SONG OF THE DAY: I'll Keep Searching (kudzu'd)

I had planned on writing something intelligent here when I woke up this morning, but then I fissured my brain with work (the things I do to make a paycheck to allegedly “make a living”). And in the gaps in those responsibilities, I further fissured my brain by looking inside the internet, seemingly for things but more truthfully at things, most of which I didn’t need to see. In fact, that’s likely why you are here now. We (people) really fucked up somewhere along the way. Not really feeling this big rah rah America 250 bullshit, because it feels way more like we fucked up than we got it all right.

SONG OF THE DAY: Just Me and You (kudzu'd)

I love bumpin’ the slowed souldies, and wish I could build a spot where this type of vibe could be enjoyed publicly. Seems like all you can do is either the familiar or the expected. Like there’s a certain style of “funk vibes” that’s allowed. I don’t know man, everything feels so predictable, even the allegedly clever stuff, I guess because our whole society has been tag teamed in the brain by long covid and digital dementia, and all you can really do is get a bunch of drunks to have cheerful pavlovian responses triggered by dopamine spikes from their nostalgia biases being triggered. Death to ‘Merica, baby!

SONG OF THE DAY: You Bring Out The Freak In Me (kudzu'd)

When you read the actual U.S. Declaration of Independence, it lists out 27 specific grievances the colonists had against the King of England at the time. Many of them outright describe things that the Trump regime is doing now. "He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance." Obviously, the language is dated, but I'd say he's infracted well over half of these historical infractions that caused an American revolution. And yet, the last grievance was, "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us," which sure, he's still in on this one. But that one goes on to say, "and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions," which sounds a good bit like something I'd expect J.D. Vance to be saying on a podcast tomorrow. All this is to say that yes, things are looking bleak. But I'd say the time of talking about what is isn't constitutional is probably over, because this system was flawed from the beginning. And obviously, we now have a menagerie of half-witted authoritarian wannabes trying to do it, in the most bumbling, shoot themselves in the foot way. We are actually lucky for that, because if a next time is allowed to happen (assuming we survive this time), that authoritarian wannabe may end up be far more intelligently evil. Nonetheless, it's time for a reboot, a new constitutional congress. I'd suggest we're fine with the geographical House of Representatives, but I'd switch the Senate into representation by wealth - divide the whole population up according to net wealth, split it into 100 equal groups, and each one gets one Senator. Imagine a chamber of Congress with economic representation, and how different things would be. Plus term limits, you can repeat one time as Representative, one time as Senator (except all the Senators would move to different groups due to being a Senator, and couldn't run again for like the bottom 80% of the economic strata), and one time as President. Also there should be three Vice Presidents, from the three most popular (vote getting) political parties. And anyone who identifies as an Indian savage should be able to fight the President, one on one, no weapons, naked, in Lafayette Park on Saturday afternoons. And if that savage can pin the President's shoulders to the dirt, for three strikes of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court's gavel, then that savage becomes President, and the former President takes over the Vice President spot of his political party. The former Vice President is forced to fuck off forever. And that is the platform I am running for fake Congress on, in Old Virginia's 67th District. So be sure to write in "fuck all y'all!" this November! Because "y'all" means "all"!

0VR CVLTVR3 1S 4 L4CK 0F...

our culture is a lack of 
culture… identities bought 
and sold with a heartless ease 

SH1FT1NG L4NDSC4P3S 41N'T 34SY...

shifting landscapes ain’t easy 
for those raised inside stables; 
for me, I love wilderness 

SONG OF THE DAY: Cumbia Pa Morirme (kudzu'd)

I was thinking back on the first older folks I encountered who had been brainwashed by too much Rush Limbaugh radio or Fox News tv, and how they were seemingly normal people who just got worse and worse as the diminished cognitive ability and disinformation seepage into their stream of consciousness made them unbearable to even casually talk to. I was thinking on this because there’s a pretty large abundance of people like this, who you can’t even discuss anything with, because if you disagree, they immediately flip on some reactionary defensive counter accusation based on the binaries they’ve been programmed with, which generally speaking have nothing to do with what I’m saying. And in all the fear and loathing about how quickly the illusion of American democracy is being destroyed, very little is being said about how many people are brainwashed by digital media sources, much less how we can ever get beyond that. And there were people pointing this out in 2016, but instead of doing anything, it’s just been left unchecked to get worse over the past decade.

