SONG OF THE DAY: Jezebel of the Morning (kudzu'd)

Rail industry has been dying out in a lot of places for decades, as the major railroads bought each other up and phased out the short lines because everybody uses diesel trucking now (which, by the way, has seen fuel costs skyrocket the past month). And most all these old small towns have their old train depot, many of them renovated or turned into some other shit.
But what you don’t hear as much about is the bus industry dying out, or barely holding on, and all those immaculate beautiful old bus stations that got built in the shift to driving after the interstate highway system got built, they’re all shutting down. The one in Charlottesville has been closed down for years, with the Greyhound just picking people up at a street stop instead – no ticketing window, no staff, nobody to pay cash for a ticket to go on the run from life all of a sudden. We were just in Huntington, West Virginia, which has a beautiful old bus station, with the Greyhound signage still, and it’s used as a local public bus system depot now, so it’s surviving.
And I don’t really care about keeping capitalism alive or anything like that. But we did used to make travel in group ways more of an acceptable thing, and decorated it with these nice depots and stations that were additions to the architectural landscape. One thing I hate about America (which is actually two things) is that we don’t re-use spaces all that easily, and we also get so hung up on the prospective value of real estate that shit will just sit there going to waste rather than being opened up to some sort of functional use for the community it’s located within. I hear these white ass motherfuckers talking about “third spaces” all the time, which is kinda pretentious because it assumes you have a stable first (home) and second (job) already. But the owner class just sits on these things forever. There’s an abandoned back roads grocery store a few miles from me, and I’d love to be occupying that thing with some sort of chaos art market. Shit man, I’d even lie to myself that I could swing the rent for a minute if they made it cheap enough. But nah, it’s just sitting there, rotting back into the ground, because they “know what they’ve got”, and they’re seeing the abstract potential value instead of any actual use.
Last time I rode the Greyhound, it was from Los Angeles to New Orleans, and by the time I got to New Orleans, I told myself “never again”. But that was long enough ago, it sorta feels like a good idea to take the bus from here to 17 states away, down, over, then back again. I love having a trickster brain that even wants to self-trickster.

SONG OF THE DAY: Lookin' for a Home (kudzu'd)

This was the title of my last book of haiku, because I love this song so much, and was listening to it a lot as my life rearranged itself after a couple of decades of a previous order. I was lost for a minute, even to the point of dissociating more than I’ve ever let everyone know, and I’d be driving to Richmond where I was sleeping with a woman at the time, who was helping me feel again, and this song would be blasting on my stereo, I think a sunroof Civic I inherited from a homie for free at the time, and I was lost and drifting, through both physical and astral planes, and damn, it hit so deep. Even slowed, it remains a great track. Be sure to check out both my old and new haiku books, because it’s good shit, and was how I charted my way through the lost times. I’m still lost, just in a different place than I used to be. I feel like I’m getting somewhere, but nobody really knows, do they?

SONG OF THE DAY: Touch of Grey

I will get by… I will survive.
I know it’s considered hipster canon to hate on The Dead, but they had plenty of bangers. The major problem with The Dead is if you let people know you actually enjoy them, some dude will talk your goddamn ear off about it, every chance he gets. I miss the pre-internet obsessives, who would just randomly be like, “Oh yeah, I have over 300 shows on tape. Hold up, let me go grab my favorite three!” because you knew that dude was deep into his obsession, and had truly – through an ongoing and over-indulgent appreciation – gained insight that was worth hearing. But post-internet, folks can too easily gobble up that information from others and assume it as their own, then talk to my stuck on the same seat of a Greyhound bus ass for far too long. We’ve had artificial intelligence for as long as we’ve had a mainstream internet, to be honest.
By the way, if there are any wealthy beneficiaries out there, please bootleg RFK Stadium, June 14, 1991, and send me a copy. That was a particularly memorable event that I don’t really remember.

