SONG OF THE DAY: Cry My Tears Away

This is such a great song. There’s so much good modern souldies music happening nowadays, that it makes me wonder why the fuck I don’t have a ’63 Bel Air painted purple that I’m saving up for nice rims for that I just ride around in blasting shit like this, driving nowhere in particular and everywhere at once, one finger waving at strangers and doing the solemn head nod sideways arm to those I know. Wherever Raven is doing that in the multiverse, I’d like to venmo money for a tank of gas.

SONG OF THE DAY: A Freight Train In My Mind

A freight train in my mind is about all I got most days, wishing these damn hoppers would move, or I had time to go spend the night at my boy’s house where all the coals are, or even that I had bought a house right by a yard somewhere. Or that I had known about all the coals lined up at the plant down in Bremo back in the early 2000s, when I first lived that way. Can’t wait for time travel to be real so we can indulge our obsessive compulsions across four dimensions instead of just three.

SONG OF THE DAY: Hobo Blues

I never was an official hobo, partially because I know my obsessiveness (aka alcoholism/addiction genes) and also my penchant for embracing a disappearance. I likely never would’ve come back if I ever left. I also never finished learning the banjo. It was antithetical to my brain patterns for some reason. Oh well. There's always next year, for learning the banjo or disappearing from respectable society.

SONG OF THE DAY: Together, Pt. 1

This song makes me feel real good inside. I’d love to come across that Omnibus box set of 45s at some point that includes this, but the price has gotten way too “white guys looking up the price on the internet” for me to ever afford. Gonna require some haphazard magic and a double does of the Power of Lounge for one to fall my way.

SONG OF THE DAY: Funky Honky

This song does not exist on 45, sadly. We can’t have nothing nice.

SONG OF THE DAY: Get Thy Bearings

Sometimes I dream about releasing bootleg 45s of things that absolutely should’ve been issued on 45 at some point but never were. I’ve got a cover version of this by The Sand Dollars on 45 that’s pretty great, but the OG is the OG. How did Donovan have a beat like this in 1968?

SONG OF THE DAY: Imperio de Traficantes (chopped and skrewed)

Any time somebody tries to convince me streaming services are chill and not a complete and total rip-off to both the artists (who don’t get paid) and the listener (who has limited selection which can change without your realizing), I remember there’s no chopped and screwed norteño music on streaming services for the most part. In fact, streaming minded music listeners are more likely to think “slowed and reverb” is an actual thing. We never know what we have until it’s gone. RIP good internet.
Shout out to the Skrewed Up Meskins blog, which is nothing but dead links at this point, abandoned into internet purgatory until the blogspot servers purge inactive sites eventually as a cost-cutting measure. So much great shit buried into those dead links. I'm thankful I got a bunch of it on an external hard drive still. Once it's gone, it's gone. I still wonder about once a month, "Whatever happened to DJ Dreemz?"

SONG OF THE DAY: Fantasy (Bad Boy Remix) (kudzu'd)

Dreams are just goals without plans. That’s the type of thing fake self-help alpha male influencers say all the time. Fantasies are just experiences without the fuck it. That’s the type of thing I say when I’m pretending to be one of them. Doesn’t really matter if it’s clever or not, mostly just posting here for data miners to scrape through, who probably don’t even understand the word patterns. Maybe three or four other people will see it. That’s the nature of modern digital existence… we’re all just skipping stones into streams of 0s and 1s making little ripples that die in the reverberation of algorithms and hopefully one of the four people that accidentally see it give half a fuck. Progress.

SONG OF THE DAY: A Sunrise Before

Bambu is still the best rapper going. You should buy all his shit on bandcamp the next bandcamp Friday that comes around. (And a stupid thing I dream about in my head is a Bambu/XL Middleton project.)

SONG OF THE DAY: Real Connection

I regret to inform you I have become a “souldies” guy. Maybe it’s because I have a radio show where all I do is play 45s at 33 speed, and the vast bulk of new 45s released are from the rapidly expanding souldies scene. Bobby Oroza is a dude from Finland who dropped Get On The Otherside this year on Big Crown Records, and that shit slams. Sadly, Big Crown Records has not released “Real Connection” on 45 for me to play at 33 speed. The fun thing about souldies is it’s the strangest multicultural scene ever, that has scenes pop up in expected places (like Brooklyn and Northern California) but then Finland. Anyways, I want to start a record label now, with no money and no experience. That’s what happens when you start to listen to too many 45s.

