SONG OF THE DAY: Jezebel of the Morning (kudzu'd)

Rail industry has been dying out in a lot of places for decades, as the major railroads bought each other up and phased out the short lines because everybody uses diesel trucking now (which, by the way, has seen fuel costs skyrocket the past month). And most all these old small towns have their old train depot, many of them renovated or turned into some other shit.
But what you don’t hear as much about is the bus industry dying out, or barely holding on, and all those immaculate beautiful old bus stations that got built in the shift to driving after the interstate highway system got built, they’re all shutting down. The one in Charlottesville has been closed down for years, with the Greyhound just picking people up at a street stop instead – no ticketing window, no staff, nobody to pay cash for a ticket to go on the run from life all of a sudden. We were just in Huntington, West Virginia, which has a beautiful old bus station, with the Greyhound signage still, and it’s used as a local public bus system depot now, so it’s surviving.
And I don’t really care about keeping capitalism alive or anything like that. But we did used to make travel in group ways more of an acceptable thing, and decorated it with these nice depots and stations that were additions to the architectural landscape. One thing I hate about America (which is actually two things) is that we don’t re-use spaces all that easily, and we also get so hung up on the prospective value of real estate that shit will just sit there going to waste rather than being opened up to some sort of functional use for the community it’s located within. I hear these white ass motherfuckers talking about “third spaces” all the time, which is kinda pretentious because it assumes you have a stable first (home) and second (job) already. But the owner class just sits on these things forever. There’s an abandoned back roads grocery store a few miles from me, and I’d love to be occupying that thing with some sort of chaos art market. Shit man, I’d even lie to myself that I could swing the rent for a minute if they made it cheap enough. But nah, it’s just sitting there, rotting back into the ground, because they “know what they’ve got”, and they’re seeing the abstract potential value instead of any actual use.
Last time I rode the Greyhound, it was from Los Angeles to New Orleans, and by the time I got to New Orleans, I told myself “never again”. But that was long enough ago, it sorta feels like a good idea to take the bus from here to 17 states away, down, over, then back again. I love having a trickster brain that even wants to self-trickster.

SONG OF THE DAY: Del Barrio Pal Barrio (kudzu'd)

We don’t have an actual free market, because it only allows for market changes by those already with the wealth to do so. Thus, we have “disruption” of taxi service to be gig economy jobs to drive people around as Uber of Lyft, burning through willing drivers, because it’s nearly impossible to make money at the gamified gig that benefits the creator of the new system. And you put existing taxi services out of business, by siphoning away their easiest customer base.
We used to have all these amazing Greyhound stations in America, and one by one, they’ve been shuttered and sold off, and now, for the most part, if you catch a Greyhound (if they still serve you where you are), you stand outside somewhere until it shows up, just standing around like a fuckin’ pigeon. And the old Greyhound stations were beautiful a lot of times! The Greyhound station in Charlottesville has been shut down for a while, fenced off, nobody’s bought it, looks like some work has been done inside minimally, but mostly it’s just an abandoned hulk of building that could be a goddamned bus station.
I say all this because one of the great cultural achievements that is so easily overlooked is the Transportation to Sound System channel, where a taxi driver or bus driver spends so much of their life behind the wheel, that they obviously need to keep themselves entertained, so they develop a love for playing music they love. It’s the DJ/curator on wheels aesthetic, and in many places, when combined with individual buses, which can be decorated in colorful creative aesthetics (as is often the case in non-American parts of the world), it creates a whole vibe. And who doesn’t want a whole vibe when you’re stuck on a bus for a long ass ride?
In America, we are controlled by legal ownership principles, so even if someone has a bus or cab idea, they paint them all in trademarked patterns that are patented and claimed as unique proprietary material, instead of just letting your longest time drivers also be owners and paint that shit up however they see fit, to help them enjoy their days spent working. Anyways, shout out to all the taxi cab and bus drivers out there with their signature sounds that they blast and sing along to and often times annoy white America with, because we seemingly have been trained to only appreciate the bland of the free (trademarked).

