digestive intuition

restricted by glyphosate

corn syrup kidney failure

dullard southside virginia

back road black-and-white life got

colored up by ol’ lady

resurrection of color,

dirtgod theory gives birth to
fresh blossoms for new era

heart is a most underground

muscle, concealing true strength

behind facade of soft flesh

owlcraft healing stares

we done made babies, done built

our wild harvested life arts

together, always pushing

on that homegrown tip

Baba Yaga built three shades

of beets inside dirt outside

my house; they are fermenting

tatted up and draped out and dripped out gambleraku know what I'm talkin bout

owlcraft tattoo signature

upon workingman forearms

with blemish from stray grinder

ol' lady gambleraku number one thousand probably

womenfolks has energies

that man taps and sometimes saps -

sour men stealing sweetener

Friday Love/Hate

I hate work; it gets in the way of life. My work is not real and is full of unnecessary manmade political dramas and I sit in a room with like five computer screens pointed at me like Vietcong rifles, couple of them with 30-inch monitors, and to some who would look at this it would seem like this cozy technological nest to cherish and feel awe over, but to me it's a goddamned conspiracy, and cracking the fissures in my neural tissue. I am experimenting with personal counters to protect myself from these overcivilized devils and their machines, and it's a constant process (dare I say, war) but you have to do it, or else you are one of the brain dead zombies and end up thinking Bill Simmons is funny or that you have to see a movie right away that Friday or else it will be ruined for you. I ain't going out like that.

I love my ol' lady. It is a war against the forces that are out there, but serious wars are boring and unfun to fight, and morale gets low. It is beneficial to have a life partner in these wars who shares your strange sense of humor for the strange slant of a world that thinks itself perfectly upright. We are fine-tuned to each other like any proper partnership, and can communicate with slight non-gestures oblivious to others. Without her I would not be what I am, which I am not sure what that is but I know it's a lot fucking better than it would have been without. It goes both ways too. This ain't a Hee Haw skit, it's a partnership, in a fun-loving, good-natured war against the unloungin' anti-spiritual over-civilized forces that have proliferated our 2011 world.

p n t a a

wandering old hospital
corridors, sterilized and
disinfected of all soul

Friday Love/Hate

I portend to hate many things in life at times, and shit has been truly frustrating and tension building in my humble compound for me and the ol' lady, yet I can't say I hate anything for real. It sucks to be surrounded by the emotionally crippled who don't see that in themselves and are all confident they are in a rock solid upright place, when it's obvious to anyone looking in they are fucking disasters at navigating interpersonal relationships. But somehow my wife and I found each other and have enabled ourselves to be ourselves, if that makes any sense. There will always be fleeting physical attractions and chance encounters that tempt a man or woman into stray situations, but I can honestly say that I would not be who I am today without my ol' lady being there, not so much because she made me be anything in any particular way as the stereotype would suggest, but because she enables me to find myself, and actually encourages that shit too, no matter how ridiculous I get. In fact it seems we are both very young on our own ridiculous journeys into personal stratospheres, and yet completely conjoined on those paths at the same time.

I love feeling the aura rays shoot. I love feeling the energetics soak back into me. Walking the freight yard and abandoned power plant and sitting in the field underneath the crazy moons and floating on top of the river waters, these things have infused me. There are many other spots in mind to soak up the energies of this crooked world. I have been running on battery power for a long time, and am weakened considerably (yet still stronger than most, even in this vulnerable 2011 state), but it doesn't take much when you efficient with soaking it back in. It's also fairly amazing to feel these energies for the first time really in my life without the added haze of self-medication. I do not understand why so many people who give up drinking or drugging turn to bullshit religion because submission to a god is a sign of weakness and needing empowerment through others. I feel more fucking powerful than ever, though I ain't not atheist non-believer either. I don't believe in no god that they name, but I don't have faith in science to be telling the whole story either. There was an AM radio "debate" this week I caught part of on the local station that did that, and it was interesting. Actually the god dude had better points because you could tell he was prepared to answer what the science dude would say, with valid and logical questions, although ultimately his ending argument was basically, "how could there not be a god?" which of course is not so logical. Science depends on you having faith in the scientific process, which, with me being a research scientist, I can tell you is not so solid a foundation to be building your life's philosophies upon. Science will push itself as this ultimate authority that cannot be questioned, but that's what god used to do.
I guess I kinda think that there's got to be some sort of power that engineered shit a little, more like a stoned artist than an actual scientific engineer though, and mostly that source of things doesn't give a shit about what we do or what we are. So we evolve and adapt and believe the wacky things our brains think up or studies and fight each other over it. But if you get in a zone and shoot some of your own wacky power back up into the space side of things, sometimes that power - whatever the fuck it is - it catches sight of you and is like, "Oh snap, check out holmes down there doing his thing," and you get a little zap of daps back at you, and you can feel it, and I love that.

