SONG OF THE DAY: Super Duper Love - Part 1 (kudzu'd)

As an impracticing Greater Appalachian Unorthodox Priest of Southern Gothicc Futurism, I refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Gregorian calendar, which has only been in full effect for less than half a millennium. Relatedly, its papal predecessor, the Julian calendar, was instituted by Julius Ceasar in 46 BC. But how did he know it was gonna be BC? It is still only December 19 in the Julian calendar, which is still used by many Orthodox churches, which is why them bearded ass dudes don’t have Christmas until later in January. Anyways, time isn’t real; I have a broken clock on my living room which says this – TIME ISN’T REAL – and it’s only wrong twice a day.
Nevertheless, this mark ass “new” year is still a great excuse to let love (thinking with the heart) rule your life a little more. There are those who would tell you this is weakness, because they think with their brain, which is so poisoned with misinformation that it behaves in predatory ways, even to ourselves. So I do suggest letting love from your heart, enter your mind. One of the basic tenets (or “dirtgod theory”) of Southern Gothicc Futurism is that our Mind is a studio wrestling ring where Heart, Brain, and Gut have a three-way melee for control of our being. Heart is ruled by Love, Gut is ruled by Ancient Knowledge Beyond Conscious Comprehension, and Brain is our Well of Consciousness, which is constantly polluted by the information our external census consumes. For me, I find it helpful to sneak into the ringside area regularly (five times a day, ideally), and when the referee is not looking, nail Brain with an unprotected steel chair shot to the head, to let Love have the advantage. In mark thinking, this is against the rules, and I am cheating against Brain (or Logic and Reason), but lolol have you looked at twitter lately? There is no way wielders of Logic and Reason are not the heels. And sometimes heels must be bashed in the head with a concussive chair shot, even if only metaphysically.
Anyways, if you celebrate the arbitrary prisons of calendar boxes, I hope you have a lovely new year, and may it never lose its zest, even when it becomes last year, replaced by the unsustainable newness our poison culture so desperately cultivates, to leave us all feeling lost.

SONG OF THE DAY: Don't Stop The Music (screwed & chopped)

I HAVE A DJ GIG ON JUNE 27TH, WHICH IS UNOFFICIALLY DJ SCREW DAY, AT GUAJIROS IN CHARLOTTESVILLE. I HAD BEGUN RECENTLY TO QUESTION MYSELF, AND MAYBE NOT PLAY SLOWED 45S, TO PRESENT MUSIC MORE NORMALLY, MORE LIKE A FRIDAY EVENING’S VERSION OF A SUNDAY BRUNCH CROWD WOULD LIKE. IT’S SO HARD TO GET FOLKS TO GO DO ANYTHING OUTSIDE OF THEIR DIGITAL BUBBLES, OTHER THAN GO TO WORK. AND LIKE ANYBODY PERFORMING, YOU WANT FOLKS TO ENJOY WHAT YOU DO. BUT TO BE HONEST, I CAN’T COMPROMISE THE VISION, EVEN IF NOT EVERYBODY UNDERSTANDS IT OR FEELS IT. SLOWED MUSIC IS COMMITMENT TO THE SLOWED LIFE, AND HUSTLE AND GRIND MENTALITY IS KILLING US ALL. WE ARE NOT GEARS IN A MACHINE; WE ARE BEINGS IN A BLESSED ORGANIC ASS FIELD OF CHAOS MEANT TO LACKADAISICALLY ENJOY OUR TIME. THAT TIME IS NOT MEANT TO BE A CALENDAR FULL OF PRISON BOXES, WHERE WE “KEEP APPOINTMENTS” LIKE A FUCKIN’ DOCTOR OF UNLOUNGE. TIME IS ARBITRARY, AND NO MATTER HOW MUCH OF IT YOU GET, IF YOU MAKE THE GOOD OUT OF AS MUCH OF IT AS POSSIBLE, THEN YOU DIDN’T WASTE IT. I MEAN LOOK, WE GOT A MISERABLE ASS 84 YEAR OLD WANNABE KING RIGHT NOW, WHO’S WASTED HIS LIFE IN PURSUIT OF GOLD PLATED DELUSIONS. I AM GOING TO DIG THROUGH THE IMMENSE AND EXTENSIVE STACKS, PULL OUT A FEW BOXES OF THE FUNKIEST BOOGIEFIED G-BODY ASS LITTLE RECORDS I GOT, AND COME FUCK IT UP FOR 3 HOURS. WORD IS BOND. DON’T STOP THE MUSIC.