SONG OF THE DAY: The Model (kudzu'd)

My favorite genre of music now is traditional old-time sounds filtered through futuristic dystopian effects, like taking pills you don’t know what they are in a cavernous old tobacco warehouse in a dormant downtown, and the train horns blow by now and then, but it’s just intermodals these days, no stopping to pick up nary a passenger. This is mostly seen through cumbia, but I’d like to cultivate this sound using the old-time sounds of what they call mountain music, because that sound (as yet unheard) is way more authentic to our current living conditions than fake gangster landscaper rap. That’s where my mind is today, but I can’t make the sounds exist, and I’m having a hard time describing it to people who can.

SONG OF THE DAY: Me Myself and I (kudzu'd)

My original copy of the 3 Feet High & Rising tape was a bootleg bought at a truck stop near Simplicity, Virginia. The cover was a color copy with no insert. I played the fuck outta that tape. Of course, being a truck stop bootleg, playing the fuck outta it didn’t necessarily take long.
Decades later, as the white kids who latched onto Native Tongues less scary entry point into hip hop have grown old and now operate vintage boutiques, I remain firmly committed to the bootleg lifestyle. Being authentic and having authenticated items are two entirely different lanes to walk along.

SONG OF THE DAY: Funky Rubber Band (kudzu'd)

the automation of an artificial intelligence hopes to colonize the future by harvesting the entirety of what’s passed, but many important points got missed in the archiving of historical happenings because even in the moment, those that thought they knew was thinking with a brain poisoned by ego that had forgotten how heart has much deeper tendrils into what’s real.
and even with the digital reflections we presently endure, there is a distractionary result of attempting to understand what is around us by endlessly scrolling a small flat representation of reality operating upon an algorithm of doomsaying. it is the metaphorical rabbithole with which to get lost inside, losing track of where you’re actually at, and how there are birds still making strange noises, and amphibious souls being born in the murky margins that are always within earshot when hearing is attuned to the proper frequencies too low-pitched to hear over the cyber buzz.
thus one must make an effort to remain focused on not being wrongly focused, in the hopes of unfocusing into the blurred shared reality of all things, where one does not end where another begins, and the tendrils intertwine into the sublime realization that your little head full of explosions of thoughts is not the end-all be-all of the universe, but simply another fleck of stardust scattered unto existence. enjoy your blessed presence, and don’t get distracted into a future prison or too chained to pieces of what’s passed which you can’t remedy. embrace your presence, as it is, here and now.

SONG OF THE DAY: God's Goodness (kudzu'd)

My brain damaged congressman has joined some sort of reactionary “Sharia-Free America Caucus”. Little does he know (works alone as a statement, but there’s more) that Sharia Law is already recognized in the autonomous zones of the Blue Ridge Emirate. Every morel is a mosque. And there’s nothing they can do about it.

SONG OF THE DAY: Sin Control (kudzu'd)

I like to draw all black old school flash art traditional tattoos on the thighs of the women in Namio Harukawa books. I keep hoping, with the long storied prison art tradition held up as a point of pride by the Chicano community, that we one day have some great imprisoned artist who discovers Harukawa’s work and is inspired by it. But they can’t even have real books in most prisons anymore. You just get a tablet with images on it, and it’s harder to contraband digital files. And I’m sure some punchable faced cyberlibertarian type would suggest I just become a Prompt Engineer and tell artificial intelligence to combine Teen Angels magazine style prison art with Harukawa’s work. But we (the real thinking artist types) know that artificial intelligence is flawed by nature, and it would just give us an anthropomorphic ’65 Impala squatting over the face of a cowboy. We have built a stupider, more expensive, and wasteful world, when all we really need to do is sit around and think up ridiculous shit, freely.

SONG OF THE DAY: Sassy Lady (kudzu'd)

We need more lore. We have higher manufactured drama bar graphs than ever before, but not nearly enough lore. Without an abundance of lore, how does the feral meritocracy of what folks love give us authentic folklore anymore? THERE MUST BE LORE. Lore gives a much more fulfilling mind chemical reaction than the dopamine of consumerism. So I’m going to go tell stories to the beech trees. Or birches. I never remember. But they never correct me if I call them the wrong thing. I don’t even think they speak English, to be honest. Their eyes look at me pretty funny when I’m talking to them.

