had withdrawn $350 from
an ATM which had been transferred by my ex-in-principle-but-still-legal-wife
from her paypal to a bank account we still shared, so that I could leave an
envelope full of cash on the kitchen counter for the wood guy next week, we saw
a bald eagle at same level as the car, dragging the entrails of a recently hit
deer along for a meal. I thought to myself, as my now adult child prepared to
get a passport stamped in southeast Asia again, “wow, that’s like, a metaphor
or some shit.” And then I kept driving along, as doomed as ever.
Every wack fuckin’ rapper on Earth now has a song
named after some shitty fuckin’ wrestler. Used to be you could make a list of wrestling
references in hip hop and be excited, but fuck man, it’s like a PWI 500 of
shitty ass songs that are just trash verses but then somebody samples one line
of Curt Henning from youtube so they call it Mr. Perfect and think that’s
clever. Everybody’s so fuckin’ tired creatively. Y’all fuckin’ suck. Try harder
with your wack asses.
Nonetheless I enjoy Westside Gunn, even though he’s
beat this wrestling reference horse to fuckin’ death. Wish ECW was actually
still around, and actually not a sub-entity of WWE, so that like Westside Gunn
could show up with the Gangstas to battle whatever little flip-floppy white
asshole tag team y’all pretend are super amazing in a double barbed wire cage
match in the ECW Arena. If rap is too corny and derivative, wrestling is too
fake woke, ignoring the fact that pro wrestling’s bread and butter demographic
is proudly and fiercely ignorant folk, not the woke. Way more people sitting in
a Trump rally than a hipster coffee shop next to the comic book store. Internet
communities have falsely made us think we don’t have to exist in the regular
world, which is still a giant piece of shit. You can’t walk through a day IRL
without stepping in the shit. Online makes you think a better world could
exist. You overlook the fact humans are fucking stupid.
In old studio wrestling, the role of the jobber was
them dudes who always lost, week in and week out. You had the glorified jobber,
who was usually the guy who seemed like he might be a star one day, minimally
so, and he usually had the main event television loss to an actual star, but
most of the jobbers were just jobbers. The true jobbers didn’t even have the
look – you knew there was little star potential in that body, just a malformed
ungraceful blob of an existence that was born to lose, even long after actual
competitive meritocracies were all replaced by theatrical oligarchies who
dedicated resources to engaging still in the performative acts of pretending
shit was real. True jobbers.
I appreciate the fact people love to hold up kings
and queens and these high cultural watermarks of greatness for all of us to
look back on and identify. This is especially important for oppressed people,
who in the larger culture are rarely allowed to see themselves in a successful
light. In order to keep people from feeling hopelessly destitute in their
humane existence, they need to feel like they can have something to attain in
life.
And yet, in every human culture from the beginning
of time, there’s many many true jobbers, and few true kings or queens. Too many
true jobbers, doomed in America, doomed in Europe, doomed in Africa, doomed in
all corners of the Earth whenever pyramid scams have been erected where some
are seen as greater than the rest. I’m very thankful for the class transition I’ve
made in life – I was born a true jobber, and now I feel like I’ve attained
glorified jobber status. I look like I could be a minimal star, there’s the
tease of actual success always present, but I come out losing most every week,
taking the loss, but doing so against even better and higher positioned talent.
It took a lot of work to not be a straight up true jobber, lot of luck too, and
I got to use the bias of the culture against itself too, because you clean me
up, put a decent shirt on me, I look like their preferred style of star to an
extent. They don’t realize I’m a piece of shit as easily as they would someone
with a different skin tone. But I don’t pretend that I’m not still a jobber,
and ain’t ever gonna hold a meaningful title while wrestling with meaning in
this performative American life where we pretend it’s still real. Nothing is
real anymore.
It’s weird that blues music got watered down by old
white dudes, because good blues music is straight up a soundtrack for fucking,
and nothing about old white dudes with goatees and funny hats is sexy at all.
In fact, that’s my litmus test for blues music. Does it have a good fucking
rhythm, and make you wanna fuck? Then it’s good blues music. And let’s be
honest, most of life’s blues come from fucking, either accidentally fucking the
wrong person, or not being able to fuck the right person. Sometimes you double
down on the poor choices and end up in a situation where you can’t even fuck
the wrong person, but you really want to anyways, and that’s when the high
quality full life blues kick in.