SONG OF THE DAY: Hold It Now, Hit It (kudzu'd)

Folks at work were thanking their God for it being a Friday, and talking about how it was the “week end” excitedly. But I don’t give calendars that type of authority over my life. They really want us all to stuff our entire existence into boxes, both physically and mentally. Ain’t nothing about me fit that shape though, and most of my life I’ve struggled with this, thinking something is wrong with me. But ain’t nothing wrong with me…this is how I’m supposed to be. I don’t know what God they believe in but ain’t no God that shares my heart and soul that would want all these damned boxes trapping every little piece of our lives. And it just gets worse, as human descent into spiritlessness continues. Used to be we had little travel boxes of roadside motels we wandered off to briefly to escape our regular box and see a little bit of the world. But now we hunker down in our regular boxes, and got it stuffed with so much shit that we can’t even keep it all inside the regular box, but are too psychically attached to the material clutter that we mistake as identity as a being, that the old travel boxes have been converted into storage boxes, so we can put all the stuff we don’t want but don’t wanna not have into storage boxes, so that stuff can see a different part of the world. We are a demented bunch, aren’t we?

SONG OF THE DAY: Ain't No Big Thing

3-day weekend, if you recognize calendars, or time, or recognize both and are trapped in the status quo schedule of life events. Gonna play shit like this all weekend long, sitting on a milk crate in the abandoned factory of the mind. I wish you all well. I hope you are not wrongly perceived.

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

What better way to close out a calendar year (which is nothing but printed boxes on the wall to make little notes within) than a slowed down 45 at 33 speed of a Steve Miller Band classic that all self-respecting internet-era music lovers would look down upon. This is trash music for the trash masses, and yet somehow there’s magic to it (still, even after all these classic rock years beating it to death), and slowing it down even further makes me wanna enter a used Lincoln Continental into a demolition derby with #69 and call myself The Joker in real life.

C4L3ND4RS H3LD T0G3TH3R...

calendars held together 
by obligations and 
honor codes… things fall apart 

SONG OF THE DAY: Temporal Control of Light Echoes

The calendar flipped, and to be honest everything feels as if it’s breaking, slowly. And it’s been breaking, the past couple years more obviously, essentially we were all in a car together as a culture, and the check engine light came on five years ago, maybe longer to be honest, and we were told to ignore it, no worries, but then the past couple years, the car started making a horrible clanking sound, and it’s really worrisome. But we’re speeding along the highway of human progress like everything’s fine, keep it moving. Though a new year according to Gregorian calendars, it’s still the same winter, and the second one since covid came. A smaller parallel is I lost my power this week, and the first night, I was like, “well, it’s cold as fuck, but I’ll bundle up, do a little reading by flashlight, write some thoughts on cards, this is great.” And it was cold as fuck but it was great… everything had shutdown and it felt good to have the break from all the mundane buzzing vibrating bullshit boring holes through my consciousness every moment of every day.
But then the second night came, and it wasn’t even as cold – still below freezing but a good 15 degrees warmer – and I was miserable. It fucking sucked, and I kept waking up in my seven layers, wondering how long before the sun came up, even though it’d still be freezing, I could at least soak up some sun and mark the passing of another night. That’s the second winter of covid to be honest – we are expected to be as back to normal as possible, even though things aren’t full power, and it’s all fucked up, and so many people are so fucking miserable right now, just barely holding their shit together. Makes me wonder what Dark Night of the Soul, Night 2 would’ve been if St. John of the Cross had been forced to go further. Like you get to the end of the dark night of the soul, find your union with the Universe/Creator/God, but then it goes away and you have a second night right away, just as fucked up and melodramatic. Harder to find that hope.
Anyways, back to the original metaphor of the clanking car rumbling full speed down the highway of time called civilization. I find it concerning that it feels as if everything is about to break apart, and nobody who is in charge of driving this thing really seems to give even half a fuck. The whole thing is going to break, and they don’t even seem willing to acknowledge it might be broken, much less able to figure out how to fix it once we are all stranded. And I think that concerns me too – where will I be stranded, or you? Will we make it ‘til it all falls apart in a gnashing of pieces exploding from too much friction, causing the mechanisms of production to destroy itself into a thousand pieces? Will we all be there to stand around the mangled parts and try to figure out how to get it running again? Or figure out a different way to get where we want to go? Or even agree on which way to go? Or will some of us – me, you – be tossed out while it’s falling apart, to lighten the load, because that’s what’s causing the clanking – not the engine itself but the people complaining about the engine clanking? I find it all very concerning and depressing right now to be honest, but also, there’s nothing I can do but continue. Like, there literally ain’t shit I can do about existence except keep existing. But fuck if it doesn’t feel overwhelming right now.