SONG OF THE DAY: Creeping Away (kudzu'd)

My mother passed away this past week, and our relationship had been strained, but there was always love between us nonetheless. Family is always more complicated and nuanced than a simple read would tell you. I drove between her house and Keysville a couple times this week while down there, and one of my favorite memories was from there, when I went away on a trip to Oklahoma and Colorado years ago. I left in Farmville, with my dad taking me to where the bus station used to be at a gas station that's not there anymore near the hospital heading out of town south on 15. But I came back to Keysville for some reason. I remember some old lady got on the bus in Richmond and sat beside me, and when we passed the truck stop in Amelia, I remembered my grandma had lived down a road to the left there (which my uncle just told me last night around the fire exactly where that was down that road). And then riding 360 past where you turn off in Amelia to where my grandfather is buried, on through the outer edge of Crewe where my mom worked at Piedmont Geriatric Hospital back in the day, on through Meherrin to Keysville, where the bus dumped me off at the old commercial building by Sheldon's Motel that used to be a convenience store and ice cream parlor, and was an arcade at one point in there, and also a video store. I think at the time it still had the remnants of a country store, and now I don't know, it's an insurance office or something. But there was no pay phone there, so I had to walk up the road to the abandoned gas station, because that's where the closest pay phone was. (It's funny, somebody renovated the gas station and now it's open again, but there's no more pay phones anywhere.) I did the old collect call trick saying my name was "Raven just got home I'm at the old gas station before Keysville" to collect call my mom. I waited to hear her answer and hear who the call was from, then hung up before she could accept charges, although she knew better anyways. Then I sat down on my backpack there under a tree and waited 20 minutes for her to show up.
When I'd gotten past that spot in Amelia, I was telling the old lady how I'd ridden all the way from Denver, through the flatlands of the midwest once coming down off the Rocky Mountains, and then the ripples of Appalachia after all that midwestern flatland, and now these hills of Piedmont felt like I'd gotten home. I was singing Jim Croce's "Walkin' Back to Georgia" the whole time I walked from where the bus dropped me off in Keysville to the pay phone a mile or so away, and I kept on singing it, over and over, while I waited for my mom to show up. She was glad to see I'd made it back, and we went to the house I grew up in, and I might've lived there a couple days or a couple months, not sure. I came and went a couple times over the years, as did others throughout the family. But I remember that day, getting off the Greyhound in Keysville, the only person getting off or on at that stop, and walking my slow way to the pay phone, knowing she knew I was getting back that day and was gonna pick me up if she was home (or I'd keep walking towards her house another ten miles if she wasn't home), and just sitting there under that tree, waiting to see her car pull up.
It could be chaotic, our family, with all the things that went on, both accepted and ignored. But there was always a lot of love too. The past few years, because of some of the things she never improved on for me, which affected my kids, I didn't talk to her. That didn't mean she didn't do a lot that I'm grateful for; it just meant I hoped for more with some things, and expect more from myself, too. One of the folks we had to let know was my parents' old friend Wolf, and we couldn't get ahold of him, but one of my mom's friends drew me a map at the kitchen table, explaining the map, and me and my sister went to go find Wolf and let him know. The map was good, but misleading, because you need the story my mom's friend Sue told me as she drew it, to go with the map. One without the other didn't work. So my sister looked at it and it didn't make any sense, so I explained it to her, and she had lived back here once years ago for a little while, and we took one wrong turn but knew enough to know it was a wrong turn pretty quickly, so made our way back to the right path.
Sue had said about where Wolf lived, "He's got a trailer, and then there's a second trailer, and he's got a third trailer there, too." And at the time, I thought, "Why didn't she just say it was three trailers?" but when we got there it wasn't three trailers at all, but a trailer Wolf lived in, but he had another trailer beside it, and there was a third trailer. She had actually described it perfectly, so that if she said he had three trailers, I would've missed it, but saying it the way she did, I knew it as soon as I saw it. We went in, me hollering, "Hey!" like my daddy had always showed me growing up, announcing your presence in a loud but friendly way, making sure folks knew you were there in a good way, but making sure they knew. Neither me or my sister had seen Wolfie in years, and he looked older but he looked good to be honest, and his home seemed perfect to his ways. We told him, and he was of course said, saying, "That's my oldest confidant." As we were standing around, talking, he shared a memory of me being a toddler, and my folks and him doing acid with somebody else in a VW bus that had a woodstove in the back, and while they were riding around, I touched the stove and burned myself. Wolf laughed, "It didn't burn you bad, but you didn't touch it again."
I think sometimes coming from environments that aren't what folks consider normal, the chaotic parts get focused on too much. But it was always full of love, lots of lots of love. I think you need all that love to survive some of these more chaotic environments folks are born into. I didn't forget all that love, but I know I was angry about the other parts of it sometimes. It's been good to go back home and remember all the love that's there, too, even if it was chaotic at times. Without all that love, I wouldn't be the chaotic good person I am today.
I know my mom still read these things for years, even after we didn't talk so much, then didn't talk at all. She'd leave comments sometimes. My sister does that too. These are stories that don't get told, for whatever reason. The "normal" world only likes them packaged a certain way, for their own gawkish enjoyment. And our world only tells these stories around bonfires or truck beds, and even then we leave out some of the stuff that nobody wants to say out loud. I need to be better about sharing these stories, in a way that's true to where I'm from, but in a way that also tells the whole story, in a respectful and loving way. Anything else starts creeping away from the truth of it all. And that truth is never simple, and it never will be, because life isn't either, if you're truly living it.

