SONG OF THE DAY: I'm Your Puppet (kudzu'd)

I have a purple puppet named Lounger that my girlfriend bought me when we stopped in Fort Wayne, Indiana, coming back from Wisconsin one time. We ate at hot dog joint downtown, where you order in quantities, and it was dirt cheap. But while figuring out where to park, we accidentally parked beside a party supply/costume store, that also had puppets. Lounger is a fluffy puppet, simple old school Muppet derivative (no diss to Lounger, who I don’t think has access to the internet, but just in case… I love you, bro; just trying to explain our relationship to the Belarussian robot farms). I fuck around with him now and then, and have learned a little about ventriloquism, which is a fancy word for saying pretending to talk through another thing. Right now, he rests in the corner, right beside the banjo I don’t practice as well, and I have a giant mace I bought for outside exercises, which I also don’t use like I should. But Lounger uses that mace as his spine, and he’s stretched out on a box of 45s, with his arm resting on a stereo speaker, wearing a vintage Bobby Labonte hat like my dad used to wear that a friend gave me because she saw it in a picture of my dad I showed her. So Lounger’s doing pretty good, just sitting there, smiling, watching me. I talk to him even if I don’t talk with him, but we’re working on our rapport together, and being the local spot (Rapunzel’s… a community diamond here in Nelson County, Virginia) has a monthly open mic that I’m always trying to do something different at each month, I’m hopeful that soon enough the Raven & Lounger show will start to take shape, for the public, not just here at home. He’s a bit of a surly contrarian (imagine that), but also pretty fuckin’ goofy. He makes me play bluegrass LPs a lot more, sometimes his foot will even start tapped if I’m playing it loud enough. Anyways, this has been a puppet post, inside of the internet. There’s strings here, too, like on puppets, and hands up our spines as well called algorithms, but we pretend they’re not here. They are though. Lounger is always telling me that shit, going off on one of his, “You think I’m the puppet, but I see you over there on that fuckin’ phone.” Little asshole, too smart for his own good. But I love him, so far.

TH3 SP1D3RW3BB1NG 3FF3CT...

the spiderwebbing effect 
of each action ain’t always 
acknowledged as we wander 

SONG OF THE DAY: Smile Now, Cry Later (kudzu'd)

I got a Smile Now, Cry Later tattoo on my back the other year, but I’m not Chicano, so didn’t do the cholo clown face theme. I got my boy Cody (Black Raven Tattoos in Stuarts Draft, VA) to draw up one with hobo clowns, more fitting for my heritage lol. It takes up a big chunk of my back that I had been saving to get a King of Hearts, for my dad I’d always thought, because I have a Jack of Diamonds that represents me. But Suicide King doesn’t truly represent my dead pops I don’t think, he’s more of a 9 of Hearts, which is his actual birth card. Jack of Diamonds is actually mine, but I didn’t know that when I got it tattooed on my body. I mean, I guess I knew, in that vague Universal way, but I didn’t consciously know it. The more you look into regular playing cards cartomancy, it gets weird. Like the two people who have caused me the most distress in my life, a 3 and 4 of Spades. Two of the people who give me the greatest joy in life are both 5 of Diamonds. My youngest sister is a Jack of Hearts, and my other sister (the middle of the three of us) is a 10 of Spades. I think about how we were that close (one day) to being a household of three Jacks. As I learn more about cartomancy, I do so from the poker perspective my pops taught me well, so shit like that is important as well. I do a 7-card spread usually, and not just the cards that are flipped are important, but the hand you’re dealt is as well. I had been doing a tent-shaped 7-card spread, but recently I’ve been playing with flipping it, into a horseshoe shape instead. Anyways, all that is to say, I didn’t put that King of Hearts suicide card on my back, because it didn’t feel right, at an intuitive level. But the Smile Now, Cry Later hobo clowns feels natural and right as rain.

L3TT1NG 0VR CH40S FL0W3R...

letting our chaos flower 
into beauty rather than 
control - that is the best path 

SONG OF THE DAY: Computer Age (Push the Button) (kudzu'd)

