SONG OF THE DAY: Drums of Steel (kudzu'd)

My pops was a wizard of a small engine mechanic, cobbling things together that others couldn’t comprehend. His work truck (the truck from his work) was magical because it had a lift gate, and I used to be excited on the occasional times he brought it home, riding that hydraulic lift up like the little hick I was in the back yard. That truck always had ramps too, for the loading and unloading of riding mowers, to take back to the shop for repairs. I was thinking about this the other day, riding down the road, contemplating my neighbor, who can afford anything his brain desires, as he is the son of a banker, not the son of a small engine mechanic, though he portrays himself as a Working Man now, whereas I am a remote office worker who can’t afford shit it seems. (One time, when I explained an issue I was facing with a dead tree and hovering branches, his solution was simple – “Just pay somebody to come take care of it!”) I guess that’s the path – the son of a poor man hopes to transition classes and not have to work his fingers to the bone and break his body for paychecks; and the son of a rich man wants to occupy his idle life with seemingly meaningful work, so he cosplays as a blue collar workingman, running his own business(es). Nonetheless, I was getting myself mad at how the neighbor cut his half a acre yard with his zero turn mower like twice in a week, even though we’re in a drought, and he was just torturing that grass. Sure, mine is tall and clumpy and feral, and aesthetically displeasing to HOA ass hoes, but it is not dying from torturous manicuring during extreme dryness.
But I also got to thinking about the size of his mower – ridiculously oversized for his yard, even when you factor in the second home he has down the road a few miles, which operates as an event space. Similarly, he has a big truck, like many pretend workingmen of these days. But somehow, despite these trucks being twice as big as the ones from my memories of my pops, the bed is far less. You can’t fit a fuckin’ regular-sized riding mower in them anymore. So men justify to themselves bigger and bigger mowers, which can’t fit in smaller and smaller truck beds, but they are bigger and bigger trucks, which require trailers to move a fuckin’ riding mower around. It always clown car comical to watch some big ass modern existence truck hauling along a trailer with nothing on it but a little ass lawn tractor, albeit too big for the truck bed. So we have this false and unnecessary size thing going on, all of which just feeds the feeble psychology of all these little men who are struggling to find justification for themselves. And not only is it ridiculous, with the supersized truck payments that come with those vehicles (read somewhere about average new truck payment being like $1200 a month? Wtf?), not to mention the additional payments for whatever fuckin’ power equipment you’re cutting your little ass yard with, which probably is why dudes like my neighbor cut it twice a week, because they’re trying to get their money’s worth out of a bad financial decision, which doesn’t matter because they’ve got credit to burn.
And for clarity’s sake, I did experience class transition, so I have a car payment on a new car (2024 Corolla Hybrid) which I will pay until it’s paid off, and then drive until it dies. It’s only the second bank-secured car loan on a brand new car I’ve ever had in my life (and hopefully the last). It is one of the cheaper new hybrid cars you could possibly get. I also used my burgeoning fake ass credit rating carnival game allowance a couple years back to get a good riding mower, which I paid off early when a couple four-digit side hustles here or there came through. But I “worked” the system which ultimately works me.
I don’t really have anything important to point out here, other than we seem to be doing less actual things (like physical work, or moving actual objects with a truck itself, not requiring trailer add-ons and shit) with more monstrously sized mechanisms, all of which are way more expensive, and give us a false sense of dominating our environment. It’s all very feeble-dicked, in my opinion. A real man drives a piece of shit, and can cut grass with a borrowed scythe, or just doesn’t bother cutting it because goddamn it’s hot, and gonna be a desert here in a decade anyways. I often feel unnecessarily angry at these weird men who worship big things of false power, but there is no need in confronting them. You can’t reason with a poisoned brain.