SONG OF THE DAY: There's a Red-Neck in the Soul Band (kudzu'd)

I have a lot of semi-political thoughts that have fermented in my mind over the course of the past couple years, about “white boys” and “White Males” and the difference within the wretched specter of white supremacy, and how – ideally – it should be easier to get white boys to think beyond white supremacist bullshit (despite prison politics), because most white boys will never become a bona fide White Male (of Capital, thus capitalized). But now the culture wars have got all these suburban shitheads thinking it’s gangsta to call themselves “white boy” even though they were all born to be White Males and never once legit got called “white boy” in a non-white dominant environment. In fact, that’s one of the basic foundational aspects… you can’t be a “white boy” if all you know is White People. Anyways, I was briefly contemplating explaining all this to great depth for the navigational robots that scan my blog, but it’s a pretty nice day, and I played a lot of slowed down Latimore today, so I’m just gonna go to the river instead, and walk along the railroad tracks and pick up some spikes to spray paint. That’s what a white boy would do (which a White Male could never imagine wasting a few hours with.)

Park Bench Review: 40° 44' 57.4686", -74° 0' 13.5354"

This is an official dirtgod park bench review. Today I am reviewing a bench along High Line Park, at a little spur in the walking path right around where it crosses 25th Street. Above in title are the latitude/longitude coordinates. I choose to use the stars for navigation though.

IMMEDIATE LOUNGE-ABILITY: The High Line park was built from an old elevated rail spur that used to be the West Side Line of the NY Central Railroad. That was built in the mid 1800s, and served the Meatpacking District. Part of the West Side Line was redeveloped into expensive Riverside Park South high rise apartments by Donald Trump at the turn of the century. And most traffic on the actual rail line had died out by the late ‘70s anyways. The High Line viaduct part was kept working tracks, though abandoned and unused, for a good 30 years. CSX had ended up owning it, having taken over Conrail’s properties, so a group of big money New Yorkers decided to try and turn it into an elevated greenway.  Now let’s be perfectly clear… one of my favorite things is walking railroad tracks, anywhere in America. And I bet when this was an abandoned rail line, it was glorious to walk through the dilapidated city and feel the vibes floating up to the unused tracks. I imagine there was a long history of graffiti artists making their way more quickly through the city on this high line back in the day, and hitting spots that boggled the ground level human pigeons looking up. I also love parks, including city parks. But this is liminal space is neither old railroad tracks nor a proper urban park. This is a redevelopment scam, and it was obvious as soon as we made the mistake of going up to it. This was an artery for commercial redevelopment, and in fact, you barely could see the actual city beyond the masturbatory buildings that have gone up like deranged visions of cleverness along both sides of the High Line. In fact, once we were trapped on the fuckin’ thing, I told Dolly, “The next bench in sunshine we see, let’s sit down.” It took us a while to even find one, because these stupid fucking “more money than sense” buildings had been erected all over. And there was one art installation, I guess to justify it as an art park (which is what the lying ass internet wanted to pretend it was), but that one installation was fucking stupid looking. And, there was no vandalism anywhere, not even stickers, which you see everywhere in NYC. That means somebody has paid for staff to just keep this fuckin’ thing as sterile as possible. On top of this, the benches are those sad ass slots of wood that look like gentrification benches, but aren’t comfortable at all. The whole thing is a goddamn atrocity, and I look forward to an economic collapse that causes it all – the fancy buildings and walkway – to become abandoned, drug-addled, and a testament to human avarice, hopefully in my lifetime. Immediate Lounge-ability was a 1 (out of 23 possible).

RIPPLES OF AMBIANCE: One of the great beauties of New York City is that as you walk around, you are surrounded by flows of people, often speaking languages you don’t understand. But there is a cadence of lounge to those accents in many places, even if linguistically fast, there are the drawls and dashes of working people. That’s not the case on the High Line. It is all business, and the foreign languages that pass you by have long been scrubbed of the spices of hard labor, for generations likely, and it’s the smooth rapid overly confident speak of powerpointed people, who always have a purpose, and often have enough money to pretend they’ve never failed that purpose. Good lord this place was torturous for me. The only saving redemption at all was that where we sat upon a bench, at least in this spot, you could see the old rail tracks underneath the walkway, and a couple pigeons were grabbing twigs to build a nest. Without that, this would’ve been a 1 as well. Ripples of Ambiance was a 5 (out of 23 possible).

