SONG OF THE DAY: Tricks of the Trade

The other day me and the 18 year old swang by the Goodwill in the nearby city somewhat ravaged by its best years being a century back (like many places). These are always strange lands of sadness, but I kinda dig that city because it’s not as pretentiously self-important as the college town about the same distance from us, and I love the train yard there. Some dude was buying a giant ass telescope for $20 in front of us, and the dude at the register was talking to him about it. “I’ve blown way more money and less useful things, so even if it doesn’t work, it’s worth it,” the guy buying that thing said. Ol’ dude working the register was talking about the Hubble telescope, and how this Webb telescope was about to drop its first pictures ever in a couple days (that day being today), and how it took ten years for it to happen. I just kinda stood there patiently waiting for them to finish so I could buy a dvd copy of Friday and some Nike track pants, but it was interesting to me in this fucked up little city which once housed a giant Dupont carpet fiber factory but now mostly houses lost dreams could have this scene pop up in a thrift store checkout line. It was all very interesting to the observational chaos theoretician in me. Telescope guy hauled his giant telescope off the counter, register dude checked his phone notifications with the quickest of ease, got briefly distracted looking out the front window, then says, “Imagine the crazy shit that happens in the Wal-Mart parking lot,” before ringing up Friday and the track pants.

SONG OF THE DAY: Angel From Montgomery

I ain’t much on Sturgill Simpson, on the surface because his music felt like that forced “I’m different than regular country music” style anti-country music. “Even a black sheep is still a sheep” is a saying that has stuck with me about being too reactionary forces you to be attached to that which you’re reacting to. But beyond the surface level, he wears a cop mustache, which I never trust, even ironically, but especially in his case because his dad was actually a narcotics officer in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. You should not ironically be looking like a cop when your dad was an actual cop, and one of the most dishonest and deceitful sort. But Sturgill Simpson does, and I’m supposed to trust that. What my father taught me might’ve been discombobulated, chaotic, and filtered through the haze of drugs and alcohol, but one thing I remember clearly is DON’T TRUST COPS, OR PEOPLE WHO TRUST COPS.

I say all this because they had some sort of bullshit country music awards show a few weeks back, and some people had retweeted a Sturgill Simpson opinion about how disappointed he was at the fake ass country music awards show, they didn’t take a minute to mention the deaths of John Prine and Jerry Jeff Walker. Of course he positioned it in that cooler than thou light, that he only watched for a few minutes to see if they did it, not like he watched the whole fake ass thing. Of course he watched the whole thing though. But it’s also not like the fake country music industry gave a lot of love to guys like Prine, Hubbard, and Walker while they were alive, to be honest. Why would you expect different in death? Country music has always been fake as fuck, but since the ‘90s, after the rise of Garth Brooks in Nashville, it’s turned into even more of a mechanistic churning out of neurological trickery that sounds like music, behaves like music, so it must be music, when in actuality it’s just Wal-Mart muzak meant to market the American Empire. And it’s worked. The majority of people who consider themselves "country” are more likely to identify with sitting in a Wal-Mart parking lot than sitting by a creek, and they consider that to be what country means, especially when the Lowes is right there too. Wal-Mart/Lowes combination strip mall developments are a thousand times more country than a tobacco field in 2020 – ain’t no recount on that vote, because that’s how the majority feels.

So Sturgill Simpson taking his social media soapbox stance against the ever-present hypocrisy of country music industry just made me think, “lol, of course Sturgill Simpson did that.” His whole angle is positioning himself as a manufactured black sheep in opposition to the regular sheep. And he’d be played heavily at hipster breakfast restaurants in gentrifying spaces right now, if it wasn’t for the pandemic.

Anyways, John Prine died from complications related to Covid, which of course all those Wal-Mart parking lot country folk don’t think is real. All the sheep think they’re black sheep, overthrowing the wolves, but it’s just a bunch of fucking sheep, rambling around in various strip mall parking lots, lost in the buzz of late capitalist empire.

