(7s) Recent Force Battles For Control Of My Soul Intro

It has been a year of new things, rebirths, climbing out of the deep snows of the past five years and trying to warm up and look around and be happy enough with the foundation I still have to patch up the mess of clutter and chaos that can build up when your view is obstructed by crooked eyelids. I have a lot of animosity towards the exterior humans of all walks and varieties right now, probably part of sorting out myself and lashing out from feeling stifled for so long, feeling judged by the open-minded, feeling confined by the freedom-loving, feeling fucked by those who claim to be so pure of goddamned spirit.
When you make the big changes in life, you think you've hit a fork and you make a left or right choice and leave behind the path you came along, but it's not like that. So I'm struggling to take this new course but keep hold of what's important. Sometimes it's hard to distinguish what is important and what is waste when you're a wooden ruler's width away from burning it all down, taking a Greyhound as far west as you can afford to, and seeing where that ends up.
There is a battle for my soul right now, the forces of my pasts and the forces of my futures, a chessboard's worth of holographic universe of possibilities coming together with worrisome swords, fighting it out, march madness style. And just like paying $8 to sit there in a gym and watch two teams full of dudes in matching outfits play a game at each other in front of you and a bunch of other people's eyeballs, I can feel the momentum. I can feel what forces are winning and what are losing. Some seem like upsets to me, and some make perfect sense, and all of it is happening, internal struggles that you don't even notice. Yeah, this shit happens to all of us, but we confuse and delude ourselves to not pay attention to the cellular disturbances that put extra twists in our intestines and a millisecond skip to our heartbeat like that Chilean earthquake shifting Earth time ever so infinitely not there.
So this 7-list is straight up metaphysical color commentary. I've sat in a tipi in my back yard by the pig pen where I can lift weights naked until I'm as sweaty as the beer I leave sitting on the shell of an old wood stove I use as a table back there, and go inside the tipi, wearing a pair of headphones plugged into nothing, to stifle the bzzzzzzzzzzzz that is everywhere from the multitudes of cell phone towers of Babel, and to hear the different drums inside that ideally I should be marching to. Empty five-gallon water jugs flipped over inside of milk crates for a bass, and old three-gallon drywall buckets for a snare, with a gallon wine bottle cowbell and two 1/2 inch dowel scraps for drum sticks. Short pieces of salvaged rebar make a bigger sound but break the wine bottle, and wine bottles are only meant to be broken when two-thirds full of loose change. That's the way it is.
This 7-list is a tournamental battle for my soul, as it stands (or looks like it stands from where I sit) in the just about springtime of 2010.

(7s) Fred Durst List Intro

I have always had a confidence that fame would someday surround my stupid name, and around a decade ago, it was a major goal of mine to use that fame for good. Namely, this would encompass taking up a couple of charitable causes to make poor ass kids from shitburg towns maybe grow up with a little more self confidence, or at least a stronger sense of identity other than, "Damn, we fucked." But also, I would want to smash empty alcohol bottles, preferably large ones, over the head of Fred Durst, as he was, at the time I came up with this life goal, riding the brief wave of popularity that the bad white rapper/crappy rock band cross-genre was experiencing. Fred Durst seemed to me to be the antithesis to everything that made sense inside my brain, and it was bothersome that people would even momentarily like him. Of course, one should never be shocked at how stupid the things the masses enjoy are, but also, a guy like that was bound to fall back down anyways. After that hideous remake of a Marvin Gaye song, not to mention just too many public displays of how clueless he really was, he faded into the woodwork. I do remember at one point he was given some token executive A&R position at Interscope, so I don't know if he parlayed his youthful success into the Hollywood Jew career track, which, not to push tired stereotypes, to be fair is followed just as often by non-Jews, including regular white people and black people and Latina women in pant suits very commonly nowadays.
Nonetheless, I've still always wanted to bust Fred Durst upside his head with an empty wine jug, regardless of whether he's famous or not anymore. But over the years, inside my brains, I've kept a running list of people comparably deserving, according to my own highly biases judgements, of a busted up head. The list you will read over the coming days will be seven such folks, some of whom have surpassed Fred Durst in filling me with vitriolic infrared vision, and others who haven't come close but deserve mentioning, mostly so I can fill out an entire list of seven. Honestly, combining famous people who suck and real life people I hold unnecessarily long grudges against, I'd probably be hard pressed to come up with an actual seven people to bust upside the head with a bottle, with thought, but for creative purposes, let's just pretend.
Don't get me wrong though. If you gave me 7 bottles and a bust a head free card with each one, and we put them in an old vegetable box in the back of my truck, I'd be done busting them up by the end of the month, without problem. Day to day affairs always create bustable heads, but to actually premeditate such a violent outburst, it's hard to justify so easily. But nonetheless, I made a list.