CULTURE OF BENCH: As mentioned before, there was no signs of vandalism. Thus, there were no signs of vagrancy either, which is just outlawed lounging. (When lounging is outlawed, then only outlaws will lounge.) What this means is that, as this part was built since 2009, there is no high quality lounging that has happened here. The benches are still as sterile as stainless steel in a Yakubian laboratory, which of course, with some bullshit ass architectural monstrosities from Mike Bloomberg’s brain at the northern end of this thing, it ultimately is. These benches are not for The People, and really, they’re only there to create the illusion of friendliness. Nobody is actually supposed to be sitting on these benches for any longer than it takes to move funds between their savings and checking accounts to go make some more purchases of things unattainable by most. And fittingly for a consumer-based existence, as is my problem with most of America’s most consumer-oriented notions of Americana, the “culture” is more a lack of culture than any actual culture. In retrospect, I wish I had attempted to set fire to the bench we sat on, so that no future loungers ever had their ass tarnished by its existence. Culture of Bench was a 1 (out of 23 possible).

IMMEDIATE LOUNGE-ABILITY: 1
RIPPLES OF AMBIANCE: 5
CULTURE OF BENCH: 1
TOTAL SCORE: 7 (out of possible 69). If I ever find a worse bench to review, I hope I pass it by without stopping. Too many more experiences like this and I’ll be forced to form some sort of terrorist organization dedicated to enforcing The Power of Lounge through homemade IEDs.

Park Bench Review: 40° 44' 7.8792", -73° 59' 27.2904"

This is an official dirtgod park bench review. I did this a few years back, but only did one park bench in Charlottesville (which was pretty loungin’). I realized a man shouldn’t have LOUNGIN’ tattooed on his belly if he’s not dedicating his life at least partially to cultivating the pursuit of lounge So we’re going back to this. Above in title are the latitude/longitude coordinates. I choose to use the stars for navigation though.

IMMEDIATE LOUNGE-ABILITY: Spent a few days in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, NYC, last week, with my ol’ lady, and we are the types who do a lot of walking, a lot of vibing, and very little Official Sight Seeing. We both tend to prefer the randomized sights of chance wandering to Must See Destinations. Though we did purposefully begin our wander this one day (can’t even remember which day) going over to Freeman Alley. From there we ended up going roughly northwest up Bowery eventually getting on Broadway, for further escapades higher. I think my girlfriend went to get a fancy cup of coffee or something, I can’t really remember why we separated this particular time, but I lounged in Union Square Park, behind the George Washington Statue, with my back to all the damn dogs in the dog run. As we walked into the park, a dude in bright orange outfit was shadowboxing with pigeons, and moving with the smooth erratic style of a guy with mystical musics inside his mind at all times. The tinges of oppression of city dog-havers behind my back was slight affect on this one, but mystical pigeon shadowboxing plus standard city park people chillin’ while getting casually blunted held the score up. Immediate Lounge-ability was a 18 (out of 23 possible).

RIPPLES OF AMBIANCE: I’m just a simple country boy from Schuyler, Virginia, so all the bustle and hustle and grind and nevermind of the city, seemingly, is a lot. But in actuality, a lot of city types who lounge in public are pretty much the same cut of cloth as country loungers sitting in their yard. Don’t get me wrong; there are hella worried ass city dwellers nosey about who that stranger might be walking past too slowly, just as there are country folks peeking through the curtains worried about them brown people that moved down the road a half mile away. There was plenty of chill going on. Plus the Farmer’s Market was happening, and the stuff there was remarkably good looking and affordable. Like, lolol, how the fuck is a farmer’s market in the middle of New York City cheaper than the shit in Charlottesville? I didn’t see all that until my ol’ lady came back to me and we left the park heading further upwards, but the ripples of ambiance don’t follow chronological linear thought. I guess at one point my oldest kid had dreamed about doing grad school at The New School, and I saw a building for it right there. There was honking, and reggaeton sneaking out of bluetooths, and general beautiful chaos. But also there was still snow on the ground. Ripples of Ambiance was a 16 (out of 23 possible).