SONG OF THE DAY: Girls, They Love Me (kudzu'd)

I never fully understood why my hillbilly murder eyes never got as sharp as my pops' Charlie Tuna's did. He was the second generation removed from the mountains, but them eyeballs of his could get that laser focus of mountain folks where you could tell he was in a certain mood, and danger was afoot for whoever crossed whatever lines in the unseen sand had been drawn. Don't get me wrong, he had good times, too, and I remember many mornings of him goofing off, and laughing, and the eyes softening. But as he got older (which never ended up being all that old, since he died at 46), and he'd done the job to the demons he was wrestling with way too consistently, those hillbilly murder eyes were what most of us saw.
I got 'em, and can fire them up at times, if necessary, like a rattlesnake's tail, just to let someone else know, there can be immediate and undesirable consequences should all of us present choose to continue down the path we're currently on. But my dimples have always been stronger, and as I get older, I can see the joy emanating out from my face... eyeballs, dimples, all of it... far more than it used to. It's not because I've beaten the demons I'm wrestling, because they're still in there. But I tag the angels in as much as I can, five times a day if possible, and invite their glowing energy to help keep the preponderance of devils at bay. And the thing I love most about when my dimples got their glow (which is also reflected in my eyes) is, there's a certain type of woman out there that loves them, and responds to them. Thankfully, it's exactly the type of woman I love to be loved by.

SONG OF THE DAY: Time of the Preacher

Some “tugging at the roots of family” energy swirled in today, blurring the lines of spirituality and random chance of the Universe, which isn’t really blurred at all but the exact same thing, except Earthly people have perverted spirit into dogma and ruined the power of it for folks like me. Someone in Minnesota benched an old dirtgod moniker from 4 years ago which said “Dot & Tuna’s Firstborn”, and at the same time, I’m discussing the tendrils of alcoholism with my own offspring, while also receiving a poem submission for my zine from an amazing young person in West Virginia who wrote about the “synthetic exhilaration” that certain families chase, and when this young poet read her poem in West Virginia a few weeks ago, I was sitting at a table nearby, sort of MCing the affairs at that point, and she read, “And the children? Doomed from conception,” and I wanted to cry on the spot, and then wanted to cry again when I read it today in my inbox, and it’s one of those lines of poetry that is a shovel that struck the septic tank everybody forgot where it was located, and now the shit is leaking into the yard, but it had to happen. It’s been a time of the preacher since most all our stories began, but the words have been hollowed out by blank-eyed sermonizers more worried about the weight of the collection plate than helping sinners to love themselves. When one scans the environment and sees all these people who appear doomed, and feel doomed themselves, a compassionate response would never be one of condemnation (or deportation, or denial of humanity). I hate to see the patterns repeat, and the ripples of time still rippling all around me, tossing about those I love, even if I have figured out how to halfway shimmy my own ass up on this rock and feel less susceptible to them. And from your own struggles, you know how slippery and slimy the rock is trying to crawl up out the muck, and how good the momentary exhilaration of embracing the shit show can pretend to be. And you can share the possibility of climbing up on the rocks into the sunshine, but you can’t do it for nobody else. Shit, they might get up on your rock and be mad at you because it ain’t how they hoped anyways, and then they slide back down into it all, and start bouncing around inside the chaotic ripples of the doomed, and you love them, and you want to make it all better, but you can’t. You’re just a person, not a god. “Now the preachin’ is over, and the lesson’s begun.” Hopefully.

SONG OF THE DAY: Born to Lose

Got this song title tattooed on my left shoulder, right above the peace sign that says LOVE I stuck and poked with my dad in his trailer when I was 16. That was my first tattoo… a stick and poke with my dad in our trailer (in case you needed a receipt for the “born to lose” claim).

