SONG OF THE DAY: Computer Love (kudzu'd)

I probably should've posted yesterday's post with today's song, but today's song wasn't the next one to post yesterday. So I didn't. Most everything I do is the intersection of multiple constant practices, and it leads to intersections, which occasionally end up one block over from what would've been perfect to see. But that wasn't my path to take, so its perfection was just an after-the-fact footnote. And ultimately, nobody reads the footnotes, except those who are forced to by academic delusions.

SONG OF THE DAY: Trespassin'

Trespassing doesn’t exist. Decolonize yourself. (Also, don't buy a Decolonize flag, of any sort. That's mad corny, not to mention pretty dissonant.)

a freestyle sonnet about financial castles made of sand

Ignoring ebb and flow lessons of lunar tides, 
built myself shelter from a castle made of sand. 
The best laid plans of both mice and men often slides 
into chaos theory's proofs of far larger grand 

designs unknown by us apes powered by skull bone 
contents. Our inhumane confidence far exceeds 
examples shown historically, atoms blown 
apart to see what happens. Our ignorance breeds 

an internal artificial intelligence, 
planting flags along fence lines erected with fear. 
I try my best to not worship dead presidents, 
but cash rules everything around me... austere 

living seen as personal failure sevenfold. 
Indoctrination causing inside stranglehold. 

SONG OF THE DAY: Che Che Cole (kudzu'd)

I got this mostly dope book the other day called Boogie Down Predictions, but there was a chapter on DJ Screw’s whole movement, which I’d gotten excited about seeing in the table of contents, but ended up incredibly disappointed. The whole thing was written in hard academia style, which is great for academia but doesn’t really translate all that easily to normal people. Too many big ass words all for the sake of being big ass word usage. Folks struggling to still pay last month’s rent don’t have a lot of time for shit like that. Mostly, when I finished the chapter, I thought it could’ve used more Big Moe flows on it. Like just explain your whole idea, in your academic ass overwordy way, in detail to Big Moe, then let him flow for about 32 lines over an instrumental and explain it better than you. That should be how we peer review things to be honest. This is my thesis, because I am Professor Lounge (Ph.D. in Fuck That Shit).

3DVC4T3D B3Y0ND MY...

educated beyond my 

intelligence - true gods of 

dirt got grime for DNA 

M4N V3RSVS N4TVR3 1S 4N...

man versus nature is an 
intellectual fault line 
we build hopelessness upon 

TRYN4 R3C0GN1Z3 SP1R1T...

tryna recognize spirit 
instead of intelligence, 
because smart ain’t always good 

SONG OF THE DAY: I Got Style

You can inherit wealth, but not style. Style comes from culture, often enough separated from wealth these days, and to be honest, culture can’t ever be owned because it’s literal “culture” that ferments within the hearts and minds of folks practicing it. The issue with how “western culture” has developed from English colonialism is that those with wealth co-opt style by purchasing it, and in fact, any of us growing in this “western culture” are encouraged to purchase new identities as often as possible. But this also dilutes the actual culture, and in fact fucks it all up, cheapens it by attaching wealth to it rather than practice. (Practice is always worth more than wealth.) So western culture, which waves the flag of the great melting pot of cultures, also is just as much a consumption of all other cultures at this point as well. It’s like a buffet of culture, with the blandest, least spicy version of every culture, under one big heat lamp, and that’s supposed to be great. I was thinking on this earlier today as I conversed with a young creative cousin about AAVE and a meme I saw about how use of the habitual be was common in both West African and Gaelic languages, and kids shown a picture of Cookie Monster sick with Elmo eating some cookies got asked “Who be eating cookies?” and black kids knew to answer Cookie Monster while white kids answered Elmo. But if the kids were asked “Who is eating cookies?” all the kids knew the difference and answered Elmo, thus bad English actually had more depth and nuance.
Anyways, I’m a first generation college student, and I learned a lot, and was horribly embarrassed about how I was when I first went off to there. But over time, I’ve realized all my style came from before college and if anything I’ve had to make sure I didn’t learn all the wrong shit while learning all those things to get that expensive ass piece of paper that says I was highly educated. I always try to remind myself, as Jerry Clower said (whom my dad played often), to not get educated beyond my intelligence.

3DVC4T3D B3Y0ND MY...

educated beyond my 
natural intelligence, 
so had to learn to forget 

1NTV1T1V3 W4RN1NG S1GNS...

intuitive warning signs 
and red flags galore, but we 
get taught to ignore that shit 

N0B0DY N33DS R3W1R1NG...

nobody needs “rewiring” - 
sense of intelligence has 
always been artificial 

SONG OF THE DAY: Khadidja

One thing I've listened to the past half year or so that I never heard of before is rai music. I think it's old pop music but I honestly don't know shit about it other than it's from Turkey and everybody who does it famously is either named Cheb or Cheba. I could look it up and learn more but I don't really give a fuck about becoming a western academic historian of Turkish pop music from the 1980s. I just enjoy some of this shit. That should be good enough. Everybody thinks they're a goddamned archivist curator all the fucking time.