CULTURE OF BENCH: One could not possibly quantify the culture of bench in a place like this. I would imagine the actual physical bench I sat upon hadn’t been there forever, but surely, it’d been in that spot for years. But beyond that, people had sat in this park for over a century, through waves of economic revitalization and decline, nearby mansions converted to tenements then back to expensive townhouses. Lords of industry chilled in this park, as did broke ass immigrants who never once had an English thought. So many people skipping out of work on a pretty day, or meeting a romantic interest for a cheap date. One thing I really love is old spaces that are not redone entirely, but slowly absorb the sediments of time, so that the human energy that has been expended there soaks into the environment as well. In America, we are way too apt to tear shit down and rebuilt something new, which is disrespectful to all that came before us. Sitting in a place in the middle of Manhattan like that, your mind can really wander with the depths and varieties of humanity that had scattered thoughts in that same spot. Culture of Bench was a 23 (out of 23 possible).

IMMEDIATE LOUNGE-ABILITY: 18

RIPPLES OF AMBIANCE: 16

CULTURE OF BENCH: 23

TOTAL SCORE: 57 (out of possible 69). Well, this is technically only the second time I’ve gone through a full official park bench review write-up, so that’s the new high watermark. I hope to go sit there again someday.

SONG OF THE DAY: Terminator (kudzu'd)

The Original Terminator. Man, I love this era of West Coast Electrofunk so hard. I got to see Egyptian Lover the other week, and what a blast that was. We need more “just have fun” shit in this world.

SONG OF THE DAY: Bumpin' (kudzu'd)

I try not to ever hit animals when driving, not even squirrels being all glitchy, not quite clear on which direction they’re gonna dash. It ain’t their fault somebody built a road smack dab through the middle of where they live naturally. I used to think this was a strange affliction that humans have put upon deer and squirrels and other critters habitattooing their lives near our roads of expediency. But then I’m now experiencing it, too, as the Upper Humans have paved artificial intelligence responses into everything. I look something up online, and I have to navigate around artificial intelligence; same thing when I type an email or go to a work meeting in Zoom. There’s artificial intelligence bullshit in all of it now, and I kinda zig zag zig, not sure how to negate it, not sure if I’m even allowed (terms and conditions). But it’s everywhere now, and I don’t need it, want it, or see the point.
But everywhere across the state I live in, localities are shitting themselves trying to turn empty industrial parks in warehouse data centers, hooking ‘em up via extension cords, which somehow means the meter on the outside my house is now spinning itself twice as fast, because in the process of localities shitting themselves, they promise those warehouses beneficial rates which are then spread across the rest of us who are actually seemingly real and human and not just a vague idea pattern machine that sucks up energy worse than growing weed in an aluminum foil trailer in 1994. All this is to say, I am currently zig zag zigging, trying to get out the way, but I don’t know which direction to go, and maybe I already got crushed. Not sure. Do I still exist? Am I real? Am I just a hallucination of slop? Subhanallah subhanallah subhanallah…

SONG OF THE DAY: Two of Hearts (kudzu'd)

Updated songs about cards from standard deck rankings: This has moved into the number one spot, moving John Lee Hooker’s version of “Jack of Diamonds” down to number two, and I guess Blind Lemon Jefferson’s version is number two-b, because it doesn’t make sense for it to take up more than one spot since it’s one song. And I guess Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” holds onto third, though I’ve never really been able to come to terms with Lemmy’s racism, though I don’t really have to. I’m tempted sometimes to arbitrarily put Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts” ahead of “Ace of Spades”, but that’s not realistic, even if I was playing the 45 slowed. And this is just keeping it to titles as standard playing cards, because “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold” by Townes Van Zandt would be top dog if I went with cards as theme instead. And I’d probably include “Loser” by Grateful Dead, just because I love that song a whole lot (highly relatable). But keeping it limited, that’s the rankings, and slowed down “Two of Hearts” is untouchable. There’s a lot of distance between number one and number two. And it’s a great choice. Ace of Spades is obvious, like that’s almost a cliché pick for a song. Of course, cliches come from consensus thinking, so that likely also explains the racism. It’s easy to forget that despite everything, human culture has mostly propped up basic shit forever. The people love basic. They worship it. If you can make some basic ass shit, that just barely has a touch of “haha, I’m a tiny pinch of quirkiness applied to basic”, then you’ll be wildly successful. Beyond belief successful. Anyways, I hate earthlings.