A woman who used to watch my oldest when she was younger has been lost. She even took my kid to Great Britain with her daughter… that’s how much we trusted her. But she got lost to the rabbitholes and is now a Make America Healthy Again wingnut who has lost all real friends and mostly just posts to an adoring bot community on X. I saw her last fall at an opening of a play, but didn’t say hello because she had that mentally ill thousand yard star in her eyeballs, that I knew I wouldn’t be talking to the person I used to know, because that person has been altered into something else, a hollow shell of a human that still walks and talks and shits and eats and thinks it’s thinking when it’s actually just regurgitating the programming they’ve willing consumed.

I was thinking about this the other day talking with my girlfriend, too, and how bluesky can feel so demoralizing because there’s such a sense of doom, with little joy. And also how Palestinian activists, during the height of online protests, were demanding we all watch the atrocities seen in video clips, as if it was our duty to witness those horrors. There is no gauge on these things that tell us when we’ve reached our limit, that we’ve had enough. There’s no bar at the top of our screen letting us know, “Okay, you’ve consumed enough horror for the day… log off for the night.” We just keep sucking from the demoralizing tit of social media, feeling worse and worse about it all.

Today’s horror of the day is the dimwitted devils are threatening to cut the VA staff by a large chunk. Anybody who’s ever gone to a VA hospital knows it’s already a slow and tedious process, but depended upon by a lot of people. Bob was my step-grandfather, and I have fond memories of riding with him in his truck to the VA hospital off Hull Street in Richmond – over an hour drive each way, which he had to do in order to get the care he needed. He’d take me to an all you can eat cafeteria style buffet afterwards, and it was such a treat. He was a good dude, and for all intents and purposes all of our grandfather. But we just called him Bob, and he had throat cancer but the trach never healed so he had the voice box you stuck under the tongue, and he’d click it at us.

Bob and my grandmother lived in a trailer most of my life, after the first few years. The trailer was in a segregated trailer park in Farmville, Virginia, through the woods from the projects. I spent a lot of time there, and it was exciting on weekends because they had cable and I could watch World Championship Wrestling on Saturdays. Wasn’t no cable at my country house, not even possible. It didn’t exist. Even when they moved their trailer to down below my mom’s house, they got a satellite, which was much cheaper by that time, and Bob and Gramma would watch baseball. My grandma loved the Braves, but they’d watch the Cubs too… basically if baseball was on, it was in the background.

A lot of what we’re filling our time with is just that – filling our time as background. I wonder if old people could’ve just had free access to baseball all these years, would we have less brainwashed folks? They could be mad about free agent signings instead of tricked into thinking Venezuelan gangs were taking over cities.

I actually watched like 5 minutes of Fox News a few weeks back, just to see what it was bantering about. I found it shockingly hateful. It was some sort of pseudo-talk show trying to be funny, but all the jokes were cruel, and it all was just sugar coating for driving home talking points for the bullshit going on right now by the dimwitted devils. It was well produced bullshit, basically, but I imagine if I left that on in the background every night, thinking it was useful, I’d start to think like that. That’s how propaganda works. None of us are impervious to it. It’s not a free will thing the entire way, as it eventually turns into neurological manipulation. And with long covid and how much digital consumption we all have now, who knows what early dementia rates are going to look like in a decade. And of course, the act of scientific study itself is being dismantled at the same time. It’s all pretty crazy to be living through, and wondering how violent the summer is going to be, whether there’s going to be elections in 4 years, or 2 years, and if so, how many among us will still be allowed to attend the theater of voting.

I guess I say all this as a reminder that you don’t have to absorb all the seepage from the poisonous political swamp that is the United States right now. It may not do you any good to do so anyways. And I also remind you that America, the land and place, had people here and existed before the United States. And using history as a guide, it’s more likely than not going to still exist after the United States is gone. That’s likely hard for some folks to accept, because we’ve so deeply internalized this notion that the United States is a uniquely special snowflake amidst human history, that shall never be melted by the political hells known to all other people throughout time. I find myself still untangling some of those meritocracy myths lately, expecting checks and balance might still check and balance, when in actuality, like every other government or empire or nation-state throughout time, all it takes is one small group to aggressively put their thumbs on the scales to fuck it all up. The propaganda, the dehumanization of your actual neighbors, the steadfast denial of reality until the horrors swallow you personally… it’s all been seen before, many times over.

And people lived beyond it. They still had moments of joy amidst the worst times, for the most part. There are pretty horrible atrocities that have happened where it’s hard to imagine folks still finding joy in there. And I still tell myself these dimwitted devils aren’t competent enough to create that level of atrocity; they’ll just smash a bunch of shit thinking they can do it better, and make a few dollars off the upgrade, until they realize they can’t easily replicate a labyrinth of public service that took centuries to build.

