SONG OF THE DAY: Journey to Lounge

The journey to lounge always has obstacles, sometimes even coming from inside your own mind. I know I was my own worst enemy to establishing quality lounge as young adult man-child with unresolved or unaddressed shit. Some folks never even bother, just keep ignoring the mold on the walls and act like “This is fine,” ploughing through a life with no regard for how they fuck up those around them with their chaotic bad ripples. I’m still chaotic as fuck, but I’d like to believe I’m chaotic good, and I definitely feel I’ve achieved a level of lounge in my life better than ever before. It’s at least more sustainable, like I don’t have to escape the whole fuckin’ world in a self-medicated stupor to find peace. It’s already here. But I still gotta get my mind right and avoid getting stuck in the mud of others who got nothing better to do with their lives than scatter negative influences in every direction. In fact, the journey to lounge begins inside your own mind. You can’t be at peace or encourage peace and healing in others if you’re a fuckin’ shit storm of unresolved bullshit. And even if all those traumas wasn’t your fault, at some point, you gotta take responsibility for not bothering to get your shit together. There should be like a second adulthood age, because 18/21 is too young. 36 maybe? I don’t know, but at some point, you should’ve at least tried to have enough knowledge of self to stop being a negatively charged ionic treatise upon your environment. This world is fucking us all up, and we can either try to do better, or shrug our shoulders and say fuck it and replicate the patterns that made us fucked in the first place. That doesn’t feel like solid work or a good plan on the journey to collective lounge.

SONG OF THE DAY: Forgive Them Oh God Amin-Amin

You could not possibly inject enough Muslim Funk into my soul. Wish I could find my amethyst beaded tasbih beads my eldest made for me that got lost somewhere on my wayward wanders forgetting to focus on seeking truth rather than material comforts. I am confident it’s “around here somewhere” but that somewhere has yet to reveal itself, perhaps because I’m not in the right mind frame or heart space just yet. Thus, I say again, with even more urgency, you could not possibly inject enough Muslim Funk into my soul.

N0N3 0F 0VR 1D3NT1T13S...

none of our identities 
escape death; and yet also, 
it is spirit’s salvation 

"L4 1L4H4 1LL4LL4H"...

“la ilaha illallah” 
ain’t been printed on money, 
thus it retains its value 

M4NM4D3 0MN1P0T3NC3 1S...

manmade omnipotence is 
ultimately impotent; 
man created man as god 

W0RK H4RD, PL4Y H4RD, 1GN0R3 S1GNS...

work hard, play hard, ignore signs 
hard, pretend there ain’t no cops 
hard, arm leg leg arm head hard 

SONG OF THE DAY: The Creator Has A Master Plan

Pharaoh Sanders died the other week, and he was pretty amazing. This is a cover of one of his more famous songs, or at least my favorite. I don’t even know shit about the group who covered it; I just follow all these mp3 music blogs still, like it’s 2008, and one of them is a collective of DJs that release souldie mixes, and this was on one, and it rose to the top of the old iphone I use as an ipod’s play count, because I enjoyed the fuck out of it. The Pharaoh original versions on record are also great, but also recorded versions of free form songs that were played even more often live as like single snapshots of some shit that was going on constantly. It’s all very immense, and what we have to *consume* is only a tiny fraction of it all. Which of course is why this song is so beautiful in the first, and last place (alpha and omega), because ultimately we can’t control all this shit. We don’t even do a good job controlling the little tiny fraction of It All that we’ve created ourselves. You gotta let it go, and you gotta have faith, in something or another, or else you’re gonna be panicking all the damn time. Ride it out. It’ll be okay. Hopefully.

PH0N3 4PP R3M1ND3RS T0 PVLL...

phone app reminders to pull 
purple amethyst tasbih 
out of pocket, speak dhikr 

SC4TT3R1NG MY W1LD PR4Y3RS...

scattering my wild prayers 
of chaotic good amidst 
all the rules stenciled about 

BY L0S1NG MYS3LF 4T TH3...

