SONG OF THE DAY: Waiting on the Sidelines (kudzu'd)

I hate American football's artificial intelligentsia of a game of slamming human heads together exploitatively to move a weird shaped ball forward or not. What started as an aberration of unassociated football, with a weird ball, that was simply 11 dudes on each side, has morphed into this weird phenomenon that has squads of like 50 or more to fill those eleven slots in increasingly specialized ways, with a support coaching staff of almost one person per player at times, where the top coaches in the staff have overvalued their own genius in figuring out deceptive ways to concuss the less fortunate. And then all the dudes on the TV screen talking about are wearing suits, as if going to a football game is something important like arguing a case before the Supreme Court or some shit. Nonetheless, as with all cultures, whether poisonous or not, I do enjoy certain fringe parts of this. And in the over-specialized era of postmodern American football, there is nothing I love more than the Long Snapper. This is a guy who has somehow figured out how to be good at chucking the football between his legs in a highly consistent manner, to hands awaiting 25 to 45 feet behind him, depending on the stupid "special teams" play involved. And in the NFL, most teams have one guy who is the designated long snapper, to where that's all that dude does, maybe a half dozen to two dozen (on busy days) times per game. And the NFL minimum salary for a guy with one year professional experience, is over a million dollars. So these dudes are just standing around, waiting on the sidelines, and might long snap a football around 250 times a year, which averages out to a rough minimum of $4000 a long snap. Even in a sport that is scientifically proven to diminish mental cognizance, at a position that mostly just dives forward and downward into the other dude's abdomen most of the time, that's a fairly good risk vs reward ratio in the last dying gasps of capitalism. And in this mundane dystopian state of affairs we're in now, who doesn't want a little chronic traumatic encephalopathy, to take the edge off things?

SONG OF THE DAY: 'Neath That Cold Grey Tomb of Stone

My attempt at learning banjo fizzled after finger rolling style was just too damn hard. I think I might take another shot at clawhammer style, but because I’ve never been able to learn an instrument, I feel like a failure. My youngest kid has gotten the hang of guitar though, self-taught and doing pretty damn well with it. Maybe I was just missing something in my brain to get it right, I don’t know.

SONG OF THE DAY: Magic Mountain

I got this on 45 because I love it slowed down and it pairs great after spinning one of my De La Soul 45s, because folks think another De La song is coming on. This is pretty basic DJ shit, but we live in unreal times where basic is complex and a lot of folks have cognitive dissonance to such a strong amount that everything is new every time they click the refresh button, which they don’t even have to click anymore as it gets clicked for us.
I am mostly drawn to non-Eric Burdon War era stuff, but lately I have made some exceptions. Maybe it’s my own cognitive dissonance.

SONG OF THE DAY: Rock Your Baby (kudzu'd)

In the summer, I’d call it foggy brain, but it’s cold as fuck so it feels more like mush brain. The thoughts don’t chop through as cleanly, and get hung up on the briars of memory or fear or delusion or shit man I don’t even know. In periods like this, I try to be chill to myself and just survive the sludge. We expect too much from ourselves sometimes, especially those of us who make a habit of handling way too much because we never could trust others to come through with solid support. You get to a point where you depend on yourself to be impossibly solid, inhumanely solid. It ain’t sustainable at a forever pace. So when it all turns to sludge and the ability to plan much less do gets mushy, fuck it man, just ride it out. Most of what you think you need to do, you don’t need to do. Maintain the minimum, and rest. Not just not doing stuff but worried about it anyways idleness, but deep lean into it rest. Sink into the covers and let the mush envelope you. It’ll clear out. It always does.

SONG OF THE DAY: It Was Me (Car Chase)

Not a lot of people vibe out to Weather Report, but pretty much any group out here that says Weather Report was an inspiration is making good shit. I just ordered some percussion instruments myself, because Prolo is playing a show next week, and why not decide a week in advance that I should totally be able to play agogo bells while I’m delivering rhymes. This is how my mind works, even as I get older.