SONG OF THE DAY: You Need Help

So I had one of those lucid dreams the other night where it feels too real to just be a dream, but I guess it was a dream? Although perhaps it’s the not-so-distant future, I’m not sure. I was living in some sort of collective resistance group near Grafton, West Virginia, though the word “resistance” makes it seem dumb. Language is very limiting at times, to be honest. But we were working to further undermine an outside government’s influence over us, as a large chunk of Appalachia had apparently become an autonomous zone, occupied by antifascists, but not really run by anybody so much as sharing resources. But apparently, whoever was still in charge of the actual American government had developed cyborg technology, and were sending women cyborgs in to intercept plans and locations and all that type shit. The cyborgs had flesh-like features though, but were still built with patriarchal philosophical foundations, so they were quieter – expected to be seen not heard, so that they could hear more. I didn’t know all this at the beginning of the dream, but was informed of all this, because the people I was living amongst had way more detailed information than me. I was just a guy living there, trying to pitch in and not be useless. But apparently these cyborg women drone spies, for the most part, felt entirely real in all ways, and it was nearly impossible to figure out they were drone cyborg robots sent in by the authoritative United States of America, looking to squash our regional autonomy. And I’m not really sure how somebody figured this out (maybe I’ll find out in later dreams if I’m so lucky to return), but the one way you could tell they were drones was through giving them oral sex, concentrating on the clit, because they were programmed to simulate excitement, but the clitoris, when stimulated in these cyborgs, became dangerously hot – like burning hot put blisters on your tongue warmed up. So a defensive trick developed by the resistance was to get into a sexual situation with these potential cyborgs, start giving them oral sex, and find out if they were real or not. The cyborgs, again due to patriarchal philosophies of those who constructed them, was that they were willing participants in sexual situations if certain criteria were met. There was a relatively new woman in the camp that I was supposed to perform oral sex on, and find out if she was real or not.
My dream actually began with me eating her out, and all the rest came to me as memories of things that had been explained to me, mostly involving this little dude named BB (or Beebee, or B.B. but just two “b” sounds… I never saw his name written out, just spoken) who had two little splotchy and poorly done bumblebees tattooed on his left cheek, like teardrops kinda dripping from his hazelnut eye. But I was performing oral sex on this woman, who was very attractive to be honest, and her clit was warming up, nothing abnormal yet, but it felt like it was warming up to where it was going to be abnormal and I’d be certain she was a cyborg. But what fucked me up in the moment was remembering the conversations with BB where if that happened, I was to kill her. This seemed really fucked up to me, to go from oral sex with this sexy woman, to choking her to death, as I was told to do. I didn’t like it, even if she wasn’t an actual woman but a cyborg, even if the oral sex clitoris stimulation test proved this. To me, as a human, it was going to feel like I was having sex with a woman – who for all intents and purposes appeared and felt human to me – and then shifting into killing her. I couldn’t do it. But her clit was definitely heating up like a stove element, so I quit, and moved into regular sexual intercourse. It was nice.
Afterwards, BB was asking me, and I explained that it felt like she was warming up like he said a cyborg was, but I wasn’t comfortable with killing her, so I didn’t go through with it. “What? Fuck man. They’re programmed for sexual loyalty so there’s like a three month bleed out time before we can try it again with someone else with her. That’s really bad op sec.” He was really pissed at me, which also felt weird as fuck, and I was just standing there (actually sleeping here, seeing myself standing there), feeling horribly conflicted, because I didn’t want to choke somebody I was just having sex with, even if they were a fascist cyborg drone spy creation of some sort. And I didn’t really like being in this alleged autonomous zone getting yelled at by this weird little dude mad that I didn’t choke a cyborg I was fucking to death. But I also got his point, because it was bad op sec. I remember standing there in the dream, with BB kinda going off on me in a subtle but aggressive way – not really passive but not overtly aggro either – and I was thinking to myself about all the abandoned coal cars outside of Grafton still, and how I just wanted to go draw on the coal cars maybe if I could. But BB was chastising me in long form about not killing a likely cyborg, who I had just had sex with. So I was feeling fucked up that I really enjoyed sex with a cyborg too, but also didn’t wanna fuck her again because she had to have been a cyborg, and if I fucked her again (which is what BB was trying to convince me to do, to avoid the sexual loyalty programming bleed out time), I’d have to kill her. It was all really fucked up, and I woke up thinking that the future is going to be really fucked up, just not in the ways we automatically assume.