SONG OF THE DAY: Ev'ry Soul Is There

Americana music can be a hit or miss type thing. Wide swaths of it feel more hipster-oriented, like wealth adjacent folks cosplaying as old school country in vintage outfits more than authentic music. Don’t even get me started on my disdain for Sturgill Simpson, and his son-of-an-Appalachian-narcotics-officer bullshit. Whatever credibility anybody out there wants to explain to me he has is automatically negated by the aforementioned familial fact about him and him wearing a goddamn cop mustache. Wack with a capital ack. Usually my personal litmus test for Americana music is whether it would jibe with the longhaired redneck crowd… those country ass dudes who are too outlaw to even bother telling you about it, because honestly, they don’t want anyone bothering them about their shit. They are like 1%ers without motorcycles, nor the means to afford a nice Harley, much less all the material accouterments that go with that. It’s a 1%er outlaw club that drives whatever the fuck is still running and has gas in it, so they might be in an ’87 Dodge Ram one day, then an old Ford Escort stationwagon with a trash bag window on the passenger side the next, and then you see them on Friday night at the liquor store and they’re driving a fairly decent Firebird somehow. This is pretty much my dad and all his closest conspirators of FTW that I saw back in the day growing up. Malcolm Holcombe always felt completely in that crowd, like he’d be totally comfortable sitting at the kitchen table smoking a bowl with those dudes. I have loved his music for a while, and he was that refreshing actual outlaw rural voice that was tolerant of the things you’d hope one was tolerant about (folks’ sexual identity, who they wanted to fuck or how they wanted to be in the world) and intolerant of the shit actual outlaws should be intolerant of (the police state, in fact the whole goddamn militarized pyramid scam from the top down, which too many rural dudes who consider themselves outlaws seem all too intent on mentally fellating every chance they get). I had really hoped to see Holcombe perform live at some point, but I knew he was old, and word of his health problems got online as his performances became fewer and farther between. He passed away last year, but he left behind a large body of work, that if you’re looking for music that is more country than country music, and way more outlaw than the bullshit your local All Lives Matter jack ass is bumping, you should go digging into Holcombe’s discography. This was off the last album released after he died, of the stuff he was working on in the end. That makes this song feel a little more more… didn’t really know what more to put there. It’s just more. I love this dude and I hope he has found peace, and may his memory be a blessing.

SONG OF THE DAY: Play At Your Own Risk

The history of racism in America affected the segregation of musical genres, which is a shame. It would’ve been nice, in retrospect, to have music jump those borders more easily. A great example of this for me lately is Planet Patrol’s “At Your Own Risk”, which was made of extra tracks not used in Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock”, so has a similarity to it, like an alternate third jersey version of Planet Rock almost. But there was a time in my life, when I had just gotten my license, and on Saturdays the liquor store in Farmville would close at noon, but the one in Drakes Branch was open ‘til 6. And my dad would get his weekend’s liquor supply Thursday after work in Farmville, because that was payday for him, and the liquor store was usually the first stop. But generally speaking, folks would show up on Friday night to play cards at our trailer, and bottles would get passed, and if anything was left at the end of a long Friday night, it wasn’t gonna go long on Saturday afternoon. So we’d drive to Drakes Branch to hit the liquor store, so he pops could restock for the impending long Saturday night (which would basically be a repeat of the previous night most times, with most of the same characters). If it was football season, he might even have to double up on the Saturday run to make sure Sunday afternoon was covered for the Redskins game.
In retrospect, that drive from our trailer in southern Prince Edward County, to Keysville, then turn by the abandoned factory on 59 to get to Drakes Branch, turning left onto Main Street of a town that was already dying even then, that close to Reagan’s politics of doom that turned the doomed into The Doomed, “At Your Own Risk” would’ve been the perfect soundtrack. And it’s a long enough song it could’ve ate up most of that 10 mile or so stretch on 59. I do recognize and appreciate my dad’s constant wishful thinking back then, that one bottle liquor on a Thursday evening was actually gonna be enough to last the whole weekend. Too bad he never got the help to get closer to making that equation actually work out. That too is the byproduct of all our segregation and division, where we get fractured into our little silos of self-destruction and think we’re out here going through something entirely on our own, when in actuality in that 10 miles we just drove down the road, even out in the middle of nowhere, we just passed 50 motherfuckers going through the exact same shit.

SONG OF THE DAY: Pops

Yesterday would’ve been my pop’s 68th birthday, except he died at 47. Life don’t always have storybook endings, in fact, for most folks, it rarely does. I try to remind myself there is no storybook ending, no grand culmination, and to be thankful for each day that I get, because not everybody still got it. It’s easy to get lost in the resentment and anger of what you don’t got, and how maybe your path don’t look as easy as them folks you’re looking at over there who appear to have a good level of comfort, and even sometimes might be looking back at you with an obvious amount of judgment. Fuck ‘em. Forget ‘em. Be thankful for where you’re at as much as you can. And if you’re not happy, shake shit up a little, fix what don’t feel right without screwing up what already feels pretty good. It ain’t easy when you come from “head first into the wall” types like many of us do. But if it was easy, you wouldn’t know what to do with it anyways, because you ain’t even used to that.
I’m thankful for my pops. He wasn’t perfect, and he lost the fight against his own demons. But he had a good heart for the most part, and he taught me how to talk magnificent shit with an unexplainable confidence. He also taught me about “the power” and how to get into a zone with the universe where nothing can fuck with you. It’s not easy to do that either, but I’m always thankful for those moments when I’m in that zone and can feel it coursing through my every action. That’s when I know I’m my most right I can be with everything. It hadn’t happened a lot lately, but there’s still moments where I’m on that wave. I guess that’s why storybook endings are such a lie to begin with, because it’s all ebbs and flows, and riding waves or fighting from drowning. And it’s just gonna keep on being like that, if you’re lucky enough to survive the day.