SONG OF THE DAY: La Raza

Apparently, La Raza Cosmica is now problematic too, because in the process of seeing the combination of all the main human racial types, you’re eliminating the originals. The term was coined by Jose Vasconcelos in 1925, reacting to white supremacist thinking being sent out to the world from the USA and Europe, which argued that the mestizos of the Americas were a combination of the four dominant races on the Earth, creating a fifth, unifying and conglomerate cosmic race. And I can see that complaint against it, because it’s not a huge jump from chosen race to say a super mix of all races is the actual chosen race. Everything is problematic nowadays. But you know why though? Everything was built on a problematic foundation. Shit’s all fucked up. When that woman got shot in the Capitol shit, it was interesting to me how cops called everybody off, called in paramedics, the people storming shit backed off – the reality of what had happened sobered everybody present up right away. Traumas are supposed to do that, to shock you into sheltering and surviving. All the conflict that had been manufactured came to a pause, because a human life was fucked up all of a sudden.
And yet, that’s exactly the problem with racism. When George Floyd was killed, everybody present should’ve been like “Whoa… what the fuck, everybody back up, call 911.” But time after time, that’s not been the response. So it’s when dehumanization goes beyond just thinking your race is some extra special shit to thinking other races don’t deserve to exist. Death of a human being should be shocking to you, to some extent, because you’re a human, and self-preservation is part of your natural make-up. Once you get to a point where you’re deciding some humans don’t deserve preservation and others do, then you’ve gotten to that point where your brain has been educated beyond your heart’s intelligence. There’s a lot of that going around now, in both the obvious and not so obvious ways. I hope we all sober the fuck up.

SONG OF THE DAY: Mentou

Lately I've been practicing walking a lot more with my phone a lot less, sometimes for an hour or two down the same meandering back roads where I live. Being just after Christmas, there's a few fresh old televisions dumped off in ditches where normally just Bud Light cans live. I find myself less distracted by thinking about my walk as an experience to share or consume without the phone. And when I get home later in the day, and pick up the phone, and click it to life, it's like YOU HAVEN'T GOTTEN CLOSE TO YOUR STEPS GOAL FOR THE DAY. I just laugh to myself, thinking, "You don't know all you think you do, fuckin' smart phone." It's also great because it helps me remember to take everything the phone says with a grain of salt, because it doesn't really know shit like it acts like it does.

SONG OF THE DAY: Foret

WALKING THRU THE ABANDONED FACTORIES OF THE DECLINING EMPIRE

CELL SERVICE AT ZERO BARS WHICH MEANS NO DIGITAL PRISON

THE CROWS IN THE TOWERING OAKS YELLING QUOTES FROM THE WIRE

"we used to make shit in this country cawww build shit cawww cawww cawww"

AND I LOOK UP THE HOTBALL IN THE SKY

WHICH FEELS LIKE IT GETS CLOSER EVERY YEAR

AND I FINISH THEIR STREAM OF THOUGHT, YELLING

"NOW WE JUST PUT OUR HANDS IN THE NEXT GUY'S POCKET!"

AND THE CROWS FLY AWAY

STARTLED AT MY INHUMANE HONESTY

BUT I'M SIMPLY QUOTING SOME POP CULTURE I CONSUMED

VOMITING IT BACK OUT AT THE NATURAL WORLD

AS IF IT WAS INTELLIGENCE

SONG OF THE DAY: Free The Robots

Too many people think they know, which is not to say I know better so much as they don't know all they think they do, and I know I don't know, but I'm not trying to have nobody think I know more than they do. There is a confidence of outlook that exists in too many people I have to interact with that lacks humility and an acceptance that by being human you don't really know shit. I am glad the racist patriarchy is falling, but I'd prefer we not have an emulation of the shithead mediocre white male boss who has to have everybody either repeat back his ideas to him as brilliance, or just restate the work of others in a barely different enough way to claim at his own. Seems like that's where we're moving though, to a great congress of judgmental mediocrity. I don't think enough people have been hungry, or known struggle, or been trapped in an existence they know they can't easily escape, if at all. Shit like that makes you way less likely to be so sure you know what's best for everybody else. Unfortunately, this is America, and we are still ruled by people who think they know better than everybody else about what everybody ought to be doing. That's our entire political system. I'm very thankful for the people who just do shit, completely not giving a fuck about politics. This world needs a lot more doers of shit, and far less people who think they know all the time.

