SONG OF THE DAY: I Don't Want to be a Freak (But I Can't Help Myself) (kudzu'd)

In all my slowing down 45s to 33 speed years, never have I come across a song I love as much as this one, that I had no knowledge of at all beforehand. This is a 45 that I’m up to 4 or 5 copies, of varying qualities, and honestly, I can never have too many. I stockpile Dynasty 45s like dry beans for the apocalypse. Anyways, I don’t have anything clever to say today, in fact, my brain has become quite foggy. It’s too cold, or I’m too old, or it’s a time of year that runs me down, or I don’t know. But I know the mantra of this song is still true, and one day this will be our national anthem, played at the wrong speed (which is the correct one), as we realize we don’t need a flag because we don’t have borders that aren’t already present in nature.

SONG OF THE DAY: Super Freak (Part 1) (kudzu'd)

We seemed to have lost our cultural pride in freakiness. This bums me out, mostly because I’m freaky as hell. And also there’s a sort of collective performative quirkiness that’s don’t feel like authentic freakiness. Like, really weird appearing people who are basic and, to be honest, somewhat bland. The truly freaky have often looked normal enough, which is helpful, because you can’t be freaky in the weirdest places possible if somebody identifies you as “freaky looking” before you get there. Gotta have a little freak camouflage, to not call attention to yourself. Anyways, please feel free to be freakier, and take militant pride in your freakiness. Don’t let nobody tell you what you shouldn’t be doing. They don’t know you.

SONG OF THE DAY: Freak-A-Zoid (kudzu'd)

The other night, I went to bed early (I think) but got woken up by a buzzing/humming sound outside the window, like when the drug helicopters are looking for grow fields in the quarries, but closer and not as giant. Looked out and there was a blue/green glowing orb I guess hovering but it’s hard to tell if an orb is hovering or flying or just existing beyond gravitational pull, especially when it starts talking to you in a voice that sounds like Sun Ra but also your dead Uncle Ray. He got shot in a home invasion and lost three fingers on his right hand, including the thumb, so they grafted a big toe onto it so that he still had opposable digits, and he loved to thrust that two fingered one thumb hand at people and exaggeratedly go, “Nice to meet ya!” The voice told me that despite me playing records slow, I hadn’t slowed my own anxieties, so really hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface on the Power of Lounge. The voice challenged me to not really to do anything more but just to be my full self. So I’ve been working on that this week, trying to put together a more full version of dirtgod for when I’ve committed to going out in public and acting like I know what I’m doing. We’re simultaneously trying to activate full super freak mode but also just start letting the Power of Lounge start trickling in through the divisive barriers and obstacles put up everywhere. Not ones you see, all the invisible metaphysical barriers. And I’m not even trying to destroy those, because once you get into the reactionary mode of trying to destroy all that’s wrong with the world, you’re just swinging an angry hammer around everywhere all day long, and not being true to your heart. I’m just trying to seep through the cracks, and make ‘em worse. All this is gonna fall apart on its own because it wasn’t built right in the first place. I ain’t gotta do nothing but increase the Power of Lounge on my end, so that once it does all come apart, there’s a thick coating of goodness already on everything.

SONG OF THE DAY: Freaky People Pt 1(kudzu'd)

Made me and my girlfriend matching iron-on letter shirts, black shirts with silver sparkle letters. One says SUPER FREAK, the other says SUPER FREAKY. I kept asking her to choose, because I didn’t want to assert authority over our roles, but she kept deferring and making me choose. So they were sitting on the couch, she was across the room, and I threw the SUPER FREAK one at her, and kept the SUPER FREAKY one. Says a lot about our relationship to be honest. Anyways, we wore them out one time and people looked at us like we were fuckin’ crazy.

existential crisis caused

by too much sleep/not enough

sleep/moon too bright freaking outs

Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournament in Charlottesville this Thursday evening