by losing myself at the 
fractured edges, I begin 
to find little bits of peace 

SONG OF THE DAY: The Creator Has A Master Plan

I know spirituality is frowned upon in my generation, us being more inclined towards jaded nihilism. But I’ve come to have faith in the concept of a creator as whatever made the universe be the universe, with all its repeating patterns and strange balance of positive and negative and how those things transcend humanity or what man’s made. I never loved organized religion, but to be honest I don’t love organized nothing, since all of it is organized by humans. Science has claimed dominion over the Earth in more recent times, or at least tried, but still seems to fuck up as much as it fixes. So I have quietly come to trust how my heart always felt – that there’s something bigger than me, or my species, or the Earth; and yet somehow it’s also smaller, at all times. Trust in that helps a lot of situations not be as stressful, because honestly, none of us control half the shit we think or hope we do. Even if we apply ourselves, as militantly and humanely as possible, so much shit is beyond our control. Science mistakenly seems to think it can correct the mistakes people have made, and that the entirety of existence can be broken down and entirely understood. I mean, I guess it can, but not by us. We don’t have it in us, and to think we do is just more human vanity, it’s just we replaced perverted notions of god made in our own image with perverted notions of a scientific process, entirely brainstormed by only our brains, without consideration for the rest of creation. Thus I don’t fuck with either, and believe in a creator as an entity of energies which has a basic plan for everything, but also respects the power of lounge, so that good things come around, and if you get yourself synced up with the way of things, that reflects back on you. I won’t say it “benefits” you necessarily, because there’s connotations with that word that don’t seem to fit what happens. But I also know anytime I think I got shit all figured out, something busts it up, so that I have to rethink everything to some extent. That’s natural evolution, which is constant, and yet unseen.
I had a volunteer vine climb up the front of my house, then the screen porch. It had trouble grabbing the siding above the screen but eventually jumped its way over. It tried to grab the screen door a couple times, so I had to tell it that it was okay to grow everywhere else, to see what happens, but to stay off the door. It’s mostly learned by now to do that, but it does like to drift a vine that way to high five me on my way in and out. Turns out it was a star cucumber vine, and it’s turned my entire front porch screen green on two sides – big beautiful bright leaves that glow when the sun shines on that side of the house. I’ve loved it, and I’m very thankful me and that star cucumber vine could come to a mutual agreement about how to live together this past couple months. I think about that relationship, and how many other relationships we ignore, or pretend don’t exist, or that the other biological organisms have no say compared to us. What a sad way to view the world, so dark and lonely and trapped inside the human brain’s dark cave of unenlightened reality.

S4Y1NG 'S4L44M' T0 MYS3LF...

saying “salaam” to myself 
while walking crooked sidewalks 
through America’s decline 

SONG OF THE DAY: La Ilha Illa Allah

Chant it with me now.

4N VNVS3D M3NN0N1T3 CHVRCH...

an unused Mennonite church 
which I cut through the woods to, 
dhikr clicking tiny beads 

P13C1NG 1T T0G3TH3R WH1L3...

piecing it together while

trying to remember to

say salaam five times a day

SONG OF THE DAY: Away Away

“Capitalism” is such a dogmatic sounding word, that I’m not sure if you’re practicing something so polysyllabic you can do it ethically. But the other day I went to my local Afghan market, and thought about how it’s the type of business I like to support. I had passed by earlier on the bus and saw a dude unloading a bunch of bags of flatbread from the trunk of his car, obviously somebody who made it themselves. That flatbread was looking good as fuck in passing so I figured after I did a couple things, I’d wander my way on foot back by the market.

When I did finally get back, there was another dude in the tight aisles, blocking my path to the half-gallon of mint ayran (a must). Really all I came in for was ayran, dates, and one of them bags of that flatbread. Dude in aisle went to check out, which is just one counter, where the dudes who work there are always giving out of date candy to kids, and an old Afghan dude is generally sitting inside within talking distance of the counter, unless it’s warm, and he might be sitting outside. Dude in front of me asks about paneer, and guy behind the counter says, “No, we only get paneer in on Wednesdays.” I’d asked about goat before and they only get that on Fridays. And obviously it looks like the flatbread bags come in on Monday. I always fuck up and forget to go by on Fridays to get goat though, which bums me out, because I bet some halal goat would recharge my depleted ass.

Once I was checking out, I asked how much the flatbread bags were. (Please understand when I say “bag” I mean large ass turkey size bag with flatbread pieces larger than a pizza.) “$6.90, but there’s ten of them in there.” I had to get that, and have been snacking on them all week long. Hungry as fuck in the middle of the evening? Rip off half a piece of flatbread, grab four or five dates, I’m good. I bought enough shit this particular time I had to use a card, but generally speaking I try to use cash there. And I’ve noticed that as I’ve used cash, usually for single serving mint ayran bottles, the price can fluctuate slightly to your benefit, as both a regular customer and a cash-paying customer.

