Rojonekku: global warming

Showing posts with label global warming. Show all posts

Friday, May 3

SONG OF THE DAY: Sin Control (kudzu'd)

Just vibing to the rising temperatures in this old house in rural America, about to break out the window fan arsenal to point in at night and out in heavy sunlight. Got a couple window units upstairs in the kids’ rooms, but I don’t fuck with the conditioned air. If it’s gonna keep getting hotter and the electric grid eventually fails sporadically, gotta get used to it. It’s weird to me folks that think survivalism is having an expensive generator that they financed. That’s temporary survival at best. You gotta have life skills and the ability to deal with bullshit. And hot ass days is dealing with bullshit.
But this is also the sweet spot, because even as it cracks 90 degrees god awfully early in the calendar year, the house still has that nice cool earth floor basement shooting cold up through the floor. Winter hadn’t been baked out the house’s bones yet. Come August, it’s gonna be different, and my sweating ass will probably be cussing the heat and wondering about getting one of those new-fangled mini-splits. Anything that’s gotta get financed though is out of my price range.
I actually hate that about green energy and generators, or getting solar panels. All it is in America is a financing scam, and you don’t save money, and you don’t save the environment unless you got the money to throw away on it, and everything is filtered through the prism of “how can we make an industry off this that can extract additional wealth?” It’s such bullshit. That’s why I look forward to grid collapse some days. All this bullshit won’t last. It never does. Wintertime comes for every self-important empire.

Thursday, April 6

SONG OF THE DAY: Hard Steppin' (kudzu'd)

I try not to dig too hard into the modern funk movement, or if I do, I try and do so with an open mind, because often times you find out the band is a bunch of white-appearing dudes from post-gentrification Brooklyn, or like based out of Finland. But at the same time, they often also try to put on their heroes from the past, and do so with full support and credit to those legends. So even though this particular music scene has a lot of what would be described as hipsters, it also has given new life to old, forgotten artists as well. I don’t know man, everything is always more nuanced and complicated that simple internet discourse can handle, and if folks are doing something they love with respect for those who came before them, it’s hard to get mad at. And I don’t know how to be part of a horn section, like at all, so I got no room to complain.

Tuesday, May 31

SONG OF THE DAY: Still the Same (slurred & blurred)

It is hot as fuck outside, so let me just advise you all to slow it down. In fact, with climate change an inevitable byproduct of the eternal impossible growth plans of capitalism, it’s only going to get hotter, so you should only get slower. Don’t work fast, don’t drive fast, don’t play music fast, do nothing fast, ever. Like, what’s the point? What are you in a rush for? Time is a social construct anyways, just meant to make your ass feel late when “late” isn’t even real. I do not have AC in most of my old ass house, just a small arsenal of fans of various eras pointed in different directions depending on the heat outside, side of the house the sun is on, and other bizarre life scientist calculations that I’ve accumulated over a lifetime of being broke but beautiful. All in all, it’s tolerable, but even if it wasn’t, lolol what am I gonna do? Quit existing? Fuck no. There is no exclamation point to the end times, just a long slow ellipsis. So ride that fucker out.

Wednesday, June 9

SONG OF THE DAY: Kiss The World Goodbye

It is currently about 3069 degrees, and I refuse to have conditioned air because how will I survive the weather apocalypse if I don’t condition myself more than the air blowing into my house? I have a minor arsenal of box fans – some old box jams, some the new fangled bubble vortex fans – positioned around the house hoping to overwhelm the humidity like one of those stupid io games where you just have all your little singularly colored people flying in at the other color people. It doesn’t seem to be working; maybe I need to watch some ads in order to get some free fans. But a storm is rolling in, and that will bring that sweet cool relief ever so briefly.

Sunday, January 26

SONG OF THE DAY: Summertime

Was talking with my gf before the big parade of gun dorks in Richmond, comparing and contrasting how that felt in the build-up to Charlottesville in 2017. I was talking about how it being cold as fuck was a benefit, "because it doesn't feel so good get punched in the fuckin' face in freezing weather." She suggested it never feels good to get punched in the face, but I don't know, coming from a hopeless, reckless, and self-destructive background, there's times where you just want to feel a small dose of violence, like an immunization against worst flare-ups almost, and getting hit in the fuckin' face is part of that. Summertime it don't feel so bad, if you're looking for trouble - you get into conflict, people smash on each other, everybody ideally feels a little less likely to smash on each other. I'm not sure in a world where a bunch of people have pretty frustrating and pointless existences that you can ever have an idealized utopia without shit like that. But I know I'm far more likely to be looking for a fight and hoping shit pops off in the summer than I am the winter. That's when cities with gun problems have more shootings, people are out more getting on each other's fuckin' nerves, all that.