THIS THURSDAY NIGHT at 7:00 PM at BON coffee event performing house center of underground greatness, we will be having a Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournament. Details as to how that works are below, but basically you show up with 20-some haiku, which can either be 5-7-5 syllable structure or just short poems 17 syllables or under, and you trade off one-on-one against others, until one is defeated, on and on until a single person is standing, who is crowned the Haiku Spirit Warrior of the evening, and gets a one-of-a-kind motherfuckin' railroad haiku spike of my own creation. The one I've hand-selected for this even is about shineface people, because I often wonder if Charlottesville is not simply full of shineface people, looking to gentrify rusty styles into something they can live vicariously through. I realize this is partially my own pre-conceptions, but experience here has not exactly countered that internal bias. But we are brining the Rojonekku Word Fighting Arts Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournament to the public, in the hopes that the shinefaces who gentrify the earth and commodify trash do not ruin our good time this one evening. SO I AM CALLING ALL FREAKS, FOOLS, FIENDS, FUCKERS, FREESTYLE PHILOSOPHERS, HOMELESS BUKOWSKIS, BABYLONIAN RESISTANCE FIGHTERS, SLAM STARS, MILLENNIAL FALCONS, WHITE WALKERS, ONLINE PERSONAL BRAND DEVELOPERS, DESIGNERS, FINE ARTS PAINTERS, HOUSEPAINTERS, SKYLINE PAINTERS, LEAVES CHANGING COLORS IN THE AUTUMN FAIRY PAINTERS, GLITTERATI, LITERATI, HIPSTERATI, BUGATI RIDERS, BOX CHEVY DRIVERS, DIP DIP DIVERS, EASYRIDERS, FORMER EASYRIDER OL' LADIES OF THE MONTH FROM THE 1970S, FORMER EASYRIDER OL' LADIES OF THE MONTH FROM THE 1980S, BEAVER HUNT PARTICIPANTS PRE-1983, COFFEE AFICIONADOS, SELF-PUBLISHING EXPERTS, ZINESTERS, SCENESTERS, BIG DREAM BELIEVERS, SMALL TOWN BELIEBERS, DON'T FIGHT THE FEELERS, YEEZUS FREAKS, FAMILY MEMBERS, VW MICROBUS PROPHETS, RAINBOW FAMILY MEMBERS, ASTRAL TRAVELERS, ACOUSTIC GUITAR BUSKERS, MONSANTO CORN HUSKERS, CATCHIN FIREFLIES IN JARS AT DUSKERS, VISIONARY ARTISTS, OUTSIDER POETS, STREET GENIUSES, WORDSMITHS, BLACKSMITHS, TRAMPS, HOBOES, BUMS, EMPERORS OF THE NORTH POLE, KINGS, QUEENS, GODS, EARTHS, KNIGHTS, DAZE, BISHOPS, ANTI-BISHOPS, CARDINALS, ROOKS, RAVENS, WOLFDOORS, WOLF SHAMAN, COYWOLVE AFICIONADOS, SPIRIT ANIMALS IN HUMAN FORM, SPIRIT PLANTS IN ANIMAL FORM, SPIRIT MATTER IN EARTHLY FORM, MCS, DJS, DANCERS, ROMANCERS, STONES, DREAMLESS FLESH AND BONES, DRUNKARDS, HOP-HEADS, AND ANYTHING ELSE to come on out, it might be cool and shit.

Hand-to-hand haiku is an actual thing that has existed in various forms as an offshoot of poetry slams for over a decade, but I am bringing it to the here and now wherever my chaos tornado spins because it is a thing I wish was happening all the time on every street corner around barrel and pallet fires so that I could take part. So I guess I will emcee the affair and create its existence locally.

WHAT HAND-TO-HAND HAIKU ENTAILS

A hand-to-hand haiku battle works as a single-elimination tournament, meaning eight people start out in one-on-one matches, where one winner advances to the next round, with eight going down to four, then four down to two, and so on. Thus, there will be four first round battles, two semifinal battles between first round winners, then a final showdown between the two semifinal winners. For our purposes, the first round will be a best of 5, semifinals will be a best of 7, and the finals will be a best of 11.

What does that “best of” mean, and how does that work? Well, that’s easy. There will be three judges pre-selected for the evening’s festivities. They will have two flags (different ones obviously, we’ll assume red and blue for ease of explanation). In each match-up, one competitor will have a red flag, and the other a blue flag. Red flag reads a haiku first, then blue, then after a brief moment of thought, the three judges, who hold both flags, raise the flag of who won that round, in their on-the-spot opinion. Whichever flag a majority of judges raises is considered the winner of that round, meaning if two out of three judges say blue, then blue wins the first round, and is up 1 to 0. Loser of any round reads first the next round, so red would read a second haiku, followed by blue, followed by judges’ decision, and so on, until one of the first round competitors wins 3 rounds. At most this would need 5 rounds to decide, thus it is called a best-of-5. The same process is repeated, but with more rounds, for the semifinals and finals.

This means for all people reading haiku, you may need up to 23 different haiku, in the off-chance the first round, the semifinals, and finals all go to their maximum amount of rounds, and that you advance accordingly. Thus, I say you need a minimum of 23 haiku, although if you are eliminated early or win rounds quickly, most likely very few of you will actually use 23 haiku, perhaps even using as few as 3. No worries; save what you wrote for the next one.