R3FL3CT1NG VP0N P4TT3RNS...

reflecting upon patterns of thinking which lead me to dissatisfied conclusions 

SONG OF THE DAY: Sugar Free (Deo/Super Dance Mix)

More vehicles should have mixers in them, because this is a great song for a 5 month drive time, and you could loop that beat from the first 30 seconds or so for at least two weeks. Then loop the part right after that where the hook is teased before the verse starts, and loop that for a week and a half, then drop it back to the beginning for a few hours, before finally rocking into the first verse, somewhere around the fourth or fifth week of your drive. I’m not big on cyborg bullshit, but if they gave me a mind mixer, I’d jump at that chance. The problem with most of our delusional cyborg dreams is they’re based on implants in the brain, which isn’t even where the mind is, ignoring the heart completely, so you’re gonna have a bunch of dumbasses running around with these brain implants, thinking things into the microchips with their poisoned ass brain thoughts. The folly of men, thinking they know what they know when they don’t know shit (and never have).

SONG OF THE DAY: Low Down (chopped & kudzu'd)

Had a bad day or two here where there was some anger and pain from the past that I didn’t realize was still there, which got unexpectedly dredged up by a simple interaction with someone else showing their thoughtlessness about anyone but themselves, while also assuming the role of eternal victim. It becomes hard to give a fuck about yourself to step up in those moments, because you’re already positioned as the person taking advantage. Anyways, I can recognize that shit quicker now though, and don’t get lost in depressive episodes like I used to, and don’t run head first into walls as a self-destructive act of knocking the pain away either. Hard as fuck to learn and practice new habits, especially when people take advantage of your weakness and kindness. But fuck it, ain’t nobody gonna do it but you. Fuck the haters, especially those that portray themselves as lovers. Those are the worst kind of haters – secret double reverse psychology snake haters, wrapped up in self-centered good vibes.

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: Come and Get Your Love

brain not always working well enough to put whole thoughts into whole sentences lately 
can put half thoughts into long sentences or make whole sentences 
out of fragment clusters but fuck man 
feeling exhausted 
maybe this is what getting old is 
I don't know 
weight of the world both immediate and beyond my control 
starting to feel like too many cobwebs 
and you can't fit a broom into the corner of your mind 
so I juggle expectations and obligations 
and hope to make it to another day 
where I don't have to listen to an alarm clock 
and can sleep in my own bed 
unencumbered by anything 
need to be floating again 
like clouds 
not feeling lost but having to keep pushing 
like fog 
anyways 
come and get 
your love 
while 
you 
can 

SONG OF THE DAY: Teach Me

I'll admit, I'm hard headed. That's the whole post - there's no "but..." with a long-winded clever exploration into some sort of self-realization. I'm just a hard headed dude sometimes. A lot of times actually.

SONG OF THE DAY: A Change Is Going To Come

Too much thought paralyzes action, as does perfecting the types of thoughts you have. Thoughts are meant to be fucked up sometimes, so nobody has perfectly formulated philosophies. I mean, we can learn how to filter our wild thoughts into publicly acceptable behavior, that doesn’t fuck up other people’s lives, although at the same time there’s plenty of dumbass “free thinkers” who believe they should never filter shit, that First Amendment means you assault rifle all your thoughts out like a mass shooter and if anybody gets hit by something they don’t like, well fuck it, that’s the price of this American brand of freedom. I don’t really feel that way.
I said “feel” instead of “think” because it’s always seemed to me that brain thinks differently than heart. And then as I got older and learned about fermentation and probiotic gut flora and shit like that, gut thinks even differently. They had some study a couple years back where your gut had an idea it sent to your brain before your brain thought it, suggesting free will is not a scientific reality necessarily. Then again, that’s likely not true because we attach will to the brain, not believing the gut or heart has shit to do with it. So I guess it’s not so much too much thought itself paralyzes action but too much brain thought does, or too much disparity between the various places a person thinks in their human body. Your brain says, “let’s do this!” but your gut intuition is like “hold up, bro,” and meanwhile your heart is screaming at you that you’re fucking up. I think with the way we’re living right now, if you’re heart’s not screaming at you a whole lot of the time, then you might’ve been ignoring your heart way too much. I’m actually ignoring mine right now. I always joke that when I die, my heart’s going to be clogged with fried chicken thighs, but it’s more likely going to get seized up by the denial of thought energies flowing outward, that congeal in my chest cavity like soul grease that clogs me to frustrated death.