s u z z r

collecting eggs, feeding pigs,
hauling emptied sheet rock mud
buckets full of well water

s u z z t

children and bills, chores, trials,
juggling shaky finances -
all worth it when we both laugh

s u z z u

married one month longer than
oldest child's birthday, at least
in the eyes of government

r i v z u

store bought flower bouquets tied
up by blue ribbons bows, clutched
by soft and dainty children hands

s u z z v

dirty cookie cutters and
recycling bin clutter lay
across well-worn countertops

Friday Love/Hate

I hate waiting on destiny. I had a vision/dream early on right before my appendicitis of some sort of eastern European vagrant woman, but there were no buildings and cities and stuff. I was against a barbed wire fence - an old one that was not stretched tight, but I was hanging there, and this old lady was walking with a mule pulling a two-wheeled cart, full of trunks and shit, looked like it was painted pimp as fuck in that old world way a few years back, but was faded by this point, and covered in the dust of the roads we were along. I'm not sure where they went, because I kind of fell into the dream. And it was after my fall that gave me whiplash on the side porch, because she looked over at me and said, "You are stiff." I was like, "Yeah, I fell." She said, "That is good. Rapid changes are in your face, and the stiffness will slow it down from being too overwhelming before you are ready. But prepare yourself. A tornado is in the lines around your eyes. And you seem able to ride the tornado, but embrace this stiffness, rest yourself, for the storm that will form around you in April." I was like whatever, then realized it was a dream vision type thing, so woke up. I am always mad at myself for not being able to control my subconscious better and remain in that world to ask more. I've read books I've written in that world and get so excited by the pages I'm turning that I realize it's a dream and it's my future and I wake up without trying to memorize the gist of the stories in my hand. It is the larger universe speaking at me, and I've not learned how to listen as well as I should yet. But I'm still young - only 38, and far from a Learned Elder. But I can feel it bubbling up on the periphery of my life at times now, the boil is just starting to percolate a little. It will be boiling here soon. I am excited for the journey.

I love my Bird Tribe. No doubt about it. My ol' lady is rock solid and a complement to my ways, and as crazy as me, and as tortured by visions and stifled creativity and on a similar path, just different. It is interesting over time that from an initial attraction and relationship, you really don't know how it will unfold. But we were driven together by forces larger than us - there are many instances where this was shown to us, beyond our belief at times, because I certainly did what I could to fuck it all up at one time or another - and we are supposed to be together. I've not met a woman elsewhere who could not only tolerate the whirlwind chaos of my aura, but know how beautiful it is. And the kids we are bringing up in this wacked out world where Bill Gates is secretly perpetuating eugenics programs on the poor through charitable trusts, they are going to be fucking warrior goddesses, no doubt about it. It is almost scary at times, because the powers seem to be magnified in them, at an earlier age, and we just have to try to teach them how to unlock it and not be overwhelmed by it. That's a tough lesson to teach, especially when I'm still having to learn it myself. But hey, Bird Tribe Glide with Pride, like I scribbled on the old Nissan truck hood that is strapped to two posts as the gate to my pigpen.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #9: "Soul Glo (The Knocks Remix)" by Paper Route Gangstaz