Here is the thing though: you select which haiku you read for each round, rather than reading them in a set order, so to have a larger, more varied arsenal of haiku gives yourself the freedom to choose ones that might fit your opponent or the moment more easily, to tap into the flow of the evening, or which one you would assume might strike a favorable mood with the judges. I look at it as each haiku is an arrow, and the more arrows you have in hand, the more likely you are able to find a sharp one. So come equipped as you see fit.

On a personal aside, as a man who has literally written several thousand haiku over the past decade, a method I use is writing them one per index card. This is a good method for a hand-to-hand haiku battle, as you can have your handful of index cards, mark out ones you use, and shuffle them around and use them accordingly. Just a tip; you can use it or ignore it as you see fit.

WHAT ABOUT HAIKU?

Ah yes, the terribly pretentious question us westerners are forced to ask ourselves with regards to a Japanese literary tradition based on a language of characters while we speak syllables. Haiku traditionally was tied to the seasons, and the most common western translation has been a three-line poem of five syllables, seven syllables, and five syllables, which is often times seen as the truest replication of the Japanese poem. For the sake of our Hand-to-Hand Haiku purposes, to keep everybody on even ground, we are going to go with this. Now somebody may say, “Wait, counting syllables goes against what haiku actually is, Raven Mack!” Well, let me tell you, I know this form on a deep and personal level, and could tell you that haiku is not even a poetic form on its own, but is part of a larger group form of poetry called renga where the first part was called hokku and became the title of famous renga poems, thus it became its own thing as literary time passed. So haiku is not even technically what the hell it is supposed to be. So for all haiku traditionalists insulted at counting syllables, once you are holding mass parties where groups of people compose poems as a group with 100 verses per poem, you can hold your complaints to yourself. We cannot accept part of a tradition but pretend the rest doesn’t exist and call ourselves traditionalists. I mean, we could, and in fact that’s what most people do, but I’m not supporting that.

So for our sake, our haiku will be three-line poems, preferably of 5-syllables, 7-syllables, and 5-syllables. I will not count them though, and if you feel overly confined by this structure (form is good for you though), you can stretch the definition of haiku to mean a short poem of 17-syllables (or less).

Also, traditionally, these have been tied to the seasons, or nature, but I regard the act of haiku as more a meditation or habit of observation, which means all the fucked up parts of the world made by man are as natural as nature, and more than perfect for haiku. You can go traditional or you can go with observing the world around you or you can go experimental. Whatever’s clever.

And obviously, you should write your own haiku. If you have competed before in a different Rojonekku Hand-to-Hand tournament, you're expected to come with fresh material. Obviously there is no haiku police who will count syllables or be like, "Didn't she read that one before?" We, as the viewing community, will police ourselves, so if you are in the crowd at an event and it seems someone's gone long on syllables or repeating themselves, I encourage you to chatter amongst yourselves about it to create that uncomfortable buzz thing that happens in public events. If the competitor repeats these shady activities, hopefully the buzz will turn to outright booing and jeering. In fact, unlike your standard poetry reading, I encourage the crowd to make noise and respond. This is not to be a silent awe affair.

BUT HOW WILL THESE BE JUDGED?

A valid question, as none of us wants to be judged, and yet judges will be involved. Honestly, there is no right or wrong way to pick a winner, and this method will always be subjective. Always. But I am going to have three judges, and attempt to curate each of them from a different angle of cultural sensibilities. Judges’ decisions will be final, and also subjective, so never take it personally. This is meant to be fun, and will be fun, so nobody needs to get all, “Damn, why wasn’t my eternal creativity of poetic greatness not properly recognized in this damn hand-to-hand haiku thing? This is bullshit!”

Judges: You will judge as you feel appropriate. Like I mentioned above, I’ll pick you because I'm thinking you'll observe from a certain perspective, but I might be completely off on judging your personality, so feel free to toss that aside completely and just go with your heart. In fact, the whole point of haiku is to go with your heart, and this whole nonsense endeavor of a tournament is meant to motivate people to go with what’s in their heart, not worry and become anxious.

SO WHAT DO WE WIN?

Winner of the night’s tournament will receive the accolades of an adoring attending public, and I'm sure I'll find something from the Bird Tribe compound to show my gratitude to you as well. But don't expect anything in particular, or at all, because one never can predict what I'll do.

Speaking of which, as part of hosting the festivities, I'll share some of my own writing, or unique perspective, or perhaps just talk about what I've been cooking up in the kitchen. The entire motivation behind Rojonekku WFA (Word Fighting Arts) is to battle the complacency of routine life with words, and this means not just books or printed matter but stories and jokes and strange tales from stranger places and just everything and anything to be honest.

