g r f a l

“my soul – like eagle – fly high,”

I sing in broken english

on my wagon ride westward

(7s) Recent Force Battles For Control Of My Soul #7 - White Trash Genetical Heritage vs. Strange Electronic Musics

Look, I will be honest, this is not even a fair battle. No amount of musical expression, no amount of electronic clutter inside my mind, no amount of nothing from everywhere could ever trump my goddamned insides. Not like my pockmarked liver and cluttered intestines and hop-skipping heart and grey matter gone black from broken axons brain type of insides, but my straight up deep down inside every molecule type insides. I was born this man I am, and the new job has been strange, because I am navigating a world of responsibility and pretending I know what I'm doing. I actually flew to Florida related to work and we had a big Sunday dinner at fancy restaurant sponsored by our hosts, collaborators in a ginormous fucked up project, where entrees were $25 on the low end, and they had multiple forks laid out, and everybody who knew what they were doing was laying a cloth napkin across their lap in different manners. I will not front... I do not understand all this. But at the other end of the table was a Ukrainian lady who was my parallel counterpart at the Florida research lab doing what we do in Virginia, and she spoke broken English and was mostly quiet. As was I, although I guess my English is more warped than broken. But I had a very valuable moment of lucidity sitting there waiting for my $28 bison strips with grilled squashes and sautéed wild mushrooms... even though I am no other country immigrant, this world I am trying to navigate is very foreign to me. I do not know its customs or mannerisms or anything really. I mean, I guess I could know them, from seeing it in movies or on PBS cooking shows about manners or something, but I don't deep down in my molecules know them. I am of the earth, which is, if you haven't been paying attention, full of trash for the last hundred years. I am born of the light-skinned wretched of the earth, more inclined to get drunk as hell, be hungover the next day, and the only thing that keeps me from passing out under a table from the sweats is the delusional perverted thoughts that run wild through my brain during that moment of intense wet dehydration. I was born to somehow get brand new pairs of pants hung on barbed wire, or accidentally hit the concrete barrier at the gas station in a new ride, which isn't even "new" so to speak so much as new to me. Hell, I'm lucky to have a car from this decade most years of my life (for the record, three of my 37 years, I've rocked a ride from the same decade I'm driving through at the time).
Yet this has helped me immensely. Because even though I don't know how to act right in those prim and proper situations, or remember to cut my hair more than once every two months, being I'm not from that world, I am hungry, and full of a pitbull work ethic. I can do 17 things that would be menial to someone who knows how to swirl red wine around in a paper thin glass goblet, and in a third of the time it would take them to get started. I was born hungry, and those small high dollar portions of the good life will never satisfy that deep down in my molecules hunger. So as long as I can channel my immigrant thinking into a positive direction, to hold down the button-down job, then I can live the American Dream.
But at the same time, that hunger inside of me from birth... from before birth really, often times it needs to be fed with reckless nomadic wanders into shithole territories, sleeping on hotel mattresses that would look like disco balls underneath one of those exposé news shows black lights, and burn down all the bridges I’m sick of looking at, crossing back and forth for too long a stretch of my life. This is how I’m wired. Nothing can ever change that, and nothing can ever block that.
On my right forefinger is a crude, splotchy ahnk I gave myself when I was 17, sitting in my dad’s trailer living room. And there are times when I am navigating this brave new world I’m trying to belong to, at least during the work day, and I catch people’s eyes trying to figure that out. Why is it there? It is a leak of my inside molecular structure, right there in the opening, that no long-sleeved shirts or hair clippers can hide. And being to the rest of the upwardly slanted American world, I am not a bonafide foreigner of obvious immigrant status, I’m sure they question my presence in their world. As do I. But whatever. Civilization’s stacked enough bricks and paved enough paths through the wilderness that a man can burn a hell of a lot of bridges and still not be stuck on an island. Or in a prison. All that other electronic new-fangled cluttery is just prison bars or electrified fences trying to keep me penned up. But I’m too wild inside to stay still forever, plus I can’t ever have nice shit, always breaking it or busting it or half-assedly fixing it back together, so my type of stuff doesn’t properly transmit all that new age fencing charges like it’s supposed to anyways. My internal structure trumps outward controls. You can take the boy out of the cursed yet somehow perfect genetics, but you can’t take the cursed yet somehow perfect genetics out of the boy.

