SONG OF THE DAY: Greenville Trestle High

The lonesome whistles are fewer and farther between, and trains of thought are easily derailed by the fog of distractions blowing from the unseen smokestacks surrounding us. Many places, they’re ripping out the train tracks and putting pea gravel down, hoping to convince the leisure class to go on long bike rides and spend bits of their wealth while on tourist excursion. And other places they’re quietly building cavernous warehouse data centers, consuming energy at alarming rates, just to spin faster through artificial permutations to answer idle questions or execute passive ideas that wouldn’t have ever survived physical effort. We are somehow building a more difficult world for regular folks under the guise of progressing towards some sort of perverted notion of what technology is supposed to do. And I try to sit outside at night, and soak up the stars in the sky for calming effect, but I get distracted myself. I try to wait it out and hear at least one or two of those lonesome whistles, either the north/south intermodals running to the west of me at Rockfish, or the east/west coal trains running to the south in Howardsville. When I hear one, sitting out there, trying to do more nothing, my heart flutters for a split second.

SONG OF THE DAY: Speedoo

Don't worry, just because sometimes I be listening to shit like this, I ain't gonna start wearing a pork pie hat or bowtie or twisting the ends of mustache up with beeswax or nothing.

SONG OF THE DAY: When I Hear Music

One of the main reasons I don’t get all caught up on “Oh, gotta listen to this new music right away!” is there’s always a false sense of immediacy attached to capitalism, that we all gives ourselves because we act like we’re supposed to be curators of culture when actually we’re mostly just getting tricked into consuming a bunch of shit. There is no must-watch TV or must-see movies or brand new albums we have to hear, and if any of that shit is actually as good as it’s being hyped, it’ll still be around when we get around to it.
I say all this because I had no idea this song existed six months ago. I never even heard of Debbie Deb that I can remember. And if I had heard of it back in 1983 when it came out, I was a little aspiring delinquent metalhead, so I probably would’ve been too cool to give a fuck. But this song did come across my experiential radar this year, and it immediately became a favorite. The 45 also went to the top of the list to acquire, because I could tell that beat slowed down was gonna bump like crazy. And it does. I can’t imagine not spinning this record already whenever I have a slowed down 45 gig. That doesn’t happen often because most people don’t want things they don’t recognize. They want nostalgia or basic, and usually a combination of those two. Shit, even when I was at the stupid local community radio station, when I was getting run off for daring to think I could play records in the daytime, the rock programming manager lady was like “We just prefer to keep weird stuff late at night.” To a basic ass fucker, a slowed down beat is weird, especially if they don’t already recognize the song.
We live in such basic times. We need more Debbie Debs.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Like It

I think I am slowly working my way back to no social media. I miss the old internet, which was far more creative, kooky, and actually informative. I was reading about “cyberbalkanization” the other night, or how the internet has contributed to the fracturing of people into sub-groups, thus adding to the divisiveness of the physical world. And to be honest, the internet was plugging along just fine without that problem. I’m sure it existed, but it seemed like you were more likely to find weirdos you got along with more easily than things to be mad about. The algorithm-driven social media we’ve come to depend on has definitely mauled those divisions into different channels, and even Google search results have gotten so trash in recent months. I’m not sure if it’s an overload of bad information, algorithms pulling too heavily from certain sources, or a combination of it all. And weirdly, this stupid little blog has plugged along for well over a decade (maybe longer, I couldn’t figure out how to see the first post). We feel like we have to re-brand ourselves so often too, where if we have a new idea or new phase, we kill off all the old versions and create new ones, abandoning the layer of cringe that built a sediment of our digital existence (and an important one since every layer is built upon the previous ones). It all feels so fucked. But I still post various projects and posts here because it’s kinda like throwing a rock into a creek… it still makes ripples, even if mostly nobody sees that ripple. I guess the real difference is I don’t encounter many frogs by maintaining this page, which is a shame.

SONG OF THE DAY: I'll Never Grow Old

Another Wu sample, and though this is the original song, I did recently get a bootleg 45 with this on one side and “C.R.E.A.M.” on the other side. It’s easy to be a digital bootlegger but it takes dedication to the underlying philosophical foundations to transition into physical media world with bootleg 45s. I appreciate people who do that, to be honest. A lot of shit is unnecessarily expensive or impossible to find, and bootleggers fill an important purpose. And the idea that bootleg shit is lesser quality frankly overestimates the morality of the legal manufacturers, who often times are not moral at all, and cut any and all corners possible to increase their own profits. Anyways, this is a great song, and this has been a Saturday blurb on a minor old style “blog” website that very few people ever see because the means for communicating digital information has left this lane by. But I gladly occupy the front porch of my little back road blog still. They called it the “information superhighway” at one point, then built social media interstates around those old superhighways, so I’m a back road of a forgotten road now. That’s okay. Fuck false progress.

SONG OF THE DAY: Space

Bums me out that futuristic visions always have to be highly technological and flying through space and shit. Southern gothicc futurism is firmly based on the historical precedence of tri-racial isolationism, hopefully somewhere where there’s mountains and sea, definitely rivers, and that can be anywhere in space. But it also has to be somewhere, like early American swampland, seen as not having value, so all the assholes go away. Although I guess they never go all the way away.