SONG OF THE DAY: Come to Mama

 

Need more feel good, less run over by life times.

MY M1ND F33LS L1K3 4N 0LD SH3D...

my mind feels like an old shed - 
cluttered with archaic tools, 
filled up with cobwebs, useless 

TH3 C0GN1T1V3 D1SS0N4NC3...

the cognitive dissonance 
involved in believing we're 
more connected than ever 

S4D H0W TH3Y T1LL3D 1 N33D T0...

 

sad how they tilled "I need to 
be more productive" thinking 
into the back of my brain 

SONG OF THE DAY: Signoya

video 

The river is high from all the rain, which I like because it means that all the spots where people sit there drinking a quarter or pint or whatever, and bottles got left in the brush, it all gets washed loose and down the river. Then it recedes, and bottles which got moved about end up in the muck down below where I live, and I find them while tromping along the road. It takes a lot of patience to write poems on old river bottles, because you can't rush the finding of bottles. Nature has to do their part in the creative process. If I started forcing it, or getting bottles in a different way, I'd be turning creative process into manufacturing, and then I'd lose heart for it, because creation is a heart thing but manufacturing is a brain thing. Fuck my brain, in my opinion.

SONG OF THE DAY: Tevez

People are complaining about “these linebackers” and shit like that on my timelines again, and it’s an annual seasonal reminder of how thankful I am I gave up the American football for the world’s football. 45 dudes mostly standing around, running head first into each for about 11 minutes over an almost four hour commercial-heavy mind-numbing suck at a screen? Like they hardly do shit the whole time, and yet somehow still obliterate their own brains. Is there anything more American? Extract all physical usefulness out of these young men in a small window of their prime physical years and leave the empty physical remnants walking around the Earth afterwards, broke more often than wealthy off the whole deal, like human slag piles from mining operations.

You know how much fucking money good soccer players get paid? And that there’s literally a slew of domestic markets around the world, with a variety of clubs within each of those markets, that would play for your services if you were good? And that you don’t give yourself CTE? I think America’s development of soccer should be based around that shit more, with youth from more marginal backgrounds, because there’s a fucking HUGE opportunity to actually get paid, with far less destruction of your own body.

Look at Carlos Tevez. Born in Buenos Aires, with a giant burn scar on his neck from getting scalded with boiling water as a kid. Shit his whole story is wild, because he was born Carlos Martinez, but ended up taking on his adopted father’s surname in some sort of dispute between his original childhood club, All Boys, and the infamous Boca Juniors, whom his family signed him with when he was 13. At Boca Juniors, he became a star. This is one of Argentina’s biggest two clubs, along with River Plate. River is sort of the club of the bourgeoisie, while Juniors is the club of the people, and was where the legend of Diego Maradona was born in the decades past. Tevez was featuring for Boca Juniors senior club at the age of 17, and it wasn’t long before he was sold to a wealthier Brazilian club for a season, then off to the deep coffers of the English Premier League, where he spent a single season with West Ham before moving onto stints at both major Manchester clubs, with two seasons at United before making the rare jump to heated rivals and playing four for Manchester City. He absolutely lit up the Premier League his first two season with them, with 52 goals over all competitions those first two seasons in the powder blue. All told, he got over a hundred goals in Manchester, at both clubs, before transferring for a couple of seasons to Italy’s premier club, Juventus, and another high profile gig.