(7s) Recent Force Battles For Control Of My Soul #6 - White Trash Genetical Heritage vs. The HAARP Hum-Along

The BZZZZZZZZ surrounds with a mighty electronic swarm, especially at my new work. But my blood is thick with rural ignorance, not only here in the white mutt homeland of the American South (technically, Virginia is not entirely part of that anymore, but Southside Virginia - the state's armpit - is most definitely still a tragic gothic place), but back in the old world from my orphaned Swedish grandmother, my son of Ellis Island boat-riding Polacks, the other side of my family which is a hodgepodge of Scottish drunkards and German stubborns, it all coagulates thickly in my bloodstream, and no matter how hard they BZZZZZZZZZZ at me from all around, that blood flow can't be stopped, especially when perfectly thinned down with alcoholic beverages about 0.15%, give or take a few hundredths.
These are strange times for the electronics, them being everywhere, including on our pocket to go straight to our brain on our smart phones while we are tracked constantly like cows with blue clips dangling from their ears. It’s changed everything, including the moon cycles and ocean currents and caused more seismic activty which recently resulted in volcanic ash blacking out the European skies to airline flights. These are the natural repercussions to our natural actions, as we are men, a part of nature, and the eminent domain we declare over everything to recreate and reshape is a natural action, one that is supposed to happen. And what happens in return is also supposed to happen, the pendulum swinging back the other way, whether by global warming or an eventual mad cow/bird flu disease spreading quickly into mass madness as we eat cannibalistic meat products from allegedly lesser animals that are under our domestic rule.
Yet my blood still flows. My brain still thinks deranged caveman thoughts. Sure, sometimes I am distracted greatly by the shiny and bright digital displays of a million things at a million angles at a relentless pace; but I am also still tormented by adrenalin rushed fears of the sounds in the dark and a coyote yelp beyond the line of pines might make me run from my sitting stump by the pig pen back to the safety of the BZZZZZZZ of my house an acre away. But I at least am still pulling away from that BZZZZZZ, trying to settle myself on the stump, trying to sleep in the yard more often, once even in the chicken coop. I wish I had made myself more brotherly to my pigs because cuddling up with them at night in their nest would be perfect on those heavy BZZZZZZZZing nights. But I try to communicate with the pigs, with my dogs, with my chickens, with my children, with my sitting stump and the red maple in the field and the sky and stars and all of it out there away from the BZZZZZZZZ. I can’t communicate with the BZZZZZZZZZZ because I can never get a word in edgewise. I am thankful to be DNA-cursed enough to still realize that.

(7s) Recent Force Battles For Control Of My Soul #5 - Strange Electronic Musics vs. Mind Mush

Music is what saves me. Without it, I'd be dead. And times change, that's for sure. I am not playing slabs of vinyl on ill-begotten turntables anymore, as the kitchen desktop computer with Itunes loaded full of stolen digital tracks tends to be the main night time stereo of my life... all very electronic and unreal and disconnected. Yet it helps ease the day's frantic breaths back down to normal breathing, and eventually I can convince myself that I guess I'm getting somewhere with this one ragged life.
And the music I enjoy has become more electronic because of this contributing environment. What I would've thought some punk ass bullshit a few years back is now soothing good shit. It's a combination of my kid being into electronic music, and equipment becoming cheaper and low-fi so that I can do strange hip hoptronic country outlaw bullshit as well production-wise as Pussy Galore in the camper behind my house.
I have a turntable that plugs into a computer. I didn't even have a computer when I was my oldest kid's age. I had the Atari 2600.
The weakening of my mind is a definite thing, I can feel it. Cell phones, wi fi, HAARP beams, fluoridated toothpaste, EMF tasers, tectonic shifts along the Appalachian ridgeline releasing mind-numbing Active Denial gases into the air... it's all going on at once, converging upon my now. But the human body is a fucking amazing thing. You can chop an oak tree into slabs and see the circles of years of existence. I have those same scars on me, but you cut a cross-section of my leg and it's not there, as I shed my skin like a snake, constantly healing, even in the worst of situations. Electronic mind clutter is no difference, so my warped mind seeks refuge in new art forms and new musics and new ways of expressing the unexplainable internal struggle in whatever words it has left to use. And it helps stabilize the deteriorating mindstate. Like planting oats on the blown away dunes of a rapidly eroding shoreline. It ain't gonna fix the problem, or make it like it was before it got all fucked up by what's been done, but I guess it helps. It certainly can't hurt. Like right now I think I could use a good infusion of go-go music, a half gallon jar of that cayenne pepper maple syrup cleansing lemonade, and some holy basil tincture, to keep my grey matter from turning black so fast. But the go-go music is a major part of that equation, and helps make tomorrow get here right on time.