SONG OF THE DAY: Back Roads

Big Country has you brainwashed into thinking back roads are real 

they're not, nothing within 25 miles of an interstate is back road 

nothing within 10 miles of US highway is back road 

there are no back roads in America 

this is all a trick played by Big Country 

to make you think a new truck loan 

and going to Wal-Mart is a rural identity 

but it's not, you don't grow things, you don't build things, 

America is a giant plot, completely plotted out 

everything on-the-grid, nary a back road to be found 

google mapped into tax plats 

we are living a fraud 

WAKE UP SHEEPLE 

your guns are just more materialism 

all your points are hollow 

all your dirt roads have had gravel laid down by the state 

your mud bogging is performative faux-freebird wildness 

you are not even a cog in a machine any more 

not even a column in a spreadsheet 

you are just a single cell 

to be concatenated 

into submission 

The Unexpected Power of Lounge - Part I

(artist's rendering of what COULD'VE happened with our car;
also there may never be a Part II to this tbh)

Before I get into this essay upon the discreet and underground Power of Lounge, let me say Fuck Wal-Mart in general, and Fuck the Zion’s Crossroads Wal-Mart Super Center tire center in particular, for being bold and profound powers of unlounge working against us all in general, but recently my family in particular. My eldest daughter was about to head off to college, but got involved in a traffic accident where some dude passed out and ploughed his Nissan truck into oncoming traffic. He died, and a work van got crushed in the middle, and my daughter was involved in the third part, which destroyed her Volvo (late model, a 2001 S80), but sold me on Volvos because likely if she had been driving a Tercel or shitty old Citation (like teenage me), she would’ve been dead too. So we found another Volvo (even later model, a 1998 V70 station wagon, so conceivably she can live it once this U.S. Empire finishes failing). It needed a pair of tires and an oil change leading up to her going to college, so the ol’ lady and eldest daughter took it to the Wal-Mart there in Zion’s Crossroads, because how can you fuck up tires and an oil change?

I’ll tell you how. First, you put different size tires on than the ones you took off, although that didn’t cause an immediate problem. But secondly you can mangle the oil cap to where it no longer functions as a cap, but send the car on its way. We were heading a two-hour drive the next morning to move our daughter off to college, all her shit in the van up front, and her driving behind us (with her sisters, enjoying donuts and a last moment as siblings under the same roof). Not even half an hour into it, her car starts smoking like mad, so we get off the interstate (another force of unlounge on this Earth), and I pop the hood, and there’s oil everywhere, all over the bottom of the engine and catalytic converter and the shit’s actually on fire. So we call 911 because I ain’t got no fire hose, and I’m like “okay, yall shift everything around in the van so she can ride sitting on a milk crate, and I’ll stay here with the burning vehicle while you get her to college on time.” But the fire went out before the fire truck got there, and I left it with a lime green dust cloth in the window to tow to the shop later, wondering what the fuck was wrong with it now that it’d been on fire.

The shop I took it too is chill – Volvo specialists, but not on the high-and-mighty end of Volvo-dom (which is common for European vehicles, yet another force of unlounge… there’s so many). Daughter was at college without a car (which is fine, fuck it, you’re in college, go join the socialist club or something – which she literally did), and me and the ol’ lady are wondering if this previously perfectly fine late model Volvo station wagon was now toast due to incompetent ass Wal-Mart oil changers. The answer was no, not yet, as the shop called and said they replaced the oil cap that got fucked up, and cleaned off the engine, and we should be okay, though it would smell like de-greaser for a while until all that burned off too. So I paid the bill, and caught a ride into work bright and early the next morning with a dude down the road to pick-up the Volvo and park it to drive home after work. It did smell like de-greaser, which has that citrus-y smell of where mechanics wash their hands (think Orange Gojo, my preferred brand, which I think is what my dad used to use at the family shop he worked at for forever), and it was actually kinda pleasant on the way to parking, though the car still sounded rough.