(7s) LPs I Be Lusting After Intro

Look, I am a white guy who grew up right when CD technology (and profit margins) were phasing out vinyl, and also hip hop was blowing up to the point Colonel Sanders died and became a cartoon doing the backspin across the screen like a Press Your Luck whammy. So it is only expected that I would be obsessively compulsive and collect records like an autistic audiophile with triple disability checks to spend. (Speaking of which, has there been any study on why children of the ‘80s became so obsessive compulsive, and helped create all the stupid things we helped create? Were previous generations like this, just they didn’t have the internet to fully indulge themselves and their bizarre obsessions?)
In my adult life, it seems the more I have children, the less I buy records. At one point, inside the Secret Clubhouse message board, we used to do a thing called the $20 Record Challenge, where the rules were you had a simple $20 and you spent it on records all at one time in one record store. This gimmick allowed me to get clearance from the home office for more than a couple $20 binges in the basement of Plan 9 Carytown, or digging through the strange 7-inches in the back room of that weird ass record store in Ruckersville. Now, my records have been scattered amongst the compound. There’s stacks of 7-inch singles in the unfinished hallway cabinet. There are sideways stacks of albums in the front room, plus a ton of records in the camper behind the house. The odd diaspora is all the records used to be in the front room, but the best ones made it outside to the camper over the past two years, but then probably two milk crates worth of the best of the best made it back into the house for the kitchen record player or those times I hooked up the USB turntable inside, so my records are all over. That’s a long ways from when I used to have them separated into about five different genres, then alphabetized by artist. The best set-up was this big two shelf rack I had that held them all at that poine (which was about 1500, which I made my limit... if it went bigger than the racks, it was time to thin out the herd), and I would pick records out to play, and then when it’d get sag to the stacks, I’d push the records to the edges from the middle, and fill the bottom spaces with ones from the top, so essentially, my best records would be towards the middle of the top shelf. None of it was alphabetical, or even slightly organized, and there’d be clusters where I could recognize, “Oh yeah, that was when I was in a British space rock kick,” or “Man, I was playing the fuck out of shitty B-team Wu-Tang instrumentals there for a while.” Records are the greatest material possession I’ve ever unnecessarily accumulated. As much as people would tell you otherwise, they’ve never been made obsolete. Records are my friend.
This will be a list of records I wish I had. I’ve tried to limit it to records that actually exist on the earth, but I haven’t actually finished the list yet, so who the fuck knows? Most likely, knowing me and how I get bored with being serious about anything, I’ll probably make up some complete nonsensical rigamarole, say something retarded, and call it a wrap.