This made me wonder the etymology of “blues” and a rapid internet search told
me it perhaps stems from a 17th century English expression for “the blue devils”
one sees during severe alcohol withdrawal. But like all of the most wonderful
things, there’s no real known beginning of what “the blues” means, nor really
when blues music started. Shit just kinda came together, like cultural gumbo,
and then it existed bigger than anybody realized, and now it ain’t going away, because
once obsessive old white dudes get ahold of something, it’s stuck in for good.
I refuse to believe the true etymology of “the blues” doesn’t have to do with
fucking, or lack thereof though.
An old roommate of mine's, who plays the guitar. I once watched him and my other roommate get in a fight over the last piece of bread. Also my bedroom was literally a closet. We are all thankful social media didn't exist back then because that place was fucked. Anyways, Matt still does the music, classic singer-songwriter stylings, but he's not wealthy or connected to wealthy, or touring the hipster diner circuit. So he just shit, obscurely, in an attempt to make the constant train wrecks feel better.
Hi. Do you need an angry but positive fuck you anthem after too much extended family and unrelenting consumer capitalism beating on your fucking brain? Good. Relatedly, a couple months back I was in the outlet store and they had Basquiat socks, which I got, because I have a job where I wear fake nice clothes and act like I'm a decent and upstanding member of society instead of the mental degenerate who wants everything to crumble into a fresh progressive apocalypse that I am. So I bought these Basquiat socks for like $3, and it feels pretend resistant, but it's actually just somebody got a licensing agreement for dead Basquiat's art, and I bought some fucking socks, which apparently not enough people bought at the regular overinflated price, so I got them at the outlet store. Trickle down identity, lol, a lower class boy that's done come up in the world, WEARING A MOTHERFUCKIN' THREE DOLLAR PAIR OF SOCKS, LIKE A GODDAMN FAUNTLEROY.
I'm not one of those types to do an album of the year list, because I don't like tying my enjoyment of music into consumption of brand new items only, and also calendars are kinda bullshit. People who make these lists usually wrap them up by the first weekend of December, which eliminated almost a whole month. Fuck that shit. We're not all curators of culture to where we gotta do this shit all the time. That being said, if I limited myself to the calendar on the wall, and thought about some shit I ain't even listen to before 2019 but have played the living fuck out of this year so far (and counting), Bambu's at the top of the list, which isn't even a list to be honest, but just me thinking about it. There's so many faux woke people posturing online to gain woke credits for their little circle jerks of selfish self-righteous people, I can really appreciate the actual don't give a fuck attitude of Bambu, which also really does give a fuck, just not the way we're all trained into channeling our fuck giving. I'm sure "polite" and "politics" got the same root, but I don't feel like googling that shit, and I'm not an etymological encyclopedia, but it was funny to see people posturing about how they was mad at their racist uncles or drunk aunts on Thanksgiving. What the fuck? Go fix your goddamned own lives and families, and stop being out here judging every fuckin' body else for not following your lists of rights and wrongs. Anyways, it's Black Friday, and I ain't buying shit, but I do gotta mail a couple books out that got bought off my site, so I do have to go the post office for that shit, but I'm gonna bump Bambu loud as fuck as much as possible, because it sounds like people are moving into the apartment upstairs, and I've enjoyed the lack of neighbors overhead clomping around on the goddamn floors for a month or so, so I want them to know what the fuck's up. Or not. Fuck being polite all the time. Or politically righteous. Or political at all. I ain't wanna do shit but sit around and play dominoes to be honest, at least this weekend.