SONG OF THE DAY: Back to Hell in a Greyhound

My first extra-long on purpose Greyhound trip was to Oklahoma, from Farmville, Virginia, and there was a gas station on the west end of town (now gone) that was the Greyhound stop, and I had a big backpack all packed up and met my dad at his lunch spot at the park, and he drove me to catch the bus, because he was quietly worried about why the fuck I’d ride a bus to Oklahoma for no good reason. A lady we both knew, older outlaw woman type who feel in age between the two of us, so I had lustful thoughts of her as a child, she worked the register and had to do the sliding credit card machine thing to charge my ticket, because this was in the 1990s still. The bus came, and two dudes got off to go in and grab some drinks and one of them fell out in the store, like passed out, and I got on the bus and then those two dudes came back on, and apparently one of them had just given the other a pill which knocked the second one out. After Roanoke, where the pill-giver got off, and I had a phone call on the pay phone (those still existed too) calling a dude that used to be tight with my dad, just checking on him, but all he did was complain about how his back was all fucked up and he couldn’t work. One of his two kids ended up being a methhead in Washington, sadly. When I got back on the bus, the passer-outer sat across from me, and we shared stories for hours and hours, long into the night. He’d just gotten released from mental hospital, because he got sent there instead of prison, but explained to me how that wasn’t so good because at least with prison, you got released, but with the mental hospital system, “Once they got you, they got you whenever they want.”

Anyways, I’ve had a number of long ass bus rides since then too, and they’re always full of people and stories like this. It’s a world full of people with more time than money, and that type of person always has some shit going on. Having been in an MFA level creative writing class before, I’d say the back of the Greyhound is a way better writing class than any MFA program operated by the CIA, or by a cash-hungry school mimicking the popular CIA MFA programs at the more prominent universities. I could tell some of my favorite Greyhound stories for hours, and I wonder if I’m anybody else’s favorite Greyhound story? I kinda expect my last ride I might’ve been, when I rode from Los Angeles to New Orleans, and it was hellish and I hadn’t showered in a long time, and stank really bad, too bad for a bathroom baby wipe bath to address, like nasty balls dick stank level stank. And I squeezed into the back row with a nice lady who I considered old but to be honest she was probably around my age, and I was the only gringo on the whole Greyhound. We rode near enough to the border through a chunk of Arizona and New Mexico that we had a couple of immigration stops even. But this lady sitting beside me, who I felt sorry for having to have me beside her, we started talking, and then she was watching a George Lopez comedy special on her phone, and she shared an earbud, and we laughed and laughed together at George Lopez and started telling each other shit, and I was explaining how I was riding the train and bus all the way around the country, had just done Amtrak from Seattle to Los Angeles, just in time to catch this bus to New Orleans, and she was fascinated by my ridiculousness, or so it seemed. She got off in El Paso, and convinced me not to cross the border while we were stopped there, because the bus station was literally a block from the border crossing. “The bus is only here for 45 minutes, you would get lost over there in something, I am sure.”