(7s) Longest Serving U.S. Representatives Intro

Well, this will be the House of Representatives version of the longest-serving elected fuckfaces in America list I did for the U.S. Senate as a 7-list, and really what more can I say to explain it other than be like why the fuck do we just appoint these guys for life and not care anymore? It seems like it'd be easier to remain a Representative than a Senator because you are from a smaller district, and it's a harder nut to crack (a much more elite exclusive club), but still, seems weird guys get elected and then everybody just keeps voting for them because they are like, "Well, I know this guy because he's the guy already and I never heard of this other guy, so fuck it, same guy it is."
You may say to yourself, "Yeah, complain and bitch and complain and gripe. What are your solutions Raven Mack, Mr. Standard Internet Know-it-all Blowhard?" Well, I'm glad you think that, and I'll use this opportunity to lay out my plan for term limiting these assholes and making it more exciting for our 21st century massive masses mindstates. First off, being an elected official becomes a three-tier process, with the Presidency on top, Senate at the second level, and the House being the entry level. You have the same requirements as now to be a U.S. Representative, and you can run for re-election one time, but that's it, maxing you out in the House at four years. From there, you can run for the Senate. In fact, only former Representatives can run for Senate, and only from the state they were a representative in. None of this buying a house in New York dual statehood Hillary Clinton bullshit. Senators serve six-year terms instead of two, and would not be allowed to ever run for re-election, ever. This would make the whole Senior/Junior Senator structure from states more important because the dude who's been Senator for four years already could show the dude who just got sworn in the ropes a little, but there'd be a hand-off, and no one would be so entrenched in the Senate that they'd become too powerful. Like instead of guys becoming committee heads because they've been a Senator since 1975, they'd have to select the most appropriate members of the Senate from the dudes who are in the last two years of their term. I don't think any benefits of knowing the way Washington politics works makes it okay to have guys just stay on forever.
Finally, in order to run for President, you should be a former Senator, which most Presidential candidates are anyways. I know state Governors often run and win, pretending to be a Washington outsider, and I guess there could be allowances for that inclusion in the Presidential race, but I'd rather it just be Senators to be honest with you. Because then you could reframe the whole November election time every even numbered year as a November Madness style thing where it's a free-for-all of former famous Representative running for Senate, and former famous Senators running for President. And my favorite part of this proposed system is, at the maximum level, if you are one of tha best (ideally) and rare few who become President, you serve for 18 years (because of course Presidents can still get re-elected one time). More likely though, you max out after your Senatorial term at 10 years. And even more likely, you don't even get elected Senator, since in many states many many many former Representatives would be battling it out for one of the two elusive Senate seats, you serve four years as a House member if you're lucky. And I think if you have a steady cycle of fresh know-it-all wealthy assholes, we are all more likely to benefit than having a pretty much set group of stale know-it-all wealthy assholes making our legislative rules. And who knows, maybe we'd run out of rich people and great Americans like balding black guys missing two teeth who work as a janitor at a major university or greybearded white guys in trucker hats who have never heard the term "trucker hats" with forearm tattoos could become our elected officials. Plus short cherub Mexican-American women who have overseen the raising of 6 children and 19 (and counting) grandchildren in a single rented house with the front side painted orange. Then, and only then, could we get down to making this a better country.

(7s) Longest Serving U.S. Senators Intro

My man Tommy Jefferson said a long time ago in a galaxy right about here (actually five miles from where I sit, although I’m talking of his fancy mountaintop home, not our galaxy, because I’m actually in that too and it’d be strange if I wasn’t but only five miles outside of it), “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” And we as Americans are trained to hold bullshit back-story like that close to our heart by way of our brains and act like we have some amazing, ever-changing, free-flowing freedom machine. Yet in practice, we limit ourselves to two slices of the same upper crust white bread, both very adamant about how different they are from the dude that looks just like them behind the other podium on the TV talks. And we limit ourselves with our attitude that whoever is already there is okay, new is not good, so guys become career politicians, living for decades in Washington, D.C., trendy neighborhoods, lavishly, to the point that the home state they represent is more a property claim than an actual home. It’s pretty ridiculous.
Well, in the spirit of this ridiculousness, I figured I’d do a list of the seven guys in both chambers of Congress who have been sitting in office the longest, to get a flavor for just how unchanging we really are as a country, even though we act like we have a revolution every four years. Changing the brand name of the same old tired product is not a “revolution” by definition, though if you redefine (or rebrand) “revolution” to accommodate such non-change, then it allows people to better understand revolutionary new detergents and a revolution in the taste of Pepsi even though it’s the same diabeetus-inducing corn syrup that it’s been since the ‘60s.
I will start with the Senate, since it’s the more prestigious chamber, being only 100 mostly white guys than the 365 mostly white guys of the House of Representatives. The Senate is often times a springboard towards Presidential campaigning, and that used to mean you vacated your seat to do so, but starting with John Kerry’s campaign in ’04, as well as McCain in ’08, not to mention Lloyd Bentsen not dropping his seat when he was on the Presidential ticket as Vice-Homeboy, they don’t even do that anymore. Why give up the cushiony lifetime public appointment for a 50/50 chance at the best pension on Earth? Keep your second best pension on Earth growing and take a shot at the upgrade without losing your solid thing already. These fucking guys...
Anyways, tomorrow will start the list of the seven longest serving current U.S. Senators, and hopefully you dumbasses will stop electing all of them. But I know you won’t. Of the 100 Senators currently in office, I would bet at least 20 of them are still in office on the day I die. Hell, I talk too much shit in these write-ups, they might cancer me and all of them might still be in office.

