Sometimes I wish I could move to El Paso, and grow a short and long haircut and wear silk shirts, and maybe live in that little sliver of a neighborhood that is somehow squeezed south of the rail yard but north of the Rio Grande, by the water treatment plant. I walk around there a lot in my dreams, I guess maybe I got a spot in alternate realm I live at on Charles Road there. There’s a garage backed up to the alley but all I’ve ever seen in there is giant speakers and some turntables, and there’s like 4 or 5 wooden picnic tables in varying states of weathered disrepair, with all sorts of names carved into them. And in the dream strolls, I feel like this spot is mine, whether I’m renting or just long term crashing out with somebody, and the garage with speakers and music feels familiar, but I’m never in there playing records. Usually just walking around the neighborhood, by the train tracks, looking through the fence, then I cut through the alley to walk through the simple chain link gate to the yard of the place that’s familiar, and I sit at the picnic tables, listening out for train sounds, while cumbia music plays slowly. I can never tell if it’s coming from the garage or just generally blowing out over the whole neighborhood, and I always wanna go mark trains, but it’s a big ass BNSF yard, and it looks like I could sneak in one end. But in my conscious life, I don’t know the vibes of BNSF yards, so I just wander my way back to the place I seemingly stay at, and sit at the picnic table, and start carving a “dirtgod” into it. In my dreams. So I guess it would be nice if I could actually move there, and grow my hair out again, and wear silk shirts, and do that. One can never tell if the dream alternates of themselves are from the future, the past, or just a parallel twin that broke psychic containment. Maybe I’ll get dream El Paso Raven, and here Blue Ridge Raven (which is not the “here” to all the other Ravens) to start putting up flyers for a big Reunion of Ravens, across the times. I hope they let me DJ. Although that’s pretty self-centered, because how do I know I’m even the best Raven for the task?
Friday, May 15
Thursday, May 14
SONG OF THE DAY: I'll Keep Searching (kudzu'd)
I had planned on writing something intelligent here when I woke up this morning, but then I fissured my brain with work (the things I do to make a paycheck to allegedly “make a living”). And in the gaps in those responsibilities, I further fissured my brain by looking inside the internet, seemingly for things but more truthfully at things, most of which I didn’t need to see. In fact, that’s likely why you are here now. We (people) really fucked up somewhere along the way. Not really feeling this big rah rah America 250 bullshit, because it feels way more like we fucked up than we got it all right.
Wednesday, May 13
SONG OF THE DAY: I Only Have Eyes For You (kudzu'd)
Blind spots in the surveillance state should not be shared with everybody. Toys will burn your best liminal semi-autonomous zones by telling the wrong people about it, or using the wrong robot technology to talk about it. You should be in the practice of visiting at least 3 places a week where everybody knows that not only is it expected you won’t have a smart phone on you, but you should’ve cut it off at least 2 (urban) to 10 (rural) miles away beforehand. The surveillance state will never figure out how to capture data of the entire Earth, and it will struggle to keep up with sorting through the data it can capture, even with the flawed aid of artificial intelligence. Exploit the margins, As it’s always been, when you find a crack in the systems built around us all, rather than point it out, you should stick something hard into it and start wiggling it to make the crack bigger and bigger. “But what if the system is good?” Lmao, don’t be a mark.
Wednesday, May 6
SONG OF THE DAY: Le Spank (kudzu'd)
I could never roller skate regular style but I could do tricks. My favorite trick was jumping over barrels, except instead of roller skates I used a dirt bike, and we did it in the yard instead of a roller rink. But we built a tall enough stack of cinderblocks and triple layer plywood scraps that we could launch over three rusty barrels. Using back roads mathematics while drunk at age 14, we realized that we could set the middle barrel upright and use it for its rightful purpose of burning household garbage, and still likely jump that. My partner in stupidity was 9 months younger than me, so as the eldest, I had right of going first or refusal to pass along, but we all know that refusal to do such a thing was a huge red flag of deep character flaws, so of course I went first. It didn’t go well. I hit the ramp awkward, might’ve been a bit nervous, and I remember thinking, “Why didn’t we do a test run without the barrel fire going?” and that was my last conscious thought as I wobbled off the ramp and fell directly into the barrel fire. Turned out the barrel fire was actually a portal into America, which is how I ended up here. All that we know is actually the ass end of a portal opening where they burn the trash of a better place. I miss it there, but I don’t know how to get out of this shitty portal.
