SONG OF THE DAY: Bust A Move (kudzu'd)

I have the first haiku slam of the year in a few hours, and I’m horribly disorganized and unprepared, so I don’t have time to babble some writing like I normally would for these song of the day lists that I think my sister, my girlfriend, a guy in Australia, then like a rotating cast of 2 out of 9 others will see. Nonetheless, if you are currently wavering in personal decision making, let me and this song just put a mark in the affirmative column for you to bust a move.

SONG OF THE DAY: Why Can't We Be Friends?

Been trying to think of something to write for this song coming up for like four days in a row. Brain just ain’t thinking of things like I’d like it to, although that’s not entirely true, because I dropped a long ass thing at my patreon today, and am either writing or doing some sort of nonsense art constantly, reasonably so. I need more external outputs, for sure, but having a haiku slam a few weeks back helped, which I guess I didn’t even write about here. That’s sort of the problem with me – I scatter my shit in nine different places, it’s impossible to have any one space be the complete picture. Anyways, we’re having another haiku slam on Saturday, May 21, outdoors, south of Charlottesville. If you wanna come make new friends, or connect with old ones, let me know. Not so sure we live in an age of sharing everything openly and publicly anymore. Western civilization keeps hyping itself as expressive but keeps getting more and more repressive. And the weird thing is the people who claim to be protecting expression are the exact same ones actually repressing shit (like that oligarch billionaire that looks like a bleached frog). So I don’t know. Get at me though. Or go away. Maybe both.

SONG OF THE DAY: Alabama

I still have goals of Southern Gothicc Futurist haiku slams starting up again, and getting a title belt made for our champion. Stylistically, I think the best title belt to base things off of is back when Adrian Street won the Southeastern Heavyweight title from “Wildcat” Wendell Cooley in the Alabama territory in the ‘80s, and painted it pink. That belt had giant crowns sticking off the champion logo, plus even a confederate flag emblem as one of the flags on the belt (which was not uncommon at the time in southern wrestling). Adrian Street’s gimmick was always that he was effeminate but masculine, had a female valet, and tough as shit. He painted the belt bright ass pink, which of course just infuriated the mid-‘80s pro wrestling attending demographics of Alabama, who back then would’ve hated Trump too because he was from New York City. That belt would be the basis of a Southern Gothicc Futurist Haiku Slam Championship belt, without a doubt. Might go lavender in color, but pink is always a bold choice, and good for challenging simple assed people with their brains full of poisonous muck.

HAIKU SLAMS 2020

I guess some people actually still come to this site instead of just social media, so let me let you know that the first Sovthern Gothicc Fvtvrist Haiku Slam of 2020 happens later this month, in fact next week, at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar in Charlottesville, VA. Like all haiku slams, all you need is 15-20 haiku and the desire to share to come sign up, and take a shot at winning the main haiku slam. There's also always a battle royal, for both those eliminated early as well as folks who just wanna give it a tiptoe tryout the first time, where all you need is a couple haiku maximum. We've got sponsorship from our friends at Market Street Wine, so we'll have cash prizes for the winners. And in the main event, it's gonna be 2019 Champion Hawktalon J Crowfighter vs. dirtgod raven mack. He beat me in the quarterfinals of the championship tournament, and I'm looking to get some revenge. Not really, mostly we're just looking to exorcise the demons of existing in this fucked up world. Come build community with your cousins in Sovthern Gothicc Fvtvrism.

I do keep a fairly updated schedule at my namesake website too though.

UPCOMING HAIKU SLAMS

The 411 on upcoming Sovthern Gothic Fvtvrist Haiku Slams.

• SATURDAY NOVEMBER 23 - CHARLOTTESVILLE VA - TWISTED BRANCH TEA BAZAAR

OUR YEAR END EVENT! Featuring a Tournament of Haiku Death Matches, plus two open battle royals between tournament rounds. The 8 competitors for the final tournament championship of 2019 will be announced on social media.

I do also have an official (lol) website now, with a page on haiku slams there as well - check it out - and book me to come do one of these things in your neck of the woods.