SONG OF THE DAY: Electric Boogie/Break Dance

I can't breakdance worth a shit. Is it too late to learn? Perhaps not but it feels like it. Instead I shall rock electro rap jams at the wrong speed and shuffle around in my old slides while the cats look at me inquisitively. "Play the hand your dealt," like my pop taught me. But also cheat if you get to deal.

SONG OF THE DAY: Little Hero

My first tattoo was homemade, with my dad in the living room of the trailer we lived in, just me and him, after my parents split, when I was like 15 or 16. We just called it homemade, as stick and poke (as well as mullet) weren't things said until the internet homogenized slang globally. I did a peace sign on my arm, with LOVE written above, an ahnk on my left hand forefinger, and a NO $ on my upper shoulder which never took (because I'm destined for vast riches). I've done a few other homemade tattoos over the years, and still do to be honest, just as a general rejection of tattoo snobbery, but also because sometimes you just want an extra star on your leg at 9 in the evening or you need DIRTGOD on your thigh. I have nice shop tattoos now too, plus some really dumb ones (because it's my brain thinking these things), but I have never been ashamed or wanted to cover up my fucked up, fading homemade tattoos.
A weird thing happens though, and I had it happen recently when in a room full of well-meaning self-identified progressive white men talking about some art shit, where when I find myself in certain environments, all the homemade tattoos start to throb. I used to think it was a pain years ago when I first noticed it, and it came from anxiety about well-to-do people realizing I'm a natural born piece of shit. But over the years, as I've come to trust the guiding hands of ancestors looking out for me, I realized the throb is not pain or anxiety but warning, "These are not your people" or "You are in a dangerous environment, protect yourself." And they're not dangerous physically, but culturally/systemically, dealing with people who have always had some sort of power within our society who don't even need to use physicality because they've transcended use of their body for survival. They live off the abstractions, embezzling the labor of others, either directly or through inherited or familial wealth, and thus their danger is also in the abstract realm.
In our society though, the goal is for "economic liberation" or to gain that abstract comfort so that you don't have to destroy your fuckin' body the rest of your life. Like that's the individual goal (and our society is built to mainly think about individualistic goals, not communal or collective ones, even amongst the progressive types). Any sad sack out here suffering through whatever hustle/grind/pray combination they're dealing with in our capitalistic society says they're doing it for their kids or family or future or something like that. You are sacrificing, working hard to get that bag, money before hoes... there's no shortage of euphemisms for this individualistic moral compromise.
That's why I'm thankful for my shitty homemade tattoos which ache when I find myself in the presence of too many abstract devils at once. That No $ that you can't see starts vibrating with warning, like a rattlesnake tail only I can feel saying, "Beware these snakes!" And I realize, I would much rather lounge than grind, and definitely prefer hoes way more than money. Ultimately the goal of not using your body to survive capitalism is so you can lounge around and fill your brain with serotonin. Why deny it now to chase an abstract carrot version of it you'll most likely never catch?

SONG OF THE DAY: High Cost of Living (chopped & kudzu'd)

