SONG OF THE DAY: PE vs The JB's (DJ A-L Remix)

Bootleg everything. Intellectual property is colonial thought. I don't even believe you own your own thoughts. Why would you own some shit that just randomly fired up inside your mind? I thought about that recently when I described my artistic processes as "world building". It seemed very conquest-like, that I'm developing an unexplored territory from a capitalist perspective. I'm fuckin' lucky the universe lets my mind see all the wild shit it sees. I'm blessed. Why would I want to start acting like I own all that shit and piss off the universal muses? Disgusting behavior. So I think of it less as world building now and more just cultivating my internal mythologies.

SONG OF THE DAY: Nak Deranine

Every time I eat a big juicy apple, I immediately wonder why I don’t eat apples way more often. And then I also understand that if biblical mythology was truth, I can get why them apples was so damn tempting, especially if you’re just sitting around naked with the only other human and y’all are naked. Who wouldn’t eat that apple? And what kinda deity is like, “Okay, I know y’all are naked, and there’s this juicy ass apples just dangling here. But you can’t have none. Cool?” Hell nah.
Side note, my favorite obsessive dork of recent memory is the “apple variety” dork – them rare souls who go wandering around, seeking out forgotten and obscure varieties of apples, as our post-modern agricultural practices have narrowed everything down to an easy to control handful, and thus eliminating a wealth of apple varieties, in the name of progress, which tends to crush a whole lot of great shit just to make everything easier to produce at a greater profit.

0V3RL00K3D P30PL3 B3C0M3...

overlooked people become 
easily radicalized 
by myths of tradition 

VN1V3RS4L TRVTHS H1J4CK3D...

universal truths hijacked 
by mythologies ingrained 
in brain from a tender age 

BV1LD1NG 0VR MYTH0L0G13S...

building our mythologies 
with return to positive 
raw essence always in mind 

FR0M TH3 WR3CK4G3 0F TH3S3 GR34T...

from the wreckage of these great 
American myths, many 
wild chaos monkeys emerge 

C0NSVMPT10N MYTH0L0G13S...

consumption mythologies 
which launder the ethics of 
the means which create all ends 

1MM0R4L SYST3MS L4VND3R3D...

immoral systems laundered 
through these “cream rises to the 
top” meritocracy myths 

TH3 M3R1T0CR4CY MYTHS...

the meritocracy myths 
planted in my brain blossom as 
failure demons, fraud syndrome 

SONG OF THE DAY: Twenty Skinny

Working from home, I let the cats spend most of the day outside, but always try to get them in before we leave, or do anything down in the front of the yard, trying to train them to treat the back and woods behind the place as well as the sides and just out front as their full domain (which is a really FULL domain for two cats), and to stay the fuck away from the road. But if we’re going to go somewhere or be gone, I’ll call them in, and generally they’re out there long enough they come running if I call, occasionally even happily leaping into the house as I hold the screen door open.

I should mention how our two cats are. We have a grey tabby named Stella who is like a baby leopard in stomach markings and spirit. She is goofy as fuck, and would stalk bugs and butterflies for seven centuries if I let her. She’s also the one that comes in the last, barely needing inside time, and in fact I often let her sleep on the back porch because she likes it better than all the way inside. Ponyo is a black cat, and has one of the strangest auras of any cat I’ve ever been around. She skip flies onto an 8-foot bookcase in the living room to sleep on top of it, and will strangely show up meowing at me when I’m thinking sad thoughts. I really don’t know how to explain her other than she is something else entirely, like even in the realm of cats being strange, she is STRANGE, but not bad strange, just special strange.

The other day, me and the kids were gonna head out on some errands and goofing off, and I went to call the cats in. It had been hot and they’d been out there for a long ass time, so I knew they’d come running. I opened the screen and did my goofy cadence “KITTY KITTY KITTY” that I learned by osmosis from my younger sister growing up, a weird mountain yodel call to the cats that sounds ridiculous I’m sure if you look over and see this bearded dude jabbering it out the screen door at the world at large. But it works.