My wife is an herbalist, so she makes tinctures from plants that can help your brain not be so screwy, not to mention help actual physical ailments. She has often offered to make me brain tonics, but I'm just not good about remembering to do things like that. I was good about rubbing goldenrod oil on my back when it started spasming out while working on a ladder, but brain medications... I have always felt like mind over matter is the only way to go for a true alpha-to-omega mind like my own.
Of course, the modern world is buzzing and humming with electronic tomfoolery perhaps not completely meant to but definitely does cloud up the natural rhythms of the natural alpha-to-omega mind. I am not going to get conspiratorial and say this has been done on purpose, and we are all being weakened, maybe not to simply buy things in some sort of capitalist agenda, or to thin us out as the earth is becoming more overtaxed of its resources. Actually yeah, I am saying that. Look at fucking Japan right now, unleashing radiation into the atmosphere, perhaps building to a full-blown China Syndrome (which would actually be New York Syndrome if it happened in Japan, because burning through the core of the earth with toxic radioactive materials to the other side would go there instead... which is interesting that New York and Tokyo are on opposite sides of the earth, of course I have not looked this up on a map at all, so no need to correct me... I am just saying), and having had conversational interactions secondhand with someone who has suggested to me they security clearance access to things and that they know for a fact there have been immunizations tainted with cancer causing agents given to poor people, and that the Gates Foundation is a massive cultural engineering front for performing just such things in the third world...
Wait, this is the wrong direction. My wife made me a herbal tincture to help me focus on not getting caught up in the three thousand things that swirl through my head that I MUST ATTEND TO NOW ALL AT ONCE and to calm myself and handle my business in the thoroughly efficient and gangsta ass ways that I do when my alpha-to-omega mind is not jumbled by the buzzes and hums. And getting caught up in disaster porn or irradiation of the earth fears, that is buzz and hum. Thinking globally and acting locally may make a wonderful bumper sticker for Subaru stationwagons, but it is not a way to live your actual life. The World is huge, and it is impossible, even with the interwebs, to build community with the whole goddamned thing. You have to focus at what is at hand, take care of what needs to be taken care of, and move forward with that. So my wife made me an herbal mix for just such things, to take a few times a day, keep myself from getting fetal positioned out inside my cerebrum, and she called it Soul Shine Tonic because she gives them all names. This of course made me think of this "Soul Glo" song from the Fear & Loathing in Hunts Vegas mixtape from a couple years back that helped launch the Huntsville, Alabama, rap scene onto the world. Of course, that rap scene is a perfect example of thinking locally and acting globally, because for years and years, a solid and thickly intertwined underground scene was built, to the point there's nothing else like it going on right now for the most part, at least not to the extent Huntsville was doing it. Then they blasted out from that, through the interwebs, and now G-Side can get paid to go hang out in Norway, and Jackie Chain can get comp drinks in clubs from Charlotte to San Antone.
So let your soul shine fellow e-folks. Get your hands dirty in your own back yard, and leave the grime on your fingertips when you log into your cyberbot, and let that real soul grime slink into the belly of the beast. Live locally and pollute (the good kind of pollution) globally. But without the local foundation, you can't support the global aspiration. This is why I dremel Rojonekku poems into guard rails throughout southside and central Virginia. This weekend will be my first trip since being injured in January, since it's warm. I try to do a hundred guard rails a weekend, fifty per day, but if you get a good day going, you can knock most all of it out on a wide circle drive Saturday afternoon, and then top it off locally on Sunday morning with the last ten or so, then hit the dumpsters at the Food Lions, come home slop the pigs their Sunday feast, and sit in the back yard trying to figure out if the horizon is as askew as it feels, and how you can use the transmission from the old Datsun and a half-used spool of dry-rotted electrical wire to build a homemade Tesla coil to jam the buzzes and hums on at least part of your five acres.
STEAL "Soul Glo"
NEXT: I will be writing about Bob Dylan, which seems pretty shameful to me!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - February '11 #11: "Peace Beneath The City" by Iron & Wine