JVGGL1NG 0BL1G4T10NS 4ND...

juggling obligations and 
tending expectations and 
stacking the days in boxes 

SONG OF THE DAY: Word Up

The words don’t come up sometimes, like I sit here and think, “Just write some stupid shit,” which normally is pretty easy for a heart that has a steady flow of shit talk like mine. But I just ain’t into it half the time lately. Everything feels boring, mundane, and yet weird and dystopian. How can a dystopia be mundane? That doesn’t even make sense, and yet here we are, bored as fuck and waiting for doom at the same damn time. I should probably shift into hibernation mode, and read more, because mostly all I read is the words that are printed like ticker tape of conscious thought inside my mind constantly. I guess that’s still in there, but I’ve blurred it out, because I’m tired of looking at it. Tired of everything, yet can’t sleep half the time. The mundane dystopia, just occupying the boxes on a calendar, flipping the pages without actually doing anything all that notable.

M0ST 0F 0VR L1V3S SP3NT BV1LD1NG...

most of our lives spent building 
pyramid schemes for others; 
embezzle back the minutes 

SONG OF THE DAY: Summer Breeze (slurred & blurred)

Summer might be over if you’re bound by the shackles of the calendar boxes, but the summer breeze never stops if you got your fifth eye activated to the synchronized dance of Jupiter and Saturn, with the hunter’s moon making night as if day. The summer breeze is much colder this time of year, but that’s just to encourage hibernation of spirit to process the devils who have blossomed in your life over the past planting season, and cast those who need to be forgotten away as memories instead of accomplices. Place a white quartz stone at your back door for environmental benefit, and also stack a few in your front yard as a warning to any carriers of negativity that their intentions shall not pass. Usually a quartz pile of ten to three thousand stones, from seven inches to 469 feet high, should do the trick.

L1V1NG L1F3 0N 4 D41LY...

living life on a daily 
basis, trying to ignore 
calendar boxes flipping 

C0VNT1NG 0VR HVM4N Y34RS 4S...

counting our human years as 
annual existence; my 
outlook is perennial 

SONG OF THE DAY: 100 Years Ago (Piano Demo)

Over a century ago, the house I live in was some sort of supervisor’s house for the soapstone quarry down the hill. The old road is my driveway, and I can walk the dog down paths back there still that go down to some abandoned and gutted buildings, plus a lot of debris. This was one of the first places with electricity in America, apparently, and the smokestacks from two defunct power plants are visible a couple stones throws away, both of which got washed out in hurricane floods in 1969. The area itself got washed out economically by the Great Depression though, long before that. This quarry operation used to employ thousands of people, had a local narrow gauge train line that ran between quarries, and ran to connect to north-south mainline a few miles west of here, and the east-west mainline a few miles south of here. There’s an old stone church a half mile away, which used to be Episcopal but is not occupied by Mennonites, though not Old Order because there’s cars parked there on Sundays, not buggies. Houses everywhere are old company houses, strings of them identical looking still, even though a hundred years old, in varying states of care or disrepair. And there’s soapstone slag everywhere, giant rocks piled here or there that got blasted and cut but wasn’t up to snuff to be used back when it was used. It’s all a really neat and beautiful place, but one that was literally built and blasted by business, left to rot for the most part, and has gradually become one with the Earth again, though full of litter. I find old bottles all the time on my walks through woods and along the river, and have been writing poems on the more appropriate bottles.
The river right below my house, where the bridge and one of the power plants got washed out in 1969, still flows like always, diverted by the dam that’s still there but not powering anything now. I wonder what the river’s decline in this area was before the dam, how steep was it originally? Seems like the land slanted hard there, so I imagine there was a natural waterfall at one point that caused them to put a dam there. A hundred years seems like such a solid slice of time, but it’s similar to flying to Chicago, in my opinion. The years are still relatively arbitrary chunks of time, although the days represent one cycle of sun and night, and the year is meant to mark a full circle around the sun in our little corner of infinite space. But all the minutes and seconds get lost, and you just end up a hundred years away, like landing at O’Hare, missing all the little pieces and parts that got you there, from point A to point B. Chances are I won’t know “one hundred years” personally, at least not as this collection of molecules as their currently arranged into a dirtgod raven mack. Humans chase “knowing” more than their fair share of space on the timeline through reciting history and writing shit down like mad, but when I get lost in the tiny steps of walking along the river and through the woods, not keeping track of them nor wanting to, it seems like I might be happier as a human if I let that shit go entirely – all the minutes and hours and days and years, stop fretting over age or wasted time or grey hairs signifying failures of fulfilling mechanistic checklists of being a “productive” member of society. I ain’t got to do shit really. Time is a goddamn chain, tying me up in the yard of my life, leaving me stuck there, barking at the river down the hill that I want to go run to and dip my bare feet in, because I’m trapped. My oldest kid has a concept they always drive home called Time Destroyers United, and I’ve come to love that concept – just destroying time, not in some big revolutionary explosion of cataclysmic change, but just little pokes and stabs and monkey wrenches, sabotaging our concepts of time wherever we can. So I hope you destroyed some time today, and also enjoyed yourself, free from clocks, or phones, or clock phones, or phone clocks, or anything.