Anyways, with climate changes and the current era being a bit warmer than historical recent eras, get ready for more people looking to punch each other in the face. If you're not about that, learn navigational skills, because you'll never stop it entirely. Warm weather ain't always about big breasts in tank tops and hypermasculine abs on full display. If life gives you lemons, everybody knows to make lemonade, but a lot of people out here ain't got no sugar to put in it.

Thursday, January 23

SONG OF THE DAY: Telemo

At some point I fell into a Ghanaian Hip Life website, and grabbed a bunch of tracks. Without a doubt this particular song has been my most played song through the winter while riding around in the Corolla. It’s weird to me how nationalized our consumption of music is. There is no real global coverage for hip hop and hip hop tangential releases. My oldest has spent a couple trips in recent years in Malaysia specifically but throughout Southeast Asia, and the hip hop scene over there is vast, and actually pretty amazing. And man, they got their content and marketing attitudes down. She forwarded me a screenshot from the Malaysian Hustler the other day, using M.E.C.C.A. as an acronym for Mindset, Ethics, Character, Communication, and Attitude. The secular but highly Muslim culture of Malaysia has its effect on all that, and fuck if M.E.C.C.A. isn’t just emblazoned in my mind now, to where I’m contemplating that shit, like any good mantra.

Anyways, jam the fuck out to Gasmilla’s biggest hit, “Telemo”. His nickname is the International Fisherman, which would make a great iron-on letter t-shirt. As would MECCA. Fuck it, I might dig out my box of iron-on letters and do both tonight.

Wednesday, July 10

SONG OF THE DAY: Ritmo Sabroso

Global diaspora of various beginnings combined with digital communications has made the world smaller while also not acknowledging the digital gaps that still exist and how there are always going to be shadows for the forgotten. Been thinking on what I am as a human, accepting my status as white male in America, yet also realizing I’m not entirely like a lot of other white males. Been thinking of myself as unwhite lately, because I’m externally identified as white, most certainly, but I try my best to not perpetuate a lot of that shit with my own actions. It’s impossible to detach yourself from how others identify you, including systems built on biases which benefit you, but it’s also very possible to actively not embrace that shit, and definitely you can do the work to not perpetuate the ugly side of that.

And yet I went to a home funeral yesterday, where we stood around the grave that the family dug, and they played a couple old bluegrass songs at the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, and there’s a cultural context to all this for me – greater Appalachian roots which came from Scottish highlands… a common theme in the eastern half of the U.S. But also I’m a product of various immigrant diasporas – one quarter Polish with a variation on “fisher” surname, a quarter Scandinavian, part German-ish as filtered through Pennsylvania mountains… but standing at home-cooked funeral, outside, old folks playing old instruments, singing old songs about finally being free, it’s all cultural at molecular and unexplainable level that’s not evil. The history of globalization and empire and dominant cultures, even within the framework of racial divisions, is one where dominant cultures consumed and suppressed even other cultures within what we now see as the same.

It will be interesting to see how this shifts in the near future, now that we have these handheld devices that educate as well as delude us, and so many cultural things are cross-pollinating each other. And yet also, we’re experiencing a vast superficial knowledge of more, while knowing deeply less. Someone once told me about the difference between knowing one square inch a mile deep, and one square mile an inch deep, and how superficial knowledge doesn’t actually allow for root knowledge, and can easily be washed away. As I helped dig a grave this past week, I thought about that, as we dug shovelful by shovelful, down through the silt, luckily not too red clay, far deeper than one normally digs, because that’s how deep you have to go for safe eternal resting space. I don’t come from high and mighty people, despite the privilege I do have, and there’s a lot of cultural pieces that were lost because of that. I knew drug culture better than people playing banjos, although there was crossover, like an old dude called Rocky Top who had drank himself out of Nashville who sat around the poker table at Tank’s house where my folks went every weekend, picking songs. But I do know piecing it together, and how to get shit done when it needs to be done, rather than planning and talking and thinking about it forever.

Humanity is no more fucked now than it’s ever been. But there’s a lot of hard work that needs to be done. Not discussed and delegated and argued and talked over and hashed out and endless circles of discourse and spirals of power hierarchies that destroy actual collective work ever getting done. There’s enough work for all of us to just get to doing in our own lives, daily. And that helps establish new cultures, new cross-pollinations that aren’t appropriation or assimilation or suppression and oppression, but actual shared physical acts of working together. The arts falls into this as well, because the arts is the fun work you do after the hard work is done. And fuck man, nobody wants to just do the hard work seven days a week without doing the fun work too. Every somber Sunday morning needs a feral Saturday night. Life needs contrast in order to not be mundane to the point of just sitting around waiting for death. It feels a lot of times like our one inch deep knowledge of the square mile of today’s existence is severely lacking, at least to me. But ain’t shit to do about it except get to work going deeper.