SOVTHERN GOTHIC FVTVRIST HAIKV SLAMS (the rebirth of sikk - fool like dat)

What was called Rojonekku Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournaments is back, but now called Southern Gothic Futurist Haiku Slam. It is still a tournament where anybody on the whole wide Earth who wants to sign up is welcome to sign-up. We will have best-of-3 rounds of elimination until there are only four people left, who will go through semifinals and finals to crown a champion of ill literary styles in seventeen syllables or less. The more styles the better. This is like a literary cookout (not a pot luck) – bring your own side dish, and make sure it’s homemade, and get the fuck outta here with the whole foods pasta salads.

There also will still be a haiku death match where I take on a proven haiku competitor in a best-of-25 no-holds-barred super destructor bout of haiku supremacy. These bouts are meant to showcase how wild style the haiku format in battle mode can be. I take my role as facilitator/space holder of these events seriously, and look to defend my role as well as challenge myself. AND YET RARELY DO I LOSE.

I am excited to announce as well (which I should’ve already done) that we’ll be going monthly moving forward at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar on the downtown mall in Charlottesville, Virginia. This is a business that I’ve loved to support over the years, held down the picnic table on the back deck in the hookah lounge playing dominos many a weekend night, been to mad shows there over the years, and love the spot. It’s a place I’ve always wanted to run my event at, because it makes sense. It fits.

When we set this up, I asked for second Wednesdays, just to have a set night of the month, which is easy for humans to remember in robot phone age. Oddly, without planning, it fell the week before the one-year anniversary of a bunch of shit happening in Charlottesville. Tea Bazaar is located just around the corner from where Heather Heyer was murdered. This weighs heavily locally, energetically. These haiku events have always been open to all, and I’ve encouraged them to be a sanctuary where people can express themselves – seriously, strangely, wildly, howeverly – and that has not changed. But it takes on added importance (in my mind) with the launch of this new venue at this particular time.

We get locked down by life and algorithms and activities into our separate and segregated little cliques, and build invisible walls around these little sub-sets, and as we get deeper into these segregated compounds, especially the ones with digital walls which we don’t see out of so easily, we become more distrustful, fearful, paranoid, judgmental, and ultimately outright hateful. I firmly believe in the natural fact that people are people (for the most part) and if you can strip away the propaganda and poison, we can enjoy shared space in a beneficial way for all. That’s the hope of these things. I hope for them not to be my event, but our event.

That being said, don’t bring your poison or toxicity to the cookout. Your ass will get asked to sit the fuck down or leave right quick. We go by sanctuary cookout rules – don’t fuck up nobody else’s good time.

Anyways, this is the long-should’ve-been-done post on my website saying the haiku slams I have held, now called Southern Gothic Futurist Haiku Slams, are back. Oh yeah, the name... Southern Gothic Futurist... what does that mean? Well, one of the most inspirational wild style artistic philosophers of the past half century for me was Rammellzee, and his Ionic Treatise Gothic Futurism document is hugely influential on my philosophies of recent years, as I’ve attempted to take my fucked up lower class bound for doom rural white southern ass, which I’d already healed (a bit) from white trash to dirtgod, and move it further to a more post-colonial way of thinking, due to a lot of personal realizations over the past few years, plus the influence of where I live and the river I sit by and the language all that speaks (which is not English). I love the south, but I realized I love it as a philosophical thing as much as geographical. The American South is where immigration has already had strong foothold for decades. I got a coconut water (agua de coco) at a tienda in sleepy ass Keysville which I used to ride my bike to as a kid. Cross-cultural pollination is a good thing. And the American south I grew up in, with the added influence of Latin immigration, combined with heavy African-American presence, plus ragged underclass white influences, has always felt like a special mix to me, that fits the ingredients to build a post-whatever the fuck we’re living in culture’s healing redone culture.

But also, the Global South, which is everywhere on Earth pretty much exploited and pillaged and siphoned off of by what it is often misidentified as “western culture”, has that same philosophical bent to it. In the spirit of being against the energies that killed Heather Heyer and stormed into Charlottesville last August, and in fact have been rearing themselves like poison ivy throughout the internet and into real life, I want to embrace and manifest that Southern Gothic Futurist vision fully. I don’t care about politics to be honest, at least not at organized level, don’t care about borders, about race or ethnicity, really don’t care about none of these structures put in place which help create those walls I spoke about above. I don’t give a fuck about none of that (which is not the same as saying they don’t exist... they definitely exist). Southern Gothic Futurism is about everybody, all us ragged and wretched and marginalized and forgotten and unheard and even some that aren’t ragged or wretched or marginalized but are respectful, all of us coming together and sharing our selves in short blasts, and having fun, and building community, and building love together, and being cousins in the human experience. We are all gonna be cousins. That’s the Southern Gothic Futurist vision.