RVSH1NG B3TW33N 3RR4NDS TH4T...

rushing between errands that 
ultimately don't mean shit, 
blind to all the small magic 

4N0TH3R C1RCL3 4R0VND...

 

another circle around 
the sun, etching one more line 
into the walls closing in 

SONG OF THE DAY: Rascal

Is a mysterious dude in a ski mask and gold grilles, flashing weapons and re-contextualizing Rascal Flatts' songs into an ode of mean-spirited women and fucking the police the song of 2020? I don't know, but it might as well be. Fuck calendars anyways.

SONG OF THE DAY: Tre World Freestyle

video 

Hadn't even been six months since George Floyd got murdered by police in Minnesota. What the fuck? RIP Big Floyd.

SONG OF THE DAY: Soub Hanak

 
VIDEO 

Intentions are important. One of the worst things about this human age where we have been trained to believe we’re machines with mechanistic schedules, where we have to be productive, and achieve goals all the time that are laid out like a project manager’s flowchart, is that we go through the physical motions in a lot of parts of our life. I mean, I’m writing this while going through the physical motion of being "at work”, while at home, which means that productivity has crept into the space I’m supposed to be free from that shit. Going through the motions, of appearing to be doing something while our heart (or mind) is not emotionally into it, at all. And in fact, I’d say a lot of our current politics has began to mimic this entirely, where we’re now in a pro wrestling-esque political age, with all these grifters who play characters that start to reap benefits, so they then remain that character, even if it’s not how their mind actually feels. But they do it so long and so hard, that the angle they’re selling becomes what they believe. They start to become victim to their own con, and become that shit. And to be honest, there’s a lot of capitalist-based self-help people who will instruct you as to exactly that – the one path to economic success is to believe those things without listening to your heart at all, and forgetting the humanity of others or the beauty of the natural world, and only “work” towards those “goals”.

Intentions though, are giving voice to our heart, before our body goes through deliberate physical motions. Speaking what our heart (mind) actually believes, so that the body knows in advance, “This is why we are about to do this thing.” It’s important, because I know I feel much better about what I’m doing if I do it purposefully, instead of getting to the end and being like, “What happened?”

Of course, there’s a lot of unexpected and unexplained that still happens – both positive and negative. There’s always little signs of whether you’re on a good or bad path with that too, which a lot of folks ignore, call superstition or silly, but I live by that shit. Even today, saw a big bright beautiful quartz rock sticking out a fallen tree’s roots/dirt clump while tromping through the woods with the dog. That was a great sign on the day; I knew I was doing good. But I also went into the woods with the intention of not thinking about civilized dramas, and just taking the dog out there to sniff around, and be outside, and see what happens. The dog’s gotta shit, and they can’t do it in the house.

The full moon was last weekend, so the new moon’s not too far away. They use the sighting of the new moon as marker to switch months in the Islamic calendar. I like that, and to be honest, my heart prefers that to Gregorian calendar. My brain has been taught otherwise, in a deep cultural way, so as my heart and brain battle for what my mind does, there’s not a lot of give on the Gregorian calendar. But I practice observing the Islamic calendar, because it makes way more sense to me, innately. The new moon is also, traditionally, considered a time to sow your intentions. It’s also, quite literally the time farmers planted, because according to those unknown vagaries people lived by before the scientific age claimed dominion over the Earth, it was better to do so. So I’m gonna try to get some new moon intentions together, maybe start trying to have my months (according to those new moon delineations) have a little more of my heart speaking some plans into existence, at least some hopes, before my body starts going through the routine motions that occupy most of an average month. I’d like my body to be giving me more happiness, and not just fucking around wasting my life going through motions that I could give half a fuck about.

SONG OF THE DAY: Eso Que Tu Haces

I have played the fuck out of Lido Pimienta's Miss Colombia album, which apparently came out this Gregorian calendar year, but who gives a fuck about time still? Nonetheless, in quick digital search, I see the album still doesn't have a Wikipedia page, which just further reinforces the reality that the internet is not as all-knowing and on top of shit as we think. But this album is fucking great.