(7s) Goals For 2010 #7 - "Monetize" This Here Rojonekku

People still claim to make money off the internet, or try, but I don't believe any of them. It's a sham, like those paper towels that you can pour water in allegedly. But this blog plugs along, not very worthwhile content most of the time, boring ass shit a lot of times, but I keep putting boring non-worthwhile stuff up for you to waste your time with. I never ask for anything really, other than maybe you comment so I know your feelings or that you're even there. I did put that ENABLE ROJONEKKU button on the side for paypal donations a while back, and nobody but one dude's ever used it, which is fine. I'd be writing retard shit whether you read it or not, but something about the cyberworld makes people think they deserve something for nothing. I am no different. So my goal for this blog this year is to "monetize" it, as pseudo-wealth experts would call it. All this means is if you read something, and you enjoy the fuck out of it, or think it's stupid in an entertaining way, or whatever, break me off a paypal. Anything, 47 cents or two dollars or $37.50 or a quarter or whatever. I have established inside my brain a personal goal for the end of the year, and at some point will be putting a link to this post along with a nice little thermometer style "until our goal" graphic like every community library and volunteer firefighter organization since the dawn of nonprofit time has used in small towns across America. And I can also tell you that for every $10 donation, I'll wax retardedly about your special requests, but only for a few hundred words. But if you want to get buck wild, drop $100 in my paypal and you can make me do some stupid project on the blog, the amount of stupid I'm willing to undertake depending on the amount of dollars you donate to my always hungry paypal account.

(7s) Goals For 2010 #6 - Finish Rojonekku Back Roads Ninja Training Manual

I’ve been letting this “book” percolate for a few years now, giving it varying amounts of attention. Now that I have a job that allows me time to think and note down what I’ve thunken, perhaps I shall start finally organizing the assorted parts into the order that I’ve created in a separate notebook flow chart. The problem I have with writing long form things is my mind is so mathematically stifled, like I build all these frameworks inside, 36 parts, with 3 themes that cover 12 parts each, plus 4 other developments that go in 9 parts each, and they intertwine, and then there’s 6 types of parts, each used 6 times each. It’s ridiculous actually, but I can’t not do it, no matter how hard I try. So as I put something together over the long term like I have with this Rojonekku training manual, it becomes not only the separate word files on the computer, but stacks of index cards wrapped up in hair tyes, and a couple dollar store composition books with sketches and layouts of the actual physical space that is supposed to be occupied. I have made it a point to never go to any type of psychologist or psychiatrist (outside of off-the-grid new age types who make you put your hands in a bowl of sand and close your eyes and draw pictures of yourself with your finger) because if they started hearing how my brain bounces all over but is held together by cobbled together half-assed parameters and an over-intake of fringe pop culture nonsense, I’d be medicated as fuck by now.