SONG OF THE DAY: Mountain Roads

Apparently all I’ve been listening to lately is imaginary wrestling entrance music for a non-existent territory called Greater Appalachian Championship Wrestling, COMING TO THE CIVIC CENTER SATURDAY NIGHT! OUR MAIN EVENT IS A STEEL CAGE GRUDGE MATCH FOR THE GREATER APPALACHIAN HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE, AS… and then you can just let your brain run from there while the song plays. Somebody’s gonna get piledrived though.

DR34MS 4R3 4 C4RN1V4L G4M3...

dreams are a carnival game 
where only the wealthy win… 
the cynicism of doom 

SONG OF THE DAY: Wrong Crowd

Easy to forget how many obscure soul and R&B and even rock and country groups there were back in the day. But think about how many soundcloud rappers there are in every corner of the American Earth, getting cursive letter face tattoos just above their eyebrow, thinking that’s the magical missing piece to becoming the Next Big Thing. Capitalism still eats up people’s dreams, as we get trained to think our dreams need to turn into money, and somebody exploits that weakness in vision to their own benefit. This track is from an old Virginia soul compilation that I couldn’t even find to illegally download online, so somebody sent me a burned copy. Prince George is the county southeast of Petersburg, south of the James, headed down to Nat Turner country – a wonderful expanse of rural Virginia that I’ve often wandered through, and in fact prefer to the interstate if I have to go to dreaded Virginia Beach. Shit, at this point, I don’t even like riding 460, so I jump onto 10 for as much as I can. That’s state highway 10, not even a US highway – places even more littered with ancient dreams where folks sitting at a picnic table beneath LED lights on a warm Saturday night break into mythical “remember back when…” and memories of those dreams float back up to the aether, one more time, to give the night stars just a little more shine. Or maybe not. All I know is sitting at a picnic table talking shit with folks who have lived real lives is much preferable to capitalism and this fuckin’ abomination of a cultured life we have to lead now. I fell in with the wrong crowd, just by being born in America during this period. Still hoping for a miraculous recovery though, because at my heart, I’m just a country bumpkin, and a born mark. Some of us are dreamers more inclined to get exploited than connivers meant to profiteer. I'm okay with how I am and who I am.

SONG OF THE DAY: All Over But The Crying

 

Time to throw on a track suit that doesn’t actually exist, and drive a car I can’t actually afford towards a horizon I’ll never actually reach, just blasting this, until I drive off the edge of the fake earth like the Duke boys, landing in the hay barns of universal reality.

SONG OF THE DAY: Ramblin' Gamblin' Man (45s on 33)

The other weekend, I was in a giant antique/junk/flea market with my girlfriend, and some stand had a whole bunch of car magazines marked down cheap (relatively speaking for a “serious” antique market). I thumbed through almost all of the stacks, hoping to find a bunch of Lowriders for a $1.30 each. In fact, any time I’m in a flea market, I hope I’m gonna stub my toe on a box full of old Lowriders with a “entire box $10” on it. I check ebay all the time looking for some but fuck they’re expensive. There’s an Orlie’s Lowriding magazine as well, which I’d be just as happy to find even though it’s not as well-known. And then there’s the holy grail of all low riding magazines – Teen Angel. Teen Angel was an artist who worked by that pen name at Lowrider magazine back in the late ‘70s, who was far more interested in the cholo/pachuco art and street culture than the vehicular owriders themselves, so branched out and began his own magazine specializing in the art, plus prison letters, since the majority of the art was done by prisoners. It basically became a popular underground magazine of its own, at stores and car shops related to Chicano culture, across the southwestern part of the US. It also became the reason Lowrider itself started carrying more art like this, and even had its own off-shoot magazine called Lowrider Arte. Most copies of Teen Angel go for a couple hundred dollars now, and the first issue goes for over a thousand, so if I ever happened across a box of those at a flea market for $10, I’d finally be able to afford to cover myself in horrible tattoos. I actually thought about that while thumbing through a seemingly endless stack of Truckin’ magazines that weekend, “What if I find a couple Teen Angels in here?” But that’s not practical, and even in this fantasy scenario of imaginary magazines stacks in a box at an undefined and probably non-existent flea market, I’m not gonna pretend Teen Angels would be there. Is that a lower class thing, where your imagination even in fantasy still limits itself? Is that why I’d be so fascinated with a sci-fi show about a spaceship custodian who just cleans the halls mostly? Even pretending has to be reasonable. I’m not no Rockefeller or Rothschild out, here imagining I’m gonna find a box full of exactly what I want, and be able to afford it. Haha, the privilege of dreaming whatever you want, imagine that shit.