The other day, I do this, and immediately here comes Stella bounding from behind the graffiti shed, full baby leopard leaping mode the whole way across 50 feet of yard, through the screen door and porch, into the house. While Stella is coming, about halfway, I see Ponyo peripherally coming from the left, around the house, also leaping in full run. She is about two seconds behind Stella’s pace, and as she rounds the flower garden on that side of the porch, with an old metal goat sculpture, no shit, a spider leaps behind her from the garden. Stella jumps over the steps from the left side and goes through the screen door into the house, AND THE SPIDER LEAPS ONTO THE STEPS THEN SLIDES INTO THE PORCH AS WELL, right past the screen door, behind a recycling bin. It was the weirdest thing – the spider seriously leapt just like the cats, and followed them in the house.

In West African Ashanti culture, Anansi was a spider-trickster that had all the knowledge of the world. Similarly, in Lakota mythology, there was Iktomi, a spider-trickster spirit as well. There are tricksters of various forms in all indigenous cultures not yet bleached by economic colonialism, regardless of continent. There is no way that spider is not some sort of trickster spirit flying up into our house, and yet also this does not scare me, because the way it bounced, there was nothing but joy in its movement. It’s been two days, and I keep waiting for that spider to make itself known again, in some way, but so far as I can tell thus far, nothing beyond the regular extraordinary has happened. It does feel good to know we’ve already cultivated a home environment where silly spider spirits feel excited about coming in and joining us.

C0NSVM1NG MYTH0L0G13S...

consuming mythologies 
which we wish to represent 
us, in deeply settled state 

3V1CT3D FR0M TH3 C0MF0RT...

evicted from the comfort

of merit mythologies

exempt from reality

TH3 MYTH0L0G13S W3 T3LL...

the mythologies we tell

ourselves as ultimate truths

tie us down instead of free

R3CR34T10N4L 3SC4P3...

recreational escape

an outlandish fairy tale

when trapped in reality

MYTH0L0G1C4L SYMB0LS...

mythological symbols

fade into obscurity,

having lost their relevance

SONG OF THE DAY: Standing at the Crossroads

People always talking about being at a crossroads, but roads are built along master planned grids. That's why intersect they at 90 degree angles. Ain't no 90 degree angles with rivers and creeks and shit. On top of this, crossroads mythologies always got this angel/devil dichotomy, good and bad battling it out, which direction will you go. It all feels very limited, in that both roads got built by somebody trying to make me follow that path, good or bad. Even the bad road probably was the good choice to whoever built it, and the good one is bad. Binaries. If you don't do one, then you gotta do the other.

Fuck a crossroads, I'm walking diagonally into the woods. And not even a straight diagonal but a cattywampus diagonal with chaos in every third step (so as to balance between right and left footed chaos steps).

But nooooo, the assholes put all the food stores and Goodwills right along the stupid fucking roads, at the crossroads, so I'll have to come back out and get some food and look for work clothes with the red tag because that's the tag this week. One day I'm just gonna wear poplar bark to work, fuck it. If they fire me it'd probably be a blessing. But the same people who built all the roads to intersect at imperfect 90 degree angles are the same one who build meticulous bureaucracy into everything else, so I wouldn't even get fired right away. They'd write up notes, and get filed with other people, and then official types would talk to me or make me do a training video and I'd have to send a screenshot of having completed the training video, and then sign a statement that says something official and legal sounding that is essentially a translation of "RAVEN, DON'T WEAR FUCKING POPLAR BARK TO WORK AGAIN" and fuck man, all of this is so pointless, isn't it?

SONG OF THE DAY: Chains 4 Crowns

In old studio wrestling, the role of the jobber was them dudes who always lost, week in and week out. You had the glorified jobber, who was usually the guy who seemed like he might be a star one day, minimally so, and he usually had the main event television loss to an actual star, but most of the jobbers were just jobbers. The true jobbers didn’t even have the look – you knew there was little star potential in that body, just a malformed ungraceful blob of an existence that was born to lose, even long after actual competitive meritocracies were all replaced by theatrical oligarchies who dedicated resources to engaging still in the performative acts of pretending shit was real. True jobbers.

I appreciate the fact people love to hold up kings and queens and these high cultural watermarks of greatness for all of us to look back on and identify. This is especially important for oppressed people, who in the larger culture are rarely allowed to see themselves in a successful light. In order to keep people from feeling hopelessly destitute in their humane existence, they need to feel like they can have something to attain in life.