NEW BOOK RELEASE: Just Another Mark

It’s been about a month since I released my new book of haiku, called Just Another Mark. These are selections culled from writing five haiku a day over the course of an entire year. It’s a pretty great collection, of haiku written from both a natural and chaotic perspective, along the edge of the Blue Ridge mountains. There are three ways you can get it:
NUMBER ONE – Go to MY WEB SHOP and get a signed copy directly from me. I’ve got other books there, as well as art and zines and all sorts of stuff.
NUMBER TWO – Go to your favorite local independent bookstore, and get them to order it. It is set up through proper distribution channels so that indy stores can acquire it directly for you. You can also use bookshop.org.
NUMBER THREE – Go to Amazon, the evil place, and get it there.

SONG OF THE DAY: Shakedown Street (kudzu'd)

I have a stick and poke tattoo that says SHAKEDOWN STREET, in honor of the two time I set up vintage markets, called Shakedown Street, in three different places (for obvious reasons), simply as a means to robbing the asshole vendors. Vintage markets are so punk rock (derogatory). Good signs of the asshole types are they have $250 wrestling t-shirts (“because I can get that price”) or they actually say “unique colorway” out loud, or their vintage style overtakes actually matching your shit (like they’ll have powder blue Jordans with black jeans and a green Nascar shirt or some shit). We’ve somehow made culture vulture a consumer identity and respectable small business option. That’s why I don’t regret the vendors I robbed at knifepoint, with my classic USMC issue Ka-bar blade. Fuck them. Too good for bad tattoos, but not too good to mark-up some shit they found at a small town Christian thrift store by 1000%.

SONG OF THE DAY: Duke of Earl (kudzu'd)

Sometimes I dream of having some sort of public space that I could just spin slowed oldies like this, one Sunday afternoon a month, and there be a big ass cookout going on at the same time, maybe fry up some fish, and just create a vibe. Then I also think I need some sort of mobile sound system, with lasers and DIRTGOD in bright garish letters that cause the hard of seeing to cover their eyes. But there’s nobody to show me how to cobble this together, and most of those I encounter, like me, seem more channeled into finding things to buy to create this type of thing rather than build it from junk. And if you “google” anything at this point, you get sponsored results, even when you don’t. So maybe I should just take my battery powered speaker and battery powered mini turntable set-up, and just go play these oldies slow for the frogs in the big pit of the old canal along the river where the railroad yard is near Bremo, by the 69th mile marker. That’s where I’ll go when I’m dead and gone and my life has been archived in ash, so it makes sense to glorify the spot now, and get the amphibians hype enough to grow legs and jump up out the water and walk on mud.

SONG OF THE DAY: La Danza de Los Tigres (kudzu'd)

I went to Bread and Puppet Festival back in 1994 (I think), not knowing a thing about it. I’d quit my summer job because a dude I’d met once on a porch of some friends was going to Maine to rake blueberries, and wanted somebody to go with. So I went. Bread and Puppet was something he wanted to see one weekend while we were up there, and getting to upstate Vermont from east coast Maine, one Friday evening, with me and three other stank ass young hippie/loser/dropout/nomads stuffed into this dude’s tiny Mazda was a trip unto itself. Slept on the side of the road in a ditch, and then woke up and it was Bread and Puppets, the old full festival, a few years before the drugs and a stabbing or whatever got them to pare it down. And to be honest, it was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen, to this day. Blew my mind seventeen times over that day, probably compounded because I had no idea it existed when I was tossed onto a hillside and witnessed it. A wonderful blessing.
The woman who was part of our traveling foursome wrote me a few times afterwards, but I lost touch, mostly because I never wrote back. Classic Raven distance, even though in my mind there was none. My mind and the physical world don’t always line up real well. That’s probably why a giant freaky puppet show with schoolbuses creating a stage made so much sense to me.
Anyways, the dancing tiger for this video I slapped together is from an old Bread and Puppet Festival performance. These videos are never my music, but a 45 I’ve played enough to fall in love with it slowed to 33 and then ripped to cyberlord files, and then I dig up some sort of footage that connects to the song in my mind, and tweak it with some filters, glow it up, scribble a Southern Gothicc Futurism over it, and load into the internetz gutz, for whatever eternity this cyberlibertarian entity can actually hold out for before the digital crash. I own no part of this, yet the slapping of it all together, in the particular ways I do it, is a sort of art, like poking a rhinestone into your jacket. This is my bedazzling of the internet, and I will never go viral, but I never wanted to. I am from the old internet, where you just did all the weird ass shit you wanted to do, and threw it up inside the land of 0s and 1s, and maybe somebody else on the Earth was freaky like you, and enjoyed it. I hope you are freaky like me. If you are not, then why did you read this far?