I kinda told myself when I got to New Orleans that time that I would never ride a Greyhound again, no more long ass slow ass rides like that. But lately I’ve been seeing the Greyhound heading south out of Charlottesville when I’m driving, with LOS ANGELES or DALLAS on the front of the bus, and I briefly think about riding the Greyhound from here to LA or Texas or go up through the northwest again (one of my all-time favorite bus rides, for the beauty of the landscape as well as chaotic bus stories galore). Covid plus being responsible has me itching to do something stupid like ride a bus for 5 days straight.

SONG OF THE DAY: Ridin' That Midnight Train

Tagging that midnight train, hoping somebody benches it in Georgia. Even wrote “El Hijo del Jim Croce” because I was thinking about that “Walkin’ Back to Georgia” song he does. One time I rode the Greyhound from Colorado to Keysville, Virginia, which was ten miles from my mom’s house. The Greyhound still went to Keysville back then. A long ass ride, and I was squeezed next to an old woman as we went from Richmond down 360 through Amelia, and I felt close to home finally. We talked about it, and she said she could see the twinkle in my eyeballs. The bus stop in Keysville was what used to be a video store/restaurant/country store/pool hall combo building, that’s now split it up into some other barely not failing businesses more appropriate for today, but there was no pay phone there, even though pay phones were still a thing back then. I walked the mile from Keysville’s Greyhound drop-off to the gas station by the building supply store, because the gas station had a pay phone. I sang, “Walkin’ Back to Georgia” the whole way, and then kept singing it after using the pay phone to call my mom’s house and use the “state your name” request to say rapidly as fuck, “It’s Raven, just got home, at the gas station in Keysville, come get me,” so that collect call said, “You have a collect call from it’s-raven-just-got-home-at-the-gas-station-in-keysville-come-get-me, do you accept?” Everybody knew not to accept and just do what the message said, because that was also a thing back then. The building supply store is now one of those temperature controlled storage unit places, and I’ll never speak to my mom again while we’re both alive. But if you see that dirtgod moniker in Georgia, and it says “El Hijo del Jim Croce”, that’s all the stream of thought that went through my mind in the twenty seconds it took me to write that on an empty grain hopper. Every single moniker is like that, an entire world of philosophy and experience and reality and subjectivity boiled down to a bare essence that gets scribbled onto the side of a train, like a message in a bottle, knowing maybe nobody will ever notice it.

W1LL 4LW4YS F1ND 4 GR3YH0VND...

 

will always find a Greyhound 
before the kudzu gets too 
tight a grip round my ankles 

SONG OF THE DAY: Mafatshe Leh

I know it’s a pandemic still but I’m bored, so I bought a bus ticket to Cairo, the long way, through the deep South then through Texas down on the Gulf side of Mexico all the way to Panama, where a ramp is set up and the bus does a big jump over the Panama Canal, which will have four trash barges set on fire as we do the jump, and then in Colombia, where we recreate the Herzog epic Fitzcarraldo, complete with Klaus Kinski’s son Nikolai playing his father’s role at the front of the bus (which we’re pretending is our steamship), then down all the way to Chile, where we cut across to Montevideo, Uruguay, to park on a steam ship and sail over to South Africa, then continue the bus journey up through the interior of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on well-rutted roads, with a brief layover in Lubumbashi (go TP Mazembe!), working our way to catching a steamer way up river on the Congo, where we float to Kinshasa, before cutting our way northward up through the Central African Republic’s jungles, then South Sudan, entering the Saharan zone of the lower Nile in Sudan, on up into Egypt and eventually landing in Cairo. So I won’t be reachable by email through next Thursday, sorry.

SONG OF THE DAY: One More Mile

"The last hour is the longest" is a thing I've thunk while riding Greyhounds or Amtraks home. The landscape shifts into what you know as "home" in that cellular way that defies logic, and you become anxious to get off the traveling contraption. All of us are going nowhere in life, always, it's just we leave a lot of shit in one place, and that becomes home. It's still nowhere. That's not bad. It's better to live nowhere than somewhere anyways. If you live somewhere, a bunch of other people come through gawking at shit, trying to get you to take pictures of them standing in front of some dumb shit, and just generally clusterfuck up everything about a normal day with some abnormal not-from-here ways. Living nowhere is a blessing, because you can swing the door open on a warm day, and look out upon all the beautiful nothing, and nobody's fucking it up with cranes or bath and bodyworks or median strips or chik-fil-a zoning approvals. Just a big ol' fat wondrous nothing. I love nothing, and wish I had more of it in my life.