Made my way through another day of pretending to be productive within the overly-complicated labyrinth of the immense bureaucracy, took my one mile walk back to where I park (by the railroad tracks, naturally), and attempted to drive the Volvo home. It still sounded rough, something not quite right, but I didn’t know what, so like anybody with a lifelong history of only driving shitty vehicles in various states of near death, I opened it up on the interstate, staying to the right lane as much possible (easier to escape sharing your natural-born carnage with others that way – the real danger of living a carnage-based lifestyle is being found legally and thus financially liable for committing carnage upon others; nobody gives a fuck if you mangle your own un-excel spreadsheets), and then when I got on the back roads headed home, opened it up the rest of the way. There was a knocking sound at regular intervals, and being this was originally an all-wheel-drive vehicle, upon which the dumbasses at Wal-Mart had put different size pair of tires on one end, I assumed those were related issues, of which I hoped to have an intense and as personal as possible in-person discussion with them as soon as I could. But I had to get home first. There is no right lane for easy escape on curvy rural Virginia back roads, so I just had to take my chances. There’s one spot in particular that’s extra chaotic for outsiders, because like one road twists through two curves while three other roads flow into it, with a country store opposite one side that has a sign out front that says things like “Happy Birthday Ol’ Fart Fuzzy” or “Now Have Bologna Burgers For Breakfast”, and it gives the impression of being like three forks in the road, each fork pointed a different way, all in about an eighth of mile of asphalt, with a country store thrown in for good measure. After clearing this chaos zone though, there’s a mostly straight stretch where you can gun it to test things out (and also where I once wrecked a Toyota Tercel and concussed myself with one of the best concussions I ever had, to where I couldn’t think clearly for a few weeks, and didn’t remember directions… that was a good one), so I tested things out.

Almost immediately there was a loud blowing out sound like a tire had popped, but I didn’t hear any rim scraping asphalt (an easily recognizable sound once you’ve experienced it a couple times). I pulled off into a logging trail entrance, and checked all the tires – good – and decided that even though it felt like I had power still, I might wanna park the Volvo up in the gravel lot by the country store to get towed back to the shop in case I’d blown something serious out. This is life of shitty vehicles thinking here, because when I wrecked my Tercel and had two crooked wheels and concussed myself, it sounded okay enough for me to drive it the remaining 10 miles home. But today’s Volvo did not sound 10-mile ready, so I parked it, texted the same dude from down the road to come pick me up, or else I was gonna start walking home. (Unfortunately I had stopped and gotten groceries, so I was prepared to hitchhike home with a backpack, carrying a watermelon, and a bag of organic chicken thighs plus some kale. Fuck it.)

Got home, and called a tow truck, then drove back in my normal shitty vehicle to wait for the tow truck. Here’s the other interesting thing about the chaos triple fork country store back road segment – GPS doesn’t map well through there, and cell service is spotty at best, so unless you know where you’re going, you likely won’t get it right.

So I went back, about 7:00 or so, and sat in my shitty minivan waiting for the tow truck. Texts could come in but not calls, so the time of arrival got updated and pushed back (and back). The country store closed at 8, and the sun made a beautiful sunset down behind the barn on the other side of the one of the forks in the road. I listened to NPR for a while, but all the after work commuter traffic from C-ville died down, and the country store shut off its lights, and it was getting dark, and I wasn’t doing shit but sitting there in the middle of nowhere – my middle of nowhere, a middle of nowhere I know deeply, so that the abandoned house with the busted windows… I knew a big sprawling family used to live there and wild ass country daughters who seemed to be too early sexualized would do backflips on the trampoline in the side yard before it became abandoned; that the house just past with the Tercel with one flat permanently flat tire used to be a functional vehicle that a crazy-eyed older woman would sometimes be pulling out in the middle of all these forks and curves in the morning around the same area this old guy would always be walking with a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the country store, so it’d be danger zone time if you’re brakes weren’t working well, which also was common but fuck it… this was all of our nowhere, and the worrisome NPR news about this impending tragedy or that overlooked injustice just didn’t resonate with me in this moment. I had a formerly okay late model car that now appeared to be a piece of shit due to corporate incompetence, but I had to get the piece of shit towed to find out for sure, so I wasn’t gonna sit here and worry myself any further. Worrying doesn’t solve nothing, as I always tell my children when anxious.

