PR4CT1C1NG BLV3GR4SS F1NG3R...

practicing bluegrass finger 
rolls while singing thirty three 
alhamdulillahs, with twang 

TH4NKFVL T0 TH3 CR34T0R...

thankful to the creator 

for any and all magic 

I'm able to conjure up 

SONG OF THE DAY: Cry My Tears Away (kudzu'd)

I’ve been trying to shimmy dance on the kitchen linoleum a lot more lately, even if it’s a slow slide shuffle at night. Always been self conscious about dancing in front of other folks, because I got way too high one time at a young age and overthought about the ridiculousness of shaking your body around in a rhythm. But anything is weird as fuck if you overthink it. If I get to clapping and sliding, the dog seems to like it, but I think she thinks it means we’re about to go for a walk. Sometimes, I try to pick up a cat and dance with them, but generally my cats ain’t about that shit. One of ‘em will tolerate it sometimes, but mostly they just wanna get let back down and watch me anxiously from underneath the kitchen rolling island thing. Makes me sad none of these animals wanna dance. What kinda miserable compound have I built here? Anyways, if you know of good dancing animals, put 'em in the comments. I might get one or two.

K33P F4T R0LLS 0F P0STC4RD ST4MPS...

keep fat rolls of postcard stamps 
in possession at all times, 
and ain't afraid to use 'em 

SONG OF THE DAY: Mainstreet (kudzu'd)

My dad had a crazy uncle or two, as all quartz rock solid rural archetypes do, and they used to congregate on a fringe corner towards the south end of Main Street, near what used to be a pool hall, which became a video store when I was a kid, and had arcade games too, in the back, until Nintendos came out. Then they started renting video games and the back room became the adult rentals. 
I had my own crazy uncles, as all quartz rock solid rural archetypes do, and when they were coming up, they’d built a bypass around downtown, a new four-lane with two smooth asphalt lanes going both ways, and folks had measured a near perfect quarter mile from just underneath the bridge that Nat Turner Road passed over, to the end of the guardrail headed west. It was just right for illegal drag racing, back then, but they built a Wal-Mart and a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Food Lion and a Valero and a Comfort Inn and then that doubled and tripled, and downtown became obsolete and the four-lane got slow and had some stoplights thrown up. One uncle died early, as half of all quartz rock solid rural archetypes do, and the other one was briefly lacking a home base, so he’d be hanging around some of those stop light intersections.
Them stores been in decline, too. We’ve got a Big Lots where the department store was, and I think there’s a church that meets where that other grocery store used to be. The Wal-Mart is still there but it’s a sad and doomed place to be. Downtown is mostly empty, but there’s a smattering of boutique businesses that make no sense to people who lived here for more than one generation, run by folks who came from elsewhere, where they couldn’t afford to have a boutique business. They mostly get mad at us, for not spending money we don’t have to sustain their fantasies. I’d support them if I could, but I don’t often need $12 knick-knacks or $23 suppers.
They hadn’t figured out how to build a bypass around the bypass, so we all just get stuck at stoplights with the same stores they have in every other shithole nowhere to everybody else but us. Some dude who said he’s always been from here, but I’ve never seen, who wears polo shirts with his grandpa’s last name on them, is fixing up the old tobacco warehouse downtown, and turning it into a microbrewery or some shit. He was on the news from the city an hour away, talking about how they wanted a road that went around the bypass and came right to the quaint end of downtown he was doing this at. I think his wife runs the $12 knick-knack shoppe (extra letters to show you how it’s laid out inside). They was trying to get a roundabout built there, and have a historic downtown shopping district.
That’s the other end of Main Street from where my crazy great uncles hung out, and the video store was. That building is still there, too, all fucked up and rotting back into the earth. But the building had good solid bones, from before any of our time. I dream about owning it, and having a flea market there, or something. But I can’t even pay the bills I got, and it’s getting cold, and that means heating bills about to be crazy, so we gotta limp along until we hopefully see the redbuds again. And maybe something magical happens and it all gets better, and making a living don’t feel so goddamn much like somebody slowly choking you to death, with hands you can’t see, which is letting just enough oxygen in you can keep paying your bills, but not letting go enough you can do anything better with your life. But what are you gonna do? Not that much you can do, if there ain’t no oil paintings of your great grandparents nowhere. At least that’s what I tell my nephew.