(7s) Goals For 2010 #5 - Upwardly Mobilize My Grandchildren

I know nothing but being an ugly broke ass. I was raised that way, and can escape it no better than Pigpen can escape his dust clouds on Charlie Brown. But my children have a better outlook on life. My kids are told they will definitely go to college. My daughters take ballet a few hours a week. They have knowledge of a larger world already. So my goal is to make it so my grandkids can improve upon that.
Let's face it, nobody gets rich, like for-real rich. You are born with it, or you are not. Sure, you can struggle and work hard and think up something stupid that everybody loves and make lots of money, but the truly wealthy are born truly wealthy. All the hard work in the world is not going to make me truly wealthy. But all the hard work in my lazy ass bones if motivated correctly (probably with a newspaper clipping on the mirror ala Rocky) can make me have more money, which can lay the groundwork for my children to maybe make the same parlay for an even better starting point for their kids. And then if everything breaks right, maybe one of those grandkids can hit the trifecta and actually break towards being truly wealthy.
But it's a Darwinistic process. I've got three kids, so you've gotta figure one of them will be the successful one, one will be the fuck-up, and the other will be the middle ground. The fuck-up's kids will probably be my most fun grandchildren, the ones that like to go fishing and won't tell grandma that grandpa was drinking a beer bottle on the ride home, but they won't be the ones to pull off the trifecta, mostly because whichever kid is the fuck-up will have fumbled the second step already. And the successful one's kids will all have a good chance to make the trifecta, but probably the successful one will have less kids because she's all busy successfullizing herself. But those kids, however few of them there are, have a shot. And the middle one, she'll probably have more kids than the successful one, as well as a good relationship with that sister, so her kids and the successful one's kids will probably roll tight. I think it's in that pack that the best hope for the trifecta towards becoming truly wealthy with my accursed last name lies.
You would think I could have more children to increase the odds, but in actuality, poor people have more children than wealthy people, so if I was to have another kid, I'd be screwing up all my children's chances for helping make this progress, and instead of one successful one, one fuck up, and one middle ground, adding a fourth would probably make two fuck ups, one middle ground, and one borderline successful/middle ground kid. Add another and it gets even worse. We have friends who have like 9 kids and I don't see how it can work. I also don't see how them old-timey families with 19 kids who all worked their way into outer space and invented Juicy Fruit bubblegum and shit like that could be true in today's world. Things got harder once there was television, and all the games and cable programs and DVD players and internet machines that this eventually entailed. We have doomed ourselves, with our own technologies, just like Socrates promised.

(7s) Goals For 2010 #4 - Chill At Cass State Park

It's a well known fact amongst professional loungers that state parks are twenty times more chill than national parks. The old people in RV quotient is non-existent, and even though sometimes campsites have gravel bottoms for your tent, there's far less patrolling by authoritative types, so sitting around drinking beer until 4 in the morning won't get you in trouble unless you start firing your guns. Aside from that comparison, when we break it down on a state vs. state deal, West Virginia is like the greatest most awesome parts of Virginia, jumbled into one place. If you could somehow make West Virginia connect to the Outer Banks, it'd be the Virginia my dad and grandpa used to say Virginia was before the bourgoisie took over the northern part and built their endless cul-de-sac labyrinth of sterility, and before the Navy and it's insidious sixteen tentacles of beastliness poisoned Tidewater to shit.
So yeah, state parks better than national parks and West Virginia better than Virginia. What this leads me up to is Cass State Park in West Virginia, which is a railroad park, where you can ride a fucking train up a hill and look around. But here's the awesome part, for the price of a nice hotel room, you can rent a fucking caboose, with beds and a woodstove, and they pull you up to the top of the mountain, unhitch you, and leave you until the next afternoon. I am of the belief system that who the fuck amongst us would not enjoy being pulled inside a caboose and then left to live in it at their leisure for a night on top of a mountain, underneath the stars, getting drunk with your loved ones and having sex on bunk beds with them, hoping the bears don't bust up your cooler full of sliced deli meat on the back perch. And really, a place where I can pay to sleep in a caboose that they pull up on top of a mountain and leave me, that's something I would dream could exist that usually doesn't because I only dream retarded shit nobody but me cares about. Actually, I don't dream. I'm lucky if I sleep six hours a night, for the past ten years straight.