So it got dark, and I sat there. The cicadas were freestyling a late summer freestyle about “fuck it all, I’m gonna sit here not giving a shit until the day I die, the day I die, the day I die” and I was digging it. Now and then someone else’s raggedy late model this or that would rumble through, silencing the cicadas briefly, and I would dissect the missing engines or mangled mufflers or ’93 pick-ups that obviously could not be cut off after started up unless you were already where you planned on going. The chaos of the forks and curves created a nice pattern for these mechanical messes to navigate, broken and dilapidated roars coughing to a downward crescendo until the necessary turn had been made, then a wild and wonderful resistant working person’s ROAR of making it another mile, fuck you corporate overlords and culture of big bossmans and lizard brained politicians. (Too much NPR, perhaps.) And then the cicadas would slowly start to pipe back up their feral symphonic refrain as well, “until the day I die, day I die, day I die.” It was all a very beautiful and perfect moment, and I’d had to walk through these curves due to breaking down, and wrecked in these curves before as well, and driven many a beaten and battered car of my own, commuting to various jobs at different stages of my life. GPS would get you lost, but I knew each fork, each curve, could get quickly to Palmyra, Charlottesville, Scottsville, and any point otherwise easily, fuck your robot maps. Fuck your robot world.

These were the thoughts that danced through my head, backed by the cicada refrain and shitty vehicle soliloquies going on, until the tow truck driver finally did show up, driving right past. No cell service, so I cut the lights on the minivan, and stood outside for ten minutes waiting for him to finally circle back, to pick up another vehicle which may or may not be a piece of shit, owned by a man who may or may not be the same, in an unseen rural wasteland that makes up a large chunk of the United States, as well as the Earth.

The rear drive shaft got blown out by the mismatched tires, I found out from the shop, which was what I expected, but luckily they are loungers too, and explained all we had to do was take it off the vehicle, our all-wheel drive was now just front-wheel drive (like most cars), and the exposed gear bevel box made a loud clacking sound but it was sort of like the grown person’s car version of when you stuck a jack of diamonds in your bicycle spokes. Now we can keep squeezing life out of this vehicles which has been maimed by those assholes at the Zion’s Crossroads Wal-Mart Super Center, and it might drive another 2000 or 20,000 or 200,000 miles – one can never tell, because the Power of Lounge works in unexplainable ways. But if you slow down enough, and stop sometimes – either by design or disaster – it’s easy to see. And though I could probably “apply” myself and be a more proactive success in this world in the commonly accepted sense of that word “success”, I’m pretty good with not giving a fuck, and sitting here not giving a shit about all that stress and shine, like the cicadas were singing, until the day I die, day I die, day I die.

BR4ND N4M3 C4M0VFL4G3 W4L-M4RT...

brand name camouflage Wal-Mart

markdown, made in China, worn

in woods not close to forest

SM4LL3ST T0WNS BVDG3T C0MM3RC3...

smallest towns budget commerce

tucked between Wal-Marts too far

to drive to for seven things

RVR4L 3V'RYM4N F4C4D3...

rural ev'ryman facade

manufactured and offered

exclusively at Wal-Mart

aboveground swimming pools used

to mean upwardly mobile,

now Wal-Mart Supercenter

d o o r c

I stencil a star on the
unabomber shack door frame
each time I pipe bomb wal-mart