WH3N TH3 TR41N 1S S1TT1NG TH3R3...

when the train is sitting there 
waiting on green, I wonder 
if I’m supposed to get on 

PR4CT1C1NG FR33 THR0WS 0N 4N...

practicing free throws on an 
empty court; childhood dreams of 
last second buzzer beaters 

SONG OF THE DAY: The Great Northern Coal Company

Most afternoons I day dream about walking through empty coal train yards, scribbling nothing prayers to float across nowhere, back and forth from mountains to ocean as earth’s guts get scraped out to keep all these screens feeling lit. A post-industrial late American empire message in a bottle of sorts, except there’s all sorts of other messages in bottles stuffed onto the coal trains too, in every open spot sometimes, and you sit there when blessed by one rolling past and look for people you know, or wish you knew, or folks you love, and some you don’t like at all because you know they’re full of shit and fake as fuck. It all floats past.
Most nights I lay in the bed, staying up too late, worrying about how I’m gonna do everything that needs to be done, plus the shit I wanna do, and have enough time for family, for friends, much less my solitary pilgrimages along the tracks, “silver blazing” as the great American wandering poet Marcher Arrant calls it; and I don’t get enough sleep, and I wake up tomorrow even more rest-deprived, with the need-to-dos stacking higher, and you shovel as much of that shit out of the way as you can on the weekends, which means the weeks never really end… just the responsibilities you get paid by some fuckers for bleed into the responsibilities you squeeze around bleed into each other and all over any dreams you once had, which is why you can’t sleep. You don’t dream anymore… you just keep trying to shovel the needs down as fast as you can, but they’re piling up even faster, and it’s a fucking nightmare, but this is how it will probably be until it all collapses.

SONG OF THE DAY: First Place Ribbon

 

Gillian Welch is on the short list of women I sometimes fantasize about sharing a trailer with somewhere near Roxboro, North Carolina, probably have one of those vintage tables in the kitchen, wake up naked together on the weekends and not even think about putting on clothes  until 2 in the afternoon, maybe, cooking pancakes with chopped walnuts in them bamas and drinking like four French presses of coffee, not doing shit, talking about Mary Oliver poetry and how great creeping phlox is and wondering if there were any new collections of VHS tapes at the Goodwill to dig through to add to the collection, even though we hadn’t hooked the VCR back up since I had them both in the middle in the room trying to do some VHS mixtapes with an old computer monitor. But then these fantasies always get fucked up because usually I’m laying on the couch reading an old magazine or some shit, and she walks through from the back bedroom to the kitchen, and I notice her really really nice full-color plant tattoo from her left shoulder all the way down to her elbow, like $1200 worth of tattoo, and I start to lay there on that couch in my fantastical mind, thinking about all the vehicles I bought that cost less than that (most of them, to be honest), or how much I could use that $1200 not in fantasy mind life but to pay off medical debt that just keeps trickling along in the real life, on the wrong side of the fantasy. Sometimes I just wake up from the fantasy and realize I’m zoning out while at work, in front of a computer screen, pretending to do shit that matters my whole goddamned wasted life. Other times I was half asleep, and I pick up my iphone to check my IG notifications. But sometimes I just get mad in the fantasy, at Gillian Lucinda Welch Williams Jr. there, except I don’t say nothing, because lolol I hadn’t worked in my fantasy in 9 months, and she pays all the bills. But I’m gonna log into OKCupid after she goes to bed tonight, and flirt with women that don’t exist on multiple levels.