Tuesday, May 5
Monday, May 4
SONG OF THE DAY: Ice Cold (kudzu'd)
I love little microslices of Americana to show how doomed and cursed we’ve always been, instead of it just being a recent trend. For example, one of the great minor league logos after the rebranding era of the 1990s was the Carolina Mudcats, from Zebulon outside of Raleigh. The logo had a big red C, with a big ol’ fat almost smiling catfish peeking through the hole in the C. It was glorious. Well, that team had been in the Southern League from its move to Zebulon in 1991, until 2011, when it got demoted (so to speak) from Double-A baseball to Single-A in the Carolina League. Earlier this decade, the team said it needed to update the Five County Stadium it played in, which had been specifically built in the early 1990s to get the team to move there from Columbus, Georgia. Minor league teams regularly do a smaller version of major league clubs holding localities hostage, sort of like the monorail episode of the Simpsons, selling them on paying for a baseball stadium that the team struggles mightily to get people to come out for. Well, when Wake County resisted pressure to throw more money at a stadium renovation, nearby the town of Wilson pushed to snatch them away, with a $280 million development built around a $70 million baseball-specific stadium. And as Wilson explored this, the plan had been to market it after the Whirligig Park of Vollis Simpson’s art that has made Wilson a tourist destination. The club was gonna be called the Wilson Whirligigs. Somewhere along the way though, some dork ass branding expert was consulted, and he convinced the team that “whirligigs” made no sense, so the name got switched to Warbirds, due to World War II pilots being trained at a nearby air force base. So the Carolina Mudcats were sacrificed, and we got a tease of having the Wilson Whirligigs, as a small sugar coating to another municipality being fleeced by a minor league baseball team for a for-profit stadium to operate out of, and instead all we got was some corny patriotic bullshit Wilson Warbirds.
But get this, the little slice of Americana’s weirdness goes further than that. Just before the Mudcats moved to Carolina, they played two seasons as the Mudcats in Columbus, Georgia, which is right on the Alabama state line, as one of the earliest minor league clubs to rebrand themselves from the previous era’s names which just adopted that of their major league associate. Before that, the Columbus team had been the Astros from 1970 through 1988, and the Columbus White Sox in 1969. But get this – in 1967 and 1968, the Southern League had dropped from 8 to 6 teams, and Columbus was a return in 1969, because they’d previously been in the Southern League from 1964 through 1966, as a farm club for the Yankees. But since they were in Georgia, they were called the Columbus Confederate Yankees. Officially, the team name was always the Columbus Yankees, but because they feared rural Georgia/Alabama would be haters on such a team name for a local club, they chose to sew Confederate flag patches on the arms of the jerseys. The logo on the hat was the Y like a New York Yankees hate, but with a C for Columbus. The NY on Yankees hats is not for Yankees, but New York, and somewhere along the way, a sportswriter or somebody wrote that the CY was Confederate Yankees. Previous to having the club in Columbus, the Yankees same level farm club had been in Augusta, Georgia, known as the Augusta Yankees, and had the lowest attendance in the Southern League, and that lack of care about going to the games caused the Yankees to cancel the affiliation with Augusta. And in order to not replicate the same level of Southern indifference, around the time of the centennial of the Civil War, and coinciding with the Civil Rights movement happening to a major level in nearby cities like Atlanta and Birmingham, they chose to throw the Confederate flag patch on the jerseys. Attendance was much better than in Augusta. (Perhaps the only name as ironic as "Confederate Yankees" was the Negro League team from Atlanta called the Black Crackers.)
Thus, we get a little slice of long sordid history of America, through the marketing of minor league baseball, from the Columbus “Confederate” Yankees, to the Carolina Mudcats, to the godawful Wilson Warbirds. We can’t have nothin’ nice, and also never have apparently. And you can’t get peanuts, and a box of Cracker Jacks is $4 (last time I checked). Probably $5 this year, because my most local to me minor league team rebranded as some sort of collective of monsters from the graveyard.