I don’t really have nothing hopeful to end this on. I’m just sharing my thoughts today. All of what’s going on is hard for many people in many different ways, and to varying levels. I know of people who have lost jobs already. I also know folks struggling with their health right now, so the politics is background anxiety to life and death worries. Life remains life, and if you still got it, you gotta live it. I hope you are still able to practice finding joy in your life, and I hope that never stops. I hope you are able to share joy when possible. I know I hope I do. I want the world to be better, and feel better, because of my actions and how I am. Not worse. And I just can’t understand how people can think they make the world better through cruelty. I hope they have to answer for it at some point down the road, but that’s not my role in this universe.

SONG OF THE DAY: The Message (kudzu'd)

“Don’t push me, I’m close to the edge,” skipping and repeating should be the national anthem.

SONG OF THE DAY: Paradise

Bambu is one of the best MCs out there in my opinion. I look forward to whatever new shit he ever drops. And if he don’t drop nothing new, I can keep enjoying the body of work he already created. It’s dudes like this that I wish got paid enough to survive capitalism more easily in our fucked up poison culture. But of course you don’t get paid for telling real shit, unless your realness is fake shit that the Think They’re Reals gobble up like candy corn in the feedlot. And honestly, I truly just appreciate Bambu for being dope as fuck. I wish all of us survived capitalism, and in fact wish the whole fuckin’ thing just got cancelled and we could have a more direct line to happiness, instead of this Rube Goldberg ass contraption called western culture pursuit of happiness if you wasn’t born rich.

SONG OF THE DAY: Making Cash Money

I love a good “making cash money” song because I am, in fact, the opposite of this vibe. I’d guess the bulk of folks throughout the times of hip hop who have bumped songs about making cash money are of the same lot in life, and it’s one of those situations where we happily manifest the opposite of reality. It’s a great release that helps you forget how crushing an economic system we live in, which is even more so now with digital tracking and credit scores and shit that wasn’t even hitting as hard when this song first came out. We really did create one fucked up way of living here in America. Anyways, I could really use a magical influx of cash money; or I could use the end of this system we currently live in. I’d be good with either one to be honest. I think my escape the crushing conditions is more individualistic – the end of this horrible system would be collective. That’d be painful too, to navigate the transitions, but there’s no reason we can’t make catchy songs for that, too, to sing around the pallet fires at night together. Or we could just keep singing how we’re making cash money around the pallet fires. That’d be wonderfully dystopian, and actually happens already, in houseless camps everywhere. What an amazing country, lol.

SONG OF THE DAY: Status Quo

Even in living in the Greater Go-Go Belt (from far south of Baltimore to about Petersburg, with rural trickles into the Piedmont of Virginia that fluctuate, occasionally even reaching North Carolina), there’s so much music that got to exist that is hard to find. So much stuff has gotten a second life due to the digital era, but a lot of it – this song for example – seem to have had a second life in Europe and beyond all the while mostly forgotten in America. Are we that superficial here in America, bouncing between next things too fast to pay attention to the last dozen things deeply enough? Maybe. But how a 10-minute long go-go tinged song called “Status Quo” complaining about Reaganomics could’ve gotten lost on me until the past year bums me out. This shit is great. Political as fuck, but not in a pretentious way like today’s online politics tends to always be, and still funky as fuck too. Where the fuck is Donald Banks now? What happened to this dude? And obviously this was such a jam that the original Kapital Sity Records release got re-released by 4th & Broadway in Europe. I miss physical media, which I guess is why I’ve gotten so into 45 collecting the past year or two. Shit just takes a weird life of its own, bouncing between homes, and will exist magically in an unplayed state for decades. There is a 45 version of this, obviously not 10 minutes long, but I ain’t found one I can afford yet. Best believe if I do that shit is going in the collection. I just hope if they chop up the song for the 45, the b-side is just full of percussion breaks from this long version, because I need that as much as anything else.

M1L1T4NT TYP3S W4V1NG FL4GS...

militant types waving flags 
so hard they lost all meaning; 
just waiting for the fire now 

4DH3R3NC3 T0 D0GM4...

adherence to dogma will 
always lose the real essence 
(the goal is to live freely) 