Rojonekku Haiku Basho explanation of how they work

UPCOMING BASHO:
May 9 - Charlottesville VA at Firefly FB EVENT PAGE

JJ Krupert Jan 2018 number six "i found a man in my bed"

the last haiku event I did in Richmond was a horrible failure because the gallery – which already had felt questionable because they shut down the zine library that had been housed there – double-booked haiku event with some shitty indy rock show (sorry indy rockers) so we had to move upstairs after yoga was over, and it was noisy and stupid and I really wanted to punch people. also we had to wait outside for like an hour for yoga to end, and really I should’ve just cancelled it but I had a couple people coming who love the events and I love those people so I didn’t. but it felt like a horrible fucking mistake.

there was an older african-american dude panhandling out front, and though I had no money, I got bored standing around with the well-to-do struggle professional class which usually attend haiku events (no diss) so started chatting the dude up. turns out he’d been out of prison for a little while after shooting a dude in the ass when he caught him fucking his ol’ lady. also turns out he was from 10 miles way out in the country where I live, not Richmond, and he knew about how good brown’s country store’s fried chicken used to be, and a guy I used to work with and get high and drunk with in the warehouse was actually his cousin. “he loves them white girls, don’t he?” lol, yes he did.

anyways, now every time I hear this Roy C song about whether you’d shoot a dude you caught in the bed with your ol’ lady or not, I think of that guy out on the street at that shitty haiku event, and wonder what kind of haiku that dude would’ve wrote? and how come I’m not doing haiku events with people like that? or at all?

also if you know of a place to do haiku events, hit me up. gonna re-write the manual/introduction at some point while fucking off at work or home in the next few weeks, but if you already know, you already know. and if you don’t, just find 8 people, tell them to write some haiku, and have me show up and babble at you. give me a couch to sleep on too please, if it’s too far away from home. or if I just wanna hang out and meet some new people. that’s actually the whole point of those things – for people to meet each other and act a fool together. not nearly enough acting a fool goes on nowadays, the simple type of acting a fool where you’d know if you stepped into serious foolishness, like sleeping with somebody’s partner in shady ways, you might get shot. people assume they can suck and not catch repercussions too much, because the repercussions are wrong. right and wrong has very little to do with what you do with most of your day.

so yes, I would’ve shot that man, Roy C, now that you ask, except I don’t keep guns, so I would’ve stabbed him instead, which would’ve been a lot messier and less chance of fatality too.

Rojonekku Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournaments 2015

So we've already done a couple of haiku events this year, but I've failed to update my site. Basically these are ongoing affairs of battle thru haiku, where I host/MC the event, and we all share through the crazy characters we indulge thru haiku, and fun is had and connections are made and the world's evil is destroyed with immensity of wonderfulness.
Here is a google doc link that explains how they work in greater detail than most humans think about caring for nowadays.
Also I can do this nonsense anywhere there is interest. I will tell tall tales of wonderful realness, as part of my philosophical wanderings thru the deserts of the North American wilderness. I work well with both children and the incarcerated (so far), and am able to talk in whatever direction might be important to you, so long as it is also halfway important to me. I'm not a prostitute, though I've got books and zines and other nonsense ephemera of Raven-life that I hopefully will sell enough of to get Greyhound bus money home. If not, oh well, I guess I'm homeless in your town. Congratulations. Just hit me up at ravenmack at gmail dotcom. Also I have a FB page and Twitter which I think are in the sidebar but maybe not too. Google that shit though. I'll show up.

Upcoming events:

FRIDAY MAY 29 AT THE LITTLE GRILL

IN HARRISONBURG VA - 8:00 PM FREE

PLUS PREVIOUS EVENTS THIS YEAR

First event in Richmond of 2015 at Balliceaux, Ryan Apehead won regular tournament in finals over Amy Wonderchicklady.

First event in Charlottesville of 2015, at Al-Hamraa in IX Art Park as part of IX@6. Mostly I yelled nonsense at people who didn't know me, and then Benji the Boatwright won a shortened field tournament.


A night of nonsense in Richmond again. Flash-brain the bartender won the tournament, Eric this dude won the battle royal, and I beat Mr. Revolt of the Apes in a ridiculous death match.