K33P1NG L1F3 4FF0RD4BL3...

keeping life affordable 
by scribbling graffiti all 
over ambitious downtown 

TH3 SP0RT1NG G0DS K33P VS DRVNK...

the sporting gods keep us drunk 
on dogmatic statistics 
that add up to more nothing 

JVST 4N0TH3R CL0WN SHVFFL1NG...

just another clown shuffling 
around this mortal coil, as 
foolish foil for perfection 

4 SM4LL T0WN S4TVRD4Y N1GHT...

a small town Saturday night, 
buzzing with the chaotic 
energy of feel good types 

TH3 CH4R4CT3RS W3 P0RTR4Y...

the characters we portray 
to others never admit 
the masks which hide our true selves 

W1TH1N TH1S T0PSY TVRVY...

within this topsy turvy 
world, we must begin to make 
sense of where our true place is 

DVST1NG TH3 C0BW3BS 1N TH3...

dusting the cobwebs in the 
corners of my mind, five times 
a day... dhikr’s cleansing whoosh 

N4V1G4T1NG TH3 D4RKN3SS...

navigating the darkness 
of our own damned creation, 
but the light is always there 

TH3 1NV3NT10N 0F PSYCH1C...

the invention of psychic 
hamster wheels in digital 
realm ruined reality 

TH1S P13C3 0F TH1S VN1V3RS3...

the piece of this universe 
I stumble round might seem small, 
but it's my everything 

"L1F3 1S 4 C4RN1V4L" 41N'T...

"life is a carnival" ain't 
meant as justification 
for hustling other people 

34CH H0M3 B0X FVLL 0F B0D13S...

each home box full of bodies, 
each minding own universe 
of infinite potential 

1 F1ND CR4ZY S0 S3XY...

I find crazy so sexy 
because sanity seems 
an impossible red flag 

L1F3'S 3SS3NT14L F0VND4T10NS...

life's essential foundations 
concealed within even most 
clusterfucked environments 

HVM4NS S33M T0 C0MPL1C4T3 TH31R...

humans seem to complicate their 
simplicity with shame, fear, 
and unreal expectations 

TH3 TRVLY B34VT1FVL D0N'T...

the truly beautiful don't 
bother realizing it, as 
it's their innate existence 

L0V3 T0 ST1CK MY T0NGV3 PL4C3S...

love to stick my tongue places 
I probably shouldn't, but 
I can't seem to help myself 

N0 CR34T10N 1S GR34T3R...

no creation is greater 
than its creator; and with 
all things, alhamdulillah 

1 4M N0T 4 PR0DVCT 0F...

I am not a product of 
my environment, so much as 
compound accumulation 

SONG OF THE DAY: Smooth Operator (kudzu'd)

Ravishing Rick Rude often used “Smooth Operator” as his entrance music.
Briefly, Rick Rude had his sister, performing as Raven, be his valet. She (by her own admission) couldn’t handle the pro wrestling on the road lifestyle.
I am, in fact, named Raven, and have been since the day I was born.
Rick Rude is dead (may his memory be a blessing).
Thus, I am the Smooth Operator now.
I will be ironing silver letters onto a dark grey shirt which say so. Anybody who dares challenge the proclamation ironed onto my shirt will be in for a rude awakening.
(That was Rick Rude's finisher, which was a reverse neckbreaker style DDT of sorts.)
(My "rude awakening will instead be a fireball, like they used to use in wrestling way more than they do nowadays.)
(Please note, my "fireball" will be a Molotov cocktail, even though I don't drink.)