I’ve been chopping and screwing old country or country-adjacent songs off and on at my patreon, and actually released a 12-pack of these at my bandcamp when I had twelve old school jams done. This particular song has always felt like a theme song for my dad, and I was specifically picking songs I had some sort of relationship with to chop, because I feel you chop it different when you have that long-time relationship with a song. You dig in deeper than if you’re just jumping in to chop it (but no diss to that method at all). This song came out a few years after my dad had passed, but this one and Jamey Johnson’s “Can’t Cash My Checks” are just pure Charlie Tuna, and I know he would’ve loved this fuckin’ song so much had he been alive to hear it on the local country radio station that played in the small engine repair shop where he worked when he wasn’t too drunk or high to make it into work (usually Mondays, and often Fridays, because he got paid on Thursday evenings traditionally). I miss that fucker a lot of times, but also know if he had still been alive, man, it would’ve been hard all these years. The thing about death is you then get to slowly re-imagine a person in all their best attributes, and forgive their failures, because they ain’t failing nobody any more. And you hope they’ve found peace and comfort. I had a dream one time, which felt like a visit, but who knows for certain (metaphysical shit is far from certainty, by design), where I’d gone to the house he lived at when he died, in Victoria, not far from where a giant bustling train yard used to exist but had long been pulled out, vacating the town, which was essentially a railroad town for The Virginian line back in the days. Anyways, my dad had come up the outdoor steps from the basement, even though that house had no actual basement, and me and him were talking. He was all wired up from crank, like he often was the last few years whenever I saw him, and there was music bumping from the basement, so I knew there was folks in there and they were “partying” so to speak. He was asking about my kids, and we were shooting the shit, when I kinda realized he was stuck in that “party” mode which had sort of overtaken his ability to function in the end, and him being stuck in the basement felt like hell to me, for him. I thought this but didn’t say anything to him, because I didn’t wanna ruin the visit, but I could tell he could see what I was thinking. He was always very intuitive like that, even at his worst. Anyways, I woke up a bit shook by the dream, and it just made me hope even more so that whatever happens after one dies, it gave him some peace from the demons that had been fucking with his ability to enjoy life. It’s weird how “partying” is a way to enjoy life, but then gets in the way of enjoying life, and there’s no real definitive line of to where you went too far and got lost. You just kinda ended up on the wrong side of things, without planning, or even knowing precisely where that shit got fucked up. That’s why this is such a great fucking song, too, because it captures some unexplainable shit about as good as one can.

SONG OF THE DAY: Country Boy

This song makes me miss my dad, and think of going to Tom’s Country Store to get hot dogs for lunch with him, then sitting up in the park where he ate and read the paper every day, even though he only had a 7th grade education. I mean, he read the paper every day until he replaced it with a fifth of vodka entirely, not just partially. He also had a little blue Ford Courier pick-up that we painted a grim reaper on the hood of, based off a t-shirt of mine as a delinquent metalhead teenager. That truck was great, classic wheelbarrow truck – so tiny, with the tweeter kick cassette player, but with that grim reaper hand-painted on the hood, it was pretty sick. When I first got my license, I got to drive it to school now and then, blasting some shitty metal, grim reaper on the hood, blowing into school like the misfit I was, living River’s Edge in real life, but nobody got murdered necessarily, just ripped off. Kinda come to realize as much as I hate all those charts where you plot yourself, I’m about as Chaotic Good as it gets when I’m properly synchronized with my ultimate dirtgod raven mack ultramagnetics. I'd rather be Chaotic Good than anything else, but especially Lawful Neutral. Way too much fuckin' Lawful Neutral out here, fucking everything up with its nothingness.

SONG OF THE DAY: Back to Hell in a Greyhound

My first extra-long on purpose Greyhound trip was to Oklahoma, from Farmville, Virginia, and there was a gas station on the west end of town (now gone) that was the Greyhound stop, and I had a big backpack all packed up and met my dad at his lunch spot at the park, and he drove me to catch the bus, because he was quietly worried about why the fuck I’d ride a bus to Oklahoma for no good reason. A lady we both knew, older outlaw woman type who feel in age between the two of us, so I had lustful thoughts of her as a child, she worked the register and had to do the sliding credit card machine thing to charge my ticket, because this was in the 1990s still. The bus came, and two dudes got off to go in and grab some drinks and one of them fell out in the store, like passed out, and I got on the bus and then those two dudes came back on, and apparently one of them had just given the other a pill which knocked the second one out. After Roanoke, where the pill-giver got off, and I had a phone call on the pay phone (those still existed too) calling a dude that used to be tight with my dad, just checking on him, but all he did was complain about how his back was all fucked up and he couldn’t work. One of his two kids ended up being a methhead in Washington, sadly. When I got back on the bus, the passer-outer sat across from me, and we shared stories for hours and hours, long into the night. He’d just gotten released from mental hospital, because he got sent there instead of prison, but explained to me how that wasn’t so good because at least with prison, you got released, but with the mental hospital system, “Once they got you, they got you whenever they want.”