All of this, as I walked out to catch the bus with my big bag of flatbread, made me realize this is exactly the type of business I feel good about supporting. Cash between hands (hopefully) helps cut out government embezzlement of survival wealth, and a place that is filled in its tiny location, that is content in operating at that filled and functional level, only having goat on Friday, paneer on Wednesday, and flatbread on Monday, is okay by me. We always have this notion that growth should be continual, and that you need larger stores, more franchises, everything should be available at all times. That type of growth is unnatural, and thus likely unethical, no matter how you do it. Natural world is not continuous – you can get some shit sometimes, and other shit other times. It’s not all available around the calendar, at your convenience. Fuck man, life is not convenient. It takes some work and navigation and effort. That’s how it should be. Moving from providing for your life and your family and a few others to where you feel the need to accumulate wealth and control a whole arsenal of marketplaces like that… I don’t know that I think that can ever be ethical. If you’re sitting around in some faraway place contemplating how you can improve profitability (another too many syllables word to ever be simple enough to be ethical) without actually putting your ass in a market, standing around on your feet, breaking down boxes to put in the recycling bin beside the dumpster, or sweeping anything, then I don’t know if you’re thinking with all the heart you need to be thinking with. Ever. Not even on Mondays, when your work week starts, and flatbread is coming in.

SONG OF THE DAY: Allah Hoo Allah Hoo

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is basically the King Diamond of Sufi devotional music. Tons of qawwali music inside the cybervoids, tons by this dude, but I prefer to just listen to ALLAH HOO ALLAH HOO ALLAH HOO ALLAH HOO on loop, in the woods, chanting with the crows. I wasn’t gonna say nothing smart about music but then I accidentally explained who he was a little. Pretend I didn’t. Pretend none of this happened.

1NT3RN4T10N4L M4RK3T...

international market,

Lynchburg side street, offering

halal goat meat, mashallah

SONG OF THE DAY: Toumast

Doom and dysphoria high right now. So much digital fentanyl fog that we ain't even thinking about seeing clear no more, just wanna see our favorite fog, get wrapped up in it and let the hours scroll away. No red pill blue pill binaries, just lost, not even in between the accepted binaries but on a different spectrum entirely, not even acknowledged as real, so that everything feels unreal. Got me feeling that urge to walk to the ocean, make a pilgrimage of returning to the simplicity in most simplistic manner - on my own damn feet, slowly, ragged step by ragged step, and throw rocks into the ocean, stone the devil away, unfuck the world if I can in my own little rippling way while still on this crooked Earth.

The tracks run along the James from here to Richmond (and beyond), just walk checking off the mile markers, passing #69 where they'll scatter my ashes, pass the power plants in Bremo, pass the fork of the Rivanna where Rassawek once was, pass the state-controlled prison industrial complex, on through the western end suburban metastasis sprawl of Richmond, cross the river by Oregon Hill where my firstborn was first born, travel the southern end from there, along route 10, through the more neglected bank of western civilization, the south side always neglected for some abstract potentially related to cartography reasons, maybe cross back over on the ferry at Jamestown but maybe not because you can't walk across the tunnels to the ocean from that tip. Imagine that - building a conduit for travel across an immense body of untravelable Earth, but saying, "there can be no pilgrims here, only larger mechanized vehicles… humans are secondary" because progress is not necessarily ever about humanity so much as strange perversions in the minds of certain men. I'd hope that if I spent a couple weeks walking from here to the ocean, many of my own perversions and delusions and these feelings of doom and dysphoria and of being lost in the dystopian fog might lift a little, the manufactured veil pulled back just enough to baptize myself in the salt water and look out over the immensity contemplating my miniscule yet perfect existence - a single atom in the endless universe - and chill the fuck out, finally.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Gave Up All I Had

First day of Ramadan, and I am not fasting because that fourth pillar is a tough one coming from the poison culture background of unsustainable abundance. I know fasting would be beneficial, but I’m weak right now, or lazy, or just generally unwilling to change, at least right now. It can sometimes feel like there’s been too much change, too rapidly, and one can’t possibly handle it. But at the same time, it’s not so much too much change as it is just the true nature of things recalibrating back to where it’s supposed to be. And you can handle it. Meaning I can handle it. Shout out to everybody trying to be a better version of themselves, especially those working without a good path to follow.