RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.
Showing posts with label nothing is real. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nothing is real. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 4

SONG OF THE DAY: Bumpin' (kudzu'd)


I try not to ever hit animals when driving, not even squirrels being all glitchy, not quite clear on which direction they’re gonna dash. It ain’t their fault somebody built a road smack dab through the middle of where they live naturally. I used to think this was a strange affliction that humans have put upon deer and squirrels and other critters habitattooing their lives near our roads of expediency. But then I’m now experiencing it, too, as the Upper Humans have paved artificial intelligence responses into everything. I look something up online, and I have to navigate around artificial intelligence; same thing when I type an email or go to a work meeting in Zoom. There’s artificial intelligence bullshit in all of it now, and I kinda zig zag zig, not sure how to negate it, not sure if I’m even allowed (terms and conditions). But it’s everywhere now, and I don’t need it, want it, or see the point.
But everywhere across the state I live in, localities are shitting themselves trying to turn empty industrial parks in warehouse data centers, hooking ‘em up via extension cords, which somehow means the meter on the outside my house is now spinning itself twice as fast, because in the process of localities shitting themselves, they promise those warehouses beneficial rates which are then spread across the rest of us who are actually seemingly real and human and not just a vague idea pattern machine that sucks up energy worse than growing weed in an aluminum foil trailer in 1994. All this is to say, I am currently zig zag zigging, trying to get out the way, but I don’t know which direction to go, and maybe I already got crushed. Not sure. Do I still exist? Am I real? Am I just a hallucination of slop? Subhanallah subhanallah subhanallah…

Sunday, January 11

SONG OF THE DAY: Do It (kudzu'd)


This song goes out to all organic thomas crooks out there. Not the sports entertainment ones, but the real ones. Do it for my boy Larry King.

Wednesday, May 8

SONG OF THE DAY: Just Me And You


Numero Group is my favorite label. All their reissue sets are so fuckin’ great. I ain’t had discretionary income lately, so the ol’ record collection has been put on pause for a while. Thankfully there’s a ton of good Numero comps, including all their variations on the East Side Story comps. Haha, my dumbass was looking at the back one day, actually hoping there were actually 19 volumes of the South West Side Story. Magic realism is way better than actual realism.

Thursday, September 28

SONG OF THE DAY: Night Owl


One of my favorite things is when somebody dramatically says, “I could say some things right now, but I’m not going to,” like cracking open a can of sardines in hot sauce but deciding not to eat them even though all the cats are meowing around now. Fuckin’ say that shit, get it out in the open! I think most folks are used to not being accountable to their own actions, they assume everybody else will quiver in fear at that statement. I do not give a fuck. Air your grievances out. I love burning bridges anyways and I got a can of 5-gallon bucket metaphysical flammables on hand at all times (even though time is a social construct).
None of this has anything to do with this pretty great cover of "Night Owl" but I chose to expound upon it here. Nobody's reading this anyways other than bots scanning for data. What's up bots! I hope all your 1s as sharp and 0s are thicc as hell.

Thursday, April 20

1N T1M3S WH3R3 N0TH1NG 1S R34L...


in times where nothing is real 
(including time), to think too 
much on it can drive one mad 

Saturday, November 12

Tuesday, May 24

G1V3 M3 4 D1RTY W1ND0W...


give me a dirty window 
to stare out all day long, so 
I can think about “nothing” 

Friday, April 29

SONG OF THE DAY: (Loose Booty) Is A Real Thing


On one hand, people will have you thinking nothing is real, that the complete clusterfuck clutter of “information” with an endless array of semi-factual seeming items that have the all the hallmarks of “facts” but are just random ass speculation made up by somebody with the ulterior motivation of confusing truth entirely has made it so you can’t possibly know anything any more at this point. But on the other hand, you’ll get an impassioned plea – such as this song – very precisely explaining how loose booty is a real thing. Hard to argue with, to be honest.

Friday, March 4

SONG OF THE DAY: Love Come Down


Imagine the type of life you must be living to go by a nickname like “Champagne”. Imagine people bumping into you at the laundromat, saying, “Hey Champagne! How’s things been?” It feels almost impossible not to wanna put CHAMPAGNE in silver reflective glitter letters at the bottom of your doors of your ’88 Caprice if that was your name.

Friday, November 19

Thursday, October 28

Sunday, October 17

Wednesday, October 13

SONG OF THE DAY: Shake That Thing


There is an abandoned soapstone factory in the woods around here, like a giant structure made of soapstone slabs with no roof where narrow gauge train used to roll in and get loaded up. I do a lot of wandering, so accidentally discovered that if you’re sitting around down there on a new moon that falls on an increment of 7 as a day (like the 7th, 14th, 21st, or 28th), it turns into a spirit dive, so you see (hallucinate? who knows, nothing is real, especially not reality) an old bar take the form of the building, and a bunch of weird characters (me included) are all hanging out. I never drank the first time I was there but the second time an old dude named Juney told me it was okay, the wine didn’t actually have alcohol in it, or anything, like if you drank it nothing came out the cups, but it got you drunker on the vibes by pretending, so I did. Great time. That night an old spirit they called Haze started banging this song out on a homemade cigar box guitar, loud as fuck he was yelling the song, and all the spirits – man, woman, other – just started shaking their (our) asses like wild, “MAMA, SHAKE THAT THANG! DADDY, SHAKE THAT THANG!” for what felt like hours and hours and hours but I couldn’t tell time at all because it was a dark new moon and the kerosene lanterns (hallucinated) in the joint were the only light. When I made my way back up the hill, I’d only been down there about 15 minutes, but I was sweaty as fuck, and somehow I lost a sock, but still had my walking boots on. Never quite figured that part out, hallucinations or real or whatever. How the fuck do you lose a single sock without taking your shoes off? It was one of my favorite socks too, blaze orange Polo crew sock. Shit kinda bums me out but I hope a spirit just took that shit as a memento. Still though, what the fuck?