(7s) Should Be On DVD Easier Intro

I tend to fight entertainment technology advances, partially due to systemic poverty along my lifeline's fractured meanderings, but also because I tend to like the finer stupid things in life, and they can be accumulated more abundantly in ancient formats. But I've been brought into the DVD age for a while now, but with an old ass 32 inch TV that had to have an RF Modulator to play the DVD machine. But my brother-in-law, who is our family gadget enabler, such a huge gadget man himself that he will visit and feel almost offended by the fact we don't have modern conveniences that he sees as a natural right for any free born semi-successful American. Thinking like that causes him to do things like he did the end of last year where he bought us a giant high def flat screen (don't know the dimensions, but it's bigger than the old 32 was), and a blue-ray player (which we've only watched like three actual blue-ray movies on, and honestly, I didn't notice a big enough difference between that and regular DVD to pay double for shit, although coming from a shitty cable-ready 32-inch to the wide screen probably means my attention to definition is by nature minimal), and a Wii set-up (which doesn't get used as much anymore after I schooled the fuck out of everybody on Mario Kart and the other games were too complicated to even figure out).
For the wildly fluctuating brain patterns of a guy like me, the Netflix has been a goddesssend, because I can think something like, "Hey, I'd like to watch every Charles Bronson movie I've never heard of," and I can set it up to do it. Or I can watch The Wire, beginning to end, more than once, and overindulge myself to ridiculous levels where I'm sleeping at night, dreaming about going to a Chinese buffet with Bunk and McNulty meets us there and he's all sorts of fucked up and he keeps pushing my shoulder really hard with his finger, and Bunk keeps shrugging at me like "Sorry man, Jimmy's an asshole."
But why the fuck isn't everything ever on DVD now? It seems incredible to me that anything anybody might've ever wanted, obviously other than brand new TV series or some shit, should be on DVD. I mean, you can hit the bootleg man for DVDs of new release movies the same week they come out in theaters. So why isn't everything fucking ever put into a rentable DVD format for easy public consumption?
I know there's probably legitimate business reasons behind a lot of that, and illegitimate business reasons as well (like Disney's refusal to have shit for sale but every so often to drive up the price of it like assholes who don't have three daughters in the house). I also know that the type of crap I tend to like, it's usually made by semi-degenerates, and that type of person tends to lose ambition at times or fall into dark muddy places in life and not be able to follow through on everything they might want to. Nonetheless, here bestarts a list of some things I wish I could get on the digital video disc format more easily, and preferably through Netflix so I didn't even have to pay for it like normal style but could just rent it, burn it, and send it back, like my type of free born semi-successful Americans naturally do.