(7s) Goals For 2010 #3 - Traditional Chicken Fighting

Animal fighting is a lost cause in 2010 because people are all about animal rights or animal feelings or whatever it is that makes them feel better about animals than they do about people. But having had chickens in a crew of 11, with two roosters, really, there's nothing more beautiful than them flexing their neck mullet feathers and flapping their wings at each other in a sign of BACK OFF like Yosemite Sam mudflaps. My ameracauanana rooster is not alpha enough to have put up a fight with the buff orpington one, so they've not gotten into actual scraps. But the way they flaunt themselves then fly to attack, spinning in mid-air, I can only imagine it's a beautiful thing to watch. The thing I don't understand is why did dudes start duct-taping switchblade-like gaffs to the legs of fighting chickens? I mean, I guess it's to make the fight quicker, but it seems to me that you could have a couple of alpha male game roosters flap and fly at each other, and after a few rounds, you'd have a good idea of who was winning. Fuck it, have judges. They don't have to stab each other up for our enjoyment, do they? Haven't we come beyond that? In fact, haven't we come beyond common knee-jerk reactions as well? Can't we just let chickens fight like they'd want to, as it naturally comes to them, and not make it a gory affair, nor make it seem like we molesting children in the process? Well, in 2010, I'm gonna turn my back pen into a rooster pen and get them to fighting the way nature intended for them to fight - slowly and over a long period of time until one of them eventually gives up and succumbs the alpha position with the available hens.
It is sad that you can't even joke about animal bullshit anymore. I had somebody get upset with me because I was raising pigs for meat. What the fuck else am I gonna do with them? By the time they're full size, they'll be eating like $10 of food a day. The government doesn't even give my family of five $10 a day in food stamps, and we're below the poverty line. Not for long though. Like my proud buff orpington Dixie, I'm shaking my neck feathers and flapping my way back up the socioeconomic ladder. Hopefully, I will make enough money that I can send back to Nigeria for a second Ibo wife. But that is a goal for the 2011, not 2010. Much naira to be made in America, is there no?

(7s) Goals For 2010 #2 - Finish Beerbox Haiku Project

The beerbox haiku project was actually what started this blog, and though I did finish writing 1000 haiku, the first step of the project, and sifted out the best ones to put on reshaped cardboard beer boxes, and picked out the matching pilfered over the decades magazine pictures all the same size to put on the boxes as well, to create three-paneled wall hangings after installing grommets and connecting with brass chain, I never did finish up the assembly line. There's still about 20 boxes that need to be made, then those plus another 25 or so that need to be triple polyurethaned, and then really the entire project for the most part needs to have the grommet/brass chain bit done to it. I did finish about the first five, to get an idea of how it would look, and it looks fucked. They hang about 6 or 7 feet tall, and about a foot wide, and when done I'd have approximately 180 panels, which breaks down to about 60 of these giant three-paneled wall hangings. It would make for a great installation of retard art should I ever get it done. Well this year I shall, so that next spring at the latest, this bizarre and slightly disturbing (the amount of beer I drank to get those boxes alone is bothersome, and probably why my lower back aches all the time) shall hang in some sort of venue, for strangers to come around and look at and judge its merit, and for my friends and family to get invited to, look at, and be impressed but also probably shocked by just how intensely retardedly creatively fucked my brain actually is. But they'll smile and be cool, because that's how family and friends roll... they'd rather the world break your heart and dreams down into painful memories than they do it. And in the process, they teach you that you can't trust them, so that when the world does break you down, you feel you have nowhere to turn. So you end up writing 1000 haiku and scribbling them on empty 12-pack boxes you accumulate in your camper some gypsy jewish lady left on your land.