Final Hand-to-Hand Haiku Showdown of 2014

So this is the end of the second year of this thing, Saturday, November 8, at BON Cafe Wildstyle Spot on South Street about two blocks off the stupid Downtown Mall in Charlottesville. There is a $5 suggested encouraged you might as well cover at the door (capped at $15 per family, if you are bringing family, which you should, because this is family-friendly). There will be a large year-end championship tournament. It says Invitational but I may let anybody compete because I am a practicing chaoticist. Also there will be music by Harli Saxon, an amazing young singer-songwriter from the area. And of course there will be all the normal Raven Mack Rojonekku nonsense gibberish.

I contemplated putting a dagger into the heart of these events, but I have been conjuring spirits by my field rock altar, and envisioning a revamped format for 2015. So we will be back for a new season next calendar year. But, as always (which is not so obvious being this is only the second year), we will take off the winter, horde our haiku nuts for self, sit by the fire wearing fresh pelts so fresh and so clean clean, and prepare both physically and mentally and heartfully for next year. But let's go out with a blast. Let us conjure up and manifest "It". What is "It"? I don't know. I don't even know "I". If I can't know "I" which seems by our language to be the first half of "It", how can I truly know "It", in a way that can define it using the limitation of words? I can't. But we will try to manifest "It" in full and living motherfucking effect, on November 8. Word is bond (as well as bondage).

ADDITIONAL NOTE ABOUT THE COMPETITION ITSELF ON NOVEMBER 8: Competitors are coming from east, north, south, and west. Originally I had envisioned this as an invitation-only competition, but instead it's going to be wide open to whoever wants to compete, though those who have competed and won in the past will be advanced out of preliminary round. You can use any haiku from throughout the year as well, as it's 2014 Championship so to speak, so again, word.

2014 Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournaments

ROJONEKKU HAND-TO-HAND HAIKU NONSENSE. Probably worth nothing there are only two of these officially left for the year - the last Richmond one and then the year-end championship invitational nonsense. Participation has waned at times recently, as has enthusiasm both from others as well as myself. Looking forward to shutting it down for the winter and perhaps coming back with a revamped style next spring. BUT FOR NOW LET'S MAKE THESE LAST TWO EVENTS RAUCOUS AFFAIRS OF BEAUTIFUL NONSENSE GIBBERISH!

• October 22: Balliceaux, Richmond, VA, 8:00 pm sign-up, 8:30 pm kick-off
• November 8: BON, Charlottesville, VA, 7:00 pm sign-up, 7:30 pm kick-off

PREVIOUS POSTERS PLUS HOW THIS SHIT WORKS IF YOU STILL DON'T KNOW

old haiku flyers from 2014 & how that shit works

I hope to see all of you and talk in real life and conspire against these fucking robots that are starting to control every aspect of our lives and communications and creations. If you have any questions email me at ravenmack inside google dotcom or hit me up on Facebook where I am Raven Doctorlounge Mack or better yet twitter where I am the rambling subconscious of the Piedmont foothills at SSVa_Raven.