Jailbreaking an army of cybertrucks to drive into the wireless zones of West Virginia, to leave there to rust. Code name Teflon Rust, working with crow allies to combat starling drones manufactured since at least 1983. There is no technological solution to being human.
the bang of creation, inner muse ejaculated upon the world oftentimes unnoticed, stains along the bottom sides of capital life's secondhand cushions easing the existential pain of mundane existence common wage slave's resistance "LIFE IS PAIN MOTHERFUCKER" proclaimed buddha ray moore and never have those words been truer - that's it… never have they been truer… this is what being human is about navigating the ridiculously sprawling labyrinth of manmade obstacles we've built over centuries stale places of mildew and rot and devising a way to make it feel fresh cultivating bang culturing bang to fend off the metaphysical vultures by swinging our vorpal blade around at the entangling world trying to choke us out like kudzu made of burnt copper wires snaking through yakubian spreadsheets… by swinging our vorpal blade clearing out a little space to take a deep breath and realize deep in your heart fuck it
it's a cold Sunday, so I made chanko nabe stew in big steel pot sautee onions and garlic in oil, add chicken thigh meat I make my own broth, frozen, on hand, stored in old yogurt containers one at the ready to throw in the big pot whenever bought some giant red beets the other day, so took the tops, chopped them up throw it in the pot, along with some shiitake mushrooms chop up spinach bunch, add that; starting to smoke so throw in broth ice cube everything cooks while broth melts, softening, blending, stewing I have that "crab meat" stuff, which when cooked unravels kinda like noodles threw in some mussel meat, plus medium-sized shrimp, with tail on that shit was on sale, half-price - ingredients are determined by cost next time I make it, it'll be completely different and yet, entirely the same essence - slow, simmering stew of hearty shit all this sat on medium-low for a good hour, rightening busted out saucepan, six minutes to soft-boil eggs, runny in middle timer goes off, dunk in ice cold water until all cool I just let it all sit there, simmering on stove, did my Sunday chores washed and hung clothes, vacuumed, watched little Anthony Bourdain finally, I was ready for big fat bowl of chanko nabe stew in fact, I ate four… it'll sit on the stove for few days I've often joked that Ishiura should eat his chanko nabe stew so small, always looking to do the side dash thing for win and yet this second Sunday of this basho, side stepping didn't work Nishikigi clutched him tight, gripped for inner position Ishiura seemed doomed, yet again, when his trick failed upon start somehow, once Nishikigi pushed, Ishiura slipped past with upper grip now, Ishiura wrapped one leg around opponent he grabbed Nishikigi's left leg, and thrust his head like goat Nishikigi's vast body fell like oak, carrying Ishiura with ultra-rare triple attack - mitokorozeme move me sitting here with chanko nabe dribbling down blackberry bush beard no smack for Ishiura - more man than I'll ever be I finish it all by writing silly poems for obscure website while Ishiura drives off in his green Lamborghini
Chiyomaru's one of my down-low favorites - sideburned heavyweight born in Shibushi, as a child he studied judo first by high school, sumo chose him, even though he had not yet chosen it he's got that extra-sumo shape, yet extremely agile his judo remains with him - day seven he fought Kotoshogiku immediately has his man pushed to the dohyo's edge Kotoshogiku regains footing, so "fuck it" thinks Chiyomaru he just shoots back other way, slapping his opponent down I often wonder the sense of touch in these men, feeling muscle shifts naked flesh pressed together, feeling the other man's thoughts unconscious of mind reaction times when one feels energetic shift using opponent's own force against himself - pure judo
Hakuho's tiny protege, Enho, always fights above his weight somehow he does well, despite being many stones lesser against Shohozan, he again did far better than his size would dictate Shohozan maintained composure, got him slipping on the sand Enho had strange split - sumo dudes practice that leg split mobility shit the level of specific training involved in insane thousands of practice bouts, pushing giants backwards until exhausted serving up chankonabe for stable elders, for years this has been Enho's destiny, living under Hakuho's strong wing Enho's fighting an uphill battle, succeeding thus far but he's many bowls of chanko nabe lighter than most of these dudes on day six, mighty Shohozan caught the young buck slipping, sat him down on a day where all leaders except Hakuho took loss Shohozan - wily veteran maintaining place middle of the pack too good for juryo, but not quite good sanyaku level
Discourse
Warning – none of us born here chose to be American, that shit chose us. Any
space is only as exceptional as how much effort and work the people occupying
that space put into making it exceptional or special, or whatever the fuck.