Anyways, I’ve had a number of long ass bus rides since then too, and they’re always full of people and stories like this. It’s a world full of people with more time than money, and that type of person always has some shit going on. Having been in an MFA level creative writing class before, I’d say the back of the Greyhound is a way better writing class than any MFA program operated by the CIA, or by a cash-hungry school mimicking the popular CIA MFA programs at the more prominent universities. I could tell some of my favorite Greyhound stories for hours, and I wonder if I’m anybody else’s favorite Greyhound story? I kinda expect my last ride I might’ve been, when I rode from Los Angeles to New Orleans, and it was hellish and I hadn’t showered in a long time, and stank really bad, too bad for a bathroom baby wipe bath to address, like nasty balls dick stank level stank. And I squeezed into the back row with a nice lady who I considered old but to be honest she was probably around my age, and I was the only gringo on the whole Greyhound. We rode near enough to the border through a chunk of Arizona and New Mexico that we had a couple of immigration stops even. But this lady sitting beside me, who I felt sorry for having to have me beside her, we started talking, and then she was watching a George Lopez comedy special on her phone, and she shared an earbud, and we laughed and laughed together at George Lopez and started telling each other shit, and I was explaining how I was riding the train and bus all the way around the country, had just done Amtrak from Seattle to Los Angeles, just in time to catch this bus to New Orleans, and she was fascinated by my ridiculousness, or so it seemed. She got off in El Paso, and convinced me not to cross the border while we were stopped there, because the bus station was literally a block from the border crossing. “The bus is only here for 45 minutes, you would get lost over there in something, I am sure.”

I kinda told myself when I got to New Orleans that time that I would never ride a Greyhound again, no more long ass slow ass rides like that. But lately I’ve been seeing the Greyhound heading south out of Charlottesville when I’m driving, with LOS ANGELES or DALLAS on the front of the bus, and I briefly think about riding the Greyhound from here to LA or Texas or go up through the northwest again (one of my all-time favorite bus rides, for the beauty of the landscape as well as chaotic bus stories galore). Covid plus being responsible has me itching to do something stupid like ride a bus for 5 days straight.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Betcha Heaven's On a Dirt Road

When I was a kid, I grew up on a dirt road and drank from the garden hose in the summer and if I saved up enough nickels drank a Pepsi from the country store and rode in the back of a pick-up truck and walked barefoot through a yard that wasn’t cut all nice like a cop’s head and I say “yes ma’am” and “nah bro” and “fuck yeah” and I grew up just fine LIKE IF YOU AGREE!
When I was a kid I didn’t wear a seat belt and rode in the back seat on the floorboard as my dad drove drunk home from playing poker at Tip’s house a thousand miles an hour and then my folks split up and my dad and me lived in a trailer and I ate fried duck eggs from the old lady’s farm down the road because her son was in prison and I did chores for the eggs and my dad and me would drive to stash empty beer cans with little bags of weed in them for that dude to stuff up his ass because he was on a road crew and he’d take the weed into jail and live like a king and we got thick sliced baloney from the country market down the road on credit until they cut my dad off because he never paid his tab and we’d have fried duck egg and fried baloney sandwiches for supper five nights out the week because that was all we had and I grew up just fine SHARE IF YOU AGREE!
When I was a kid I couldn’t wait to go away to college and then my dad was briefly kinda homeless but in the country so moved his pop-up camper behind my grandma’s trailer and that’s where he lived even in winter until he started sleeping with this woman that he started staying with regularly and they ended up getting married but she ain’t never really like me and I ain’t like her and then my uncle shot himself in the head the early morning hours before Father’s Day one year telling my grandma and step-grandpa Bob “I love you” in the middle of the night in the trailer before going behind my dad’s pop-up camper and shooting himself so my dad burned the pop-up camper because shouldn’t nobody be staying in it after that and he lived with that other woman the whole time but was never really happy so his drug problems got worse and sometimes we’d talk and he’d say “I think your uncle is gonna visit you” and he’d be right but then he got too lost in the vodka and meth and then he had a stroke and bled out on the bedroom floor before they could get him to a hospital and I ain’t but 48 but he was younger than that when he died and his dad before that was even younger than him when he died and that’s my country paternal lineage but I grew up just fine SHOOT AT THE SKY IF YOU AGREE!