Rojonekku Hand-to-Hand Haiku tournaments are a variation on haiku battles that have existed as an off-shoot to poetry slams for the past decade. Our version was established with students in my Rojonekku Word Fighting Arts school, and has been adapted for public performance/competition. The idea is to be all-inclusive, of styles of poet, of types of people, of modes of thinking, of anything really, so as to cultivate as wide a diversity of short poems as possible. Our world needs more diversity. And then that diversity needs to be more diverse. Ten shades of the same thought is not diversity. Ten different thoughts is.
WHAT HAND-TO-HAND HAIKU ENTAILSA Hand-to-Hand haiku battle works as a single-elimination tournament, meaning any number of people can participate. The first round works to eliminate the field down to the closest number divisible by two, in one-on-one matches. From that point on, it’s a simple matter of one-on-one match-ups to narrow the participants down to four, and then a final two competitors. All early rounds are a best of 3, the semifinals a best of 5, and the finals a best out of 7. The number of rounds required depend on how many competitors.What does “best of” mean, and how does that work? Easy, yo. There will be three judges pre-selected for the night’s festivities. They will have two flags (different ones obviously, we’ll assume red and blue for ease of explanation). In each match-up, one competitor will have a red flag, and the other a blue flag. Red flag reads a haiku first, then blue, then after a brief moment of thought, the three judges, who hold both colored flags, raise the flag of who won that round, in their on-the-spot opinion. Whichever flag a majority of judges raises is considered the winner of that round, meaning if two out of three judges say blue, then blue wins the first round, and is up 1 to 0. Loser of any round reads first the next round, so red would read a second haiku, followed by blue, followed by judges’ decision, and so on, until one of the competitors wins 2 rounds. At most this would need 3 rounds to be completed, thus it is called a best-of-3. The same process is repeated, but with more rounds for the semifinals and finals.This means for all people reading haiku, you may need up to 25 or so different haiku, in the off-chance the first round, the semifinals, and finals all go to their maximum amount of rounds, and that you advance accordingly. Thus, I say you need a minimum of 20-some haiku, although if you are eliminated early or win rounds quickly, most likely very few of you will actually use that many haiku, perhaps even using as few as 2 or 3. No worries; save what you wrote for the next one.Here is the thing though: you select which haiku you read for each round, rather than reading them in a set order, so to have a larger, more varied arsenal of haiku gives yourself the freedom to choose ones that might fit your opponent or the moment more easily, to tap into the flow of the evening, or which one you would assume might strike a favorable mood with the judges. I look at it as each haiku is an arrow, and the more arrows you have in hand, the more likely you are able to find a sharp one. So come equipped as you see fit.On a personal aside, as a man who has literally written several thousand haiku over the past decade, a method I use is writing them one per index card. This is a good method for a hand-to-hand haiku battle, as you can have your handful of index cards, mark out ones you use, and shuffle them around and use them accordingly. Just a tip; you can use it or ignore it as you see fit. Once you use a haiku though, you can’t re-use it in the tournament format again, so if you put them all on one page, put an X next to the ones you’ve used so as to not repeat yourself.
WHAT ABOUT HAIKU?Ah yes, the terribly pretentious question us westerners are forced to ask ourselves with regards to a Japanese literary tradition based on a language of characters while we speak syllables. Haiku traditionally was tied to the seasons, and the most common western translation has been a three-line poem of five syllables, seven syllables, and five syllables, which is often times seen as the truest replication of the Japanese poem. For the sake of our Hand-to-Hand Haiku purposes, to keep everybody on even ground, I tend to encourage that we go with this. Now somebody may say, “Wait, counting syllables goes against what haiku actually is, Raven Mack!” I can assure you, I know this form on a deep and personal level, and could tell you that haiku is not even a poetic form on its own, but is part of a larger group form of poetry called renga where the first part was called hokku and became the title of famous renga poems, thus it became its own thing as literary time passed. So haiku is not even technically what the hell it is supposed to be. So for all haiku traditionalists insulted at counting syllables, once you are holding mass parties where groups of people compose poems as a group with 100 verses per poem, you can hold your complaints to yourself. We cannot accept part of a tradition but pretend the rest doesn’t exist and call ourselves traditionalists. I mean, we could, and in fact that’s what most people do, but I’m not supporting that.So for our sake, our haiku will be three-line poems, preferably of 5-syllables, 7-syllables, and 5-syllables. I will not count them though, and if you feel overly confined by this structure (form is good for you though), you can stretch the definition of haiku to mean a short poem of 17-syllables (or less).Also, traditionally, these have been tied to the seasons, or nature, but I regard the act of haiku as more a meditation or habit of observation, which means all the screwed up parts of the world made by man are as natural as nature, and more than perfect for haiku. You can go traditional or you can go with observing the world around you or you can go experimental. Whatever’s clever. For me, it is a meditation on the world around me, and this can be natural or it can be spiritual or completely inside my own head. I use it as word medicine, so whatever I feel like I need the form to give me, to make me feel better, to help me process the world I’m in, that’s how I go.And obviously, you should write your own haiku. If you have competed before in a different Rojonekku Hand-to-Hand tournament, you're expected to come with fresh material. Obviously there are no haiku police who will count syllables or be like, "Didn't she read that one before?" We, as the viewing community, will police ourselves, so if you are in the crowd at an event and it seems someone's gone long on syllables or repeating themselves, I encourage you to chatter amongst yourselves about it to create that uncomfortable buzz thing that happens in public events. If the competitor repeats these shady activities, hopefully the buzz will turn to outright booing and jeering. In fact, unlike your standard poetry reading, I encourage the crowd to make noise and respond. This is not to be a silent awe affair.
BUT HOW WILL THESE BE JUDGED?A valid question, as none of us wants to be judged, and yet judges will be involved. Honestly, there is no right or wrong way to pick a winner, and this method will always be subjective. Always. But I am going to have three judges, and attempt to curate each of them from a different angle of cultural sensibilities. Judges’ decisions will be final, and also subjective, so never take it personally. This is meant to be fun, and will be fun, so nobody needs to get all, “Damn, why wasn’t my poetic greatness not properly recognized in this damn hand-to-hand haiku thing? This is bullshit!”Judges: You will judge as you feel appropriate. Like I mentioned above, I’ll pick you because I'm thinking you'll observe from a certain perspective, but I might be completely off on judging your personality, so feel free to toss that aside completely and just go with your heart. In fact, the whole point of haiku is to go with your heart, and this whole nonsense endeavor of a tournament is meant to motivate people to go with what’s in their heart, not worry and become anxious.
SO WHAT DO WE WIN?Winner of the night’s tournament will receive the accolades of an adoring attending public, and generally I try to have some sort of prize to present to the winner, depending on what I get my hands on from willing accomplices. As part of hosting the festivities, I'll share some of my own Rojonekku writing, or unique perspective, or perhaps just talk crap about what I've been cooking up in the kitchen. The entire motivation behind Rojonekku WFA (Word Fighting Arts) is to battle the complacency of routine life with words, and this means not just books or printed matter but stories and jokes and strange tales from stranger places and just everything and anything to be honest.So that is how the Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournament works. If you are interested in participating - which I hope you will be - contact me at ravenmack at gmail dot com. Even though this is developed from the slam poetry tradition, my goal with this is to bring different styles of poets from different backgrounds into a mutually accepted format, and interact. Then we cross-pollinate each other, and everything will taste better.