People don’t seem to be “putting in work” but they wanna still expect everybody
to give America the accolades of being some mighty shining beacon of whatever
the fuck we’re supposed to be a beacon of. One of the greatest strengths of
trash culture like poor people or gangs or survivalist hillbillies is that
these cultures all know that YOU AIN’T SHIT IF YOU DON’T KEEP PUTTING IN THE
WORK. It’s all sand castles and washes the fuck away pretty quickly unless you
keep putting in the work. Right now, America is fucked, but it’s mostly fucked
because nobody wants to do the work. And I don’t mean manual labor at
construction sites, I mean the hard work of fixing a bunch of shit that ain’t
working for the benefit of most people. You can’t keep selecting your favorite
self-important asshole because they got a blue or red check beside their name,
and think they gonna do it. None of those fuckers care, because they don’t
understand. But they think they know. People who don’t understand but think
they know are the most dangerous human beings around. And that’s about 99.9% of
our political class. So we’re fucked in that sense. So I’ll just keep putting
in work, try to make alliances for survival, try to carve out a shady corner to
be able to take deep breaths without somebody stepping on my head. I didn’t
choose this life I’m living, it chose me. None of us picked getting slowly
crushed by the corporate oligarchy’s avarice and greed that is the pyramid scam
of America in the 21st Century; but we’re here. Putting in work won’t set you
free – there’s no escape, unless you’re lucky. But putting in work means you
don’t crushed out of existence, hopefully, at least not today. Although it’s
crushing somebody else right now, and crushing way more than it’s lifting up.
Takayasu's big hairy ass is personal fave… always has been stoic gaze and bulldog frame, but the ozeki's struggled always injured it seems, and there's no break from this sumo life (for life) Meisei arrived on day five, with spirited performance they give an award out for best fighting spirit every basho Meisei made an early play for its consideration Takayasu's five thousand metaphysical pounds came out thrusting Meisei danced the physical rikishi tango dervish with lime green power aura, Meisei's metaphysical mystical force rose a twist of torso, yank of Takayasu - victory
if Tochinoshin had remained full strength, might've made yokozuna the Georgian mountain of a man could overpower all full-strength, he lifted even the most gigantic men, and carried them now, with perpetual sore knee, plus elbow, not the same and yet, somehow he's still able to pull off these amazing displays tussling Takarafuji, no man gaining advantage looked like another Tochinoshin slow defeat, after his strength failed as it looks almost over, a rare kubihineri "head twisting throw" is the Japanese translation, first time in nine years one arm around opponent's neck, the other takes his hand then Tochinoshin twisted Takarafuji's neck until he flipped "where your head goes, your ass shall follow" George Clinton once said or something like that; but even not at full strength, Tochinoshin rules can't help but wonder about if he had remained healthy might we have seen the first ever European yokozuna rank? sumo is relentless; body's health will job to mental state
the makuuchi debut of another young sumo rikishi twenty-four years upon Earth; grown life in grappling's clutches his first basho has begun with promise and strength - but life can be cruel how many young rikishi start strong but burn out promptly? the weight of broken dreams attacks the heart harder than red meat vices his chankonabe bowl's full right now though; enjoy it, prince
I have meant to post more but I’ve been uninspired.
That’s mostly your fault, to be honest. The internet is a bougie ass cesspool
of neoliberal pretty vacancies, and that’s just the part I look at. The larger
internet is giant strides towards blissful fascism, and fuck both those
choices. I take pretty pictures and manipulate words with good practice, but I
still think classlessly. I am a dirtgod – thus born ugly and forced to take
pride in my wretched nature, because even if fully assimilated and exploited, I
can’t be one of y’all. (Unless you’re not one of them either; in that case, did
you watch that Dolemite shit on Netflix? That was great, wasn’t it?)
Tsurugisho and Shohozan have epic slap happy battle Tsurugisho absorbs concussion-like punishment and yet somehow he's able to grab Shohozan, and flip his ass out afterwards, for long moment, Tsurugisho stands still able to withstand in the moment, but after brain's like "what the fuck?" life briefly turns black and white - fighting through concussive fog sumo protocol is you continue until you are unable masculine traditions which are toxic yet intriguing wish my own toxic masculinity involved wearing dope silk robes instead, I sit, self-conscious in these lavender silk draws life slapped me around; and still I stand, stubbornly existing, goat mind noble Tsurugisho's fight through slap fog inspires me life is often like running headfirst into walls keeping you confined metaphysical slaps from all directions… frustrating fuck it though - refuse to quit; exist simply to piss off your masters goat minded people shall walk beyond End Times (like always)