PR4Y1NG F0R B3TT3R FVTVR3...

praying for better future 
outcomes, while acknowledging 
some past failures were blessings 

T3LL1NG TH3 D3V1LS T0 G3T...

telling the devils to get 
the fuck outta here today, 
I got better things to do 

M1NDS C4N B3C0M3 P0CKM4RK3D BY...

minds can become pockmarked by 
negative experience, 
so it's best to let shit go 

SONG OF THE DAY: I Need Some Money (kudzu'd)

Everything feels a bit untenable currently, in terms of economics. But even beyond the fact the news doesn’t really seem to address this, neither does our popular culture. As a kid, there were multiple struggle ass shows my broke ass family loved and related to, even though Good Times and Sanford & Son were “black” shows. At one point when me and my dad lived in a trailer, there was a UHF station out of Richmond that showed syndicated reruns of Gomer Pyle and Sanford & Son back to back. That was like the most powerful and perfect hour of television ever devised for my pops, scratched both sides of his personality. We don’t seem to have shit like that now. I don’t hear music coming from the economic struggle or see TV shows or movies like that either. They definitely got them fog machines that Chief Bromden knew about in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest cranked the fuck up. And that’s something that concerns me… The nitwits currently in power have certainly become privy to whatever actual electronic and unacknowledged psyops programs there are out there at a democratic demigod’s disposal. And I know these fucks got no real sense of thinking things through. So you know they got ‘em turned all the way up to 11. That can’t be healthy for us, and probably means them machines will break down faster. But I guess that’s ultimately a good thing, when they do break, although will we all wake up when the fog machine dies? Or will we feel lost and disoriented once the fog is gone? And it might not be a constant fog anyways, so much as a deterioration of cognitive abilities, so the fog might be coming from inside the house by now.
All I know is I actually get paid more than ever in my life, and I’m still somehow feeling tight as fuck, and actually cutting a bunch of shit out of my life. How is that possible? It makes no sense. But all the media sources I see and hear, even pop culture music and movies and shit, is just cruising along like all is normal. Them commercialized emails definitely ain’t slowing down from the place I bought a pair of flannel pajamas from once like 5 years ago. In fact, as I struggled with how much it was costing to fill my hybrid sedan gas tank yesterday, with the gas credit card getting close to maxed out, I had the commercial coming out the gas pump, which I instinctively muted, only to realize another commercials was beaming over a radio even higher in the air. Plus the normal billboards and store signs both permanent and temporary, and man, we sure built a fuckin’ clusterfuck of commercialization to navigate. Imagine if all that was gone, how serene the scenery would be, even like pumping gas across the four-lane from a strip mall. I don’t know what America was supposed to do in terms of human civilization, but it sure feels like we fucked up our chance pretty badly. Like, you can’t even reform this shit at this point.

B4RR1C4D1NG S3LF W1TH1N...

barricading self within 
our owned madnesses, hoarding 
curvatures of brief escape 

SONG OF THE DAY: I'm Coming Out (kudzu'd)

You ever see that picture of the two cholo dudes cuddled in the bathtub, looking street hard but gay? I know the guy that took that picture. This song, slowed down, was what they were bumping.

G1V3N 4N 1NDVSTR14L...

given an industrial 
purpose to "make a living", 
but it all feels alien 

SONG OF THE DAY: Something (kudzu'd)

Practicing junkyard mind frame kung fu against the rising tide of societal failures, which are nipping at the edge of most all our rugged individual sand castles right now. I slap away each momentary emergency of an economic nature, and attempt to catch my breath between waves. Every now and then, I notice someone who had been standing around me for a long time is gone. Sometimes, I am even able to see them washing out to sea, and I skip a few of my cowry shells out towards them, hoping it helps prevent the drowning. Our human lungs were not meant to tolerate these types of conditions, but somehow the people standing on the third story deck of the palatial houses beyond the sand dunes yell down to us all that it’s never been better, and we should be happy. We’d love to go argue with them about it, debate them on the merits of their comfortable proclamations, but we’re too busy fighting for our lives, metaphorically until it becomes literal due to one slip on a seismic wave from an unguarded direction. God dam this bullshit. O' giant force of creative energy which swirled this Universe and whatever's might be beyond, please do something.

C0P13S 0F 4 C0PY 0F...

copies of a copy of 
copy of original, 
which we forget how to see 

3MPTY 4BVND4NC3 T34S3S...

empty abundance teases 
our heart with false happiness; 
la ilaha illallah 

N3V3R L0S3 S1GHT TH4T TH1S W0RLD...

never lose sight that this world 
hides hopeful redirections 
along even most doomed paths 

D1G1T4L VT0P14S...

digital utopias 
miss real life's strange nuances, 
where good's bad, and vice versa