C0VLDN'T 4FF0RD TH3 H1GH R04D...

couldn’t afford the high road, 
but found escape… always took 
the back roads (like my dad taught) 

SONG OF THE DAY: Country Child

I’m an old fool from the old school, who still downloads full ass albums of mp3s from random ass music blogs which still exist doing such things. I didn’t sit there spending 28 hours downloading a single Metallica mp3 back in the dark digital ages to give up having actual copies of shit, especially considering how often my kids are trying to stream a song in the car, and the song is no longer there or not downloaded to stops in the middle of our shitty cell reception region. You either got it or you don’t, fuck them fake ass clouds.

I got this one because I saw it pop up on a blog I check, and the cover met my aesthetics challenge of “does this look like a butter container design from 1974?” Then I looked up Robert Finley’s story, and dude’s an interesting fucker, definitely, so I copped it, and enjoyed it so much that he entered the realm of “if they got a bandcamp I’m gonna buy their new shit moving forward.” This song was one of my favorites, because he offers a woman that he’s not broke, got $15, and would buy her a hot dog. For some reason this reminded me of some shit my dad would say, because the small engine shop he worked at, he loved to go to Tom’s Country Store a block away and get their hot dog specials. Any time I met him for lunch, that’s what we did. At one point, he had a tiny ass Ford Courier pick-up with a grim reaper painted on the hood (that I painted actually), and he’d run up to Tom’s for hot dogs for lunch, then go eat it in the park, reading the newspaper. Later in life, when alcoholism got him too bad, he went to the liquor store instead, and would drink his Aristocrat at the park instead.

I’m first generation college graduate, not an obvious dumbass (though we all are, to one extent or another), and have exposed myself to a lot of art and creative shit. But I’m still a raggedy ass country boy to my heart, and I don’t even really understand these weird ass digital radicalized suburbanish country boys of nowadays. Nor do I relate to the petty bourgeoisie. (Yes, “petty” not “petit”.) It’s fucked up. But I can still walk in the woods and find an old bottle dump, dig ‘em out, wash ‘em up, spray paint them, and write cryptic warnings about the downfall of our ancient ways. “’Cause I’m a country boy…”

SONG OF THE DAY: Roll Um Easy

IF YOU ARE THE DUDE WHO STOLE MY LITTLE FEAT CD THE NIGHT WE HAD A PARTY IN MEHERRIN AFTER BURYING MY DAD BECAUSE YOU PLAYED IT BY THE BONFIRE IN YOUR TRUCK, PLEASE REVEAL YOURSELF SO THAT I MAY KNOW WHO I HAVE HELD A LIFETIME (and beyond) BLOOD GRUDGE AGAINST PLEASE. My youngest sister refuses to tell me to this day who you are, and she even bought me a new copy of that particular CD, but it just don’t sound the same. It just don’t sound the fuckin’ same bro.

L1F3 G4V3 M3 4 H4RD SCR4BBL3...

life gave me a hard scrabble 
philosophy; dad always 
said, “boy, we are survivors” 

SONG OF THE DAY: Two Wings

 

Rev. Utah Smith got the nickname “the Two Winged Preacher” because of his evangelical showmanship. He was from Shreveport, Louisiana, and became a traveling evangelist for the Church of God in Christ, holding court in tent revivals, banging out songs on an electric guitar, wearing a giant pair of angels wings, and even eventually having a bunch of ropes and pulleys hooked up so he could fly around while performing. At his peak, he did other wild shit like preaching sermons from inside a casket. Strangely though, considering he was most active in New Orleans, and from Shreveport, he had been buried in a hometown cemetery in an unmarked grave. Regional music blog dorks uncovered this information, and were shocked, so crowdfunded getting him a proper grave marker, which he now has, that says “Elder Utah Smith – Electric Guitar Evangelist”. That’s pretty nice.