And yet, in every human culture from the beginning of time, there’s many many true jobbers, and few true kings or queens. Too many true jobbers, doomed in America, doomed in Europe, doomed in Africa, doomed in all corners of the Earth whenever pyramid scams have been erected where some are seen as greater than the rest. I’m very thankful for the class transition I’ve made in life – I was born a true jobber, and now I feel like I’ve attained glorified jobber status. I look like I could be a minimal star, there’s the tease of actual success always present, but I come out losing most every week, taking the loss, but doing so against even better and higher positioned talent. It took a lot of work to not be a straight up true jobber, lot of luck too, and I got to use the bias of the culture against itself too, because you clean me up, put a decent shirt on me, I look like their preferred style of star to an extent. They don’t realize I’m a piece of shit as easily as they would someone with a different skin tone. But I don’t pretend that I’m not still a jobber, and ain’t ever gonna hold a meaningful title while wrestling with meaning in this performative American life where we pretend it’s still real. Nothing is real anymore.

SONG OF THE DAY: Put Your Love In Me

I am regressing momentarily, to recharge. Or maybe forever. JUST GONNA KEEP PUSHING THIS ROCK UP THE HILL I'M SURE IT'LL REMAIN IN PLACE ONCE WE GET TO THE TOP!

SONG OF THE DAY: Quiet Village

I have for a while maintained relations with the elves that inhabit Seven Islands in the river known as James post-colonialism, but earlier this spring in chatting with their sentry and my friend Chubbrock, he informed me of other bands of these elven river people along other outposts of the James, as well as the Rivanna and Appomattox rivers. He sent communication to a friend of his at one of their outposts not far from Texas Beach in Richmond earlier this year, to establish a meeting which happened a month or so back – a friend vouching for friend, because it is hard even in my rural area for these endangered elven people to trust human contact in their quiet villages, but even more so in a heavily populated area with a publicly accessible beach frequented by so many, who – despite their self-identification as progressive and caring – endanger non-human existences simply with their presence.

Anyways, I met this other elven person last month, and I’m not sure it went well as I don’t think they trusted me at all. Sometimes in situations where one person vouches for another, it what we hope would work to increase the trust between Person A and Person C connected by Person B, it only works to weaken the faith in that Person B. This may have happened for Chubbrock, but I applied my learned practices of sitting there, shutting the fuck up, and listening. Strangely, I had been listening to something on the Richmond NPR station while driving into the river area to meet this elven dude about divisiveness in current American culture. I say “strangely” because basically all this elven dude did was tell me a story.

He said that at one point, on what we call Belle Isle now, there was a giant tree, back before men had settled there, which reached a thousand clouds high. This tree’s roots touched all areas within the wandering foot’s imagination beneath the ground. But men came along, and were unable to see trees as culmination of existence. Men felt the compulsion to reshape existence of all things, so the tree was cut down and sliced into segments. “The same thinking is why you have machines, which are supposed to make work easier according to your human ways, but actually disconnect you from the work, and somehow leave you feeling lost.” He had a wispy elven beard but there was a tiny bald patch with a scar on his left cheek. I noticed he rubbed at the spot a couple times while he was talking. Not sure if that’s important or not, but I noticed it.

The thing was, he continued, our thinking eventually decided even having segments of trees separated as they were was not enough, so the men begin splitting the segments further down, using wedges. “These wedges were not physical, not steel, but made of strange mechanical codes,” he explained. And all the segments from the giant tree were fractured down into smaller splinters, in what humans thought were more useful. “And you swollen people” (lol that’s what he called humans sometimes, derogatorily almost, “swollen people”)… “you realized the giant tree was destroyed but you couldn’t put it together again. So you just stood around yelling at each other that you had to put the giant tree back together, mad at each other for not putting the pieces back in place right, taking turns but it all just falling apart, because you never could seem to understand that you just had to let a new tree grow, and that there were already many trees, as there are here now around us, that are half a cloud high already, and nothing can speed up or perfect existence other than accepting it as it already exists.”

I was thinking in my head about the NPR talk radio thing, and how the weird code mauls he was speaking of were maybe algorithms? But that was also me projecting, as humans do, and I caught him rubbing his bare spot on this beard and looking at me with concern. “How long have you known Chubbrock?” he asked, and it wasn’t very long after that he found reason to leave me without plans of entertaining another visit. Can’t blame him to be honest; I’m too human to be trusted.

B4BVSHK4 0F TH3 4L03...

babushka of the aloe,

who after I took this pic

started killing the aloe