SONG OF THE DAY: Graveyard Train

Grew up on Creedence, so much so used to stare at the album cover for Willy & The Poor Boys and I actually thought it was the little ass abandoned train town our post office was in. For reference, this was before school, so I mostly just hung out at home or at my grandmother’s trailer, no social activities, so riding from our house by a dairy farm to the post office in Rice, Virginia, where they had like six brick buildings all in a row together, that was big time. A few years back, when I was still married, me and the family were riding back where I had grown up, and I took them down the road that old house had been on, which dead ended into a lake now because they created a reservoir where a dump used to be. The house was gone, but the house next door was still there, and some old lady was sitting on the porch. I got out and asked her about the house that used to be next door, assuming she was an old lady so might’ve lived there a couple years, I don’t know. She didn’t live there when I was a kid. “What house?” she yelled, rather crazily. “In the field, there used to be a house, I lived there when I was little.” “Ain’t no house there now!” she yelled. “Yeah, I see. When was it torn down?” “Ain’t no house over there.” I gave up at that point. You can’t return to the past.

TH3 STRVCTVR3 0VR M0D3RN L1V3S...

the structure our modern lives 
have been given was all built 
in the past two centuries 

SONG OF THE DAY: Red Garter Strut

Honestly at this point we should replace the internet with fishnets. 

SONG OF THE DAY: Chippy, Chippy

Spent another hour today fighting the push mower, as I made it do things the modern American push mower is not designed to do without falling apart, because they're mostly for looks, not function. Got me to thinking about progress, as Frank Sobotka's voice echoes in my mind, talking his shit about how we used to make things. Progress in America with regards to the fucking lawn is you used to be able to pay a neighbor kid $20 to cut your grass. Now you gotta pay some Polo shirt landscape company dude $120, so that he can maintain payments on his zero-interest if paid off in six months credit on latest piece of power equipment, and he pays some Honduran dude $20 to cut it for you. It also subsidizes two or three weeklong vacations in Rodanthe, as seen by the prominent Salt Life sticker in his work truck's back window. Both political parties support this alleged progress - only difference is one party's landscape company owner/manager is more likely to use an electric weed eater.
I hate the fetishization of riding mowers, as seen by those stupid fucking "middle class fancy" shirts, which is way too bougie for my tastes. Riding mowers are too goddamned expensive, which is why I keep pushing this push mower. And even buying them used, you have to get a good brand you know will last, and you can't tell if the good brands are actually good any more, because all of them have a cut-rate version they sell at the big box hardware stores, so your John Deere may not be a legit John Deere because it came from Lowe's and is about to fall to shit anyways, so you'd be wasting $300 on a used one. Just get another fucking push mower.
I've done a lot of class transition in my adult life... I mean, not really a lot, but I'm not as fucked as I was growing up. You know what middle class fancy is to me? My cats eat wet food. And not pate, because they hate it, but that shredded shit, in the can. Their favorite is turkey and cheese, but you can never find it because the logistics of having cat food at the grocery store has gotten complicated as fuck. There's always nine rows with like two in stock if you're lucky. Whenever the turkey and cheese shreds are there though, I load the fuck up, thinking I'll go ahead and do the 10 for $8 (which used to be 10 for $6.50 like last year, what the fuck), but then go ahead and get two more, because stupid math rules everything about my life, and the wire shelf I stack the cat food on is underneath a cabinet, and I can stack cans of wet food three high, but the stacks have to be same flavor. That's the rules (in my mind). Been noticing the upward trend of prices too, through the advanced sale mode. Wet cat food was 10 for $6.50, then they bumped it to 10 for $7, but kept it "on sale" at $6.50, to cushion you for the actual price raise. Then it was on sale for 10 for $7, but actual price got bumped to $8. Now it's just that price, not on sale, which I guess means in a couple weeks, it'll be on sale for this same price, but the "regular" price will be 10 for $9. Squeezing us blind, little by little, in the tiniest of increments, like the walls closing in an eighth of an inch a day, until one day we realize we're fucking crushed.
Anyways, fuck the United States of America. Even though it's gonna be a horribly painful shit show when it finally falls apart, I sometimes we think we need to go ahead and rip the scab off, and get it over with. We won't though, because we're all afraid of how much it's gonna bleed.

W3 M1LL3D TH3 0LD GR0WTH F0R3STS...

we milled the old growth forests 
into forgotten structures 
not glossy enough for us 

SONG OF THE DAY: Tanokumbia

Cumbia music combined with electronic music combined with abandoning western (aka european settler) time norms is the most perfect music. It should be taught to school children, in the woods.

M0R4L1TY FLVCTV4T3S...

morality fluctuates 
over course of history… 
sacred texts re-examined 

SONG OF THE DAY: Joy And Pain

I was thinking today how weird it would be if the internet just went out, like it completely stopped working, and as they frantically tried to put it back in place, it was all janky, so you’d have five minutes where it worked but your email would just download all these fuckin’ useless BIG 50% OFF SALE TODAY ONLY at some website you bought a single item at seven years ago, so you didn’t even get any real emails you needed to see in that tiny window of function. Eventually, we’d have a lot better mind frame, less poisoned by a thousand trending demons all at once, but man, that collective detox period would be FUCKED UP. Anyways, I hope it happens before I die.

PVTT1NG CL41MS 0N 4 FVTVR3...

putting claims on a future 
which isn’t our’s to be part 
of - we never seem to learn 

N3GL3CT3D F33LS F4M1L14R...

neglected feels familiar - 
overlooked by progress’s 
eyes for turning a prophet 

Y3ST3RD4Y'S PR0GR3SS W4S T0R3...

yesterday’s progress was tore 
down - demolished to make room 
for more of the same, but new 

TH3Y ST1LL BV1LD PR0GR3SS, BVT 1T...

they still build progress, but it 
ain’t for all of us - just the 
high-born who can afford it 

Y3ST3RD4Y'S PR0GR3SS T0RN D0WN...

yesterday's progress torn down 
so that a new impotent 
progress can be erected 

PR0P3RTY CL41MS P41NT3D 0N...

 

property claims painted on 
pine trees, middle of nowhere - 
perverse progress, even here