I had a real formative time in my teen years, fucking around in a trailer with my dad and uncle that me and my dad shared but my uncle was always around. My uncle killed himself a couple years later, but has a drag racing-style funny car doing a burnout on his grave marker. My dad died a few years later, and he has a chainsaw on his. These were the images chosen by family members who were paying for that shit that closely identified with the spirit of them. (It should be noted, we have kept a horseshoe on top of my dad’s grave ever since too. Sometimes people move it around into a different way, leaning on some shit, or however, but any time I go there, I always make sure it’s making a ringer around the dumbass thing you put plastic flowers in. My dad would want to be throwing ringers.)

I often wonder about what people might think represented me to put on a grave marker. But I also think have it pretty much set I’m gonna get cremated and have my ashes scattered around the 69th mile marker of the Rivanna line, right by the James River. I mean, I don’t have any legal papers that say that, but I wrote a poem about it, and printed it up and made everybody who needed to know had seen it. That’s as legal as shit I’m gonna do likely will get when it comes to paperwork.

SONG OF THE DAY: We Can't Make It Here

Went for a long walk down the dirt road I live along yesterday, teases of spring in the early March environment. Some ol’ dude with a beard in overalls (classic style) was hacking away some grapevines that were trying to cobra clutch some apple trees into submission. “How you making it today?” I asked, in my yokel ass ways. The guy stopped, sighed deeply, and said, “Well… slowly but surely, I reckon.” The “surely” was more “shorely”, and this of course unlocked about twenty minutes of shooting the shit. He and his wife lived in the garage apartment of the place up the road, where the big house was owned by some big doctor and his trust fund wife from the nearby university. They owned that place, an old logging chunk across the road with a five-acre lake, and 155 acres across the river too, which had just been logged. They weren’t hurting for money, but they logged it anyways. I guess according to ol’ boy, they had two grown kids who spent like a month there every summer, but lived in San Francisco and Boston. The couple themselves lived only half an hour away, but only stayed there in the summer, sporadically. But ol’ boy I was talking to and his wife were paid servants, to caretake the property. Ol’ boy, of course, told me about his triple bypass he had a couple years back. Got me to thinking about that old phrase “living off the fat of the land,” and how that used to be the rugged individual notions of America that feed our mythologies to this day. Much of the MAGA talk as well as neoliberal dreams are built off that living off the fat of the land. But there ain’t no fat on the land anymore. It’s all bought up. There no new worlds to find, to colonize, to continue the great western civilization ponzi scheme with. It’s just super rich folks, and the rest of us trying to find enough use to them to be on their payroll. We live off the fat of them, sucking sustenance out of the bones and scraps they throw us, after they’ve cherry-picked all the good parts. This is true of wealth, of land, of jobs, of non-profits, of the entirety of American civilization. They pick what they want, and toss us the rest. Some do it begrudgingly, and others do it sugar-coated with progressive mantras, convincing themselves they’re one of the good ones.
I’m luckier than ol’ boy. I bought my house – an old company house on executive’s row of a quarry that’s been mostly unproductive for the past century. But I could afford the house – one of the only ones I could afford in this entire area. But I’m first generation college graduate and affording a low end house (value-wise, not aura-wise… this house is dope as fuck). All I’m gonna have in this life is what I personally earn, no inherited wealth will ever come to me. When my dad died, my mom – whom he was no longer married to – had to take a personal loan out so we could bury him. And we put a collection pickle jar in the small engine repair shop he worked most all his life when he wasn’t too drunk to go in. I don’t say all this to bemoan anything about my life, because like I said, I’m doing good. No triple bypass yet, and hopefully after a few years, I’ll have more life insurance than Earthly debt, and maybe my kids can keep this house briefly after I’m gone. It’s all a gamble. But there is no fat of the land to live off at this point. Our culture has parceled it out, to where obscene factory farms rape our food from the depleted soil, and boutique elite folks create little organic operations to convince themselves they’re doing good in this late capital hellscape. They don’t farm it – others living off their fat do that, college-educated farm managers for the cheap and interns drunk off promises of a better world still being possible. Humanity has triple bypassed that shit though.
We’re not doomed though. We’re never doomed. I mean, because of the unrealistic greed of those who have hoarded all that fat, a lot of us will die, and continue to needlessly suffer. But people will keep scratching out lives upon the Earth for a long ass time. We’re too goddamn stupid and stubborn not to.

TH3Y C4LL 1T M1D-L1F3 CR1S1S...

they call it mid-life crisis, 
but this is the same age my 
dad and grandfather both died