Sunday, October 3

SONG OF THE DAY: Down And Out

 

Been listening to a lot of Charlie Rich. Little known fact about Charlie Rich… he’s former NWA World Heavyweight champion Tommy Rich’s uncle. If you look at pictures, you can see the resemblance. Man, what a Cadillac car ride from Macon, Georgia, to Memphis, Tennessee, that would’ve been in 1979.

Wednesday, September 29

SONG OF THE DAY: Long As I Can See The Light (45s on 33)


I have temporarily or permanently disabled a couple of my social media accounts, and for some reason that makes people worry about me. Is that a requirement, to be as online as possible now, addicted to the dopamine of social media notifications popping up on our smart phones in our hands constantly, an umbilical cord to the digital ouroboros scroll of nothingness? I can't say I've really done anything better with my time - not outside more, still got grass to cut, haven't broken into any abandoned factories or anything. But I feel better not worrying about dumb shit like I did. I also feel that social media encourages resentment, and hatred, and is very much integral to fissuring society into these hateful little factions that we mistakenly feel are far greater and more powerful than they are in the physical world. But it also creates a way more extremely online mentality in the real physical world, so that what is real is further distorted by digital propagandas. But I don't really give a fuck. I'm just one person; I can't fix the world, and even if I tried, I'd only fuck it up in some weird other way that would be symbolic of my own failings.
Anyways, I assure you I'm okay, in fact pretty good. Real still recognizes real, except nothing is real either, so it's all fuckin' weird and dysfunctional and held together by cyber-duct tape. But if it all fell apart tomorrow, it wouldn't be nearly as bad you think, although also worse than you think, both of those at once. But it's never the end, no matter how much folks wanna believe that shit. The sun will turn the sky light again tomorrow morning, and every day I get to fuck around is a blessing, even if I don't get to do shit I want to most days. I'm still fucking around, and that in itself is the blessing.

Tuesday, May 25

SONG OF THE DAY: Sharing the Night Together

Blasting “Sharing the Night Together” while driving a hacked and stolen Tesla Cybertruck through the middle of an abandoned mall, but not for any great post-Apocalyptic shit, just to take a funny picture to post on Instagram, but not before checking how many of my followers are currently active so as to maximize engagement with the post. It’s all about “engagement” with the unseen entities that operate accounts on the other end of our reality experience.

Sunday, March 14

SPR1NG T1M3 TH0VGHTS 0F M4CH3T3S...

spring time thoughts of machetes 
hacking unnecessary 
growth, both real and imagined 

Monday, January 11

SONG OF THE DAY: Slow Down


I was gonna write something super clever and poignant, maybe about current events but maybe just about life in general – that timeless prose that’s not attached to the moment, which we get trained to worship constantly being connected. But I didn’t write nothing. I ain’t do shit. Fuck it. And I ain’t gotta do shit. Y’all ain’t paying for this shit. Most of y’all don’t even read it. Keep telling myself “slow down”. I got nowhere to go and nowhere to be, except right here, now. Fuck it.

Tuesday, October 6

SONG OF THE DAY: Harlem Rap

Old school things I'd like to see make a comeback:

  • assassinations
  • local railroad lines
  • burn barrels
  • dirt roads
  • airbrushed overalls
  • plotting an assassination around the burn barrel off a dirt road with your crew all of y'all wearing matching airbrushed overalls with your crew name taken after the local railroad line beneath the new moon which is important because grand ideas should be planted during the new moon they're more likely to grow into reality that way

Sunday, February 2

SONG OF THE DAY: One More Mile


"The last hour is the longest" is a thing I've thunk while riding Greyhounds or Amtraks home. The landscape shifts into what you know as "home" in that cellular way that defies logic, and you become anxious to get off the traveling contraption. All of us are going nowhere in life, always, it's just we leave a lot of shit in one place, and that becomes home. It's still nowhere. That's not bad. It's better to live nowhere than somewhere anyways. If you live somewhere, a bunch of other people come through gawking at shit, trying to get you to take pictures of them standing in front of some dumb shit, and just generally clusterfuck up everything about a normal day with some abnormal not-from-here ways. Living nowhere is a blessing, because you can swing the door open on a warm day, and look out upon all the beautiful nothing, and nobody's fucking it up with cranes or bath and bodyworks or median strips or chik-fil-a zoning approvals. Just a big ol' fat wondrous nothing. I love nothing, and wish I had more of it in my life.