All this time, he remained a wild spirit from Buenos Aires, never having to hide his feral side too much, and refusing to ever get cosmetic surgery to cover that burn scar. For the most part since 2015, he’s played back in Argentina for Boca Juniors, one of the highest paid players in South America. You can’t even say it was past his prime, because he got 29 goals in Italian and continental competition for Juventus his last season for them, strong numbers for a striker entering his 30s. And though he did play for a huge paycheck for part of 2017 in China, he’s been back at Boca Juniors since then, and is key to their Copa Libertadores efforts this season. They’d looked like they might not make the knockout stages, due to Covid wracking the club roster, and their aging manager actually even managing matches virtually, believe it or not, due to his high risk status to the virus. But Boca still looks to be moving forward, and that’s in no small part due to Carlos Tevez’s 36-year-old ass straight up stalking the pitch, as fierce as ever.

And while Tevez is certainly not a political figure, at least not in any respectable sort of way, it’s hard not to compare that life trajectory of person through sport to Colin Kaepernick, for the sake of argument between American football and world football. Tevez was 3 when Kaep was born. As Tevez made his name known as a young star in South America for Boca Juniors and Corinthians, Kaepernick became a multi-sport athlete of some exception in California. From 2006-2010, Tevez moved onto England, to bigger contracts from West Ham to Man United, from Man United to Man City. Kaepernick, by American football’s design, spent five years as a student-athlete, with the diminutive financial benefits that come with that system, at University of Nevada.

From 2011-2016, Tevez continued to get paid as one a league superstar, in England, then Italy, and then returned home to Argentina as that nation’s domestic league’s biggest star in a number of years. A hero returned home. This same period saw Kaepernick battle his way to being the starter for the San Francisco 49ers, be condemned as not an elite QB, despite favorable statistics in two playoff runs in 2012 and 2013, and then get cast aside after a couple of rough seasons as star player on a team of 45 human beings, which also involved some high profile acts of protest which the NFL didn’t appreciate at all. There was no other league to go to though, no other country to go be a star in, no right to work anywhere else. So while Tevez has soaked in the adulation of his native Argentina, and become an absolute all-time legend at Boca Juniors, and even mixed in a well-compensated vacation to Shanghai, China, Kaepernick has been on ice, unable to get anything more than a performative NFL tryout after American police killed so many black men, the league felt guilty enough to capitalize on woke marketing to stage a Kaepernick workout.

So on one hand you have a sport that’s incredibly destructive, with a limited market for making money for yourself if you get good at it, where if you piss the bosses off, you’re locked out forever. On the other hand, you have a worldwide sport with literally layers and layers of pyramids where so long as you can still play to a certain level, and once you have made your name, you can find somewhere to get paid. And it’s physically demanding, like any sport is going to be, but you’re not obliterating your own ability to think, at least not with the sport itself. Why the fuck would you want to choose that shit for your kids? Why the fuck would you want to keep supporting it by watching it?

I guess mostly, it’s tradition. People in America grew up watching American football, so we continue to throw good brains after bad. But I understand. Why do anything less self-destructive and better for you if nobody did it before you? It’s better to run straight into that wall of seasonal anger and alcohol-fueled madness, because that’s all you know, yelling at TV screens during endless commercial breaks, where the last two minutes lasts for half an hour. All for nothing. Meanwhile, I’m feeling good on my wild lettuce tincture, enjoying high quality Copa Libertadores matches on a Thursday night, where that shit is signed, sealed, and delivered well within two hours. And usually, when it gets to South American club football knockout stages, you get a couple good fights in those last added minutes too, to get you hyped up as it ends. America is fucking cancelled in my opinion. We can’t even do toxic machismo in an enjoyable way.

MY N4TVR3 H4S N3V3R B33N...

my nature has never been

industrious, though I've been

trained to think differently

P0RT4LS T0 1NF1N1TY...

portals to infinity

embedded inside rib cage;

we think with our brains too much