(7s) Recent Force Battles For Control Of My Soul #4 - Mind Mush vs. Natural Structures & Fresh Air

I can feel this one as I sit surrounded by computers with various internet speeds all fucking day long, with a window to my office that I keep the shade drawn because it messes up the $100,000 microscope. The monitors are like soldiers' guns pointed at me, and even if I log them all off of their individual connections, it is there. You waste your time by looking up important things, then the semi-important, and you tell yourself you're staying informed, staying sharp, or just enjoying your slow death time through the work day. But man, I can feel my brain tissue ache. I guess saying it's soft is not the right term because it's spongy already, but there's something about the overload of electronic rays that causes it to tingle in a different way, like a slow charging taser shot straight past the blood brain barrier.
The odd thing is my job is related to the neurosciences, so in the process of being accessible to my work, I am weakening my own mind. Perhaps that is the point and I'm an elaborate fucking experiment. There's not much difference between us and the albino rats they genetically engineer at Charles River Laboratories. You take 100 of them, and completely randomly and by luck, 20 are kept on normal water and food, and the other 80 are given cancer through chemical-laced drinking water and high fat rat chow that weakens their liver even more so than their strange genetic make-up does. Completely by chance. They are trapped in cages together in groups of two, and play wrestle in the bedding and shit because what the hell else are they gonna do? We are no different, randomly placed into our lives, no choice in where we're born, and because of where we're born, genetically placed to have a 4 in 5 chance of dying that slow death of no hope, no glory, no cash money beyond the little stacks we grab in frustrated stabs at a future that isn't ever gonna exist no matter how hard we daydream. The weak mind feeling is the hardest for me because that's really what I prided myself on was my sharp sword of mentality that chopped at the senseless cravings.
I should be out in the air, feeling the solar rays, tromping through the woods where the redbuds are on display right now. I should be wearing loose-fitting clothes that I can easily take off and disappear into the water buck ass naked like the day I was born and the day I will die. Instead I am cramped in stiff clothes in a dark office with machines whispering all at once at me and I can't understand any of them but I know they are talking, and talking about me even, in disparaging ways, but I'm not supposed to not listen. I need to be accessible at all times, by email, by cell phone, by brain chip, by fucking god.
Right outside the thick glass is sunshine. The interstate of 64 is just beyond the trees over there to the right of my window view. It goes everywhere eventually, but none of that is the escape. It's just bouncing around at a high rate of speed to end up right back here in the same spot and let my brain bounce around the sensations to process them for a while and ignore the slow death cubicide, and how uncomfortable it is to have to wear underwear to work.
What I should do is go camping with no gear right there in the median strip of the interstate, hiding out overnight, training myself to tune out the constant hummmmmmm of Those Things That Hum. But I don't have the time. I have to hurry up and waste my fucking life. My mind aches like a bright, fat tomato, going to rot on the vine, the bugs crawling in and out that no one sees nor does anybody care.

(7s) Recent Force Battles For Control Of My Soul Intro

It has been a year of new things, rebirths, climbing out of the deep snows of the past five years and trying to warm up and look around and be happy enough with the foundation I still have to patch up the mess of clutter and chaos that can build up when your view is obstructed by crooked eyelids. I have a lot of animosity towards the exterior humans of all walks and varieties right now, probably part of sorting out myself and lashing out from feeling stifled for so long, feeling judged by the open-minded, feeling confined by the freedom-loving, feeling fucked by those who claim to be so pure of goddamned spirit.
When you make the big changes in life, you think you've hit a fork and you make a left or right choice and leave behind the path you came along, but it's not like that. So I'm struggling to take this new course but keep hold of what's important. Sometimes it's hard to distinguish what is important and what is waste when you're a wooden ruler's width away from burning it all down, taking a Greyhound as far west as you can afford to, and seeing where that ends up.
There is a battle for my soul right now, the forces of my pasts and the forces of my futures, a chessboard's worth of holographic universe of possibilities coming together with worrisome swords, fighting it out, march madness style. And just like paying $8 to sit there in a gym and watch two teams full of dudes in matching outfits play a game at each other in front of you and a bunch of other people's eyeballs, I can feel the momentum. I can feel what forces are winning and what are losing. Some seem like upsets to me, and some make perfect sense, and all of it is happening, internal struggles that you don't even notice. Yeah, this shit happens to all of us, but we confuse and delude ourselves to not pay attention to the cellular disturbances that put extra twists in our intestines and a millisecond skip to our heartbeat like that Chilean earthquake shifting Earth time ever so infinitely not there.
So this 7-list is straight up metaphysical color commentary. I've sat in a tipi in my back yard by the pig pen where I can lift weights naked until I'm as sweaty as the beer I leave sitting on the shell of an old wood stove I use as a table back there, and go inside the tipi, wearing a pair of headphones plugged into nothing, to stifle the bzzzzzzzzzzzz that is everywhere from the multitudes of cell phone towers of Babel, and to hear the different drums inside that ideally I should be marching to. Empty five-gallon water jugs flipped over inside of milk crates for a bass, and old three-gallon drywall buckets for a snare, with a gallon wine bottle cowbell and two 1/2 inch dowel scraps for drum sticks. Short pieces of salvaged rebar make a bigger sound but break the wine bottle, and wine bottles are only meant to be broken when two-thirds full of loose change. That's the way it is.
This 7-list is a tournamental battle for my soul, as it stands (or looks like it stands from where I sit) in the just about springtime of 2010.