(7s) Women Singers That Tricked Me Into Loving On Them Intro

Ahh... the sweet siren song of the seductress female, speaking to something deep within my caveman soul, making me want to crash against better judgement and do nasty things in cheap hotel rooms under the false pretense of sensory stimulated "love". That's what this list is about, womenfolks, mostly of a pop cultural variety, who have made me think I could love them, simply with their singing voice. It has happened often in my life, and will probably happen again. I can't front, music hits me heavy and is something I'd freak out without. TV/movies/video games... you could take that away forever, and I wouldn't fret about it. But music, man, I'd be lost without it. So through the next week, I'll be talking upon seven womens types who have tricked my brain with their throat sounds...
[The pic above is of Betty Davis, who was married to Miles Davis, and is fucking great.]

(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.

(7s) Magazines Subscriptions Wanted Intro

I know this is the online age and newspapers are shrinking away to nothing and magazines die weekly, but I'm an old school type of dude, who likes to lay on the couch with my feet by the woodstove and my head by the draft coming in from the unfinished front room, thumbing through a magazine, reading the light stuff at first, as I tease myself with sleep, saving longer more informative articles for serious bouts of chilling. I don't really read books too much anymore, not having the time (a likely excuse), and when I do, I tend to read non-fiction because I feel like I'm wasting my time reading made-up stuff. An odd ultimately self-defeating attitude for an aspiring writer, but hey, I'm nothing but confusing contradictions, wrapped up in 225 pounds of mostly solid, heavily bearded dude. Nonetheless, if I can ever get my personal financial condition back on stable and then improve upon that, I'd most likely blow discretionary income on magazine subscriptions galore, to keep my tumbleweed post office box randomly stuffed with shit that might actually give me something to ramble about. Here would be the Top 7 subscriptions on my wish list, some I've had before, some I've never seen.

(7s) Artists Wanted Intro

Everyone has dreams, and me and the ol' lady dream of our big ol' farmhouse being fixed up nice and filling it with all types of fucked up art to surround ourselves with. I am lucky enough to have an ol' lady who thinks a lot like me, that regular art is cool art, but so is shit like dudes in North Carolina who staple gun magazine scraps into Biblical scripture stories. And ultimately, we both thrive personally, on a creative level, by surrounding ourselves with all sorts of crazy visual stimuli. It seems our lives have become cluttered by more normal material waste though, and we can feel it in our lack of creative passion lately. We are drained by our environment. For her birthday, not last year but the year before last, I bought her a painting done by my man D-Mo aka Dave Moore - (The Lowland King) - hoping to set up the pattern of us buying each other art for our birthdays. Who knew the economy would crumble and my self-employment would become more self-unemployment than anything, we'd be on food stamps, and waiting for something to magically save us from the creditor calls that go straight to the answering machine because no matter how many times you answer the phone and explain to them you haven't been working and have no money, no not even a partial payment, they will keep calling. They say they note your account, but they don't seem to note shit because the calls keep coming constantly. Anyways, let us pretend we have recovered from this Good Depression as my oldest daughter called it - "If that was the Great Depression, then this must be the Good Depression," - and we be blowing mad money on art to surround ourselves with like we're some sort of media magnates or financial elite instead of the broke ass pieces of shit we seem to be most of the time. These are the artists I'd most want to have tacked up to the wall somewhere in this house, preferably with a giant assed three-story addition coming off the back corner.

(7s) 2009 Goals: Intro

I don't make new year resolutions, because shit like that is like swearing off alcohol while hungover - you are going to abandon it, and once abandoned you are done with it. Instead, I try to toss into my head little goals for this new year, rather than resolutions, so that if I fail, which I tend to do, I don't have to jettison the whole process and pretend it never happened, adding to my overall sense that I never finish a fucking thing I start, my life full of half-assed attempts to accomplish things beyond the abilities given to me by my upbringing and allowed by my retarded brain.
Speaking of retarded, this is the first post in my attempt to do a 7-list each week this year, so I guess it would be obvious I will be talking upon personal goals for the 2009 calendar cycle of boxes on the wall. If it's not obvious, let me tell you, that's what I'm gonna do this week. Pretend you care.