t o y z e

magnetic flags from wal-mart
proclaim patriotism
at affordably low costs

MNZ: B&W Magazine March 2011

Very occasionally I'll buy the fancy photography magazines, mostly for pictures for the shoebox full of same-sized magazine cutouts that I've accumulated for over a decade now that I used for the old beerbox haiku and am planning on starting to scan into the cyberwebs because I am bored with the pictures you find inside the cyberwebs. At the same time, I feel weird about that because these are real actual magazines in my life that I'm not sure I should throw into the 1s and 0s boxes. But whatever.
I am convinced that somehow these art photography magazines are aware of my sampling purposes, because all too often most all their photos are just a little too small for my purposes. They know what's up, and people are possessive of the eventual potential awesome ramifications of what I may do, because the trend in our minds is to purchase awesomeness. These people want to maintain all control of who purchases their pieces, even if it's just a vague corner of one snapshot of this or that. Capitalism has poisoned us in so many ways.
The occasion upon which this issue was bought was because it had Shelby Lee Adams in it, who is this dude from Kentucky who did some normal photography work, but then made his name off of taking pics of his hillbilly brethren in their natural dwindling habitat, doing the things they would normally do. He utilizes lots of light and portrait style poses, but in normal spots, to make some pretty spooky stuff with some pretty scary people. Liberal elite types have accused him of exploiting the poor, and perpetuating stereotypes, which is kind of funny that the elite have to defend the poor from being exploited by the elite. But also, the problem people seem to have is it's not straight photojournalism, which I guess ruins the poverty porn aspect of it. If you are looking at awesome pictures of fucked up hopeless poor people, I guess it's better if you are just sneaking pictures of them without interacting. Shelby Lee Adams' most famous scene may be a grinning Deliverance-harkening family sitting and standing around a hung and slaughtered pig. On that day, Adams actually purchased the pig, so that the family could slaughter in the traditional ways, and have the pig. They would not have afforded the pig otherwise, so some have suggested Adams is setting these people up to exploit themselves.
The thing is - and this is all gone through in detail in a movie called The True Meaning of Pictures - he does these portraits and pictures of families, give them copies, and lets them allow or not allow him to use them for his books and shows. They may not get paid royalties off the images, but the families he is in constant contact with definitely receive compensation from Adams, in the form of food he may bring by, or simply the friendship. And let's be straight here - if an AP photographer snaps a Pulitzer winning photo of a woman with her face covered protesting in the bloody streets of Tripoli during the Libyan thing going on, and that photographer gets mad scrilla off the use of that photo, it's not like he's back out there searching for whoever that woman is to give her a cut of the action. The crying woman in that infamous Kent State shooting photograph from the '60s (or was that in 1970?) didn't get shit except a life of questions about, "Hey, ain't you the chick in that picture?"
I like Adams stuff a lot, because even now, those way lost poor ways are being sterilized by Wal-Mart. Tacking tin coffee cans over holes in the wall or floorboards of the house is being replaced by cheap Chinese goods. Seriously. Wal-Marts are big with country folks, and an hour drive twice a month to spend government money on cheap goods is a common thang amongst these folks. I saw how it changed my own grandparents when it came to Farmville, Virginia. It has an effect, and that effect has trickled deeper into the hollers and hills than I think most people realize. The ability to scrape and scratch it on hardscrabble ground is being phased out.
Part of this is white guilt though. White people are trained to believe white people automatically have it better than everybody else. And there is truth to that, just so you don't think I'm going off on some WHITE PEOPLE WAKE UP tangent here. But that is a segment of white people, not the entirety. There are a bunch of broke ass piece of shit white folks who have been pieces of shit for multiple generations, and stand very little chance of escaping that in the next couple generations. So to white people who are not fucked from birth, these shitty broke ass broken white people are examples of bad white people - those who are racist and ignorant and were the ones who probably enslaved and exploited others. Problem is, these broke ass and broken people have never had the social position to do such things. It's just plain old ignorance, no mass conspiracy to keep the rest of the world down. These fucked up hillbillies are as apt to become part of the wealthy elite at birth as your average inner-city crack baby, which is to say highly unlikely.
But fuck it man. Nothing's gonna change. Poor people are gonna be fucked, and rich people are gonna make the rules. They elected a (half) black President, and hillbillies are still doomed and the inner-cities are still crushing zones for the soul. And if a guy wants to take spooky but oddly beautiful pictures of a tiny sub-set from one of those wretched of the earth groups of doomed Americans, then goddamnit, I think it's a good thing.