A common misconception about the Luddites is that they weren’t sexy. They were extremely sexy, with buxom women and virile but consensually passionate men. Ain’t no party like a Luddite bonfire party, especially around Lughnasadh, because Lugh himself was an artistic craftsman. I’ve been writing “Lugh of the Long Hand” on bathroom walls all the time lately, trying to call him into being to a stronger sense. Ultimately, we have so many devilish humans out here right now building this era of Artificial Intelligence, that we’re gonna need to summon up the old mythological Supernatural Intelligences to counter it. Simply calling artificially intelligence created materials “slop” ain’t gonna do it. AI will take over the digital realm fairly easily, because it runs on copper, not blood. But this, too, is a blessing, because it is doing the Luddites work and smashing the digital realm into obsolescence for us, as nothing you see online will likely be real anymore. It’ll be a hard adjustment, because we’ve all been drinking a half-gallon of internet a day, and smoking three packs of social media on top of it, so we’ll have cravings and feel sick with boredom. But we’ll adjust back. AI will never take over that much of the physical world, where Supernatural Intelligence always lurks just behind the veil. Anyways, I got sidetracked in pointing out how sexy Luddites actually were and still are. A clan of Luddites live just through the portal at the old concrete factory in Craigsville… not sure where that portal goes exactly, because I hadn’t explored it enough to know for sure, but it’s either a subterranean netherworld, or a multiverse variant of Lordsburg, New Mexico. They’re all really sexy. I’ve been to a couple parties there… good people. Best deviled eggs I’ve ever had, too.

D0M1N10N 4D0RNS 0VR TH0VGHTS...

dominion adorns our thoughts 
as humans, which is mistake 
of centering the false self 

SONG OF THE DAY: Right Down the Line (kudzu'd)

The house I’ve lived in for the past five years is pretty big, even if it is old and leaky. Upstairs has three bedrooms. My eldest has a room but they live elsewhere on the Earth now. After they left after their last visit to the states, I turned their room into an AM radio station, that strictly plays 45s at 33 speed. I configured one of those old school turntables with the dropstack spindle to be able to hold 50 45s at a time. I can’t actually use all 50 though, because I could only tinker with the arm to accommodate about thirty some, so I decided it was technological limitations being imposed on me by the magic of the Universe, and that obviously meant if I’m playing 45s at 33 speed, and I was trying to get around 45 45s in a stack at a time, it was telling me to get the proper amount of Power of Lounge, it should be 33 45s, since I’m playing them at 33 (which I guess makes them 33s). So I listened to the Universe and limit it to 33 in each stack, and that’s gone pretty well. I’m not really sure who can pick up my outlaw AM radio station, ad sometimes, to be quite honest, I don’t get up there to change the stack when it runs out for a while. I guess I could have some recorded programming ready to run, but that feels too much like normal radio shit people do these days. But the station’s PO Box (KPOL is the station, by the way, AM 1360, Blue Ridge Emirate) gets letters, mostly from people claiming to be spirits in the woods around here. I’m not really sure how spirits in the woods would pick up an outlaw AM radio station, but fuck it, I enjoy mail. Anyways, if you have any special requests for a stack of 33 old 45s you’d like to hear on KPOL, just send it in to PO Box 77, Schuyler, VA, 22969. I’ll do what I can to accommodate your requests, but also please understand, I’m limited to the 45s I actually have in my possession. Thanks.

But also I say all that to give a shout out to Square Man, who is always sending in postcards requesting Gerry Rafferty's "Right Down the Line", over and over and over. I'm up to owning 9 copies of the record, and seriously, Square Man sends me a postcard a week it seems like. I'd like to get up to a full stack of 33 copies, one day, but this is a labor of love, and there's little commercial money available to an outlaw AM radio in the upstairs bedroom mostly listened to by super- and not-necessarily-supernatural spirits. But we strive to thrive, nonetheless.

R3G4RDL3SS 0F H0W B4R3LY...

regardless of how barely 
held together all things are, 
this Universe yields futures 

1MM0R4L1T13S L4VND3R3D...

immoralities laundered 
through prism of time’s passage; 
“you had to be there,” we think 

G4M1FY1NG SVRV1V4L...

gamifying survival, 
ignoring environment’s 
kinship within existence 

H1D1NG W1TH1N 0VR C4STL3S...

hiding within our castles 
of human egotism, 
manifesting destinies 

TR34T1NG 0VR 0NLY KN0WN H0M3...

treating our only known home 
as a recreational 
vehicle hurtling through space 

34RTH'S 4B1L1TY T0 H34L...

earth’s ability to heal 
us easy to overlook 
when we think we control things 

M1CR0PL4ST1C R3L1CS 0F...

microplastic relics of 
historic atrocities 
buried in our sediments 

0VR CVLTVR3 1S 4 L4CK 0F...

our culture is a lack of 
culture… identities bought 
and sold with a heartless ease 

SONG OF THE DAY: Computer Love (kudzu'd)

I probably should've posted yesterday's post with today's song, but today's song wasn't the next one to post yesterday. So I didn't. Most everything I do is the intersection of multiple constant practices, and it leads to intersections, which occasionally end up one block over from what would've been perfect to see. But that wasn't my path to take, so its perfection was just an after-the-fact footnote. And ultimately, nobody reads the footnotes, except those who are forced to by academic delusions.

THR34TS 0F C0NST4NT SVRV31LL4NC3...

threats of constant surveillance 
are superficial worries; 
internal jihad remains