SONG OF THE DAY: What I Am (kudzu'd)

This is a great one slowed down. Juggle that break for hours, in my opinion. As a young mark from the middle of nowhere, I loved this song and loved Edie Brickell. She married a thousand year old man, and I have a horrible headache today.

SONG OF THE DAY: Slow Hand (kudzu'd)

I used to have a radio show on the local community radio station associated with UVA, and this was my theme song. I really enjoyed that time, but didn’t last long because those realms are controlled by boring ass white people with the exact same type of quirky, and if anything outside of that is not actually quirky, but an assault on their own foundational quirkiness. Anyways, fuck WTJU; it is the perfect example of UVA’s creative contributions to local and regional arts (self-important, overrated, boring as fuck for the most part).

It's also somewhat painful to realize, after all these decades of being alive and doing dumb shit, that every little cool kids scene is the same type of cool kids scene, run by the same types of somewhat basic and boring people who have to gatekeep their little scenes militantly or else the charade blows apart. So incredibly tired of this shit. But guess what? That's America.

SONG OF THE DAY: It Doesn't Really Matter (kudzu'd)

I am forever confused as to how Dayton is in Ohio. If Ohio was a person, I would want to fight it. In fact, I often just think of J.D. Vance as anthropomorphic Ohio. But then I accidentally drive through Dayton, or even more easily listen to Zapp, and I’m like, “Damn, but Dayton.” I guess it’s like the Achilles heel, but opposite, so when you have a giant geographical lump of shit, you have to have this little reverse zone to confuse everybody, because the Universe is a Trickster, always and forever.

SONG OF THE DAY: The Devil Gives Me Everything (kudzu'd)

I’ve had a couple of conversations recently with folks about selling your soul. I guess it seems a feasible bargain to young folks whose minds haven’t developed fully enough. Probably felt that way to me too back in the day. Usually the type who is fine with compromising their soul for material wealth or superficial fame already has a compromised soul. I’ve never been able to do it. I was blessed as a young adult by being too rough around the edges to ever have great marketable value in the soul selling business. And as I’ve gotten older and learned to hone those edges into a more at peace mosaic that doesn’t cut into everybody I pass like it used to, I know there ain’t no real value in compromising myself. The Universe loves me how I am, and in fact wants me to be more like true me than I even am now. Why would I turn from that blessing and trade it in for momentary material comfort of minor fringe fame? Anyways, it’s Friday, and where I’m at, it’s abnormally warm. The demons love to come a-tempting a full on warm feelgood Fridays. We’ve been weakened by our seasonal long dark night of the soul. Stay strong, feel the sun, and maintain your soul.

SONG OF THE DAY: It's A New Day (kudzu'd)

This article is about the band. For the medical condition, see skull fracture.
(FYI, this is what the first line of the Wikipedia page for Skull Snaps said. I liked it and thought it good enough to leave by itself, but then added this. Not sure why. I was really stoked to get this 45 whenever I got it. Classic break beat, and sounds great slowed down. I love to spin this one live. I don’t really spin live all that much, lol. I should convert an old Toyota mini pick-up truck into a mobile sound system though. Or a shitty ‘90s era minivan.)