But get this, the little slice of Americana’s weirdness goes further than that. Just before the Mudcats moved to Carolina, they played two seasons as the Mudcats in Columbus, Georgia, which is right on the Alabama state line, as one of the earliest minor league clubs to rebrand themselves from the previous era’s names which just adopted that of their major league associate. Before that, the Columbus team had been the Astros from 1970 through 1988, and the Columbus White Sox in 1969. But get this – in 1967 and 1968, the Southern League had dropped from 8 to 6 teams, and Columbus was a return in 1969, because they’d previously been in the Southern League from 1964 through 1966, as a farm club for the Yankees. But since they were in Georgia, they were called the Columbus Confederate Yankees. Officially, the team name was always the Columbus Yankees, but because they feared rural Georgia/Alabama would be haters on such a team name for a local club, they chose to sew Confederate flag patches on the arms of the jerseys. The logo on the hat was the Y like a New York Yankees hate, but with a C for Columbus. The NY on Yankees hats is not for Yankees, but New York, and somewhere along the way, a sportswriter or somebody wrote that the CY was Confederate Yankees. Previous to having the club in Columbus, the Yankees same level farm club had been in Augusta, Georgia, known as the Augusta Yankees, and had the lowest attendance in the Southern League, and that lack of care about going to the games caused the Yankees to cancel the affiliation with Augusta. And in order to not replicate the same level of Southern indifference, around the time of the centennial of the Civil War, and coinciding with the Civil Rights movement happening to a major level in nearby cities like Atlanta and Birmingham, they chose to throw the Confederate flag patch on the jerseys. Attendance was much better than in Augusta. (Perhaps the only name as ironic as "Confederate Yankees" was the Negro League team from Atlanta called the Black Crackers.)
Thus, we get a little slice of long sordid history of America, through the marketing of minor league baseball, from the Columbus “Confederate” Yankees, to the Carolina Mudcats, to the godawful Wilson Warbirds. We can’t have nothin’ nice, and also never have apparently. And you can’t get peanuts, and a box of Cracker Jacks is $4 (last time I checked). Probably $5 this year, because my most local to me minor league team rebranded as some sort of collective of monsters from the graveyard.
Friday, May 1
SONG OF THE DAY: Mr. Telephone Man (kudzu'd)
I have a land line phone again, except it's not to this land. I've built this thing I call a Tesla coil of lounge in the backyard, which is an empty metal spool from them running broadband fiber, and I've laid it sideways, hung a bunch of pentatonic wind chimes on it, and dead center in the middle, as I've done a number of places around the house, I set up a big ass railroad spring I found (like 15 inches tall) and stuck a hefty quartz rock on top. This particular quartz was retrieved by my ol' lady from my ancestral lands up in Wards Gap when we were down there one time, going down the dirt road my kin would've lived on, except I had to stop because my Corolla was not gonna handle that incline safely, on a dirt road, and we were at a small enough pull-off to turn around, or likely be committed to going to wherever that road took us, against our will (point of no return). But she made me stop as I was 7-point turning it, and she hefted a big ol' chunk of quartz into the trunk. So even though I have a number of railroad springs with a quartz rock on top of it, this one is especially strong, and it's positioned in the middle of this metal spool contraption with pentatonic clangs going all the time. Plus, I've put painted bottles and animal bones and turtle shells and railroad spikes and other magical ephemera on top of it. Plus there's more quartz rocks being dumped from time to time in the middle, and we planted tulips and daffodils around it, and a giant forsythia already touches it nicely on the clothesline side of things.
Well, there was some old satellite cable or something that runs beneath the ground right there that got uncovered. I cut it near the Tesla coil of lounge, and spliced it over to the center part of this growing contraption. Then I ran the other end from where it was going to the house, traced it to the inside, and hooked up a phone jack there, just connecting wires all willy nilly, because conceivably they connect to nothing manmade. But I got an old phone (of course) that I went ahead and plugged in, you know, just because. If you're gonna build an elaborate nonsense, you gotta sell the angle all the goddamn way.
Here's the thing though... the fuckin' phone actually rings from time to time. Despite the shocking nature of this, I of course answered, because it also makes perfect sense. I went, "Hello?" the first time, and all there was on the other end was a humming sound, I guess organic (natural) but also with a weird harmonics to it. Over time, I've kinda deduced that maybe this is ancestral spirits calling in on me, or it might just be the general magical energy of the Earth. And honestly, from the moment we moved into this house, with the weird shit that's going on in the woods down behind us, the kids automatically said it was like we had moved into a Miyazaki movie, so it could just be generalized Earth spirits of ignored eras and planes.