So that is how the Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournament works. If you are interested in participating - which I hope you will be - contact me at rojonekku at gmail dot com. Even though this is a slam poetry tradition, my goal with this is to bring different styles of poets from different backgrounds into a mutually accepted format, and interact. Then we cross-pollinate each other, and everything will taste better.

Weekly Recap

Well, I skipped a week there but ain't shit to recap anyways. New editorial command at Heavy dried up that gig, but Armchair Linebacker is always there, where you can read my angry and drunken Washington Redskins fandom play out firsthand. This past week, I recapped the loss to the Colts, and talked about how important in the modern NFL climate it will be for the Redskins to concuss more people than concuss them.
Additionally, the dude that be doing Amphetazine is putting up older classics from this site over there (like this thing about Goat Rights vs. Property Rights). Amphetazine is a noble idea, and the other stuff over there is interesting, so you should check it out. I hope I have remembered to put it in my sidebar, but mayhaps I have not yet.
Speaking of which, you can order the book I have a story in (story called Escambia Counties) called Florida Heat Wave, with other projects on the horizon. Everything I do, I have to do all grand and convoluted, so none of these projects are on the immediate horizon, but they are there. I can definitely feel an energy shift of shit about to be changing in the coming year. In relation to that, I know I have a loyal fanbase, but whenever you feel the lololols or enjoy some of my dumb shit on Rojonekku, it helps to click those sharing buttons under every post. I could remain an obscure dude forever and live a long frustrated life, or I could become exploited in exchange for fame and ultimately self-destruct through my own drunken recklessness because of the way my DNA is swirled. You can help me do the latter by sharing links and helping spread my fresh-dipped SS Va. ways to the rest of the crooked ass world. Mad daps to you if you do. And the reason I'd prefer the exploited ultimately destructive route instead of the obscurity route is because one involves dick tattoos and the other does not. It has long been my goal in life to have a dick tattoo, meaning a tattoo on my penis, not a tattoo of a penis. Also relatedly to the new-fangled cybertronic hyping machines of the world, I have the twitters now (@rojonekku) and yes, twitters is the stupidest fucking idiotic goddamn thing ever. Yes. But I am there. And being certain real life people who are Facebook fans are not in the twitters, I find I can get away with saying stupider things there, which of course, just perpetuates what the twitters actually is. It is a bizarre spiral we are in.
Also, Rojonekku t-shirts, hopefully beginning of November, will be for sale. You can always donate money to my dumb ass to buy caffeine-free ginger ale to take my medicines with by clicking the ENABLE ROJONEKKU button. If you give me $10, I'll postcard you back. If you give $20 or more, I'll write you a letter. (Triple N - your letter is on my desk at home; I keep meaning to tear this one page out of a magazine to put in the envelope too but keep forgetting to get the magazine in question out of the camper behind my house after work. John B - I will write you a letter this weekend... thanks bro.)
Another also, this past week I wrote about an Uncle Sinner song in the J.J. Krupert countdown, and actually got an email from the dude Uncle Mike Sinner, who is as solid as his song suggested to me, and fights that good/bad fight with pushing your ideas out to the world through the inhibiting DNA of deeply embedded recklessness and destruction. Anyways, Uncle Sinner has a myspace, and after talking to the dude, I felt compelled to share the link. Check it out.
Finally, I am in the preliminary stages of setting up a monthly event called the CVA WFA or Central Virginia Word Fighting Arts. This is an offshoot of my personal brand of meandering writing - Rojonekku - which is a SSVA (southside Virginia) word fighting art, not so much to fight other people but just generally to fight the entire fucking world and everything that makes life so goddamn hard to handle on a day-to-day basis. It is so easy to just fellate a pistol and cash out early, and I had an uncle of mine do that back in the day and he was one of the most solid dudes I ever knew. But fuck man, when you are blessed with the unlocked creativity flow of whatever medium your brain is predisposed towards, you have to use it to keep yourself from being dead. And if you ain't got it unlocked yet, you have to find that shit. Ultimately that's what Rojonekku is all about anyways, and I should have some sort of explanation for all this on the blog, but I don't. That's one of the projects on the horizon, the Rojonekku Training Manual, which literally what it sounds like, methods and exercises I've used with the semi-delinquent vagabond teenagers I tend to attract to the compound, to put them on the path to not fucking up the world normal-style, where all you do is get put in jail, but fucking it up on that other level, where you destroy norms by proudly being your own form of normal, disrupting the status quo's standards of normalcy. It's an important fucking thing to do, in fact it's imperative. Honestly, I regard my paypal donations as slush funds for just such endeavors, so I don't tell my family about it. Those $20 drops here or there do not go to electric bills or gas for the truck or new ballet shoes for the kid; it all goes on fucked up things. Old Easyriders off Ebay or 17 different world flags that look fucked up to string up along the roadside in front of my house to scare the world or india ink to continue putting raggedy ass homemade stars on my thighs or a box of wine to go hike all the way through the pitch black darkness of the Crozet tunnel through Afton Mountain with my man D-Mo. It generates psychic nonsense for my little corner of the world, which in turn is filtered into more psychic nonsense words - Rojonekku - inside the interweb demons, which hopefully is strong enough to transmit through all the electronic clutter in our lives just enough to spiral your day into a more nonsensical and non-normal way. That's really all I want to do - fuck shit up with words.