TH4T S4M3 C4RN1V4L SP4RKL3...

that same carnival sparkle

should be applied to public

transit - candyflake greyhounds

SONG OF THE DAY: Yo Soy Norteño

Every day of my life I think about how I need to get better at Spanish. Couple years back I rode the bus from L.A. to New Orleans, and until we hit El Paso, I was the only gringo on the bus as it crawled along the highway close to the border. I hadn’t had a shower since Chicago (having gone to Seattle by bus, then down to L.A. by train since Chicago), and baby wipes in the bathroom wasn’t cutting it. Sat next to this nice bilingual woman though, who said nothing about how I stank, and even shared her George Lopez special on her ipad with me. It was chill.

Where I used to live out in the country, there was people across the road with confederate flags still up, and they was on that immigrant hate shit, I’m sure. I never got that, because if somebody’s taking your job, is that the worker’s fault, or the bossman’s fault? If your boss is hiring somebody for lower wage and pushing you out the door, why are you mad at the other worker? That’s a dude in the same situation you are, out here struggling to survive on this goddamned greedy ass Earth. I’d rather have immigrants next door than confederate flags anyways.

Nonetheless, I gotta get better with mi español. I look forward to be an old ass gringo somewhere where it’s not white as fuck, reading Galeano at a café that makes an ojo negro with cayenne.

SONG OF THE DAY: Take Your Time

Not sure why stereotypes always have to be negative, except for maybe people are just channeled into negativity too much. The negative stereotype of the pretentious white Becky for example – I bet we all know a chill Becky or too, and it feels awkward to be all “lolol” at Becky memes when you suddenly humanize this otherwise dehumanizing activity with a real life chill Becky. I mean, I also get it, it’s a reactionary dehumanization process against a larger dehumanization process that is cultural, so I ain’t mad at nobody… just saying.

A stereotype I apply in real life, sort of, is one I call the Otis. I ride the bus a lot, and also tend to be one of those types that interacts with people in passing, and also seems to draw in interactions with random people, specifically the wild ones. I guess it’s my natural dirtgod nature. I can throw up metaphysical boundaries if I need to, activate the hillbilly murder eyes and get a little space, in fact as a kid that’s how I survived a lot of times riding the bus. But now for the most part, when meandering to and from this or that, my boundaries are minimal and I’m talking shit with the world in passing, because that’s how I enjoy this limited ass life I got. Invariably when living this way, you’re gonna have conversations with older chill dudes – old school loungers – who got a solid power of lounge outlook on life despite not having all that much. The shocking thing we sometimes forget in this American death machine is that you actually don’t need a whole lot to be happy. Doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be treated equally, or that wealth inequality is not the defining issue of our current state of political affairs, but it does mean that we ain’t all gotta be millionaires living in a big house on a tall hill looking down on the rest of the world. You can carve out a pretty happy life in simple means, and in actuality it might be easier if you keep it simpler. I strive for this in my basement apartment phase of life I’m living now.

These old loungers will always have that conversation for you though, about chill places in town, or about some dude who wasn’t no good at work, generally a management type, and there’s like a small arsenal of them in my everyday life now. We get to talking so much, and be like “what’s up” every time we see each other though, that we never get around to knowing each other’s name. Ever. And I ain’t the type to be asking some dude his name. Why can’t we just talk and be chill and friendly and have each other’s public back without knowing who the fuck we exactly are? These dudes, to me, are Otises. All of them are Otis.