So I got into Iron & Wine there for a while, and the wife loves that sound, so do the kids, so it's getting heavy play here at the compound. I write about it in last month's J.J. Krupert list, and somebody responds that they thought the dude went to VCU nearabouts the same time I did. So I go to Wikipedia, because honestly I didn't know shit about who did Iron & Wine other than it was a guy with a beard, and what do you know... it's a guy that was in art school same time as my ol' lady. It was a guy I knew who lived with dudes I still keep in touch with. In fact, it was a guy who used to sit idly on this little raised theater platform where a bunch of us would always sit, in Shafer Court at VCU, looking like a ragtag bunch of college kids I guess, except like a bunch of long-haired degenerate Allman Brothers roadies. I used to go sit there before classes, and sometimes, the small entourage of comers and goers seemed more interesting than class, so I'd just stay there. People watching. Chit chatting. And there was a guy who sat there too, quiet guy with sad eyes, never really said a whole lot, but was there a lot of times. That was Sam. He is know the Iron & Wine guy to the rest of the world.
Funny thing about that time, and that little group that hung out there, members of that little cluster became members of the well-known Lamb of God, the core of other groups like Alabama Thunder Pussy and RPG. We called it the Southern Rock bench. And looking back at that group as well, thinking about my homey Dave Moore, doing his painting thing to this day in ways I don't think anyone else does (I've got two of his paintings in my raggedy ass house, and proud of it), and just the general crazy vibe of VCU at that time in the early '90s. One thing we've been training our children to think in terms of college is not so much that it makes you accessible to higher paying jobs, but that it opens you up in your personal development. You'll meet people there who will expand what you are into, and you'll meet people who will help you grow into what you are supposed to be. That's some important shit, far more so than worrying about a job.
VCU cleaned itself up a lot since we were there. Shafer Court is all bricked up. I don't think HR of Bad Brains rides his bicycle to free shows on Friday afternoons anymore. I'm not sure if the art school is as important as it once was, since they've been pushing the second-rate business school instead. Which is sad. A lot of shit came out of Richmond that got drawn into Richmond because of that place. A lot of great shit is still gonna come out of it. I write, don't make music, so my window hasn't hit the peak yet, like it has for Iron & Wine or Lamb of God. But it does make me feel better knowing another dude who was just sitting around on that Southern Rock bench with me is now selling out shows and making some chill ass music, and being successful with his creative side, not as some punk ass businessman telling you constantly enough how great his useless thing is until you finally start to believe how his useless thing is awesome and buy into it.
Honestly, the fact is I met my ol' lady there, and had our first conversations on that Southern Rock bench, including talking about how I had a hard time chatting up women, and she gave me a piece of paper as a joke that said "Do you like Raven?" with a box for yes and a box for no, and I kept that piece of paper in a notebook, and five years later we were an item, and what, like 18 years later we've got three kids and five acres and two pigs and eight chickens and one future. I think back to her, the beautiful but crazy hippie chick - probably the closest melding of my ideal "redneck, hippie Mexican woman" that I was searching for that you could come across, and now her on this herbal path, talking at the plants and concocting mad medicines in our kitchen apothecary and building some serious healing powers, but with a spark of creativity and art, and not in a sterile "health food store" way. And I think about myself back then - longhaired goofy gangsta hippie freestyling ass degenerate drunkard - and how to this day I still throw words, still fight at the sprawl trying to crawl into the tall grasses around the edges of my brain, and I know we came together at a Power Site during powerful times. And we're still building our powers now, in our new home of ten years-plus, establishing our compound. I think that's a hard thing for a lot of people to understand when you yourself know you are on a path, there's a destiny you will get to. You are not meant to be obscure or unknown. And when I find out by chance that the guy who was always sitting next to me is the Iron & Wine guy, that kind of drives that destiny home. Not everybody gets born into these paths, or is blessed with a partner who can help blast you (and you her) into that direction. I am a lucky motherfucker, but it was not by accident.
STEAL "Peace Beneath The City"
NEXT: there is no Zulu word for "lost"!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - February '11 #12: "House At Pooh Corner (live)" by Loggins & Messina