upcoming

previously

Last Hand-to-Hand Haiku Event of 2013

On the evening of November 21st, we will be having our last Hand-to-Hand Haiku tournament of the calendar year at BON space on South Street in Charlottesville. This first year of public haiku events has been a lot of fun, and I'm packing all the surprises I can into this last one, to make it sort of a year end get-together for anyone who has attended any of them throughout the year. And if the turnout is as good as it was last month, I plan on having both an under-18 and adult tournament at this event.
In addition, I'll be talking my standard Raven Mack speaking-in-tongues gibberish. I'll have some poetry books there for the buying, and also stacks upon stacks of truth-free pamphlets for the having (donations kindly accepted to support the Rojonekku WFA cause). For anyone who's been to one of these in the past, you know already to expect whatever. There are a number of paths any one given event could take, and I try not to hold too tight to the reins. If we go in a different direction than anticipated, that's what we do. You can't control life, just ride that motherfucker out.
Sign-up starts at 7:00 pm, we'll start the jibber-jabber at 7:30, and as always, the event is free. Here is how Hand-to-Hand Haiku tournaments work. If you have any questions, just hit me up at ravenmack at gmail.com.

ORALE! Let me speak on this! at VCU November 15 (plus Hand-to-Hand Haiku tournament)

On Friday afternoon, November 15, at 3:00 pm in the Student Commons at Virginia Commonwealth University, I will be giving a presentation or some sort called New Writing: Maintaining Your Shadow in Light of Total Awareness. What will this presentation involve? All of the following:

• Keeping it shady even though authoritative overlords want you to be transparent as fuck so as to get a better digital read of how they can sell you shit/make you afraid of shit.
• Preventing your blood from being turned into money by lizard humanoids.
• Using curry in combination with lacto-fermented foods to loosen up stagnant energy in your gut – kinda like that bullshit lemonade master cleanse thing, but actually encouraging positive probiotic growth instead of just gut-bombing yourself like healthy bulimia.
• How to successfully navigate time travel to within five decades past, and four weeks forward. Beyond that either way, you’re on your own.
• The importance of writing strict form sonnets in the 21st Century, but not iambic pentameter because BORING.
• How our minds being completely fragmented by wireless digital energies what which we interact with openly is definitely a change occurring, but rather than get all Luddite scared, perhaps we should just learn to do better more soulful mosaics with our fragments.
• Increasing flow of positive chemicals in your brain like serotonin (sex juice), omega-3s (fish juice), beta-endorphins (exercise juice), and how to combat the depressing tall grasses that grow in your mind’s blind spots (aka sub-conscious).
• How to turn human misery into abstract wealth.
• The neo-pagan, post-industrial, subliminal earth consciousness of Balkan state football hooligan groups, specifically as it relates to setting fires in occupied spaces at away games.
• Bedazzling balaclavas, while still maintaining an Etsy- and Pinterest-free zone.
• Wearing digital sock puppets for increased comfort.
• How to psychologically justify to yourself that America is indeed still an exceptional meritocracy, and because of that, if you are smart enough and work hard enough, you will not be fucked.
• Using paint-sticks efficiently on rusty objects.
• How to treat the surface web and more covert deep web like a raised bed garden, using digital composting to bear life sustaining fruit not yet harvested by libertarians (aka The Alternate White Guys).
• Back yard screen-printing.
• Converting old government auction school buses to bio-diesel, and how to effectively bury recycled shipping containers for concealed lifestyles. (NOTE: This particular part will be specific to southern West Virginia.)
• Appearing in real life to actually exist, to other animals.
• Identifying future trends by communicating with forest spirits, who have basically been in hiding since 1672 on the North American continent, east of the Mississippi.
• How to securely change your password with Google products without having to ever use auto-save again.
• The art of burning bridges, enjoying the fire, fighting up stream, baptizing yourself in struggle, building new bridges, and then burning those too (and how to save fun metallic memento pieces from every bridge to weld your own Power Whirligig Nkisi).
• Composing post-narrative resumes for a career-less world.
• Increasing your personal brand’s worldwide presence through guerrilla means that are not necessarily cool or necessary, then feeling bad about it but being stuck with what you’ve done, and learning how to come to grips with what a piece of shit you were. And selling related t-shirts.
• Squatting on, developing, and sharing intellectual property wasting its true potential because people are assholes who think they own every fucking thing they ever thought of in their lives.
• Raising chickens, including proper hen-to-rooster ratios as it relates to egg productivity and quality of life, as well as further explications of gamecock vs. peacock cultural differences, and how the guinea hen sort of bridges those differences, which is why guinea hens are so goddamned annoying.
• Where to find the least toxic blunt wrappers in the hood.
• Living discreetly in interstate median strips, and how to get EBT benefits with no known address.
• Counting to 666 by 7s, using only whole numbers.
• Illegal emigration, and which South American rural area might be best for you.
• How “WHOO!”ing like “Nature Boy” Ric Flair can benefit you in your everyday life, and figuring your way out of four common locks on our psychic energies.
• Making your own stencil that says GENTRIFIED to spray all over everything every where.
• How impact font is the comic sans of pretend-seriousness.
• Creating effective memes and hashtags through the use of memes and hashtags.
• How to write better books that will get published and sell a bazillion copies to everybody on earth and then you’ll be rich as fuck and never have to hear another person tell you how to write better because it’ll totally finally be done, like magic, FTW.
• Culturing buttermilk at home, and using this as a basis to eat from-scratch buttermilk cornbread at least three mornings a week, thus increasing your ability to use a cast iron skillet which justifies the continued existence of cast iron skillets, which ultimately will become more important than smart phones, again. Also building cast iron skillet apps (aka recipes).
• Whether yarrow tincture is actually the tinfoil hat people always joke about, and whether tinfoil hats may actually increase the damage done to your neuronal composition.
• Monster catfish of the James River, and they symbolic relevance to our human struggle for equality worldwide, but specifically 85 miles in both directions off the river throughout Virginia.
• Turning personal demons of self-destruction into dragon slayers what which you unleash upon the unlounging aspects of this crooked world.
• How to successfully pretend you care about unimportant bullshit both online and in the post-modern workplace, so as to not call attention to what you’re really working on in life.
• Making yourself more upworthy, by speaking pure truth at 1:32 mark, but literally blowing people’s minds into a thousand shards of newfound awareness at 3:48.
• Plus assorted other recipes, anecdotes, and creation myths from my family’s 4.45 acre Bird Tribe Compound, currently co-spirited by the trickster nature of ravens and the healing nature of owls.
• None of the above. Always none of the above. Perhaps. Who knows?

After the “talk” there will be a short break I guess, where we talk at each other on a more personal level, then we’ll have a Rojonekku W.F.A. Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournament for all who choose to take part. If you aim to compete, bring yourself 20-some haiku. If you aim to watch, aim away. I hope you hit the target.