There’s one Otis in particular, I see this dude all the time, African-American dude, we talked in passing on his birthday one time, talked about UVA basketball, talked about every damn thing pretty much. He’s like me, interacts with the passing world. Now I’ll just randomly be walking through some part of town (always on foot, the way of the lounger, if able) and I’ll hear, “there he goes” or something like that, and it’s Otis. Of course I don’t know his name is actually Otis so I’m like, “hey, what’s up potna?” or “what’s going on chief” or some colloquial code switching nonsense like that from my youth. I guess it ain’t really code switching because that’s more my heart, and I’m actually code switching when I’m surrounded by these well-to-do devils and acting like I prefer perfect grammar and respecting the written law of the government more than the unwritten law of the lounger. But nonetheless, Otis always brightens the day, and has helped raised the bar of all Otises in passing, so that when I’m on a road trip in some strange place, and say I’m about to go into the Roses in Henderson, North Carolina, and some old dude is rolling up in a dented and skinned up but still relatively clean old ass Lincoln, windows down and the old jams playing, I think to myself, “hell yeah, fuckin’ Otis” and it’s a positive stereotype, and I feel better, and then I go into Roses and get a couple more throw pillows like I planned.

PR1S0N BVS3S L1N3D VP 0N...

prison buses lined up on

side street, waiting to haul off

either cops or protesters

BVNCH3S 0F HVM4N TR4FF1C...

bunches of human traffic

patterns intersect at south

end of town, always popping

SONG OF THE DAY: My Uncle

On the bus this morning, the chill driver stopped next stop after mine and picked up this chill dude I always see on the bus and around town, he explicated to me in great detail how he makes good jerk chicken one time. Anyways, those two dudes sat up front talking about house prices in Charlottesville, how everything was like $300K, and three-storey, and how couldn’t nobody working a regular job actually find a house to buy. This kinda tripped me out because since my separation I’ve operated under the assumption I’ll never buy another house, that because of my income and lack of savings and no family to borrow any money from to make shit happen on a down payment or whatever, that I’ll just rent the rest of my life. It had never even occurred to me that it’s normal American dream thinking to assume that if you’re employed regularly, with no plans of not being employed, that you buy a house probably. Like this was not even in my brain as a reality.

That tripped me further out because I’ve always thought of gentrification and rising housing prices as affecting renters, not home owners. Usually low-income renters are in cheaper apartment complexes, and higher-end renters are doing so from private owners, who own more than one place generally. Rising home costs mean people who are ownership class having rising mortgage costs for the extra shit they buy, which means they jack up rents, which also means being able to rent a place goes beyond what working people can afford and then relies on the market of wealthy students or adults who are partially supported by inherited wealth. The idea of a bus driver or the other guy who makes the best jerk chicken allegedly or lmao me actually being able to buy a house, in the city, that was like imagining a trip to Uruguay next weekend – an impossible fantasy which you think briefly then move on with real life.

Anyways, this song is called “Uncle” so my weak tie-in is that if you have familial wealth, and consider yourself “broke” because you don’t have cash wealth at hand but still have a healthy network of familial wealth, including uncles and aunts you can ask for help, or non-cash resources you can easily access should a financial emergency come up, you’re not broke. I mean shit, I’m not even broke to be honest, even though I only have six cents for the next two days. I’ll still get paid on Friday, guaranteed, and got food enough in my basement apartment, and all my regular bills are current, and I’ll be able to juggle and shift the medical debt collections as well, for at least another month (which is all we do each time). So I don’t consider myself broke even, because I’ve known for-real broke before. I’m living fucking good to be honest. But I hadn’t even considered I’d ever own a house again until I heard them dudes talking about it like that was some shit people still aspired to. Normally I would’ve blown it off as elite nonsense gibberish, but being this was two black dudes on the bus, that wasn’t appropriate. It made me want to have dreams again, but also made me mad at the dream crushers out there who have built this incredible inequality in our lives. Fuck y’all. If you’re one of those people reading this, you’re not broke, so stop acting like it. And support my patreon.

SONG OF THE DAY: Crying in the Chapel

The metaphysical veil is thick today… I can feel the pressure pushing in on all fronts. The fog machine malfunctions and you can hear the cogs and gears grinding because the oil of forever progress is not sustainable and the mechanisms are struggling to keep up the pace we’ve all been forced to depend upon. Metaphysical land mines are everywhere, exploding into unseen crises, damaged people going about their days as if nothing has happened but inside they are mangled, missing limbs, bleeding to a psychic death, but afraid to admit it on the external level. I rode the bus this morning, simultaneously about to cry and about to smash the shit out of anybody who looked at me wrong. Some kid was in the back with me, playing his fucking phone out loud, blip bloop noises, and there was no fog to hide in, I refused the electronic opioids in my pockets, and stared out the window as construction continued unabated on Main Street of Charlottesville, Virginia, the busy town pretending everything was moving along just fine, everything’s fine. But you can feel it… it’s all really close to breaking down. I wish you well.