100 VINYLZ: #68 - Rowdy LP by Hank Williams Jr.

(1981, Curb Records)
Another of my folks' albums that I've got now. The cover of this LP has Bocephus kicking it with a pair of trashy yet what up womenfolks in the booth of some place that allows him to have a bottle of Jim Beam and a personal jukebox. On the back side, someone's spilt a beer and everyone's laughing instead of canoodling, but I remember being a young buck and looking at all that and thinking, “I’m not sure what’s going on here but it looks cool as fuck,” like you think back before you know what’s going on completely but you’ve looked at some magazines hidden under the bed and you get that uncontrollable tingle to your brain and body.

August O.C.D. #5: Historic Porn

Look, don’t tell anybody, but once in awhile me and the ol’ lady might try to watch a porn movie. Very rarely does it actually happen though because very little porn is geared to be enjoyable to a functioning couple. Mostly it’s weird, control freakish bullshit meant to be viewed by weak-minded dudes who want to control the world they feel so lost inside of all the time. At least that’s how I see it. I’m not sure what’s stimulating about having three dudes standing around one girl and trying to blast cumshots on her face. That actually seems kinda gay to me, to be perfectly honest. In fact, a lot of man/woman porn seems ultimately gay to me, not in the sense it’s gay porn but in the sense it’s for guys unable to admit emotion to women or bond with them, but can do that with their bros, at a woman’s expense. This often involves her ass as well. Very odd. But anyways, I’ve sought out porn that might be interesting to both of us and not make us feel all creeped out or bored or whatever, and here are some things I’ve noticed. First off, porn video stores really get lazy by the fact they’ve got porn. I mean, they sort of separate it into categories, sort of, but beyond that, nothing. You’re thumbing through flicks trying to find something, and honestly, you’re gonna see something fucked up in the process. And once it’s in your brain you can’t make it go away. It sucks. Secondly, once you find movies that might not be bad, nine times out of ten, they end bad. Like what is the deal with newer porns (meaning since 1989 in my mind, and not featuring Randy Spears or Tom Byron) doing this thing where it’s sex, but you have no sound from the sex, and soundtrack is some generic ass music like a new age musician trying to make what they think is rock music? Does anybody like this? Shit, if you’re gonna dub over the sounds of the people completely (which sucks, by the way), you might as well just play some old wacky ass funk music and kick the whole porn soundtrack stereotype in full. This new age rock crap is terrible. But also, it seems no porn anymore is really about a storyline, which doesn’t have to be that great, but it’s nice to have a little story to explain why those two chicks are fucking that one guy in the back of a tractor and trailer, don’t you think? Doesn’t have to be a Pulitzer story or anything, just a simple tale to tie the scenes together.
But ultimately, what I want on my quest is historic porn, meaning set in the olden times, with chicks wearing lots of clothes that may not ever come completely off. We watched Pioneer House not too long ago, and oddly enough, that shit was highly sexual to me. And this dude in Australia sent me some old porn tapes of his, and sadly most of them sucked. Poor dude spent a ton of money mailing them to me. But there was a Dracula porn flick from the ‘70s or early ‘80s that was kinda cool, except the historic porn was very sadomasochistic. What I want is just some good sweet old school historically accurate porn, set in an old log cabin, perhaps along the river where flat-bottomed boats of trade poled by regularly, and all sorts of wild encounters happened from that. In fact, that’s a good idea, and if I could make it, I’m sure I’d get wealthy, because people love porn and spend money on porn like mad. Except those that spend money on porn like mad are social misfits and total malcontents and only want to watch nine dudes stand around glad-handing each other while they commit bukkake on some chick’s face. Fucking world. I wish it would blow up sometimes.