I will readily admit that Loggins & Messina is the sappiest, easy listening ass music that I proudly pump. The thing is, I don't get into just any Loggins & Messina. I've actually bought a few of their studio albums in the past and absolutely hated it. I think I even got a solo Jim Messina record one time. And we all know how Kenny Loggins turned out. But the On Stage double live LP this track is off of, I don't know, it has just soaked into my soul in some way that I just can't shake.
I grew up with this record being played by my folks, usually loud as fuck on a hungover Sunday morning after they had been out partying, playing poker or Spades, drinking liquor and beer and smoking weed and disappearing into the back room one at a time to shut the door and come out sniffling and wiping their faces with wide-eyed attention. These were great times for me as all the kids were usually allowed free reign to play wild. We might make paper airplanes and have a war with the wasps nest on the front porch where the rule was once you knocked them to the ground with your plane you could stomp them. We might just have straight up stick fights in the back yard (at like midnight, bunch of kids fighting with sticks in the solitary light of one flood light in rural ass back yards... memories). But we'd be doing something, and it would be way past when we should be awake, and inevitably somebody would get fucked up and go crying into the grown folks room, littered with quarters and Miller High Life pony bottles and playing cards, and they'd tell us to go play. Shit man. This was like every weekend when I was a kid, Friday and Saturday night. If my dad did good at the poker table, when we came through town (Farmville), he'd swing through the drive-through at Hardees (unless it was already after 3 in the morning, when they closed) and buy me a biscuit for the ride home. Other times, he'd be extra fucked up, flying down the road, usually we'd be coming from Cumberland County, sometimes Rice, but always a good 40 minute drive or so back to Meherrin, testing his mortality I guess, and I'd lay down in the back seat or slide down onto the floor and just hope to make it home. Really, as a kid it was completely awesome to have that type of freedom on weekends, but looking back, yeah, probably some rough shit for a kid. I wouldn't roll that way with my kids, I know that much.
Anyways, Loggins & Messina's On Stage was a constant fave on the following hungover Sunday mornings, somehow my dad up and at them early as fuck, cooking up breakfast, waking the dead. I'm not sure if he even went to sleep now looking back. I know the crank was nothing that ever came into our house when I was a kid, it was strictly a weekend warrior partying at other folks type of thing. I think that's how my dad rolled even into his later years, which is why once I was grown, and he had a new family, he'd sometimes disappear for three days for the most part.
It's actually pretty fucked up that I've done crank with my own father. Like at the time, you're like, "Haha, this is crazy man, what a crazy thing!" For the most part, when people are immersed uncontrollably in shit, it is a natural reaction to take pride in that shit, and pretend that being a piece of shit is the greatest thing in the world and somehow makes you better than everybody else. It's reverse elitism. "All those hoity-toity uptight motherfuckers, they don't know the real shit. I'm real motherfucker." I've done it myself, many times. It's the source of many many bad tattoos on this earth. But goddamn, how twisted?
I didn't mean for this to get all weird like that, talking about how my childhood might've been fucked up, because really, I don't think about it for the most part. I don't feel victimized or anything. I mean, I'm a fucked up dude, sure, but we all are. I've got enough shit in my brain to work out that's my own fault before I go looking to blame anybody else for how I am.
But Loggins & Messina' On Stage, I don't know, I guess those mornings when there wasn't school on the weekend, when the ol' man was cooking up breakfast, and my mom was cleaning up the house or whatever, it was the most chill ass time, where there felt like a leisurely love in the house, instead of running off to catch a schoolbus or sell a bag of weed or everybody pile into one shitty car to drive all over three goddamned counties to get everybody to work and school on time. So I guess Loggins & Messina's live album associates in my mind with that. Because that's how I feel when we play at our house, cooking breakfast on a Sunday morning, kids running around the house, me and the ol' lady flirting with each other, stealing kisses, making coffee, grabbing eggs out the chicken coop for the freshest omelet possible. It's all love. "Danny's Song" off On Stage is certainly the more loving couple song, but "House At Pooh Corner" really ties it into the kids, ya know? It makes it family, but not in a purposely corny way like putting on a Barbie Princess CD would.
And I guess, completely by accident, my point of all the gibberish is this: we all have fucked up childhoods in one way or another, or at least a lot of us do. All you can do is try and hold onto the good parts of what you were taught, no matter how small or large a part of the overall body of work that is, and let go of the shitty lessons. Let go of that shit. Because if you get too hung up in being proud of being a piece of shit, you'll accidentally raise more little pieces of shit. Call me crazy, but I'd like my kids to end up being better people than me.
STEAL "House At Pooh Corner"
NEXT: how the hell does "iron" go with "wine"?