SONG OF THE DAY: Nowhere Fast

Bored and lonely last night so I did what any idiot looking to feel as solitary as possible would do – I rode the bus around for no reason. Mid-going nowhere fast trip though I decided to go look at magazines at the still a book store in the fancy normal people who have money shopping district, thinking “oh hey I’ll buy a Juxtapoz or maybe a train magazine, and then scribble haiku on pages or some dumb shit so I can justify the purchase aka waste of money” but I didn’t feel like riding the bus and walked instead, sitting on park benches whenever one appeared to test the lounge factor and blend into the questionable scenes adding my own question marks of “how do we read this guy?” for others passing by. Eventually, after much goofing off and taking pictures of an abandoned drug store in a dying strip mall, and also lamenting the bulldozed remnants and giant hole where previous old buildings I’d taken pictures of were now lost to progress, including a copy shop where I printed a bunch of zines over the years, I made my way across the street to the fancy normal people who have money shopping district and the book store, to piss in their bathroom, and also think about buying magazines.

Magazines are expensive, so I did not buy any magazines. I am so used to things trickling into my life second-hand or in bulk purchases of old shit either in real life junk markets or the internet junk markets that I forgot new shit, even dumb shit like magazines which is entirely geared towards you spending money in order to “discover” new ways to spend other money, well I forgot that new shit costs more than my broke ass comprehends.

After being bored by new magazines, and Parcheesi blocked walking down multiple aisles by well-tended white men and their princely heirs to their privilege, I made my way back to the bus stop, by the McDonalds, where we sat on the bus for a while while old men smoked cigarettes and the driver ran over to Mickey D’s. Eventually back unto Main Street, it was quarter to nine, so I got off to hit up the Afghani market for a delicious ayran for the rest of the walk home, having successfully eaten up most of the evening, alone, wandering, could disappear and nobody would notice for at least two days. But they didn’t even have mint ayran, only regular. “Fuck it,” I thought, and went ahead and got it, and it was the not main dude at the register but the second-to-main dude, and the main dude charges me flat chill price of regular but this dude hadn’t before, but tonight he did, so though they didn’t have mint ayran I at least wasn’t white-charged at the Afghani market.

I walked the rest of the way home, and this city is boring and maybe not even a city to be honest, and I passed all the places of people living, both the projects rebranded as “friendship court” and the pastel or earth tone hearty plank sided homes of gentrification within rock throwing distance of the projects, and thought about all the lives inside those places, and the comfort and lack of comfort, and how some of us have an upward trajectory or downward spiral and many of us simply have neither, just fluctuations slightly above or below whatever the fuck we were born into in the first place. The lack of support I have from family or even solid friends who are there other than when they need my support feels like a thousand pound kettlebell tied to my ankles, both of them at once, tightly, trying to swim out of deep murk. Seeing people, just random ass pairs of people – my age black couple pushing a stroller, affluent white folks headed to the downtown mall, old Indian couple – all walking together got me thinking on that fact how loneliness is unhealthy, but also how you can’t fix it on your own because duh you are alone, and when not wanting to be alone you always find the worst possible fucking humans who vampirize your life and energies. But then while I was thinking that I had already made the steps home, so I went inside and cut on two or three dollar store Chinese lanterns and sat there, thinking “well, that was a day” without even the motivation to write a poem, even a dumb simple poem as means of maintaining practice.

R34D1NG R3D P1N3 TR4NSL4T10NS...

reading Red Pine translations

of Chinese hermit poets

on back seat of Greyhound bus

4NG3L1C DR4W1NG BL3SS3S...

angelic drawing blesses

me in passing, wasting time

behind the Greyhound station

H0W M4NY J1M CR0C3 S0NGS...

how many Jim Croce songs

can I sing between here and

the Aberdeen bus station?

DR34MS 0F CVST0M C04CH L1F3STYL3...

dreams of custom coach lifestyle

replaced by compound truths and

dilapidated campers