I've come to understand the tone of the hums better. Certain harmonic hums mean I'm mostly doing okay, so I can ask for blessings to paths and projects I'm already on. But other harmonic tones I can tell have concern to them, and this means my paths and projects might need adjustment. So I ask the questions that come to mind to try and figure out what the Universe is trying to tell me. This isn't always easy, communicating in my version of English language, to spirits that may or may not even have ever used this particular tongue. One time, notably, the phone rang a couple times a day for four or five days in a row, with a concerned hum, and I kept asking questions to try and figure out what I needed to adjust. I started with bigger things, and it never stopped the calls, and I kept spiraling the questions I asked to the hum, until I ran out of major things and dialed it back down to less cataclysmic concerns, and seemingly it turned out, I just needed to stop wearing blue so little. Like, I used to rarely wear blue clothes, because I just didn't rock with that color. But in all my wondering what I might be doing wrong, we somehow got around to asking about wearing blue, and the hum softened, after a few days of these calls. So I started wearing blue. And to be honest, it's been pretty great. That color unlocks a whole different vibe in a lot of spaces, which I had been closing myself off to, unnecessarily.
Don't take that as me suggesting you should wear more blue. We all have different congresses of spirits speaking a chorus of guidance to us. I don't really know how to tell you to try and build a phone like this. Mine happened accidentally, but also looking back, was just as intentional with purpose even if I didn't know the purpose. So I guess just attune yourself to building energetic contraptions in your life that are intentionally purposeful by accident. And then listen for the calls. And if you get them, you gotta answer. A whole lot of people get these calls, all the fuckin' time, but never bother answering. Why would you diss your chorus of unexplained spirits like that? That's crazy.
Well, there was some old satellite cable or something that runs beneath the ground right there that got uncovered. I cut it near the Tesla coil of lounge, and spliced it over to the center part of this growing contraption. Then I ran the other end from where it was going to the house, traced it to the inside, and hooked up a phone jack there, just connecting wires all willy nilly, because conceivably they connect to nothing manmade. But I got an old phone (of course) that I went ahead and plugged in, you know, just because. If you're gonna build an elaborate nonsense, you gotta sell the angle all the goddamn way.
Here's the thing though... the fuckin' phone actually rings from time to time. Despite the shocking nature of this, I of course answered, because it also makes perfect sense. I went, "Hello?" the first time, and all there was on the other end was a humming sound, I guess organic (natural) but also with a weird harmonics to it. Over time, I've kinda deduced that maybe this is ancestral spirits calling in on me, or it might just be the general magical energy of the Earth. And honestly, from the moment we moved into this house, with the weird shit that's going on in the woods down behind us, the kids automatically said it was like we had moved into a Miyazaki movie, so it could just be generalized Earth spirits of ignored eras and planes.
I've come to understand the tone of the hums better. Certain harmonic hums mean I'm mostly doing okay, so I can ask for blessings to paths and projects I'm already on. But other harmonic tones I can tell have concern to them, and this means my paths and projects might need adjustment. So I ask the questions that come to mind to try and figure out what the Universe is trying to tell me. This isn't always easy, communicating in my version of English language, to spirits that may or may not even have ever used this particular tongue. One time, notably, the phone rang a couple times a day for four or five days in a row, with a concerned hum, and I kept asking questions to try and figure out what I needed to adjust. I started with bigger things, and it never stopped the calls, and I kept spiraling the questions I asked to the hum, until I ran out of major things and dialed it back down to less cataclysmic concerns, and seemingly it turned out, I just needed to stop wearing blue so little. Like, I used to rarely wear blue clothes, because I just didn't rock with that color. But in all my wondering what I might be doing wrong, we somehow got around to asking about wearing blue, and the hum softened, after a few days of these calls. So I started wearing blue. And to be honest, it's been pretty great. That color unlocks a whole different vibe in a lot of spaces, which I had been closing myself off to, unnecessarily.
Don't take that as me suggesting you should wear more blue. We all have different congresses of spirits speaking a chorus of guidance to us. I don't really know how to tell you to try and build a phone like this. Mine happened accidentally, but also looking back, was just as intentional with purpose even if I didn't know the purpose. So I guess just attune yourself to building energetic contraptions in your life that are intentionally purposeful by accident. And then listen for the calls. And if you get them, you gotta answer. A whole lot of people get these calls, all the fuckin' time, but never bother answering. Why would you diss your chorus of unexplained spirits like that? That's crazy.
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