(7s) Goals For 2010 #1 - Unabomber Shacks On Compound

Years ago, I still lived with my moms, sleeping on a mattress behind the living room couch with my dog Waylon. I worked the second shift over an hour away in Richmond, and everybody else in the house was normal daytime people, so I'd be home at like 1 in the morning, eat dinner, drink beer and write until like four or five in the morning, then go to sleep, dead to the world as my moms and my sisters got up and went to work or school. Usually on the weekends, I wouldn't make it home for a couple days, so we never crossed paths on that, and mostly I was out of the way, except on my days off which were like Tuesday and Wednesday I think. Well I ended up quitting that job to move to the beach, but then the guy I was going to move to the beach with, Boomer, disappeared on me, so I didn't move to the beach. Instead I got a job painting houses in stupid fucking Farmville, the real life shithole not the stupid Facebook game. At this point, I was in the house the same time everybody else was, and you could see the house wasn't big enough for such personalities.
Back then I used to go sit on my grandfather's porch to hear him unwind his bizarre and hobo-like past. Wrecking cars trying to see some girl, building irrigation ditches with Indians, falling in love with some crazy woman in New Orleans, marrying some crazy woman in Chicago (what up grandma, I know you reading this!), all that stuff. So I talked him up about helping me build a nice little simple shack, about 8 feet by 12 feet, which, as it came together, I affectionately dubbed the Unabomber shack. Once we had framed it all and put the roof on though, I ended up splitting a trailer with a dude I had worked with, and trailer park life swallowed me whole and I only went home the 8 miles away if there was a football game I couldn't see on my rabbit ears and to check my mail of all the strange shit people used to mail me when The Confederate Mack was going strong. (Actually, there was a brief period of time where the mailing address to the zine actually included "Trailer #7" in the address.) My first sister ended up living in the Unibomber shack for a while, called it something else of course, and then when my youngest sister moved back home with her 49 cats, the cats lived in the Unabomber shack, they put a cat door on it, and it has been called The Cathouse ever since. Most of the wood came from a hurricane that blew through and knocked down a bunch of trees on my grandpa's property that he had some dudes with a portable sawmill come mill up for him.
Anyways, in our current compound, my wife be seeing clients on the regular for herbalism treatments for what ails them. (Oddly enough, that is not a euphemism for drugs. She's actually a trained and certified herbalist, always making me take little droppers full of things in two fingers of well water.) As my wife sees more clients here at the house, it becomes hard to separate the kids from the house, because I'll have to rush home to take them to the library or something. It's not convenient.
And at the same time, some gypsy jewish lady left a camper here for me to use as a studio, and for her to conveniently store her camper, like six years ago. The camper is pretty stifling though, not to mention it's all fucked up from being in my possession for so long. I honestly don't know if the lady could get it out of here now. I've wanted to call and make an offer for it, but I know she thinks she has more than what she has, so she'd probably say something like $1500 when you couldn't get more than $300 for that thing in the local Bucksaver newspaper. I've wanted to call her and be like, "I'll give you $200 for it," and if she says no, tell her to come get it off my property. She's some sort of nomad based out Canada or some oddball set-up like that. Seriously, she's only come back to see her camper once, and the last time she called, she couldn't even remember my name.
Now what I plan on doing is laying out the building of a pair of Unabomber shacks, one in our pasture for my wife's herbal clinic, and the other back where the camper is for my studio. It'd be pretty easy to do step by step, get it all built and wired, and then have my uncle come out one Saturday to run power from the box on the house to each of those buildings, already wired up. Additionally, and I have to do the research on this, but if you are under a certain square footage, it doesn't fall under the domain of the building inspector so stringently. In fact, I could see building like 9 of these things on our property in various spots in a slow meandering "addition" to our main farmhouse.
Having just started work, and having dug a mighty hole for myself moneywise the past four months, I'm probably a good half a year away from having plenty of money for building materials. But I'm sure I could site scavenge enough foundation blocks to go ahead and dig the two foundations for both shacks. First though, I have to get rid of the camper, which is too full of stuff right now to even think about that, and I have to get the pasture chopped down a bit up front where it's grown kinda wild. Or I could just set fire to the camper and take the stupid old-fashioned scythe we have and get medieval on the area of the pasture where the herbal clinic will be. DIY, always the hardest way and just barely the cheapest way, once all is said and done.

(7s) Goals For 2010 Intro

Goals are important in life, and these are my personal goals for the year 2010. I had started a similar list last year as a 7-list and never ever finished it. Perhaps the same will happen this time too, because I never learn sometimes. 2009 was not the greatest year I've ever had. Financially, it was shambles, and I wrapped it up unemployed and on food stamps and probably could've qualified for welfare but the food stamp process was demeaning enough. But personally, my family is tight, and we got by, and we got animals now, so fuck it. It can always get better though. So here's what I'd like to percolate up for the next 365.