SONG OF THE DAY: Caravan of Fools Remix

Ain’t no qualified Working Class Whisperers because our concept of what’s working class has been distorted. Labor Day weekend is perfect example, because the notion of a three-day weekend is alien to a vast expanse of wage laborers working in the sprawling and rootless suburbs that all look the same no matter which city they’ve show up as freedom tumors upon. We got two political parties deemed feasible in American life, and both of them speak to fake working classes that have middle class wealth – one not necessarily with college education and living off the actual land and coin wealth of their earlier generations, and the other often depending upon a college education but still lifted beyond the crushing struggles of actual daily poverty. It’s all so performative, and these dueling middle classes – both of whom manipulated to the benefit of the actual hyper-wealthy, spit and jeer at each other, and it’s become a dueling vision for America’s late empire fascist state. And I want to be clear – I’m not “both sides”ing this thing, because the right gives zero fucks about destroying us all who don’t fit their vision of a pure American future. But the liberal left, despite (in my mind) being the lesser of the two evils, is still a very evil and entirely unsupportable entity as well. The Dark Biden memes gave way to him living the gimmick, standing in front of red and black background with Marines flanking him this past week, looking like the bad guys from V for Vendetta.
Riding actual roads (not interstates), walking actual streets (not cul-de-sacs), and talking to other people is the only thing that will ever break through this. And I’m not even sure that’s as possible as it was even 6 years ago. I remember reading a dude who engineered some Latin American elections through use of digital means how the Clinton/Trump Presidential campaign was, to him, very clearly two propaganda machines working double time to defeat each other. Neither was benevolent, or resting on their own good; they both were manipulating human consciousness as best they could, with the digital tools at their disposal. That has only worsened in the ensuing six years, and people’s brains are heavily poisoned at this point, to where they don’t even see the strychnine in their thought processes. I still think actually talking to folks long enough to break through the politics can help, but also folks are so heavily poisoned, that there’s fewer and fewer folks willing to entertain your conversation from the beginning, because they look at you and decide who you are by the stereotypes the poisoning has implanted in their thinking, and they might not even be listening to you even if they let you talk. Shit is fucked.
But like always, when there is too much chaotic undergrowth, some sort of cultural fire will come along and clear it out, open the landscape back up, and folks will see more clearly again. That fire might be destructive, and painful, but at this point, ain’t no way around it. Too much shit has been allowed to digitally grow, creating a tinder of kindling for some sort of cataclysm that’s always just around the corner right now. We can’t escape it; just gotta keep an eye out for the smoke and make sure you keep yourself from getting consumed in the actual fire when it inevitably happens.

SONG OF THE DAY: Chippy, Chippy

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

VN1V3RS4L TRVTHS H1J4CK3D...

universal truths hijacked 
by mythologies ingrained 
in brain from a tender age 

SONG OF THE DAY: Lonely, Lonely Nights

Not been sleeping well lately, nor unwell really. Just your basic toss and turn with lack of comfort in any part of existence, but fatigued enough the body shuts down for five hours solidly, before waking up so that I can study the darkness with wide awake eyes, worrying about a whole lot of nothing. Life feels pretty good for the most part, if I actually think about it in that light way of thinking where you don’t go digging too deeply. Not entirely sure life can feel good within modern civilization if you go digging deeper though. Hate to think superficially, but we’re so removed from a deeper existence, interconnected with anything more than a couple days ago, that superficiality is kinda necessary. There’s a strange loneliness to existence currently, where you have the electronic impulses of being surrounded all the time – and we certainly as humans crave those connections still. But it disappears easily, and also has a hollowness to it so that when you’re fuckin’ losing your shit in the car outside the grocery store because you forgot about an insurance payment, and it triggered overdraft shit that’s got the chance to spiral the fuck beyond control by midnight, none of those digital connections can actually sit in the passenger seat and pick a song to play or just sit there uncomfortably while you freak out, and then when you calm down, go, “well, fuck it, you know?” I see sleep depictions or mattress promises where it’s like falling into clouds that wrap around you, and maybe I’m just poor and have never had a new mattress, but I’ve literally never had an experience like that sleeping. I’m tossing and turning, or my back is aching from some soft ass mattress not built for broken people like myself, so I have to sleep in my stomach because it feels like I’m tucking myself into a spoon and I better do it backwards lest I be half-crippled in the morning. The lonely, lonely nights of a rapidly decaying empire, that is going to enter the forced part of its empirical history, demanding compliance or be damned. So I’ll probably start sleeping even worse. Well, fuck it, you know?

4M3R1C4N DR34MS M4NGL3D...

American dreams mangled 
by diminishing returns 
of an empire in decline 

FR0M TH3 WR3CK4G3 0F TH3S3 GR34T...

from the wreckage of these great 
American myths, many 
wild chaos monkeys emerge 

TH3 R3D, WH1T3, 4ND BLV3 F4C4D3...

the red, white, and blue facade 
is faded and flaking, but 
folks keep swearing it’s all good 

R3ST0R3D P4SS3NG3R C4R S1TS...

restored passenger car sits 
outside visitors center 
in another dying town