1S 1T M1S1NF0RM4T10N...

is it misinformation

if nobody realizes

we all think the same, wrongly?

SONG OF THE DAY: Baldwin

It’s too bad you can’t read through memes because there seemed to be a sudden explosion in James Baldwin memes the past couple years. I really love the notion of people absorbing some James Baldwin philosophy, but I don’t know, memes feel hollow in the long run. Being meme woke is not much better than being red-pilled, which is not much better than being a grandma who believes Nigerian prince emails. Maybe I should just recreate Going to Meet the Man in full through memes, which I post on a dedicated twitter account. That’d be wonderful – spend hours upon hours upon hours to create an elaborate workaround to just reading a book for an audience that likely won’t ever pay attention to it. The internet really is a Rube Goldberg machine for intelligence.

F3T1SH1Z1NG TH3 S1MPL3...

fetishizing the simple 

life, made too complicated 

by the shackles of progress 

SONG OF THE DAY: Going Home

Notions of home we’re often born into, without stability, to where general geographic areas become home more than specific piece of land – a neighborhood or more expansive area we bounced around while developing our human roots. Often times we’re uprooted, perhaps by economics, perhaps by traumas, maybe weather… who knows, but shit happens, regularly, that blasts stability sideways. I consider myself from southside Virginia in very general sense because my sense of home has taken a couple of body shots over the years, to where the two actual places that are buildings I slept in the most amount of nights of my life aren’t really my legitimate home any more. One I don’t ever want to go back to, to be honest, not that specific house, and I won’t unless somebody dies and familial obligation will force me back. The other, I still have access to, and my not being there is on friendly terms, but it’s also not my home any more because home requires that constant exchange of energy with a place where you see the subtle changes in it and it sees the subtle changes in you. Where I live now does not feel like home, and in fact is even outside that general feeling of home relationship I have with southside Virginia. The shape of things is different, and the culture is close but not the same, and I don’t know, it just don’t feel like home.

So many humans end up living in places that are not home. It’s a fairly common thing actually, and it’s perfectly easy to accept living in a non-home place and make the most of it, but you’re also not home. I thought on this a lot over the course of two events this weekend. First, I helped dig a grave, for a woman being buried at home, next to one of her favorite gardens, and that deep connection to home so impressed me. I’ve attended a couple home burials in the past, and in fact always joke about how, being from southside Virginia, I’ve been to two funerals in junkyards. This is a factual statement, and both were beautiful and completely appropriate events. But digging a grave for a home burial where home was still known, to such a deep level… it impressed me greatly. There is a strength in having a lifetime of connection with a place, one that transcends economics in a lot of ways, which is why when experts tell people from economically depressed places that they need to move to where there are better opportunities, and not everybody jumps at the chance, I can understand that. If you have deep cultural roots to a place, separate from economics, it is not easy to just assume getting a paycheck is enough to tear those roots out and try somewhere else, where there’s no guarantee of financial success.

I also thought about this notion of home during the Mexico/U.S. Gold Cup final, because that was held in Chicago, and essentially any U.S. men’s team match against a Latin American country that is not held in ultra-white spaces like Columbus or Salt Lake City is going to be a road match for the home team. That was the case in Chicago, where the crowd was predominately pro-Mexican team, far more than visible support for the U.S. team. And it got me to thinking of immigration and the political discourse about that, and all the Mexicans and Salvadorans and Hondurans and others who traveled so far from their notion of home, simply to find a decent life. And how you can find that community elsewhere, if there’s enough of you from back home, to build a little slightly stable slice of that back home in a completely different place. I don’t see how anybody could be mad at that. That’s really all any of us want, is to have a home, and feel complete there, and safe, and know there’s a community acting like family to help us when crisis comes up.

Most spiritual mythologies talk about helping strangers, and making them feel at home. That’s a deep concept which seems to be lost upon too many humans these days. To act with compassion, and not just let somebody into your space to sleep on the floor, but to welcome them, make them feel as if it is their home too. It won’t, because home is deeper than one day’s worth of actions – it is woven slowly through time, through many days’ worth of actions, years, even generations. But simply helping somebody to feel at home shows at heart level, not brain level, not politics level – but right-thinking heart level that you understand home cannot be manufactured out of nothing, but you want them to know they are welcome.

It’s a weird feeling not having a strong sense of specific home any more, and there’s a strange restlessness I get sometimes that I think comes from that lack of roots. Like I said, it’s not uncommon, but damn if it doesn’t feel weird, especially on those weird moments where I don’t even realize I don’t feel at home, but then I roll into the general part of the Earth that does feel like home, on a perfectly home-like day that activates all these cellular memories, and it’s just some fucked up moment riding down an old road, and my body and being is like “ahhh, home” beyond my ability to rationalize or understand in intelligent scientific way. True home.